space.com – When a shock wave from a solar storm hits the Earth’s protective magnetic bubble, it creates highly energetic particles dubbed “killer electrons” that can be dangerous to satellites. During solar storms, the number of killer electrons in the radiation belt grows at least 10 times. The European Space Agency’s Cluster mission has helped figure out how these killer particles are created, which could help to better protect Earth’s satellites and astronauts – Read Article
Space.com – A new study reports that the top of the gigantic conveyor belt of plasma moving inside the sun has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years. The phenomenon might be the reason why the sun has continued to have so few sunspots recently when it should be ramping up the production of these surface-blotching storms. “I believe this could explain the unusually deep solar minimum we’ve been experiencing,” said David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA and co-author of a new study describing the findings, in a NASA statement. “The high speed of the conveyor belt challenges existing models of the solar cycle and it has forced us back to the drawing board for new ideas.” Read Article
DW-World – The Earth is an oven. 99 percent of our planet is hotter than 1000 degrees Celsius. This natural heat can be harnessed for eco-friendly electricity production. What is more, poor countries can profit from it. The ancient Romans knew how to live the good life. They turned hot springs with sulfurous water into thermal baths, creating health spas for the rich and powerful. This knowledge of the Earth’s heat was passed on to their descendants: modern-day Italians who set up the first geothermal power plant Italy in 1913, paving the way for a new form of energy production. Today, geothermal energy is used in numerous countries. It works especially well in places where volcanic activity is high and the crust of the Earth is thin. Drilled tunnels several kilometers long release steam with a temperature of more than 200 degrees Celsius (392 degrees Fahrenheit), which is then easily turned into electricity at special power plants around the world from New Zealand to the Philippines to the West Coast of the United States – Read Article
Ed – It is so accessible that even the Queen has a geothermal generator at Buckingham Palace as seen in this very early Open Your Eyes News article
(Reuters) – Like a savvy Madison Avenue advertising team, senators pushing climate-control legislation have decided to scrap the name “cap and trade” and rebrand their product as “pollution reduction targets.”
A clunky and difficult term to define for laymen and some politicians, “cap and trade” had become dirty words on Capitol Hill in recent months. Republicans called the plan nothing more than “cap and tax” and one influential senator took great pains last week to declare cap and trade “dead.” Senator Joseph Lieberman, an independent trying to draft a bipartisan bill, said, “We don’t use that term anymore.” Instead Lieberman said, laughing: “We will have pollution reduction targets.” Read Article
Daily Mail – Britain is the worst country in which to raise children, while Australia is the best, a study has found. A massive 78 per cent of children who moved there from countries such as the UK spent more time outdoors than they did before, and the majority ate more healthily. Read Article
(AP) Two years after receiving Its first deposits, a “doomsday” seed vault on an Arctic island has amassed half a million seed samples, making it the world’s most diverse repository of crop seeds, the vault’s operators announced Thursday. Cary Fowler – who heads the trust that oversees the seed collection, which is 620 miles from the North Pole, said the facility now houses at least one-third of the world’s crop seeds – Read Article
SkyNews – The Earth really did move during last month’s massive Chile quake, which killed hundreds of people and left two million homeless. Researchers say cities and islands physically shifted west. Thanks to satellites, scientists at Ohio State University and the University of Hawaii found that the city of Concepcion moved at least 10 feet to the west – Read Article
Daily News – A series of powerful aftershocks struck Chile Thursday morning – the strongest a 7.2 magnitude quake in the central part of the country. The aftershock hit the country as President-elect Sebastian Pinera and hundreds of high powered guests gathered for his swearing in ceremony in Valparaiso, a coastal city outside the capital, Santiago. Read Article
Science News – New research reveals just how bad an idea it was to colonize Greenland and Iceland more than a millennium ago: average temperatures in Iceland – Read Article
The Australian -THE chairman of the ABC, Maurice Newman, has told about 250 leading journalists, program-makers and managers at the ABC that the media had displayed “group-think” on the issue of climate change in a speech that led to a feisty exchange with senior journalists- Read Article
Associated Press – President Barack Obama made a renewed push for a long-stalled climate and energy bill Tuesday, urging lawmakers at a White House meeting to pass a comprehensive bill this year. Fourteen senators from both parties. Read Article
Nature – Temperature records gleaned from clamshells reveal accuracy of Norse sagas. Oxygen isotopes in clamshells may provide the most detailed record yet of global climate change, according to a team of scientists who studied a haul of ancient Icelandic molluscs. Most measures of palaeoclimate provide data on only average annual temperatures,… Read Article
Somehow the tables have turned. For all the smears of big money funding the “deniers”, the numbers reveal that the sceptics are actually the true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St. How times have changed. Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil’s supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking. The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the money? So I did and it’s chilling. Greens and environmentalists need to be aware each time they smear with an ad hominem attack they are unwittingly helping giant finance houses. Read the full Op-Ed by Joanne Nova
CTV News – NEW DELHI- India has officially agreed to sign on the nonbinding Copenhagen climate accord. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told parliament the decision implies that India stands by the accord. India, along with Brazil, China, South Africa, the EU and the U.S., forged the compromise at the Danish summit in December. But there was some concern earlier this year after several countries missed an initial deadline to express support for the accord that even the weak agreement would fall apart. Read Article
Weekly Standard – It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. Read Article
Financial Times – China Daily reports that the country’s Weather Modification Office says there is ‘rising demand’ for ways to control the weather: As drought and hailstorms pose severe threats to rural income and food supply, there is a rising demand for technology to cushion the impact, Zheng Guoguang told China Daily. What is weather modification, you ask? Well, it’s mostly cloud-seeding, and, in China at least, precipitating snowfall and preventing hail. Read Article
The Independent – Three years of heavy rain and low temperatures made it hard for insects to fly. Five of Britain’s rarest butterflies are on the road to extinction after three sodden summers in a row, the charity Butterfly Conservation reveals today. Headed by the rapidly vanishing Duke of Burgundy, a small but very attractive insect whose wings are a lattice of marmalade-orange and black, the threatened species continued to plummet in numbers or remained at near rock bottom levels during the course of last summer. Read Article
Science Daily — At the end of the last interglacial epoch, around 115,000 years ago, there were significant climate fluctuations. In Central and Eastern Europe, the slow transition from the Eemian Interglacial to the Weichselian Glacial was marked by a growing instability in vegetation trends with possibly at least two warming events. This is the finding of German and Russian climate researchers who have evaluated geochemical and pollen analyses of lake sediments in Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Russia. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Some of America’s top ”warmist” scientists, demoralised at how their faith is being discredited, are planning a counter-attack on the “climate sceptics”, according to the Washington Times. “We’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” says Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. As for “well-funded”, a new study by Jo Nova suggests that, in the US alone, the $79 billion (£52bn) of state funding for pro-warming research in the past 20 years outweighs the money given to climate sceptics by 3,500 to one. As for Prof Ehrlich, he is best known for his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb which, as well as catastrophic climate change, predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s. He also forecast that by 1980 the average age of death in the US would be 42, due to pesticides. Sounds like just the man to restore our faith in true “science”. Read Article
Washington Times – Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics. In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of “being treated like political pawns” and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times. “Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails. Some scientists question the tactic and say they should focus instead on perfecting their science, but the researchers who are organizing the effort say the political battle is eroding confidence in their work. Read Article
Ed – The question is who is better funded? Those who are supported by vested interests in the oil industry, or those who are supported by vested interests in Governments and the banking industry? Who needs rational debate & science anyway when there is money to be made?
Science Daily — Geologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a “snowball Earth” event long suspected to have taken place around that time. Read Article
Ed – And yet CO2 levels were many, many times higher than present. What does that tell you?
Daily Telegraph – The European Union is drawing up plans for its first direct tax with a “green” levy on petrol, coal and natural gas that could cost British consumers up to £3 billion. The European Union is drawing up plans for its first direct tax. Proposals expected to be announced next month would give the EU its first funding which would not come from national governments. Algirdas Semeta, the new European commissioner for taxation, is planning a “minimum rate of tax on carbon” across the whole EU as a “priority”. Read Article
Ed – Using the cult of CO2-hate as a trigger for another tiny step towards a country called Europe, a country that already has a President, a Parliament, a currency, a central bank, a national anthem and the beginnings of an army……and a step closer to towards the end game of a world government for the benefit of the few over the many.
Irish Independent – Ireland suffered its coldest winter in almost five decades as the country shivered in the big freeze, it was revealed. Met Eireann said temperatures were around two degrees lower than average during the season, making it the coldest winter recorded since 1963. Read Article
Forbes – Just when we thought that–finally–we wouldn’t have Al Gore to kick around any more, he resurfaces with a characteristically apocalyptic, know-it-all New York Times op-ed about global warming, “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.” How awful a calamity? “The displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.” Sounds almost as bad as a Gore presidency Read Article
Science Daily — Scientists broadly agree that global warming may threaten the survival of many plant and animal species; but global warming did not kill the Monteverde golden toad, an often cited example of climate-triggered extinction, says a new study. The toad vanished from Costa Rica’s Pacific coastal-mountain cloud forest in the late 1980s, the apparent victim of a pathogen outbreak that has wiped out dozens of other amphibians in the Americas. Read Article
