Earth ChangesS


Blackbox

Arctic summer ice could vanish by 2013

David Ljunggren
Reuters
Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:19 UTC
The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on Thursday.

Warwick Vincent, director of the Center for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", which call for an ice free summer in 2013.

The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong -- each year we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected," he told Reuters.
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Cloud Lightning

US: Storms throw bus into Indiana building, damage homes


Charlotte Observer - Associated Press
Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:50 UTC
Strong winds from severe thunderstorms raked parts of the Midwest on Sunday, tossing a school bus onto a building, destroying or damaging homes, and cutting off power to thousands of customers in Indiana and Illinois.

Emergency management agencies reported a tornado in Lawrence County, said John Erickson, a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Homeland Security. The National Weather Service has not confirmed the reports.

Footage from WTHR-TV in Indianapolis showed a school bus lying atop a flattened building in Fayetteville, about 70 miles south of Indianapolis, where the tornado was reported.

Lawrence County Sheriff Sam Craig said at least 19 houses had been damaged, including three that were leveled.
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Bizarro Earth

US: Earthquake Magnitude 3.4 in Oklahoma City


US Geological Survey
Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:44 UTC
Image
© US Geological Survey

Sunday, March 08, 2009 at 13:06:39 UTC

Sunday, March 08, 2009 at 08:06:39 AM at epicenter

Location 35.447°N, 97.457°W

Depth 5 km (3.1 miles) set by location program

Distances:
* 1 km (0 miles) S (174°) from Smith Village, OK

* 1 km (1 miles) WNW (287°) from Del City, OK

* 5 km (3 miles) NNE (26°) from Valley Brook, OK

* 8 km (5 miles) ESE (119°) from Oklahoma City, OK

* 301 km (187 miles) NNW (348°) from Dallas, TX
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Compass

Don't e-mail me the UKMET ideas

Joe Bastardi
Joe Bastardi European Blog
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:08 UTC
I have been getting a lot of e-mail on the UKMET center announcement which people email me, and I am not reading. Why? Because such agenda-driven agencies, and plainly they are, can distract me from the actual weather. I am aware of their position, I think it makes them helpless in the face of the obvious if its coming, and unlike me, I do respect the opposite side's argument. What I don't respect is a scientific agency that is driven more by government policy than the science. So, their agenda is plain.. Mine is also..,debate and let's get the right answer.

Succinctly put, I can't trust what they say given the things I know to be fact about past climate conditions that the Earth has experienced. They have ranged from ice fairs on the Thames in the time of Victoria to weather which inspired the tapestry's of orange trees around the time of the Tudors...which occurred at the last end of the warm cycle that predated the mini ice age that was ending around the time of the Victorian reign.
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Bizarro Earth

Saving the Earth?

Alan Caruba
CO2 Sceptics
Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:42 UTC
global warming snowman demonstration
© unknown

Every time I hear someone say something about "saving the Earth" I want to say, "Are you out of your mind?"

The Earth is some 4.5 billion - that's billion with a b - years old. How did it ever manage to exist without us? How did it survive ice ages, meteor impacts, and all the other stuff that went on before homo sapiens decided to climb down out of the trees and walk upright?

If human beings are responsible for "global warming" how did the Earth manage to get through various earlier stages such as the Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pleistocene, and our era, the Holocene which reaches back a mere 10,000 years; a period that matches up with the ending of the last major ice age.
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Radar

New Report On The Lack Of Recent Global Warming

Michael Reilly
Climate Science
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:31 UTC
There is an interesting article on at MSNBC from the Discovery Channel titled, "Warming might be on hold, study finds Authors sense hibernation, but warn of 'explosive' rise later" (Link)

This article finally (although implicitly) acknowledges in the media that there a substantive issue with the predictions of the IPCC and CCSP models.

It includes the revealing comments that
"according to a new study, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades."
and
"It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970's was due to a free variation in climate," Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. "Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again."

Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. But he warned that it's just a hiccup, and that humans' penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us.

"When the climate kicks back out of this state, we'll have explosive warming," Swanson said. "Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive."
First, these statements clearly indicate that the IPCC and CCSP global model predictions (which are being used as the basis for making expensive and difficult to implement government policies) are seriously flawed.
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Binoculars

Two years of cooling has destroyed global warming consensus

Gregory J. Rummo
CO2 Sceptics
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:54 UTC
Last June I found myself somewhere over Central America at about 37,000 feet in a 757, en route to the Andes Mountains in Peru for an annual missionary trek that I have been a part of since 1999. While getting a cup of coffee in the galley in the rear of the aircraft, I struck up a conversation with a Peruvian who wanted to know what a Gringo was doing traveling to his country for the eighth time in ten years. I explained that our treks through the mountains to visit different villages of indigenous Quechua often took us through passes or pasos de portachuelos at the edge of snow fields starting around 16,000 feet.

In ten or twenty years all the snow and ice will be gone from the Nevados of the Cordillera Blanca because of global warming, he said to me in Spanish.

So when I arrived a day later in the city of Huaraz in the Callejon de Huaylas, I was curious to see if in fact the glaciers had retreated and if the snow cover was reduced from prior years. What I learned was in fact, just the opposite - from my own photographs and from the testimonies of the people with whom I spoke over the next two weeks.
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Hourglass

Natural Global Warmings Have Become More Moderate

Dennis Avery
Canada Free Press
Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:39 UTC
This week, at the 2nd international conference of man-made warming skeptics sponsored by the Heartland Institute in New York, I'll predict the earth's warming/cooling trends for the 21st century.

I will be among splendid company such as John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, Ross McKitrick, who debunked the "hockey stick" study, physicist Willie Soon, and many other presenters with brilliant credentials. A thousand scientists, economists, and skeptics from every walk of life will meet to discuss the current climate indicators.

I'll use physical evidence of the more than 500 warmings in the past million years, which are found worldwide in ice cores, seabed sediments, fossil pollen and cave stalagmites. At least 700 scientists have published evidence on these solar-driven Dansgaared-Oeschger cycles. The good news is that the D-O cycle's warmings have been getting somewhat cooler for the past 10,000 years, and there is no evidence that human-emitted CO2 will make them much warmer.
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Better Earth

It's the Sun, stupid!

Wille Soon
American Daily
Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:06 UTC
New direct evidence demonstrate that changes in solar activity influence climate - The theory that climate change is chiefly caused by solar influences "is no longer tenable," says US National Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cicerone. Carbon dioxide, he argues, is the key driver of recent climate change. I beg to differ.

The amount and distribution of solar energy that we receive varies as the Earth revolves around the Sun and also in response to changes in the Sun's activity. Scientists have now been studying solar influences on climate for 5000 years.

Chinese imperial astronomers kept detailed sunspot records. They noticed that more sunspots meant warmer weather on Earth. In 1801, the celebrated astronomer William Herschel noticed that when there were few spots, the price of wheat soared - because, he surmised, less "light and heat" from the Sun resulted in reduced harvests.

Is it true then that solar radiation, which supplies Earth with the energy that drives our climate, and caused so many climate shifts over the ages, is no longer the principal influence on climate change?

Comment: Dr. Willie Soon's Harvard affiliations can be found here.

Wikipedia page on Dr. Willie Soon is here.

Notice how Dr. Willie Soon makes it clear at the end of this article that this is his opinion based upon 18 years of scientific research. This wouldn't be evidence of this career researcher trying to protect himself from being fired, harassed or blacklisted in the scientific and academic community would it?

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Info

Alaskan weather "very, very unusual"


IceAgeNow
Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:52 UTC
National Weather Service Fairbanks Alaska

Stormy weather over the Bering Sea .. Significant snowfall possible over the interior Friday...

In most Alaska winters, winter storms reach their greatest strength and frequency in November, December, and January. By February rough weather begins to subside. By April the spring season usually comes gently.

This winter has not followed the normal pattern. During February a series of 8 strong low pressure systems made their way through the Bering Sea, all accompanied by gale force winds.
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