Global Warming Subtopics and Sidetracks

Hurricane intensity, endangered polar bears, rising sea levels, etc.

The Global Warming hoax hasn't gained sufficient traction in the news media using scientific evidence and reasoning, so the proponents of global warming hysteria have resorted to arguments that are based on feelings and emotions rather than cold hard facts.  This is especially useful when selling the global warming frenzy to school children or to the always-helpful news media. Subsections: Polar Bears Polar Ice Glaciers The Catlin Expedition Rising Sea Levels Hurricane numbers and intensity The coral reef scare Polar Bears Note:  The newest material is at the top of this subsection. The polar bear is being used for emotional leverage. Ten Climate Change "Flagship" Species Named.  Although the ten species aren't those most at risk, IUCN selected them because they are well-researched "flagship" species that are being affected by a spectrum of climate change impacts, from melting sea ice to beach erosion.  "The polar bear has become an icon of climate change, and it's doing a fabulous job," report co-author Wendy Foden of IUCN's Species Programme said by phone in Copenhagen. Move Over Polar Bear, the Arctic Fox is the New Furry Face of Global Warming.  On Wednesday's [12/16/2009] Today show, the co-hosts of the 10am hour, Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb, invited on David Mizejewski of the Wildlife Federation to participate in that talk-show time honored tradition of the animal segment but viewers couldn't enjoy the cuddly creatures without getting a dose of global warming alarmism. Polar bear and its cub drift on shrinking ice 12 miles from land ... but is it all it seems?  A forlorn polar bear cub is comforted by its mother as they drift miles from shore on a rapidly shrinking ice floe. ... But despite this image being released today, it was actually taken in August last year ... "Polar bears have four-inch-thick blubber to keep them warm, big paws that act as flippers and waterproof fur — that means they are incredibly well suited to the water.  An adult can swim up to 50 miles at five or six miles per hour, so the mum here should have no trouble completing the 12 miles back." Lessons to Be Learned in the Climate Alarm Zone.  [Scroll down]  You see, dear children, the Earth's temperature has naturally wavered between periods of hot and cold throughout its history.  And in the 130,000 years that polar bears have been around, they've managed to adapt through many periods much warmer than the one that ended last century.  Just ask evolutionary biologist Susan Crockford, who ... concluded that "There is no evidence to suggest that the polar bear or its food supply is in danger of disappearing entirely with increased Arctic warming, regardless of the dire fairy-tale scenarios predicted by computer models." Even polar bears stayed in, but people take storm in stride.  Polar bears love the snow, but there are limits.  And Lincoln Park Zoo's Anana isn't stupid — after a brief inspection of Chicago's first major snowstorm of the winter Thursday [1/7/2010] at lunchtime, she went indoors and stayed there.  "She's always been a bit of a princess," zoo spokeswoman Sharon Dewar said as the city braced for a deluge of up to 12 inches by this afternoon.  "She likes it better in the warm." Climate challenges.  We are told that the melting of Arctic ice is endangering the future of polar bears.  There were 5,000 polar bears 50 years ago.  There are 25,000 today.  This does not seem like extinction to me.  Additionally, Captain Roald Amundsen of Norway explored that entire region in 1905 — sailing through the North-West Passage — in a sailboat!  Today, there is usually ice blocking his route. Climate change not to blame for polar bear cannibalism.  The gory photos of male polar bears devouring cubs, dragging shredded carcasses around and creating a bloody mess on the white snow of Canada's North have caused a stir on the Internet and in reports that link the activity to climate change.  But cannibalism among the species is a natural occurrence, says one expert, disputing what is just the latest story to put the polar bear in the debate over man-made global warming. Court rejects lawsuit over polar bears.  The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday ruled against an environmental group that had sued the federal government for allowing oil industry activities to occur in areas that polar bears also use.  The bears are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Foolishly Choosing Bears Over Barrels.  [Al] Gore is just plain wrong.  Yet the myth he perpetuates has dealt a critical blow to our hopes for true energy independence.  Despite ever-increasing numbers and demonstrated adaptability, the famous Knut the polar bear and his kind are still said to be endangered.  That in turn has prompted the federal government to designate 200,541 square miles off the coast of Alaska as critical habitat for polar bears, effectively killing hopes to exploit the vast energy riches of the American Arctic.  The world polar bear population is at a modern high and growing. A Primer on Global Warming.  The overall polar bear population has increased from about 5,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 today, and the only two subpopulations in decline are in areas where it has been getting colder over the past 50 years.  Polar bears have survived long periods of time when the Arctic was much warmer than today.  Yet alarmists say the bears cannot survive this present warming without help from government regulators. Of Arctic Ice and Polar Bears.  Those who are most passionate about the threat of global warming have recently been up in arms about melting ice in the Arctic and using the cutest pictures of polar bears to illustrate the threat to nature caused by global warming.  Never mind that the population of polar bears is growing (from an estimated 5,000 in 1960 to 22,000 today), and we could make it grow even more quickly by, umm, not shooting them.  The pictures we see of the polar bears 'stranded' on a small ice floe make them look forlorn, but in fact these bears are either surfing — or fishing.  Polar bears swim quite nicely, thank you and rest on the occasional floe, or use it as cover while they look for something to eat. Polar Bear Hype.  Environmentalists and the media have successfully bamboozled half the populace and every school child in America into believing large numbers of polar bears are starving and drowning in the Arctic because of global warming.  But it's obviously not even close to being true.  How do we know this?  Because if even just one emaciated drowned polar bear's body had been fished from Arctic waters in the last five years, we'd have seen its sorry carcass a thousand times on TV and on the covers of Time and Vanity Fair. Polar bear expert barred by global warmists.  Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen.  Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group ... will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming. ... But one of the world's leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week's meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group. The World Wildlife Fund's Polar Bear Lies.  No doubt you've seen the ads: The music is dramatic.  The scene is tragic.  The message emotional.  Polar Bears, holding on for dear life to bits of ice, their artic habitat destroyed by Global Warming.  And the narration tells you of the tragic fate of the bears, all because of man and his selfish destruction of the earth.  Of course, the ad ends with a plea for funds to help the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) protect the bears and stop Global Warming.  Cute, fuzzy animals always do the trick.  Trouble is, it's all a lie. Alaska Governor Fights Polar Bear ESA Listing.  Republican vice presidential candidate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) is leading a legal challenge against the U.S. Interior Department's May 14 decision to list polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.  In a lawsuit filed August 4, Alaska emphasizes the scientific evidence showing polar bears are not threatened by predicted global warming and any future retreat of the Arctic polar ice cap.  The Interior Department asserted polar bears are under threat of extinction, even though the animals' numbers have increased significantly over the past several decades. The plight of the mighty polar bear.  It's fashionable to blame global warming for the shrinking of Arctic ice that makes life more difficult for polar bears.  But if global warming is merely cyclical change, the polar bear will exist in today's numbers long after "experts" predict its extinction. Legal group sues over polar-bear listing.  The Pacific Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging the Bush administration's decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species, the latest salvo in the debate over global warming and its impact on Arctic wildlife.  Reed Hopper, the foundation's lead attorney on the case, said the polar-bear listing under the Endangered Species Act was the first time "that a thriving species has been listed based entirely on speculative models forecasting future events." Polar bears and green self-hate:  Today's widespread polar bear concern is shot through with myth and misinformation.  One of the nine scientific errors found in Al Gore's horror film An Inconvenient Truth, following a case brought in the British High Court last year, concerned his claims about polar bears.  Gore claimed a scientific study had discovered that polar bears were drowning because they had to swim long distances to find ice.  Yet the only scientific study Gore's team could provide as evidence was one showing that four polar bears had recently been found drowned because of a storm. Endangered Specious.  Alaska says it will sue to challenge the listing of polar bears as a threatened species.  The designation could block vital oil and gas development.  But that was the whole point in the first place. Obama sticks with Bush-era polar bear rule.  The Obama administration will retain a Bush-era rule for polar bears, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Friday, in a move that angered activists who noted the rule limits what can be done to protect the species from global warming. The Editor says... I'd like to reiterate, as forcefully as I can, that (a) there is no shortage of polar bears, and (b) there has been no global warming since 1998. One and a Half Cheers for Interior Secretary Salazar.  Exactly a year ago President Bush's Interior Sec., Dirk Kempthorne, under pressure from greenies and global warmists, invoked the U.S. Endangered Species Act to list polar bears as "a threatened species."  The listing was idiotic; in fact polar bear numbers have doubled worldwide over the past 30 years.  And three years earlier Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, acting on the advice of people who actually live around polar bears, had filed suit against the Dept. of the Interior to prevent the listing. Unbearable Legislation.  The decision announced yesterday by the Secretary of the Interior, to list the polar bear as "threatened," removes all doubt that the Endangered Species Act is broken and in need of urgent repair.  It is the environmental movement that must take responsibility for breaking it.  A sensible discussion of the polar bear requires acknowledging a simple fact:  that the polar bear is merely a proxy for something else. Playing God with "Endangered" Species.  In an effort to ensure that no exploration or drilling for oil could occur anywhere in the habitat of the polar bear, this species was put forward for listing as "endangered" even though its population has been growing steadily since the 1950s.  The reason cited, however, involved the projection of melting sea ice over the course of the next fifty years resulting from global warming.  That's right.  A perfectly fine population of polar bears that have been around for millions of years is deemed "endangered" based on computer models for something that is not happening. Officials say polar bears to be protected species.  The Interior Department has decided to protect the polar bear as a threatened species because of the decline in Arctic sea ice from global warming, officials said Wednesday [5/14/2008].  Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne scheduled a news conference to announce the action.  It comes a day before a court-imposed deadline on deciding whether the bear should be put under the protection of the federal Endangered Species Act. Polar Bear Melodrama:  Polar bears are not the fragile, vulnerable creatures of liberal iconography.  They have thrived in the Arctic for thousands of years, both through periods when their sea-ice habitat was smaller, and larger, than it is now.  They will continue to adapt — and the Endangered Species Act can't make the slightest difference.  Such realities haven't prevented green showboaters from claiming victory after the Bush Administration designated the polar bear as a "threatened" species yesterday [5/14/2008]. Arctic Fairy Tale.  The decision on Wednesday by the U.S. Interior Department to declare the polar bear a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act is a major victory for environmentalists who have been looking for a back-door legal mechanism to limit carbon-dioxide emissions.  The decision was made after nine U.S. Geological Survey studies looked into the possibility that the polar bear might be faced with extinction late in this century. Are Polar Bears Really an Endangered Species?  Environmentalists use charismatic megafauna to raise awareness of and promote policy solutions to perceived environmental threats.  Studies show charismatic species are more likely to be protected than are less photogenic animals.  Giant pandas are charismatic megafauna, as are whales, salmon, eagles, and caribou.  The latest example is Ursus maritimus, the polar bear.  Environmental groups, claiming manmade global warming threatens the polar bears' survival, have called for an endangered species listing with extraordinarily far-reaching consequences. Fears about Polar Bear Populations Are Refuted by Scientific Forecasting.  [Scroll down]  When I joined forces with a prominent forecasting expert and one of the world's leading climate scientists to audit the government's forecasts, we found the predictions were based on false assumptions and violated many principles of scientific forecasting.  In fact, we found the government forecasters followed less than one-sixth of the relevant principles of scientific forecasting.  The bottom line is that the government studies are irrelevant to the question whether polar bears are endangered or threatened. Alaska's 'Frustrated' Governor Palin On Our 'Nonsensical' Energy Policy.  We believe that listing polar bears as such is a significant threat to development, because most live on the North Slope.  (But) the biggest problem with the ruling is that we are the only state that is impacted.  Most polar bears (are found) in Canada.  We've got other places in the world once again telling us Alaskans how to live, and whether we can develop.  We've coexisted with bears for decades to no detrimental effect.  Our bear population is thriving.  This listing is nothing but interference from outsiders who insist on keeping Alaska from developing our resources responsibly. Oil Companies Brace for Battles Over Polar Bear Listing.  The lawyers aren't clearing their calendars just yet, but the oil industry is bracing for some courtroom battles to maintain its stake in Alaska's oil-rich fields now that the Interior Department has listed polar bears as a threatened species. Polar Bear Ruling to Bring Tsunami of Lawsuits.  As expected, the U.S. Department of the Interior added the polar bear to the list of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act last week. … Such an action is logically and ethically indefensible.  For the administration to determine that the polar bear is threatened, it had to conclude that global warming will melt the ice that polar bears need to survive.  Having reached that conclusion, the Endangered Species Act requires them to take action to slow global warming.  They can't decide not to do their job and enforce the law. Governor:  Alaska to challenge polar bear listing.  The state of Alaska will sue to challenge the recent listing of polar bears as a threatened species, Gov. Sarah Palin announced Wednesday [5/21/2008].  She and other Alaska elected officials fear a listing will cripple oil and gas development in prime polar bear habitat off the state's northern and northwestern coasts.  Palin argued that there is not enough evidence to support a listing.  Polar bears are well-managed and their population has dramatically increased over 30 years as a result of conservation, she said. Canadians argue for polar bear hunt.  Officials from northern Canada were in Washington on Monday to make an unpopular argument:  Let U.S. hunters continue to kill polar bears for sport.  The politicians from Canada's Northwest Territory asked Interior Department officials to allow U.S. sportsmen to still bring back polar bear hides after their hunts in Canada's Arctic region, despite the increased protection now afforded the bear under the Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Values List.  Environmentalists have now succeeded in placing the polar bear on the Endangered Species List despite the fact that, according to The International Union for Conservation of Nature, their population has almost doubled from 10,000 in 1965 to over 20,000 in 2006.  This action will restrict the production of oil and natural gas in Alaska even further. March of the Polar Bears.  A preventive war worked out so well in Iraq that Washington last week launched another.  The new preventive war — the government responding forcefully against a postulated future threat — has been declared on behalf of polar bears, the first species whose supposed jeopardy has been ascribed to global warming. Policy Experts Reject Proposal to List Polar Bears as Threatened.  U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne proposed on December 27 that polar bears be listed as a "threatened" species, not because their populations are currently in decline but because global warming may threaten them in the future.  Kempthorne's proposal came in response to a lawsuit filed by environmental groups against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice.  I'm not quite sure what the future holds for polar bears, but it doesn't appear that any alleged manmade global warming has anything to do with it.  The report, entitled "Impacts of a Warming Arctic," pretty much debunks itself on page 23 in the graph labeled, "Observed Arctic Temperature, 1900 to Present."  If polar bears really are getting skinnier as the 1999 study suggested, it may actually be due to an increased population subsisting on the same level of available food.  After all, the harvesting of Alaskan polar bears has been limited by the Marine Mammal Protection Act and international agreements since 1972. The Polar Bears Are All Right.  In 1817, nearly a century before Roald Amundsen first navigated the long-sought Northwest Passage, the Royal Society in London got word of "new sources of warmth" in the Arctic.  The society was the Victorian-era equivalent of NASA, and its president reacted with great enthusiasm to the sudden prospect of discoveries "not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations."  Times change, as does the climate.  New sources of warmth are no longer greeted with such good cheer. The Great Polar Bear Population Puzzle.  Before anybody tries to change the world to save polar bears, which the Department of Interior listed as "threatened" last week, somebody should figure out how many polar bears there are.  When the world's foremost polar bear scientists gathered in Alaska in 1965 for their first international meeting, they confronted a cold fact:  They did not know. Church of Green:  The U.S. government just put polar bears on the threatened species list because climate change is shrinking the Arctic ice where they live.  Never mind that polar bears are in fact thriving — their numbers have quadrupled in the last 50 years.  Never mind that full implementation of the Kyoto protocols on greenhouse gases would save exactly one polar bear, according to Danish social scientist Bjørn Lomborg, author of the book Cool It! A Bear of a Problem.  Declaring the polar bear a "threatened" species imperiled by global warming certainly hands a public relations victory to environmentalist groups.  Now they have cute and cuddly mascot for their climate-change campaigns.  Given the structure of the ESA, the listing may provide them with a powerful legal weapon as well.  Because the ESA can be used to force legal action even when unwarranted or unwise, it can provide pro-regulatory forces with tremendous leverage over private development.  The one thing the listing will not do, however, is help save polar bears or the arctic habitat in which they reside. Arctic Warming Update.  Once again claims are flying thick and fast regarding dramatic, in fact, unprecedented Arctic warming.  Once again, we look at the available data, now updated to the end of 2004.  Once again, we find the claims to be dead flat wrong. There's no need to 'save' the polar bear.  Environmental groups are pushing to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, and the Bush administration is considering their demands.  It might make sense — if the polar bear were endangered.  But the worldwide population of these bears has more than doubled since 1965, to an estimated 20,000-25,000 today.  Far from being threatened, by all accounts the bears are thriving.  So what's behind the push to "save" the bears?  A desire to ban energy exploration in much of Alaska, and a threatened species tag is just the ticket to make it happen. Bear Necessities:  [Scroll down] … It was foolish of the Interior Department to add the polar bear to the endangered species list.  Anyone who thought that environmental groups would settle for half a loaf — a "threatened" listing with caveats — has failed to learn the lessons of history.  Environmental groups are, by their nature, extreme in their desires:  they are single-value groups that subordinate all other concerns to the preservation of nature. Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice.  The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on September 7 claimed that two-thirds of the world's polar bears may die by 2050 due to global warming.  Such claims are strongly contradicted by real-world evidence. Companies get OK to annoy polar bears.  Less than a month after declaring polar bears a threatened species because of global warming, the Bush administration is giving oil companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit of oil and natural gas. Referring to the article above... Polar Bears Are More Important Than Western Civilization.  Years ago we might have chuckled at reading such a silly article and shaken our heads in comical disbelief.  Today, it is clear beyond doubt that the mainstream media seeks to stage a coup by imposing their beliefs and values on the citizens of this country through incessant propagandizing and opinion shaping.  A press that writes every article with a preordained agenda and bias against individual liberties can be very dangerous if its audience does not recognize the propaganda for what it is. Federal Government Continues to Weigh ESA Listing of Polar Bears.  Dr. Mitchell Taylor, a biologist recently retired from the Nunavut Territorial government in Canada, pointed out in testimony to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that modest warming may be beneficial to the bears because it creates better habitat for seals and makes blueberry bushes more abundant.  "Ice has declined in some areas of polar bear range, and this decline in ice appears to have reduced the viability of two populations — at Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufiort.  However, polar bears are currently abundant in all populations, and are not threatened with extinction by sea ice reductions," Taylor said. Arctic Ice Melting, Polar Bears Endangered, Govt. Says.  The Bush administration wants to add polar bears to the endangered species list as a result of the ice melting in the Arctic.  Global warming is being blamed for harming the bears' habitat, but global warming skeptics are unconvinced. Do polar bears need U.S. protection?  That's the question under consideration at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which is poised to recommend whether the icon of the Arctic should be officially designated as a threatened species — even though the bear's numbers currently are not in precipitous decline.  The judiciousness of protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), in anticipation that its frozen habitat will be thawing as a consequence of climate change, is a matter of hot debate. Canada Inuit rap U.S. greens for polar bear campaign.  Leaders of Canada's Arctic Inuit people denounced U.S. environmentalists on Monday [1/14/2008] for pushing Washington to declare the polar bear a threatened species, saying the move was unnecessary and would hurt the local economy.  The United States last week delayed a decision on whether global warming threatened polar bears on the grounds that it needed more time to analyze the data.  Three U.S. green groups said they would sue for quicker action. Top 10 'Global-Warming' Myths:  (#6) Global warming has doomed the polar bears!  For some reason, Al Gore's computerized polar bear can't swim, unlike the real kind, as one might expect of an animal named Ursa Maritimus.  On the whole, these bears are thriving, if a little less well in those areas of the Arctic that are cooling (yes, cooling). Is it proven fact, or just conventional wisdom?  "If you look at the long term records, the Arctic has been as warm or warmer than it is today," says [University of Alabama at Huntsville climatologist John] Christy.  He cites temperature data from the Hadley Centre in the UK showing that from 70 degrees north latitude to the pole, the warmest years on record in the Arctic were 1937 and 1938.  This area is just slightly above the Arctic Circle.  Furthermore, those same records show that the Arctic warmed twice as fast between 1917 and 1937 as it has in the past 20 years.  After 1940, the Arctic saw a big cool-down and climatologists noted sea ice expanding in the northern Atlantic. The miraculous survival power of the polar bear:  Polar bears have become the poster animals of the catastrophic MMGW movement, like the panda is for the World Wide Fund for Nature.  Many environmental organisations are predicting the imminent extinction of polar bears because of MMGW.  The Australian activist Tim Flannery recently predicted that polar bears could be extinct in 25 years.  However, as with so many of the 'predictions' by global warming alarmists, a reality check shows this to be highly unlikely. Alaska disputes polar bear threat.  The polar bear can be found in just one place in America — Alaska — and is perhaps as much a symbol of the state as, say, alligators are of Florida.  So you might think Alaska's politicians would be pounding on doors in Washington to protect it.  You'd be wrong.  As the federal government decides whether to list polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, Gov. Sarah Palin and the state's Republican congressional delegation are solidly opposed to the idea. Polar Bears and Stalking Horses:  If the polar bear is declared "threatened," this could trigger a number of restrictions on activities that produce carbon emissions in the "lower forty-eight" states — a persistent objective of the more extreme environmentalists.  To get to that point, several groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, filed suit to put the bears into the "threatened" category.  The environmentalists' concern for polar bears is touching, but the furry creatures are only a stalking horse for their real objective:  stopping the construction of a natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the Lower Forty-Eight in order to tap the 35 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves in the North Slope. The Polar Bear And The ESA:  Backdooring Global Warming Regulations.  The federal Endangered Species Act has long been known as extremely burdensome to practioners and the landowners they represent.  If the polar bear is listed, a new set of industries will feel those burdens directly. Polars bears on the brink?  Don't you believe it.  When you're up above the Arctic Circle, on the trail of polar bears who haven't eaten a square meal in months, it's advisable to follow a few basic rules.  Number one, as perishing cold as you may be, is don't drink too much coffee.  … Polar bears, you see, have an acute sense of smell which helps them to track down prey up to 60 miles away. ESA Listing Not Needed for Polar Bears.  Many analysts see the proposal to list the polar bear as threatened as not so much about the welfare of the bears themselves but as an effort to force the Bush administration to adopt regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions. … [Steven] Milloy noted, "If the administration admits that the bear is dying due to climate change, it may be forced to start energy rationing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to comply with the Endangered Species Act.  This is what the environmentalists filing the lawsuit had in mind all along." Saving 0.06 polar bears per year:  Given limited resources to address the problem, we should put our money into the highest-yielding policies.  For example, [climate scientist Bjorn] Lomborg writes that following the enormously expensive Kyoto recommendations would save 0.06 polar bears per year at most.  "But 49 bears from the same population are getting shot every year, and this we can easily do something about." Theory On Thin Ice.  Global warming alarmists have made a big deal out of North Pole ice melting and polar bears suffering due to climate change.  Before they mouth off again, they should look at a new NASA study. … "Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming," said the University of Washington's James Morison. Polar bears in danger?  Is this some kind of joke?  No wonder Greenpeace had trouble getting polar bears placed on the endangered species list.  A fivefold population increase isn't exactly a catastrophic decline. Polar bears 'thriving as the Arctic warms up'.  Pictures of a polar bear floating precariously on a tiny iceberg have become the defining image of global warming but may be misleading, according to a new study.  A survey of the animals' numbers in Canada's eastern Arctic has revealed that they are thriving, not declining, because of mankind's interference in the environment. ESA Listing for Polar Bears Unsupported by Sound Science.  "The leftist Center for Biological Diversity conceived abuse of the Endangered Species Act for creating in the public mind a false crisis over polar bears that will force radical social changes it has been unable to obtain through the democratic process. … The intended outcome is the crippling of the U.S. economy through fossil fuel starvation, increased dependence on insecure energy sources, and a green path to serfdom…." Deadline Postponed on Polar Bear Listing.  Citing the complexity of the decision, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Monday [1/7/2008] it would not meet a deadline for a recommendation on listing polar bears as a threatened species due to global warming under the federal Endangered Species Act. The Polarizing Politics of the Polar Bear:  The question that the Fish and Wildlife Service must answer is:  Is there clear, scientific evidence that current worldwide polar bear populations are in trouble and facing possible extinction in the foreseeable future?  As the Fish and Wildlife Service reviews the issue over the next year, I feel confident they will conclude as I have, that listing the polar bear is unwarranted. Canadian Survey Reveals Polar Bears Populations Increasing.  If the polar bear is the 650-kilogram canary in the climate change coal mine, why are its numbers increasing?  The latest government survey of polar bears roaming the vast Arctic expanses of northern Quebec, Labrador and southern Baffin Island show the population of polar bears has jumped to 2,100 animals from around 800 in the mid-1980s.  As recently as three years ago, a less official count placed the number at 1,400. Polar Bears on Thin Ice, Not Really!  Though polar bears are uniquely adapted to the Arctic region, they are not wedded solely to its coldest parts nor are they restricted to a specific Arctic diet.  Aside from a variety of seals, they eat fish, kelp, caribou, ducks, sea birds and scavenged whale and walrus carcasses.  In addition, as discussed above, Arctic air temperatures were as high as present temperatures in the 1930s and polar bears survived. The Bear Facts:  The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has just put the polar bear on the endangered species list because it is supposedly "facing extinction" — mainly, it claims, as a result of global warming.  But statistics show the polar bear is not facing extinction, not by a long shot. The bears are in trouble, but they're not on thin ice.  Reports of the imminent extinction of polar bears are exaggerated, says Stuart Wavell, while another threat is ignored. Polar Bears Endangered — By Greenie Bureaucrats.  There [are] roughly twice as many polar bears in the world today as thirty years ago.  But on May 14th U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, invoking the U.S. Endangered Species Act, proclaimed polar bears as a "threatened species."  In 1972 the creatures had already lost value in the U.S. when the Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibited their hunting in Alaska.  (And no, it's not the hunting ban that caused their increased numbers; they proliferated equally in Canada which continued the polar bear season.) They are not just cute and harmless creatures. Chilling game of hide and seek with a hungry polar bear.  There are few things more enjoyable on a freezing day than a vigorous game of tag followed by a hearty meal.  Unless you're supposed to be the main course, that is. ... Barrow [Alaska] is the northernmost town of the United States, 340 miles north of the Arctic Circle.  Polar bears are frequently spotted around the area.  They are the world's largest land predator, and are the only animals that actively hunt humans. Global Warming Update:  It's deeper than just money.  Schoolteachers have created polar-bear-dying lectures to frighten and indoctrinate our children when in fact there are more polar bears now than in 1950.  They've taught children about melting glaciers.  Just recently, the International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit that their Himalayan glacier-melting fraud was done to "impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action." More about environmentalism in schools. Polar Ice Three Decades Of Global Cooling.  As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades.  Whatever happened to global warming? ... It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to the computer models.  The National Snow and Ice Data Center released its summary of summer sea-ice conditions in the Arctic last week and reported a substantial expansion of "second-year ice" — ice thick enough to have persisted through two summers of seasonal melting. Look at the polar ice caps.  [Scroll down slowly]  The arctic ice cap represents less than 2% of the earth's surface.  What these people are doing is taking only one of the two ice caps, the north one, and the difference in its extent over the most recent 30 years.  That proves nothing about "global" anything.  It is one tiny part of the planet over one relatively short time span. Climate Cools But Arctic Ice Scares Continue.  We've heard many claims of Arctic ice collapse.  In August 2000, the New York Times reported ships at the North Pole in open water and claimed it was the first open ice in 50 million years.  A picture of a submarine in open water at the Pole in March of 1959 quickly proved it wrong. ... In the 1990s, the scare was ice thinning based on comparison of data obtained by under ice submarine measures.  Trouble is they were done with different equipment in different months... Deafening Silence on Real Climate Change.  Antarctic Ice Melt Lowest Ever Measured.  Where's the headline?  Where's the television camera?  Anyone out there?  It's right there in the September 24 issue of the refereed journal Geophysical Research Letters.  The senior author is Marc Tedesco of City College of New York, not exactly off the mainstream media's beaten path.  The work was sponsored by NASA. Incredible Sea Level Rise Is ... Not Credible.  Global warming alarmists are particularly desperate to claim that the Antarctic is "warming first" -- as the computerized climate models predicted the Polar Regions would.  That's a problem.  Satellite readings show the Antarctic ice is increasing by 45 billion tons per year and the Antarctic sea ice is at record-large extent.  Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University ... points out that the average temperature in the Antarctic is about 55 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.  In order to melt any ice at all, you'd have to raise the temperature of the region by 87°F. just to get to the melting point of ice.  To do this in 50 years is -- incredible! North Pole Sea Ice twice as thick as expected.  The research aircraft "Polar 5" today [4/29/2009] concluded its Arctic expedition in Canada.  During the flight, researchers measured the current ice thickness at the North Pole and in areas that have never before been surveyed.  The result:  The sea-ice in the surveyed areas is apparently thicker than scientists had suspected. The elements conspire against the warmists.  As the clock ticks down towards December's historic UN Copenhagen conference on climate change, the frenzied efforts of the warmists to panic us over all that vanishing Arctic and Antarctic ice are degenerating into farce.  That great authority Ban Ki-moon, the UN's Secretary-General, solemnly tells us that the polar ice caps are "melting far faster than was expected just two years ago".  Yet the latest satellite information from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (passed on by the Watts Up With That blog) shows that, after the third slowest melt of April Arctic ice in 30 years, the world's polar sea ice is in fact slightly above its average extent for early May since satellite records began in 1979. Top 10 dud predictions:  In April this year, the papers were full of warnings the Arctic ice could all melt.  "We're actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time," claimed Dr David Barber, of Manitoba University, ignoring the many earlier times the Pole has been ice free. ... In fact, the Arctic's ice cover this year was almost 10 percent above last year's great low, and has refrozen rapidly since.  Meanwhile, sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been increasing. Earth bears scars of human destruction:  astronaut.  A Canadian astronaut aboard the International Space Station said on Sunday [7/26/2009] it looks like Earth's ice caps have melted a bit since he was last in orbit 12 years ago. The Editor says... Evidently we don't need continuous satellite measurements to prove global warming.  All we need is one Canadian on the Space Station to have a look now and then. Media Credibility, Not Ice Caps, In Meltdown.  Eco-warriors and media hype aside, the fact is, as we head into 2009, that the world's ice mass has been expanding not contracting.  Which will surprise evening news junkies fed a diet of polar bears floating about on ice floes and snow shelves falling into the oceans.  But if a whole series of reports on ice growth in the Arctic, the Antarctic and among glaciers are right, then it is truth in the mainstream media (MSM) that's in meltdown, not the polar ice caps. Even Antarctica is now feeling the heat of climate change.  It's official:  there is nowhere left to hide from global warming.  The notion that Antarctica is the last continent not to be heating up because of climate change is dead, according to a new study. ... On average the entire continent warmed by 0.5°C between 1957 and 2006.  On average, the planet has warmed 0.6°C in 50 years. The Editor says... The writer of this article seems surprised that there's "nowhere left to hide from global warming", but isn't that obvious, if it's global? Despite the hot air, the Antarctic is not warming up.  [Scroll down]  Another example last week was the much-publicised claim, contradicting all previous evidence, that Antarctica, the world's coldest continent, is in fact warming up, Antarctica has long been a major embarrassment to the warmists.  Al Gore and co may have wanted to scare us that the continent which contains 90 percent of all the ice on the planet is heating up, because that would be the source of all the meltwater which they claim will raise sea levels by 20 feet.  However, to provide all their pictures of ice-shelves "the size of Texas" calving off into the sea, they have had to draw on one tiny region of the continent, the Antarctic Peninsula — the only part that has been warming. George Will Q&A on his recent column.  Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review decided to ask George Will a few questions about his recent column. ... Will was recently villified for his column and for his printing of his interpretation on arctic sea ice in particular. Scare Watch:  'Arctic warming is unprecedented'.  [Scroll down]  This report reveals very little that is new, and is predicated on a number of unproven assumptions, not the least of which is that the "global warming" that began 300 years ago, when the Sun was at its least active for 10,000 years, and continued until the latter part of the 20th century, when the sun was at its most active for 11,400 years, is chiefly anthropogenic.  The mere fact of this warming, nearly all of which took place before humankind can possibly have had any significant influence, does not tell us its cause. Facts melted by 'global warming'.  Last weekend, that heroically diligent US meteorologist Anthony Watts noticed that something very odd had happened to the daily updated graph on the official Nansen website that shows how much sea-ice there is in the Arctic.  Without explanation, as he reported on his Watts Up With That website, half a million square kilometres of ice simply vanished overnight. ... The warmists are so locked into their general narrative that the plummeting temperatures and abnormal snowfalls of the past two winters have thrown their army of media groupies into quite a tizzy. Pessimistic Reporting, Optimistic Data.  Washington Post correspondant Juliet Eilperin, in her 12-26-08 report entitled "New climate change estimates more pessimistic," dutifully surveys the latest bleak findings of the climate change community. ... Three years ago what NASA quantified as an alarming loss of annual ice loss from Greenland was easily demonstrated at that time to be an insignificant loss, and today NASA's updated data appears to suggest the annual rate of global polar ice loss has actually decreased since then. Top TV Networks Spread False Arctic Sea Ice Scare.  High-profile media reports predicting the North Pole would lose its ice cover failed to materialize in 2008, as less Arctic sea ice melted than in 2007 and open water came nowhere near the North Pole.  On the July 28, 2008 NBC Nightly News, reporter Anne Thompson warned ominously of ice loss in the Arctic.  "This summer, some scientists say that ice could retreat so dramatically that open water covers the North Pole, so much so that you could sail across it." Reality cools climate cultists.  While one ice floe does not amount to a mini-ice age, the dramatic evidence runs counter to the mantra of the climate warming cult which has claimed the Arctic is becoming progressively free of ice.  The mantra of less ice has long been coupled with the warning that rising sea levels will soon swamp coastal areas and both claims have been used to heighten fears about climate change and add a greater sense of urgency to calls for action now. Another Roll of the Ice Dice.  It is my somber duty to relay that, according to Reuters, "The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013[.]"  I must admit, sad as I am, I'm mostly confused.  I read last June that "for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year."  "This year" is now last year, and the iceless age never came to pass. Canadian hunters killing narwhals trapped in ice.  Canadian hunters in a remote Arctic community have started killing a large number of narwhals — small, white whales best known for their long tusks — that are trapped by ice, a federal official said on Friday [11/21/2008].  The whales — which number between 100 and 200 — are stuck near Bylot Island, close to the tiny town of Pond Inlet on the northern end of Baffin Island.  The nearest open water is 30 miles away. Save the whales trapped in Arctic ice.  Global warming alarmists love to maintain that the Arctic ice pack is melting.  Tell it the whales trapped in Arctic ice! Our New Established Religion:  The first prediction was that the polar caps could melt, covering the whole globe with water.  (A puzzling prediction, given that there have been times when the Earth's polar caps have been almost nonexistent and yet the continents have mostly remained above water.)  Other predictions were that the increased heat energy would lead to destructive weather patterns, including droughts, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and tidal waves.  It was even, paradoxically, predicted that warming could cause another ice age. Arctic Sees Massive Gain in Ice Coverage.  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. Alarmist global warming claims melt under scientific scrutiny.  Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts.  However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat … making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."  Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet.  But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered.  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. More Ice Than Ever.  Despite a warming Southern Ocean, the amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level ever measured for this time of the year, since satellites first began to monitor it almost thirty years ago.  This represents a continuation of the record set last winter (our summer). … At present, the coverage of ice surrounding Antarctica is almost exactly two million square miles above where it is historically supposed to be at this time of year. Where ice caps grow:  You've probably heard the permanent ice cap in the Arctic has receded considerably, because the people who are worried about global warming talk about it all the time.  You may not know ice in Antarctica is growing.  This is an awkward topic for global warming alarmists, because if global warming were, er, global, this shouldn't be happening. Does CO2 really drive global warming?  The model we now have is that if the Arctic Ocean is frozen over, as is the case today, the existing ice cap is not being replenished and must shrink, as it is doing today.  As it does so, the Earth can absorb more of the Sun's radiation and therefore will heat up — global warming — as it is doing today, so long as the Arctic Ocean is closed.  When it is warm enough for the ocean to open, which oceanographic (and media) reports say is evidently happening right now, then the ice cap can begin to re-form. The Top of the World:  Is the North Pole Turning to Water?  Water at the North Pole was big news in August 2000.  Was it just another media scare story, or is the Arctic sea ice really disappearing?  This report details the whole issue of Arctic sea ice. Antarctic Ice Melt Scare Lacks Scientific Support.  Despite a warming Southern Ocean, the amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level ever measured for this time of the year, since satellites first began to monitor it almost 30 years ago. Experts challenge ice shelf claim.  Two scientists have claimed that climate change was not the only cause of the collapse of a 500bn tonne ice shelf in Antarctica six years ago.  The 656ft (200m) thick, 1,255 sq mile (3,250 sq km) Larsen B shelf broke apart in March 2002.  But Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University and Ted Scambos of Colorado University claim in a new study that it had been on the brink for decades. Ice returns as Greenland temps plummet.  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.' Arctic Sea Ice Not Melting.  A Canadian scientist is pouring cold, unfrozen water on the notion that global warming is melting arctic sea ice like a Popsicle at the beach. The end of the fake consensus on global warming.  [In his new book, Lawrence Solomon] attempts to give readers insight into how non-settled and fragmentary the science actually is on climate change.  For example, think the polar icecaps are melting?  That's true at the North Pole, but it's not certain at the South Pole, according to Duncan Wingham.  A portion of Antarctica's northern peninsula is melting.  But that's a tiny slice of the 14 million square kilometre continent.  And confounding evidence exists.  Since the inception of the South Pole research station in 1957, recorded temperatures have actually fallen. 'Nightly News' Gives One Side of Antarctica Ice Changes.  Defying the tenets of ethical journalism has become the norm for some media outlets when it the issue is global warming.  "NBC Nightly News" was no exception.  On January 14, "Nightly News" aired a biased alarmist report of changes in the ice shelf in Antarctica during its "Our Planet" segment, blaming "manmade carbon dioxide" for the shift and ignoring any other possibilities. World's largest ice sheet in 'stable' condition.  An ice sheet in Antarctica that is the world's largest — with enough water to raise global sea levels by 200 feet — is relatively stable and poses no immediate threat to ocean levels, according to new research. 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. Global Warming Is Not the Cause of Polar Ice Cap Retreat.  Although Arctic sea ice last summer reached its minimum extent since satellites began measuring the ice in 1979, NASA scientists have discovered the sea ice retreated due to variable local wind patterns rather than global warming.  Moreover, the ice re-formed at a record pace last fall.  In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctic sea ice is at its greatest extent in recorded history.  The majority of Antarctica is in a prolonged cold spell and has been accumulating snow and ice for decades. Gulf Stream Will Not Shut Down, Science Magazines Admit.  Putting to rest nearly a decade of scare scenarios involving polar ice caps quickly reclaiming Canada, the northern United States, and northern and central Europe, scientists now report there is no chance of the Gulf Stream shutting down any time soon, regardless of any predicted global warming. The Gulf Stream is Here to Stay.  The Gulf Stream, that almost mythical flow of warm seas that makes Norway and a few other Nordic countries liveable, isn't about to disappear any time soon. New research contradicts earlier theories that it might. Testing The Waters:  According to the greenies, the Earth is supposed to warm continuously and disastrously without taking any rest breaks.  Yet after taking actual data from the Labrador Sea where the Gulf Stream gives up its warmth before sinking and returning southward and projecting forward, the Kiel team says the Atlantic currents will keep rising temperatures in check around the world, much as the warming and cooling associated with El Niño and La Niña in the Pacific affect global temperatures. Open Water at the North Pole is Not Proof of Global Warming. Polar Ice Cap Studies Refute Catastrophic Global Warming Theories:  More recent studies of the polar ice caps show the polar ice caps are holding their own and actually growing slightly. Greenland's disappearing lakes leave giant ice sheets largely unmoved.  Fears that the rapid draining of water from the top of Greenland's ice sheet may be contributing to the rise of global sea levels have been allayed by new research.  Though scientists confirmed that the water can drain away faster than Niagara Falls, it did not seem to accelerate the movement of the ice sheet into the ocean as previously thought. Arctic Sea Ice — Is it Disappearing?  If we want to understand variability of Arctic sea ice (and, for that matter, sea and air temperature) we should take our eyes off greenhouse gases, at least for a moment, and study multidecadal phenomena.  We should also avoid the temptation of taking the last 20–30 years of data, computing a trend, and assuming that that trend will continue for 50–100 years.  History tells us that long-term linear trends will not occur. More breathtaking stupidity from the mainstream media.  Tom Nelson comments on the article posted immediately below.  "It's not even rare for the North Pole to be ice free." Exclusive:  No ice at the North Pole.  It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.  The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic — and worrying — examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Editor's note: First of all, the statement that there is open water at the North Pole "for the first time in human history" is simply a canard.  A group of environmental scientists on the Russian icebreaker Yamal went to the North Pole in August 2000.  "When they got to the North Pole they were greeted by an expanse of open water, photographs of which became the subject of sensationalist reporting in the media."*  Second, since there has been no global warming in several years, it is not likely that global warming is the cause of the open water at the pole.  If this report is true, however, the open water might be due to volcanic activity in the area.  (Am I the only one to connect these dots?  Can they be connected?)  It could be a case of abrupt local warming.  Keep reading... Study finds Arctic seabed afire with lava-spewing volcanoes.  The Arctic seabed is as explosive geologically as it is politically judging by the "fountains" of gas and molten lava that have been blasting out of underwater volcanoes near the North Pole.  "Explosive volatile discharge has clearly been a widespread, and ongoing, process," according to an international team that sent unmanned probes to the strange fiery world beneath the Arctic ice. Volcanic eruptions reshape Arctic ocean floor:  study.  Recent massive volcanoes have risen from the ocean floor deep under the Arctic ice cap, spewing plumes of fragmented magma into the sea, scientists who filmed the aftermath reported Wednesday.  The eruptions — as big as the one that buried Pompei — took place in 1999 along the Gakkel Ridge, an underwater mountain chain snaking 1,800 kilometres (1,100 miles) from the northern tip of Greenland to Siberia. Arctic Volcanoes Found Active at Unprecedented Depths.  Buried under thick ice and frigid water, volcanic explosions are shaking the Arctic Ocean floor at depths previously thought impossible, according to a new study. Are Volcanoes Melting Arctic?  In August 2000 the New York Times ran a piece claiming the pole was free of ice for the first time in 50 million years, long before SUVs roamed Earth.  As earth scientist Patrick Michaels noted, "It was retracted three weeks later as a barrage of scientists protested that open water is common at or near the pole at the end of summer."  As reported in the June 26 edition of ScienceDaily, a research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) has uncovered evidence of massive undersea volcanic eruptions deep beneath the ice-covered surface of the Arctic Ocean. Looks to me like there's plenty of ice at the North Pole and the South Pole. Source:  The Cryosphere Today. Chart: Global Sea Ice Area 1979-present. [A tip of the hat to Greenie Watch.] Are the ice caps melting?  The headlines last week brought us terrifying news:  The North Pole will be ice-free this summer "for the first time in human history," wrote Steve Connor in The Independent.  Or so the experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado predict.  This sounds very frightening, so let's look at the facts about polar sea ice.  As usual, there are a couple of huge problems with the reports.  Firstly, the story is neither alarming nor unique. Climate change chicanery:  Recent events have seen the scare campaign over global warming descend to the level of a Monty Python sketch.  Much publicity was given, for instance, to Lewis Gordon Pugh, who set out to paddle a kayak to the Pole to demonstrate the vanishing of the Arctic ice.  At 80.5 degrees north, still 600 miles short of his goal, he met with ice so thick that he and his fossil-fuelled support ship had to turn back. Dying for a heatwave.  Three shivering global warming activists, stuck on an ice floe in the Arctic, are helping to tear up the psychology textbooks.  In 1956, US psychologist Leon Festinger became instantly famous for giving us "cognitive dissonance" — the theory that humans couldn't tolerate two conflicting perceptions.  One would have to go.  Ha!  It's taken half a century, but warming believers are now making a monkey of old Festinger. The 'Global Warming Three' are on thin ice.  The only problem with a project to prove that Arctic ice is disappearing is the fact that it is actually getting thicker. Scientist Links Melting Polar Ice to Greenhouse Effect but Government's Own Research Shows Otherwise.  Dr. Joe D'Aleo, executive director of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project [ICECAP], said the depletion of sea ice in the Arctic is part of the Earth's cycles — and "solar activity".  "The Arctic temperatures undergo a cyclical change every 60 to 70 years tied to cycles on the sun and in the oceans," said D'Aleo, who was the first director of meteorology at The Weather Channel.  "You can see very warm temperatures in the 1930s then cooling and another warming in the last few decades in close correlation with solar activity," he added, "but with a poor correlation with CO2." Sea rise from ice melt 'overestimated'.  A bit of encroaching realism here.  They admit that the main mass of the Antarctic ice will never melt but they have a new scare to make up for that.  They think that over the next 500 years enough ice will melt to throw the earth's rotation out of balance!  But it is all speculation which ignores the fact that Antarctic ice is if anything growing overall.  There is no evidence since measurements began of Antarctic ice loss on anything like the scale projected.  And as a prediction of what could happen in 500 years' time, it is pure hubris and imagination. Report: Antarctic Ice Growing, Not Shrinking.  Ice is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.  The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast. Embellishing exaggerations.  Even the global warmists packing the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say the chances of the West Antarctic ice sheet melting completely are indistinguishable from nil.  Global temperatures would have to spike 5°F and stay there for thousands of years before half the sheet would disappear.  However, the earth's temperature has fallen more than 1°F since 1998, erasing the entire increase of the 20th century, and shows no signs of rising anytime soon. Great Lakes Are Rising.  Great Lakes water levels are on the rise, putting the damper on media reports claiming global warming has been causing declining water levels.  Water levels for each of the Great Lakes are rising.  Water levels in Lakes Huron and Michigan have risen a full foot since 2008.  Great Lakes water levels rose during the second half of the twentieth century but experienced a short-term decline from the late 1990s through the middle of this decade. Alarmists blamed that on global warming. Arctic temperature is still not above 0°C — the latest date in fifty years of record keeping.  The average arctic temperature is still not above (take your pick) 32°F 0°C 273.15°K — this the latest date in fifty years of record keeping that this has happened.  Usually it is beginning to level off now and if it does so, it will stay near freezing on average in the arctic leading to still less melting than last summer which saw a 9% increase in arctic ice than in 2007. Lies Revealed — Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice Exaggeration.  The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has admitted his organization's recent claim that the Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was "a mistake."  Greenpeace made the claim in a July 15 press release entitled "Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts," which said there will be an ice-free Arctic by 2030 because of global warming.  Under close questioning by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on the "Hardtalk" program, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, said the claim was wrong. Sen. Kerry Recycles Greenpeace's Lie About Arctic Ice.  Radical environmentalists love recycling so much that they recycle lies — and the lies are even bolder when reincarnated.  Sen. John Kerry proved it this week when he recycled Greenpeace's lie about an ice-free Arctic and said it will become a reality even sooner, by 2013. What the Stations Say:  Listed here are a set of historical temperature graphs from a large selection of mostly non-urban weather stations in both hemispheres.  This data originated with the NASA Goddard Institute (GISS) in the USA and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England.  With a few exceptions, large cities have been excluded because of Urban Heat Island Effect distortions to long-term data. Circling the Arctic.  The highly variable temperatures and amounts of sea ice in both polar regions is well-known to locals, but cherry-picked extremes have become a media weapon to scare ignorant folk with.  Greenlanders today are aware of recent warming; but history, archaeology, and the Norse sagas show that Greenland was warmer than today in the Middle Ages, when crops and trees were grown there. Arctic temperatures hit 2,000-year high.  The 1990s were the Arctic's warmest decade in the past 2,000 years, says a study released in Friday's edition of Science. ... Scientists used "natural" thermometers — such as glacial ice cores, tree rings and sediments from lakes — to calculate the temperatures of the Arctic over the past two millennia.  Instruments have been used to measure the actual temperature of the Arctic since the late 1800s. The Editor says... Hmmm... where to begin?  One or two "instruments" in the late 1800s would not be enough to perform accurate measurements of the Arctic Circle.  Before that, nobody kept records, so the "report" relies on tree rings, tea leaves and wild guesses.  But even if the current Arctic temperature is the highest in a long time, so what?  It is still plenty chilly at the north pole. Arctic ice proves to be slippery stuff .  BBC viewers were treated last week to the bizarre spectacle of Mr Ban Ki-moon standing on an Arctic ice-floe making a series of statements so laughable that it was hard to believe such a man can be Secretary-General of the UN.  Thanks to global warming, he claimed, "100 billion tons" of polar ice are melting each year, so that within 30 years the Arctic could be "ice-free". ... Everything about this oft-repeated item was propaganda of the silliest kind. Arctic melt opens shortcut.  For centuries, mariners have dreamed of an Arctic shortcut that would allow them to speed trade between Asia and the West.  And Friday, German merchant ships traversed the fabled Northeast Passage, aided by the retreat of Arctic ice that scientists have linked to global warming. The Editor says... Wouldn't it make more sense to say the ice decrease is "linked" to summertime, and the non-stop sunshine at the pole? Global blushing.  It's hard to be green when you're red-faced all the time.  It's easy to be red-faced when your cause is global warming doomsterism.  This week, the doomsters were embarrassed to learn, once again, that the planet was not in grave peril.  Antarctica, their greatest candidate for catastrophe, was not melting at an ever-faster rate, according to a report in Geophysical Research Letters, but at the slowest rate in 30 years. Hot and cold.  The Arctic ice "is melting far faster than had been previously supposed," we heard this week from the UN's Environment Program, in releasing its 2009 Climate Change Science Compendium.  This same week, National Geographic reported that the Arctic ice is probably melting far slower than previously supposed. 'Penguin tourists' trapped in Antarctic ice.  More than 100 penguin-loving tourists including dozens from Britain are trapped by ice off Antarctica aboard a Russian ice-breaker cruise ship.  The Kapitan Khlebnikov is in a bay near Snow Hill island, located off the northeastern end of the Antarctic Peninsula, and cannot leave as the bay is sealed off with ice, the Russian transportation ministry said. Sea level rise will double due to melting of Antarctica.  Sea levels could rise more than twice as fast as previously predicted due to melting ice caps around the south pole, according to the most comprehensive study into how climate change is affecting the Antarctic. The Editor is quick to point out... First of all, remember that while one pole melts, the other pole freezes.  They take turns.  It's a process called "summer and winter."  Secondly, the average annual temperature of the interior of Antarctica is -57°C (-70°F).*  This means that the temperature of Antarctica would have to increase by 100°F.  — permanently — before the polar ice would melt. Antarctica may heat up dramatically as ozone hole repairs, warn scientists.  As blanket of ozone over southern pole seals up, temperatures on continent could soar by 3°C, increasing sea level rise by 1.4m. The Editor says... Less ozone = more warming?  Obviously then, the solution to global warming is to destroy the ozone layer!  Look, the area of the oceans is 139,544,600 square miles.  Water 1.4 meters deep across that area would amount to 3,437 cubic miles.  That's about three times the volume of Lake Michigan.  I doubt if there are 3,437 cubic miles of ice within 3°C. of melting (permanently).  And even if such a mass of ice exists, in order to affect sea level it would have to be ice that is not currently floating on sea water. Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don't add up.  In his speech [at Copenhagen], Mr Gore told the conference:  "These figures are fresh.  Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years." Al Gore's melting Arctic claim unites scientist and sceptic alike.  Al Gore stood by his claim yesterday [12/15/2009] that the North Pole could be ice-free within five years, attracting a storm of criticism from scientists and sceptics alike.  In an address to the Copenhagen summit, the former Vice-President of the United States quoted an international report published this year, which suggested that the North Pole could have lost virtually all of its ice by 2015. Al Gore tries to cool 'climate spin' by correcting claims of North pole thaw.  Al Gore's office issued a formal correction yesterday [12/16/2009] to a speech the former US Vice-President had given earlier in the week that started the latest in a series of "climate spin" rows.  Mr Gore told the Copenhagen summit meeting that the latest research suggested that the North Pole would be ice-free within five to seven years. Climategate:  This time Al Gore lied.  Al Gore's claim last week that the Climategate emails were insignificant relied on two main defences.  Both are so flagrantly wrong that it's not enough to say Gore is simply mistaken.  No, Al Gore is a liar.  Last week we showed that the first of his Climategate defences was so preposterously wrong that it was doubtful he had even read the leaked emails he tried to dismiss. Climategate and the Migrating Arctic Tree Line.  [Scroll down]  The report correctly states that there has been migration of the polar tree line over the past several thousand years, but the investigators attribute this migration singularly to the cold tolerances of tree species.  Although the botanists are correct that cold tolerance does affect the northern limit of trees, they incorrectly attribute the migration solely to variation in climatic temperatures.  This is only part of the answer.  The other part lies in the in the geographic fact that creates the Arctic Circle in the first place. Sea icy off part of Antarctica despite fear of melt.  Sea water under an East Antarctic ice shelf showed no sign of higher temperatures despite fears of a thaw linked to global warming that could bring higher world ocean levels, first tests showed on Monday [1/11/2010]. Antarctica and the Myth of Deadly Rising Seas.  On Monday [1/11/2010], scientists from the Norwegian Polar Institute reported that they'd measured sea temperatures beneath an East Antarctic ice shelf and found no signs of warming whatsoever.  And while the discovery's corollaries remain mostly blurred by the few rogue mainstream media outlets actually reporting it, the findings are in fact yet another serious blow to the sky-is-falling-because-oceans-are-rising prophecies of the climate alarm crowd. Lake Erie freezes over.  Lake Erie is completely frozen over for the first time this winter season, according to the National Weather Service in Cleveland, slowing the lake-effect snow machine. ... [Meteorologist Gary] Garnet said it is fairly common for Lake Erie to freeze, and in an average Ohio winter, it is close to completely frozen most years. That's not Hell freezing over, but it's close.  Lake Erie has frozen over for the first time in 14 years, according to AccuWeather.  It's good news if you happen to live in Buffalo or southern Ontario. The Editor asks... Does anyone believe that Lake Erie is frozen over, but the North Pole is not? Hoax of the Century.  [Scroll down]  While endless keening is heard over the Arctic ice cap, we hear almost nothing of the 2009 report of the British Antarctica Survey that the sea ice cap of Antarctica has been expanding by 100,000 square kilometers a decade for 30 years.  That translates into 3,800 square miles of new Antarctic ice every year. Glaciers NZ glacier findings upset climate theory.  The paper published in Science magazine yesterday showed the Mt Cook glaciers advanced to their maximum length 6500 years ago, and have been smaller ever since.  But glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced to their maximum only in the past 700 years — during the Northern Hemisphere's "Little Ice Age", which ended about 1860. World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown.  A warning that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it. The Latest Global-Warming Baloney:  Glaciergate.  Yet what these revelations do prove, again, is that the groups and individuals attempting to sell the world the idea that "the planet is melting" are, at best, prone to wild exaggerations to scare people into accepting radical plans that would cripple economies and restrict freedom.  At worst, they have, again, shown themselves capable of outright fraud in the name of their ideological commitment to cripple capitalism. When 'green' is shorthand for environmental idiocy.  Unfortunately, the lights-out campaign exemplifies the state of much of our environmental debate.  We are spoon fed stories that fit preconceived frameworks.  For example, the recent breakup of a massive glacier in the Antarctic supposedly proves the mounting effects of global warming.  But we don't hear that the area was ice-free, possibly just some 400 years ago, without the help of global warming.  We don't hear that the Wilkins Glacier makes up less than 0.01 percent of Antarctica.  Nor do we hear that the Antarctic is experiencing record sea ice coverage since satellite measurements began. Study show Greenland's glaciers have been shrinking for 100 years.  Greenland's glaciers have been shrinking for the past century, according to a Danish study, suggesting that the ice melt is not a recent phenomenon caused by global warming. Here Comes The Sun.  Drip by drip, like a glacier melting in the sun, the claim that man is changing the climate is dissolving into irrelevance.  The recent findings of Swiss researchers expose another hole.  Former Vice President Al Gore has for years warned that man-made global warming is melting the world's glaciers — a tactic commonly used by alarmists who want to whip up hysteria.  Swiss researchers, however, have presented evidence that weakens the argument. The IPCC's Abominable Snowmen:  The scientists who said that Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 have admitted the claim has as much credibility as sightings of the mythical Yeti.  It's their fraudulent claims that are melting away. UN climate panel blunders again over Himalayan glaciers.  The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.  Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers. Pachauri:  The real story behind the Glaciergate scandal.  I can report a further dramatic twist to what has inevitably been dubbed "Glaciergate" — the international row surrounding the revelation that the latest report on global warming by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contained a wildly alarmist, unfounded claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. Glacier scientist:  I knew data hadn't been verified.  The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. 12 more glaciers that haven't heard the news about global warming.  Turns out the IPCC's chicken little story that all the Himalayan glaciers are melting is just another exaggeration.  Or fraud.  Take your choice.  You know, like the stats coming out of East Anglia CRU. Global Warming Dogma Melts in Glaciergate.  [Scroll down]  The latest setback came last week, when the world was presented with a new climate scandal:  Glaciergate.  In the latest case, it turns out that the IPCC employed shockingly sloppy science to suggest that, as a consequence of global warming, Himalayan glaciers were on the verge of destruction.  Specifically, the IPCC fabricated a non-existent link between climate change and natural disasters. The Wheels Come Off for the IPCC.  Back in December 2009, Madhav Khandekar, in a guest posting on the blog of Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., questioned the IPCC AR4 report's conclusion that glaciers in the Himalayas — vital to the water supply of the whole Ganges Valley — would disappear by 2035.  The problem was that this really couldn't be verified in the "peer-reviewed" literature.  In fact, as it was investigated, it looked more and more suspicious. Can Climate Forecasts Still Be Trusted?  [Scroll down]  In its current report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the glacier, which is 71 kilometers (44 miles) long, could disappear by 2035.  It also predicts that the other 45,000 glaciers in the world's highest mountain range will be virtually gone by then ... "This prognosis is, of course, complete nonsense," says John Shroder, a geologist and expert on glaciers at the University of Nebraska in Omaha.  The results of his research tell a completely different story. Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen.  Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it.  He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.  The IPCC's report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions. Student Paper Is Prime Source on Ice-Melting.  The IPCC's latest scientific transgression consists in basing assertions about ice disappearing from the earth's mountain tops on a dissertation written by a geography student studying for the equivalent of a master's degree at the University of Berne. The great global warming collapse:  In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim:  The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035. ... But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it.  It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF [World Wildlife Fund] itself. What to say to a 'warmer':  An Indian climate official admitted in January that, as lead author of the IPCC's Asian report, he intentionally exaggerated when claiming Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 in order to prod governments into action.  This fraudulent claim was not based on scientific research or peer-reviewed.  Instead it was originally advanced by a researcher, since hired by a global warming research organization, who later admitted it was "speculation" lifted from a popular magazine. Climate Change Debate Over?  It's Just Begun!  Isn't it really funny how all the "errors" made by the climate scientists seem to fall on one side of the debate?  If the glaciers of the Himalayas are all going to melt by 2035, that's a real problem.  But if they're not expected to melt until 2350, it's another matter.  Guess which date the IPCC chose to publish?  Just a typo? The Catlin Expedition Here we have three people attempting to walk to the North Pole to prove that the ice is all gone.  (If there was no ice, they couldn't walk to the pole.  It is the Arctic Ocean after all.)  They soon learned that the Arctic Circle is just as cold as it has ever been. The Gore Effect:  Catlin Arctic Expedition Hampered by Cold.  The Catlin Expedition, which is trekking to the North Pole to highlight effects of global warming on Arctic sea ice, has had equipment malfunctions due to extremely cold weather. ... One of the key pieces of equipment that failed is a radar device to measure ice thickness.  The expedition seeks to show that arctic sea ice is getting thinner due to global warming. Arctic Ice Thicker than Expected; Catlin Trek on reduced rations.  The German team found ice up to four meters thick when they were expecting the ice to be about 2 meters thick.  The CAS expediton was designed to show that ice thickness is decreasing, but they have not released any ice thickness data yet. ... If the resupply flight does not make it to the team soon, a rescue flight may be necessary.  The leader of the team, Pen Hadow, had been rescued on the arctic ice in 2003 during another expedition. Liberal Fantasyland.  The Catlin Arctic Ice Survey is giving up on its journey to the North Pole to measure arctic ice thickness.  Championed by Prince Charles and funded by an insurance company that wants to sell insurance against climate change, the Catlin team travelled 434 km in 73 days, with 490 km remaining to the pole. The Catlin Ice Follies.  The global warmists have yet another embarrassment on their hands.  The Catlin Arctic Survey was the brainchild of British explorer Pen Hadow who organized an expedition to trek to the North Pole to highlight how global warming was melting the Arctic ice cap.  But his quest was thwarted when Mother Nature responded with fierce winds, bitter cold temperatures, and just plain lousy weather which destroyed ice measuring equipment and hampered resupply efforts, which at one point, left the team close to starvation. Explorers:  North Pole summers ice free in 10 years.  The North Pole will turn into an open sea during summer within a decade, according to data released Wednesday [10/14/2009] by a team of explorers who trekked through the Arctic for three months. The Editor says... Having failed to prove what they set out to prove on their mission, the "explorers" return and simply declare that the ice will disappear in ten years.  Why is their opinion of any more value than yours or mine? Another expedition, equally pointless, equally unsuccessful: North Pole expedition abandoned.  [Scroll down]  The trio had aimed to be the first Irish team to reach the North Pole without the aid of dogs or any mechanical means.  They had been planning to walk, ski and swim in their 784km journey, which would have taken almost two months. ... In a message to Mr Foley, Mr Falvey said the team had spent five days in -40 degree conditions. ... The team was prepared for all eventualities, including the possibility that they might have to swim in sub-zero temperatures. The Editor says... That sounds like a perfectly sensible project, doesn't it? Change is a cold certainty.  Russian sea captain Dimitri Zinchenko has been steering ships through the pack ice of Antarctica for three decades and is waiting to see evidence of the global warming about which he has heard so much.  Zinchenko's vessel, the Spirit of Enderby, was commissioned in January last year to retrace the steps of the great Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, marking the century of his Nimrod expedition of 1907-09.  Spirit of Enderby was blocked by a wall of pack ice at the entrance to the Ross Sea, about 400km short of Shackleton's base hut at Cape Royds. Report:  Antarctic Ice Growing, Not Shrinking.  Ice is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.  The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast. Closest Station Antarctic Reconstruction.  In my last alternate reconstruction of Antarctic temperature I used the covariance of satellite information to weight surface stations.  While the reconstruction is reasonable I found that it distributed the trends too far from the stations.  This prompted me to think of a way to weight stations by area as best as I can.  The algorithm I employed uses only surface station data laid on the 5509 grid cell locations of the Steig satellite reconstruction. Arctic sea ice does not melt in place, it is pushed out of the arctic by winds and currents.  "One of the common misconceptions pushed in the media is that Arctic sea ice simply 'melts in place'. ... [But] this NASA JPL study that suggests winds may play a key role in pushing Arctic sea ice into lower latitudes where it melts.  The author suggests winds may be the dominant factor in the 2007 record low ice extent ..." Sea ice around Antarctica has been increasing since the 1970s.  The study by the British Antarctic Survey, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, says rather than melting as a result of global warming, Antarctica continues to expand.  The fact that Antarctic ice is still growing does not in itself prove that global warming is not happening.  But the BAS says increased ice formation can be explained by another environmental concern, the hole in the ozone layer, which is affecting local weather conditions. Polar meltdown? NOT!  According to the University of Illinois Antarctic sea ice is nearly 1,000,000 square kilometers above the 1979-2000 normal.  That means that the excess sea ice would cover an area about the size of Michigan and California combined!  According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, CO — Antarctic sea ice has grown at the rate of over 4% per decade over the past 30 years and reached an all-time maximum in 2008. Climate change research:  Weather hampers Arctic mission.  Extreme weather conditions are hampering attempts by a team of three British explorers to survey the Arctic sea ice around the North Pole.  The Catlin Arctic survey expedition, led by the explorer Pen Hadow is travelling around 1,000 km on foot to the pole. Global Warmists' Sly Polar Disorder.  If there's one thing climate alarmists have become quite good at, it's retrofitting both their computer models and the climate phenomena those models predict whenever they fail to do so correctly.  And whether projecting increases in temperature, sea levels or atmospheric carbon dioxide — that means often.  But some of the most brazen intellectual corruption warmists have committed under fire concerns the sometimes polar opposite trends of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice. Rising Sea Levels The Effects of Burning Hydrocarbon Fuels over the last 100 years:  This is a guest editorial by Dennis Barr, who asserts that the burning of hydrocarbon fuels — not global warming — is the reason for the one-foot increase in the mean sea level over the last century.  Dennis ran the numbers and calculated that the combustion of one gallon of octane produces one gallon of water — and it is water that did not previously exist. Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told'.  If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels.  The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.  Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59 cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. Sea Level Rise:  A Major Non-existent Threat Exploited by Alarmists.  Sea level is not level.  This is a surprise to most people and enough to make claims of changing level questionable.  For example, it is different at each end of the Panama Canal yet the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are connected at the both ends of the Americas.  Sea level varies with changes in atmospheric pressure.  It can rise up several meters over very large areas under large low-pressure systems.  This is a factor in dramatic sea level rise when hurricanes approach land.  It can vary with winds piling it up in one area and removing it in another.  It varies with variations in crustal density. Skeptical Environmentalist' Doubts 'Underwater Manhattan' Global Warming Scenario.  One of the tricks in the global warming alarmist playbook over the years has been to show how global warming will cause sea levels to rise and flood the low-lying coastal areas where population centers happen to be, specifically lower Manhattan in New York City. Hot air from Obama:  In one of his first public policy statements as America's president-elect, Barack Obama focused on climate change, and clearly stated both his priorities and the facts on which these priorities rest.  Unfortunately, both are weak, or even wrong. ... Obama went on to say why he wants to prioritise global warming policies:  "The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.  Sea levels are rising.  Coastlines are shrinking.  We've seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season." ... These statements are — however eloquent — seriously wrong or misleading.  Sea levels are rising, but they have been rising at least since the early 1800s. Climate change is driving increase in tiger attacks.  The number of tiger attacks on people is growing in India's Sundarban islands as habitat loss and dwindling prey caused by climate change drives them to prowl into villages for food, conservation experts say.  Wildlife experts say endangered tigers in the world's largest reserve are turning on humans because rising sea levels and coastal erosion are steadily shrinking the tigers' natural habitat. This story also appears under the heading of Global Warming is Blamed for Everything. When Will We Tire of the Fear Mongers?  Sea level may rise a foot this century, according to a new report from that font of unvarnished truth, the United Nations.  But seas have been rising seven inches a century for at least the past 800 years.  No one knows where former vice president Al Gore gets his scary 20 foot prediction for sea level rise. Global Warming:  Unfinished Business.  Sea level rise is a major feared impact of a future warming.  It seems likely, however, that increased evaporation from the ocean may lead to more rapid accumulation of polar ice and a lowering of sea level.  This possibility is supported by an observed inverse correlation between sea level rate of rise and tropical sea surface temperature. An Inconvenient Truth exaggerated sea level rise.  While some mainstream predictions project sea levels 2 to 4 meters higher by 2100, a new study published today [9/4/2008] in Science concludes that a rise in sea level between 0.8 and 2 meters is much more likely.  While scientists agree that sea levels rose by six inches over the course of the 20th century, estimates of future rises remain hazy…. The Truth about the Maldives and Sri Lanka.  In 2000 we launched an international sea level research project in the Maldives to shed new light on these manifold sea level problems.  We soon understood that this region was by no means undergoing a present sea level rise, and we are now able to give the all-clear for the near future.  [PDF] Climate chaos?  Don't believe it.  In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3°C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1°C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch).  The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports. The history of Greenland alone should be enough to convince you that global warming is a natural process. Who's Afraid of Global Warming?  J.R. Dunn debunks the presupposition of global warming's connection to rising sea levels, eroding beaches, threats to coral reefs, mass extinction, storm severity, melting ice sheets, and widespread tropical diseases. This chart shows sea level has risen, by best estimates, between four and eight inches in the last 150 years. Will sea levels rise 20 feet as Gore predicts?  First of all, let's understand just how cold the Antarctic is.  Winter temperatures on its high, cold interior plateau range from 40 to 95°F below zero!  In the summer (December) it "warms," with temperatures dipping only to 49°F below zero — and sometimes rising within 25°F of the melting point (32°F).  But even then, the ice reflects virtually all of the sun's rays back out into space. Sea Level Rise:  The 20th Century in Perspective.  In contrast to the oft-stated claim that the rate of sea-level rise has been accelerating in tandem with the rate of rise in the air's CO2 concentration and/or its temperature, Larsen and Clark could find no evidence that supports that contention. Warming Likely to Have Modest Effect on Sea Level, If Any.  One of the great fears generated by global warming is that the oceans are about to rise and swallow our coasts.  These concerns have been heightened by the substantial uptick in Atlantic hurricane activity that began in 1995.  The frequency of really strong storms striking the United States now resembles what it was in the 1940s and '50s, however, which few people (aging climatologists excepted) remember. Volcanic eruptions cause sea level spike.  The fiercest volcanic eruptions affect global sea level in unexpected ways — at least, in the short term — according to a new study.  Particles produced by major eruptions are known to block out sunlight and cool both the ground and the ocean.  But computer modellers previously thought this might result in a drop in sea level, since water becomes denser as it cools.  In fact, sea levels shoot up after an eruption — initially, at least — according to Aslak Grinsted of the University of Lapland in Finland and colleagues. Why Worry About Global Warming?  (1) Whereas the climate modelers in 1980 were forecasting an increase in sea levels of 30 feet, that forecast fell to three to five feet by 1988, and the current forecast is only 12 inches.  (2) New evidence shows that the polar ice caps are growing, not melting; and almost all the warming at the poles is occurring during the polar winters, when no melting can occur.  (3) New research on hurricanes shows they are not produced by global warming and, if anything, warmer temperatures make hurricanes less severe.  (4) Most of the warming so far has occurred at night, reducing the number of frosts and increasing the growing season for farmers – 1990, one of the warmest years in recent history, was also a record year for crops. Flatter oceans may have caused 1920s sea rise.  The movement of a colossal "mounds" of water in the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans may have caused sea levels to suddenly begin rising more quickly in the 1920s, researchers say.  Their analysis presents a more complex picture of sea-level change and suggests that the rate of change has been more dramatic than previously thought. Global warming impact may be overstated.  The most pessimistic predictions of sea level rises as ice sheets are melted by global warming may have to be scaled back as a result of an extraordinary discovery that ice persisted when the Earth was much hotter than today.  Scientists have discovered that glaciers survived for hundreds of thousands of years during an extraordinary era when crocodiles roamed the Arctic and the tropical Atlantic Ocean was as warm as human blood. Global Warmists' Mouths Frozen Shut.  [Scroll down]  Neither the short-term nor long-term trends keep the alarmists from fear-mongering with junk science intended to cause you to give up your money and your economic liberty.  Energy Secretary Steven Chu warned earlier this year of dramatic long-term sea-level rises due to global warming even though multiple studies have shown no trend of accelerating rises ... and no rise at all around some of the island nations like Tuvalu and the Maldives which routinely try to extort money from the west with the excuse that we're causing them to be flooded out of existence. Error in Dutch polder data undermines trust in IPCC.  A United Nations report wrongly claimed that more than half of the Netherlands is currently below sea level.  In fact, just twenty percent of the country consists of polders that are pumped dry, and which are at risk of flooding if global warming causes rising sea levels. New Paper in Science: Sea level 81,000 years ago was one meter higher while CO2 was lower.  Sea-level rises and falls as Earth's giant ice sheets shrink and grow.  It has been thought that sea level around 81,000 years ago — well into the last glacial period — was 15 to 20 meters below that of today and, thus, that the ice sheets were more extensive.  Dorale et al. now challenge this view. Scientists Retract Paper on Rising Sea Levels Due to Errors.  Scientists have been forced to retract a paper that claimed sea level were rising thanks to the effects of global warming, after mistakes were discovered that undermined the results. A few words about Tuvalu Tuvalu is the poster child for the "crisis" of rising sea levels.  It could be that Tuvalu is subsiding and the mean sea level is more or less constant.  But the citizens of Tuvalu have their hands out, looking for a way to cash in on this alleged crisis, since they have no other substantial sources of income. Don't boo-hoo for Tuvalu:  If you heard that the island nation of Tuvalu was being swallowed up by the ocean thanks to global warming, Patrick J. Michaels would like to put your mind at ease.  Sea level around Tuvalu has been falling precipitously for the last half-century.  The natives want out because they wrecked the place. Sinking Islands or Stinking Islands?  The headline on Monday [4/20/2009] read, "Climate refugees in Pacific flee rising seas".  Boy did the editors get this one wrong.  A more accurate caption would have been, "Jesse Jackson-like shake-down gets tribe taken off tropical trash heap".  A focus of the story was the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. ... For decades there have been ridiculous rumors of islands sinking due to rising waters.  The Tuvaluan fantasy has been especially propagated by Al Gore's brilliant work of fiction, An Inconvenient Truth. The supremacy of Tuvalu.  Among the heroes of the [Copenhagen climate change] conference are Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe.  Andrew Bolt gets to the heart of the conference with a look at one of the lesser known figures.  Bolt writes:  "Nothing is real in Copenhagen — not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the 'solution.'"  Quoting a report from the Australian, Bolt provides a good example of "how fake it all is." It's settled; climate circus was a fairy tale.  Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms. ... Alas, nowhere in this emotionally harrowing dispatch was there room to mention that Ian Fry's country is not Tuvalu but Australia, where he lives relatively safe from rising sea levels given that he's a hundred miles inland. Embellishing exaggerations.  Before you paddle off for higher ground, remember Mr. Gore, a Democrat whose education and training are in government, politics and the law, not science, has been known to embellish from time to time and leave out important facts.  He does this to raise the volume of his alarmism to attract "journalists" forever on the lookout for fodder for apocalyptic reporting.  This symbiosis is most closely replicated in nature by farm animals and dung beetles. Don't Drown in Hysteria!  Read Climate Depot's Factsheet on Sea Level. Climate change quickens, seas feared up 2 meters.  Global warming is happening faster than expected and at worst could raise sea levels by up to 2 meters (6½ ft) by 2100, a group of scientists said on Tuesday [11/24/2009] in a warning to next month's U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. The Editor says... Global warming stopped, or at least halted temporarily, at least ten years ago. Hurricane numbers and intensity Related topic:  You may wonder if it is possible to forecast global warming trends for the next 100 years, when forecasters can't make accurate predictions about this year's hurricane season. Bad climate for global worriers.  In 2005, global warming worriers warned, as they tend to do after all adverse or anomalous environmental events, that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming and foreshadowed an increase in the number and destructiveness of hurricanes.  As this year's Atlantic hurricane season ends, only three hurricanes have formed — half the average of the past 50 years — and none has hit the United States. Latest science debunks Hurricanes and Global Warming Link.  Before the media starts predictably linking Hurricane Gustav and Hannah to man-made global warming a sampling of a few of the most recent studies should easily silence such chatter. Post hoc, ergo procter hoc. Sunspot-hurricane link proposed.  A new study suggests that more sunspots mean less intense hurricanes on Earth.  But many hurricane experts are cool on the idea.  James Elsner, a climatologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has analyzed hurricane data going back more than a century.  He says he has identified a 10- to 12-year cycle in hurricane records that corresponds to the solar cycle, in which the Sun's magnetic activity rises and falls. M.I.T. Scientists:  Warming Will Actually Reduce Number of Hurricanes.  After Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, global warming alarmists claimed greenhouse gas emissions had led to a season that had 22 named tropical storms.  Recent reports raise strong doubts about those claims. Global Warming Hurricane Scare Exposed as Hot Air.  Two new studies of historical hurricane patterns have slammed the door on claims that global warming has caused unusually strong and frequent hurricanes during the past few years.  The studies add to a growing body of research that is quietly discrediting global warming alarmism.  In the June 7 issue of Nature, scientists documented their reconstruction of Atlantic Ocean hurricane activity dating back 270 years. They found the 1970s and 1980s were periods of "anomalously low" hurricane activity compared with historical norms. Revisiting the global warming-hurricane link:  Since the devastating 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, scientists have been briskly testing the notion that global warming's fingerprints have already appeared on tropical-cyclone activity worldwide.  Now, a new analysis from the scientist who helped trigger that flurry of studies suggests that the answer to questions about global warming's impact on current tropical cyclone trends may instead be:  No, not yet. Hurricane expert reconsiders global warming's impact.  One of the most influential scientists behind the theory that global warming has intensified recent hurricane activity says he will reconsider his stand.  The hurricane expert, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this week unveiled a novel technique for predicting hurricane activity. Hurricane Intensity Trends Are Natural, Not Manmade.  Clearly, Floridians have a lot at stake when hurricane season approaches each year.  Hence the question of whether human-induced changes in the Earth's greenhouse effect may impact current or future hurricane patterns is probably nowhere more important than it is in Florida, with its 17.3 million coastal residents (making up half of the vulnerable coastal population from Texas through North Carolina). Decisions to name storms draw concern.  With another hurricane season set to end this Friday, a controversy is brewing over decisions of the National Hurricane Center to designate several borderline systems as tropical storms.  Some meteorologists, including former hurricane center director Neil Frank, say as many as six of this year's 14 named tropical systems might have failed in earlier decades to earn "named storm" status. Expert disputes storms' link to global warming.  Chris Landsea, science and operations director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said the notion that global warming is causing an increase in hurricanes gained widespread attention after the stormy seasons of 2004 and 2005.  But that perception is wrong and the statistics don't bear it out, Landsea told about 200 students and professors in the auditorium at USC's geography building.  Further study continues to show that hurricane activity occurs in cycles of 20 to 45 years, he said. Hurricanes:  are they or aren't they?  Much is being made of increased hurricane threat as a result of human-induced (anthropogenic) global warming (AGW).  This is a contentious issue, to say the least, with a great deal of "he said, she said" making the situation as clear as mud.  Let's see if we can't slice through a little of the heated rhetoric and try to find any cold facts that may be available. Global Mean Temperature in degress Kelvin, 1850-2000 Carbon dioxide, storm strength not linked, Gray says.  Major cuts in carbon emissions would hurt the nation's economy and provide little or no environmental benefit, a top hurricane predictor said Friday [5/18/2007].  And there's scant evidence that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases affect hurricane power or frequency, professor William Gray told an audience Friday, the final day of the Governor's Hurricane Conference in Fort Lauderdale. Big increase in hurricanes is not caused by global heating, say scientists.  Hurricanes in the Atlantic are increasing because of natural weather patterns rather than global warming, a study has concluded.  Growing numbers of hurricanes battering the United States and the Caribbean have made their presence felt in the past decade and are forecast to worsen.  Global warming has been cited as a possible cause but researchers looking at sediment and coral deposits have now identified natural variations in their frequency. Three Things to Know About Global Warming:  (#2) Global warming does not affect the frequency and strength of hurricanes.  According to Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center:  "Hurricanes, and especially major hurricanes, are cyclical.  We'll have a few decades of really active hurricanes, and then inactive periods, followed by active periods again. Blaming Bush.  About the connection between hurricanes and global warming, [Stanley] Goldenberg [meteorologist at the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA] concludes, "I speak for many hurricane climate researchers in saying such claims are nonsense." Hurricane Katrina and Global Warming:  Katrina has nothing to do with global warming.  Nothing.  It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces. Study:  Global warming may diminish Atlantic hurricane activity.  The debate over whether global warming affects hurricanes may be running into some unexpected turbulence.  Many researchers believe warming is causing the storms to get stronger, while others aren't so sure.  Now, a new study raises the possibility that global warming might even make it harder for hurricanes to form. Global Warming and Hurricanes:  Still No Connection.  While the impacts of the currently active hurricane period are being felt especially hard in the United States, there remains no scientific proof that human contributions to an enhanced greenhouse effect are the root cause. Assigning blame for Hurricane Katrina:  This kind of stupidity merits no attention whatsoever, but I'll give it a paragraph.  There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes.  Period. CBS Whips Up Worry about Hurricane Season:  The first day of spring [2006] proved perfect timing for the CBS's Jim Acosta to resurrect global warming as the villain behind last year's hurricane season, downplaying how hotly debated the matter is in the scientific community. Dr. Gray says Al Gore does 'great disservice' by stirring up alarm over global warming.  Dr. William Gray, the scientist known as America's most reliable hurricane forecaster, on Friday called Al Gore "a gross alarmist" for making the Oscar-winning documentary about global warming. Forecaster Blasts Gore on Global Warming.  A top hurricane forecaster called Al Gore "a gross alarmist" Friday [4/6/2007] for making an Oscar-winning documentary about global warming.  "He's one of these guys that preaches the end of the world type of things.  I think he's doing a great disservice and he doesn't know what he's talking about," Dr. William Gray said in an interview with The Associated Press at the National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans, where he delivered the closing speech. Florida Billboards Blame Bush for Hurricanes.  Because President George W. Bush has "ignored the threat of global warming," Floridians can expect to be hit by increasingly destructive hurricanes, a new billboard campaign says.  The billboards, going up along Interstate 4 between Tampa and Orlando — a week before the presidential election — read, "Global warming equals worse hurricanes.  George Bush just doesn't get it." The Editor says... This demonstrates that the global warming issue isn't about science, it's about politics. I'm No Climatologist.  I'm sure Al Gore will find some way to spin the spectacular lack of serious tropical storms this year into more proof of human caused climate damage.  He is probably just waiting for the right moment. Tornadoes are not a sign of global warming.  Climate and environment were previously outside of politics, but once they became potential election issues politicians exploited them better than environmentalists. … So before anyone attempts to make political gain from the tragic events of the tornados that killed people across the southern US recently, let's put the science on the record.  And while we're at it let's explode another false claim that storms and severe weather will increase with global warming. Global Hurricane Activity Lowest in 30 Years.  Global hurricane activity over the past two years fell to its lowest level in at least 30 years, according to a researcher at the Florida State University Center for Ocean-Atmosphere Prediction Studies.  The news drives another nail in the coffin of the myth that global warming is causing an increase in hurricane activity and intensity.  "Global hurricane activity has continued to sink to levels not seen since the 1970s," researcher Ryan Maue noted on the Web page of meteorologist Anthony Watts. Big Tropical Storms in Atlantic Hit 1,000-Year High.  The people of U.S. Gulf Coast have felt unusually battered by big storms during the past few years.  Now, it turns out their instincts are right.  A new report in the scientific journal Nature indicates that the last decade has seen, on average, more frequent hurricanes than any time in the last 1,000 years. The Editor says... Wow!  That's astonishing news, especially since there are no detailed records of such things before World War II.  National Geographic (dot com) says, "Accurate records of hurricane activity date back 60 years for the Atlantic Ocean and the western Northern Pacific Ocean, but only about 30 years elsewhere."* Climate change 'to cost more than £300 billion'.  The UN originally said it would cost just £25 to £105 billion ($40-170 billion), or the cost of about three Olympic Games per year, from 2030 to pay for the sea defences, increase in deaths and damage to infrastructure caused by global warming.  However a new study by leading scientific body the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London estimated it will cost more than triple that amount per annum. The Editor says... Here's a suggestion:  Wait until there is a problem before spending the money.  Where are the deaths and "damage to infrastructure?"  If sea levels are rising at the rate of one foot per century, there's no rush. My Global Warming Epiphany:  How can you blame man for sea levels rising when about 99% of that rise since the last ice age occurred before man built the pyramids, much less SUVs?  A rise in sea level over the last century should not be surprising; it's been rising for the last 20,000 years. More Science Fiction from the IPCC.  In reality, hurricanes, in both strength and in frequency, have been decreasing over the past four years.  Ryan Maue of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) at Florida State University, a hurricane researcher, has shown that "global and Northern Hemisphere tropical cyclone activity remains near 30-year historical lows — three years in a row now of considerably below-average activity globally." UN's climate link to hurricanes in doubt.  Research by hurricane scientists may force the UN's climate panel to reconsider its claims that greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the number of tropical storms.  The benchmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that a worldwide increase in hurricane-force storms since 1970 was probably linked to global warming. ... However, the latest research, just published in Nature Geoscience, paints a very different picture. Hoax of the Century.  [Scroll down]  Though America endured one of the worst winters ever, while the 2009 hurricane season was among the mildest, the warmers say this proves nothing.  But when our winters were mild and the 2005 hurricane season brought four major storms to the U.S. coast, Katrina among them, the warmers said this validated their theory.  You can't have it both ways. The coral reef scare Moved to this page. 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