Earth ChangesS


Mr. Potato

The Crying Dutchman unexpectedly steps down as UN climate chief

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© Yvo de Boer
Yvo de Boer, the UN official who oversaw four years of climate talks has suddenly quit his post. He claims disappointing Copenhagen outcome was unrelated to decision, but it doesn't sound that way:
De Boer said that he was not quitting the key UN Framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) post because the Copenhagen climate talks in December were widely seen as a failure. "We were about an inch away from a formal agreement. It was basically in our grasp, but it didn't happen. So that was a pity," he said.

But he was known to have been frustrated by the outcome, and doubtful whether anyone could steer through a major global agreement between wildly diverging rich and poor countries. Today he said hat the talks were "on track," but that he was uncertain that a full treaty could be finalised this year.

Attention

World's biggest coal company brings U.S. government to court in climate fraud

The world's largest private sector coal business, the Peabody Energy Company (PEC) has filed a mammoth 240-page "Petition for Reconsideration," a full-blown legal challenge against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The petition must be answered and covers the entire body of leaked emails from 'Climategate' as well as those other 'gate' revelations including the frauds allegedly perpetrated under such sub-headings as 'Himalayan Glaciers,' 'African Agricultural Production,' 'Amazon Rain Forests,' 'Melting Mountain Ice,' 'Netherlands Below Sea Level' as well as those much-publicized abuses of the peer-review literature and so called 'gray literature.' These powerful litigants also draw attention to the proven criminal conduct by climate scientists in refusing to honor Freedom of Information law (FOIA) requests.

Peabody is, in effect, challenging the right of the current U.S. federal government to introduce cap and trade regulations by the 'back door.' In this article we summarize Peabody's legal writ.

Comment: Well, it does look like the whole Climate Change Fraud is about to really start unraveling. And there are civil suits lodged against the scientists involved in the hacked email exchanges,according to the article. Very interesting to see how this plays out and how long it takes before governments like the US and Australian governments are put under pressure to cancel their cap and trade schemes.


Bizarro Earth

Earthquake Magnitude 6.9 rocks China-Russia-North Korea border region

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© USGS
A magnitude 6.7 earthquake rocked the region where China, Russia and North Korea meet Thursday, the U.S. Geological Survey said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

Though area residents said they did not feel the quake, office towers in Beijing - about 770 miles (1,240 kilometers) away from the epicenter - swayed slightly for about a minute.

The quake occurred 335 miles (540 kilometers) below the earth's surface.

With earthquakes centered deep underground, sometimes those close to the epicenter don't feel it while people further away notice some shaking, said the duty officer at the Seismological Bureau of Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China's Jilin province. He refused to give his name as is common among Chinese officials.

The Korea Earthquake Research Center said there was no damage in North or South Korea and that quakes occur in that region about once a year.

Arrow Down

Oceangate: sea levels shown to have fallen for past six years

Independent bloggers have found that by using the Pacific Marine Atlas program to plot data from the entire ocean network of automatic measuring stations, there is was actually a downtrend in global sea levels over the past six years.

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The Hockey Schtick blog made it's astonishing discovery after analyzing the full 6-year dataset of ocean levels from January 31, 2004 to January 31, 2010.

By using the data from the 'ARGO' global network of sea level measurements it was found that ocean levels have actually been decreasing and not rising, contrary to global warming forecasters. This latest revelation is wholly contrary to claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC has continually argued that human emissions of carbon dioxide were causing the polar ice caps and thousands of glaciers around the world to melt so that such warming would cause global sea levels to rise, according to the IPCC's 35 SRES scenarios, by up to 0.5 meters (18 inches) this century.

Frog

Is there an ecological unconscious?

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© Artwork by Kate MacDowell; photograph by Dan Kvitka for The New York Times
About eight years ago, Glenn Albrecht began receiving frantic calls from residents of the Upper Hunter Valley, a 6,000-square-mile region in southeastern Australia. For generations the Upper Hunter was known as the "Tuscany of the South" - an oasis of alfalfa fields, dairy farms and lush English-style shires on a notoriously hot, parched continent. "The calls were like desperate pleas," Albrecht, a philosopher and professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth, recalled in June. "They said: 'Can you help us? We've tried everyone else. Is there anything you can do about this?' "

Residents were distraught over the spread of coal mining in the Upper Hunter. Coal was discovered in eastern Australia more than 200 years ago, but only in the last two decades did the industry begin its exponential rise. Today, more than 100 million tons of black coal are extracted from the valley each year, primarily by open-pit mining, which uses chemical explosives to blast away soil, sediment and rock. The blasts occur several times a day, sending plumes of gray dust over ridges to settle thickly onto roofs, crops and the hides of livestock. Klieg lights provide a constant illumination. Trucks, draglines and idling coal trains emit a constant low-frequency rumble. Rivers and streams have been polluted.

Snowman

Flashback Another Crack in the Edifice - Global Cooling In Antarctica

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© Unknown
Antarctica overall has cooled measurably during the last 35 years - despite a global average increase in air temperature of 0.06 degrees Celsius during the 20th century - making it unique among the Earth's continental landmasses, according to a paper published today in the online version of Nature.

Researchers with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Longterm Ecological Research (LTER) site in Antarctica's Dry Valleys - a perpetually snow-free, mountainous area adjacent to McMurdo Sound - argue in the paper that long-term data from weather stations across the continent, coupled with a separate set of measurements from the Dry Valleys, confirm each other and corroborate the continental cooling trend.

"Our 14-year continuous weather station record from the shore of Lake Hoare reveals that seasonally averaged surface air temperature has decreased by 0.7 degrees Celsius per decade," they write. "The temperature decrease is most pronounced in summer and autumn. Continental cooling, especially the seasonality of cooling, poses challenges to models of climate and ecosystem change."

Wine

Hurricanegate: IPCC claims just a storm in a teacup

Dr. Les Hatton, a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, today released a global statistical analysis testing six Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) statements against raw data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Administration to prove there has been no increase in global hurricanes or typhoons, contrary to IPCC claims.

Hatton was inspired to analyse the IPPC hurricane data after the climategate email revelations and found that although the North Atlantic hurricane activity increased significantly, the increase was cancelled out overall by diminished activity in the East Pacific. Thus, the declines balance the increases. His detailed report can be found in this PDF.

"When you average the number of storms and their strength, it almost exactly balances."

Igloo

Czechgate: Climate scientists dump world's second oldest 'cold' climate record

The latest independent analysis of world climate data by acclaimed skeptic blogger 'Chiefio' (aka E. M. Smith) and his blog contributors confirm that the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) has cynically dumped the world's second oldest and reliable climate record at Prague in the Czech Republic for no scientific reason.

Climate skeptics claim the censoring of the Czech's raw data has been perpetrated by climate scientists because the Prague records prove there has been no warming in Europe for over two hundred years.

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© Unknown

Butterfly

ConocoPhillips, BP, Caterpillar to Quit Climate Group

ConocoPhillips, BP Plc and Caterpillar Inc. won't renew their memberships in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of companies and environmental groups seeking legislation to reduce greenhouse- gas emissions.

Proposals in the U.S. Congress "unfairly penalized" domestic refineries, ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Jim Mulva said today in a statement. The role of natural gas in lowering greenhouse-gas emissions has been ignored, he said.

"We believe greater attention and resources need to be dedicated to reversing these missed opportunities, and our actions today are part of that effort," Mulva said.

Comment: Interesting. First we have the revelations from ClimateGate and now this.


Binoculars

Buddy, Can You Spare a Banana? Study Finds That Bonobos Share Like Humans

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© iStockphoto/Ronald Van Der BeekVoluntarily sharing something with another may not be entirely exclusive to the human experience.
New research suggests that the act of voluntarily sharing something with another may not be entirely exclusive to the human experience. A study published in the March 9th issue of Current Biology, observed that bonobos -- a sister species of chimpanzees and, like chimps, our closest living relatives -- consistently chose to actively share their food with others.

"It has been suggested that only humans voluntarily share their food," says lead study author Brian Hare from Duke University in North Carolina. "However, the food sharing preferences of the unusually tolerant bonobos have never been studied experimentally." Dr. Hare and Suzy Kwetuenda from the Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary for orphaned bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo conducted a study with unrelated pairs of hungry bonobos.

In the study, bonobos had to choose whether to eat some food by themselves or to give another bonobo access to it. The test subjects had the opportunity to immediately eat the food or to use a "key" to open a door to an adjacent empty room or a room that had another bonobo in it. The test subjects could easily see into the adjacent rooms, so they know which one was empty and which was occupied.