Earth ChangesS

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Climate Fear Promoters Try to Spin Record Cold and Snow: 'Global warming made it less cool'

The year 2009 is proving to be a yet another very inconvenient year for the promoters of man-made global warming fears. As the "year without a summer" continues, the U.S. in July alone has broken over 3000 cold temperature records, and global temps have fallen .74F since Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" was released in 2006. In addition, meteorologists are predicting more record cold and snow this winter. (See: Brisk July portends 'heavy snowfalls and bitter cold this winter along Eastern Seaboard')

But man-made climate fear promoters have finally constructed an explanation for the recent record cold temperatures.

The explanation? According to climate activists: "Global warming made it less cool."

It appears the global warming fear movement has gone from predictions that we face a "climate crisis" and we are all going to die to their new slogan: "Global warming made it less cool."

The environmental activist group Union of Concerned Scientists declared "Global warming made it less cool." Brenda Ekwurzel, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, claimed in a July 24, 2009 letter to the editor in the Washington Post that "2008 was a cooler year, but global warming made it less cool."

Let's consider the Union of Concerned Scientists' claim that "global warming made it less cool."

Gore's hometown, Nashville, recently broke an 1877 cold temp record set when Rutherford B. Hayes was in the White House.

Are we to believe that instead of breaking the 1877 Nashville cold temperature record set when Rutherford B. Hayes was president, the city would have allegedly broken a hypothetical 1862 cold temp record set when Abraham Lincoln was president? Or a hypothetical 1797 temperature record set when George Washington was president?

Cloud Lightning

10 dead in Nepal floods, landslides

At least 10 people were killed in landslides and floods triggered by torrential monsoon rain in Nepal over the last two days, officials said Tuesday.

Seven Hindu pilgrims were swept away while trying to cross the swollen Kamala river in southern Nepal and three people were killed in a landslide in the east of the country, a government spokesman told AFP.

Chess

US: The good old summertime? Ah, yes, I remember it well...

You might want to clip this column out and save it on your fridge, because it could come in handy later.

That is, you might want to be reminded how to behave in hot weather. Of course, it might get a little dog-eared while you're waiting.

Now, don't me wrong. No one is dying of frostbite. But here's an interesting statistic: The daily temperature so far this month has not once exceeded the norm for July in Northwestern Connecticut - not once. Oh, we've had some days in the 80s, but none of those good old sizzlers where you drip with sweat just walking to the car.

The chances of that happening get less likely as we enter August.

"The hottest period is traditionally this week," the head of the Connecticut Weather Center, Bill Jacquemin, told me last Wednesday. "From here on, it gets gradually cooler, down to the third week in January, which is normally the coldest."

He hastened to add that doesn't mean the unusual cannot happen, just that the chances of the thermometer hitting the 90s decreases with each day that passes.

Igloo

'Polar frost' leaves 40 dead in Argentina

Snow Argentina
© Reuters / Chip East

Moscow - Severe cold weather that has gripped central and southern Argentina for two weeks has already killed about 40 people, the Infobae news website reported on Monday.

According to Argentinean media, "a wave of polar frost" came to Argentina last week and caused "a sensational drop in the temperature to minus 16 degrees Celsius." The average winter temperature in Argentina is about 10 degrees Celsius, ranging from 20 C in the north to 1 C in the south.

Compounding the cold, several southern regions saw heavy snowfalls, including in the south of Buenos Aires province, where there was 40 centimeters of snow for the first time in 50 years.

A representative of voluntary organization "Red Solidaria" said most of the deaths were the result of hypothermia or improper use of heating devices, either by fires or carbon monoxide poisoning.

Alarm Clock

Canada: So where's that global cooling alert?

Toronto is having a Newfoundland summer.

Now I don't mean, even though it would be a wonderful idea, that there are bake-apple festivals at Bloor and Yonge. Or that the Bay Street stockbrokers are out jigging codfish on "food fish" weekends. Though that, too, would be an encouraging, even edifying, spectacle.

No, what I mean is that, for most of July, temperatures in the Ontario capital and beyond are in that sweet temperate zone of the low 20s, and there seem to be as many grey and rainy days as sunny ones. With a great heave of homesickness, I've even seen fog obscuring the shoreline of Lake Ontario and the nether parts of the metropolis itself. I know it's odd, but when I see the Royal York hotel clouded by mist, I immediately think of Twillingate.

For Toronto, a Newfoundland summer in 2009 is a godsend. Because as all of Canada and a good portion of the world knows, this city is caught in the turmoil of a garbage strike. Its citizens are doing the best they can with the ever-growing heaps of garbage, but it's been a hard go.

Binoculars

Global cooling hits Al Gore's home

Nashville, the home of leading global warming prophet Al Gore, has enjoyed the coolest July 21 on record, observes Christopher Booker.

Al Gore
© Associated PressAl Gore, obscured by snow.

It was delightfully appropriate that, as large parts of Argentina were swept by severe blizzards last week, on a scale never experienced before, the city of Nashville, Tennessee, should have enjoyed the coolest July 21 in its history, breaking a record established in 1877. Appropriate, because Nashville is the home of Al Gore, the man who for 20 years has been predicting that we should all by now be in the grip of runaway global warming.

His predictions have proved so wildly wrong - along with those of the Met Office's ยฃ33 million computer model which forecast that we should now be enjoying a "barbecue summer" and that 2009 would be one of "the five warmest years ever" - that the propaganda machine has had to work overtime to maintain what is threatening to become the most expensive fiction in history.

The two official sources of satellite data on global temperatures, for instance, lately announced that June temperatures had again fallen, to their average level for the month over the 30 years since satellite data began. By contrast, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, run by Mr Gore's closest ally and scientific adviser, James Hansen - one of the two official sources of global temperature data from surface weather stations - announced that in that single month the world had warmed by a staggering 0.63 degrees C, more than its net warming for the entire 20th century.

Sun

Sun's antics continue: "Old" cycle 23 sunspot trying to form

sunspot july 23 2009
© SOHO

The strange transition between solar cycles 23 and 24 continues. For the first time in several months, a cycle 23 sunspot is trying to form. This further illustrates the fits and starts that the sun has experienced during its deepest solar minimum in 100 years.

The strange transition between solar cycles 23 and 24 continues. For the first time in several months, a cycle 23 sunspot is trying to form. This further illustrates the fits and starts that the sun has experienced during its deepest solar minimum in 100 years.

Years of study and measurement have shown that during solar cycle transitions, which happen about every eleven years (this one is a year overdue), the sunspot of the emerging (new) cycle appears at latitudes above 20 degrees while the spots of the waning cycle pop up closer to the sun's equator.

Bizarro Earth

Is Earth an "Ill-Fated Planet"?

The following article is based on information gathered during more than 40 years of study. It addresses some of the most vexing problems of human existence through explanations that may seem speculative but also worthy of attention. The reader is simply asked to approach this material with an open mind.

We have discovered through the science of ecology what poets, lovers, and mystics have always known: that the Earth is a living being, amazingly complex, fertile and renewing, and wondrously beautiful.

Earth is the common mother of us all - humans, animals, plants, stones, mountains, rivers, and the sea alike.

If Earth is a mother, then the Sun is a father: the source of life-giving energy, the one whose light shines upon all, regardless of status in the chain of creation. Sunlight, when crystallized within the womb of Earth, becomes organic life, including our own human bodies.

Fish

Migrating red crabs driven by sugar rush

Image
© Jurgen Freund / Nature Picture Library / Rex FeaturesDriven by blood sugar levels.
Claws aloft they flow in a vast carpet of red, across busy roads, through shops and over the island's golf course. The annual march of the Christmas Island red crabs has been described as one of the most spectacular animal migrations on Earth.

Now researchers have identified some of the metabolic changes that occur to transform tens of millions of red crabs from inactive, antisocial creatures that hide in their burrows into an unstoppable sea of individuals capable of walking for several days on end in order to fulfil their desire to reproduce.

"This [migration] requires a major physiological change," says Steve Morris of the University of Bristol, UK, who led the study. "If they are made to walk for 5 minutes in the dry season they build up high levels of [lactic acid], yet when the rains come they'll walk a kilometre a day quite easily."

The red land crab, Gecarcoidea natalis, is unique to Christmas Island, which is located in the Indian Ocean, south of Indonesia. Their migration usually occurs at the start of the wet season, and is timed so that females can release their eggs into the sea at the turn of high tide during the last quarter of the moon.

Meteor

Forget global warming, there's a space rock with our name on it

The year is 2109. Celebrations continue as mankind's heroic, century-long, quintillion-dollar effort to lower the global mean temperature by 1 degree has paid off: It's just as hot as it was in 2009. Few can contain their jubilation.

But even as the carbon-neutral champagne corks fly, the sky darkens. A projectile of a different kind is coming our way. An asteroid streaks across the skies, giving the media just enough time to spread the word. The New York Times, now beamed directly into subscribers' brains via digital-neural networks, fulfills ancient prophecy and warns that women and minorities will be hardest hit by the incoming object.