An Orange County man is co-author of a new UC Irvine study that offers precision analysis of smoke plumes from tropical burning — a feat in itself, because he began the work as a 17-year-old high school student.

Alex Krolewski, now a 19-year-old freshman at Harvard University, says he simply thought it would be “cool” to do some scientific research while in his junior year at University High School in Irvine.

Believe it or not, people have been talking about climate change for a REALLY long time! As early as 1906, a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius predicted that a doubling of carbon dioxide would raise global temperatures by 5°C. While Arrhenius used a relatively simple model that could be drawn on a piece of paper, scientists today run complicated models with millions of lines of computer code on supercomputers. But the theory of predicting climate change is still basically the same, and it all revolves around a term called ‘radiative forcing’.

Scientists around the world are closing in on some dirty truths about carbon emissions and climate change.

A cover-up is plainly involved; it’s not about scandal but dirt itself. That means soil, the upper layer of earth typically a few feet but sometimes 10 feet or more thick, usually black or dark brown. Below is rock or other material that contains little of the organic matter, derived mainly from plants, that gives good farmland its fertility.

• Oceans across north pole of planet
• Identified by radar scan of surface from Mars orbiter
• 'Oceans' fall within boundaries of 'shores' previously seen by space scans
• Area covered by oceans twice - last time three billion years ago

Today, Mars's surface is an arid desert - but the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has returned strong evidence for an ocean once covering part of the red planet's surface.