Will Media Expose Global Warming Con Job?

Excerpt: In the past several months, a new "crisis" has heated up the controversy over man-made global warming. A few major-media writers and TV personalities are actually reporting statements by credible scientists who are challenging the assumption that carbon dioxide is the primary force causing global warming. There's a real possibility that big-name journalists will break ranks and pursue their next Pulitzer Prize by exposing the lack of scientific consensus on CO2 as a planet-heating pollutant. That would create a crisis of confidence among the activists, researchers and global-governance apparatchiks who want a global carbon tax to build their political and financial power base.

http://www.aim.org/special-report/will-media-expose-global-warming-con-job/

Arctic Sea Ice Sees 'Significant Increase' in Size Following 'Extreme Cold' (CBC – February 15, 2008)

Excerpt: There's an upside to the extreme cold temperatures northern Canadians have endured in the last few weeks: scientists say it's been helping winter sea ice grow across the Arctic, where the ice shrank to record-low levels last year. Temperatures have stayed well in the -30s C and -40s C range since late January throughout the North, with the mercury dipping past -50 C in some areas. Satellite images are showing that the cold spell is helping the sea ice expand in coverage by about 2 million square kilometres, compared to the average winter coverage in the previous three years. "It's nice to know that the ice is recovering," Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, told CBC News on Thursday. […] Winter sea ice could keep expanding. The cold is also making the ice thicker in some areas, compared to recorded thicknesses last year, Lagnis added. "The ice is about 10 to 20 centimetres thicker than last year, so that's a significant increase," he said. If temperatures remain cold this winter, Langis said winter sea ice coverage will continue to expand.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/02/15/arctic-ice.html

New Peer-Reviewed Study Shows Arctic COOLING Over last 1500 years!

(Study published in Climate Dynamics, and the work was conducted by Håkan Grudd of Stockholm University’s Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology - Published online: 30 January 2008)

Excerpt: “The late-twentieth century is not exceptionally warm in the new Torneträsk record: On decadal-to-century timescales, periods around AD 750, 1000, 1400, and 1750 were all equally warm, or warmer. The warmest summers in this new reconstruction occur in a 200-year period centred on AD 1000. A ‘Medieval Warm Period’ is supported by other paleoclimate evidence from northern Fennoscandia, although the new tree-ring evidence from Tornetraäsk suggests that this period was much warmer than previously recognised.” < > “The new Torneträsk summer temperature reconstruction shows a trend of -0.3°C over the last 1,500 years.” Paper available here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/8j71453650116753/?p=fcd6adbe04ff4cc2... & Full Paper (pdf) available here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/8j71453650116753/fulltext.pdf

Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age - Sunspots have all but vanished in recent years.

Excerpt: Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago -- and it signaled a solar event known as a "Maunder Minimum," along with the start of what we now call the "Little Ice Age." Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, says it may be happening again. Overseeing a giant radio telescope he calls a "stethoscope for the sun," Tapping says, if the pattern doesn't change quickly, the earth is in for some very chilly weather. […] In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov predicted the sun would soon peak, triggering a rapid decline in world temperatures. Only last month, the view was echoed by Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. who advised the world to "stock up on fur coats." Sorokhtin, who calls man's contribution to climate change "a drop in the bucket," predicts the solar minimum to occur by the year 2040, with icy weather lasting till 2100 or beyond. Observational data seems to support the claims -- or doesn't contradict it, at least. […] Researcher Dr. Timothy Patterson, director of the Geoscience Center at Carleton University, shares the concern. Patterson is finding "excellent correlations" between solar fluctuations, a relationship that historically, he says doesn't exist between CO2 and past climate changes.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=10630

Another prominent scientist dissents from ranks 'consensus' of UN and Gore.

Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Art Douglas. recently retired Chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department Creighton University in Omaha Nebraska. (Bio info for Douglas here: http://flare.creighton.edu/douglas/ )
Excerpt: Whatever the weather, Douglas said, it's not being caused by global warming. If anything, the climate may be starting into a cooling period. […] The amount of sea ice is the largest ever seen in the Southern Hemisphere, and it has even snowed in Buenos Aires, Douglas said. "Within four or five months, it appears that a warming trend can go very rapidly in the other direction." Douglas said the climate can quickly correct itself, restoring lower average temperatures in as little as two years. He said he doubts global warming. […] Douglas said he believes the weather patterns the world is now experiencing are regional phenomena and not a global pattern. He also noted that the warmest year on record was 1998, but questioned why, if we're in a warming trend, it hasn't gotten any warmer than it was that year. Douglas said warming trends put more moisture in the atmosphere, resulting in more snow, which leads to cooling.
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:qQt2jnH5YWUJ:www.capitalpress.info/...

Latest Scientific Studies Refute Fears of Greenland Melt – July 30, 2008

Excerpt: Research in 2006 found that Greenland has been warming since the 1880’s, but since 1955, temperature averages at Greenland stations have been colder than the period between 1881-1955. A 2006 study found Greenland has cooled since the 1930's and 1940's, with 1941 being the warmest year on record. Another 2006 study concluded Greenland was as warm or warmer in the 1930’s and 40’s and the rate of warming from 1920-1930 was about 50% higher than the warming from 1995-2005. One 2005 study found Greenland gaining ice in the interior higher elevations and thinning ice at the lower elevations. In addition, the often media promoted fears of Greenland’s ice completely melting and a subsequent catastrophic sea level rise are directly at odds with the latest scientific studies.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&Content...

Greenland climate not varying from ‘natural climate variabilty’ (Dec. 2007)

Excerpt: RECENT PAPER ON THE HISTORY OF GREENLAND ICE MASS Showing that, although the Greenland melt has increased during the 1992-2006 period, the melt was even higher in 1900s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. So there is no indication that the current melt is above natural climate variability. Of course people who look just on the 1990 to 2007 period "see" great melting acceleration and influence of carbon dioxide and anthropogenic climate change.

http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2008/01/greenland-thaw-biggest-in-50-years...

Re: Torneträsk record. So in this location there is not much of a trend. But over to the east, in western Siberia, there is plenty of permafrost loss that is quite new compared to what has occurred in the last 2000 years and longer.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725124.500.html

I was thinking about publishing an essay on "The Last White Christmas" on how every little town and village was going to have it's last white Christmas as Global Warming took them out of the snowfall regime. That there just wouldn't be a white Christmas for that town, ever again.
Except that Global Warming is melting the permafrost all over Siberia and Canada and the melting permafrost is flowing down the rivers to the Arctic and freshening the Arctic Ocean, which is making it easier for the sea to freeze and form pack ice, which is making winter come a few weeks sooner each year.
Until the permafrost finishes melting and the Arctic Ocean resalinises, the ice pack will form faster and sooner than it used to.
The permafrost is only a few feet thick at the southern side but it is hundreds of feet thick in the areas of deep cold. It make take a while before the permafrost is completely gone.
Eventually the permafrost will be melted down far enough that the yearly melt won't be important. That make take ten or twenty years. Then the pack ice will finally go away.
So enjoy a white christmas while you can.

The only problem with this story is that it is wrong. The Arctic Ocean is losing the isolation that it had before and warm waters are helping to finish off the perennial ice.

Global Cooling: Amazing pictures of countries joining Britain in the big freeze

From UK Daily Mail – February 21, 2008

Excerpt: In light of such similar news from so many places round the world, it may not seem surprising that U.S. satellite data for January shows the extent of snow cover in the northern hemisphere as reaching its highest level since 1966, 42 years ago - and that temperatures were lower than their average for the whole of the 20th century. Furthermore, it is not only in the northern hemisphere that records are being broken. Following last year's freak snowfalls in such southern cities as Buenos Aires and Sydney, satellite observations from the other end of the world have this winter shown ice cover round the Antarctic at easily its greatest extent for this time of year since data began in 1979, 30per cent above average. […] Global warming "sceptics", on the other hand, are inevitably pointing to these record snowfalls as evidence that global temperatures are no longer rising as the CO2 theory predicts. We may, they suggest, be seeing the start of a period when temperatures reverse their generally upward trend over the past 30 years, as we did in those decades before 1978 known to climate scientists as "the Little Cooling". […] The truth is that it is still much too early to draw any long-term conclusions from 2008's great freeze. But it is one of the most startling developments to have emerged in the world's weather patterns for a long time - not least in that it was so unexpected. At least it raises important questions over how our global climate is evolving which the scientists will have to try to explain. To the millions of people whose lives have been seriously disrupted by this year's freeze, the concept of global warming must seem awfully remote.

Increased snowfall can be an indicator of warming climates, as it is in eastern Ontario. Open waters are subject to more evaporation than frozen ones, and the air takes up more moisture.

Arctic Sea Ice Sees 'Significant Increase' in Size Following 'Extreme Cold' (CBC – February 15, 2008)

Excerpt: There's an upside to the extreme cold temperatures northern Canadians have endured in the last few weeks: scientists say it's been helping winter sea ice grow across the Arctic, where the ice shrank to record-low levels last year.

BREAKING NEWS: CYCLES HAPPEN!

Why don't you share with all the good folks here what happened to sea ice in 2006 after a huge record melt in 2005?

Why don't you share wit the good people here virtually any climatic record? You know, the ones that always show a kind of sawtooth pattern as opposed to a nice linear change?

Why don't you share with people the total ice concentration and thickness, too? Particularly thickness. Why don't you tell the good people here how much 5 or ten meter-thick ice still exists vs. about 1 meter?

Why don't you share with the good people here what would happen if, say, sunspots disappear for another ten years but we keep spewing GHG's in a business as usual mode, then sunspots get back to normal?

Lastly, why don't you share with the nice people here which of the people above, if any, can be found via exxonsecrets?

Cheers

If you read this article
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/02/a-day-when-hell-wa...

And follow down some of the comments to comment number 67 you will see that Ken Tapping has discounted an article that cherry picks a few comments about the sunspot activity and indicated that he in fact thinks global warming is a far more pressing issue than the late arrival of a few sunspots.

His article about sunspot activity can be read here.
http://www.lps.umontreal.ca/~paquetteh/Maunder_SP.pdf

Not to comment on the great burden of living a Luddite life ,I have existed near the South Bank of the Red River in North Texas for the past 35 yrs.Once belonged to the Wood Heating Aliance(radical ultra left wing die hard wood burning hickies )cut and delivered over 2000 cords of oak firewood over a 20 yr period to the Dallas /Ft Worth Metroplex.Used to dream of snow laden winters and Blue Northers.1983 December was actual coldest spell during this period.
But Winters kept getting warmer-once I was unloading in a rain a week after Thanksgiving with 70 deg air temp from El Nino that fall.(1 of 2 back to back)In 1998 had to exit that business from warming,lost it!
Now I want to ask Where is this cold coming from this winter?Are diverse areas of the globe being frozen solid simultaneously?Try China,Central Asia,our Great Plains.Global dimming?Less sun spots all of a sudden?or the combined particulate areial spraying campaigns of over 100 countries worldwide.

Giant X's in the North Texas skies these past few days.

As you can see from this graph from Cryosphere Today the northern hemisphere ice cover dropped dramatically and unprecedentedly this summer and has rapidly recovered but it is still almost one million square kilometres below the 1978-2000 average. If you ignore short term variations the trend is unmistakeably down.

Arctic Ice Cover

I saw this. Three questions come to mind. 1) what did this look like going back some 2-3000 years? Of course we don't know, so we cannot compare and make a claim as to what this trend means against past trends. 2) What caused the sudden spike down? And what caused the sudden recovery? 3) what's going to happen next?

So if you saw it, why didn't you report it?

Snot-nosed cherry picker.

The sudden spike down was caused by extended temperature anomolies reaching 10 or 20C at maximum for a long period of time in a statistically significant (in terms of changing climate versus changing weather) manner. This is orders of magnitude more serious (and more localized) than any of the global warming models predict, and has been one of the reasons people are claiming such different things.

A solid possibility on the recovery spike - Pack ice which is breaking up doesn't just melt into water immediately. It spreads out into small, floating chunks of surface ice which get counted as "low ice coverage." If a lot of this happens in a warm summer, the following winter you could be faced with a huge, several-inches-thick pack of ice, instead of a smaller, dozens-of-feet-thick pack of ice - particularly if the surface water is much fresher than the ocean water (and easier to freeze).