In 2024, around 20 percent of people surveyed in Brazil said they agreed with the sentence the Earth is flat. Approximately eight percent of respondents stated that they did not know what the shape of planet Earth was.

According to a survey conducted in November 2022, 32 percent of France's youth thought that mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 could cause irreversible damage to a child's vital organs. There were almost as many respondents that thought that the result of the 2020 U.S. presidential election was skewed at the expense of Donald Trump. And finally, 16 percent of French teenagers and young adults believed it is possible that the Earth is flat.

This dataset includes the models (fortran code, matlab code, data) used to simulate the heating and photolysis rates in a spherical atmosphere. Both Solar-J v7.5 and Cloud-J v7.3c have been published previously, but with the publication of Prather and Hsu, "A round Earth for climate models" in PNAS (2019) both models have been merged in terms of overlapping subroutines and both now include option for (0) a flat-Earth atmosphere, (1) solar ray tracing through a spherical atmosphere, (2) refracted solar rays in a spherical atmosphere, and (3) a geometically expanding spherical atmosphere that includes the extra area, volumen and mass for a spherical hydrostatic atmosphere.

"Sunlight drives the Earth's weather, climate, chemistry and biosphere. Recent efforts to improve solar heating codes in climate models focused on more accurate treatment of the absorption spectrum or fractional clouds. A mostly forgotten assumption in climate models is that of a flat-Earth atmosphere. Spherical atmospheres intercept 2.5 W m-2 more sunlight and heat the climate by an additional 1.5 W m-2 globally. Such a systematic shift, being comparable to the radiative forcing change from preindustrial to present, is likely to produce a discernible climate shift that would alter a model's skill in simulating current climate. Regional heating errors, particularly at high latitudes, are several times larger. Unlike flat atmospheres, constituents in a spherical atmosphere, such as clouds and aerosols, alter the total amount of energy received by the Earth. To calculate the net cooling of aerosols in a spherical framework, one must count the increases in both incident and reflected sunlight, thus reducing the aerosol effect by 10-14% relative to using just the increase in reflected. Simple fixes to the current flat-earth climate models can correct much of this oversight, although some inconsistencies will remain."

Early climate and weather models, constrained by computing resources, made numerical approximations on modeling the real world. One process, the radiative transfer of sunlight through the atmosphere, has always been a costly component. As computational ability expanded, these models added resolution, processes, and numerical methods to reduce errors and become the Earth system models that we use today. While many of the original approximations have since been improved, one -- that the Earth's surface and atmosphere are flat – remains in current models. Correcting from flat to spherical atmospheres leads to regionally differential solar heating at rates comparable to the climate forcing by greenhouse gases and aerosols. In addition, spherical atmospheres change how we evaluate the aerosol direct radiative forcing.

In 2024, the U.S. market for ground or treated mineral and earth decreased by -1.2% to $4.3B, falling for the second consecutive year after two years of growth. Over the period under review, consumption continues to indicate a relatively flat trend pattern. The most prominent rate of growth was recorded in 2018 with an increase of 8.9%. Consumption of peaked at $4.4B in 2022; however, from 2023 to 2024, consumption stood at a somewhat lower figure.