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Climate hysterics v heretics in an age of unreason

It has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans's article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can't be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.

Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle. More

Giant chunks break off Canadian ice shelf

OTTAWA -- Giant sheets of ice totaling almost 20 square km broke off an ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic last week and more could follow later this year, scientists said Tuesday.

Temperatures in large parts of the Arctic have risen far faster than the global average in recent decades, a development that experts say is linked to global warming.

The ice broke away from the shelf on Ward Hunt Island, an small island just off giant Ellesmere Island in one of the northernmost parts of Canada. It was the largest fracture of its kind since the nearby Ayles ice shelf - which measured 25 square miles - broke away in 2005. More

Hurricane Dolly may have shrunk Gulf 'dead zone'

NEW ORLEANS - The oxygen-starved "dead zone" that forms every summer in the Gulf of Mexico is a bit smaller than predicted this year because Hurricane Dolly stirred up the water, a scientist reported Monday.

There is too little oxygen to support sea life for about 8,000 square miles - just under the record of 8,006 square miles recorded in 2001, said Nancy Rabalais, head of the head of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

"If it were not for Hurricane Dolly, the size of the Dead Zone would have been substantially larger," she said in a news release sent from the consortium's research vessel, the Pelican, as she returned from her annual mapping cruise. Rabalais measures the area during the same period each year. More

Weather Modification: Sometimes it rains cement

MOSCOW - Russian air force planes dropped a 25-kg (55-lb) sack of cement on a suburban Moscow home last week while seeding clouds to prevent rain from spoiling a holiday, according to Russian media.

"A pack of cement used in creating ... good weather in the capital region ... failed to pulverize completely at high altitude and fell on the roof of a house, making a hole about 80-100 cm (2.5-3 ft)," police in Naro-Fominsk told agency RIA-Novosti.

Ahead of major public holidays the Russian Air Force often dispatches up to 12 cargo planes carrying loads of silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and cement powder to seed clouds above Moscow and empty the skies of moisture.

A spokesman for the Russian Air Force refused to comment. More

Painting by numbers: NASA's peculiar thermometer

The story is that the world is heating up - fast. Prominent people at NASA warn us that unless we change our carbon producing ways, civilisation as we know it will come to an end. At the same time, there are new scientific studies showing that the earth is in a 20 year long cooling period. Which view is correct? Temperature data should be simple enough to record and analyze. We all know how to read a thermometer - it is not rocket science.

NASA's published data is largely based on data from the US Historical Climatology Network, which derives its data from thermometer readings across the country. According to USHCN literature, the raw temperature data is adjusted to compensate for geographical movements in the weather stations, changes in the 24-hour start/end times when the readings are taken, and other factors. USHCN is directly affiliated with the Oak Ridge National Laboratories' Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, an organisation which exists primarily to promote the idea of a link between CO2 and climate. More

Soaring energy costs are about to change everything

Back in the 1990s, when Osama bin Laden was still giving interviews to journalists and didn't have a $50-million bounty on his head, one of his biggest grievances with the West was over the price of oil. At around US$30 a barrel, it was far too cheap, he reasoned. The Western world was ruthlessly bleeding the Middle East by not paying fair market value for oil. It had to be stopped. A more appropriate price? At least US$100 a barrel, he once said, maybe even US$200.

Mission accomplished. Suddenly a world in which oil costs well over US$100 a barrel isn't just the dream of a terrorist bent on destroying the United States and its allies. It is reality. Oil recently hit US$135 a barrel, more than double where it was a year ago. And the once unimaginable prospect of oil at US$200 a barrel is gaining currency among the world's most respected oil watchers. More

Solar Storms Are About to Get Ugly

Every 11 years or so, the sun gets a little pissy. It breaks out in a rash of planet-sized sunspots that spew superhot gas, hurling clouds of electrons, protons, and heavier ions toward Earth at nearly the speed of light. These solar windstorms have been known to knock out power grids and TV broadcasts, and our growing reliance on space-based technology makes us more vulnerable than ever to their effects. On January 3, scientists discovered a reverse-polarity sunspot, signaling the start of a new cycle — and some are predicting that at its peak (in about four years) things are gonna get nasty. Here's a forecast for 2012.

Detours Clumps of ions in the atmosphere could interfere with GPS. Satellite signals are slowed by bumping into particles, meaning your trusty navigator may lose its way. Remember those colorful paper things called maps?

Falling Satellites Increased solar energy heats Earth's atmosphere, causing it to expand. That's a drag on low-flying satellites and can even knock them out of orbit. A solar storm in 1979 deposited Skylab on Australia. More

'Black hole' machine could destroy planet

An American and a Spaniard have launched a lawsuit to stop scientists from firing up a machine they fear could destroy not just life on Earth but the planet itself.

International scientists, including dozens from Canada, are about to launch the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-kilometre long particle accelerator built near Geneva, Switzerland. It will shoot beams of protons at each other in an effort to recreate conditions that resemble what the universe might have been like in the milliseconds after the Big Bang.

In the process, scientists may end up creating miniature black holes -- areas of space that have gravitational pulls so strong that not even light can escape.

The more matter a black hole pulls in, the stronger it becomes. And that's what worries Walter Wagner, the American who is suing to temporarily stop the project. He says the creation of these black holes here on Earth, no matter how small, may unleash a chain reaction that could destroy the planet.

"Eventually, all of Earth would fall into such growing micro-black-holes, converting Earth into a medium-sized black hole, around which would continue to orbit the moon, satellites, and the (International Space Station)," according to court papers Wagner, along with a citizen of Spain, filed in Honolulu. More

NOAA: Coolest Winter Since 2001 for U.S., Globe

The average temperature across both the contiguous U.S. and the globe during climatological winter (December 2007-February 2008) was the coolest since 2001, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. In terms of winter precipitation, Pacific storms, bringing heavy precipitation to large parts of the West, produced high snowpack that will provide welcome runoff this spring.

In the contiguous United States, the average winter temperature was 33.2°F (0.6°C), which was 0.2°F (0.1°C) above the 20th century average – yet still ranks as the coolest since 2001. It was the 54th coolest winter since national records began in 1895.

With higher-than-average temperatures in the Northeast and South, the contiguous U.S. winter temperature-related energy demand was approximately 1.7 percent lower than average, based on NOAA’s Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index. More

Gore unveils $300m climate ads

Al Gore, elevated to almost prophetic status for his campaign against global warming, on Sunday night unveiled a new $300m advertising blitz intended to force a debate on climate change during the presidential elections.

The Nobel laureate, who appeared with his wife, Tipper, on the CBS programme 60 Minutes to roll out the effort, is to donate a share of his personal fortune to the campaign.

The couple told 60 Minutes that they would donate his Nobel prize money as well as a matching sum in addition to their profits from the book and the movie of An Inconvenient Truth. The movie brought the issue of global warming home to millions of Americans, as well as winning Gore an Oscar.

In this latest campaign, Gore said he hopes to persuade Americans that protecting the planet transcends the usual political divisions.

"We all share the exact same interest in doing the right thing on this," he told CBS. "Are we destined to destroy this place that we call home, planet earth? I can't believe that that's our destiny. It is not our destiny. But we have to awaken to the moral duty that we have to do the right thing and get out of this silly political game-playing about it. This is about survival." More

World Bank accused of climate change "hijack"

BANGKOK - Developing countries and environmental groups accused the World Bank on Friday of trying to seize control of the billions of dollars of aid that will be used to tackle climate change in the next four decades.

"The World Bank's foray into climate change has gone down like a lead balloon," Friends of the Earth campaigner Tom Picken said at the end of a major climate change conference in the Thai capital.

"Many countries and civil society have expressed outrage at the World Bank's attempted hijacking of real efforts to fund climate change efforts," he said.

Before they agree to any sort of restrictions on emissions of the greenhouse gases fuelling global warming, poor countries want firm commitments of billions of dollars in aid from their rich counterparts. More

The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years.

That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them. This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans. More

Real Death Star Could Strike Earth

A beautiful pinwheel in space might one day blast Earth with death rays, scientists now report.

Unlike the moon-sized Death Star from Star Wars, which has to get close to a planet to blast it, this blazing spiral has the potential to burn worlds from thousands of light-years away.

"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel," said researcher Peter Tuthill, an astronomer at the University of Sydney.

The fiery pinwheel in space in question has at its heart a pair of hot, luminous stars locked in orbit with each other. As they circle one another, plumes of streaming gas driven from the surfaces of the stars collide in the intervening space, eventually becoming entangled and twisted into a whirling spiral by the orbits of the stars. More

Is Human Tampering Causing Extreme Weather?

Humans tampering with the atmosphere may be causing extreme weather patterns, experts believe.

They believe that the debate on climate change has ignored the role of environmental manipulation projects.

Artificial manipulation of the climate is nothing new. During the Vietnam war, the US military used cloud seeding techniques to cause torrential rain and disrupt enemy supply lines.

Last month, Chinese media reported that the Communist party was preparing 'rain-prevention techniques' to be used on the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics this year.

But some experts believe that new technology can enable governments to manipulate climate patterns globally for military use. More

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure.

But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. More

PA community consumed by underground mine fire

Centralia, PA — If you were driving north on route 61 in the heart of the Anthracite coal region in Pennsylvania, you may have come across a detour of 61 at the top of a hill in a community called Ashland. Thinking nothing of it you would have followed the detour signs that took you around some possible road construction or a bridge being worked on. You're then reconnected with Rt. 61 again.

Many have followed this path in recent years with little knowledge of the on going story of this little detour and the town that no longer is really a town. If you had disregarded the detour signs and make the right that 61 north takes through Ashland your first clue that something isn't right would be the abrupt end to route 61 as it once was. More

Global Warming Hype Sparks ‘Eco-Anxiety’ Syndrome

NORTH CAROLINA — Former Vice President Al Gore isn’t the only one concerned about the environment, as more and more people are starting to become aware of global warming and experiencing ‘eco-anxiety.’

“People are afraid of the future, they’re afraid of what’s going to happen,” said licensed therapist Melissa Pickett, saying of one patient, “She brought up during the course of our session that she had just read an article about the polar bears and the loss of habitat and she started crying … she said ‘I just don’t understand this.’”

Pickett said fears about the environment are sending some people into a panic. The mental health disorder has grown enough to gain the ‘eco-anxiety’ name.

“It’s causing them to feel anxiety, it’s causing them to feel depression, it’s causing them to have insomnia,” said general practitioner Cynthia Knudsen of patients. More

Disabled Spy Satellite Threatens Earth

A large U.S. spy satellite has lost power and could hit the Earth in late February or early March, government officials said Saturday.

The satellite, which no longer can be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down, they said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is classified as secret. It was not clear how long ago the satellite lost power, or under what circumstances.

"Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, when asked about the situation after it was disclosed by other officials. "Numerous satellites over the years have come out of orbit and fallen harmlessly. We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause." More

Ice returns as Greenland temps plummet

While the rest of Europe is debating the prospects of global warming during an unseasonably mild winter, a brutal cold snap is raging across the semi-autonomous nation of Greenland.

On Disko Bay in western Greenland, where a number of prominent world leaders have visited in recent years to get a first-hand impression of climate change, temperatures have dropped so drastically that the water has frozen over for the first time in a decade.

'The ice is up to 50cm thick,' said Henrik Matthiesen, an employee at Denmark's Meteorological Institute who has also sailed the Greenlandic coastline for the Royal Arctic Line. 'We've had loads of northerly winds since Christmas which has made the area miserably cold.' Matthiesen suggested the cold weather marked a return to the frigid temperatures common a decade ago. More

Al Gore's next act: Planet-saving

It's lunchtime on Sand Hill Road, and Al Gore wants answers. "How does the efficiency decline with latitude?" he asks. "What size community could be served by one plant? If a manufacturer like GE wanted to make smaller turbines, would the technology support a smaller scale?"

After loading his plate with Chinese food from a buffet, Gore is firing detailed questions at the management team of Ausra, a Kleiner-backed company in Palo Alto whose technology uses mirrors the width of a flatbed truck that focus the sun's energy to generate electricity.

Once Gore is satisfied -- sunlight lags north of South Dakota, an Ausra plant can serve 120,000 homes, and yes, smaller turbines will work fine -- he shifts from inquisitor to fixer. He was chatting with California Senator Barbara Boxer "on the way over," he reports, and he isn't optimistic that Congress will extend the tax credits Ausra has been relying on. On the upside, he offers on the spot to organize a summit highlighting the company's solar thermal technology to educate lawmakers and other policymakers on its potential. He also thinks a powwow at General Electric (Charts, Fortune 500) would be beneficial, even though Ausra is a tiny customer. More

Prius owner an alleged Eco-Dumper

San Diego , Calif. - There is much talk regarding how eco friendly that Prius Hybrid cars are and how the owners are all of the environmentally sensitive folks out to save all mankind.

On Sunday around 2:20 p.m., a correspondant witnessed one of those "environmentally sensitive" folk dump her Christmas tree on Fiesta Island.

Ironically, if she would have taken the time to look up tree collection sites she would have found a designated collection point about 1/8 mile from where she dumped it on Fiesta Island.

The charcoal gray Prius was seen leaving the scene shortly thereafter, but not before being photographed..

End of the world is business as usual for some

People forecasting the imminent end of the world used to walk through city streets wearing sandwich boards; today's doomsayers are more likely to be wearing lab coats and talking about climate change. Apocalyptic themes, which used to be the preserve of religious groups, now inform our secular culture.

Film-maker Ben Anthony was afforded entry to the Strong City commune in New Mexico where Michael Travesser, a 66-year-old former sailor previously known as Wayne Bent, modestly calls himself the Son of God. He has spent the past 20 years preparing his 56 devoted disciples for doomsday.

When Travesser announced that the world would end at midnight on October 31, 2007, his followers were exhilarated. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed the wee problem with this prophecy. The messianic charlatan got it spectacularly wrong.

This prediction game has been going on for aeons. About two centuries after Christ, some zealots in Jerusalem were convinced the apocalyptic day was dawning. They climbed to the top of Masada - a place where Jewish martyrs had once committed suicide rather than submit to the enemy - and awaited the end. Well, it came. They all died of sunstroke. More

A Look at Ancient Earth

It is useful to look at what fell down the memory hole and see what is in there. Sometimes you find things you are not supposed to know.

This is from a series in 2004:

"The planet during the Cretaceous was very different than it is today," says Adina Paytan, an assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences at Stanford and the first author of the paper.

"Not only were dinosaurs present, but the climate was extremely warm and global sea levels were significantly higher than they are today. Understanding how the atmosphere, land and ocean system interacted while in this global greenhouse mode is very relevant if we want to understand the fate of our future climate."

"This was a time when there were no glaciers in either the Arctic or Antarctic," says Miriam Kastner, a professor of earth sciences at UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a co-principal investigator of the study. More

The Climate Engineers

Beyond the security checkpoint at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, a small group gathered in November for a conference on the innocuous topic of “managing solar radiation.” The real subject was much bigger: how to save the planet from the effects of global warming. There was little talk among the two dozen scientists and other specialists about carbon taxes, alternative energy sources, or the other usual remedies. Many of the scientists were impatient with such schemes. Some were simply contemptuous of calls for international cooperation and the policies and lifestyle changes needed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions; others had concluded that the world’s politicians and bureaucrats are not up to the job of agreeing on such reforms or that global warming will come more rapidly, and with more catastrophic consequences, than many models predict. Now, they believe, it is time to consider radical measures: a technological quick fix for global warming.

“Mitigation is not happening and is not going to happen,” physicist Lowell Wood declared at the NASA conference.

Wood advanced several ideas to “fix” the earth’s climate, including building up Arctic sea ice to make it function like a planetary air conditioner to “suck heat in from the midlatitude heat bath.” A “surprisingly practical” way of achieving this, he said, would be to use large artillery pieces to shoot as much as a million tons of highly reflective sulfate aerosols or specially engineered nanoparticles into the Arctic stratosphere to deflect the sun’s rays. More

Weather Channel Founder Calls Global Warming A 'Scam'

When John Coleman founded The Weather Channel in the early 1980's, he probably never could have guessed that TWC would be promoting the theory of global warming in the 2000's.

That's because Coleman doesn't believe in global warming, or so-called climate change. In a November 7 blog entry on icecap.us, Coleman makes it clear that he does not oppose environmentalism, but he says that global warming is a "non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam."

"I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct," Coleman wrote.

"The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril." More

SoCal fires blamed on global warming

Get used to it.

That's what many climate experts are saying about catastrophic wildfires, including the dozen that have turned San Diego County into a disaster zone for the past week.

They believe such blazes will become a regular part of life in Southern California because global warming is intensifying nature's cycles by lengthening fire seasons and prolonging droughts in parts of the West. The consequences would be more deaths, more houses consumed by flames and more budgets busted by firefighting costs.

“The fires we just experienced are some of the first effects we are feeling from climate change,” said Walter Oechel, a biology professor at San Diego State University who had to evacuate his home in Jamul last week. More

Global Warming Causing African Floods

Twenty-two African countries are experiencing their worst wet seasons in decades, and climate experts say that global warming is to blame.

Devastating rains and flash floods have affected 1.5 million people across the continent, killing at least 300 since early summer.

West Africa has seen its most severe floods in years, as torrents swamped the Democratic Republic of the Congo's capital of Kinshasa last week, killing 30 people in less than 24 hours.

In northern Ghana, over 300,000 people have been uprooted by devastating downpours. More

Greenland ice yields hope on climate

An international team of scientists, drilling deep into the ice layers of Greenland, has found DNA from ancient spiders and trees, evidence that suggests the frozen shield covering the immense island survived the earth's last period of global warming.

The findings, published today in the journal Science, indicate Greenland's ice may be less susceptible to the massive meltdown predicted by computer models of climate change, the article's main author said in an interview.

"If our data is correct, and I believe it is, then this means the southern Greenland ice cap is more stable than previously thought," said Eske Willerslev, research leader and professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Copenhagen. "This may have implications for how the ice sheets respond to global warming. They may withstand rising temperatures."

A painstaking analysis of surviving genetic fragments locked in the ice of southern Greenland shows that somewhere between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago, the world's largest island had a climate much like that of Northern New England, the researchers said. Butterflies fluttered over lush meadows interspersed with stands of pine, spruce, and alder. More

Shot may be inadvertently boosting superbugs

CHICAGO, IL - A vaccine that has dramatically curbed pneumonia and other serious illnesses in children is having an unfortunate effect: promoting new superbugs that cause ear infections.

On Monday, doctors reported discovering the first such germ that is resistant to all drugs approved to treat childhood ear infections. Nine toddlers in Rochester, N.Y., have had the germ and researchers say it may be turning up elsewhere, too.

It is a strain of strep bacteria not included in pneumococcal vaccine, Wyeth's Prevnar, which came on the market in 2000. It is recommended for children under age 2. More

Two-thirds of the world's polar bears dead by 2050

WASHINGTON — Two-thirds of the world's polar bears will be killed off by 2050 — and the entire population gone from Alaska — because of thinning sea ice from global warming in the Arctic, government scientists forecast Friday.

Only in northern Canada and northwestern Greenland are polar bears expected to survive through the end of the century, said the U.S. Geological Survey.

USGS projects that polar bears during the next half-century will lose 42 percent of the Arctic range they need to live in during summer in the Polar Basin when they hunt and breed. A polar bear's life usually lasts about 30 years.

Polar bears depend on sea ice as a platform for hunting seals, which is their primary food. They rarely catch seals on land or in open water. But the sea ice is decreasing due to climate change — and the latest forecasts of how much they are shrinking are, if anything, an underestimate, scientists said. More

Cosmic blast may have killed off megafauna

Wooly mammoths, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, and dozens of other species of megafauna may have become extinct when a disintegrating comet or asteroid exploded over North America with the force of millions of hydrogen bombs, according to research by an international team of scientists.

The blast, which the researchers believe occurred 12,900 years ago, may have also doomed a mysterious early human culture, known as Clovis people, while triggering a planetwide cool-down that wiped out the plant species that sustained many outsize Ice Age beasts, according to research published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists have long speculated that an impact from a comet or asteroid may have wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But the notion of an extraterrestrial object wreaking such havoc during human times is a bit unnerving even to researchers. More

Global warming leaves Russians cold

More than 50% of Russians asked about global warming say they haven't heard much about it, according to a BBC World Service poll of 22,000 people in 21 countries.

The Russian media focus on what seem to be more pressing problems.

There are burning social issues, there's uncertainty about the security, there's a falling-out with the West, and, crucially, it is a very cold country.

A meteorologist in Arkhangelsk, in the north of Russia, once told me: "I know global warming is a problem, but I would welcome a bit of warmth up here. Then I could grow my own tomatoes." More

Climate change may help rainforests

Climate change may lead to lush growth rather than catastrophic tree loss in the Amazonian forests, researchers from the US and Brazil have found. A study, in the journal Science, found that reduced rainfall had led to greener forests, possibly because sunlight levels are higher when there are fewer rainclouds.

But scientists cautioned that while the finding raises hopes for the survival of the forests, there are still serious threats.

Climate models have suggested that the forests will suffer as the region becomes drier and will release huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. More

Scientific Studies Refute Fears of Greenland Melt

Ilulissat, Greenland – The July 27-29 2007 U.S. Senate trip to Greenland to investigate fears of a glacier meltdown revealed an Arctic land where current climatic conditions are neither alarming nor linked to a rise in man-made carbon dioxide emissions, according to many of the latest peer-reviewed scientific findings. Recent research has found that Greenland has been warming since the 1880's, but since 1955, temperature averages at Greenland stations have been colder than the period between 1881-1955.

A recent study concluded Greenland was as warm or warmer in the 1930's and 40's and the rate of warming from 1920-1930 was about 50% higher than the warming from 1995-2005. One 2005 study found Greenland gaining ice in the interior higher elevations and thinning ice at the lower elevations. In addition, the often media promoted fears of Greenland's ice completely melting and a subsequent catastrophic sea level rise are directly at odds with the latest scientific studies. These studies suggest that the biggest perceived threat to Greenland's glaciers may be contained in unproven computer models predicting a future catastrophic melt. More

Biologist searches for clues to missing bees

In the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico, many miles from the nearest town, lie several small, multicolored plastic bowls full of water and dish soap.

They’re science. Big science. Bob Minckley, adjunct professor of biology, is trying to get a handle on a problem that threatens the multibillion-dollar a year American agricultural system: Why are the honeybees disappearing?

“It’s crazy,” says Minckley. “Here’s this incredibly important linchpin to agriculture, and we have no good data on how its population changes from year to year or place to place. Honeybees are dying and we don’t even know what the scope of the problem is. We don’t know if the problem has occurred in the past. We can’t go back to look at records because we didn’t take any. And the honeybee is the best-studied bee. There are 20,000 other species we barely know exist.” More

Vatican trades Carbon Credit Indulgences

Leave it to the Vatican to place itself on the wrong side of yet another great moral divide.

In 1517 Pope Leo X offered indulgences in exchange for donations to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica.

This July, the Holy See announced it would become the first fully green sovereign state by accepting a donation of "carbon credits" from a subsidiary of Planktos, a Foster City firm hoping to profit from the global market in CO2 offsets — the scheme whereby companies, individuals, and now nations can buy forgiveness for their global warming sins.

So just like Leo X's absolution peddling scheme a half-millennium ago, the pontiff has set his church up to look morally ridiculous. More

Summer Cancelled in Norway

As Southern Norway woke up to yet another day of heavy, leaden skies and showers, a state meteorologist threw even more cold water on hopes the sun will finally come out and stay for a while.

"If we're to get any better summer weather, something dramatic will have to happen," Pål Evensen of the state Meteorologic Institute told newspaper Aften on Monday, adding that he can see "no sign" of any warmer or drier weather in the weeks ahead.

Evensen noted that he can only predict a week in advance, but he's also working with long-term forecasts and he has no reason to think that August weather will be any better than June or July, both of which been virtual washouts. The wettest summer on record thus looks likely to continue. More

Global warming blamed for vanishing lake

SANTIAGO, Chile - Experts from Chile’s National Forestry Service (CONAF) and the Valdivia Center for Scientific Studies (Cecs) this week linked the May disappearance of a glacial lake in far southern Chile to global warming. The team made these claims after a series of visits to the site of the lost lake starting Thursday, and noted there is a possibility that the lake could reform.

Equipped with state-of-the-art laser scanners, personnel from both organizations measured the depth of neighboring lakes in order to digitally reconstruct the region’s topography. The study group wanted to take detailed photographs of lake site itself, speculating that this data would be crucial in determining the cause of the disappearance and whether or not the lake could refill. More

Driver fined for using biofuel

Bob Teixeira decided it was time to take a stand against U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

So last fall the Charlotte musician and guitar instructor spent $1,200 to convert his 1981 diesel Mercedes to run on vegetable oil. He bought soybean oil in 5-gallon jugs at Costco, spending about 30 percent more than diesel would cost.

His reward, from a state that heavily promotes alternative fuels: a $1,000 fine last month for not paying motor fuel taxes. He has been told to expect another $1,000 fine from the federal government.

To legally use veggie oil, state officials told him, he would have to first post a $2,500 bond.

Teixeira is one of a growing number of fuel-it-yourselfers -- backyard brewers who recycle restaurant grease or make moonshine for their car tanks. They do it to save money, reduce pollution or thumb their noses at oil sheiks. More

"Eco Friendly" Bulbs are Toxic

While large-scale marketing efforts tout cost savings of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), few are explaining the real cost -- to the environment and to individuals -- of broken or discarded CFLs.

One consumer has learned that accidentally breaking a CFL could cost her more than $2,000. According to the newspaper Ellsworth American, Brandy Bridges of Prospect, Maine, has been given a conservative quote of $2,000 for toxic cleanup of one CFL broken in her home.

Bridges broke the CFL as she was installing it in her daughter's bedroom. Because Bridges knew that CFLs contain hazardous materials, she called Home Depot for advice on how to clean up the broken bulb. The store directed her to a Poison Control hotline, which advised her to call the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). More

Global Warming beer available in Greenland

From rising sea levels to stifling heat waves, the effects of global warming are shaping up to be a worldwide buzz kill.

But brewers in Greenland seem to be going with the flow, having found a new use for one of their homeland's fastest growing—but least celebrated—natural resources: melted Arctic ice.

A team of canny entrepreneurs has unveiled Greenland Beer, an ale brewed with water melted from Greenland's ice cap, at a public tasting in Copenhagen, Denmark.

And if reaction from tipplers at the tasting was any indication, the brewers may be on to something. Electrician Flemming Larsen described the ale to the Associated Press as "smooth, soft, but not bitter … different from most other beer."

"Maybe that is because it's ice-cap water," he said. More

Paying to absolve the sin of emissions

When Cal Broomhead drove to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone last summer on vacation, he felt pretty bad about the carbon dioxide emissions from his Volvo station wagon.

So he paid $100 to a company that then subsidized a wind energy project that generates electricity without producing greenhouses gases. Broomhead was told his contribution made up for a year of driving about 12,000 miles as well as his household's annual use of electricity and natural gas.

In the new vernacular, Broomhead and his family were "carbon neutral."

"It makes me feel good. It means I'm walking my talk," he said. More

John Travolta's Carbon Footprint

His serious aviation habit means he is hardly the best person to lecture others on the environment. But John Travolta went ahead and did it anyway.

The 53-year-old actor, a passionate pilot, encouraged his fans to "do their bit" to tackle global warming.

But although he readily admitted: "I fly jets", he failed to mention he actually owns five, along with his own private runway.

Clocking up at least 30,000 flying miles in the past 12 months means he has produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions – nearly 100 times the average Briton's tally.

Travolta made his comments this week at the British premiere of his movie, Wild Hogs.

He spoke of the importance of helping the environment by using "alternative methods of fuel" – after driving down the red carpet on a Harley Davidson. More

GLOBAL WARMING - Not the End of the World

How bad is climate change really? Are catastrophic floods and terrible droughts headed our way? Despite widespread fears of a greenhouse hell, the latest computer simulations are delivering far less dramatic predictions about tomorrow's climate.

Svante Arrhenius, the father of the greenhouse effect, would be called a heretic today. Far from issuing the sort of dire predictions about climate change which are common nowadays, the Swedish physicist dared to predict a paradise on earth for humans when he announced, in April 1896, that temperatures were rising -- and that it would be a blessing for all.

Arrhenius, who later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, calculated that the release of carbon dioxide -- or carbonic acid as it was then known -- through burning coal, oil and natural gas would lead to a significant rise in temperatures worldwide. But, he argued, "by the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates," potentially making poor harvests and famine a thing of the past. More

Climate change fruitful for fungi

Fungus enthusiast Edward Gange amassed 52,000 sightings of mushroom and toadstools during walks around Salisbury over a 50-year period.

Analysis by his son Alan, published in the journal Science, shows some fungi have started to fruit twice a year.

It is among the first studies to show a biological impact of warming in autumn.

One of the changes Professor Gange turned up was that the autumnal fruiting period has expanded. Some mushrooms and toadstools are emerging earlier each year, others later, which he thinks are responses to warmer temperatures and higher rainfall.

More spectacularly, he found that more than one third of the species recorded have started to fruit twice per year. There was no record of this before 1976; but since then, 120 species have shown an additional fruiting in spring. More

Polar Explorers Turned Back by Cold

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

"Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.The ritual in 2005 was led by Daniel Petru Corogeanu, 31, the priest at the Holy Trinity convent in Tanacu village.

Bancroft, 51, became the first woman to cross the North Pole on a 1986 expedition. She and Arnesen, 53, of Oslo, Norway, were the first women to ski across Antarctica in 2001.

It was quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said. More

"Tens of billions" needed to combat global warming

UNITED NATIONS — An international panel of scientists presented the United Nations with a sweeping, detailed plan on Tuesday to combat climate change — a challenge, it said, "to which civilization must rise."

Failure would produce a turbulent 21st century of weather extremes, spreading drought and disease, expanding oceans and displaced coastal populations, it said.

"The increasing numbers of environmental refugees as sea levels rise and storm surges increase will be in the tens of millions," panel co-chair Rosina Bierbaum, a University of Michigan ecologist, told reporters here.. More

Mars Data Suggests Global Warming on That Planet

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.

Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.. More

Allegre's second thoughts on Global Warming

Claude Allegre, one of France's leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming.

"By burning fossil fuels, man increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, for example, has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Dr. Allegre, a renowned geochemist, wrote 20 years ago in Cles pour la geologie.." Fifteen years ago, Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming's "potential risks are very great" and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe's fragility in order to stave off "spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse." More

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Are you green? How many flights have you taken in the last year? Feeling guilty about all those unnecessary car journeys? Well, maybe there's no need to feel bad.

According to a group of scientists brought together by documentary-maker Martin Durkin, if the planet is heating up, it isn't your fault and there's nothing you can do about it.

We've almost begun to take it for granted that climate change is a man-made phenomenon. But just as the environmental lobby think they've got our attention, a group of naysayers have emerged to slay the whole premise of global warming. More

Russian Academic: CO2 not to blame for global warming

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - Rising levels of carbon dioxide and other gases emitted through human activities, believed by scientists to trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, are an effect rather than the cause of global warming, a prominent Russian scientist said Monday.

Habibullo Abdusamatov, head of the space research laboratory at the St. Petersburg-based Pulkovo Observatory, said global warming stems from an increase in the sun's activity. His view contradicts the international scientific consensus that climate change is attributable to the emission of greenhouse gases generated by industrial activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

"Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy - almost throughout the last century - growth in its intensity," Abdusamatov told RIA Novosti in an interview. More

Global Warming boost to Glaciers

Researchers at Newcastle University looked at temperature trends in the western Himalaya over the past century.

They found warmer winters and cooler summers, combined with more snow and rainfall, could be causing some mountain glaciers to increase in size.

The findings are significant, because temperature and rain and snow trends in the area impact on water availability for more than 50 million Pakistanis. More

Scientists say Arctic once was tropical

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient vacation hotspot with a 74-degree Fahrenheit average temperature, alligator ancestors and palm trees. It's smack in the middle of the Arctic.

First-of-its-kind core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that 55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise, three new studies show.

"It probably was (a tropical paradise) but the mosquitoes were probably the size of your head," said Yale geology professor Mark Pagani, a study co-author. More

New Model Predicts More Intense Solar Storms Ahead

A new computer model which accurately simulates the Sun’s past few solar cycles predicts that the next cycle will be up to 50 percent stronger than its predecessor and begin a year later than expected, scientists announced Monday.

The model offers a possible solution to the 150-year-old mystery of what’s behind the Sun’s approximately 11-year cycle of activity. It could also lead to better planning for space weather, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which can disrupt navigation and power systems and threaten astronauts in space. More

Gloom! Doom! Europe to experience Ice Age

The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age.

The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream.

The changes are too big to be explained by chance, co-author Stuart Cunningham told New Scientist from a research ship off the Canary Islands, where he is collecting more data. "We think the findings are robust." More

Or global warming will melt all the glaciers

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, December 2, 2005 (ENS) - Climate change tops the list of environmental challenges facing Europe, according to a State of the Environment report issued Tuesday by the European Environment Agency. Policy makers, businesses and individuals must act now or pay a heavy price later, the report warns.

"Without effective action over several decades, global warming will see ice sheets melting in the north and the spread of deserts from the south. The continent's population could effectively become concentrated in the center." says Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the EEA. More

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Enviromentalists decry Martian global warming

A spokesman for a Martian environmentalist group blamed the global warming of that planet on human activity.

"This ongoing assault of the planet with human manufactured rovers, orbiters and probes is beginning to take its toll", said Edgar Barsoom, spokesman for the environmental activist group Redpeace. "Mars, being so much smaller than Earth, each rover is like a huge fleet of SUVs turned loose on Martian soil."

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