It's been a long break!

 It is now 8 years since my last burst of blogging energy during a relaxing sojourn spent in Tuscany. In the meantime I have had occasion to return to one of the little problems that exercised much of my research while at UCL - the buckling of thin shells and especially those used for the construction of space launch vehicles. But I will for the moment, spare details of this area since they represent a fairly major break from the themes I have been developing in this blog.

Sadly, having been inactive for so long, I was unable to find out how to add new posts - partly because I could not recall my password! I have now rectified this and will attempt to report some more recent brushes against the joys of peer review in relation to aspects of the work hinted at in earlier postings.

This relates to the ideas being advanced in the posts of 2016 where it was suggested that the ups and downs of the Earth's lithosphere over geological timescales might relate to the very long term cycles of climate (those having 10s to 100 million year periodicities). A study of the evidence on display in the Grand and Bryce Canyons seemed to provide some substance to these ideas. But alas, for reasons that I will recount in the next few posts, full publication of the analysis reported in a paper entitled  “Phanerozoic Climate and Vertical Tectonic Cycles” (UCL Open Environment 2019) was eventually blocked. But in getting involved in this study with fascinating research on climate cycles over the past 600Ma has brought me face to face with one of the science problems currently exercising the globe - climate change and whether CO2 is such a guilty culprit to require the current global efforts to reach net zero carbon emissions. Hopefully, later posts will try to address some of the very legitimate concerns about the state of the science being used to inform important global and local policy decisions in this area.