Bloomberg – France had its fifth-wettest month of April since 1959, after a dry March, weather forecaster Meteo- France said. Nationally, rain in April was 70 percent above normal, the Saint Mande, France-based forecaster wrote in a monthly report on its website today [May 8]. Read article
Register – The WWF – endorsed by no less a body than the European Space Agency – has stated that economic growth should be abandoned, that citizens of the world’s wealthy nations should prepare for poverty and that all the human race’s energy should be produced as renewable electricity within 38 years from now.Most astonishingly of all, the green hardliners demand that the enormous numbers of wind farms, tidal barriers and solar powerplants required under their plans should somehow be built while at the same time severely rationing supplies of concrete, steel, copper and glass. The WWF presents these demands in its just-issued Living Planet Report for 2012. It’s a remarkable document, not least for the fact that it is formally endorsed for the first time by the European Space Agency (ESA) – an organisation which would cease to exist in any meaningful form if the document’s recommendations were to be carried out. Read Article
Editorial Note – The WWF’s President is Prince Charles, a man well known for his poverty stricken lifestyle, small houses and inexpensive “green” cars.
National Science Foundation – Changes in the speed that ice travels in more than 200 outlet glaciers indicates that Greenland’s contribution to rising sea level in the 21st century could be significantly less than the upper limits some scientists thought possible. The finding comes from a paper funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA and published in today’s journal Science.
While the study indicates that a melting Greenland’s contributions to rising sea levels could be less than expected, researchers concede that more work needs to be done before any definitive trend can be identified. Studies like this one are designed to examine more closely and in greater detail what is actually happening with the ice sheets, often using newer and more precise tools and thereby better defining the parameters that scientists use to make predictions, such as the upper limits of sea-level rise. Read Article
The Independent – April’s record rainfall has brought much of England out of drought status, the Environment Agency announced today. The heaviest “April showers” since records began in 1910, combined with a similarly sodden beginning to May, have allowed official drought status to be lifted for 19 counties in the South-west, the Midlands and Yorkshire, the agency said. Read article
Source: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Beck0011.jpg
AFP – Severe drought gripping northeastern Brazil — the worst in a half-century — is taking its toll on more than 1,100 towns, even triggering fighting in rural areas, local media reported Sunday. An average of one person a day is being killed in “water wars” in rural areas, while scores of animals are wasting away before perishing, the O Globo newspaper reported over the weekend. Read article
Source: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/05/uah-global-temperature-update-for-april-2012-0-30c/
The global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly increased again in April, 2012, to +0.30°C., with warming in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres, but slightly cool conditions persisting in the tropics.
The corresponding April anomaly from RSS, using a common baseline period of 1981-2010, is considerably cooler at +0.21°C.
The Australian – CLAIMS that some of Australia’s leading climate change scientists were subjected to death threats as part of a vicious and unrelenting email campaign have been debunked by the Privacy Commissioner. Timothy Pilgrim was called in to adjudicate on a Freedom of Information application in relation to Fairfax and ABC reports last June alleging that Australian National University climate change researchers were facing the ongoing campaign and had been moved to “more secure buildings” following explicit threats. Read Article
The Australian – TEMPERATURES in Sydney’s western suburbs are rising faster than in the city’s ritzy eastern suburbs, leading to a prediction hospital admissions will skyrocket by 40 per cent by 2030. A report to be released today by the Climate Commission on the impacts of climate change on NSW directly links climate change to increases in the number of heatwave days in Australia’s biggest metropolitan area, and claims that residents of western Sydney would experience more days above 35C and that this would occur at a faster rate than in the eastern suburbs. However, sea-level rises could spark storm-surge problems for coastal areas, with the report citing research that predicts a 50cm rise in sea level could spark flooding events – currently seen as one-in-100-year phenomena – every few months. Chief climate commissioner Tim Flannery said the report was based on the latest science and had been released before a series of meetings in western Sydney this week. However, Professor Hughes, the head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University, said the difference could well be a combination of climate change and the fact that a lack of a sea breeze, heat-trapping roads, dark roofs and carparks, and increased temperature had made the areas into a “heat island”. Read Article
Editorial Comment – Tim Flannery is Australia’s leading climate alarmist (and is paid $180,000 a year by the Australian taxpayer to do so) and frequently warns about rising sea levels. That did stop him recently buying a very nice waterside property in Sydney. Clearly he’s not that worried about sea-level rises after-all.
Source: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/MAINE_ANNUAL.jpg
Daily Mail – Life-threatening asthma cases will rocket this summer if the record-breaking rainfall continues, a leading healthcare expert has warned.
Recent record rainfall has triggered a spike in the number of ‘thunderstorm asthma’ admissions to hospitals, visits to doctors surgeries and emergency out-of-hours calls.
Medics say the heavy rain stirs fungal spores, especially one identified as alternaria which can cause a life-threatening asthma attack. Read article
Source: http://hidethedecline.eu/media/Nautisk/fig1big.gif
NPR – A new study has some reassuring news about how fast Greenland’s glaciers are melting away. Greenland’s glaciers hold enough water to raise sea level by 20 feet, and they are melting as the planet warms, so there’s a lot at stake. A few years ago, the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland really caught people’s attention. In short order, this slow-moving stream of ice suddenly doubled its speed. It started dumping a whole lot more ice into the Atlantic. Other glaciers also sped up. Read Article
Daily Mail – Dinosaurs may be partly to blame for a change in climate because they created so much flatulence, according to leading scientists. Professor Graeme Ruxton of St Andrews University, Scotland, said the giant animals spent 150 years emitting the potent global warming gas, methane. Large plant-eating sauropods would have been the main culprits because of the huge amounts of greenery they consumed.Read Article
Editorial Comment – Yet more proof that you can get scientific funding for anything as long as it perpetuates the myth of anthropogenic global warming
PhysOrg (7 May 2012) – An abrupt cooling in Europe together with an increase in humidity and particularly in windiness coincided with a sustained reduction in solar activity 2800 years ago. Scientists from the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ in collaboration with Swedish and Dutch colleagues provide evidence for a direct solar-climate linkage on centennial timescales. Using the most modern methodological approach, they analysed sediments from Lake Meerfelder Maar, a maar lake in the Eifel/Germany, to determine annual variations in climate proxies and solar activity.
The study published online in Nature Geoscience reports the climatic change that occurred at the beginning of the pre-Roman Iron Age and demonstrates that especially the so-called Grand Minima of solar activity can affect climate conditions in western Europe through changes in regional atmospheric circulation pattern. Around 2800 years ago, one of these Grand Solar Minima, the Homeric Minimum, caused a distinct climatic change in less than a decade in Western Europe.
The exceptional seasonally laminated sediments from the studied maar lake allow a precise dating even of short-term climate changes. The results show for a 200 year long period strongly increased springtime winds during a period of cool and wet climate in Europe. In combination with model studies they suggest a mechanism that can explain the relation between a weak sun and climate change. Read Article
The Guardian – A study that emerged from Denmark this week may not have seemed particularly striking in itself. It does, however, add to a growing body of evidence that the paucity of sunlight in the UK for most of the year not only makes us miserable, but could actually be doing us harm. The study showed vitamin D tablets could lower blood pressure just as well as prescription medicines. It was small, but the findings were significant. Almost everyone with high blood pressure in the study had vitamin D levels that were too low. So the tablets were replacing something that was missing. Read article
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml
The Australian – CLAIMS that some of Australia’s leading climate change scientists were subjected to death threats as part of a vicious and unrelenting email campaign have been debunked by the Privacy Commissioner. Timothy Pilgrim was called in to adjudicate on a Freedom of Information application in relation to Fairfax and ABC reports last June alleging that Australian National University climate change researchers were facing the ongoing campaign and had been moved to “more secure buildings” following explicit threats. Read Article
NASA – Warm ocean currents attacking the underside of ice shelves are the dominant cause of recent ice loss from Antarctica, a new study using measurements from NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) revealed.
An international team of scientists used a combination of satellite measurements and models to differentiate between the two known causes of melting ice shelves: warm ocean currents thawing the underbelly of the floating extensions of ice sheets and warm air melting them from above. The finding, published today in the journal Nature, brings scientists a step closer to providing reliable projections of future sea level rise.
The researchers concluded that 20 of the 54 ice shelves studied are being melted by warm ocean currents. Most of these are in West Antarctica, where inland glaciers flowing down to the coast and feeding into these thinning ice shelves have accelerated, draining more ice into the sea and contributing to sea-level rise. This ocean-driven thinning is responsible for the most widespread and rapid ice losses in West Antarctica, and for the majority of Antarctic ice sheet loss during the study period. Read Article
Editorial Comment – This really makes all the hype over the now discredited Steig et al. paper, which attempted to establish an air temperature warming trend as one of the possible causes for “Antarctic melting”, only to have the Mannian PCA math they used shot down in flames for smearing data from the Antarctic Peninsula all over the continent, look even weaker.
The Earth Institute Columbia University – City streets can be mean, but somewhere near Brooklyn, a tree grows far better than its country cousins, due to chronically elevated city heat levels, says a new study. The study, just published in the journal Tree Physiology, shows that common native red oak seedlings grow as much as eight times faster in New York’s Central Park than in more rural, cooler settings in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains. Red oaks and their close relatives dominate areas ranging from northern Virginia to southern New England, so the study may have implications for changing climate and forest composition over a wide region.
The “urban heat island” is a well-known phenomenon that makes large cities hotter than surrounding countryside; it is the result of solar energy being absorbed by pavement, buildings and other infrastructure, then radiated back into the air. With a warming climate, it is generally viewed as a threat to public health that needs mitigating. On the flip side, “Some organisms may thrive on urban conditions,” said tree physiologist Kevin Griffin of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who oversaw the study. Griffin said that the city’s hot summer nights, while a misery for humans, are a boon to trees, allowing them to perform more of the chemical reactions needed for photosynthesis when the sun comes back up. Read Article
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck requires Flash Player 9 or better.
