New Scientist – A wide expanse of Arctic Ocean seabed is bubbling methane into the atmosphere. This is the first time that the ocean has been found to be releasing this powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere on this scale. The discovery will rekindle fears that global warming might be on the verge of unlocking billions of tonnes of methane from beneath the oceans, which could trigger runaway climate change. The trouble is, nobody knows if the Arctic emissions are new, or indeed anything to do with global warming. Read Article
New Scientist – The calving of a massive iceberg off east Antarctica last week has prompted fears that the event could alter the salinity of the surrounding ocean, with damaging effects on marine life and global ocean currents. The 860-billion-tonne berg, with a surface area of about 2500 square kilometres, had formed 50 per cent of a 100-kilometre tongue poking out of the Mertz glacier. Major fractures had been developing for years, so the break was anticipated, say Rob Massom and Neal Young of the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Australia. “It was hanging like a loose tooth,” says Massom. The event was not the direct result of climate change, Massom and Young say. The ice was forced loose when the tongue was rammed in mid-February by an iceberg named B-9B. Read Article
Daily Mail – A fossil find suggests that polar bears may only have come into existence during an ice age 150,000 years ago as part of the brown bears’ battle for survival against climate change. Scientists discovered the jawbone of an animal that died up to 130,000 years ago at Poolepynten on the Arctic island of Svalbard. It is oldest polar bear fossil ever found and has given an intriguing insight into the origins of the planet’s largest predator. Professors Olafur Ingolfsson, of the University of Iceland, and Oystein Wiig, of the University of Oslo, who made the discovery believe it reveals polar bears may have survived at least one long period of global warming. Read Article
Science Daily — Focusing on a controversial hypothesis that ice existed at the equator some 300 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Period, two University of Oklahoma researchers originated a project in search of clues to Earth’s climate system. Read Article
Ed – Earth’s atmospheric CO2 level is currently about 0.036%. 300 million years ago this level was over 100 times greater. And yet there was ice at the equator (according to many other geological studies)
Daily Mail – Sea water under an East Antarctic ice shelf showed no sign of higher temperatures, first tests showed today.Despite fears of a thaw linked to global warming that could bring higher world ocean levels, tests conducted on the Fimbul Ice Shelf showed the sea water is still around freezing point.Thanks to sensors, lowered through three holes drilled in the shelf, scientists have discovered the water is not at higher temperatures widely blamed for the break-up of 10 shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, the most northerly part of the frozen continent. Read Article
National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research -In a vivid example of how a small geographic feature can have far-reaching impacts on climate, new research shows that water levels in the Bering Strait helped drive global climate patterns during ice age episodes dating back more than 100,000 years.The international study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), found that the repeated opening and closing of the narrow strait due to fluctuating sea levels affected currents that transported heat and salinity in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. As a result, summer temperatures in parts of North America and Greenland oscillated between warmer and colder phases, causing ice sheets to alternate between expansion and retreat and affecting sea levels worldwide.While the findings do not directly bear on current global warming, they highlight the complexity of Earth’s climate system and the fact that seemingly insignificant changes can lead to dramatic tipping points for climate patterns, especially in and around the Arctic. Read Article
Wall Street Journal – Just how endangered is the polar bear? It depends on whom you ask. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — as well as many polar-bear biologists — say that global warming is destroying so much of the bears’ icy habitat that the species could be nearly wiped out in the next 100 years. The U.S. is pushing to ban global trade in polar bears at an international meeting in March. Then there is Solomon Awa, a resident of Iqaluit in Canada’s Arctic northeast, who like many Inuit is seeing more polar bears than ever when he goes hunting. “I’ve seen polar bears are not declining,” says Mr. Awa. “Actually, there are increasing numbers.” The warring viewpoints highlight how divided the once tight-knit community of polar-bear experts has become as global warming focuses international attention and money on the plight of the bears. Scientists, governments and Inuit communities are feuding over whether polar-bear numbers are increasing or decreasing, whether they are in danger of extinction and, if they are, what to do about it. Read Article
Ed – If the Inuit’s are correct and numbers are actually rising do you think those scientific research grants are going to be so forthcoming?
New York Times – The unusual pattern of atmospheric high and low pressure over and around the Arctic that has contributed to the recent snow and cold from Alabama to Washington, to East Anglia, England (and rain and warmth along the west coast of Greenland) is also an important influence on the shifting sheath of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean. Several specialists studying Arctic sea ice told me that there’s a good chance that, if current conditions persist, the ice this spring could be in better shape than it has been over the last few years. In all of this, though, it’s important to step back from the lure of the moment, which quickly attracts bursts of attention from climate commentators when conditions favor one view or another, and examine long-term trends. Read Article
Wall Street Pit Magazine – Funny – the New York Times has been reporting on the Polar ice melt for over 100 years, and usually blaming it on man. The dumbest is the 1959 story of the ice disappearing – which was followed by 20 years of Global Cooling. From the Daily Telegraph (Australia), Eternal Melting: From the New York Times, 128 years of looming polar doom:1881: “This past Winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting …” 1932: “NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents” 1934: “New Evidence Supports Geology’s View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmer” Read Article
Ed – If they keep predicting it long enough one day they may even get it right
The Times – There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday. The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row. Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years. In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.” However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.” Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore. Read Article
NPR – Global warming may be making some people nervous now, but from 1810 to 1819, people worried because the Earth was colder than usual. For an entire decade, the Earth cooled almost a full degree Fahrenheit. In fact, 1816 was known as the year without a summer. And until recently, scientists weren’t quite sure why everyone was shivering. The chill of 1816 has long been blamed on an Indonesian volcano called Tambora, which erupted the year before. But no one could figure out why the years before Tambora’s eruption were also colder than usual. Now, newly uncovered evidence in the ice of Antarctica and Greenland suggests that yet another volcanic eruption may have contributed to the worldwide dip in temperatures. Jihong Cole-Dai, a chemistry professor at South Dakota State University, led the expeditions to Antarctica and Greenland. He tells NPR’s Guy Raz that volcanoes dump large quantities of ash and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Read Article
Ed – Volcanoes also emit vast quantities of CO2. The relatively small Mt. St. Helens eruption released more CO2, dust and ash into the atmosphere than all such emissions by human activity since the beginning of recorded human history. The majority of active volcanoes on the planet are unmonitored by humans, being in the oceans or under the ice at the poles.
The Times – The bears may be forced into eating their own kind when the slower formation of Arctic ice leaves them with a shrinking platform from which to hunt seals, according to a study by American and Canadian scientists in 2006. The World Meteorological Association reported yesterday at the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen that this decade is on track to become the warmest since records began in 1850, and 2009 could rank among the top five warmest years. However, a local Inuit leader dismissed the idea of any link between cannibalism and climate change. Jose Kusugak, the president of the Kivalliq Inuit Association, told reporters: “A male polar bear eating a cub becomes a big story and they try to marry it with climate change and so on. It becomes absurd — when it’s a normal, normal occurrence.” Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Animals may have survived the global warming that caused Earth’s biggest mass extinction by fleeing to Antarctica, scientists believe. The evidence emerged from a study of fossil bones collected from Antarctica more than 30 years ago. Researchers now know they belong to an ancient relative of mammals that lived around 250 million years ago. Read Article
Ed – Yes, global warming (and cooling) is a common occurance on Earth. The only difference is that this time, assuming it is warming and the data seems to show cooling for the last decade, there is pots of money to be made by a few and the expense of the many.
BBC – Sea levels are likely to rise by about 1.4m (4ft 6in) globally by 2100 as polar ice melts, according to a major review of climate change in Antarctica. Conducted by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), it says that warming seas are accelerating melting in the west of the continent. Read Article
Ed – DON’T PANIC! Despite the inconvenient truth of the Climate-gate revelations last week, the global warming fanatics and their banking masters are now in full PR campaign over-drive in the build up to the forthcoming Copenhagen Summit. Climate scare stories are up threefold on this time last month. Expect many similar conspiracy theories to this BBC article to be peddled over the next few weeks. With this article just remember that your ancestors 10,000 years ago had to cope with sea level rises of tens of metres and temperature rises of over 5 degrees in under a lifetime.
PhysOrg – California experienced centuries-long droughts in the past 20,000 years that coincided with the thawing of ice caps in the Arctic, according to a new study by UC Davis doctoral student Jessica Oster and geology professor Isabel Montañez. At the end of the last ice age about 15,000 years ago, climate records from Greenland show a warm period called the Bolling-Allerod period. Oster and Montanez’s results show that at the same time, California became much drier. Episodes of relative cooling in the Arctic records, including the Younger Dryas period 13,000 years ago, were accompanied by wetter periods in California. Read Article
ScienceDaily — Large blooms of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are flourishing in areas of open water left exposed by the recent and rapid melting of ice shelves and glaciers around the Antarctic Peninsula. This remarkable colonisation is having a beneficial impact on climate change. As the blooms die back phytoplankton sinks to the sea-bed where it can store carbon for thousands or millions of years. Read Article
The Historian – Irrespective of whether CO2 causes the climate to change, and irrespective as to whether the 0.0014% change in the Earth’s atmosphere caused, according to the IPCC, by man’s CO2 emissions, we should never lose sight of the fact that plants, and life in general have historical terms always thrived when the temperatures have been warmer, and when the atmospheric CO2 concentration has been higher than the current 0.038% (put another way that is 38cm in every Kilometre of atmosphere, and it has increased by 1.4cm’s due to man)
NPR – A NASA DC-8 plane equipped with lasers, ice-penetrating radar, and a gravity meter is revealing a dynamic and complex world beneath the massive ice sheet that covers Antarctica. The plane is flying over Antarctica for six weeks as part of a mission to use airplanes to replace a dying NASA satellite that’s been monitoring polar ice. The Antarctic ice sheet covers an area larger than Europe. In places, it’s miles thick. If the sheet ever melts, sea level will rise by dozens of feet. Scientists have known for years that there are volcanoes, mountains, rivers and lakes beneath the ice. But they haven’t known many details about these things. Read Article
The Historian – Ask yourself, would an unmonitored volcano potentially melt a lot of ice (plus emit tens of thousands of tonnes of CO2) if it erupted under Antarctica or the Arctic?
Daily Telegraph - This is now the third year running when there have been signs of an abnormally cold winter across large parts of the world. Last year’s October snowfalls in the US broke records which in some cases had stood for over a century, prefacing one of America’s coldest winters for decades. This summer’s Arctic ice-melt stopped nearly 1 million square kilometres short of its record low in 2007. Around Antarctica this year’s sea ice-melt was the lowest recorded since satellite data began in 1979, leaving the ice 30 per cent above its 30-year average. What a startling contrast is provided by all these events in the real world to the ever more surreal frenzy of the warmists as – with only weeks to go before their doomed Copenhagen treaty conference in December – they make a last desperate bid to keep climate change hysteria at fever pitch. Read Article
Geophysical Research Letters – A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season. Read Article
Climate Dynamics Journal – This paper presents updated tree-ring width (TRW) and maximum density (MXD) from Torneträsk in northern Sweden, now covering the period ad 500–2004. By including data from relatively young trees for the most recent period, a previously noted decline in recent MXD is eliminated. Non-climatological growth trends in the data are removed using Regional Curve Standardization (RCS), thus producing TRW and MXD chronologies with preserved low-frequency variability. The chronologies are calibrated using local and regional instrumental climate records. Read Article
The Historian - The study concludes that “The late-twentieth century is not exceptionally warm in the new record: On decadal-to-centennial timescales, periods around a.d. 750, 1000, 1400, and 1750 were equally warm, or warmer. The 200-year long warm period centered on a.d. 1000 was significantly warmer than the late-twentieth century and is supported by other local and regional paleoclimate data.” (H. Grudd, Torneträsk tree-ring width and density ad 500–2004: a test of climatic sensitivity and a new 1500-year reconstruction of north Fennoscandian summers, Climate Dynamics, Volume 31, Numbers 7-8 / December, 2008). Basically a rather inconvenient truth that the earth was warmer one thousand years ago than today.
Reuters 17th September - Arctic ice grows after near-record summer thaw Over 500,000 square kilometers gained is just “A bit”;
Reuters 3rd September 2008 - Massive Arctic ice shelf breaks away 55 square kilometers broken away is “Massive” and “Huge”
BBC – This summer’s melt of Arctic sea ice has not been as profound as in the last two years, scientists said as the ice began its annual Autumn recovery. At its smallest extent this summer, on 12 September, the ice covered 5.10 million sq km (1.97 million sq miles). This was larger than the minima seen in the last two years, and leaves 2007’s record low of 4.1 million sq km (1.6 million sq miles) intact. (The Historian – In the 30 years since 1979 that it has been accurately measured by satellites) Read Article
The Times - It is both a symbol of global warming and a potentially lucrative new trade route between Europe and Asia. Two German container ships have successfully navigated the Russian Northeast Passage across Arctic waters from the Pacific for the first time in a voyage considered impossible until a few years ago. Read Article
The Historian – Lets put this into its historical perspective. The 15th to 19th century attempts were during the Little Ige Age. Needless to say they failed. The Northeast passage was sailed in 1878 by Swedish explorer Nordenskiöld with no help from a nuclear powered ice breaker. In 1915 a Russian expedition led by Boris Vilkitsky made the passge from East to West . n the 12th century Vikings were able to cicumnavigate Greenland, something that only ice-breakers could confidently do today. Yes it is a modern achievement. No it is not an indication of anything other than the constantly changing environment of this dynamic planet.
The Times – Russia flatly denied yesterday that the cargo ship allegedly hijacked in European waters was carrying a secret consignment of missiles to Iran. Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister, rejected reports that the Arctic Sea had been loaded with S-300 air-defence missiles, saying: “This is absolutely untrue.” Read Article
The Historian – Their word is their bond. Like all Governments the Kremlin has never been shown to have lied before so to cover their tracks
The Times - A CARGO ship that vanished in the Channel was carrying arms to Iran and was being tracked by Mossad, the Israeli security service, according to sources in both Russia and Israel. The Arctic Sea, officially carrying a cargo of timber worth £1.3m, disappeared en route from Finland to Algeria on July 24. It was recovered off west Africa on August 17 when eight alleged hijackers were arrested. The Kremlin has consistently denied that the vessel was carrying a secret cargo. It claims the ship was hijacked by criminals who demanded a £1m ransom. The official version was challenged by sources in Tel Aviv and Moscow who claimed the ship had been loaded with S-300 missiles, Russia’s most advanced anti-aircraft weapon, while undergoing repairs in the Russian port of Kaliningrad. Read Article
