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Igloo

Britons going cold on global warming: Number of climate change sceptics doubles in four years

Steve Doughty
Daily Mail
Sat, 29 Jan 2011 10:34 UTC
Image
© Press Association
Chilly outlook: The ice cold winters of recent years has seen the number of climate change sceptics more than double
The number of climate change sceptics has almost doubled in four years, official research showed yesterday.

A quarter of Britons are unconvinced that the world is warming following successive freezing winters and a series of scandals over the credibility of climate science.

The figures suggest that a growing proportion of the public do not share the belief of all three major political parties and Whitehall - that climate change is a major and urgent challenge requiring radical and expensive policies.

The survey, carried out by the Office for National Statistics, has plotted levels of acceptance of the theory of man-made global warming since 2006.

In that year it found that 87 per cent of people were at least 'fairly convinced' that climate change was happening.

Comment: The statement "There is also an increasing reluctance to take personal steps to tackle climate change" seems to indicate that we can turn the ship around when in fact there is little we can do or could have done. From all appearances we are experiencing a cyclic global cooling period.

More on global cooling here.

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Bizarro Earth

Bloom in the Ross Sea


Earth Observatory, NASA
Sat, 29 Jan 2011 13:00 UTC
Algae Bloom
© Norman Kuring, Ocean Color Team, NASA
Acquired January 22, 2011.

Every southern spring and summer, after the Sun has risen into its 24-hour circuit around the skies of Antarctica, the Ross Sea bursts with life. Floating, microscopic plants, known as phytoplankton, soak up the sunlight and the nutrients stirring in the Southern Ocean and grow into prodigious blooms. Those blooms become a great banquet for krill, fish, penguins, whales, and other marine species who carve out a living in the cool waters of the far south.

This true-color image captures such a bloom in the Ross Sea on January 22, 2011, as viewed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite. Bright greens of plant-life have replaced the deep blues of open ocean water.

The Ross Sea is a relatively shallow bay in the Antarctic coastline and due south from New Zealand. As the spring weather thaws the sea ice around Antarctica, areas of open water surrounded by ice - polynyas - open up on the continental shelf. In this open water, sunlight provides the fuel and various current systems provide nutrients from deeper waters to form blooms that can stretch 100 to 200 kilometers (60 to 120 miles). These blooms are among the largest in extent and abundance in the world.
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Bizarro Earth

Jan Mayen Island Region: Earthquake Magnitude 6.1


USGS
Sat, 29 Jan 2011 10:30 UTC
JanMayen Quake_290111
© USGS
Earthquake Location
Date-Time
Saturday, January 29, 2011 at 06:55:26 UTC

Saturday, January 29, 2011 at 06:55:26 AM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location
70.965°N, 6.778°W

Depth
9.5 km (5.9 miles) set by location program

Region
JAN MAYEN ISLAND REGION

Distances
560 km (350 miles) ENE of Ittoqqortoormiit (Scoresbysund), Greenld

710 km (440 miles) NNE of Neskaupstadur, Iceland

975 km (600 miles) WNW of Tromso, Norway

2010 km (1250 miles) NE of NUUK (GODTHAB), Greenland
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Snowman

The Long Winter of 2010-2011

Alan Caruba
Warning Signs
Sat, 29 Jan 2011 08:43 UTC
Image
For New Yorkers and those in my part of New Jersey across the river, snow has fallen eight times since December 14, an average of once every five days, 56.1 inches in Central Park as of Jan 27th, and people are, shall we say, taking notice?

Along with the snow come power outages, disrupted bus schedules, air travel delays, commuting by car becomes an auto body repair business bonanza, schools shut their doors, and some people die from weather-related accidents or just from trying to shovel the snow from the driveway.

Having battled the "global warming" hoax since it was first perpetrated in the late 1980s, I have had the good fortune to make friends with many of the world's top meteorologists and climatologists who joined in the long effort to educate people to the fact that there never was a rapid rise in the planet's overall temperatures.

Even so, some mainstream media news outlets have continued to file stories incredulously blaming the winter snow storms on "global warming." The hoax for too many media folk has long since become a religion in which blind faith replaces the objective fact obvious to everyone. It is cold. There is snow. Lots of it.

Indeed, the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since around 1998 as verified by meteorological satellite and other data. Piers Corbyn, an astrophysicist and leading forecaster, said "We're now headed for a Maunder minimum of very low solar activity. The globe will be much cooler until about 2035, so there will be a lot more of these cold winters in Europe and the USA."
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Igloo

'Brace for more snow': Groundhog Day Storm to affect 100 million people next week


Daily Mail
Sat, 29 Jan 2011 04:20 UTC
Image

Groundhog Day Storm: Weather experts have predicted a severe snow storm will affect 100 million people leading up to and on February 2
* Weather experts predicts a massive winter storm to hit on February 2

* The severe conditions will affect the South, Midwest and Northeast

* Big Apple deluged by snowiest January in history

A massive winter storm forecast for February 2 is set to adversely affect more than 100 million people weather exports reported today.

The Groundhog Day snowstorm is expected to hit the South, Midwest and Northeast of the country, building from early next week.

The storm is likely to severely impact ground travel, cancellation of flights and school closures according to AccuWeather.
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Cloud Lightning

Winter Storm: East Coast Battles Another Record Breaking Snowstorm

Sam Champion,Max Golembo and Leezel Tanglao
ABC
Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:13 UTC
The East Coast is gradually digging out from the record-breaking snowstorm that battered the East Coast Wednesday night, causing power outages and leaving travelers and commuters stranded.

It was the sixth snowstorm to slam into the region in the last 30 days.

Overnight, thundersnow -- the rare phenomenon in which thunder and lightning strike even in the dead of winter -- shocked residents in Sellersville, Pennsylvania, and as far away as central New Jersey. Philadelphia was hit with 17 inches of snow, totals in the Washington D.C. area ranged from 3 to 7 inches and, according to the National Weather Service, parts of New Jersey had to dig out from 19 inches.
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Bizarro Earth

A Day of Night-Shining Clouds


NASA Earth Observatory
Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:41 UTC
Mesospheric Clouds
© Robert Simmon
Polar mesospheric clouds acquired June 20, 2007.

Scientists have a good reason to track noctilucent or polar mesospheric clouds: they are a pretty good gauge of even the tiniest changes in the atmosphere. These "night-shining clouds," as they are sometimes called, are thin, wavy ice clouds that form at very high altitudes and reflect sunlight long after the Sun has dropped below the horizon.

To look for changes in the atmosphere, scientist Matthew DeLand (of Science Systems and Applications Inc. and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) has been monitoring polar mesospheric clouds with instruments that were actually designed to study ozone, including the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite. OMI provides more detailed and frequent observations than previous instruments, giving DeLand a way to refine his previous measurements of a long-term trend towards more and brighter noctilucent clouds linked to rising greenhouse gases.

These images show OMI measurements of polar mesospheric clouds on July 10, 2007. The clouds, detectable because they are the only things that reflect light in this part of the atmosphere, are shown in white and pink. The Aura satellite travels in a polar orbit, circling from south to north as the Earth turns beneath it. As a result, the satellite gets several opportunities to image the poles every day. This series of images shows the clouds over six consecutive orbits between 7:16 and 15:52 Universal Time. Throughout the day, a wide area of polar mesospheric clouds developed over northern Greenland and Canada, peaking around 10:30 UTC (the third orbit).
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Bizarro Earth

V-Topped Light Pillars


SpaceWeather
Thu, 27 Jan 2011 13:49 UTC
Light pillars are a common sight around cities in winter. Urban lights bounce off ice crystals in the air, producing tall luminous columns sometimes mistaken for auroras. But the light pillars Mike Hollingshead saw last night near a corn mill in Nebraska were decidely uncommon. "They had V-shaped tops," he explains, "and some of the Vs were nested." Here is what he saw:

Light Pillars
© Mike Hollingshead
"These light pillars are not just rare, they are exceptional!" declares atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley. "Ordinary pillars are produced by plate-shaped ice crystals roughly half way between you and the light source. These ones are different. Their rarely seen flared tops show that they were made by column-shaped crystals drifting slowly downwards and aligned horizontal by air resistance."
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Bizarro Earth

Ghostly Figure Appears in the Clouds


The Daily Mail, UK
Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:44 UTC
Brocken Spectre
© Caters News Agency
Phenomenon: The Brocken Spectre figure was captured in the Chatyr-Dag, a mountainous region in Crimea near the Ukraine by university lecturer Mikhail Baevsky.

At first glance it may look like a ghostly shape silhouetted against a rainbow.

But this is the Brocken Spectre phenomenon, an optical illusion created when low sun shines behind someone looking down into fog from a ridge.

The atmospheric conditions throw the person's shadow forward, creating this spectral apparition.

On this occasion, the image was captured by 59-year-old Mikhail Baevsky. Handily, he teaches Organic Chemistry at a university and realised the phenomenon was probably caused by the weather.

Mr Baevsky was in the Chatyr-Dag, a mountainous region in Crimea near the Ukraine, when he took the shot.

'I had only read about this phenomenon before in books but had never seen it before myself,' he said.

'I was scanning the horizon for a good shot and while turning my head I noticed the dark ghostly figure - so I quickly reached for my camera.

'I took as many shots as possible before it disappeared. It does look amazing.'
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Black Cat

Over 200 Pelicans Wash Up Dead at Topsail Beach, NC - Preliminary Necropsies Inconclusive


Surfbird News
Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:32 UTC
Preliminary necropsies by the University of Georgia on some of the more than 200 Brown Pelicans that have washed up on the shores of Topsail Beach on the coast of southeastern North Carolina are inconclusive and do not yet support concerns that foul play was responsible. Complete toxicology and pathology reports are expected to be available soon.

A taskforce including officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as state officials, has been formed and has been meeting to investigate the deaths, but so far has not determined a cause. The first dead birds began washing up on shore in November.

pelican
© Mike Richardson
Brown Pelican, from the surfbirds galleries.
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