Global Warming

[HisDaughter]

Russian scientist says Earth could soon face new ice age
Claims data shows temperature peak already passed, cooling ahead

Temperatures on Earth have stabilized in the past decade, and the planet should brace itself for a new Ice Age rather than global warming, a Russian scientist said in an interview with RIA Novosti Tuesday.

I hope this knocks the wind out of that ol' blowhard!  You know the one I mean.

Mankind will face serious economic, social, and demographic consequences of the coming Ice Age because it will directly affect more than 80% of the earth's population, the scientist concluded.

Actually, I don't think we will make it that long.  At least I hope not.  And there are alot of other things that could achive the same the end.

[Soldier4Christ]

I hope this knocks the wind out of that ol' blowhard!  You know the one I mean.

I doubt that it will as nothing that scientists have said yet in opposition to him nor what the weather is actually doing has changed anything coming from him.

[Soldier4Christ]

China weather chaos a sign of things to come: experts

Don't tell the thousands of Chinese stuck at railway stations or airports, but the chaos caused by a vicious cold spell afflicting much of China could be just a taste of things to come, experts say.

The inclement weather and ensuing problems merely highlight the country's increasing vulnerability to the extreme weather swings characteristic of global climate change, experts say, and is likely to be repeated in future years.

Vast areas of central and southern China have experienced the most severe winter in half a century in the past few days, coming on the heels of one of the warmest winters on record last year.

With climate change gaining pace and the planet generally warming up, the social, economic and political impact on China will rise along with the mercury, experts said.

"As a developing country where the vast majority live in poor circumstances, China is unusually vulnerable to this," said Paul Harris, a professor at Hong Kong's Lingnan University, who studies the social impact of climate change.

"But what we've clearly seen this week is the inability of the government to cope with such extreme events."

There is no way to prove climate change is to blame for the extreme cold snap, but some Chinese government scientists see no other explanation for the wild temperature swings, particularly in the areas that have become accustomed recently to mild winters.

"There is no doubt (climate change is to blame) for such weather events," Wang Qiwei, a climatologist with the China Meteorological Administration, wrote in an online forum set up to answer public questions about the cold weather.

"And it's a reminder that mankind must protect this globe of ours and pay more attention to how we impact our environment."

Although climate change is most closely associated with rising world temperatures, many scientists say it also increases the intensity of all kinds of weather.

"Snow in the south of China? Whoever would have imagined that?" said Yang Ailun, climate change campaigner for Greenpeace China.

"China will be one of the countries most affected by climate change and it is in China's best interest to do more to prepare," she adds, suggesting greater disaster-response spending.

China has a history of devastating natural disasters but the current harsh winter is the latest example of increasingly extreme weather as climate change progresses.

Average 2006 temperatures in China were the warmest in 55 years, while last year saw some of the worst regional droughts in decades, leaving huge swathes of farmland withered and rivers at record low levels.

Chinese climatologists expect more extreme weather over the years, with potentially dire effects on people and agriculture.

"Global warming incidents will be more prominent, more frequent and intense, including torrential rains, droughts, and hurricanes," wrote the meteorological administration's Wang.

China's vast numbers of poor usually suffer the most from natural disasters, raising the spectre of weather-induced social unrest, Hong Kong professor Harris said.

"The people hit hardest are the poor and powerless. Climate change will just lead to more (social unrest)," he said.

The current freezing weather has paralysed transportation just as millions of people try to head home for the annual Lunar New Year holiday.

It has also triggered a power crisis as the transport chaos has endangered shipments of coal to electric power plants just as plummeting temperatures have caused energy demand to soar.

The situation starkly illustrates how extreme weather has the potential to bring the country to its knees, said Harris.

He adds that in future China will be forced to spend more on mitigating the effects of climate change, such as efforts to ensure clean and ample water supplies in times of drought.

"China is spending on building Olympic stadiums, sending astronauts into space and building up its military instead of investing in these things," he said.

"Climate change is not a central factor in current economic planning and I think that is a problem."

[Soldier4Christ]

Aha! We knew the cold would be a sign of global warming!

China weather chaos a sign of things to come: experts

Don’t tell the thousands of Chinese stuck at railway stations or airports, but the chaos caused by a vicious cold spell afflicting much of China could be just a taste of things to come, experts say.

The inclement weather and ensuing problems merely highlight the country’s increasing vulnerability to the extreme weather swings characteristic of global climate change, experts say, and is likely to be repeated in future years.

Vast areas of central and southern China have experienced the most severe winter in half a century in the past few days, coming on the heels of one of the warmest winters on record last year. (AFP)

No, you didn’t misread that. They said that the most severe winter in 50 years, coming on the heels of one of the warmest [read: mildest] winters on record last year, are both due to ‘rising global temperatures’ (which are currently not rising, so far as anyone can tell — but never mind that). And some people take this garbage seriously?

[Soldier4Christ]

Al Gore called 'prophet' at liberal Baptist meeting

Al Gore has used a speech to hundreds attending Jimmy Carter's liberal Baptist meeting in Atlanta to sell his global warming campaign.

The Tennessean in Nashville describes Gore's speech this way: "With a green-colored Bible in one hand and his familiar red laser pointer in the other, former vice president and Nobel prize winner Al Gore led 2,500 Baptist preachers and lay leaders through his global warming slide show in Atlanta Thursday. Sounding more like an evangelist than a politician, Gore drew upon Scripture, science and a Sunday school teacher from his home church to urge Baptists to do whatever they could to fight global warming."
 
The newspaper goes on to quote Gore as telling the crowd that "if we heap contempt on God's creation, that is inconsistent with glorifying God" -- and comparing the "rising storm" of the alleged climate crisis to the rise of the Nazi party in the 1930s.
 
And it appears Gore had plenty of disciples at the gathering. According to The Tennessean, Robert Parham, executive director of the Nashville-based Baptist Center for Ethics, called Gore a "Baptist prophet." In introducing Gore, Parham said, "prophets are unacceptable because their truth is inconvenient."
 
The newspaper also quotes Todd Lake, vice president for spiritual development at Belmont University, as saying Gore had opened his eyes to the scale of global warming. "Not only do we have a crisis, we have a mounting crisis," Lake stated.
 
Despite the apparent success Gore enjoyed at the meeting, many people question the former vice president's claims about global warming. They argue the earth is simply going through another cycle of changes, as it has since the beginning of time.
 
Meanwhile, the Carter meeting wraps up today with speeches from former president Bill Clinton and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who is investigating some popular televangelists' alleged misuse of financial gifts from their donors.

[Soldier4Christ]

I don't argue that he is a prophet but the word FALSE needs to be with that.

[HisDaughter]

The newspaper goes on to quote Gore as telling the crowd that "if we heap contempt on God's creation, that is inconsistent with glorifying God"
 

and comparing the "rising storm" of the alleged climate crisis to the rise of the Nazi party in the 1930s.
 

That's all I've got to say.  But then...it really says it all, doesn't it?

[Soldier4Christ]

That's all I've got to say.  But then...it really says it all, doesn't it?

Yep, it sure does.

[Shammu]

I don't argue that he is a prophet but the word FALSE needs to be with that.

Your right, he is a FALSE prophet.

[Soldier4Christ]

More Ice Than Ever

 The Washington Post recently ran a shocking above-the-fold article warning us of "Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica." A new paper by Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows a net loss of ice where most scientists thought the opposite would occur.

The Post went full-bore with this one, spreading the article on to an entire interior page. The piece ends by noting that Rajenda Pachauri, head of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is so concerned that he's is personally going down to inspect the situation.

He should. Before he even gets to Antarctica, Pachauri is going to see something even more surprising than Rignot's finding. Despite a warming Southern Ocean, the amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level ever measured for this time of the year, since satellites first began to monitor it almost thirty years ago. This represents a continuation of the record set last winter (our summer).

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can also look at the departure from the average for ice mass in a given month. At present, the coverage of ice surrounding Antarctica is almost exactly two million square miles above where it is historically supposed to be at this time of year. It's farther above normal than it has ever been for any month in climatologic records. Around now, because it's summer down there and the ice is headed towards its annual low point, there should be about seven million square miles of it. That means, as data in University of Illinois' web publication Cryosphere Today shows, that there is nearly 30% more ice down in Antarctica than usual for this time of the year.

All of the IPCC's models of Antarctica in the 21st century forecast a gain in ice, as a warmer surrounding ocean evaporates more water, which subsequently falls in the form of snow when it hits the continent. It's simply too cold for rain in Antarctica, and it'll stay that way for a very long time.

Concerning Antarctica as a whole, the IPCC's new climate compendium notes "the lack of warming reflected in atmospheric temperatures averaged across the region." Other studies, such as Peter Doran's in Nature in 2003, show actual cooling in recent decades. (There is a small area of significant warming in the peninsula that points towards South America, but this is less than 2% of Antarctica's total land mass.)

There's brand new evidence, just published in mid-January in Geophysical Research Letters, of a striking increase in snowfall over that peninsula. The few snowfall records that are available elsewhere in Antarctica show considerable variation from decade to decade, so discriminating the "signal" of increased snowfall caused by global warming from all the rest of the "noise" may be very difficult indeed.

We see the same problem with hurricanes and global warming. Their strength and numbers vary considerably from year to year. 2005 was the most active year ever measured in the Atlantic Basin, while 2007 was one of the weakest in history. How do you find the fingerprint of global warming amidst such variation?

So it's not warming up, and the snowfall data are equivocal, yet the continent is experiencing a net loss of ice. How can this be, and is it even important? The current hypothesis is that warmer waters beneath the surface are somehow loosening the ice. That's plausible, but again, there's precious little proof of it.

And further, the bottom line is that there is more ice than ever surrounding Antarctica.

One of the tired tropes that reverberate throughout global warming reporting is that inconvenient facts get left out. In this case, it's blatant. Midway through the Post's page-long article comes a statement that "these new findings come as the Arctic is losing ice at a dramatic rate." Wouldn't that have been an appropriate place to note that, despite a small recent loss of ice from the Antarctic landmass, the ice field surrounding Antarctica is now larger than ever measured?

[Soldier4Christ]

Watts Up With That? has a different slant on yesterday's 'Nessie' story: Global Warming Kills “Nessie” - Global warming gets blamed for a lot of things, like in the 90’s, when that California Cheese commercial came out blaming everything  on “Its the El Ninnnnoooooo…..”. Every day we see more an more piling on of claims that the root cause of some problem is “global warming”.

But when this one came along, it gave me such pause, that I just had to mention it due to the absurdity vortex that surrounds it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you this:

Veteran Loch Ness Monster Hunter Gives Up

Despite having hundreds of sonar contacts over the years, the trail has since gone cold and Rines believes that Nessie may be dead, a victim of global warming.

Read the whole story here at the UK’s Daily Record.

Of course we all know that Nessie is “real” and therefore it’s *ahem* reasonable to assume that the massive species extinction claimed as one of the direct effects of AGW would reach right down to the depths of Loch Ness and strike beloved Nessie dead. It’s a huge blow to Scotland’s tourist industry.

But that’s not the cause, the epic battle of Nessie’s last stand was captured in late 2007 on the Loch Ness web cam. The real culprit is not global warming, but very close.

See the picture below:



Note: yes I realize the picture is absurd, but “absurd claims require absurd proof.” (Watts Up With That?)

[Soldier4Christ]

Article from Junkscience.com:

Where have all the sunspots gone?





I’m writing this after doing an exhaustive search to see what sort of solar activity has occurred lately, and I find there is little to report. With the exception of the briefly increased solar wind from a coronal hole, there is almost no significant solar activity.

The sun has gone quiet. Really quiet.

It is normal for our sun to have quiet periods between solar cycles, but we’ve seen months and months of next to nothing, and the start of Solar cycle 24 seems to have materialized (as first reported here) then abruptly disappeared. The reverse polarity sunspot that signaled the start of cycle 24 on January 4th, dissolved within two days after that.




Of course we’ve known that the sunspot cycle has gone low, which is also to be expected for this period of the cycle. Note that NOAA still has two undecided scenarios for cycle 24 Lower that normal, or higher than normal, as indicated on the graph below:




But the real news is just how quiet the suns magnetic field has been in the past couple of years. From the data provided by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) you can see just how little magnetic field activity there has been. I’ve graphed it below:




What is most interesting about the Geomagnetic Average Planetary Index graph above is what happened around October 2005. Notice the sharp drop in the magnetic index and the continuance at low levels.

This looks much like a “step function” that I see on GISS surface temperature graphs when a station has been relocated to a cooler measurement environment. In the case of the sun, it appears this indicates that something abruptly “switched off” in the inner workings of the solar dynamo. Note that in the prior months, the magnetic index was ramping up a bit with more activity, then it simply dropped and stayed mostly flat.

We saw a single reversed polarity high latitude sunspot on January 4th, 2008, which would signal the start of a new cycle 24, which was originally predicted to have started last March and expected to peak in 2012. So far the sun doesn’t seem to have restarted its normal upwards climb.

If you have ever studied how the magnetic dynamo of the sun is so incredibly full of entropy, yet has cycles, you’ll understand how it can change states. The sun’s magnetic field is a like a series of twisted and looped rubber bands, mostly because the sun is a fluid gas, which rotates at different rates between the poles and the equator. Since the suns magnetic field is pulled along with the gas, all these twists, bumps, and burps occur in the process as the magnetic field lines get twisted like taffy. You can see more about it in the Babcock model.

I’ve alway’s likened a sunspot to what happens with a rubber band on a toy balsa wood plane. You keep twisting the propeller beyond the normal tightness to get that extra second of thrust and you see the rubber ban start to pop out knots. Those knots are like sunspots busting out of twisted magnetic field lines.

The Babcock model says that the differential rotation of the Sun winds up the magnetic fields of it’s layers during a solar cycle. The magnetic fields will then eventually tangle up to such a degree that they will eventually cause a magnetic break down and the fields will have to struggle to reorganize themselves by bursting up from the surface layers of the Sun. This will cause magnetic North-South pair boundaries (spots) in the photosphere trapping gaseous material that will cool slightly. Thus, when we see sunspots, we are seeing these areas of magnetic field breakdown.





Sunspots are cross connected eruptions of the magnetic field lines, shown in red above. Sometimes they break, spewing tremendous amounts of gas and particles into space. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME’s) are some examples of this process. Sometimes they snap back like rubber bands. The number of sunspots at solar max is a direct indicator of the activity level of the solar dynamo.

Given the current quietness of the sun and it’s magnetic field, combined with the late start to cycle 24 with even possibly a false start, it appears that the sun has slowed it’s internal dynamo to a similar level such as was seen during the Dalton Minimum. One of the things about the Dalton Minimum was that it started with a skipped solar cycle, which also coincided with a very long solar cycle 4 from 1784-1799. The longer our current cycle 23 lasts before we see a true ramp up of cycle 24, the greater chance it seems then that cycle 24 will be a low one.

No wonder there is so much talk recently about global cooling. I certainly hope that’s wrong, because a Dalton type solar minimum would be very bad for our world economy and agriculture. NASA GISS published a release back in 2003 that agrees with the commonly accepted idea that long period trends in solar activity do affect our climate by changing the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI).

Some say it is no coincidence that 2008 has seen a drop in global temperature as indicated by several respected temperature indexes compared to 2007, and that our sun is also quiet and still not kick starting its internal magentic dynamo.

[Soldier4Christ]

Of course: Cold wave in India attributed to global warming


 Mumbai: The recent cold wave sweeping across Mumbai and other parts of India could be attributed to global warming, experts said on Tuesday here at an environmental conference.

Addressing the ‘Combat Global Warming’ conference at the Indian Merchants Chamber (IMC) here, former Union minister for power and environment Suresh Prabhu said global warming was primarily a problem created and induced by human beings.

He said the increase in emission of green house gases like carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and methane had resulted in the situation, which could prove catastrophic if unchecked.

Prabhu said the cold wave that swept Maharashtra and other parts of India recently could be attributed to the phenomenon of global warming. (Sify)

______________


Cold wave in India attributed to global warming

Mumbai: The recent cold wave sweeping across Mumbai and other parts of India could be attributed to global warming, experts said on Tuesday here at an environmental conference.

Addressing the ‘Combat Global Warming’ conference at the Indian Merchants Chamber (IMC) here, former Union minister for power and environment Suresh Prabhu said global warming was primarily a problem created and induced by human beings.

He said the increase in emission of green house gases like carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and methane had resulted in the situation, which could prove catastrophic if unchecked.

Prabhu said the cold wave that swept Maharashtra and other parts of India recently could be attributed to the phenomenon of global warming.

He said global warming had already affected agriculture and water availability in various parts of the country. "A recent study revealed that 70 percent of India's water bodies are polluted," Prabhu said.

The former minister said India was one of the world's top five polluters, which also include the US, European nations and Japan.

IMC president Niraj Bajaj said the fluctuating climatic conditions due to global warming posed a threat to the very survival of the planet.

To drive home his point, he quoted Mahatma Gandhi: "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Environmental scientist Emmanuel D'Silva said Mumbai and Kolkata were among the ten worst cities in the world with regard to environmental pollution and sanitation.

"It is estimated by the year 2050, another seven million persons are expected to take refuge in Mumbai after global warming leads to either a drought or deluge in their village or city elsewhere in the country," D'Silva said.

[nChrist]

Watts Up With That? has a different slant on yesterday's 'Nessie' story: Global Warming Kills “Nessie” - Global warming gets blamed for a lot of things, like in the 90’s, when that California Cheese commercial came out blaming everything  on “Its the El Ninnnnoooooo…..”. Every day we see more an more piling on of claims that the root cause of some problem is “global warming”.

But when this one came along, it gave me such pause, that I just had to mention it due to the absurdity vortex that surrounds it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you this:

Veteran Loch Ness Monster Hunter Gives Up

Despite having hundreds of sonar contacts over the years, the trail has since gone cold and Rines believes that Nessie may be dead, a victim of global warming.

Read the whole story here at the UK’s Daily Record.

Of course we all know that Nessie is “real” and therefore it’s *ahem* reasonable to assume that the massive species extinction claimed as one of the direct effects of AGW would reach right down to the depths of Loch Ness and strike beloved Nessie dead. It’s a huge blow to Scotland’s tourist industry.

But that’s not the cause, the epic battle of Nessie’s last stand was captured in late 2007 on the Loch Ness web cam. The real culprit is not global warming, but very close.

See the picture below:



Note: yes I realize the picture is absurd, but “absurd claims require absurd proof.” (Watts Up With That?)

      The facts are killin' me - ROFL!

The ones that cause the most laughing involves anyone listening to another word that Al Gore has to say. Man has no control over the sun, so why are we still listening to "GOOBERS" who want to spend MEGA-BILLIONS on NOTHING and ACCOMPLISH NOTHING but line some fat cat pockets with CASH?

   

[Soldier4Christ]

    HuffPoster Kerry Trueman on Tuesday suggested that food shortages will be so rampant if we don't stop climate change that we'll all end up eating bugs.

    I kid you not.

    For those looking for a cut to the chase, this was the money shot:

        If the thought of eating bugs and roadkill freaks you out, consider this: competition for the world's dwindling resources is heating up right along with the planet, and global warming is worsening food shortages all over the world. In this land o' plenty o' processed foods, most Americans can't imagine an era when we'd be forced to subsist on weeds, bugs, and -- till we run out of gas -- roadkill.


Never mind that food crops like corn are being diverted to ethanol production in the name of diminishing ostensibly man-made global warming. Never mind that warmer weather and higher CO2 levels tends to produce higher yields. Greenland once was green, after all, when the climate was warmer and so was Antartica.


Hysteria is too kind a word for this idiocy.