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Snowman

Eminent geophysicist rejects global warming theory, says world on verge of 'mini ice age'

Matthew Cullinan
LifeSiteNews
Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:03 UTC
Image
© NASA
Sunspot activity since 1990
An eminent Mexican geophysicist says that despite predictions of global warming based on computer models, the world may be on the verge of an eighty-year cold period similar to the "little ice age" experienced by Europe from 1300 to 1800 A.D..

Víctor Manuel Velasco, of the University of Mexico's Institute of Geophysics, says that recent winter conditions are similar to those of the "little ice age", and in particular the "Maunder Minimum," a period during which sunspot activity dropped significantly. He also notes that the Earth is in a similar position today in relation to the rest of the solar system, a fact which he regards as significant for climate.

"We are talking about the period between 1645 and 1715, which is known as the Maunder Minimum, a period in which the sunspots practically disappeared from the surface of the sun, and in which our planet occupied a position similar to which it has today, with respect to the center of gravity of our [solar] system." Velasco said in an interview published by the university.
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Info

Did Quiet Sun Cause Little Ice Age After All?

Govert Schilling
ScienceNow
Thu, 26 May 2011 12:44 UTC
Ice Age
© Hendrick Avercamp / Wikimedia Commons
Brrr ... Cold winters in 17th century Europe, as shown in this painting by Hendrick Avercamp, may have been caused by a lack of solar activity after all.

Boston - For decades, astronomers and climatologists have debated whether a prolonged 17th century cold spell, best documented in Europe, could have been caused by erratic behavior of the sun. Now, an American solar physicist says he has new evidence to suggest that the sun was indeed the culprit.

The sun isn't as constant as it appears. Instead, its surface is regularly beset by storms of swirling magnetic fields. As a result, like a teenager plagued with acne, the face of the sun often sprouts relatively dark and short-lived "sunspots," which appear when strong magnetic fields inhibit the upwelling of hotter gas from below. The number of those spots waxes and wanes regularly in an 11-year cycle. However, even that cycle isn't immutable.

In 1893, English astronomer Edward Maunder, studying historical records, noted that the cycle essentially stopped between 1645 and 1715. Instead, the sun was almost devoid of sunspots during this period. In 1976, American solar physicist John "Jack" Eddy suggested there might have been a causal link between this "Maunder Minimum" in the number of sunspots and the contemporaneous Little Ice Age, when average temperatures in Europe were a degree centigrade lower than normal.
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Bizarro Earth

US: Mysterious Maine Earthquakes Caused by Ice Age Rebound

Brandon Keim
Wired.com
Mon, 09 May 2011 16:14 UTC
Mid Coast Earthquakes
© Wire.com
Mid coast earthquakes.
On the last day of April and first five days of May, dozens of tiny earthquakes caused Maine's eastern coast to tremble. What could have shaken this geologically quiet region, located in the middle of a tectonic plate, far from any active faults?

The last ice age, say geologists. Like a trampoline's surface after liftoff, Earth's crust along the eastern seaboard is still springing back from the pressing weight of a massive ice sheet that has since melted. The earthquakes are a present-time reminder of processes that are prehistoric at a human scale, but from a geological perspective still ongoing.

"This action is still taking place," said Robert Marvinney, director of Maine's Bureau of Geology. "Five or ten thousand feet of ice weighs a lot."
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Igloo

US: Temperatures Lowest For Time Of Year Since 1940s


CBS
Fri, 22 Apr 2011 07:15 UTC
Chicago - Not only has Chicago dealt with chilly rain, hail and even snow this week, but temperatures Tuesday were at their lowest for this late spring date since the 1940s.

CBS 2 Meteorologist Megan Glaros says the high Wednesday is expected only to reach 46 degrees with a peek or two of sunshine, but the chilly conditions will make it feel like winter never ended. As of 6:45 a.m., the temperature in Chicago was just 34 degrees.

Image
© Columbia Broadcasting System
Cold, pouring rain had people running downtown Tuesday night.
Glaros says if there were precipitation Tuesday morning, some snow would likely be mixed in. Fortunately, the storm systems have moved east and conditions were just cold and overcast.

On Tuesday, the high topped out at 38 degrees in the city. In the early evening hours, just walking a few blocks along the streets of Chicago felt like going out to sea in an open boat during a rainstorm in northern Canada. Anyone walking against the wind was blasted continuously in the face with cold droplets of rain, and given the strength of the winds, an umbrella was as good as useless.

And that was before the severe storms even hit. Lightning bolts and thunder claps soon appeared, and hail of up to 1 inch in diameter was spotted in some areas, according to the National Weather Service.

More than an inch and a half of rain fell in less than half an hour Tuesday evening, forcing the cancellation of more than 450 flights at O'Hare and Midway international airports, and leaving people sleeping on terminal floors.
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Snowman

Glaciers Growing on Mt. Shasta

Robert Felix
Ice Age Now
Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:00 UTC
Image
© USGS Lyn Topinka
Mount Shasta and Shastina, California.
Although the media has done a great job of covering this up, the inconvenient fact is that all seven glaciers on California's Mount Shasta are growing. This includes Whitney Glacier, the state's largest.

Yes, growing. Not melting.

Not only are Mt. Shasta's glaciers growing, two have nearly doubled in size.

Both the Hotlum and Wintun Glaciers have nearly doubled in size since 1950, says this article on Wikipedia. The Bolam Glacier has increased by half, while the Whitney and Konwakiton Glaciers have grown by a third.

Scientists first became aware of these growing California glaciers in 2002, and I began writing about them in 2003. Now, eight years later, most media outlets still refuse to acknowledge that these glaciers are growing.

After this year's record snowfall, it will become harder to continue the deception.
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Alarm Clock

The Japanese Quake: Another Ice Age Precursor?

Philip V. Brennan
Canada Free Press
Sat, 12 Mar 2011 13:16 UTC
ice age
© Unknown
Back in the summer of 1997, I wrote a nine-part investigative report on climate change: Global Warming or Globaloney. It attracted a lot of attention at the time, but given the fact that the nation was being barraged by advocates of the socialist global warming propaganda campaign and their media allies, what I had to say fell mostly on deaf ears.

After all, a lot of the global warming enthusiasts appeared to have all sorts of impressive sounding scientific credentials and who's going to pay attention to a mere journalist with no academic background in climatology who claimed that global warming was a contrived myth and that there was every reason to believe that the current interglacial period of temperate weather has about reached its end.

In that series I wrote that one of the precursors of the onset of an ice age are violent tectonic events such as earthquakes of an ever increasing magnitude as was the quake that just devastated much of the Japanese islands. And despite the alarms issued by Al Gore and his cohorts much of the world has not been warming but instead experiencing some bitterly frigid winters because the polar ice caps have been growing.
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Sherlock

US: Scientists Dig for Ice Age Fossils in Los Angeles

Alicia Chang
The Associated Press
Wed, 09 Mar 2011 04:16 UTC
Image
© The Associated Press / Damian Dovarganes
In this photo taken Tuesday, March 8, 2011, Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits chief curator Dr. John Harris, left, and lead excavator Carrie Howard, look at fossil deposits at Box 14 of Project 23 at La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.
With a dental pick in hand, Karin Rice delicately scraped off a clump of asphalt from a pelvic bone belonging to a horse that roamed Los Angeles tens of thousands of years ago.

Like many unsuspecting creatures of the last Ice Age, the horse probably stopped to take a sip of spring water only to be ensnared - and later preserved - in a pool of sticky asphalt that seeped from underground crude oil deposits.

"You're opening up this ancient world and getting to look back in time," Rice said during a recent dig at the La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of Los Angeles.

For the past three years, scientists have been sifting through a significant trove of bones and a nearly intact mammoth skeleton discovered in 2006 during the construction of an underground garage next to the tar pits.

It's been slow going. To make room for the parking structure, researchers at the George C. Page Museum built wooden crates to house the cache and trucked them to the tar pits complex where excavators use power and hand tools to break up the soil.

Careful to avoid the mistakes of early diggers who only prized large mammals bones and little else, a small army of museum employees and volunteers painstakingly chisels away seven days a week, recovering not only animal bones, but also saving the dirt for later inspection for microfossils.
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Igloo

'Chandler's Wobble' May Usher in a New Ice Age

Cliff Harris
CDAPress.com
Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00 UTC
Last week in 'Gems,' we reported that NASA has discovered 'cracks' in the fluctuating earth's magnetic field.

This is worrisome, because this magnetic field affects the ionosphere, and particularly the winds in the lower troposphere. These 'cracks' in the magnetic field and the shifting of our planet's magnetic poles can lead to SUPER STORMS on virtually every continent like we've seen in recent months.

This month's mega-monster cyclone 'Yasi' left much of northeastern Australia in Queensland a "war zone," according to rescue workers. This incredible storm packed winds near 190 miles per hour. Although it was labeled as a Category '5' cyclone (hurricane/typhoon), theoretically it was an 'off the scale' Category '6'!

Tens of thousands of homes were severely damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of people died. Livestock herds were decimated. There were reports of "sharks swimming through the flooded houses."

As if these worsening superstorms aren't enough, we have 'Chandler's Wobble' to worry about.

It was first discovered by an American astronomer in 1891 by the name of Seth Carlo Chandler. Chandler said that the earth "wobbles like a top" whenever our planet slows down a bit in its rotation like it has in recent years.

According to NASA, "the track of this spin began to slow down very slightly about Jan. 18, 2006." Since then, we've had a series of EXTREMELY HARSH winter seasons in both hemispheres.

If this 'wobble' of the planet continues, it's entirely possible that we will eventually see at least a new 'Little Ice Age,' maybe even a new GREAT ICE AGE like the one approximately 11,500 years ago.
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Igloo

Scientists: Sun's Approaching 'Grand Cooling" Assures New Ice Age

Terrence Aym
Helium
Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:45 UTC
ice age earth
© n/a
NASA and the ESA agree, and so does the Russian space agency, Roscosmos - the sun is headed for a Grand Solar Minimum and a Grand Cooling will commence.

The aptly named Grand Cooling is exactly what it implies: the sun is going to cool. That cooling will also cool off the Earth. It will last from 30 to 50 years.

What exactly does global cooling mean? Well for one, Al Gore was sure wrong! The Earth isn't going to warm, it's going to get colder. Much colder. So cold a little or full-blown Ice Age will ensue. As a matter of fact, some scientists claim we're already in the early stages of an Ice Age.

Maybe the Nobel Committee and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should ask Mr. Gore to return his awards.

Dutch Professor Cees de Jager, a prominent astronomer and solar expert, forcefully asserts that we the world is indeed entering for a long period of very low solar activity. The professor and his colleagues are certain Earth is heading for a "long Grand Minimum" - defined as either a Solar Wolf-Gleissberg or a Maunder Minimum - "not shorter than a century." His 2010 paper, "The forthcoming Grand Minimum of solar activity," outlined the extended period of time that the diminished solar radiation would affect the Earth.
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Igloo

Gigantic Icelandic Volcano Could Plunge Europe Into Immediate Ice Age...

Terrence Aym
Salem-News.com
Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:58 UTC
Volcano Lightning
© Salem-News.com
A plethora of scientists have come out in the past 12 months warning about the signs of an impending Ice Age.

Another mammoth Icelandic volcano, Baroarbunga, is ready to erupt. This one could dwarf the Eyjafjallajokull glacier volcano that blew in 2010 causing havoc throughout Europe.

That's the word that's streaming out of the northern island nation as geophysicists around the globe hold their breaths to see what will happen next.

The Eyjafjallajokull eruption galvanized Europe and stunned the world with its unrelenting ferocity. It caused billions of dollars in loss, paralyzed European air travel and caused food and other commodities to spike upwards.

Worried experts warn that this eruption could be much, much worse.

Eyjafjallajokull Radar Image
© Unknown
Strange illusion from Eyjafjallajokull that blew in 2010: Iceland Volcano: Radar Pictures of the Craters.
University of Iceland geophysicists have warned of a significant rise in seismic activity in the area of Vatnajökull, the largest of Iceland's glaciers. A swarm of earthquakes has erupted signaling the likely eruption of Bardarbunga, Iceland's second biggest volcano and one that sits directly above a major lava conduit.

Baroarbunga, a stratovolcano towering 6,600 feet, is part of the island nation's largest volcanic system. The huge volcano's crater covers 43 square miles and is completely encased under glacial ice.
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