The start of a mini ice age?

Interesting post by David Rose in the Daily Mail:

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.
According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

Note to all the warmists: it's time to re-think that global warming thing.

Update: this video via Captain Ed illustrates the costs of a cooler climate far outweigh those of a hotter one.

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NASA links arctic ice melt to human activity

But not because of those those CO2 emissions that the alarmists like the Goreacle and kooky Suzuki would have you believe. Noooo. This study reaches a rather surprising conclusion.

New research from NASA suggests that the Arctic warming trend seen in recent decades has indeed resulted from human activities: but not, as is widely assumed at present, those leading to carbon dioxide emissions. Rather, Arctic warming has been caused in large part by laws introduced to improve air quality and fight acid rain.

Dr Drew Shindell of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies has led a new study which indicates that much of the general upward trend in temperatures since the 1970s - particularly in the Arctic - may have resulted from changes in levels of solid "aerosol" particles in the atmosphere, rather than elevated CO2.

Shindell's research indicates that, ironically, much of the rise in polar temperature seen over the last few decades may have resulted from US and European restrictions on sulphur emissions. According to NASA:

Sulfates, which come primarily from the burning of coal and oil, scatter incoming solar radiation and have a net cooling effect on climate. Over the past three decades, the United States and European countries have passed a series of laws that have reduced sulfate emissions by 50 percent. While improving air quality and aiding public health, the result has been less atmospheric cooling from sulfates.

Meanwhile, levels of black-carbon aerosols (soot, in other words) have been rising, largely driven by greater industrialisation in Asia. Soot, rather than reflecting heat as sulphates do, traps solar energy in the atmosphere and warms things up.

More info at the NASA website.

h/t: Captain Ed.

29 years of ice melt erased in 2008

The world's ice is melting at an alarming rate, right? Well, not exactly...

Via DailyTech.com:

Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago, when the year 1979 also drew to a close.

Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards. Each year, millions of square kilometers of sea ice melt and refreeze. However, the mean ice anomaly -- defined as the seasonally-adjusted difference between the current value and the average from 1979-2000, varies much more slowly. That anomaly now stands at just under zero, a value identical to one recorded at the end of 1979, the year satellite record-keeping began.

Attention MSM: no news here. Move along to the next alarmist story.

McCain to make Palin energy czar

The Sunday Telegraph is reporting that John McCain wants to put Sarah Palin in charge of US oil and energy policy if he becomes president:

The Republican presidential candidate will make his running mate the public face of the country's drive for energy independence, according to a McCain campaign official.

The campaign official said: "The Democrats say that Governor Palin is inexperienced, but she has vast experience in the energy sector. She will be at the forefront of the push for energy independence. She's popular and she's very persuasive." A Republican Party official, who has discussed Mrs Palin's role with members of Mr McCain's team, added: "She can say: 'I'm from Alaska. I know all about this and I support drilling, even in ANWR."

"No one has more experience of getting oil out of the ground and to the market than Sarah Palin," he said. "It is the issue that most distinctively divides the two parties and it is one that has proved popular for Senator McCain.

"No political figure in the US has more experience of taking on privilege and vested interests than Sarah Palin."

On another note, Governor Palin opposed the listing of the polar bear as an endangered species and recently went so far as to sue the Department of the Interior over the issue.

August 4, 2008, Fairbanks, Alaska – Governor Sarah Palin announced today the State of Alaska has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to overturn U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne’s decision to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

This action follows written notice given more than 60 days ago to Secretary Dirk Kempthorne of the Department of the Interior and Director Dale Hall of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asking that the regulation listing the polar bear as threatened be withdrawn.

“We believe that the Service’s decision to list the polar bear was not based on the best scientific and commercial data available,” Governor Palin said.

The Service’s analysis failed to adequately consider the polar bears’ survival through prior warming periods, and its findings that the polar bear is threatened by sea-ice habitat loss and inadequate regulatory mechanisms to address sea-ice recession are not warranted. The Service also failed to adequately consider the existing regulatory mechanisms, including conservation measures within Alaska and the international community, which have resulted in a sustainable worldwide polar bear population that has more than doubled in number over the last 40 years to 20,000-25,000 bears.

Bravo for Governor Palin. Who better than Alaskans to know the real story of the polar bear? Polar bears are not threatened and the greens managed to browbeat Kempthorne into listing them as such when it was completely unwarranted.

It was just another move by the greens to make it more difficult to drill for oil in the Arctic. Let's hope Governor Palin's suit is successful and this obstacle to energy independence can be removed.

Related.

Update & Note: the term "Czar" or "Tsar" does not appear in the above article from the Sunday Telegraph. It was a term I used in the title of this post. Actually, the more appropriate use of the word in this case would be the feminine "Czaritsa" or "Tsaritsa".

At any rate, in the strictest sense it refers to a ruler or monarch, which is not a position you will find in the government of the USA. Its use here is in the more informal meaning of an:

...official having special powers to regulate or supervise an activity: a racetrack czar; an energy czar.

Massive gain in Arctic Sea Ice

via DailyTech:

Increase twice the size of Germany: "colder weather" to blame.

Data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has indicated a dramatic increase in sea ice extent in the Arctic regions. The growth over the past year covers an area of 700,000 square kilometers: an amount twice the size the nation of Germany.

With the Arctic melting season over for 2008, ice cover will continue to increase until melting begins anew next spring.

The data is for August 2008 and indicates a total sea ice area of six million square kilometers. Ice extent for the same month in 2007 covered 5.3 million square kilometers, a historic low. Earlier this year, media accounts were rife with predictions that this year would again see a new record. Instead, the Arctic has seen a gain of about thirteen percent.

William Chapman, a researcher with the Arctic Climate Research Center at the University of Illinois, tells DailyTech that this year the Arctic was "definitely colder" than 2007. Chapman also says part of the reason for the large ice loss in 2007 was strong winds from Siberia, which affect both ice formation and drift, forcing ice into warmer waters where it melts.

Earlier predictions were also wrong because researchers thought thinner ice would melt faster in subsequent years. Instead, according to the NSIDC, the new ice had less snow coverage to insulate it from the bitterly cold air, resulting in a faster rate of ice growth.

Most concern has focused on the Arctic regions, rather than Antarctica. Recent research has indicated Antarctica is on a long-term cooling trend, for reasons which remain unclear.

Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered

Steven Goddard writes in the Register:

Just a few weeks ago, predictions of Arctic ice collapse were buzzing all over the internet. Some scientists were predicting that the "North Pole may be ice-free for first time this summer". Others predicted that the entire "polar ice cap would disappear this summer".

The Arctic melt season is nearly done for this year. The sun is now very low above the horizon and will set for the winter at the North Pole in five weeks. And none of these dire predictions have come to pass. Yet there is, however, something odd going on with the ice data.

(...)

The Arctic did not experience the meltdowns forecast by NSIDC and the Norwegian Polar Year Secretariat. It didn't even come close. Additionally, some current graphs and press releases from NSIDC seem less than conservative. There appears to be a consistent pattern of overstatement related to Arctic ice loss.

We know that Arctic summer ice extent is largely determined by variable oceanic and atmospheric currents such as the Arctic Oscillation. NASA claimed last summer that "not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming". The media tendency to knee-jerkingly blame everything on "global warming" makes for an easy story - but it is not based on solid science. ®

Gunter: Environmentalism is causing global warming

Lorne Gunter in today's National Post, All the news that's fit to scare

And what of the study, released in July by Switzerland's Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, that shows European temperatures, at least, have risen in large part because of efforts over the past 30 years to clean the continent's skies?

Christian Ruckstuhl and 12 coauthors found that of the 1C rise in temperature in Europe over the last three decades, "at least half of the warming" is attributable to a reduction of aerosols, such as sulphur dioxide and black soot particles. As Europeans have cleaned up their smokestacks and tailpipes, and as dirty old Soviet-era East European plants have been modernized to Western standards, more sunlight has penetrated the continent's atmosphere and warmed things up a bit.

In other words, environmentalism is causing global warming. As ecoadvocates have won tighter clean-air regulations, their efforts have been rewarded with brighter days (a good thing), but also warmer temperatures.

Gunter also comments on the recent news stories about warming in the Canadian Arctic:

Fear that melt water from the park's glaciers might lead to flash flooding and landslides has been reported by everyone from AFP to the BBC as proof of the adverse side-effects of man-made climate change.

Meanwhile, it is barely reported outside Alaska that America's northernmost state is having a record cool summer.

If it reaches 19C in Anchorage today, it will be just the eighth time that's happened this summer. Indeed, this could be the first summer ever that Anchorage never hits 24C.

Auyuittuq is at 66 degrees north; Anchorage is at 61.

The Baffin story may be more significant than the Alaska one. But why are we hearing all about one and nothing about the other? You can bet that if Anchorage were suffering a record hot summer, it would be all over the news and presented--as the Baffin temperatures are -- as yet further proof of the dangerous impacts of global warming in the north.

Once more, the mainstream media ignores news stories that do not fit with its bias towards global warming alarmism.

Arctic ice greater than normal

Next time a global warming alarmist tries to tell you that arctic ice is at record lows, you can correct their misinformation by referring them to this article by Piers Akerman in the Daily Telegraph.

It seems that in fact there is "more ice than normal in the Arctic waters north of the Svalbard archipelago" these days.

Ed: the above link and quote corrected.