Reuters 17th September -Â Arctic ice grows after near-record summer thaw Over 500,000 square kilometers gained is just “A bit”;
Reuters 3rd September 2008 -Â 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
The Age -Â A RUSSIAN journalist who alerted the world to the disappearance and likely hijacking of the Arctic Sea cargo ship has fled Russia in fear of his life.Mikhail Voitenko believes the ship was not hijacked as the Kremlin contends, but intercepted by Israeli forces to prevent arms being shipped to the Middle East, in an incident neither country wants made public. Read Article
AFP – UN chief Ban Ki-moon visited Wednesday a vault carved into the Arctic permafrost, filled with samples of the world’s most important seeds in case food crops are wiped out by a catastrophe. The world faces many daunting challenges today, one of the greatest of which is how to feed a growing population in the context of climate change,” a bundled-up Ban told reporters after he toured the site in the Svalbard archipelago some 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) from the North Pole. Read Article
Daily Telegraph - In a July 15 press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts”, Greenpeace shrieked that there will be an ice-free arctic by 2030 thanks to global warming. Interviewing Leipold on the BBC’s Hardtalk programme, Sackur pooh-poohs this risible claim by pointing out that the Greenland ice sheet is a mass of 1.6 million square kilometres with a depth in the middle of 3 kilometres; and that it had survived much warmer periods than the present. He accuses Leipold of “misleading information” and using “exaggeration and alarmism”. After initially trying to brazen it out, Leipold is forced to surrender when Sackur tells him he’s just come back from the Greenland ice shelf so he knows whereof he speaks. ”I don’t think it will be melting by 2030,” Leipold reluctantly concedes. “That may have been a mistake.” Read Article
The Historian – Just as the left wing for most of the 20th century beleived and defended the actually corrupt “peoples utopia” of Stalin’s Russia, so now their intellectual successors in the environmentally concerned urban middle classes repeat history and have fallen for a similar mirage, the bank enriching climate change scam that will not address the real environmental challenges we face but which they will no defend and lie for as they are so deep down the rabbit hole they cannot see the reality. For the sake of humanity let us hope that they do wake up, and history doesn’t repeat itself in the millions of corpses that the earlier folly enabled and unwittingly supported.
National Snow & Ice Data Centre - During the first half of August, Arctic ice extent declined more slowly than during the same period in 2007 and 2008. The slower decline is primarily due to a recent atmospheric circulation pattern, which transported ice toward the Siberian coast and discouraged export of ice out of the Arctic Ocean. It is now unlikely that 2009 will see a record low extent. Read Article
The Scientist – Research stations in Antarctica are sullying the pristine environment by improperly disposing of sewage waste, reports a study published this month in Polar Research. The study found that more than half of the research stations that operate on the continent lack sewage systems to properly treat and dispose of waste water. Fredrik Gröndahl of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, who led the study, said it should serve as a “wake-up call” to scientists working in the region. Twenty-eight countries have a total of total of 82 research stations in the Earth’s southern-most landmass, and “they need to take action to prevent the release of microorganisms to the Antarctic environment,” he told The Scientist. “This could be a big problem.” Read Article
Reuters – Border security, the drug war and arms smuggling will join trade and the recession on the agenda of President Barack Obama’s first “three amigos” summit with the leaders of Mexico and Canada this weekend in Mexico. With Mexican gangs dominating the drug trade over the U.S. border and up into Canada, and violence — often with U.S.-made weapons — spreading north, security is in the news in all three countries, as much, if not more, than trade, economic recession and climate change. Read Article
The Historian – A meeting of the regional leaders of the soon to be North American Union? As Mexico descends into a drug fuelled chaos, the Canadians are threatened in the Arctic by the Russianian chase for oil, and the US dollar collapses under the weight of national debt and quantitative easing fuelled inflation, so the calls for united action will become louder…..
New Scientist – WITHIN 60 years the Arctic Ocean could be a stagnant, polluted soup. Without drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, the Transpolar Drift, one of the Arctic’s most powerful currents and a key disperser of pollutants, is likely to disappear because of global warming. The Transpolar Drift is a cold surface current that travels right across the Arctic Ocean from central Siberia to Greenland, and eventually out into the Atlantic. It was first discovered in 1893 by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who tried unsuccessfully to use the current to sail to the North Pole. Together with the Beaufort Gyre, the Transpolar Drift keeps Arctic waters well mixed and ensures that pollution never lingers there for long. Their model confirmed that most pollutants, including pesticide, petroleum residue and nuclear fallout, are currently washed out into the north Atlantic by the Transpolar Drift. Read Article
The Historian – As usual with the modern green agenda, the point here is completly lost. Irrespective as to whether the computer models are right and the climate does warm up. Irrespective if that warming is caused by the man or other factors like the sun, volcanic activity etc. Does this article question one definite part man has played? Where have all  the “pollutants, including pesticide, petroleum residue and nuclear fallout” come from in the first place, and if they normally flow out of the Artic where do they go then? Will “dealing with carbon emissions” deal with these?
Science Daily – For climatologists, part of the challenge in predicting the future is figuring out exactly what happened during previous periods of global climate change. One long-standing climate puzzle relates to a sequence of events 33.5 million years ago in the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene. Profound changes were underway. Globally, carbon dioxide levels were falling and the hothouse warmth of the dinosaur age and Eocene Period was waning. In Antarctica, ice sheets had formed and covered much of the southern polar continent. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Polar bears are not dying out and Turkey Twizzlers are fine, according to a new book from scientists wishing to challenge science “scare stories”. It is widely thought that the polar ice caps will melt, causing sea levels to rise, resulting in the loss of cities along the coast, as well as a the majority of polar bears. Rather than man-made CO2 being responsible for global warming, they argue that there is evidence it is caused in part by the increase in the intensity of the Sun’s heat. Although the level of CO2 is higher than the “pre-industrial” level ““ today it is about 0.038 per cent of the atmosphere, compared to 0.02 per cent, carbon dioxide levels have often been as much as 10 times higher than they are today. Most populations of polar bear are doing well. Despite the melting in the Arctic ice cap, numbers have more than doubled since 1950. They are also good swimmers. Read Article
New Scientist – IN 1986, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling to allow stocks to replenish. However, this ongoing ban allows member nations to grant themselves special permits to kill whales for scientific research, with the proviso that the whale meat is utilised following data collection.Only Japan holds a special permit. Its current research programme, which started in 2000 and is run by the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), proposes to kill more than 1000 whales a year in the Antarctic and the western north Pacific. The stated objectives are to determine the population structure and feeding habits of several whale species, including endangered fin and sei whales, in order to “manage” stocks. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Lichens that have evolved to survive the intense sunlight that leaks through the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica could be used to produce a new generation of more effective sunscreens. Scientists have found that lichens growing on the rocks of the world’s coldest continent contain compounds capable of protecting the organisms from the harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. The compounds also act as antioxidants, helping to prevent damage to cells which in humans can lead to skin cancer. Read Article
The Historian – Couldn’t be any worse than the current technology of toxic chemical sunscreens that get absorbed by the skin contributing to a massive rise in Vitamin D deficency and skin cancers in the West
Daily Telegraph – More than half the species of wading birds in Europe, Africa and west Asia are declining in numbers more steeply than ever, conservationists have warned. Water birds such as lapwings, plovers, godwits and curlews undertake long distance migrations from breeding grounds as far north as the Arctic to wintering areas as far away as South Africa.Many congregate in huge numbers in only a few sites, making those areas critical to the birds’ survival, according to Wetlands International which drew up the newly-launched atlas of key sites for waders. Read Article
The Historian – Note, nothing to do with the world’s ever changing climate. All to do with mankind
WaatsUpWithThat? – From time to time we hear that various places on earth have been “warming much faster than the rest of the planet ““ as predicted by “the models.” Â One of the places commonly mentioned in that list is the Arctic, based largely on 30 years of satellite data. Â Fortunately though, we are not limited by 30 years of satellite data, as the Danish Meteorological Institute has records going back to 1958 and GISSTEMP has even longer records.Below is a visual comparison of DMI 1958 Arctic temperatures vs. 2009, showing that temperatures have hardly changed since the start of their record. Read Article
BBC – The collapse of a major polar ice sheet will not raise global sea levels as much as previous projections suggest, a team of scientists has calculated. Writing in Science, the researchers said that the demise of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) would result in a sea level rise of 3.3m (10 ft). Previous estimates had forecast a rise in the region of five to six metres. Read Article
The Historian – But seeing as ice levels in Anatrctica are actually increasing (according to NASA’s own data) and are now above 1980 levels sea levels might actually be set to fall. Damn that climate changing all the time. One minute up. Next minute down. Who can we blame?
World Net daily – The leader of a newly formed public awareness campaign to alert U.S. citizens about an effort to stifle free speech says he expects local “boards” will be assembled within 90 days to begin censoring talk radio, a move that will come as an “Arctic blast” against the expression of opinion in the United States. WND reported just days ago on a meeting at which more than two dozen principals of the nation’s top talk radio shows held a private strategy meeting to discuss government plans to squelch critical political speech on radio. Read Article
Herald Sun – IT’S snowing in April. Ice is spreading in Antarctica. The Great Barrier Reef is as healthy as ever. And that’s just the news of the past week. Truly, it never rains but it pours – and all over our global warming alarmists.
Time’s up for this absurd scaremongering. The fears are being contradicted by the facts, and more so by the week.
Doubt it? Then here’s a test. Name just three clear signs the planet is warming as the alarmists claim it should. Just three. Chances are your “proofs” are in fact on my list of 10 Top Myths about global warming. And if your “proofs” indeed turn out to be false, don’t get angry with me. Just ask yourself: Why do you still believe that man is heating the planet to hell? What evidence do you have? Read Article
ABC News – In recent years all the headlines have been about ice melting in some of the globe’s chilliest places. But it seems that global warming may actually be leading to an increase in sea ice in parts of the Antarctic.Scientists in the United Kingdom have produced a study which shows ice has grown by 100,000 square kilometres each decade in the past 30 years. Read Article
The Historian – Isn’t lucky that an “its all man’s fault” excuse has been found so quickly or it could have been an inconvenient truth
BBC – Water levels in some of the world’s most important rivers have declined significantly over the past 50 years, US researchers say. They say the reduced flows are linked to climate change and will have a major impact as the human population grows. The only area with a significant increase in water flows was the Arctic due to a greater snow and ice melting. The study was published in the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Journal of Climate. Read Article
The Historian – As usual with the spin of climate change (its man, not the natural forces it has always been before) the boogie man presented here is climate change. No mention of man’s stupidity in the over use of scarce water resources through industry and agriculture (eg: the Aral Sea) and the inneficient management of water resources (eg: Perth which with annual rainfall of 850mm recieves more rainfall than Manchester, England, and with a smaller population still needs a hugely expensive de-salination plant). And all the while the technology exists to provide unlimited water with no pollution with technology like that of Water Unlimited (see link on side panel)
The Australian – ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap. The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent’s western coast. Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth’s ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month. However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia. East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week’s meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”. Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica. Read Article
The Historian – The mainstream press finally picks up on something we highlighted a fortnight ago
New Scientist – THE midnight sun hangs low in the sky on this November evening. A plain of flat ice sweeps in all directions and mountains rise in the distance. Perched on the sea ice is a massive, teepee-shaped tent. A mechanised rumble emanates from within. Inside the tent, men in hard hats tend a rotating shaft of steel. This drill turns day and night through 8 metres of sea ice covering the surface of McMurdo Sound, off the coast of Antarctica, and through 400 metres of water beneath it and into the seabed. It’s not oil these men are drilling for, but another precious resource – historical perspective that could help us to predict the future of sea level rise. Welcome to the Antarctic Geological Drilling project, or Andrill. Read Article
The Historian – What you mean ice sheets ebb and flow, and the sea rises and falls over time, just like temperature? Preposterous. Its all man’s fault surely?
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck requires Flash Player 9 or better.