The Death of the Global Warming Myth

[American Patriot]

So, been re-studying weather in more depth lately.

I picked up a copy of a book called "Atlantic Pilot Atlas" written circa 2000 to 2006 or so. Not sure which date this one has since there is no copyright date information on it for some reason. But it is the 4th edition. Author is James Clarke (this intro was done in 2000, so 12 years ago).

In the Introduction he talks about "Global Climate Change"... essentially he is convinced by the "then" science that it is "apparently occurring" but goes on to state that atlases helping navigators travel across oceans would be useless using newest, modern data because it is so "variable".

Instead his atlas uses data based on long term (hundreds of years) of collection by vessels traveling across the Atlantic.

Basically, he is saying that using any short term data is a BAD idea.

Just thought I'd throw this out there.....

[American Patriot]

Funny, there were no cars, or industry at the end of the last Ice Age... wonder how this happened???

4 April 2012 Last updated at 13:16 ET CO2 'drove end to last ice age'

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News


Ice core records from Antarctica had suggested the CO2 increase lagged behind temperature rise


A new, detailed record of past climate change provides compelling evidence that the last ice age was ended by a rise in temperature driven by an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.


The finding is based on a very broad range of data, including even the shells of ancient tiny ocean animals.



A paper describing the research appears in this week's edition of Nature.
The team behind the study says its work further strengthens ideas about global warming.



"At the end of the last ice age, CO2 rose from about 180 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere to about 260; and today we're at 392," explained lead author Dr Jeremy Shakun.


"So, in the last 100 years we've gone up about 100 ppm - about the same as at the end of the last ice age, which I think puts it into perspective because it's not a small amount. Rising CO2 at the end of the ice age had a huge effect on global climate."



The study covers the period in Earth history from roughly 20,000 to 10,000 years ago.



This was the time when the planet was emerging from its last deep chill, when the great ice sheets known to cover parts of the Northern Hemisphere were in retreat.


The key result from the new study is that it shows the carbon dioxide rise during this major transition ran slightly ahead of increases in global temperature.


This runs contrary to the record obtained solely from the analysis of Antarctic ice cores which had indicated the opposite - that temperature elevation in the southern polar region actually preceded (or at least ran concurrent to) the climb in CO2.


This observation has frequently been used by some people who are sceptical of global warming to challenge its scientific underpinnings; to claim that the warming link between the atmospheric gas and global temperature is grossly overstated.



But Dr Shakun and colleagues argue that the Antarctic temperature record is just that - a record of what was happening only on the White Continent.


By contrast, their new climate history encompasses data from all around the world to provide a much fuller picture of what was happening on a global scale.


This data incorporates additional information contained in ices drilled from Greenland, and in sediments drilled from the ocean floor and from continental lakes.
These provide a range of indicators. Air bubbles trapped in ice, for example, will record the past CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Past temperatures can also be inferred from ancient planktonic marine organisms buried in the sediments. That is because the amount of magnesium they would include in their calcite skeletons and shells was dependent on the warmth of the water in which they swam.


"Our global temperature looks a lot like the pattern of rising CO2 at the end of the ice age, but the interesting part in particular is that unlike with these Antarctic ice core records, the temperature lags a bit behind the CO2," said Dr Shakun, who conducted much of the research at Oregon State University but who is now affiliated to Harvard and Columbia universities.


"You put these two points together - the correlation of global temperature and CO2, and the fact that temperature lags behind the CO2 - and it really leaves you thinking that CO2 was the big driver of global warming at the end of the ice age," he told BBC News.


Dr Shakun's team has now constructed a narrative to explain both what was happening on Antarctica and what was happening globally:

• This starts with a subtle change in the Earth's orbit around the Sun known as a Milankovitch "wobble", which increases the amount of light reaching northern latitudes and triggers the collapse of the hemisphere's great ice sheets
• This in turn produces vast amounts of fresh water that enter the North Atlantic to upset ocean circulation
• Heat at the equator that would normally be distributed northwards then backs up, raising temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere
• This initiates further changes to atmospheric and ocean circulation, resulting in the Southern Ocean releasing CO2 from its waters
• The rise in CO2 sets in train a global rise in temperature that pulls the whole Earth out of its glaciated state

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Prof Eric Wolff from the British Antarctic Survey was the chief scientist on the longest Antarctic ice core, which was drilled at Dome Concordia in 2001/2002. This core records eight ice ages, not just the most recent, stretching back some 800,000 years.


He was not involved in the Nature study. Prof Wolff told this week's Science In Action programme on the BBC World Service:
"It looks as though whatever kicked off this whole sequence of events to get out of the ice age was something really, in global terms, rather minor and regional, and yet it led to a sequence of events that led to a complete change in the way the surface of the Earth looked, with ice sheets disappearing.


"So, that just reminds us that although climate might seem quite steady to us because it's been relatively steady for the last few thousand years, it is actually capable of undergoing big changes. And as one famous palaeoclimatologist put it: 'we poke it at our peril'."

[American Patriot]

Nasa scientist: climate change is a moral issue on a par with slavery

Prof Jim Hansen to use lecture at Edinburgh International Science Festival to call for worldwide tax on all carbon emissions

• Severin Carrell
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 April 2012 06.00 EDT

Prof Jim Hansen: 'We’re handing future generations a climate system which is potentially out of their control'. Photograph: Melanie Patterson/AP



Averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a "great moral issue" on a par with slavery, according to the leading Nasa climate scientist Prof Jim Hansen.


He argues that storing up expensive and destructive consequences for society in future is an "injustice of one generation to others".
Hansen, who will next Tuesday be awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal for his contribution to science, will also in his acceptance speech call for a worldwide tax on all carbon emissions.


In his lecture, Hansen will argue that the challenge facing future generations from climate change is so urgent that a flat-rate global tax is needed to force immediate cuts in fossil fuel use. Ahead of receiving the award – which has previously been given to Sir David Attenborough, the ecologist James Lovelock, and the economist Amartya Sen – Hansen told the Guardian that the latest climate models had shown the planet was on the brink of an emergency. He said humanity faces repeated natural disasters from extreme weather events which would affect large areas of the planet.
"The situation we're creating for young people and future generations is that we're handing them a climate system which is potentially out of their control," he said. "We're in an emergency: you can see what's on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction."


Now 70, Hansen is regarded as one of the most influential figures in climate science; the creator of one of the first global climate models, his pioneering role in warning about global warming is frequently cited by climate campaigners such as former US vice president Al Gore and in earlier science prizes, including the $1m Dan David prize. He has been arrested more than once for his role in protests against coal energy.


Hansen will argue in his lecture that current generations have an over-riding moral duty to their children and grandchildren to take immediate action. Describing this as an issue of inter-generational justice on a par with ending slavery, Hansen said: "Our parents didn't know that they were causing a problem for future generations but we can only pretend we don't know because the science is now crystal clear.
"We understand the carbon cycle: the CO2 we put in the air will stay in surface reservoirs and won't go back into the solid earth for millennia. What the Earth's history tells us is that there's a limit on how much we can put in the air without guaranteeing disastrous consequences for future generations. We cannot pretend that we did not know."


Hansen said his proposal for a global carbon tax was based on the latest analysis of CO2 levels in the atmosphere and their impact on global temperatures and weather patterns. He has co-authored a scientific paper with 17 other experts, including climate scientists, biologists and economists, which calls for an immediate 6% annual cut in CO2 emissions, and a substantial growth in global forest cover, to avoid catastrophic climate change by the end of the century.


The paper, which has passed peer review and is in the final stages of publication by the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, argues that a global levy on fossil fuels is the strongest tool for forcing energy firms and consumers to switch quickly to zero carbon and green energy sources. In larger countries, that would include nuclear power.


Under this proposal, the carbon levy would increase year on year, with the tax income paid directly back to the public as a dividend, shared equally, rather than put into government coffers. Because the tax would greatly increase the cost of fossil fuel energy, consumers relying on green or low carbon sources of power would benefit the most as this dividend would come on top of cheaper fuel bills. It would promote a dramatic increase in the investment and development of low-carbon energy sources and technologies.


The very rich and most profligate energy users, people with several homes, or private jets and fuel-hungry cars, would also be forced into dramatically changing their energy use. In the new paper, Hansen, director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and his colleagues warn that failing to cut CO2 emissions by 6% now will mean that by 2022, the annual cuts would need to reach a more drastic level of 15% a year.


Had similar action been taken in 2005, when the Kyoto protocol on climate change came into force, the CO2 emission reductions would have been at a more manageable 3% a year. The target was to return CO2 levels in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, down from its current level of 392ppm. The paper, the "Scientific case for avoiding dangerous climate change to protect young people and nature", also argues that the challenge is growing because of the accelerating rush to find new, harder–to-reach sources of oil, gas and coal in the deep ocean, the Arctic and from shale gas reserves.


Hansen said current attempts to limit carbon emissions, particularly the European Union's emissions trading mechanism introduced under the Kyoto protocol which restricts how much CO2 an industry can emit before it has to pay a fee for higher emissions, were "completely ineffectual". Under the global carbon tax proposal, the mechanisms for controlling fossil fuel use would be taken out of the hands of individual states influenced by energy companies, and politicians anxious about winning elections.


"It can't be fixed by individual specific changes; it has to be an across-the-board rising fee on carbon emissions," said Hansen. "We can't simply say that there's a climate problem, and leave it to the politicians. They're so clearly under the influence of the fossil fuel industry that they're coming up with cockamamie solutions which aren't solutions. That is the bottom line."

[American Patriot]

NASA Global Warming Stance Blasted By 49 Astronauts, Scientists Who Once Worked At Agency

The Huffington Post | By David Freeman Posted: 04/11/2012 1:07 pm Updated: 04/11/2012 1:07 pm


NASA Administrator Charles Bolden





Is NASA playing fast and loose with climate change science? That's the contention of a group of 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts.



On March 28 the group sent a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, Jr., blasting the agency for making unwarranted claims about the role of carbon dioxide in global warming, Business Insider reported.


"We believe the claims by NASA and GISS [NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies], that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data," the group wrote. "With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled."


The group features some marquee names, including Michael F. Collins, Walter Cunningham and five other Apollo astronauts, as well as two former directors of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.


The letter included a request for NASA to refrain from mentioning CO2 as a cause of global warming in future press releases and websites. The agency's "Global Climate Change" webpage says that "Humans have increased atmospheric CO2 concentration by a third since the Industrial Revolution began. This is the most important long-lived "forcing" of climate change."


GRAPHIC FROM NASA WEBSITE

Of course, NASA isn't the only government agency to finger carbon dioxide as a key culprit in global warming.



The EPA website says that "Increasing levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times are well-documented and understood." It goes on to say that "The atmospheric buildup of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is largely the result of human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels."
What does NASA say?



“NASA sponsors research into many areas of cutting-edge scientific inquiry, including the relationship between carbon dioxide and climate," the agency's chief scientist, Dr. Waleed Abdalati, told The Huffington Post in an email. "As an agency, NASA does not draw conclusions and issue 'claims' about research findings. We support open scientific inquiry and discussion...If the authors of this letter disagree with specific scientific conclusions made public by NASA scientists, we encourage them to join the debate in the scientific literature or public forums rather than restrict any discourse.”

What do you think? Is NASA pushing "unsettled science" on global warming?
Also on HuffPost:
Play

[American Patriot]

NASA still at it too:

NASA Expert Speaks On Coal-fired Power Plants, Climate Change

April 11, 2012


Lawrence LeBlond for Redorbit.com
A leading climate change scientist at NASA is urging the United Kingdom to cease building coal-fired power plants, and is calling for a worldwide tax on all carbon emissions, to tackle the climate change fight head-on, reports BBC Scotland.
Dr. James Hansen said, in an interview with BBC Scotland, that averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a “great moral issue” on par with slavery, and added that storing up expensive and destructive consequences for the future of society is an “injustice of one generation to others.”
“In the case of civil rights the courts were able to come to the assistance of people whose civil rights were being violated by requiring governments to say what they were going to do about for example, segregated schools. In the same way, governments could be required to present a plan to reduce carbon emissions to ensure young people have a decent future,” said Hansen.
Hansen, 71, has been awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal at the city’s Science Festival for his contribution to science. He plans to use his acceptance speech to call for a carbon emissions tax to save the climate.
Hansen has argued that the worldwide publicity given to the referendum on Scottish independence was the ideal time for First Minister Alex Salmond to be “honest” about his long-term climate change policies.
Hansen told daily newspaper The Scotsman that US President Barack Obama failed to highlight global energy issues by targeting domestic policy, and urged Salmond not to do the same.
“Obama had the chance to say, ‘OK we’re going to fight our fossil fuel addiction’ and take on the big corporations, but instead he concentrated on health,” Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the paper.
“Salmond should use this time and be very, very open and honest about the energy plans are for the long run and the need to move towards the post-fossil fuel era,” Hansen urged. “You might think Scotland is going to be like Norway. But that does not prevent moving towards a carbon-free economy.”
Scotland has plans for two coal-fired power facilities to be built at Grangemouth and Hunterston in Ayrshire. But Hansen believes the country would be better off building new nuclear and renewable energy facilities to prevent further climate changes.
“For base load electric power, I think that we need next generation nuclear power, which can be much safer and which can burn nuclear waste and solve that major problem with nuclear power,” he said.
US firm, Summit Power Group, is spearheading the plan to build the coal-fueled power plant at the port of Grangemouth. It said the plant would use carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology in a bid to reduce emissions by more than 90 percent.
A public inquiry is due to be carried out before the Scottish government makes a final decision on proposals for a similar facility at Hunterston. In November last year North Ayrshire Council rejected plans by Ayrshire Power for a coal-fired station but the company vowed to fight on.
Hansen, who has been arrested four times for protesting against projects he believed to be damaging to the environment, is standing strong with his opposition to coal-fired power plants in Scotland, and is ready to call for a global tax on carbon emissions, to prevent further climate change.
While acknowledging that oil and gas would be around for years to come, he said that did not preclude plans which that see money from carbon tax distributed to the public. “Using easily available oil and gas which can be traded on the international market is something that is going to happen, but we have to phase it out,” he told The Scotsman.
“We could have a gradually rising tax on carbon emissions, with the money collected from companies distributed to the public in a monthly dividend, to pay less for their fuel bills and start thinking of lifestyle changes, such a carbon-efficient car or building a home which includes energy efficient features,” he added.
“Why haven’t we done something like that before? Because fossil fuel industries have too much clout. Money talks in capitals around the world,” he said.
In an interview with The Guardian, Hansen said the latest climate models show the planet is on the brink of an emergency. Humanity is facing the threat of repeated natural disasters from extreme weather events that could affect large areas of the planet.
“The situation we’re creating for young people and future generations is that we’re handing them a climate system which is potentially out of their control,” he said. “Our parents didn’t know that they were causing a problem for future generations but we can only pretend we don’t know because the science is now crystal clear,” he said.
“We understand the carbon cycle: the CO2 we put in the air will stay in surface reservoirs and won’t go back into the solid earth for millennia. What the Earth’s history tells us is that there’s a limit on how much we can put in the air without guaranteeing disastrous consequences for future generations. We cannot pretend that we did not know,” he added.
Hansen said his proposal for a global carbon tax is based on the latest analysis of CO2 levels in the atmosphere and the impact that has on global temperatures and weather patterns.
His scientific paper on the issue, which is co-authored by 17 of his peers, including climate scientists, biologists and economists, calls for an immediate 6 percent annual cut in CO2 emissions, and a substantial growth in global forest cover to avoid catastrophic climate change by the end of this century.
The paper, which is in the final stages of publication by the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), says that a global tax on fossil fuels is the strongest tool for forcing energy firms and consumers to switch quickly to zero carbon and renewable energy sources.
In his plan, the carbon tax would increase year on year, with the tax income paid back to the public as a dividend, shared equally, rather than put into government coffers. Because the tax would greatly increase the cost of fossil fuel energy, consumers that rely on green or low carbon sources of power would benefit the most as this dividend would come on top of cheaper fuel bills. It would promote a dramatic increase in the investment and development of low-carbon energy sources and technologies.
The proposal would also require those who are the most wasteful energy users — people with several homes, private jets, and fuel-hungry vehicles — to dramatically change their energy use habits. Hansen and his colleagues warn that failing to cut CO2 emissions by 6 percent now will mean annual cuts would need to reach a more drastic 15 percent per year by 2022.
Hansen said current attempts to limit carbon emissions have been “completely ineffectual.” Under a global tax proposal, the mechanisms for controlling fossil fuel use would be taken out of the hands of individual states influenced by energy companies, and politicians anxious about winning elections.
“It can’t be fixed by individual specific changes; it has to be an across-the-board rising fee on carbon emissions,” Hansen told The Guardian. “We can’t simply say that there’s a climate problem, and leave it to the politicians. They’re so clearly under the influence of the fossil fuel industry that they’re coming up with cockamamie solutions which aren’t solutions. That is the bottom line.”
Hansen, regarded as one of the most influential figures in climate science, is the creator of one of the first global climate models, and his work in pioneering warnings about global warming is frequently cited by climate campaigners such as former US vice president Al Gore.
He will be appearing at the 2012 Edinburgh International Science Festival tonight in the “Our Climate Future” discussion at 8 p.m. local time, and then again tomorrow in “Fixing The Planet” at 5:30 p.m., both being held at the National Museum of Scotland.
More information can be obtained at www.sciencefestival.co.uk
Hansen’s climate change stance is, in part, the subject of debate by a group of 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts who sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week, criticizing the agency for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that human-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting practical evidence that calls the theory into question.
The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, indicated in the letter that they were disappointed over the failure of NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change. They believe that NASA is relying too heavily on complex climate models that have proven scientifically inadequate in predicting climate change only one or two decades in advance.
H. Leighton Steward, chairman of the non-profit Plants Need CO2, said many of the former NASA scientists have doubts about the significance of the CO2 climate change theory and have concerns over NASA’s advocacy on the topic. While making presentations in late 2011 to many of the signatories of the letter, Steward realized that the NASA scientists should make their concerns known to NASA and the GISS.
“These American heroes – the astronauts that took to space and the scientists and engineers that put them there – are simply stating their concern over NASA’s unusual advocacy for an unproven theory,” said Steward. “There’s a concern that if it turns out that CO2 is not a major cause of climate change, NASA will have put the reputation of NASA, NASA’s current and former employees, and even the very reputation of science itself at risk of public ridicule and distrust.”

[American Patriot]

Damn the LUCK! Those DAMNED cheating glaciers!

Global warming mystery: Some Himalayan glaciers getting bigger

The Himalayan glaciers are the planet's largest bodies of ice outside the polar caps. New research shows some Himalayan glaciers got bigger between 1999-2008.


By Nina Chestney, Reuters / April 16, 2012

• 

An aerial view shows mountains of the Karakoram range, the Himalayan region. New research shows that the Karakoram glaciers have not followed the global trend of glacial decline over the past three decades.
REUTERS/Inter Services Public Relations




London



Some glaciers in the Himalayas mountain range have gained a small amount of mass between 1999 and 2008, new research shows, bucking the global trend of glacial decline.

• Global warming began in oceans 135 years ago, suggests study

The study published on Sunday in the Nature Geoscience journal also said the Karakoram mountain range in the Himalayas has contributed less to sea level rise than previously thought.


With global average temperature rising, glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets melt and shed water, which contributes to the increase of sea levels, threatening the populations of low-lying nations and islands.


IN PICTURES: Disappearing Glaciers


The research at France's University of Grenoble estimates that the Karakoram glaciers have gained around 0.11 to 0.22 metres (0.36 feet to 0.72 feet) per year between 1999 and 2008.


"Our conclusion that Karakoram glaciers had a small mass gain at the beginning of the 21st century indicates that those central/eastern glaciers are not representative of the whole (Himalayas)," the experts at the university said.


The study appears to confirm earlier research that had suggested the Karakoram glaciers have not followed the global trend of glacial decline over the past three decades. The mountain range's remoteness had made it hard to confirm its behavior.


The Karakoram mountain range spans the borders between India, China, and Pakistan and is covered by 19,950 square kilometers (7,702 square miles) of glaciers. It is home to the second highest mountain in the world, K2.
"We suggest that the sea-level-rise contribution for this region during the first decade of the 21st century should be revised from +0.04 mm per year to -0.006 mm per year sea-level equivalent," the study said.


MELTING ICE
The Himalayas hold the planet's largest body of ice outside the polar caps and feed many of the world's great rivers, including the Ganges and Brahmaputra, on which hundreds of millions of people depend.


The world's glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets have shed around 4,200 cubic kilometres (1,007 cubic miles) from 2003 to 2010, experts suggest, which is enough to raise sea levels by 12mm over that period.


Stephan Harrison, associate professor in quaternary science at the UK's University of Exeter, said the new research had showed there is "considerable variability" in the global climate and in how glaciers respond to it.


The Karakoram glaciers are also unusual because they are covered with thick layers of rock debris, which means their patterns of melting and mass gain are driven by changes in that debris as well as in the climate.


Much of their mass gain also comes from avalanches from the high mountains surrounding them, Harrison said.


"Overall, the impact of melting glaciers such as these on sea level rise is known to be negligible, but it does mean that there is much more to be learned about exactly how the world's glaciers will respond to continued global warming," he added.


A separate study in February found that Himalayan glaciers and ice caps as a whole were losing mass less quickly than once feared, offering some respite to a region already feeling the effects of global warming. (Editing by Alessandra Rizzo)

[American Patriot]

Well BEFORE cars' exhaust.... and the "industrial age".

Global warming began in oceans 135 years ago, suggests study

A study of temperature recordings from the 1870s suggests that the oceans began warming more than 100 years ago, much earlier than previously believed.


By Joseph Castro, LiveScience Staff Writer / April 2, 2012

• 

This undated handout photo provided by NOAA shows Arctic ice. A new study reveals that ocean surface temperatures have been increasing for twice as long as previously believed.
NOAA/AP/File






The world's oceans have been warming for more than 100 years, twice as long as previously believed, new research suggests.


The findings could help scientists better understand the Earth's record of sea-level rise, which is partly due to the expansion of water that happens as it heats up, researchers added.


"Temperature is one of the most fundamental descriptors of the physical state of the ocean," said the study's lead author,Dean Roemmich, an oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego. "Beyond simply knowing that the oceans are warming, [the results] will help us answer a few climate questions."



From 1872 to 1876, the HMS Challenger sailed the world's oceans along a 69,000-nautical-mile track, crossing the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. During the voyage, scientists among the 200-person crew took 300 ocean-temperature profiles, or measurements at several depths in each spot, with pressure-protected thermometers.


Roemmich and his colleagues compared Challenger temperatures with data from the modern-day Argo project, which uses 3,500 free-drifting floats to measure the temperature and salinity, or salt content, of the world's oceans every 10 days. The comparison showed a 1.1-degree Fahrenheit (0.59-degree Celsius) temperature increase at the ocean's surface over the last 135 years, a result corroborated by a large body of sea-surface temperature data that goes back more than 100 years. [The World's Biggest Oceans and Seas]


"That is a substantial amount of warming," Roemmich told LiveScience. Ocean warming has been previously linked to glacial melting and mass coral bleaching.
The team also looked at subsurface temperature differences between Challenger and Argo, taking into account several sources of error in the Challenger readings.



One issue with the Challenger data, Roemmich explained, is that the vessel's scientists didn't directly measure the depth of their thermometers; they measured only the length of the line extending the instruments into the water. Because of ocean currents, it's nearly impossible to get a line to be completely vertical in the water, resulting in an actual depth that is a little less than the full length of the line.


"What you are then going to see is a temperature that is a little warmer than it would have been if the line has been perfectly vertical," Roemmich said, referring to the fact that temperatures are typically warmer at shallower depths. Other Challenger errors include incorrect measurements of pressure effects on the thermometers and faulty thermometer readings, he added.


Accounting for these issues, Roemmich and his team found that, on average, global ocean temperatures increased by 0.59 degrees F (0.33 degrees C) in the upper ocean down to about 2,300 feet (700 meters). This global temperature change is twice what scientists have observed for the past 50 years, suggesting that the oceans have been warming for much longer than just a few decades.


Given that thermal expansion is believed to be a major contributor to sea-level rise, Roemmich believes that the results of the study will help scientists better understand the historical record of the rising sea levels, which have been increasing since the 19th century.


Roemmich also thinks the results have important implications for understanding the imbalance of the planet's energy budget. Previous research has shown that the Earth is absorbing more heat than it is radiating, and that 90 percent of the excess heat added to the climate system since the 1960s has been stored in the oceans. "So that means that the ocean temperature is probably the most direct measure we have of the energy imbalance of the whole climate system," he said.


The study was published online yesterday (April 1) in the journal Nature Climate Change and supported by U.S. Argo through a grant by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

[American Patriot]

Heartland Institute grows isolated as three more donors disassociate

Ultra-conservative climate sceptic thinktank continues to lose mainstream support, damaging its prospects of expansion

• Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 May 2012 17.58 EDT

Three donors the latest in a rush of companies to distance themselves from Heartland after an ad campaign featuring Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Photograph: The Heartland Institute



Heartland Institute was cut off by three more corporate donors on Monday, further isolating the ultra-conservative thinktank from the mainstream business world.
The defections reinforce the sense of Heartland's isolation, ahead of its major climate contrarian conference in Chicago next week. A number of prominent speakers also pulled out of the conference after Heartland put up a billboard on a Chicago expressway suggesting believers in climate change were akin to serial killers.
In statements to advocacy groups, pharmaceutical giant Eli Llily, BB&T bank and PepsiCo confirmed they would not fund Heartland in 2012 – dealing a blow to the thinktank's plans of building long-term relationships with major corporations.
The three were the latest in a rush of companies to distance themselves from Heartland after the ad campaign featuring Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
"Lilly is not funding Heartland in 2012 and has no plans to do so in the future," David Marbaugh, communications director of Corporate Responsibility for Eli Lilly informed Forecast the Facts by email. "That type of ad is not consistent with how Lilly engages in public debate."
In purely monetary terms, Monday's defections will have very little effect on Heartland.
None of the three had contributed to Heartland in 2011, according to confidential documents obtained by the water scientist Peter Gleick, and released without the thinktank's permission.
PepsiCo's contributions in 2010 amounted to only $5,000. Eli Lilly donated $25,000 in 2010 and BB&T $16,105.
However, they make it very difficult for Heartland to pursue its expansion plans for 2012 and disprove its efforts to project itself as a mainstream organisation seeking to act as an honest mediator in debates over climate policy.
The Heartland budget and ambitious expansion plans for 2012 had been predicated on returning those donors to the fold. It had projected a $3m budget increase for 2012, based on those plans.
Specifically, Heartland had hoped to raise $1.5m or half of those funds from "lapsed" corporate donors like Eli Lilly.
But it appears that the exposure of Heartland's key mission of discrediting climate change – including a project to influence kindergarteners – has turned off public corporations.
Many publicly traded companies outwardly endorse climate change and sustainability as part of their corporate brand – and that makes association with Heartland politically awkward.
Those contradictions intensified after the Gleick leak last February when advocacy groups began focusing more intensely on Heartland's corporate donors – even those funding programmes that have nothing to do with clinate change.
Pepsi made up its mind to steer clear of Heartland well before the Kaczynski ad.
"As previously stated, our relationship ended in 2011," Paul Boykas, vice-president of public policy and government affairs for PepsiCo told Forecast the Facts by email. The advocacy group noted the PepsiCo's website reaffirms its belief in climate change.
BB&T told Greenpeace, meanwhile, it had not received requests for 2012 funding.
"We do not have any active request from or any planned contribution to Heartland Institute in 2012," Maria Lachapelle, vice-president of corporate communications for BB&T, told Greenpeace by email.
In another blow to Heartland, a meterologist from the National Hurricane Center on Monday publicly disassociated himself with the organisation.
Chris Landsea, the hurricane centre's science and operations officer, asked Heartland to remove him from its website, the Washington Post reported on Monday.
It quoted a posting from Landsea to the website BigCityLib Strikes Back saying: "The billboard campaign that you all have recently been displaying is not in good taste nor is it furthering the advancement of better undstanding of how our climate fluctates and changes. Please remove my name from your list of experts."

[American Patriot]

More non-scientific bullshit.

Pollution in thunderclouds increases global warming


Posted on May 21, 2012 - 03:00 by Kate Taylor
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Pollution is leading thunderstorm clouds to capture heat, increasing global warming in a way that climate models have failed to take into account.


It strengthens them, causing their anvil-shaped tops to spread out high in the atmosphere and capture heat, especially at night, says Jiwen Fan of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.


"Global climate models don't see this effect because thunderstorm clouds simulated in those models do not include enough detail," says Fan. "The large amount of heat trapped by the pollution-enhanced clouds could potentially impact regional circulation and modify weather systems."


Thunderstorm clouds - known as deep convective clouds - are an important part of the climate cycle. They reflect a lot of the sun's energy back into space, trap heat that rises from the surface and return evaporated water back to the surface as rain.



Previous work has shown that when it's not too windy, pollution leads to bigger clouds. This occurs because more pollution particles divide up the available water for droplets, leading to a higher number of smaller droplets that are too small to rain. Instead, they ride the updrafts higher, where they freeze and absorb more water vapor. Collectively, these events lead to bigger, more vigorous convective clouds that live longer.


To find out which factors contribute the most to this invigoration effect, the team set up computer simulations for two different types of storm systems: warm summer thunderstorms in southeastern China and cool, windy frontal systems on the Great Plains of Oklahoma.



The simulations had a resolution that was high enough to allow the team to see the clouds develop. The researchers then varied conditions such as wind speed and air pollution.


And they found that for the warm summer thunderstorms, pollution led to stronger storms with larger anvils. Compared to cloud anvils that develop in clean air, the larger anvils both warm more, by trapping more heat, and cool more, by reflecting additional sunlight back to space. On average, however, the warming effect dominates.


The warming was surprisingly strong at the top of the atmosphere during the day when the storms occurred. The pollution-enhanced anvils also trapped more heat at night, leading to warmer nights.


"Those numbers for the warming are very big, but they are calculated only for the exact day when the thunderstorms occur," says Fan. "Over a longer time-scale such as a month or a season, the average amount of warming would be less because those clouds would not appear everyday."

[American Patriot]

Methane Gas Leak in Arctic Throws Scientists a Climate Change Curveball

Scientists say a naturally occurring methane leak could make climate change even harder to gauge

By Jason Koebler

April 25, 2012 RSS Feed Print Although the methane is most likely naturally occurring, ice melts potentially caused by climate change have allowed it to escape into the atmosphere.



Humans might not be to blame for the latest piece of news that has caused new concerns about global warming. A newly-discovered, naturally occuring methane leak over the Arctic Ocean could play a role in future climate change, according to a NASA scientist.


Scientists have long known that there are naturally-occurring pockets of methane gas along many of the oceans' surfaces, but openings in Arctic sea ice fields have allowed the gas to leak into the atmosphere, which lead researcher Eric Kort says may play a "non-negligible" role in future global warming.


[Study: Carbon Dioxide Increase Caused End of Ice Age]
"We suggest that the surface waters of the Arctic Ocean represent a potentially importance source of methane," the researchers wrote in Sunday's edition of the journal Nature Geoscience. "The potential atmospheric impact of this Arctic marine source has not been previously assessed."


The finding makes predicting global climate change even more difficult—Kort called methane the "second most important contributor" to global warming, after carbon dioxide. Although methane traps more than 20 times as much heat as carbon dioxide, it dissipates after about 15 years. He believes the methane leaking out of the Arctic is likely smaller than that of other human-influenced methane sources such as natural gas systems, coal mining and landfills. Although the methane is most likely naturally occurring, ice melts potentially caused by climate change have allowed it to escape into the atmosphere. Scientists had long known that methane existed in the Arctic Ocean, but, in his e-mail, Kort wrote that he was surprised the gas was leaking.


"We didn't expect to see methane being emitted from the remote Arctic Ocean," he wrote. According to the researchers, the amount of methane coming from the Arctic Ocean is about as big as the pockets of the gas being released from an ice shelf in Siberia. In 2010, the National Science Foundation said that the "release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the [Siberian] shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming."


Jason Koebler is a science and technology reporter for U.S. News & World Report. You can follow him on Twitter or reach him at jkoebler@usnews.com.

[American Patriot]

Global warming skeptics as knowledgeable about science as climate change believers, study says

By Maxim Lott
Published May 28, 2012
FoxNews.com

• 
  The predicted temperature changes (darker red indicating greater change) due to global warming, based on data that scientists, policymakers and the public are now questioning.
  

Are global warming skeptics anti-science? Or just ignorant about science?
Maybe neither. A study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Changefinds that people who are not that worried about the effects of global warming tend to have a slightly higher level of scientific knowledge than those who are worried, as determined by their answers to questions like:
"Electrons are smaller than atoms -- true or false?”
"How long does it take the Earth to go around the Sun? One day, one month, or one year?"
“Lasers work by focusing sound waves -- true or false?”
The quiz, containing 22 questions about both science and statistics, was given to 1,540 representative Americans. Respondents who were relatively less worried about global warming got 57 percent of them right, on average, just barely outscoring those whose who saw global warming as a bigger threat. They got 56 percent of the questions correct.

'As respondents’ science literacy scores increased, their concern with climate change decreased.'

- Study

"As respondents’ science literacy scores increased, their concern with climate change decreased," the paper, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, notes.
Yale Law Professor Dan Kahan, the lead author of the study, cautioned that the survey results are not evidence for or against climate change.
"This study is agnostic on what people ought to believe," he told FoxNews.com. "It just doesn’t follow to say this finding implies anything about what people should believe on this issue."
Kahan said that he thought another finding of the study was more important: That people’s cultural views – how much they value things like individualism and equality -- affect their views on global warming much more than actual knowledge about science. Regardless of how much they know about science, individualists were relatively unconcerned about global warming, whereas those who value equality were very concerned.
Both sides of the global warming debate say the study's findings support their views. Those who worry about global warming say it shows that cultural biases blind even smart people to the “scientific consensus.”
"Kahan’s research is so interesting,” Aaron Huertas, a spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told FoxNews.com. “Over the last few years, the policy issues surrounding climate change have become increasingly politicized, and that’s bleeding over into people’s perceptions of climate science.”
"What we need to remember is that we have a number of excellent non-partisan scientific resources… [They] all tell us that human activity is altering the climate in ways that are disruptive to our economy and way of life."
But some of the 16 scientists who signed a letter this January titled "No Need to Panic About Global Warming" disagree.
Dr. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, was one skeptical scientist who signed the letter. He said that the finding that skeptics know as much or more about science surprised him "not at all."
"MIT alumni are among my most receptive audiences," he added.




Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/...#ixzz1wYobtQbo

[American Patriot]

Damn those internal combustion engines 4000 years ago anyway!

4,000 years ago, climate change caused massive civilization collapse

By Charles Choi

Published May 29, 2012

LiveScience

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/...#ixzz1wYqQ4wGm

• 
  A simple map of the Indus Civilization (or Harappa civilization) with important archeological sites noted. (Wikipedia)

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/...#ixzz1wYqHP1he

The mysterious fall of the largest of the world's earliest urban civilizations nearly 4,000 years ago in what is now India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh now appears to have a key culprit — ancient climate change, researchers say.
Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia may be the best known of the first great urban cultures, but the largest was the Indus or Harappan civilization. This culture once extended over more than 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Sea to the Ganges, and at its peak may have accounted for 10 percent of the world population. The civilization developed about 5,200 years ago, and slowly disintegrated between 3,900 and 3,000 years ago — populations largely abandoned cities, migrating toward the east.
"Antiquity knew about Egypt and Mesopotamia, but the Indus civilization, which was bigger than these two, was completely forgotten until the 1920s," said researcher Liviu Giosan, a geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "There are still many things we don't know about them."

'The Indus civilization ... was completely forgotten until the 1920s.'

- Researcher Liviu Giosan

Nearly a century ago, researchers began discovering numerous remains of Harappan settlements along the Indus River and its tributaries, as well as in a vast desert region at the border of India and Pakistan. Evidence was uncovered for sophisticated cities, sea links with Mesopotamia, internal trade routes, arts and crafts, and as-yet undeciphered writing.
"They had cities ordered into grids, with exquisite plumbing, which was not encountered again until the Romans," Giosan told LiveScience. "They seem to have been a more democratic society than Mesopotamia and Egypt — no large structures were built for important personalitiess like kings or pharaohs."
Like their contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Harappans, who were named after one of their largest cities, lived next to rivers.
"Until now, speculations abounded about the links between this mysterious ancient culture and its life-giving mighty rivers," Giosan said.
Now Giosan and his colleagues have reconstructed the landscape of the plain and rivers where this long-forgotten civilization developed. Their findings now shed light on the enigmatic fate of this culture.
"Our research provides one of the clearest examples of climate change leading to the collapse of an entire civilization," Giosan said. [How Weather Changed History]
The researchers first analyzed satellite data of the landscape influenced by the Indus and neighboring rivers. From 2003 to 2008, the researchers then collected samples of sediment from the coast of the Arabian Sea into the fertile irrigated valleys of Punjab and the northern Thar Desert to determine the origins and ages of those sediments and develop a timeline of landscape changes.
"It was challenging working in the desert — temperatures were over 110 degrees Fahrenheit all day long (43 degrees C)," Giosan recalled.
After collecting data on geological history, "we could reexamine what we know about settlements, what crops people were planting and when, and how both agriculture and settlement patterns changed," said researcher Dorian Fuller, an archaeologist with University College London. "This brought new insights into the process of eastward population shift, the change towards many more small farming communities, and the decline of cities during late Harappan times."
Some had suggested that the Harappan heartland received its waters from a large glacier-fed Himalayan river, thought by some to be the Sarasvati, a sacred river of Hindu mythology. However, the researchers found that only rivers fed by monsoon rains flowed through the region.
Previous studies suggest the Ghaggar, an intermittent river that flows only during strong monsoons, may best approximate the location of the Sarasvati. Archaeological evidence suggested the river, which dissipates into the desert along the dried course of Hakra valley, was home to intensive settlement during Harappan times.
"We think we settled a long controversy about the mythic Sarasvati River," Giosan said.
Initially, the monsoon-drenched rivers the researchers identified were prone to devastating floods. Over time, monsoons weakened, enabling agriculture and civilization to flourish along flood-fed riverbanks for nearly 2,000 years.
"The insolation — the solar energy received by the Earth from the sun — varies in cycles, which can impact monsoons," Giosan said. "In the last 10,000 years, the Northern Hemisphere had the highest insolation from 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, and since then insolation there decreased. All climate on Earth is driven by the sun, and so the monsoons were affected by the lower insolation, decreasing in force. This meant less rain got into continental regions affected by monsoons over time." [50 Amazing Facts About Earth]
Eventually, these monsoon-based rivers held too little water and dried, making them unfavorable for civilization.
"The Harappans were an enterprising people taking advantage of a window of opportunity — a kind of "Goldilocks civilization," Giosan said.
Eventually, over the course of centuries, Harappans apparently fled along an escape route to the east toward the Ganges basin, where monsoon rains remained reliable.
"We can envision that this eastern shift involved a change to more localized forms of economy — smaller communities supported by local rain-fed farming and dwindling streams," Fuller said. "This may have produced smaller surpluses, and would not have supported large cities, but would have been reliable."
This change would have spelled disaster for the cities of the Indus, which were built on the large surpluses seen during the earlier, wetter era. The dispersal of the population to the east would have meant there was no longer a concentrated workforce to support urbanism.
"Cities collapsed, but smaller agricultural communities were sustainable and flourished," Fuller said. "Many of the urban arts, such as writing, faded away, but agriculture continued and actually diversified."
These findings could help guide future archaeological explorations of the Indus civilization. Researchers can now better guess which settlements might have been more significant, based on their relationships with rivers, Giosan said.
It remains uncertain how monsoons will react to modern climate change. "If we take the devastating floods that caused the largest humanitarian disaster in Pakistan's history as a sign of increased monsoon activity, than this doesn't bode well for the region," Giosan said. "The region has the largest irrigation scheme in the world, and all those dams and channels would become obsolete in the face of the large floods an increased monsoon would bring."
The scientists detailed their findings online May 28 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• History's Most Overlooked Mysteries
• The Awá: Faces of a Threatened Tribe
• Image Gallery: One-of-a-Kind Places on Earth

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/...#ixzz1wYq9m0CU

[American Patriot]

Wow... a HUGE pile of horseshit is threatening the entire planet!

It's called "Global Warm Horseshit"!

lol

Earth Approaching Climate Tipping Point, Scientists Say

By Justin Doom on June 06, 2012





Earth may be nearing an ecological tipping point that threatens biodiversity, food production and water supplies as humans consume resources at an unsustainable pace, according to an article to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature.



About 43 percent of the Earth’s surface has been built upon or is being used for agriculture to support the planet’s 7 billion inhabitants, according to Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrated biology at the University of California, Berkeley. As that figure approaches 50 percent, there may be irreversible and significant environmental changes.


“Unless we take note of exactly how we’re changing the world and what that means in a biological sense, we can’t steer the ship,” Barnosky said in a phone interview yesterday. Without policy and behavioral changes, the planet’s environment will suffer. “When that happens you get a period of societal adjustment that usually includes economic problems, wars and famines.”



Humans consume 2.25 acres of resources per capita, and with the Earth’s population projected to reach 9 billion by 2045, half of all land may be in use by 2025, Barnosky said. That includes Antarctica, Greenland and other mostly uninhabitable regions.
Extinction Risk

Small-scale ecosystems have shown that once 50 percent of an area is altered, biodiversity is often lost and animal and plant species are at risk of extinction, he said.



There’s “an urgent need” to reduce population growth and per-capita resource use, grow more food on less land and replace fossil fuels with renewable-energy sources, according to the report. Barnosky, the study’s lead author, spent 18 months working with 21 scientists from the U.S., Canada, Chile, Finland and Spain researching and writing the article.



“It’s a global society, and these are global problems, and the only way we can solve them is through global cooperation,” Barnosky said. “The big winners in the world 50 years from now will be the nations that have developed new forms of energy. Those nations and entrepreneurs are going to come out ahead.”



To contact the reporter on this story: Justin Doom in New York at jdoom1@bloomberg.net



To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net

[American Patriot]

You know how when you see a really stupid story about a really stupid happening you might say, "You really can't make this shit up!", right?

Well, you really CAN make shit up...

Environmental collapse now a serious threat: scientists
(AFP) – 4 hours ago



PARIS — Climate change, population growth and environmental destruction could cause a collapse of the ecosystem just a few generations from now, scientists warned on Wednesday in the journal Nature.


The paper by 22 top researchers said a "tipping point" by which the biosphere goes into swift and irreversible change, with potentially cataclysmic impacts for humans, could occur as early as this century.
The warning contrasts with a mainstream view among scientists that environmental collapse would be gradual and take centuries.


The study appears ahead of the June 20-22 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, the 20-year followup to the Earth Summit that set down priorities for protecting the environment.


The Nature paper, written by biologists, ecologists, geologists and palaeontologists from three continents, compared the biological impact of past episodes of global change with what is happening today.
The factors in today's equation include a world population that is set to rise from seven billion to around 9.3 billion by mid-century and global warming that will outstrip the UN target of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).


The team determined that once 50-90 percent of small-scale ecosystems become altered, the entire eco-web tips over into a new state, characterised especially by species extinctions.


Once the shift happens, it cannot be reversed.


To support today's population, about 43 percent of Earth's ice-free land surface is being used for farming or habitation, according to the study.
On current trends, the 50 percent mark will be reached by 2025, a point the scientists said is worryingly close to the tipping point.


If that happened, collapse would entail a shocking disruption for the world's food supply, with bread-basket regions curtailed in their ability to grow corn, wheat, rice, fodder and other essential crops.


"It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point," said lead author Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California in Berkeley.


"The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations."


The authors stressed it was unclear when this feared tipover would happen, given blanks in knowledge about the phenomenon.


And they said there were plenty of solutions -- such as ending unsustainable patterns of growth and resource waste -- that mean it is not inevitable.


"In a nutshell, humans have not done anything really important to stave off the worst because the social structures for doing something just aren't there," said Arne Mooers, a professor of biodiversity at Simon Fraser University in Canada's British Columbia.


"My colleagues who study climate-induced changes through the Earth's history are more than pretty worried," he said in a press release. "In fact, some are terrified."


Past shifts examined in the study included the end of the last Ice Age, between 14,000 and 11,000 years ago, and five species mass extinctions which occurred around 443 million, 359 million, 251 million, 200 million and 65 million years ago.


Earth today is vulnerable to fast change because of the growing connectedness between ecosystems, voracious use of resources and an unprecedented surge in greenhouse gases, the authors concluded.
In a report on Wednesday issued ahead of the "Rio+20" summit, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warned that burgeoning populations and unsustainable patterns of growth were driving Earth towards "unprecedented" eco-damage.

[American Patriot]

Yes you IDIOTS, it WAS climate CHANGE. God. But, not man made GLOBULL WARMING. Idiots. Idiots.

Did climate change turn Mars into a dead planet?

Detailed pictures of two sister craters offer proof that the Red Planet may once have been sufficiently moist to support life

posted on June 11, 2012, at 2:16 PM

Two craters on the surface of Mars, color-coded here to highlight their varied terrain, may prove that the planet underwent significant fluctuations in its climate. Photo: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) SEE ALL 113 PHOTOS


New evidence suggests that Mars' dry climate was once wetter and possibly more Earth-like. The European Space Agency (ESA) has released images of two side-by-side craters offering clues to the dusty, barren Red Planet's past. Here's what you should know about the new theory:


What exactly do the photographs depict?

The high-resolution stereo images showcase the Danielson and Kalocsa craters, which sit side by side in a desert-like region called Arabia Terra. Snapped on June 19, 2011, from aboard the Mars Express spacecraft, the photos highlight new topographical evidence that has led experts to posit that the larger crater was once filled with water.



What's the evidence?

In the much bigger, 38-mile-across Danielson crater — named after George E. Danielson, who pioneered many of the cameras used to photograph Mars today — steep, wind-carved hills called "yardangs," characterized by distinct layers of sediment, protrude from the crater's bottom. (See a photo below.) ESA scientists believe the sediment that forms these yardangs was deposited there by strong north-northeasterly winds and then hardened (or cemented) by water, "possibly from an ancient deep groundwater reservoir," says Alan Boyle at MSNBC. In contrast, the more elevated, 20-mile-wide Kalosca crater features a smooth bottom with no such structures jutting out, possibly because it was never deep enough to reach the groundwater.


What happened to the water?

The theory is that slight shifts in the planet's axis triggered drastic climate changes over millions of years, leading to intermittent wet and dry periods. Judging from the yardangs' orientation, researchers believe that the same strong north-northeasterly winds that deposited the original sediments battered them with dust and sand during a dry spell after the water disappeared, carving the yardangs into their characteristic shapes. Similar axis changes are thought to have wrought the extreme ice age cycles here on Earth. Take a look at the yardangs in the Danielson crater:



Sources: Astro Bio, Daily Mail, MSNBC, PhysOrg

[American Patriot]

Monster Fires Push Case for Forest Restoration

Published June 14, 2012
Associated Press

• 
  Smoke billows from a wildfire burning west of Fort Collins, Colo., on Tuesday, June 12, 2012. (AP Photo/The Coloradoan, V. Richard Haro) (AP2012)
  

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – The increasing occurrence of monster forest fires across the western United States has revived debate over a U.S. Forest Service practice which may be contributing to making the fires worse, and prompting calls to restore forests to a more natural state, where fire was a part of the landscape.
Experts say a combination of decades of vigorous fire suppression and the waning of the timber industry over environmental concerns has left many forests a tangled, overgrown mess, subject to the kind of super-fires that are now regularly consuming hundreds of homes and millions of acres.
The Forest Service is on a mission to set the clock back to zero and the urgency couldn't be greater, says Tom Tidwell, chief of the U.S. Forest Service. The plan calls for accelerating restoration programs — everything from prescribed fire and mechanical thinning — by 20 percent each year in key areas that are facing the greatest danger of a catastrophic fire.
This year's target: 4 million acres. The budget: About $1 billion.
"We need to understand the conditions we're facing today," Tidwell told The Associated Press in an interview. "They're different than what we used to deal with. We're seeing erratic fire behavior, more erratic weather."
In southern New Mexico, a lightning-sparked fire raced across more than 37,000 acres in recent days, damaging or destroying at least 224 homes and other structures in the mountains outside of the resort community of Ruidoso. Hundreds of residents remained out of their homes Wednesday.
The Little Bear blaze has scorched 58 square miles in the Sierra Blanca range and containment stood at 40 percent after crews used a two-day break in the hot, windy weather to build miles of fire lines and conduct burnout operations.
To the north, smoke from a fire burning in Colorado was blowing into southeastern Wyoming and smudging the skies above Cheyenne on Wednesday. That blaze, about 15 miles west of Fort Collins, has burned 73 square miles, destroyed more than 100 structures and forced hundreds of people from their homes. The blaze was 10 percent contained late Wednesday.
More than 1,000 firefighters labored to build containment lines as air tankers and helicopters focused on protecting buildings from the High Park fire.
The accelerated restoration effort is focused on several landscape-scale projects, the largest of which is a 20-year plan that calls for restoring 2.4 million acres across four forests in northern Arizona. The Forest Service recently awarded a contract to start thinning the first 300,000 acres.
A similar project is planned in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, where a historic fire ripped through 244 square miles and threatened one of the national's premier nuclear laboratories just last summer.
Another concern is the 8.6 million acres of standing trees killed by beetle infestations. Restoration projects from Oregon and South Dakota to Colorado are aimed at tackling that problem. One of those, the White River National Forest collaborative project, is expected to result in more than 190,000 tons of biomass through thinning.
Forest officials estimate the cost of fire suppression in some of the areas targeted for restoration could be reduced by up to 50 percent because of the work.
The directive doesn't stop at the landscape level, however. Each forest in the Southwest is part of a pilot project that pools regular watershed and wildlife program funds for restoration. Regional forester Corbin Newman said that amounts to millions of dollars.
In an era of tight budgets and taxed resources, forest officials acknowledged that restoration will be a challenge. They said part of the solution is setting priorities and forming more partnerships with states, municipalities and even water utilities given the impacts catastrophic fires can have on watersheds. Some 66 million Americans rely on drinking water that flows from the nation's forests.
Still, there are millions of acres — wilderness and roadless, rugged areas — where mechanical thinning won't be an option. In those areas, fire will have to take its natural course.
"Everybody has to keep in mind that fire will play a huge significant role in our landscape for the rest of time," Newman said. "Sometimes people think through either restoration or suppression we can just make fires go away. We have to remind folks we're just trying put fire back into its natural processes and cycles as opposed to what we're seeing in today's world."
With more natural fires, experts contend the forest has a better chance of recovering. Severe fires tend to sterilize the soil, destroy any banks of seeds stored in the ground and leave mountainsides primed for erosion.
Newman and other forest officials lamented that educating people about the complexity of restoring forests and fire's natural role will take something more than Smokey Bear, the black bear that became the nation's most successful symbol of fire prevention in the 1940s.
Tidwell said campaigns are under way at the federal and state level to address the benefits of restoration, particularly prescribed fire under the right conditions.
"We're going to have trade-offs of either dealing with smoke at different times of the year or dealing with what we're dealing with now," he said, pointing to the fires burning across the country.
Across the West:
— Utah: Two wildfires blackened 4,000 acres in Fishlake National Forest in southern Utah. Meanwhile, a preliminary report found an air tanker that wrecked June 3 while fighting a wildfire in southern Utah veered off its flight path while following a lead plane moments before crashing into mountainous terrain. Both pilots in the tanker died; they were from Boise, Idaho. The National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday it's still investigating the cause of the crash.
— Wyoming: Investigators determined a 2,800-acre fire burning in Guernsey State Park was human-caused. It is 95 percent contained, while a 13-square-mile fire in Medicine Bow National Forest is fully contained. The risk of new fires is high in much of the state because of dry air and expected strong winds.
— Arizona: A 2,600-acre wildfire in the Tonto National Forest northwest of Phoenix is 40 percent contained. It's not threatening any buildings. Crews fully contained a wildfire that had forced the evacuation of the historic mining town of Crown King. Firefighters were also maintaining a perimeter around a 500-acre forest fire outside Grand Canyon National Park. The blaze about 11 miles southeast of Grand Canyon Village isn't expected to deter visitors to the park.
___
Associated Press writers Bob Moen, Ben Neary and Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyo.; and Brian Skoloff in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.




Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/lif...#ixzz1xn0xPR2A

[American Patriot]

Death of Environmentalists on the Rise, Experts Say

Published June 20, 2012
Associated Press

• 

Standing up for the environment in some places has proven to be a dangerous avocation. And the murder of environmental leaders and activists seems to be on the rise around the globe.


In Brazil, The chief of an Amazonian tribe was gunned down in November while trying to protect his land from ranchers and poachers. Nisio Gomes’ body was never seen again.


In Cambodia, Chut Wutty was shot by a military policeman while trying to fight the massive illegal deforestation occurring in one the country’s last big forests.
People who track killings of environmental activists say the numbers have risen dramatically in the last three years. Improved reporting may be one reason, they caution, but they also believe the rising death toll is a consequence of intensifying battles over dwindling supplies of natural resources, particularly in Latin America and Asia.


Killings have occurred in at least 34 countries, from Brazil to Egypt, and in both developing and developed nations, according to an Associated Press review of data and interviews.


A report released Tuesday by the London-based Global Witness said more than 700 people — more than one a week — died in the decade ending 2011 "defending their human rights or the rights of others related to the environment, specifically land and forests." They were killed, the environmental investigation group says, during protests or investigations into mining, logging, intensive agriculture, hydropower dams, urban development and wildlife poaching.
The death toll reached 96 in 2010 and 106 last year, said the report, which was released as world leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro for a conference on sustainable development. The report's annual totals for the six prior years range from 37 in 2004 to 64 in 2008.


More than three-quarters of the killings Global Witness tallied were in three South American countries: Brazil, Colombia and Peru. Another 50 deaths occurred in the Philippines. All have bloody land-rights struggles between indigenous groups and powerful industries.


Global Witness' figures are much higher that those that Bill Kovarik, a communications professor at Virginia's Radford University, has been compiling since 1996. He focuses on slayings of environmental leaders and does not include deaths in protests that are counted in the Global Witness report. But Kovarik, too, has noticed a substantial jump: from eight in 2009 to 11 in 2010 and 28 last year.
"For many years intolerant regimes like Russia and China and military dictatorships tolerated environmental activists. That was the one thing you could do safely, until some crossed into the political area," Kovarik said. "Now, environmentalism has become a dangerous form of activism, and that is relatively new."


Both Kovarik and Global Witness believe even more killings have gone unreported, especially in relatively closed societies in countries such as Myanmar, Laos and China. Global Witness said there is an "alarming lack of systematic information on killing in many countries and no specialized monitoring at the international level."


The dead last year included Rev. Fausto Tentorio, an Italian Catholic priest who fought against mining companies to protect the ancestral lands of the Manobo tribe in the southern Philippines. Affectionately known as "Father Pops," he was buried in a coffin made from a favorite mahogany tree he had planted.


In Thailand, where at least 20 environmental activists have been killed over the past decade, seven hired gunmen were paid $10,000 to kill Thongnak Sawekchinda, a veteran campaigner against polluting, coal-fired factories in his province near Bangkok. Powerful figures believed to have ordered the slaying are yet to be apprehended.


In developing countries, bolder and more numerous activists have come into sharper conflict with governments and their cronies or local and foreign companies, some with low environmental and ethical standards. These are moving in to "industrialize" areas where rights of the local people are traditional rather than clearly defined by modern laws.


"It is a well-known paradox that many of the world's poorest countries are home to the resources that drive the global economy. Now, as the race to secure access to these resources intensifies, it is poor people and activists who increasingly find themselves in the firing line," Global Witness said.


Julian Newman of the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency said the killings will only get worse because one of the key flashpoints — land ownership — ignites powerful passions.


"To people protecting their lands, their forests, it's very personal, and they suffer when confronted with influential forces who have protection, be it the police in Indonesia or thugs in China," Newman said.


Targeted assassinations, disappearances followed by confirmed deaths, deaths in custody and during clashes with security forces are being reported. The killers are often soldiers, police or private security guards acting on behalf of businesses or governments. Credible investigations are rare; convictions more so.


"It's so easy to get someone killed in some of these countries. Decapitate the leader of the movement and then buy off everyone else — that's standard operating procedure," says Phil Robertson, Asia deputy director of Human Rights Watch.


The countries where environmental killings are most common share similarities: a powerful few, with strong links to officialdom, and many poor and disenfranchised dependent on land or forests for livelihoods, coupled with strong activist movements which are more likely to report the violence.


Environmental groups say it is time to build a comprehensive database of such violence and mount unified campaigns.


"In Asia there has been a rise for some years but this has been off the radar of international NGOs until recently," says Pokpong Lawansiri, Asia head for the Dublin-based Front Line Defenders. "Political rights activists usually have international connections but environmental ones are often teachers, community leaders and villagers, so they have little profile."


Robertson called for "a waves-to-the-beach strategy. It can be small and irregular but it always has to keep coming."


"Without that constant level of concern and anger, things won't change. Governments and companies play for time and for most of the victims and their families time is not on their side," he said.
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[American Patriot]

lol.... sorry, I ought not laugh about the death of fellow human beings.... lol

oops sorry. did it again

[Ryan Ruck]

Sorry Global Warming Alarmists, The Earth Is Cooling

May 31, 2012

Climate change itself is already in the process of definitively rebutting climate alarmists who think human use of fossil fuels is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming. That is because natural climate cycles have already turned from warming to cooling, global temperatures have already been declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will continue to decline for another two decades or more.

That is one of the most interesting conclusions to come out of the seventh International Climate Change Conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, held last week in Chicago. I attended, and served as one of the speakers, talking about The Economic Implications of High Cost Energy.

The conference featured serious natural science, contrary to the self-interested political science you hear from government financed global warming alarmists seeking to justify widely expanded regulatory and taxation powers for government bodies, or government body wannabees, such as the United Nations. See for yourself, as the conference speeches are online.

What you will see are calm, dispassionate presentations by serious, pedigreed scientists discussing and explaining reams of data. In sharp contrast to these climate realists, the climate alarmists have long admitted that they cannot defend their theory that humans are causing catastrophic global warming in public debate. With the conference presentations online, let’s see if the alarmists really do have any response.

The Heartland Institute has effectively become the international headquarters of the climate realists, an analog to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has achieved that status through these international climate conferences, and the publication of its Climate Change Reconsidered volumes, produced in conjunction with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

Those Climate Change Reconsidered volumes are an equivalently thorough scientific rebuttal to the irregular Assessment Reports of the UN’s IPCC. You can ask any advocate of human caused catastrophic global warming what their response is to Climate Change Reconsidered. If they have none, they are not qualified to discuss the issue intelligently.

Check out the 20th century temperature record, and you will find that its up and down pattern does not follow the industrial revolution’s upward march of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), which is the supposed central culprit for man caused global warming (and has been much, much higher in the past). It follows instead the up and down pattern of naturally caused climate cycles.

For example, temperatures dropped steadily from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. The popular press was even talking about a coming ice age. Ice ages have cyclically occurred roughly every 10,000 years, with a new one actually due around now.

In the late 1970s, the natural cycles turned warm and temperatures rose until the late 1990s, a trend that political and economic interests have tried to milk mercilessly to their advantage. The incorruptible satellite measured global atmospheric temperatures show less warming during this period than the heavily manipulated land surface temperatures.

Central to these natural cycles is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Every 25 to 30 years the oceans undergo a natural cycle where the colder water below churns to replace the warmer water at the surface, and that affects global temperatures by the fractions of a degree we have seen. The PDO was cold from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, and it was warm from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, similar to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).

In 2000, the UN’s IPCC predicted that global temperatures would rise by 1 degree Celsius by 2010. Was that based on climate science, or political science to scare the public into accepting costly anti-industrial regulations and taxes?

Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus of Geology at Western Washington University, knew the answer. He publicly predicted in 2000 that global temperatures would decline by 2010. He made that prediction because he knew the PDO had turned cold in 1999, something the political scientists at the UN’s IPCC did not know or did not think significant.

Well, the results are in, and the winner is….Don Easterbrook. Easterbrook also spoke at the Heartland conference, with a presentation entitled “Are Forecasts of a 20-Year Cooling Trend Credible?” Watch that online and you will see how scientists are supposed to talk: cool, rational, logical analysis of the data, and full explanation of it. All I ever see from the global warming alarmists, by contrast, is political public relations, personal attacks, ad hominem arguments, and name calling, combined with admissions that they can’t defend their views in public debate.

Easterbrook shows that by 2010 the 2000 prediction of the IPCC was wrong by well over a degree, and the gap was widening. That’s a big miss for a forecast just 10 years away, when the same folks expect us to take seriously their predictions for 100 years in the future. Howard Hayden, Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Connecticut showed in his presentation at the conference that based on the historical record a doubling of CO2 could be expected to produce a 2 degree C temperature increase. Such a doubling would take most of this century, and the temperature impact of increased concentrations of CO2 declines logarithmically. You can see Hayden’s presentation online as well.

Because PDO cycles last 25 to 30 years, Easterbrook expects the cooling trend to continue for another 2 decades or so. Easterbrook, in fact, documents 40 such alternating periods of warming and cooling over the past 500 years, with similar data going back 15,000 years. He further expects the flipping of the ADO to add to the current downward trend.

But that is not all. We are also currently experiencing a surprisingly long period with very low sunspot activity. That is associated in the earth’s history with even lower, colder temperatures. The pattern was seen during a period known as the Dalton Minimum from 1790 to 1830, which saw temperature readings decline by 2 degrees in a 20 year period, and the noted Year Without A Summer in 1816 (which may have had other contributing short term causes).

Even worse was the period known as the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715, which saw only about 50 sunspots during one 30 year period within the cycle, compared to a typical 40,000 to 50,000 sunspots during such periods in modern times. The Maunder Minimum coincided with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, which the earth suffered from about 1350 to 1850. The Maunder Minimum saw sharply reduced agricultural output, and widespread human suffering, disease and premature death.

Such impacts of the sun on the earth’s climate were discussed at the conference by astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon, Nir J. Shaviv, of the Racah Institute of Physics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Sebastian Luning, co-author with leading German environmentalist Fritz Vahrenholt of The Cold Sun.

Easterbrook suggests that the outstanding question is only how cold this present cold cycle will get. Will it be modest like the cooling from the late 1940s to late 1970s? Or will the paucity of sunspots drive us all the way down to the Dalton Minimum, or even the Maunder Minimum? He says it is impossible to know now. But based on experience, he will probably know before the UN and its politicized IPCC.

[American Patriot]

Lol