You wouldn't think so if you read recent press reports. Just like this time last year, the global press is bombarding the public with alarming reports coming from the bottom of the world. From the Discovery Channel on April 28th, 2009 "Huge Ice Shelf Breaks From Antarctica, Fractures." From National Geographic News on April 30th, 2009 "Giant Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses." From Reuters on April 28th, 2009, "New York City-sized Ice Collapses off Antarctica."

Exactly one year ago, similar stories circulated, and if anything, they were more alarming. On March 25th, 2008, the BBC reported "Antarctic Ice Hangs by a Thread," a result, they stated, of "unprecedented global warming." But these reports, both last year and this year, are talking about the same ice shelf - the Wilkins Ice Shelf, an insignificant bit of floating ice that is located on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Didn't it break up last year? How many times do we recycle the alarm over the seasonal melting of the same few thousand square miles of floating ice (ice that floats cannot contribute to sea level rise), off a continent that exceeds five million square miles in area?

Sao Paulo - Officials say floods and mudslides from heavy rains in northeastern Brazil have killed at least 14 people in the last month and driven tens of thousands from their homes.

Regional Civil Defense departments report that at least 62,600 people are homeless in five northeastern states.

Maranhao has been the hardest hit, with some 40,700 people living in shelters and six dead.

Those masters of disaster are at it again, and it appears our friendly scientists at that National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) help this story along each year.

Thanks to WUWT reader Ron de Haan who spotted this on Applied Information Systems:

It seems that not only is the photography recycled, so is the storyline. It seems to happen every year, about this time. Note the photos show shear failure and cracks, not melted ice. Shear failure is mostly mechanical-stress related, though ice does tend to be more brittle at colder temperatures.

A fired British executive is suing his former employer on the grounds that he was unfairly dismissed due to religious views - his belief in global warming.

According to the Independent:

"In the first case of its kind, employment judge David Sneath said Tim Nicholson, a former environmental policy officer, could invoke employment law for protection from discrimination against him for his conviction that climate change was the world's most important environmental problem."

The judge ruled that Nicholson's extreme green views fit the definition of "a philosophical belief under the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, 2003." So strong were these "beliefs," that they "put him at odds with other senior executives within the firm." The 41-year-old told the employment tribunal that, as head of sustainability at Grainger plc, Britain's largest residential property investment company, he constantly tangled with fellow-executives over the company's environmental policies and corporate social responsibility.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference kicks of this week in Poznan, Poland, and in anticipation of this great event, we have examined three research papers published recently in top journals that give us insight into the climate history of Europe. Given the results of these papers, we doubt they will receive any press attention from the massive media delegation covering the climate conference.

First up is from a paper forthcoming in Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics by three scientists with the Atmospheric Physics Group in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in Italy's University of Trento; the project was funded by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund. The authors turn their attention to the northern European city of Verona, and they note a special opportunity there to reconstruct temperatures at a very high resolution going back 250 years. Andrighetti et al. note "after a careful search of both published and unpublished data from early observations, dispersed in various archives and libraries, under the guidance of historical information, data covering almost completely the period 1741 - 2006 were found, which provided the basis for the analysis presented in this paper." However, they state "After careful evaluation, measurements covering the period 1741-1768 appeared to be affected by too many discontinuities, gaps and possible ambiguities in the interpretation of data." They conducted many statistical tests on the remaining 1769-2006 data, and in the end, they were highly confident that the resulting time series was reasonably accurate.

The White House - Press Office - Remarks by the President at Arnold, Missouri Town Hall

Now, there is a long-term problem that we've got to deal with, and that's is a tough one. And that is this issue of climate change. I want to tell you the truth here because this is going to be a debate that we're going to be having over the course of the next year. The average person probably thinks, yes, climate change, that's kind of a drag, but it's not one of my top priorities -- because you don't really see it or feel it, it doesn't hit your pocketbook, it doesn't have to do with your job directly. And so the tendency is just to kind of push it off. People think, well, this just has to do with polar bears, and I feel bad about polar bears but I've got other things to worry about.

OUR understanding of the natural world does not progress through the straight forward accumulation of facts because most scientists tend to gravitate to the established popular consensus also known as the established paradigm. Thomas Kuhn describes the development of scientific paradigms as comprising three stages: prescience, normal science and revolutionary science when there is a crisis in the current consensus. When it comes to the science of climate change, we are probably already in the revolution state. In particular there is growing concern that some of the physics underpinning the IPCC climate models may be flawed. The work of Ferenc Miskolczi is a case in point.

Some years ago this Hungarian physicist, then working for NASA, discovered a flaw in an equation used in the current climate models. In order to progress this research Dr Miskolczi eventually resigned from NASA claiming his supervisors at NASA tried to suppress discussion and publication of his findings which have since been published in IDŐJÁRÁS, The Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service.

In essence Dr Miskolczi showed that the solution to a differential equation for the greenhouse effect developed in 1922 by Arthur Milne, and central to the current paradigm, wrongly assumed an infinitely thick atmosphere. In re-solving this equation a new term and also a new law of physics have been proposed setting an upper limit to the greenhouse effect. Dr Miskolczi's theory indicates that any warming from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide will eventually be offset by a change in atmospheric moisture content.

The idea that water vapour is a negative rather than positive feedback is consistent with the findings of other climate scientists undertaking independent research that is also challenging the current paradigm, for example the work of Dr Roy Spencer.

Arctic ice extent appears to have bottomed out in 2007, and has recovered the last two years as shown by this graph from the University of Illinois Cryosphere.

It has returned to very near the 1979-2000 year average (NSIDC). Had NSIDC used the entire period of record as their base period (1979-2008), we would be at or above the average.

Washington, DC - The New York Times has issued a "climate correction" for an "error" in its April 24, 2009 (posted online April 23) high profile front page global warming article that was touted by former Vice President Al Gore during his Congressional testimony as evidence that industry was clouding the science of climate change. [ See: Gore Mouthing-Off About Make-Believe Madoffs ]

But just little more than a week after publishing the front page article, the New York Times and reporter Andrew Revkin have now admitted the article "erred" on a key point. Revkin wrote about the now defunct Global Climate Coalition and documents that suggest the group had scientists on board in the 1990's who claimed "the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted." Revkin's article came under immediate fire from scientists and others who called into question the central claims and the accuracy of the story.

Our last post concerned the New York Times article by Andrew Revkin, about allegations of a 'tobacco strategy' conspiracy to distort the climate debate in the interests of energy companies.

The story was used by Al Gore in testimony to congress, in which he accuses the group of a fraud larger than that committed by Bernie Madoff, as Think Progress reports. They also upload a video and transcript of Gore's speech, which makes this post much easier to write.