posted October 10, 2006 11:58 PM            

Somehow, I don't think smoking unlit cigarettes is going to catch on. What other neat things can you do with a vaporizer?

posted October 13, 2006 05:42 PM            

2 Feet of Snow Hits Great Lakes Region
Oct 13 2:18 PM US/Eastern

By CAROLYN THOMPSON
Associated Press Writer

A rare early October snowstorm left parts of the Great Lakes and Midwest blanketed with 2 feet of snow Friday morning, prompting widespread blackouts, closing schools and stranding travelers.
The wet, heavy snow downed tree limbs and toppled power lines, leaving 350,000 homes and businesses without electricity in western New York, officials said.

Workers on snowmobiles delivered food and water to motorists stuck along the New York Thruway, which was shut down for more than 100 miles by the storm. Buffalo's normally busy downtown streets were deserted.

"All the trees are down. No power," said resident Ron Pellnat, surveying the damage. "It's Friday the 13th, how about that?"

The city's main airport was closed Friday morning as runways were cleared after at least 14 inches of snow fell, said Tom Paone, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. The snow was expected to continue throughout the morning, he said.

Gov. George Pataki headed to the area Friday and was expected to declare a state of emergency for four hard-hit counties.

On Thursday, 8.3 inches of heavy snow set the record for the "snowiest" October day in Buffalo in the weather service's 137-year history, said meteorologist Tom Niziol. The previous record of 6 inches was set Oct. 31, 1917.

"This is an extremely rare event for this early in the season," Niziol said.

Detroit and Chicago also set records, for the earliest measured snow. On Thursday, Detroit broke the mark set on Oct. 13, 1909. Chicago beat a mark twice set on Oct. 18, in 1972 and 1989.

Detroit's weather, among other factors, prompted Major League Baseball to move up the start time of Game 3 of the AL championship from 8:19 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Friday.

"It's definitely not going to be baseball weather," said Dave Gurney of the National Weather Service in Michigan. "Around 45 degrees, wind gusts up to 35 mph and some snow showers."

Only a few players braved the cold to practice outdoors at Comerica Park on Thursday.

The New York State Thruway was closed for 105 miles from Rochester to Dunkirk, southwest of Buffalo because of the storm. Highway spokeswoman Sarah Kampf said she did not know when the road would be cleared or how many motorists were stranded there.

Crews worked through the night to restore power, but many customers were expected to remain in the dark through the weekend and into next week, National Grid energy company spokesman Steve Brady said.

Brady said the snow was especially heavy and was weighing down tree limbs that mostly still have leaves.

"Our people are getting stuck in the driveway here," Brady said.

Dozens of schools were closed and towns declared states of emergency, and unnecessary driving was banned in Buffalo and some suburbs.

"We have a condition where 80 percent of the roads are impassable," said Amherst Police Lt. Stephen McGonagle.

One of the few signs of life Friday in Buffalo was children throwing snowballs and digging in snow on the unexpected day off from school.

posted October 13, 2006 06:09 PM              

Global Warming Means More Snow For Great Lakes Region

Source: Colgate University
Date: November 6, 2003

Global warming has had a surprising impact on the Great Lakes region of the U.S. more snow. A comparative study of snowfall records in and outside of the Great Lakes region indicated a significant increase in snowfall in the Great Lakes region since the 1930s but no such increase in non-Great Lakes areas.

A team of researchers, led by Colgate Associate Professor of Geography Adam Burnett, published the study, "Increasing Great Lake-Effect Snowfall during the Twentieth Century: A Regional Response to Global Warming?" in the November issue of the Journal of Climate.

Syracuse, NY, one of the snowiest cities in the U.S., experienced four of its largest snowfalls on record in the 1990s the warmest decade in the 20th century, as a result of global warming.

"Recent increases in the water temperature of the Great Lakes are consistent with global warming," said Burnett. "Such increases widen the gap between water temperature and air temperature the ideal condition for snowfall."

The research team compared snowfall records from fifteen weather stations within the Great Lakes region with ten stations at sites outside of the region. Records dating back to 1931 were available for eight of the lake-effect and six of the non-lake-effect areas. Records for the rest of the sample date back to 1950.

"We found a statistically significant increase in snowfall in the lake-effect region since 1931, but no such increase in the non-lake-effect area during the same period," said Burnett. "This leads us to believe that recent increases in lake-effect snowfall are not the result of changes in regional weather disturbances."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031106052121.htm

posted October 13, 2006 06:49 PM            

And later in the winter when there's another cold snap and heavy snow it will be because of...Global Warming.

And when temperatures are 2 degrees above normal on Christmas Day it will be because of....Global Warming.

No matter what the temperature, too hot, too cold or just right, it's because of...Global Warming.

When the temperatures stabilize or start to decline, scientists will...once again be predicting a new ice age and that will be trumpeted in headlines in newspapers...just as it was in the past...in the early 20th Century and again from the 1950's to the 1970's.

posted November 07, 2006 10:30 AM            

The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth

Biblical droughts, floods, plagues and extinctions?

Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all my references and detailed calculations here.

The Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red cent from Exxon.

In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports.

advertisementThis week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.

Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.

So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:

• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.

• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".

• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.

Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.

The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.

The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.

In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming. Here's how:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/05/nosplit/nwarm05.xml

posted November 07, 2006 11:01 AM            

• The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.

• Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar forcing.

Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably. But recent solar changes have been big.

Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.

The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure.

The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.

Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger.

Then the UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could find. Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30 years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books called The Cooling.

In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere, 20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's fast-disappearing temperature stations.

The number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in 1970. It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick" curve, and an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer guesswork rather than facts.

Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing.

You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than mass.

The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies 1.9C.

On the UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th century was 2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a temperature increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But using Stern's 1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his imagined 20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre had the same problem, and solved it by dividing its modelled output by three to "predict" 20th-century temperature correctly.

A spate of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth report next year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to keep up with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a giant heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not mentioned by Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past ocean temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged over a depth of at least a mile and a quarter.

Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above freezing. The models tend to over-predict the warming of the climate-relevant surface layer up to threefold. A recent paper by John Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. The computers didn't predict this. Sea level is scarcely rising faster today than a century ago: an inch every 15 years. Hansen now says that the oceanic "flywheel effect" gives us extra time to act, so Stern's alarmism is misplaced.

Finally, the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used these and other adjustments to predict a 21st-century temperature increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 10C.

Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of wrong numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection.

posted December 09, 2006 11:07 PM              

By Teresita Perez

December 7, 2006

posted December 09, 2006 11:25 PM            

Washington D.C. - Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the outgoing Chairman of Environment & Public Works Committee, is pleased to announce the public release of the Senate Committee published booklet entitled “A Skeptic’s Guide to Debunking Global Warming Alarmism. Hot & Cold Media Spin Cycle: A Challenge To Journalists who Cover Global Warming.”

Click here to download the "Skeptic's Guide" http://epw.senate.gov/repwhitepapers/6341044%20Hot%20&%20Cold%20Media.pdf

The color glossy 64 page booklet -- previously was only available in hardcopy to the media and policy makers -- includes speeches, graphs, press releases and scientific articles refuting catastrophe climate fears presented by the media, the United Nations, Hollywood and former Vice President turned-foreign-lobbyist Al Gore.

The “Skeptic’s Guide” includes a copy of Senator Inhofe’s 50 minute Senate floor speech http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id=263759 delivered on September 25, 2006 challenging the media to improve its reporting.

The ‘Skeptic’s Guide’, which has received recognition by the LA Times and Congressional Quarterly, is now available free for international distribution on the Senate Environmental & Public Works Web site http://epw.senate.gov/w_papers.cfm?party=rep

The book, which features web links to all supporting documentation, also serves as a handbook to identify the major players in media bias when it comes to poor climate science reporting. The guide presents a reporter’s virtual who’s-who’s of embarrassing and one-sided media coverage, with a focus on such reporters as CBS News “60 Minutes” Scott Pelley, ABC News reporter Bill Blakemore, CNN’s Miles O’Brien, and former NBC Newsman Tom Brokaw.

Senator Inhofe’s “Skeptic’s Guide” also includes hard hitting critiques of the New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Associated Press, Reuters, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post.

Senator Inhofe has challenged the media in a series of speeches and hearings to stop the unfounded hype.

“The American people are fed up with the media for promoting the idea that former Vice President Al Gore represents the scientific “consensus” that SUV’s and the modern American way of life have somehow created a 'climate emergency' that only United Nations bureaucrats and wealthy Hollywood liberals can solve,” Senator Inhofe said in October.

Skepticism that human C02 emissions are creating a “climate catastrophe” has grown in recent times. In September, renowned French geophysicists and Socialist Party member Claude Allegre, converted from a believer in manmade catastrophic global warming to a climate skeptic. This latest defector from the global warming camp caps a year in which numerous scientific studies have bolstered the claims of climate skeptics.

Scientific studies that debunk the dire predictions of human-caused global warming have continued to accumulate and many believe the new science is shattering the media-promoted scientific “consensus” on climate alarmism. See: http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264777

Related Links:

12/06/2006 - Inhofe Says Global Warming Media Hearing Exposed Alarmist Media http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=266540

10/17/2006 - Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming – Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264777

10/30/2006 - “I Don’t Like The Word ‘Balance’’- Says ABC News Global Warming Reporter http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=265464

10/24/2006 - Senator Inhofe Credited For Prompting Newsweek Admission of Error on 70's Predictions of Coming Ice Age - In Case You Missed It.... http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=265087

09/25/2006 – Senator Inhofe Speech: “Hot & Cold Media Spin: A Challenge To Journalists Who Cover Global Warming” http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id=263759

posted December 09, 2006 11:27 PM              

Another Typhoon Hits the Philippines
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/09/AR2006120900686.html

Floods in Horn of Africa leads to major health risks: WHO
http://english.people.com.cn/200612/09/eng20061209_330489.html

posted December 09, 2006 11:43 PM            

This year's tropical activity fell well short of predictions made at the beginning of the season that called for an above-average number of storms -- although not as many as last year's record-shattering season of 28 named storms.

posted December 11, 2006 12:24 AM            

The UN has now identified the culprit.

Cow farts cause global warming. More global warming than all transportation sources combined.

What will they want to regulate next?

Cow 'emissions' more damaging to planet than CO2 from cars
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Published: 10 December 2006

Meet the world's top destroyer of the environment. It is not the car, or the plane,or even George Bush: it is the cow.

A United Nations report has identified the world's rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.

The 400-page report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation, entitled Livestock's Long Shadow, also surveys the damage done by sheep, chickens, pigs and goats. But in almost every case, the world's 1.5 billion cattle are most to blame. Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.

Burning fuel to produce fertiliser to grow feed, to produce meat and to transport it - and clearing vegetation for grazing - produces 9 per cent of all emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. And their wind and manure emit more than one third of emissions of another, methane, which warms the world 20 times faster than carbon dioxide.

Livestock also produces more than 100 other polluting gases, including more than two-thirds of the world's emissions of ammonia, one of the main causes of acid rain.

Ranching, the report adds, is "the major driver of deforestation" worldwide, and overgrazing is turning a fifth of all pastures and ranges into desert.Cows also soak up vast amounts of water: it takes a staggering 990 litres of water to produce one litre of milk.

Wastes from feedlots and fertilisers used to grow their feed overnourish water, causing weeds to choke all other life. And the pesticides, antibiotics and hormones used to treat them get into drinking water and endanger human health.

The pollution washes down to the sea, killing coral reefs and creating "dead zones" devoid of life. One is up to 21,000sqkm, in the Gulf of Mexico, where much of the waste from US beef production is carried down the Mississippi.

posted December 11, 2006 12:25 AM            

Bovine emissions account for around one million tonnes of methane a year in the UK and now the government wants farmers to change what they feed the animals to cut down greenhouse gases.

Scientists have already conducted experiments on different cattle feed to determine which one best cuts down gaseous after-effects, and ministers have not ruled out action to force farmers to change their cows' diet.

Officials have worked out that agriculture contributes 7% of all the UK's greenhouse gas emissions. The sector accounts for 36% of Britain's emissions of methane, and farm animals - chiefly cows - contribute the vast majority of it.

The problem is worse in Scotland, which has a higher concentration of agriculture, meaning farm animals produce 46% of methane emissions.

Methane has been described by the United Nations as 23 times more "warming" than carbon dioxide. A UN report reveals that: "Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems."

The answer, according to scientists at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), is for farmers to alter what they are piling into their cows' front ends.

A Defra spokeswoman said:

"We do encourage farmers to look at this research and consider acting on it. There is no regulation [saying] they will have to change fodder, although that may be something we will have to look into in the future."

Britain's attempts to get to grips with the issue are in line with a growing trend in research into cows' digestive systems around the world. Scientists at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen have recorded impressive reductions by introducing a mixture of organic sugars and a special bacterium into the animals' diet.

Belgian researchers have found that adding fish oil to fodder reduced methane emissions in cattle by up to 80%, while the Australians are even experimenting with a flatulence-reducing vaccine.

posted December 12, 2006 09:14 PM              

John Roach
for National Geographic News

December 12, 2006

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061212-arctic-ice.html

Summers in the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free by 2040—decades earlier than previously expected, according to a new study of the effects of global warming on sea ice.

The scenario is predicted by computer models that assume greenhouse gas emissions will continue unabated.

Gases such as carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants and automobiles are considered major drivers of global warming.

According to computer models, if the gases continue to build up in the atmosphere at the current rate, sea ice will steadily decline for decades and then abruptly disappear.

(Related news: "Arctic Ice Levels at Record Low, May Keep Melting, Study Warns" [October 3, 2005].)

"There are tipping points in the system," said Bruno Tremblay, an assistant professor of atmospheric and ocean sciences at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

"When we reach them, things accelerate in a nonlinear way."

Tremblay is a co-author of the research, published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and presented on Monday at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California.

Feedback Loop

In the Arctic, the summer melt reduces ice cover to its minimum by September, when the arrival of winter usually refreezes the sea ice.

In one model simulation, September sea ice coverage will shrink from about 2.3 million square miles (6 million square kilometers) to 770,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) in a span of ten years.

By 2040 only a small amount of sea ice will remain along the north coasts of Greenland and Canada, while most of the rest of the ocean basin will remain ice-free through the summer (North America map).

Winter ice will thin from about 12 feet (3.7 meters) to 3 feet (1 meter) thick.

Tremblay explains that the Arctic sea ice is like a giant mirror. It reflects the sun's energy back into the atmosphere and prevents much of it from being absorbed by the ocean.

But as warmer average temperatures melt the ice, the mirror shrinks. A smaller mirror means that the ocean absorbs more of the sun's energy, which creates further warming.

This warming causes more ice to shrink, which causes more heat absorption.

"It goes into a positive feedback loop—a very efficient way of getting rid of the ice cover," Tremblay said.

In addition, climate models suggest that global warming will alter ocean circulation patterns and drive warmer currents into the Arctic.

"That is a positive feedback as well," he added. "It enhances the melting of the ice."

Dire Consequences

According to Tremblay, a summer with particularly thin ice cover combined with a pulse of warm water from a modified circulation pattern might be the tipping point.

"For us to say it could happen by 2020 or 2030 is not unrealistic," he said. "We are already seeing very strong signs in the rate of sea ice change."

Loss of Arctic sea ice would likely take a lethal toll on animals such as polar bears that rely on the ice as a hunting platform. (Related news: "Polar Bears Suffering as Arctic Summers Come Earlier, Study Finds" [September 21, 2006].)

Local indigenous people would also be unable to fish from the ice, forcing them to adapt.

"That's going to be a big strain on their mode of living," he said.

posted December 18, 2006 04:54 PM            

Lord Monckton, former policy adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, writes: "You defy every tenet of democracy when you invite ExxonMobil to deny itself the right to provide information to 'senior elected and appointed government officials' who disagree with your opinion."

In what The Charleston (WV) Daily Mail has called "an intemperate attempt to squelch debate with a hint of political consequences," Senators Rockefeller and Snowe released an open letter dated October 30 to ExxonMobil CEO, Rex Tillerson, insisting he end Exxon's funding of a "climate change denial campaign." The Senators labeled scientists with whom they disagree as "deniers," a term usually directed at "Holocaust deniers." Some voices on the political left have called for the arrest and prosecution of skeptical scientists. The British Foreign Secretary has said skeptics should be treated like advocates of Islamic terror and must be denied access to the media.

Responds Lord Monckton, "Sceptics and those who have the courage to support them are actually helpful in getting the science right. They do not, as you improperly suggest, 'obfuscate' the issue: they assist in clarifying it by challenging weaknesses in the 'consensus' argument and they compel necessary corrections ... "

Lord Monckton's Churchillian reproof continues, "You acknowledge the effectiveness of the climate sceptics. In so doing, you pay a compliment to the courage of those free-thinking scientists who continue to research climate change independently despite the likelihood of refusal of publication in journals that have taken preconceived positions; the hate mail and vilification from ignorant environmentalists; and the threat of loss of tenure in institutions of learning which no longer make any pretence to uphold or cherish academic freedom."

Of Britain's Royal Society, a State-funded scientific body which, like the Senators, has publicly leaned on ExxonMobil, Lord Monckton said, "The Society's long-standing funding by taxpayers does not ensure any greater purity of motive or rigour of thought than industrial funding of scientists who dare to question whether 'climate change' will do any harm."

To the Senators' comparison of ExxonMobil's funding of climate sceptics with tobacco-industry funding of research denying the link between smoking and lung cancer, Lord Monckton counters, "Your comparison of Exxon's funding of sceptical scientists and groups with the former antics of the tobacco industry is unjustifiable and unworthy of any credible elected representatives. Either withdraw that monstrous comparison forthwith, or resign so as not to pollute the office you hold."

Concludes Lord Monckton, "I challenge you to withdraw or resign because your letter is the latest in what appears to be an internationally-coordinated series of maladroit and malevolent attempts to silence the voices of scientists and others who have sound grounds, rooted firmly in the peer- reviewed scientific literature, to question what you would have us believe is the unanimous agreement of scientists worldwide that global warming will lead to what you excitedly but unjustifiably call 'disastrous' and 'calamitous' consequences."

SOURCE Center for Science and Public Policy

posted December 20, 2006 01:17 PM            

The scare du jour on global warming is a massive inundation of our coast caused by rapid loss of ice from Antarctica. It's a core point in Al Gore's science fiction movie, and it continues to be thumped by doomsayers around the world, in the echo chamber of the alarmist media. It's also a bunch of hooey.

If you could take the boredom, you could have read hundreds of news stories on this since An Inconvenient Truth debuted on May 25. But you'll find very little mention of a paper that appeared a mere six weeks later, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which should have stopped the whole show cold. The work is by Brenda Hall from the University of Maine and several co-authors.

First, Gore's science fiction. Due to the warming of the surrounding ocean, big ice-shelves begin to crack off and float away. Because that ice is floating, it doesn't raise sea level a bit. But then the ice cracks all the way back to where it is grounded on the ocean floor. That stuff isn't floating and the ocean rises dramatically, some twenty feet in a hundred years. Much of Manhattan, the movie suggests, is under water, along with just about every other coastal city.

Now, the truth. The notion that this is going to happen soon has just been fatally harpooned by giant Elephant Seals (Mirounga leonine). They generally hang out a long distance form Antarctica. Most of their breeding rookeries are a good 2,000 miles away on islands in the open ocean, where they feed. Most of the Antarctic coast is hemmed by huge ice shelves that prevent them from finding food.

But that wasn't always the case. According to Hall's paper, a large area of the Antarctic coast was ice-free between 1,100 and 2,300 years ago. Elephant seals established multiple rookeries on the continent. Temperatures had to be much warmer than they are today, for at least 1,200 years, and yet there was no disintegration of the large ice shelves. Hall et al. then noted another similar period, almost twice as long, from 4,000 to 6,000 years ago.

The warm millennium ended as the world's temperature descended from what scientists call the "Medieval Warm Period" into the "Little Ice Age." Antarctica has yet to fully recover from this last period, as temperatures averaged across the continent actually showed a net cooling in the last three decades.

Hall studied ancient Antarctic beaches, which could only contain relics of large numbers of elephant seals if there were open water. Others have examined extinct penguin rookeries and found that those happily footed birds tended to be absent when the seals were present. That's because penguins feed along the edges of sea-ice, so if there isn't any, there aren't any birds.

Of course this also means, even as temperatures warm to degrees seen for more than half of the last six millennia, that penguins will be displaced from their current rookeries. The horror of natural climate variability! Cute little penguins driven from their homes by cruel Mother Nature!!

Hall et al. give a quantitative perspective on today's climate. Current thinking is that the Antarctic ice shelves become susceptible to rapid breakup when the January (Summer) temperature averages about -1.5 degrees Celsius But the seals only thrive, according to the paper, "when the mean January temperature exceeds 0 [degrees] C, usually by considerable margins."

So Hall and her colleagues conclude that "January temperatures...surpassed the -1.5 [degrees] C threshold during two long periods at ~1,000-2,300 and 4,000-6,000 years b.p. [before present]."

George Denton, one of Hall's University of Maine colleagues and coauthors, summed it up in the school's U Maine Today Magazine: "Through her discovery of elephant seal remains over a widespread area where they do not exist today, she [Hall] shows evidence not only that a warming occurred, but that the Ross Ice Shelf survived that event. It's important because it speaks to the staying capacity of the ice shelf in the face of global warming."

Stories about an imminent collapse of Antarctic ice shelves can go back to the science fiction shelves, where they belonged all along.

For that matter, so can this whole apocalyptic myth. If Antarctic ice remained stable for thousands of years with temperatures considerably warmer than they are today, how in the world are we going to provoke a catastrophe? Among other things, we will still have to be powering our society on fossil fuels in the year 4,100.

posted December 27, 2006 12:01 PM            

Remember The Twilight Zone? Back in 1961, Rod Serling wrote an episode that was set in New York City amid rampant global warming. Somehow the Earth's orbit had shifted, and the planet was moving inexorably toward the sun. "This is the eve of the end," Serling intoned in his introduction. "Because even at midnight it's high noon, the hottest day in history, and you're about to spend it — in the Twilight Zone."

The story revolves around a few desperate New Yorkers struggling to survive the murderous heat. As the temperature climbs, social order crumbles. An intruder, crazed with thirst, breaks into an apartment to steal water. An elderly woman collapses and dies. Thermometers shatter, their mercury boiling over. Finally Norma, the main character, screams and passes out. Then comes the "Twilight Zone" twist: Norma wakes up to find that it's snowing outside. She'd been having a nightmare. The Earth isn't hurtling toward the sun, after all; it's spinning away from the sun. The world isn't going to end in searing heat, but in a dark and deathly deep-freeze. Fade to credits.

Well, that's climate change for you. Maybe Mother Earth is warming up, or maybe she's cooling down, but either way it's always bad news.

Here, for example, is former vice president Al Gore in 2006, on the threat posed by global warming: "Our ability to live is what is at stake." It doesn't get much more dire than that.

Yet here is climatologist Reid Bryson, in Fortune magazine's award-winning analysis of global cooling in 1974: "There is very important climatic change going on right now, and it's not merely something of academic interest. . . . It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth — like a billion people starving." It doesn't get much more dire than that, either.

Bryson's article is quoted in "Fire and Ice," a richly documented report by the Business & Media Institute, an arm of the Media Research Center. Climate-change alarmism, the report shows, is at least a century old. A few examples:

"Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again," asserted a New York Times headline in February 1895. Worrisome if true, but just seven years later, the Los Angeles Times reported that the great glaciers were undergoing "their final annihilation" due to rising temperatures worldwide. By 1923, though, it was the ice that was doing the annihilating: "Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada," the Chicago Tribune declared on Page 1.

So it was curtains for the Canadians? Er, not quite. In 1953, The New York Times reported that "nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat." Yet no sooner did our neighbors to the north breathe a sigh of relief than it turned out they weren't off the hook after all: "The rapid advance of some glaciers," wrote Lowell Ponte in The Cooling, his 1976 bestseller, "has threatened human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union." And now? "Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say," the Times reported in 2002.

Over the years, the alarmists have veered from an obsession with lethal global cooling around the turn of the 20th century to lethal global warming a generation later, back to cooling in the 1970s and now to warming once again. You don't have to be a scientist to realize that all these competing narratives of doom can't be true. Or to wonder whether any of them are.

Perhaps that is why most Americans discount the climate-change fear-mongering that is so fashionable among journalists and politicians. Last spring, as Time magazine was hyperventilating about global warming ("The debate is over. Global warming is upon us — with a vengeance. From floods to fires, droughts to storms, the climate is crashing"), a Gallup poll was finding that only 36 percent of the public say they worry "a great deal" about it.

Still, there is always a market for apocalyptic forebodings. Paul Ehrlich grew rich writing jeremiads with such titles as The Population Explosion and The Population Bomb, which predicted the imminent deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings from starvation and epidemic disease. The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome's 1972 bestseller, warned that humankind was going to experience "a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline" as the world's resources — everything from gold to petroleum — ran dry. Jonathan Schell and Carl Sagan forecast a devastating "nuclear winter" unless atomic arsenals were frozen, or better still, abolished. Those doomsday prophesies never came to pass. Neither have the climate-change catastrophes that have been bruited about for a century.

posted December 28, 2006 01:13 AM              

· Melting arctic ice prompts climate change concession
· Campaigners hope to force cuts in carbon emissions

John Vidal, environment editor and Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Thursday December 28, 2006
The Guardian

The Bush administration yesterday made one of its most significant concessions to date on the dangers of global warming, proposing protection for the polar bear, whose habitat is threatened by the melting Arctic sea ice.

The recommendation by the interior secretary, Dick Kempthorne, that the bears be added to the list of threatened species, marks a reversal by the administration from its reluctance to acknowledge the consequences of climate change.

It would bar US government agencies from any activity that would jeopardise polar bears or their hunting grounds, and could potentially require the administration to compel US industries to curb their carbon dioxide output.

The move was hailed as a victory for environmental organisations which have increasingly resorted to the US courts to try to bring America in line with other countries on global warming.

"This is a very different position than the administration was taking a few years ago when it was casting doubt on the science of global warming," said Brendan Cummings, a lawyer for the Centre for Biodiversity, one of three environmental organisations which brought a suit on behalf of the polar bear. "It's an affirmation that global warming is real."

Kassie Siegel, also of the centre, said: "This is the beginning of a sea change in the way this country addresses global warming. There is still time to save polar bears but we must reduce global warming pollution immediately."

Mr Kempthorne tried to downplay the decision, telling reporters it did not amount to a recognition of the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions. "That is outside the scope of this," he said.

But environmental activists said the stringent provisions of the Endangered Species Act - and the administration's natural reluctance to avoid a public relations fiasco over its treatment of such a popular species - worked in the polar bears' favour.

In their legal challenge, the organisations had invoked legal protections for endangered species, hoping to compel the administration to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide.

Similar tactics have been pursued by environmental groups to confront other aspects of global warming, with activists joining municipal governments and 12 states to try to force the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions under America's Clean Air Act.

For the Bush administration, which rejected the Kyoto protocols aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, Mr Kempthorne's recommendation amounts to an important admission.

The public will have 90 days to comment on the proposal, and the administration will have up to a year to formally place the polar bear within the ranks of bison, prairie dog and bald eagle on the endangered list. According to the latest data, the Arctic is now warming at faster than twice the rate of the rest of the world, and sea ice is projected to disappear in summer months before 2050.

There are an estimated 22,000-25,000 polar bears worldwide with populations in the US, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia. However, according to a report last month by the World Conservation Union, five of these populations are in decline.

Researchers are concerned that polar bears will not survive climate change. Because the ice is breaking up earlier in the year, they have less time to hunt seals and build up fat reserves that have to sustain them for up to eight months of the year. As they have become thinner, so cub survival rates have fallen.

Scientists have observed that the bears are behaving differently to only a decade or so ago. Some have been found looking for food closer to human communities, others are changing diets and there have been three reported incidents of cannibalism.

The UN Environment Programme recently concluded that the extent of summer ice in the Arctic has shrunk by more than 25% over the past 50 years.

The US government's official National Snow and Ice Data Centre says that a "stunning" reduction in sea ice has taken place in the past four years.

posted December 28, 2006 08:03 AM            

By Steve Jalsevac

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 22, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The general warming of global temperatures in recent decades appears to mostly be the result of a regular, sunspot induced climate cycle that has been occurring roughly every 1500 years for at least the past one million years. Climate physicist S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, discussed the substantial evidence for their new book "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years," at a Hudson Institute book forum in Washington, D.C. last month.

The book is said to make a very powerful case that the current climate trends we are currently seeing are in fact part of a product of a solar-linked cycle that creates harmless naturally warmer conditions approximately every 1500 years.

Dennis Avery, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, an agricultural economist and former senior analyst in the Department of State, began the discussion noting that the Romans grew wine grapes in Britain in the first century and records indicate grapes were being grown there again in the 11th century, both situations indicating that today's temperatures are not unprecedented.

Additionally, scientific analysis of ice cores from Greenland and the Antarctic found that there is a clear record of a moderate, abrupt 1500-year climate change cycle running all the way through all the major warmings and all the ice ages. Cores taken from the seabed of six oceans, including the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Arabian Sea have also revealed the same unmistakable 1500-year cycle.

The authors relate that one seabed core from near Iceland that goes back a million years revealed that the 1500-year cycle runs through the whole million years.

Avery and Singer, a professor emeritus of environmental research at the University of Virginia and the former first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service, have concluded that the alarmist predictions about how much the earth will warm in the near future are based on a radical overestimate of how much carbon dioxide changes the earth's temperatures.

The massive and natural release of carbon dioxide by the oceans; the fact that "three-fourths of our modern warming occurred before 1940, which was before much human-emitted CO2"; demonstrably false claims of a scientific consensus on global warning; and the fact that it isn't even as warm today as "it was during the medieval warming when the Vikings were able to grow crops in Greenland" - bolster the authors' politically incorrect claims on this dominating issue.

Avery and Singer do not deny the greenhouse effect but state that it is small. They state, "What we're suggesting is that both history and the recent pattern of things, particularly the warming before 1940, would indicate that the CO2 impact is a good deal smaller than the climate models which are telling us to be frightened."

Avery concludes, "it looks to me as though 75 to 80 percent of the warming I see can be credited to the natural cycle". Even then, the authors emphasize, the degree of overall warming that can be expected will be relatively harmless and does not warrant the alarmism and extreme economic and political measures being proposed.

posted January 12, 2007 12:37 PM            

Yep, 16*F in Woodland Hills, California is proof of global warming which cannot be ignored.

Cold, Snow in Parts of Southern California
LOS ANGELES, January 12, 2007

A cold snap hit the Southland amid forecasts of record or near-record low temperatures Friday and Saturday night in metropolitan, coastal and valley areas of Los Angeles County.

Post-midnight lows early Friday included 16 in Woodland Hills and 8 in some mountain areas of Los Angeles County, including Warm Springs and Sandberg.

The National Weather Service issued a Freeze Warning, effective from 1 a.m. Saturday until 9 a.m. Sunday, for the Santa Monica Recreational Area and the San Fernando, San Gabriel and Santa Clarita valleys -- areas where a "hard freeze" was expected .

A Freeze Warning is issued when temperatures are expected to dip to 28 degrees or lower for a period of two hours or more.

NWS forecasters said near-record low temperatures are possible Friday and Saturday night in downtown Los Angeles and other metropolitan and coastal areas of the city, and record lows are possible in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. The forecast for the Antelope Valley was for record or near- record lows.

The forecast highs through Saturday will range from the mid 40s to the mid 50s at low elevations and the 20s and 30s in mountain areas, along "very cold" lows -- below freezing, in some cases -- through Sunday morning.

The arctic blast hitting the Southland is the product of a very cold upper-level low-pressure system that originated in Alaska, according to the NWS.

"While this weather system is not expected to produce a lot of precipitation, it will likely bring very low snow levels to the region," said an NWS advisory.

The snow level was expected to dip to around 1,500 feet Friday morning.

"While any snow accumulation in the foothills and Antelope Valley is expected to be minimal, the mountains could experience a few inches of new snow with this very cold and unsettled weather pattern," according to the advisory.

It said the very low snow level could affect traffic on Interstate 5 from the Grapevine to Santa Clarita and Interstate 14 through Soledad Canyon, as well as highways in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=local&id=4929652

posted January 17, 2007 02:45 PM            

Snow, Ice Storm Blamed for 55 Deaths
By JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS

McALESTER, Okla.
Thousands of people stuck it out in dark, unheated homes Wednesday and hundreds of others hunkered down in shelters waiting for restoration of electrical service knocked out by the snow and ice storm blamed for 55 deaths in nine states.

posted January 17, 2007 02:49 PM            

Sure glad Arrrrnold has a plan to cool off the world climate.

Schwarzenegger sees $1 bln (that's billion} crop losses from frost
Wed Jan 17, 2007 2:01pm ET

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger estimated on Tuesday that a series of unusually cold nights would cause total state crop losses of $1 billion, including oranges and other fruits and vegetables.

"The financial losses to the agricultural industry will likely reach $1 billion," Schwarzenegger said in a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns.

"These extreme weather conditions have had a devastating impact on California's agricultural industry, exacting catastrophic losses on our citrus, avocado, vegetable and strawberry crops," the governor wrote.....
http://today.reuters .com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2007-01-17T190044Z_01_N16245202_RTRUKOC_0_US-CALIFORNIA-FREEZE.xml&src=rss&rpc=22

posted January 17, 2007 02:58 PM            

Ice plays havoc with U.S. power grid
At least 80,000 homes still without electricity as frigid weather spreads south
8:09 PM ET Jan 16, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - Emergency crews scrambled Tuesday to restore electricity to about 80,000 customers nationwide that are still in the dark following a series of ice storms that snapped trees and power lines from the Southwest Plains to New England.