What an Engineer Finds Amazing About the Claims of Arctic and Antarctic Melting

Ronald D Voisin 
wattsupwiththat.com

It’s just amazing how we as a society can let global group-think ideas have fantastically large continued public traction when direct scientific observation utterly refutes the very basis of the ideas.  Can not the alarmist scientific folks (I’m thinking here of Mann, Alley, Schmidt, Hansen, etc.) be just a little bit honest about what is actually going on?

Sea level rise is widely reported every single day as an imminent man-made climatic disaster.  Portions of Greenland melt, and portions of Antarctica melt. are presented as proof-positive that human burning of fossil fuels is causing the Earth to overly warm and therefore causing these melts…which will lead to coastal inundation…and we must therefore change our ways at any cost.

However, it just so happens that these same portions of Greenland and Antarctica melt are now known to be situated over highly active geothermal sites…and that 100% of the observed melt is easily and readily attributable to current enhanced geothermal heat release.

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Ocean indicators suggest CO2 isn’t the strongest driver of climate

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?

From the website CO2 is Life:

The Most Powerful Evidence Climate Scientists Have of Global Warming…Rules Out CO2 as the Cause



Source

We have mentioned countless times on this blog that the warming oceans are evidence that CO2 is not the cause of global warming. To understand the climate you must first understand the oceans. The oceans control the global climate. As the oceans warm, they warm and alter the humidity of the atmosphere above them. The problem is, as we have pointed out countless times, CO2’s only defined mechanism by which to affect climate change is through the thermalization of LWIR between 13 and 18µ.

LWIR between 13 and 18µ doesn’t penetrate or warm the oceans. Visible radiation, mainly from the high energy blue end of the spectrum does. CO2 is transparent to incoming visible radiation. The energy stored in the atmosphere and land is insignificant when compared to the oceans. The oceans contain 2,000x the energy of the atmosphere, so small changes to the oceans can mean big changes in the atmospheric temperature. The oceans also produce vast amounts of CO2 (20 x the amount man produces), and the most abundant and potent greenhouse gas, water vapor.

The warming oceans are evidence that CO2 ISN’T the cause of the recent warming. Oceans are warmed by more incoming radiation reaching them, and that is in fact what has been happening (Click Here). It is extremely easy to explain the recent warming due to natural causes, explanation that is backed by the evidence (Click Here), not just uneducated highly biased and conflicted opinions.

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Convincing climate sceptics that change is a problem

Scott Adams
Scott Adams's Blog

I don't know much about science, and even less about climate science. So as a practical matter, I like to side with the majority of scientists until they change their collective minds. They might be wrong, but their guess is probably better than mine.

That said, it is mind-boggling to me that the scientific community can't make a case for climate science that sounds convincing, even to some of the people on their side, such as me. In other words, I think scientists are right (because I play the odds), but I am puzzled by why they can't put together a convincing argument, whereas the skeptics can, and easily do. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

As a public service, and to save the planet, obviously, I will tell you what it would take to convince skeptics that climate science is a problem that we must fix. Please avoid the following persuasion mistakes.
1. Stop telling me the "models" (plural) are good. If you told me one specific model was good, that might sound convincing. But if climate scientists have multiple models, and they all point in the same general direction, something sounds fishy. If climate science is relatively "settled," wouldn't we all use the same models and assumptions?

And why can't science tell me which one of the different models is the good one, so we can ignore the less-good ones? What's up with that? If you can't tell me which model is better than the others, why would I believe anything about them?
2. Stop telling me the climate models are excellent at hindcasting, meaning they work when you look at history. That is also true of financial models, and we know financial models can NOT predict the future. We also know that investment advisors like to show you their pure-luck past performance to scam you into thinking they can do it in the future. To put it bluntly, climate science is using the most well-known scam method (predicting the past) to gain credibility. That doesn't mean climate models are scams. It only means scientists picked the least credible way to claim credibility. Were there no options for presenting their case in a credible way?

Just to be clear, hindcasting is a necessary check-off for knowing your models are rational and worthy of testing in the future. But it tells you nothing of their ability to predict the future. If scientists were honest about that point, they would be more credible.
3. Tell me what percentage of warming is caused by humans versus natural causes. If humans are 10% of the cause, I am not so worried. If we are 90%, you have my attention. And if you leave out the percentage caused by humans, I have to assume the omission is intentional. And why would you leave out the most important number if you were being straight with people? Sounds fishy.  

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Despite Denial, Data Shows Global Temperatures Are Dropping Fast

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?

All global temperature data sets confirm that global temperature has fallen rapidly in recent months as the recent El Nino ended.

Guest essay by Dr David Whitehouse, The GWPF Science Editor

Over the last couple of years there have been many articles about how they have been record-breakers in global temperature. It’s often sold as a simple ‘the planet is getting warmer only because of us’ story. As I have discussed before the concurrent El Nino was dismissed by some climate scientists as having an insignificant contribution to that record. However, there is a great deal of confusion and diversity in the assessment of its contribution. Some scientists maintain that it was the recent very strong El Nino that elevated the temperature to record levels.

Nevertheless some maintain that warm records would have been broken without the El Nino (although the significant contribution made by the highly unusual warm “Pacific Blob” is usually ignored).

As the 2015/16 El Nino started to wane wiser heads said the records would fade along with it, “No El Nino, no record,” they said, showing that the El Nino was responsible for edging the years to be records.
It is obvious that the world is cooling after the El Nino and nobody knows how much it will as global temperatures bottom out. So the time is right, one would have thought, to monitor that cooling process and see what can be deduced to set the recent record warm years into their proper context.

In doing so it seems that you can write a straightforward article, clearly one that can be revisited in the coming months with new data, present some current data, discuss the caveats surrounding it, and still get criticised, especially about what the article did not say. Cut and past comments and quotes blossomed in many blogs, sloppy statistics are banded about, along with not a little hubris wrapped up in ignorance and gratuitous use of the ‘denier’ label.

David Rose’s article in the Mail on Sunday simply reported what has happened recently to the Lower Tropospheric temperature over land. This data set responds more quickly to temperature changes that other sets which follow suite later. Land temperatures heat up and cool down quicker. They show the El Nino spike very clearly and the possible return to pre El Nino temperatures.

Some have said the article is flawed because it has cherry-picked the particular data used, some have even said “extreme cherry-picking,” implying it is the only data set that shows the global temperature drop. This is nonsense.

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Global warming fraud: NOAA shows record warming where NO temperature stations exist

Adapt 2030
YouTube

NOAA shows record warm temperatures where there are no temperature monitoring stations or ocean buoys, that is straight up fraud. From Africa, Middle East and Antarctica, all made up data. All the while second most snow for Northern Hemisphere and RSS land stations show strong cooling and the sunspots are gone from our Sun three years early on the regular 11 year solar cycle.

NOAA September Temperature Fraud
"The Abnormal Warmth That Prevailed In The First Half Of The 20th Century" deleted 1970's cooling
October Global Temperature Down a Little from September
www.drroyspencer.com/
International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS)
Record Global Cooling Over The Last Eight Months
Global 2 meter anomalies
Sun spotless again 11/20
Northern hemisphere historical snow cover

Big Chill: ‘Substantial Cooling’ Predicted Within The Next Few Years

The Global Warming Policy Forum


New NASA Survey Finds Antarctica Covered in More Ice Than Previously Thought 

Climate boffins believe the UK’s topsy-turvy climate is in for a chilly twist within the next few years as three major forms of climate change trigger “substantial cooling”.

Drastic changes in ocean conditions, greenhouse gases and a weakening of the sun threaten increasingly worsening winters of blistering blizzards and severe snowstorms for years to come.

This cocktail of climate threats, paired with “hasty climate policies”, could mean “rolling blackouts” in the UK over the next few years, plunging the country into long period of darkness.

These “worse case scenario” climate threats will hit the elderly hardest, leaving “some pensioners alone in the dark” on a freezing nights resigned to a “lonely death”.

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Spectacular Drop In Global Average Satellite Temperatures

Roy Spencer
Global Warming Policy Forum 

Second largest 2-month drop in global average satellite temperatures– Largest 2-month drop in tropical average satellite temperatures.

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for June, 2016 is +0.34 deg. C, down 0.21 deg. C from the May value of +0.55 deg. C (click for full size version):

This gives a 2-month temperature fall of -0.37 deg. C, which is the second largest in the 37+ year satellite record…the largest was -0.43 deg. C in Feb. 1988.

In the tropics, there was a record fast 2-month cooling of -0.56 deg. C, just edging out -0.55 deg. C in June 1998 (also an El Nino weakening year). [...]

The rapid cooling is from the weakening El Nino and approaching La Nina conditions by mid-summer or early fall.

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Coolest Summer On Record In The United States

Ice Age Now

Meanwhile the propaganda-spewing media keeps on harping about global warming.


“The frequency of 90 degree days in the US has been plummeting for 80 years,” says the Steven Goddard website.

So far, “2014 has had the lowest frequency of 90 degree days through July 23 on record.”

The scandal of fiddled global warming data

Red Pill Network

 

The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster.

But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

 

Cooling in the USA

Ice Age Now

It’s not just a “pause” in global warming: According to NOAA, temperatures have been going down for nearly a decade. Down!

“Not only is there a pause in the posited temperature rise from man-made global warming, but a clearly evident slight cooling trend in the U.S. Average Temperature over nearly the last decade,” says Steven Goddard website.

“The trend line illustrates a cooling trend in the minimum temperatures across the Contiguous United States for nearly a decade….all three temperature sets, average, max, and min show a cooling trend is notable.

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Devastating human impact on the Amazon rainforest revealed

Comment: I don't subscribe to the anthropocentric global warming view. I think that human influence on Climate Change is virtually nil due it being a natural ebb and flow of complex forces which produces a warming / cooling cycle. However, CFC and ozone depletion along with rainforest destruction CAN be laid at the door of humanity. This report clearly illustrates the effects of that influence. 

Instead of wasting money on something we have no hope of changing we are allowing our planet to be destroyed through destructive processes which ARE within our collective power to change. 

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Science Daily

he human impact on the Amazon rainforest has been grossly underestimated according to an international team of researchers from Brazil and the UK, led by Lancaster University.

he human impact on the Amazon rainforest has been grossly underestimated according to an international team of researchers from Brazil and the UK, led by Lancaster University.

They found that selective logging and surface wildfires can result in an annual loss of 54 billion tonnes of carbon from the Brazilian Amazon, increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

This is equivalent to 40% of the yearly carbon loss from deforestation -- when entire forests are chopped down.

This is the largest ever study estimating above and below-ground carbon loss from selective logging and ground level forest fires in the tropics, based on data from 70,000 sampled trees and thousands of soil, litter and dead wood samples from 225 sites in the eastern Brazilian Amazon.

The forest degradation often starts with logging of prized trees such as mahogany and ipe. The felling and removal of these large trees often damages dozens of neighbouring trees.

Once the forest has been logged, the many gaps in the canopy means it becomes much drier due to exposure to the wind and sun, increasing the risk of wildfires spreading inside the forest.

The combination of selective logging and wildfires damages turns primary forests into a thick scrub full of smaller trees and vines, which stores 40% less carbon than undisturbed forests.

So far, climate change policies on the tropics have effectively been focusing on reducing carbon emissions from deforestation only, not accounting for emissions coming from forest degradation.

Lead researcher Dr Erika Berenguer from Lancaster University said: "The impacts of fire and logging in tropical forests have always been largely overlooked by both the scientific community and policy makers who are primarily concerned with deforestation. Yet our results show how these disturbances can severely degrade the forest, with huge amounts of carbon being transferred from plant matter straight into the atmosphere."

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Antarctica, is it melting or not? Man-made global warming can't explain this climate paradox

Sott.net

In the last week or so a number of articles have surfaced concerning scientific observations made in Antarctica. When comparing these articles, it's hard to not be a little puzzled as to what is going on. One even gets the impression that climate scientists don't talk much to each other but rather stay within their own specific field of research. Before we examine these articles, let's take a quick look at Antarctica. According to Wikipedia:

At 14.0 million km² (5.4 million sq mi), it is the fifth-largest continent in area after Asia, Africa, North America, and South America. For comparison, Antarctica is nearly twice the size of Australia.

About 98% of Antarctica is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet, a sheet of ice averaging at least 1.6 km (1.0 mi) thick. The continent has about 90% of the world's ice (and thereby about 70% of the world's fresh water).

Furthermore the Antarctic ice sheet is divided into the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) and the East Antarctic ice sheet (EAIS), something which is often missed in the mainstream media, where promoting the man-made global warming idea is all-important. Here is an image of Antarctica: 

I couldn't find the exact percentage but as we can see, the WAIS is by far the smaller of the two ice sheets, accounting for no more than 20%. There are important differences between the two ice sheets. From Wikipedia again:

In East Antarctica, the ice sheet rests on a major land mass, but in West Antarctica the bed can extend to more than 2,500 meters below sea level. Much of the land in this area would be seabed if the ice sheet were not there.

Earlier this week a report claimed: Antarctica's ice melt is unstoppable:

Massive regions of the ice sheet that makes up West Antarctica have begun collapsing in a process that scientists have worried about for decades and fear is likely unstoppable, two separate teams of scientists said on Monday.

A Guardian headline specified that Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn, with the subheading, "Two separate studies confirm loss of ice sheet is inevitable, and will cause up to 4 meters of additional sea-level rise."

The collapse of the Western Antarctica ice sheet is already under way and is unstoppable, two separate teams of scientists said on Monday.

The glaciers' retreat is being driven by climate change and is already causing sea-level rise at a much faster rate than scientists had anticipated.

The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet could eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise, devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world. But the researchers said that even though such a rise could not be stopped, it is still several centuries off, and potentially up to 1,000 years away.

Making predictions and statements about something being "unstoppable", and sea level rises hundreds of years - if not thousand of years - into the future, seems to be a little unscientific and more akin to saying what elicits the most institutional grants wishful crystal-gazing, especially given the fact that the current events are little understood.

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Global Cooling, Russia, Ukraine, Europe & The United States: The Battle Over Natural Gas

Comment: If you're into top-level mundane Astrology then you'd be very wise to check out Theodore Whites' excellent analysis:  The Grand Cardinal Cross Of Spring 2014: Crisis In Ukraine, Crimea, Russia & The West

The following is only a small extract of a very long and detailed post where astrology meets geopolitics with special attention given to the Ukraine-Russia crisis. 

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The Grand Cardinal Cross Spring 2014

[...]

The overall series of seven (7) exact Uranus-Pluto World Squares, of which the fourth exact aspect activated on November 1, 2013, will take us to the fifth (5th) exact square of April 21, 2014, and that is smack in the middle of the ongoing Grand Cardinal Cross of spring 2014. 

1 March 2014 - Mars stations retrograde at 27-Libra

2 March 2014 - Saturn stations retrograde at 23-Scorpio

6 March 2014 - Jupiter stations direct at 10-Cancer

Then, into the Grand Cardinal Cross of spring of 2014:

10 April 2014 - Mercury heads N in declination

14 April 2014 - Pluto stations retrograde

15 April 2014 - New Moon and Lunar Eclipse at 25-Libra

20 April 2014 - Jupiter squares Uranus

20 Apr 2014 - Jupiter opposes Pluto

21 Apr 2014 - 5th Uranus square Pluto, exact aspect

20-23 April - Strong cardinal transits

From these planetary configurations, it is my assessment that we are heading into dangerous times for 2014, a major cardinal crisis year.

The Holy Week of April 2014 is highlighted for much of the cardinal crisis energies.

Another problem is that there is a lunar eclipse on April 15, 2014, which compounds an already powerful time in the world. It will extend into the months of May and June 2014.

A Grand Cross, or Grand Square configuration, consists of four (4) or more planets spread out at intervals of approximately 90-degrees.

This powerful configuration features two oppositions with four planets that are square to each other. 

In the case of spring 2014, these planets are:

Mars, retrograde in Libra

Jupiter in Cancer

Uranus in Aries

Pluto, retrograde in Capricorn

Now, this configuration differs from a T-square configuration which diffuses energy, as the grand cross configuration focalizes it.

The reason for this is because any one of the planets in a grand cross, or grand square, can be considered a focal point.

These are powerful focalized energy conduits that demand attention.

Therefore, any attempt to resolve any problems caused by a single planet in the grand cardinal cross configuration simply aggravates more problems with the other planets in the configuration.

This means that one is forced to scramble, from one crisis situation to the another, without being able to concentrate long enough on a single situation to be effective in resolving anything, that is, without causing even more problems in events taking place at the same time.

Remember, this 2014 cardinal configuration shows a continuous cycle of 'focalized crisis situations,' in each of the planetary positions - Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto - as those involved are unable to fully resolve the problems associated with each single planetary body that are in unfavorable adverse aspect to one another.

The Uranus-Pluto world squares will bring about more revolutionary sentiments, violence and disruption that forces the status quo into what I consider to be suicidal attempts to regain 'control,'as the status quo is actually losing power.

It will call upon everyone with common sense, intelligence, courage and insight to counter the negativity brought about by the dying oligarchy and establishment that have laid down the groundwork of the dysfunction and disruption that is now in operation.

The spring into mid-summer 2014 is also not a good time for extended travel. I continue to warn about this due to the unfavorable world transits.

Any travel plans you have should be cancelled due to the high probability for accidents and troubles in foreign countries from now through to mid-to-late summer 2014.

My mundane advice is that it is best to stay close to home.

[...]

The Battle Over Natural Gas Global Cooling, Russia, Ukraine, Europe & The United States:

By Theodore White, astrometeorologist.Sci 

In forecasting the brutal winter of 2014 several years ago, I noted that the anomalous cold temperatures, ice and snow storms of winter 2014 would break records in the northern hemisphere.

And so it did.

The winter of 2014 shows what near future winters will be like under the new climate regime of global cooling that I have also forecasted will soon set upon the entire Earth.

And yet, another of the great bonehead errors that Washington DC and the Obama administration has consistently been making is their stance on ‘climate change.’

I will remind all that despite even President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry saying that ‘man-made global warming is a fact’ - that that is impossible.

The laws of physics which govern the Earth's entire planetary climate state outright that ‘man-made global warming,’ aka, ‘climate change’ cannot happen on Earth.

That means that it is impossible.

That is a fact.

Moreover, the solar-forced global warming that has been caused by the Sun since 1980-81 has been on the wane for years and will end, according to my Astromet calculations, in the year 2017.

And the new climate regime that is coming is global cooling, which is far, far worse than global warming could ever be.

In fact, global warming is good for the Earth, but global cooling is not.

And it is global cooling that is coming. 


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Sea Ice News – Volume 5 Number 1 – multiyear ice on the rise

Watts up with that?

Multi-year Arctic ice posts a large gain, peak ice occurred later this year. Antarctica had fourth highest minimum.

From NSIDC: Arctic sea ice at fifth lowest annual maximum

Arctic sea ice reached its annual maximum extent on March 21, after a brief surge in extent mid-month. Overall the 2014 Arctic maximum was the fifth lowest in the 1978 to 2014 record. Antarctic sea ice reached its annual minimum on February 23, and was the fourth highest Antarctic minimum in the satellite record. While this continues a strong pattern of greater-than-average sea ice extent in Antarctica for the past two years, Antarctic sea ice remains more variable year-to-year than the Arctic.

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Anti-Science: Those Who Wish to Debate Climate Threatened with Death or Jail

Washington's Blog


Preface: The scientific method requires allowing a free-for-all of hypotheses, which then rise or fall based upon the results of actual experiments.
 
For example, imprisoning Galileo for life because he didn’t agree with the “accepted” consensus that the Sun revolved around the Earth was not a great example of the scientific method. Instead of conducting experiments to see whether the Earth or Sun were the center of the Solar System, those with the prevailing view simply silenced the dissenter.

Anyone who has studied the history of science knows that many theories that were universally accepted and “known” to be true turned out to be false. See these examples from the Houston Chronicle and the Guardian.

Noam Chomsky said years ago that he would submit to fascism if it would help combat global warming:

Suppose it was discovered tomorrow that the greenhouse effects has been way understimated, and that the catastrophic effects are actually going to set in 10 years from now, and not 100 years from now or something. Well, given the state of the popular movements we have today, we’d probably have a fascist takeover-with everybody agreeing to it, because that would be the only method for survival that anyone could think of. I’d even agree to it, because there’s just no other alternatives right now.”

In 2006, Grist called for Nuremberg-style trials for climate skeptics. (The article was later retracted.)
Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lashed out at global warming skeptics in 2007, declaring “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.”

In 2007, a UN official – Yvo de Boer – warned that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be“criminally irresponsible.”

The same year, another UN official – UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland – said “it’s completely immoral, even, to question” the UN’s scientific consensus on climate.

In 2008, prominent Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki called for government leaders skeptical of global warming to be “thrown into jail.”

The same year, British journalism professor Alex Lockwood said that writers questioning global warming should be banned.

In 2009, a writer at Talking Points Memo advocated that global warming “deniers” be executed or jailed. (He later retracted the threat.)

James Lovelock – environmentalist and creator of the “Gaia hypothesis” – told the Guardian in 2010:

We need a more authoritative world. We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It’s all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can’t do that. You’ve got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.
But it can’t happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What’s the alternative to democracy? There isn’t one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

Earlier this month, an assistant philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology said he wants to send people who disagree with him about global warming to jail.

And there are many other examples of threats made in regard to the climate debate.

Postscript: If we can’t have free speech and an open scientific debate, then we are no longer living in a democracy or a society which follows the scientific method. Threatening scientific debate is anti-science and anti-liberty.
It is especially troubling given the background of climate discussions. Specifically, in the 1970s, many American scientists were terrified of an imminent ice age. Obama’s top science advisor – John Holdren –was one of them. Holdren and some other scientists proposed pouring soot over the arctic to melt the ice cap and so prevent the dreaded ice age. Holdren warned of dire consequences – including starvation and the largest tidal wave in history – if mankind did not rally on an emergency basis to stop the coming ice age.

Were those who questioned the likelihood of an imminent ice age also threatened with death or imprisonment?

Moreover, it is also concerning that many of the “solutions” proposed to combat a changing climate could do more harm than good (and see this). That’s sort of like invading Iraq after 9/11 because we had to “do” something…

Let’s say that – hypothetically – 100% of all climate scientists reached a consensus that manmade global warming from carbon dioxide was an imminent threat. Shouldn’t we choose approaches that actually work – and which do more good than harm (more) – instead of messing things up even further?

More good news for polar bears, ice habitat higher now than in 70′s/80′s

Watts Up With That?
Anthony Watts

Dr. Susan Crockford writes:

Davis Strait polar bear habitat higher now than in 1979 and early 1980s
The Davis Strait polar bear subpopulation is said to be ‘vulnerable’ to the supposed effects of global warming because, like Hudson Bay, Davis Strait sea ice retreats every summer, leaving polar bears on land for several months.

However, Davis Strait bears have been upgraded to ‘stable’ status, according to the latest table (2013) issued by the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (see their boundary map for Davis Strait bears below). Recent development of sea ice in the region can only improve that rating.

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Is our Sun falling silent?

Comment: Though not as crudely corporatised as the US media, the BBC is similarly compromised when it comes to objective reporting. It is an arm of the Establishment as we have seen with the Jimmy Savile debacle and endless human-influenced global warming bias. Here, they really need to get up to speed on the idea of climate change as a cyclic phenomenon including both global warming and global cooling periods. 

It's only "baffling scientists.." if they happen to have bought into the theory of anthropocentric global warming.

In 2007, William Livingston and Matthew Penn were talking about all this in their paper "Sunspots may vanish by 2015".  The potential effects on climate were also discussed in: " The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change", by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder. Yet the  BBC still have their mandate to push the highly flawed and politicised "scientific consensus" of the minor effects of man-made CO2 emissions...

Anyway, at least the BBC has decided to acknowledge that the Sun can affect the climate. I suppose that's something...


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The Sun's activity may be falling faster than at any time in 10,000 years

BBC News 

"I've been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I've never seen anything quite like this," says Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

He shows me recent footage captured by spacecraft that have their sights trained on our star. The Sun is revealed in exquisite detail, but its face is strangely featureless.

"If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive... you've got to go back about 100 years," he says.

This solar lull is baffling scientists, because right now the Sun should be awash with activity.

It has reached its solar maximum, the point in its 11-year cycle where activity is at a peak.
This giant ball of plasma should be peppered with sunspots, exploding with flares and spewing out huge clouds of charged particles into space in the form of coronal mass ejections.

The Sun should be at the peak of its activity - bursting with flares and coronal mass ejections

But apart from the odd event, like some recent solar flares, it has been very quiet. And this damp squib of a maximum follows a solar minimum - the period when the Sun's activity troughs - that was longer and lower than scientists expected.

"It's completely taken me and many other solar scientists by surprise," says Dr Lucie Green, from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory.

The drop off in activity is happening surprisingly quickly, and scientists are now watching closely to see if it will continue to plummet.

"It could mean a very, very inactive star, it would feel like the Sun is asleep... a very dormant ball of gas at the centre of our Solar System," explains Dr Green.

This, though, would certainly not be the first time this has happened.

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See also: Is a mini ice age on the way? Scientists warn the Sun has 'gone to sleep' and say it could cause temperatures to plunge

German global analysis: 2013 was a debacle for the cult of anthropogenic global warming

Sott.net

Veteran German journalist Ulli Kulke of Die Welt writes a summary of 2013 in terms of the global warming debate at his blog donnerunddoria.welt.de. He concludes: "Once again evidence has mounted that we are slowly but surely departing from the view of a global apocalypse."

On 2013 global temperature, Kulke writes:

We will hear that 2013 was one of the ten warmest years of recent history (probably one of the seven warmest). And with great certainty the following will be concluded from all this: This is proof that global warming is galloping unhindered, if not accelerating. But according to the statistics this is not the case at all, especially the latter. It cannot be emphasized enough: One of the 'ten warmist' or 'seven warmest' in fact shows that global warming has reached a relatively high level, but also that the dynamic for a further warming has halted, at least for the time being. [...]

In the meantime there's another observation that has been officially recognized. Even the IPCC confirmed in its fifth assessmernt report from last September: There has been no statistically significant warming in the last one and half decades. [...]

Thus global warming has stopped - and has done so even while CO2 emissions have increased unhindered."

2013 was a blow to the credibility of climate models and CO2 sensitivity. Kulke:

It was just last year - and regrettably this was kept away from the public's attention - that many scientific peer reviewed papers appeared in scientific journals showing that CO2′s effect on the climate, its 'climate sensitivity', had previously been estimated to be much too high."

2013 saw the death of the science that claimed CO2 is causing more storms. Kulke writes:

Here there are no indications that the number or intensity of hurricanes and typhoons have increased over the last decades. Quite to the contrary. The tendency is, for both strength and frequency, significantly less, as shown by this compilation umistakably shows. Also the last 2013 report from the IPCC: The authors downgraded the statements on the probability with respect to the previous report of 2007."

And 2013 saw another grand climate conference failure in Warsaw:

No one expected there would be an agreement on a binding reduction of CO2 emissions. And of course there wasn't. What a surprise...just like every year before. [...]

Once again what became clear in Warsaw: In the end it's not really about CO2 emissions - it's mostly about money and a redistribution from North To South."

Also Kulke writes it is very clear that in countries like Canada, Japan, Russia, Great Britain and Germany have been sending out loud signals that their enthusiasm about climate protection is waning.

The list of naysayer countries has gotten considerably longer."

Kulke adds that even climate refugees seeking asylum from sea level rise were turned away:

All that remains to be mentioned for 2013 is the court case in New Zealand where a citizen of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati attempted to be recognized as a a climate refuges because his island nation is supposedly going under. The judge threw out the case - mainly due to formal reasons. That's a pity because she could have provided the Polynesian with a real factual reason: namely that the islands of his nation are not going under. Quite to the contrary in the last 50 years the islands are growing, as you can read about it here."

2013 was in fact so bad that even after almost everyone had closed the books on the year and unanimously called it a knockout for the skeptics, 2013 delivered two other massive bonus blows that left the warmists reeling at the very end of the year: the Chris Turney Antarctic expedition debacle and the record North American cold wave. These last-second blows are carrying well into the year 2014.

Never has a new year started off so well for the skeptics. The debate tipping point is steadily getting closer. 

Global warming scientists forced to admit defeat... because of too much ice: Stranded Antarctic ship's crew will be rescued by helicopter

Daily Mail

•  Chris Turney, a climate scientist and leader of the expedition, was going to document 'environmental changes' at the pole
• In an interview he said he expected melting ice to play a part in expedition
• MV Akademik Schokalskiy still stuck among thick ice sheet 1,500 nautical miles south of Hobart, the Tasmanian capital
• Called for help at 5am Christmas morning after becoming submerged in ice
• Australia's back-up ship, Aurora Australis could not break through 

They went in search evidence of the world’s melting ice caps, but instead a team of climate scientists have been forced to abandon their mission … because the Antarctic ice is thicker than usual at this time of year.

The scientists have been stuck aboard the stricken MV Akademik Schokalskiy since Christmas Day, with repeated sea rescue attempts being abandoned as icebreaking ships failed to reach them.

Now that effort has been ditched, with experts admitting the ice is just too thick. Instead the crew have built an icy helipad, with plans afoot to rescue the 74-strong team by helicopter.

Read more

Britons have to choose between food and heat

dw.de/
via iceagenow.info

“But not one clue about the unusual hard winters,” says reader Steave. “Only about high energy costs and missing insulation.”

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31.000 Britons died last year because of the cold says this article on deutschewelle.de. “Many of them were older people who lived in poorly insulated houses who were surprised by exorbitant gas and electricity prices,” says the article.

“In the past 10 years, gas and electricity prices have risen by 150 percent.

“More and more people are faced with the choice of either buying groceries, or running the heater.

“I’d rather starve than freezing to death , if it comes to that ,” Cath Dixon says in an interview with DW. So far, they ‘ve still been lucky. The 76- year-old lives in a poorly insulated and therefore heatable intensive home in Longsight, one of the poorest parts of the city of Manchester.

“The heating system runs all day ,” said the old lady. You have severe arthritis, and cannot tolerate cold, so have no other choice.

In a survey, almost one in four of the 2,000 respondents said he or she would have to ration food in order to pay the cost of energy. And for every 10 it was clear : No Christmas gifts for the family this year.

“You pay more than 10 percent of your income on electricity and gas in order to “remain reasonably warm”.

“One of the main reasons for the price increase this year is not the rising gas and electricity prices – there are social and environmental costs that are simply folded over.”

“Ironically, it is the social and environmental programs that drive higher costs for everyone.”