Extreme Temperatures
September marks the end of Antarctica's winter, and daily sea ice reports posted online at the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., suggest the growing ice pack has already smashed the all-time record ice extent set in September 2012. This year's massive sea ice reached 7.53 million square miles (19.51 million square km) on Sept. 14, 2013, the NSIDC reports.
The old record was 7.51 million square miles (19.44) million square km. The data is preliminary and the NSIDC website came back online yesterday (Sept. 16) after a three-day shutdown due to the Colorado flooding disaster.
If any business were to submit a prospectus as patently false and deliberately dishonest as the ones used to advance the cause of the global warming industry, its directors would all be in prison by now. (C Jeff Randall)Does that mean Ed Davey should have followed Chris Huhne into the slammer for his claim to Andrew Neil on BBC Daily Politics the other day that in "a recent analysis of 12,000 climate papers...of the scientists who expressed a view 97 per cent said that climate change was happening and that it was human-made activity."?
Not quite, unfortunately, because nothing Davey has said there is technically untrue. A better candidate for prison, actually, would be whoever tweets under the name @BarackObama. When he Tweeted: "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous" he was promulgating a demonstrable untruth.
So says German Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, who is one of the founders of Germany's modern environmental movement, and agreed to an interview with NoTricksZone. He is one of the co-authors of the German skeptic book "Die kalte Sonne", which took Germany by storm last year and is now available at bookstores worldwide in English under the title: The Neglected Sun.
In Germany Prof. Vahrenholt has had to endure a lot heat from the media, activists, and climate scientists for having expressed a different view. But as global temperatures remain stagnant and CO2 climate sensitivity is being scaled back, he feels vindicated.
timeseries.global.anom.1979-2008
One of the most prescient indicators clearly shows it, namely the Danish Meteorological Institute's daily mean temperatures for the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel. They have been measured for over 50 years which shows a long-term average of 90 days with the air temperature above freezing.
The Year 2013
The year 2013 has seen a dramatic departure from that routine. In 2013, the summer (above freezing temperatures) lasted for only 45 days, one half of the average number of days. Not only did the frost-free days start much later than on average this year, they also ended much earlier, see the figure below. In fact, the frost-free period seen this year was significantly shorter than in other year since 1958, when the recordings began.
The new data corroborate other findings of no global warming for the last 18 years. In fact, not a single of the 20-plus climate prediction models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) even shows the recent temperature developments as within their model uncertainties. It begs the question: Is another ice age imminent?
Looking at the data for the last decade or so, one thing stands clear: Global temperatures have been showing many more signs of cooling than warming. Already we are sensing that global temperature has lost the battle to stay up. The HadCrut data series above shows that cooling has gained the upper hand. Indeed warming is now in the history books, having died some 15 years ago.
Intriguingly, the current solar cycle shows a striking similarity with solar cycle 5 which was also very weak, with the same double peak as the current cycle, and ran from approximately the mid 1790s to around 1810.
Solar cycle 6 was weaker still and stretched from around 1810 to the early 1820s.
Solar cycles 5 and 6 were so unusual that they were named the Dalton solar minimum after meteorologist John Dalton and coincided with a period of increasingly cold winters and poor summers.
This type of climate is a result of a jet stream that's positioned further south than normal - caused, it's thought at least in part, by the behaviour of the sun.
The mechanism as to why weak solar cycles may affect the position of the jet stream is poorly understood.
But a more southerly positioned jet stream is the reason why the UK has recently seen a return of cold snowy winters and a run of poor summers.
The conventional view of climate scientists, as expressed in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is that most of the warming of the Earth's surface over the last few decades is down to the atmospheric build-up of manmade greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. But Henrik Svensmark of the National Space Institute in Denmark believes that an effect related to the Sun's fluctuating magnetic fields may also play a major role in the warming.
For well over a decade Svensmark has studied how the energetic particles reaching Earth from deep space, known as cosmic rays, can influence the planet's climate as a result of changes to the Sun's output. The idea is that cosmic rays seed clouds by ionizing molecules in Earth's atmosphere that draw in other molecules to create the aerosols around which water vapour can condense to form cloud droplets. The low-lying clouds that result then have the effect of cooling the Earth by reflecting incoming sunshine back out to space. Since the Sun's magnetic field tends to deflect cosmic rays away from the Earth, the planet will be warmer when solar activity is high and, conversely, cooler when it is low.

The US NSIDC monitors Arctic sea ice extent on a five-day mean. The 16 September 2007 record low falls below the previous minimum set on 20-21 September 2005, by an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined, or nearly five UKs.
Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.
Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.
Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores. The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.
Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century - a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.
The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has 'paused' since the beginning of 1997 - an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.
Comment: This comes as no surprise to SOTT's regular readers since we've been disputing so-called global warming for years. Here's just a few recent articles to add to the mix:
Ice delays supply barge for Western Arctic communities
Tom Coburn: I'm a 'man of science' and the Earth is moving into a 'mini-ice age'
Record cold in parts of Alaska
South American countries gripped by snow
Comment: For more on Henrik Svensmark's research see: The Cloud Mystery