Earth ChangesS


Igloo

Another Dalton Minimum Possible!

By C. de Jager, S. Duhau in paper "Forecasting the parameters of sunspot cycle 24 and beyond.", Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, vol. 71 (2009), pages 239 - 245.
Abstract: Solar variability is controlled by the internal dynamo which is a nonlinear system. We develop a physical-statistical method for forecasting solar activity that takes into account the non-linear character of the solar dynamo. The method is based on the generally accepted mechanisms of the dynamo and on recently found systematic properties of the long-term solar variability. The amplitude modulation of the Schwabe cycle in the dynamo's magnetic field components can be decomposed in an invariant transition level and three types of oscillations around it. The regularities that we observe in the behaviour of these oscillations during the last millennium enable us to forecast solar activity. We find that the system is presently undergoing a transition from the recent Grand Maximum to another regime.

This transition started in 2000 and it is expected to end around the maximum of cycle 24, foreseen for 2014, with a maximum sunspot number Rmax = 68 plus/minus 17. At that time a period of lower solar activity will start. That period will be one of regular oscillations, as occurred between 1730 and 1923. The first of these oscillations may even turn out to be as strongly negative as around 1810, in which case a short Grand Minimum similar to the Dalton one might develop. This moderate to low-activity episode is expected to last for at least one Gleissberg cycle (60 - 100 years). See full paper PDF here.

HAL9000

Best of the Web: Pro-Global Warming Study Receives Worldwide Headlines; Discovery of Error in Study Garners Op-Ed in One Paper

When University of Washington Professor Eric Steig announced in a news conference and a published paper in the January 22 edition of the journal Nature that he and several colleagues removed one of many thorns in the sides of climate alarmists -- in this case, evidence that Antarctica is cooling -- he received extensive worldwide attention in the mainstream press.

But when a noteworthy error was found in Stieg's research less than two weeks after it's publication, of the mainstream press, only an opinion column in the London Telegraph and a blog associated with the Australian Herald Sun carried the news.

The Stieg paper's release was covered by 27 newspapers, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle & Los Angeles Times, by CNN, by the Associated Press, by NPR and quite a few others (see reviews of the coverage at the end of this post).

After independent analyst Steve McIntyre discovered a major error in the data, and released his results on his influential blog Climate Audit beginning on February 1, based on a Nexis search I conducted today, none of these outlets chose to inform their readers.

Comment: This is how the propaganda machine works. The release of Steig's paper was truly a grand media event. Everyone in the Manmade Global Warming camp has been waiting for something like this so they could vent and fume and degrade any scientist or media person not in sync with their agenda. Several of the authors of the paper are among the most radical promoters of Manmade Global Warming.

Now here is some perspective on what Steig's paper claims to have found -

The proposed 50 year warming of Western Antarctica is 0.17 degrees Fahrenheit every 10 years.
That is 0.017 degrees each year.
Yes you got it, seventeen one-thousandths of a degree Fahrenheit per year.
Over 5 decades (50 years) this amounts to 0.85 degrees Fahrenheit.
The claim is that this is so significant that it outweighs the Eastern Antarctic cooling.

Let's take a look at how the Anthropogenic Global Warming promoters reacted. In particular let's pay attention to the words they use, the quotes they chose and who they are aimed at.

From the above article:
Ira Flatow in a National Public Radio interview,
called Steig's paper "probably historic."
Seattle Times science reporter Sandi Doughton wrote,
By bringing Antarctica in from the cold, the new study could undermine the small cadre of global-warming skeptics who still argue that the planet is not getting hotter, or that humans are not to blame. Many have used the apparent cooling in Antarctica to attack global climate models and point out perceived weaknesses in the scientific consensus that emissions from automobiles and factories are beginning to change global climate.
New York Times reporter Kenneth Chang, in his piece quoted a scientist saying,
"But the idea of a long-term cooling is pretty clearly debunked."
Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press said,
"Antarctica, the only place that had oddly seemed immune from climate change, is warming after all, according to a new study."

Seth Borenstein also included a quote from global warming activist scientist and study co-author Michael Mann, saying the study refuted the views of climate "contrarians."
Thomas H. Maugh II of the Los Angeles Times wrote,
Global-warming skeptics have pointed to the presumed cooling of the continent as evidence that researchers' computer projections of climate change are in error, but the new findings reported Thursday appear to refute their criticisms...
The San Francisco Chronicle Science editor David Perlman told his readers,
"the issue [of Antarctic warming] has apparently been resolved."
Damian Carrington of the Guardian tells his readers,
"Research 'kills off' the climate skeptic argument by showing average temperature across the continent has risen over the last 50 years."
Carrington also quotes Steig,
The issue, which had been highlighted by global warming sceptics, was an annoyance, said Steig, despite the science having been reasonably well understood. "But it has now been killed off," he said.
Carrington adds,
The rapid warming now revealed in the west concerns some scientists.
This is how it works. Big media, big money, big promotion.

AS SOTT mentioned in another article, when errors were found in the Steig paper by Steve McIntyre the reaction was far less than scientific.
When Steve McIntyre revealed this on ClimateAudit, Gavin Schmidt closed comments on the RealClimate blog, and the British Antarctic Survey removed the faulty data from their site without explanation.
Remember Stieg himself is a contributor to the ardently pro-alarmist and environmentalist-supported PR blog RealClimate.

Apparently the data errors were so embarrassing that GISS employee Gavin Schmidt claimed the discovery of the data errors himself when reporting them for correction, causing another embarrassing incident.

The saga is ongoing at this moment. Steve McIntyre's site ClimateAudit is attempting to make sense of the errors and the behaviors.


Ambulance

Final death toll may reach hundreds as army called in to battle raging Australian inferno

Image
© A Coppel/ Newspix/ Rex FeaturesFirefighters overwhelmed by scale of fires
The death toll from the deadliest bushfires in Australia's history could reach into the hundreds as the devastation is uncovered in the burning and blackened ruins of towns, the authorities warned last night.

Described as "hell on earth", the fires left at least 108 dead, but police in Victoria said the final death toll would be much greater.

"I think it [the body count] will be up into the 100s ... 200," acting Sergeant Scott Melville, who has the job of dragging bodies out of charred vehicles and homes, told the Melbourne Age. "It's like a friggin' war zone up here, it's like a movie scene."

Bizarro Earth

Survivors tell of Australian bushfire horror

Image
© Unknown

Survivors of Australia's deadly bushfires on Sunday described how a thick blanket of black ash blotted out the sun, leaving only a "horrible orange glow" as flames bore down on their homes.

Residents in the worst-hit areas northwest of Melbourne, where most the reported 93 fatalities occurred, told how they lost loved ones to the flames and desperately tried to help the injured, including children.

Entire townships were razed to the ground, with burnt-out cars strewn across the road outside one of the worst-hit communities, Kinglake, standing in mute testimony to residents who made doomed attempts to escape.

An AFP photographer who reached the town described how the cars had crashed into each other or into trees as towering flames put an end to their flight from the town.

Info

Boy feared snatched by crocodile in Australian floodwaters

A five-year-old boy is feared to have been snatched by a crocodile in floodwaters in northern Australia while walking with his dog on Sunday, police said.

"The boy was walking with his seven-year-old brother earlier this morning when he followed his dog into floodwaters," police said in a statement.

"He disappeared in the water and his brother saw a large crocodile in the vicinity of his disappearance."

A large-scale search for the boy has been launched at Cape Tribulation in far north Queensland.

Police were also searching for two people missing after their car was washed away as they tried to drive through floodwaters south of Tully in Queensland.

Much of the state has been declared a disaster zone, with an area of more than a million square kilometres (386,100 square miles) and 3,000 homes affected by floods due to torrential rains.

Bizarro Earth

La Nina seen gradually weakening in 2009: NOAA

La Nina
© REUTERS/NASA/Handout This image from the U.S.-French Jason oceanographic satellite released by NASA April 21, 2008 depicts one of the strongest La Ninas in many years as it is slowly weakening but continues to blanket the Pacific Ocean near the equator.

The La Nina weather anomaly will persist into the spring of 2009 but should gradually weaken during that period, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said on Thursday.

In a monthly update, the CPC said "a majority of the model forecasts ... indicate a gradual weakening of La Nina through February-April 2009, with an eventual transition to neutral conditions."

CPC is an office under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The body said La Nina will last into spring of this year.

La Nina literally means "little girl" in Spanish. It results in cooler-than-normal waters in the Pacific Ocean. The more famous El Nino weather phenomenon has the opposite effect.

Bizarro Earth

Drought starts to bite in northern Kenya

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© REUTERS/Antony NjugunaA Kenyan nomadic herder looks at his cow, too weak to walk, at a water point in the northeastern town of El Wak, close to the Somalia and Kenya border, February 6, 2009.

Waregadud - Clouds of dust rising above the harsh scrub herald the arrival of more livestock at a borehole in northeastern Kenya, the end for some of a 45-km (28-mile) trek for water that must be repeated every few days.

Drought is starting to bite in east Africa's biggest economy and the government has declared a state of emergency, saying 10 million people may face hunger and starvation after a poor harvest, crop failure, a lack of rain and rising food prices.

For an economy still recovering from post-election violence last year and facing fallout from the global slowdown on export markets, Kenya's looming food crisis risks putting more pressure on its fragile coalition government.

Kenyans have been horrified by multi-million dollar government graft scandals in the maize and fuel sectors in the middle of the food shortage, and at a time when the administration is appealing for international food aid.

Sherlock

A Zen Discovery: Unrusted Iron in Ocean

Iron dust, the gold of the oceans and rarest nutrient for most marine life, can be washed down by rivers or blown out to sea or - a surprising new study finds - float up from the sea floor. The discovery, published online Feb. 8 in Nature Geoscience, connects life at the surface to events occurring at extreme depths and pressures.

The two worlds were long assumed to have little interaction.

A team from the University of Southern California, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory took samples from the East Pacific Rise, a volcanic mid-ocean ridge.

The group found that organic compounds capture some iron spewed by hydrothermal vents, enabling it to be carried away in seawater.

Bizarro Earth

"Noah's Flood" Not Rooted in Reality, After All?

The ancient flood that some scientists think gave rise to the Noah story may not have been quite so biblical in proportion, a new study says.

Noah Flood
© Melik Baghdasaryan/APSome believe that Noah's Ark came to rest on Turkey's Mount Ararat.
Researchers generally agree that, during a warming period about 9,400 years ago, an onrush of seawater from the Mediterranean spurred a connection with the Black Sea, then a largely freshwater lake. That flood turned the lake into a rapidly rising sea.

A previous theory said the Black Sea rose up to 195 feet (60 meters), possibly burying villages and spawning the tale of Noah's flood and other inundation folklore.

But the new study - largely focused on relatively undisturbed underwater fossils - suggests a rise of no more than 30 feet (10 meters).

Bizarro Earth

Canada: Small Quake Felt Near Vancouver

Residents of a Vancouver, British Columbia, suburb reported feeling a small earthquake, officials said Sunday.

The temblor, measured at 2.1 on the Richter scale, struck Langley, British Columbia, at 9:23 p.m. Saturday, Canwest News Service reported. It was centered approximately 3 miles north-northwest of the community.