Unquiet Ice Speaks Volumes on Global Warming

Nothing, that is, until early in the Antarctic summer of 2001–2002. In November 2001 Scambos got a message he remembers vividly from Pedro Skvarca, a glaciologist based at the Argentine Antarctic Institute in Buenos Aires who was trying to conduct fieldwork on Larsen B. Water was everywhere. Deep cracks were forming. Skvarca was finding it impossible to work, impossible to move. Then, in late February 2002, the ponds began disappearing, draining—the water was indeed chiseling its way through the ice shelf. By mid-March remarkable satellite images showed that some 1,300 square miles of Larsen B, a slab bigger than the state of Rhode Island, had fragmented. Nothing remained of it except an armada of ice chunks, ranging from the size of Manhattan to the size of a microwave oven. Our emergency landing site, stable for thousands of years, was gone. On March 20 Scambos’s striking satellite images of the collapsing ice shelf appeared above the fold on the front page of the New York Times.

Source: Scientific American (online), February 2008

Ice cores show faster global warming

Climatologists from Bern University said their study also showed that concentrations of greenhouse gases are increasing at a faster rate, Swissinfo.com reported. For example, the concentration of carbon dioxide increased by 31 parts per million during one 1,600-year interval in the pre-industrial period -- its fastest growth before the industrial age -- and went up by the same amount in the past 20 years

Source: NewsDaily, February 1, 2008

Scientists update climate change position

The world's largest scientific society of Earth and space scientists has updated its position, saying the consequences of climate change "are not natural."

Source: NewsDaily, January 25, 2008

Ocean CO2 levels can influence climate

To discover how the situation has changed since the last ice age, researchers studied 20,000-year-old mud samples from the sub-Arctic Pacific Ocean lying approximately three feet below the present sea bed. They found the water in the ocean's depths exchanged less CO2 with the atmosphere than it does at present, while capturing more atmospheric CO2 than the water does today, suggesting as oceans become warmer as a result of climate change they release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Source: NewsDaily, January 24, 2008

Antarctic Ice Loss Speeds Up, Nearly Matches Greenland Loss

Ice loss in Antarctica increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years due to a speed-up in the flow of its glaciers and is now nearly as great as that observed in Greenland, according to a new, comprehensive study by NASA and university scientists.

Source: ScienceDaily, January 24, 2008

Scientific Group Releases New Statement on Climate Change

These climate changes, the statement says, are "best explained by the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century."

Source: LiveScience, January 24, 2008

Antarctic volcanoes identified as a possible culprit in glacier melting

Volcanic heat could still be melting ice to water and contributing to thinning and speeding up of the Pine Island glacier, which passes nearby, but Vaughan said he doubted that it could be affecting other glaciers in western Antarctica, which have also thinned in recent years. Most glaciologists, including Vaughan, say that warmer ocean water is the primary cause of thinning.

Source: Herald Tribune (online), January 20, 2008

Report: Antarctica melting accelerated

Eric Rignot -- a senior scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of the paper published online in the journal Nature Geoscience -- said Antarctica is losing ice annually, and losing it at an accelerating rate, even though land temperatures are holding steady except on the peninsula, which is warming at a rapid rate.

Source: NewsDaily, January 14, 2008

North Atlantic Warming Tied To Natural Variability

A Duke University-led analysis of available records shows that while the North Atlantic Ocean's surface waters warmed in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, the change was not uniform. In fact, the subpolar regions cooled at the same time that subtropical and tropical waters warmed.

Source: NewsDaily, January 5, 2008

CO2 trapping capacity cut by warm fall

Using computer modeling to integrate forest canopy measurements and remote satellite data, researchers found that autumn warming greatly increases soil decomposition and significantly reduces carbon dioxide uptake.

Source: NewsDaily, January 3, 2008

Arctic Warming Faster Above Ground Level, Study Finds

Global warming in the Arctic is mysteriously occurring more quickly 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) above the surface than at ground level, a new study says.

Source: National Geographic News, January 2, 2008

Gore camp suggests scientists bought off

The report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's office of the GOP ranking member cited more than 400 prominent scientists in dozens of fields of study from more than two dozen nations around the world who voiced objections to the so-called "consensus" on "man-made global warming," the subject of Gore's award-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth."

Source: WorldNetDaily, December 22, 2007

Hundreds of scientists reject global warming

A new U.S. Senate report documents hundreds of prominent scientists – experts in dozens of fields of study worldwide – who say global warming and cooling is a cycle of nature and cannot legitimately be connected to man's activities.

Source: WorldNetDaily, December 21, 2007

Heat From Earth's Magma Contributing To Melting Of Greenland Ice

Scientists have discovered what they think may be another reason why Greenland 's ice is melting: a thin spot in Earth's crust is enabling underground magma to heat the ice.

They have found at least one “hotspot” in the northeast corner of Greenland -- just below a site where an ice stream was recently discovered.

Source: ScienceDaily, December 18, 2007

Trouble in Them Thar Hills

Warmer temperatures are only part of the problem, explained geographer Thomas Painter of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, who presented his own research on snowpack in the West at the meeting. Also contributing is carbon black, known more commonly as soot, which continually rains down on the glaciers but tends to concentrate on the surface of the ice. By the calculations of his research team, Painter said, soot increases heat absorption from the sun's rays by 43%. That provides "yet another reason" to limit carbon black from industrial emissions, says climatologist Claire Parkinson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Source: Science, December 12, 2007

State of the Science: Beyond the Worst Case Climate Change Scenario

The IPCC's fourth and final assessment of the climate change problem—known as the Synthesis Report—combines all of these reports and adds that "warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate change."

Source: Scientific American, November 26, 2007

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that Arctic ice shrank by 131,000 square miles between August 17 and 21, leaving ice coverage that is well below the 2005 record low of 2.05 million square miles. This has made the Northwest Passage easier to access than was thought possible even five years ago. “We used to say that maybe by the middle of the century the Arctic would be seasonably navigable,” says Sheldon Drobot, an Arctic researcher with the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research. “Climate change is moving faster than we thought in the Arctic. At the current rate, we could see a seasonal shipping route in the next decade or two.”

Source: Discover, November 21, 2007

Sun Blamed for Warming of Earth and Other Worlds

Earth is heating up lately, but so are Mars, Pluto and other worlds in our solar system, leading some scientists to speculate that a change in the sun’s activity is the common thread linking all these baking events.

Others argue that such claims are misleading and create the false impression that rapid global warming, as Earth is experiencing, is a natural phenomenon.

Source: LiveScience, March 12, 2007

New Study Explodes Human-Global Warming Story

Writing in the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society, professor David H. Douglass (of the University of Rochester), professor John R. Christy (of the University of Alabama), Benjamin D. Pearson and professor S. Fred Singer (of the University of Virginia) report that observed patterns of temperature changes ("fingerprints") over the last 30 years disagree with what greenhouse models predict and can better be explained by natural factors, such as solar variability.

Source: NewsMax, December 10, 2007

Tropics on the Move

Scientists have detected signs that the planet's tropics may have expanded much farther north in the past 3 decades than climate models had predicted for the next century. If the findings are confirmed and the trend continues, it could place major strains on subtropical ecosystems, hasten the spread of tropical diseases, and generally make life less pleasant for populations living with the zones of change.

Source: Science, December 3, 2007

Australia Signs Kyoto Protocol; U.S. Now Only Holdout

Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd signed the paperwork Monday to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, making good on an election promise that will leave the U.S. isolated among industrialized countries in shunning the international global warming pact.

Source: National Geographic News, December 3, 2007

The Tropics Are Expanding, Study Finds

Earth's tropical belt seems to have expanded a couple hundred miles over the past quarter century, which could mean more arid weather for some already dry subtropical regions, new climate research shows.

Source: National Geographic News, December 3, 2007

'Global warming' shocker – Who's minding thermometers?

The vast majority of the stations surveyed to date fail to meet the prescribed standards. Using a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 reflecting proper maintenance and standards and 5 representing facilities that are severely compromised, Watts says 70 percent of those stations surveyed received a 4 or 5 rating, while only 4 percent received a grade of 1.

Source: WorldNetDaily, November 18, 2007

India to become third biggest CO2 emitter by 2015

“India and China will account for around 45% of the increase in global primary energy demand through 2030, when the world’s energy needs are expected to be well over 50% higher than they are today,” IEA, an energy policy adviser for its 26-member countries, including the US and 19 European countries, said in a statement.

Source: India Times (online), November 8, 2997

Weather Channel founder: Warming 'greatest scam in history'

John Coleman, now a meteorologist for San Diego TV station KUSI, calls it a "manufactured crisis" by "dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives" who have "manipulated long-term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming."

Source: WorldNetDaily, November 8, 2007

Anti-global warming report a hoax

The report was called "CO2 production by Benthic Bacteria: The Death of Manmade Global Warming Theory?" and includes a research credit line to "Daniel A Klein, Mandeep J Gupta, Philip Cooper, Arne FR Jansson" as well as acknowledgements to the Journal of Geoclimatic Studies, the Department of Climatology at the University of Arizona, and the Department of Atmospheric Physics at Goteborgs Univeritet in Sweden.

Source: WorldNetDaily, November 8, 2007

Earth losing race against rising carbon emissions

Australian and international researchers have found that weakening of the land and ocean sinks is causing carbon dioxide to accumulate in the atmosphere faster than expected.

Source: The Age, October 23, 2007

Gore gets a cold shoulder

ONE of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, October 14, 2007

Study finds CO2 didn't end ice age

A new peer-reviewed scientific study counters a major premise of global warming theory, concluding carbon dioxide did not end the last ice age

Source: WorldNetDaily, September 29, 2007

Global-warming skeptics: Might warming be 'normal'?

Mr. Taylor manages the Oregon Climate Service, and much of his work has to do with global warming. "I'm certainly in favor of doing prudent things to reduce the human impact," he says.

But unlike most climate scientists, he does not believe that anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases – mainly from coal-fired power plants and motor vehicles spewing carbon dioxide – are the main culprits. In fact, he says, "It's my belief that in the last 100 years or so natural variations have played a bigger role.

Source: Christian Science Monitor (online), September 20, 2007

What Global Warming Looks Like

To demonstrate Mazria's point, Architecture 2030 has compiled a report that features images depicting the dramatic effects of sea level rise — from about 3 to 16 feet — on 21 cities around the country.

Source: ABC News, September 14, 2007

Warming 'opens Northwest Passage'

Historically, the Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans has been ice-bound through the year.

But the agency says ice cover has been steadily shrinking, and this summer's reduction has made the route navigable.

Source: BBC News, September 14, 2007

Kids global warming book 'deceives'

Ferguson said the David-Gordon "manipulation" is critical because the central premise of the book argues CO2 drives temperature, "yet the ice core data clearly reveal temperature increases generally precede increasing CO2 by several hundred to a few thousand years."

Source: WorldNetDaily, September 14, 2007

500 scientists refute global warming dangers

More than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting the current man-made global warming scare, according to a new analysis of peer-reviewed literature by the Hudson Institute.

Source: WorldNetDaily, September 12, 2007

UN launches web portal to help tackle global warming