Extreme Temperatures
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Binoculars

Iowa, US: Harsh winter leaves mark on flowers, trees, crops

Tom Alex
Des Moines Register
Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:09 UTC
The thermometer says another Iowa summer has arrived. But winter continues to hang around in the form of dead trees, flowers, plants and shrubs that were unable to rebound from one the snowiest and coldest seasons on record.

The state's summer palette might be a bit heavy on brown as a result.

"We've had some real damage here," Bob Atha of Appleberry Farm in Marshalltown said. "I don't know about other places, but we're expecting about half the apples we had last year, maybe a little less than half."

Experts call it "winterkill," and it's been reported from the alfalfa fields of Ontario to the wheat stands of Kansas to golf courses in Massachusetts.

In Iowa, the bitter cold and early snow was hard on even the hardiest evergreens. An early spring didn't help, either.

"We've had literally hundreds of people calling and complaining about" winter-ravaged bushes and shrubs, said Jeff Westphal, a salesman at Miller Nursery in Johnston. "Some of them were already weak going into the winter. But that doesn't explain what happened to the boxwoods and yews. I think it was just too cold for some of them."
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Bulb

Scientists Put Global Warming Into Deep Freeze - Warn Of The Coming Ice Age


The Weekly Vice
Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:56 UTC
Image
In June, 1974, Time Magazine unleashed a mountain of evidence to support what scientists - at the time - suspected was the onset of a coming ice age. Characterizing it's evidence as "telltale signs everywhere", the article went back three decades to summarize statistics and events which pointed towards global cooling.

Newsweek Magazine conducted it's own investigation about a year later, concluding that evidence supporting a coming ice age had "begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists (were) hard-pressed to keep up with it all."

When average temperatures over a 100 year period were found to have risen about a half-degree Celsius, the global cooling drum beat faded in lieu of a new worry - Global Warming. Environmentalist, looking for a way to connect man-made pollution to a more substantial argument, blamed CO2 emissions as the culprit for changes in the earth's climate. The drum beat of Global Warming grew louder and louder until the turn of the century - when climate data began defying weather model predictions and climate trend forecasts.
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Compass

Long cold spell is to blame for lack of shellfish

Jess Stevenson
Guernsey Press and Star
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:37 UTC
Guernsey fisherman are struggling to make a living after a reduction in crab stocks.

It is thought that this year's cold spell, which lasted longer than in previous years, might have something to do with the poor amount of shellfish being caught.

Potter Robert Le Noury, who fishes off the west coast of the island, said he was putting down the same amount of pots but was struggling to find any crab.

'This is the slack time of year, but it seems to have dragged on.

'It's worrying whether I will be able to catch them or not and whether the season will be a wipe-out.
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Blackbox

Canada: Winter still grips 90 per cent of north - migratory birds can't breed

Robert Alison
Winnipeg Free Press
Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:00 UTC
It is the winter that refuses to go away in northern Manitoba and most of the eastern Arctic.

Prolonged cold snowy conditions in the Hudson Bay area are expected to obliterate the breeding season for migratory birds and most other species of wildlife this year.

According to Environment Canada, the spring of 2009 is record-late in the eastern Arctic with virtually 100 per cent snow cover from James Bay north as of June 11.

May temperatures in northern Manitoba were almost four degrees C below the long-term average of -0.7, and in early June, temperatures averaged three degrees below normal.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration images confirm snow and ice blanket all of northern Manitoba, part of northern Ontario and almost all of the eastern Arctic as of June 12. U.S. arieal flight surveys confirm the eastern Arctic has no sign of spring so far.

"I have lived in Churchill since the 1950s, and this the latest spring I have ever seen here," said local resident Pat Penwarden. "The spring of 1962 was almost this bad."

Six-foot snowdrifts blocked Churchill-area roads. A thick blanket of snow, in places three- and four-feet deep, coated 90 per cent of the local taiga in northern Manitoba. Ecotourists, who normally flock to northern Manitoba every June to see birds and other wildlife, cancelled their plans this June "in droves," according to local ecotourist specialists. Snowy conditions are largely to blame.

"It is like a winter landscape," said Ruth Baker, a Michigan tourist who spent June 9 to 12 at Churchill. "I couldn't believe the snowdrifts, like mountains of snow".

Researchers confirm that the lateness of the spring of 2009 dooms local birds to a virtually complete reproductive failure.

Comment: This is a very good article until the last five paragraphs. The worldwide global warming psychological conditioning cannot be threatened by any piece of evidence that may counter the chosen agenda.
Recent late springs in the Hudson Bay area have been more frequent than normal: 2004, 2002, 2000 and 1997.
It should be pointed out that the data shows the planet has been globally cooling for at least 7 years and possibly as much as 10-11 years. (Link), (Link), (Link).

The possibility and even high probability given the data that what lies ahead is more frequent delayed springs in the north due to cooling is not even mentioned.

But, dut da da dah... Global Warming is the cause of course!
According to NOAA scientists, although the Arctic is warming, more frequent annual oscillations in temperature are likely to occur, often resulting in late springs.
Of course. And if there were less snow and earlier springs it would be of course - you got it - global warming. And it would be expected regardless.
"Such major oscillations are part of a bumpy ride toward global warming," said Thomas Karl of the National Climate Center. "For awhile at least this will be the shape of things to come."
If such oscillations increase and spread south and crops fail and there are fuel shortages, it will be because of global warming.
"People often confuse climate with weather, and this spring is a weather phenomenon," said an Environment Canada spokesperson.
This last paragraph is just plain insulting. How are the people to understand anything when the spokes people are so utterly wrong?

We will have to see what the next few years bring us.

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Info

Geologists demonstrate extent of ancient ice age


PhysOrg.com
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:25 UTC
Geologists at the University of Leicester have shown that an ancient Ice Age, once regarded as a brief 'blip', in fact lasted for 30 million years.

Their research suggests that during this ancient Ice Age, global warming was curbed through the burial of organic carbon that eventually lead to the formation of oil - including the 'hot shales' of north Africa and Arabia which constitute the world's most productive oil source rock.

This ice age has been named 'the Early Palaeozoic Icehouse' by Dr Alex Page and his colleagues in a paper published as part of a collaborative Deep Time Climate project between the University of Leicester and British Geological Survey.
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Bizarro Earth

Crops Under Stress as Temperatures Fall

Christopher Booker
Telegraph UK
Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:04 UTC
Image
© ReutersWaterworld: Floodwater surrounding a farm near Fargo, North Dakota, in March 2009
Our politicians haven't noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, observes Christopher Booker.

For the second time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food crisis, thanks to our old friend "climate change". In many parts of the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for farmers. After a fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest. In Manitoba last week, it was -4ºC. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60 years.
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Snowman

Best of the Web: Little Ice Age II, The Sequel?

Doug L. Hoffman
The Resilient Earth
Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:38 UTC
global cooling earth
© unknown

The lingering cool temperatures being experienced by much of North America has weather forecasters wondering if we are entering a new Little Ice Age - a reference to the prolonged period of cold weather that afflicted the world for centuries and didn't end until just prior to the American Civil War. From historical records, scientists have found a strong correlation between low sunspot activity and a cooling climate. At the end of May, an international panel of experts led by NOAA and sponsored by NASA released a new prediction for the next solar cycle: Solar Cycle 24 will be one of the weakest in recent memory. Are we about to start a new Little Ice Age?

According to the report, Solar Cycle 24 will peak in May 2013 with a sunspot count well below average. "If our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a peak sunspot number of 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 78," says panel chairman Doug Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. This does not mean that we won't feel the results of renewed solar storm activity here on Earth.
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Igloo

'90% of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth's climate has been an ice age'

David Deming
American Thinker
Wed, 13 May 2009 03:03 UTC
Last Ice Age
© unknown

Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk. In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt. But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years. So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously. On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides. In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds.

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth's climate has been an ice age. Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago. It began instantaneously. For a hundred-thousand years, temperatures fell and sheets of ice a mile thick grew to envelop much of North America, Europe and Asia. The ice age ended nearly as abruptly as it began. Between about 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the temperature in Greenland rose more than 50 °F.

We don't know what causes ice ages to begin or end. In 1875, a janitor turned geologist, James Croll, proposed that small variations in Earth's orbit around the Sun were responsible for climate change. This idea enjoyed its greatest heyday during the 1970s, when ocean sediment cores appeared to confirm the theory. But in 1992, Ike Winograd and his colleagues at the US Geological Survey falsified the theory by demonstrating that its predictions were inconsistent with new, high-quality data.
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Igloo

The rise of oxygen caused Earth's earliest ice age


PhysOrg
Thu, 07 May 2009 04:12 UTC
oxygen cycle
© unknown

The evolution of organic photosynthesis ca.2.5 billion years ago would have had a profound effect on Earth's surface environments, and potentially on aerobic respiration by eukaryotes.
Geologists may have uncovered the answer to an age-old question - an ice-age-old question, that is. It appears that Earth's earliest ice ages may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth.

Alan J. Kaufman, professor of geology at the University of Maryland, Maryland geology colleague James Farquhar, and a team of scientists from Germany, South Africa, Canada, and the U.S.A., uncovered evidence that the oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere - generally known as the Great Oxygenation Event - coincided with the first widespread ice age on the planet.

"We can now put our hands on the rock library that preserves evidence of irreversible atmospheric change," said Kaufman. "This singular event had a profound effect on the climate, and also on life."

Using sulfur isotopes to determine the oxygen content of ~2.3 billion year-old rocks in the Transvaal Supergroup in South Africa, they found evidence of a sudden increase in atmospheric oxygen that broadly coincided with physical evidence of glacial debris, and geochemical evidence of a new world-order for the carbon cycle.
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Document

Danger: Ice Age Ahead

Robert Felix
IceAgeNow
Fri, 08 May 2009 21:43 UTC
"We're well on our way into the next ice age," says this video from the National Geographic. "One of our major challenges will be how to keep us from killing each other." (I agree.)

"We are hardwired at a genetic level to seek survival at almost any cost," says Dr. Irwin Redlener of Columbia University. Our base survival instincts will kick in as the food chain collapses, says Redlener, an expert at the National Cdnter for Disaster Preparedness. Civilization as we know it will change forever. We could see deadly competition for food, for water, and for power, as civilization collapses. (I agree.)
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