Better hurry up and fetch your ice cubes! The Antarctic is claimed to be melting at an unprecedented rate. NASA wants you believe that “Massive Antarctic Ice Shelf Will Be Gone Within Years.”  More specifically, a team led by Ala Khazendar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has found that the ice is melting so fast that the shelf will be gone before 2020. Presumably, that’s the good news.

The bad news is that it’s all Hullabaloo. Neither the Arctic nor the Antarctic sea-ice is melting at any rate out of the norm. In fact, the opposite is true. As of late, both Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice extents have been increasing at rates not seen for a long time.

More likely than not, the approaching Grand Minimum of sunspot numbers portends even more frigid climates than experienced in recent winters.

Arctic Sea-Ice

Other NASA sources, I mean those that actually measure (what a novel idea) the sea-ice extent, have found a large increase in recent winters. Of course, during the (local) spring and summer seasons, the ice cover always shrinks in each hemisphere. It’s as natural as snow in winter and heat in summer (at latitudes above 45 degrees or so).

The annual shrinkage and expansion has been going on for millennia and that’s not rocket science. If you want see actual, current ice coverage (updated daily) in the Arctic, just go to Arctic-roos.org . If you do, you’ll see that there is absolutely nothing abnormal about the sea-ice cover. In fact, it’s just about right on the last ten year’s average.

I write to concur with conclusions in Dr S Fred Singer’s recent essay: “The Climate Sensitivity Controversy”, by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, October 15, 2014. And to solve the puzzles he posed. 

In particular he concludes “climate sensitivity, CS, is close to zero”. This means any effect of CO₂ on Earth’s temperature and climate is vanishingly small, hence unimportant. Singer leaves his warmist camp and joins the denier camp of skeptics.

I met Singer at his University of Houston lecture hosted by Prof Larry Bell on February 6, 2012 and his several talks at the latest Heartland Institute ICCC, Las Vegas, July 7-9, 2014. He has played an important role in disputing alarmist global warming claims for decades. He has received many awards.

Singer reveals he assumes CO₂ warms Earth because it is called a greenhouse gas, which does not make it so. It is also green plant food, which does chemically make it a coolant.  Great confusion arises when a radiating gas, which cools the atmosphere, is incorrectly labeled a greenhouse gas and then warming is arbitrarily assigned to it, by virtue of the nomenclature change.

I discovered in 2012 introducing radiating gases like H₂O and CO₂ to the atmosphere actually cools the Earth slightly and had useful direct email exchanges with Singer on the matter. Naturally I am pleased he has reached a similar conclusion, perhaps by another way.

The Knowledge of Photons: We often see the statement from climate lukewarmers and alarmists that the radiation from a cool object (such as the atmosphere) can not “know” that it is not supposed to travel to and heat up a warmer object (such as the surface), and thus, radiation from a colder object will heat up a warmer object.  That is, the colder atmosphere must heat the warmer surface. 

Of course, this defies all common sense and heat transfer mathematics and thermodynamics, but alas, it is what they say.  They use this “net flow” argument, where cold heats up hot and hot heats up cold, but the “net heating” is hot heating cold since the hotter heats the colder by a larger amount.  

But simply look at the logic: if cold heats hot, then as hot heats cold, the colder will heat up the hotter more, thus heating the colder more, thus heating the hotter more…ad infinitum.  So, it’s ridiculous.  And of course, heat does not flow from cold to hot in any case, and heat flow input is what is required for temperature increase.

Look at the 1st Law of Thermodynamics:

First law of thermodynamics: When energy passes, as work, as heat, or with matter, into or out from a system, its internal energy changes in accord with the law of conservation of energy. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the first kind are impossible.

So, internal energy in the thermal case would be thermal energy measurable as the system’s temperature.  To increase temperature when the action of work or exchange of matter are not occurring, then one requires heat.  Thus for the electromagnetic case, look at the radiative heat flow equation (for 2 parallel walls with unit emissivity say):

Q’ = A*σ*(Thot4 – Tcool4)

This defines Q’ as the heat.  There is a hot and cool term, and there is an exchange of energy between them since they are subtracting from one to the other; however, only that result after subtraction is heat.  Only Q’ is heat.  The radiation from the cool object to the hot object is not heat, and only the greater portion of the radiation from the hot object relative to the cool object is heat, and it transfers or flows only in the direction from the hot object to the cool object, from the greater power to the lesser power.

Since these are very basic laws of thermodynamics and heat transfer, then it has been totally established that a cool object doesn’t make a warmer object warmer still.  And hence the radiative greenhouse effect of climate alarm, and climate alarm which depends upon it, is false.  And we didn’t have to look at any pretty pictures to get here…simply math and logic.  If you want a different result than that, then you’re going to have to change the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.  Good luck with that.

Rob Wooding, the operations manager of the Australian Antarctic Division, told the media on Monday that growing sea ice around Antarctica is creating ‘serious problems’ for scientists studying the continent. Mawson Station, the longest continuously operated outpost in Antarctica, has relied on access to a nearby bay, which is increasingly becoming more complicated by sea ice blocking the way.

Wooding said “We are noticing that the sea ice situation is becoming more difficult.” This briefing was in preparation of “two days of meetings between top Antarctic science and logistics experts in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania.”

He said that it’s especially bad at Mawson, where the ice typically breaks up for maybe one or two months each summer, but “in the last four to six years this has not happened every year, and some years only partially.”

“In the 2013-14 season we couldn’t get anywhere near Mawson due to the sea ice,” he said. “We had to get fuel in there by helicopter which is inadequate for the long-term sustainability of the station.” He also noted that the French and Japanese are having the same problems. Though they haven’t come close to shutting down the base because of expanding sea ice, they did have to use “unusual measures” to keep it operational.

New peer-reviewed paper shows that the Australian government’s intention to build a ten billion dollar sea defense to ‘save’ Melbourne (pictured) is an expensive folly based on alarmist science that grossly exaggerates likely sea level trends by TEN TIMES. 

Independent scientist, Professor Albert Parker, explains that government estimates of a sea level rise of over 1 meter by 2100 is folly and building any such unecessary dam to cater for that would be a gross waste of public funds.

An extract of the paper, A. Parker, Is there any need for a dike to save Melbourne from the rising seas?, Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, 2015, Volume 2, Issue 3. DOI:10.9734/JGEESI/2015/17463 follows below. The full version is available to download.

EXTRACT

The Australian government is still basing policy on the concept that sea level will rise by 1.1 meters along the Australian coastline by 2100. The Department of the Environment has proposed a 10 billion dollar dike to save Melbourne from the hypothetical rising sea. In reality the tide gauges of Victoria are recording average relative rates of rise of less than 1 mm/year, in perfect agreement with the National average.

At this rate sea level will rise by only 8.5 cm by 2100 but even this estimate may be too high. The worldwide average sea level rise, based on only tide gauges of sufficient quality and length, is only about 0.25 mm/year, with zero acceleration over the last few decades.

Industrial wind energy is a net loser: economically, environmentally, technologically and civilly. A recent letter in my local paper by American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) representative Tom Vinson is typical of wind industry sales propaganda. It deserves correction. 

This is the reality:  Industrial wind energy is NET LOSER – economically, environmentally, technically and civilly. Let’s examine how.

Economically. New York State (NYS) has some of the highest electricity rates in the United States – a whopping 53{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} above the national average. This is due in large part to throwing hundreds of billions of our taxpayer and ratepayer dollars into the wind. High electricity costs drive people and businesses out of the state, and ultimately hurt poor families the most.

A NYS resident using 6,500 kWh of electricity annually will pay about $400 per year more for their electricity than if our electricity prices were at the national average. That’s over $3.2 BILLION dollars annually that will not be spent in the rest of the state economy.

Why destroy entire towns, when just one single 450-MW gas-fired combined-cycle generating unit located near New York City (NYC) – where the power is needed – operating at only 60{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of its capacity, would provide more electricity than all of NYS’s wind factories combined. 

Furthermore, that one 450 MW gas-fired unit would only require about one-fourth of the capital costs – and would not bring all the negative civil, economic, environmental, human health and property value impacts that are caused by the sprawling industrial wind factories. Nor would it require all the additional transmission lines to NYC.

The Institute for Energy Research tallied the numbers and found that each wind job costs $11.45 million and costs more than four jobs that are lost elsewhere in the economy, because of all the subsidies and the resulting “skyrocketing” cost of electricity. In fact, on a unit of production basis, wind is subsidized over 52 times more than conventional ‘fossil’ fuels.

In Australia, on or about March 15th this year 2015, a Technical Advisory Forum, appointed by the Environment Minister Greg Hunt (pictured), met behind closed doors with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology Scientists. The Forum will deliver its report around June 2015. 

Below is the public submission that Dr Marjorie Curtis and I submitted by public email. Also for the public record is Greg Hunt’s correspondence accepting the submission.  The world will be watching and waiting for the results of your Forums’ enquiry Minister Hunt.

Dear Minister Greg Hunt,

We are writing to thank you for organising an independent investigation  of the Bureau of Meteorology’s  data management practices.  We trust that you have received good advice and chosen independent and objective  scientists and statisticians to be members of the Technical   Advisory Forum.

We have been very concerned about the advice you are receiving ever since we heard you stating publicly that you rely mainly on the advice from the CSIRO and the BoM.

Unfortunately, as the evidence indicates, scientific integrity in  Australia’s once iconic institutions, such as the Bureau of Meteorology, (BoM) and our Universities has disintegrated.  The scientific ‘peer review’ has also collapsed.

Curtains of vapor and ice miles high and hundreds of miles long might erupt from rifts on Saturn’s icy, ocean-harboring moon Enceladus, researchers say. 

In fact, most of the seemingly discrete geysers seen on Enceladus until now may have just been optical illusions of these much broader “curtain” eruptions, the scientists said in the new study.

Enceladus is Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, a 310-mile-wide (500 kilometers) satellite coated with an icy shell. Years ago, researchers had thought Enceladus was cold and geologically dead, but in 2005, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft spotted water vapor and icy particles erupting from the moon. [See Enceladus’ Curtain-like Jets in Action (Video)]

Scientists then determined that these outbursts originate from four “tiger stripes” — fractures on Enceladus’ south pole named after the cities Alexandria, Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus. These explosions are fed by a network of cracks that may carry water up from a giant subsurface ocean.

Initially, planetary scientist Joseph Spitale, of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and his colleagues thought these eruptions were concentrated jets. But now, they’ve found that these explosions may actually be giant curtains of vapor and ice.

“A lot of things that looked like jets were optical illusions — they were really curtains,” Spitale told Space.com.

The scientists analyzed Cassini images of what they thought were jets from Enceladus in order to determine where these eruptions come from and what might cause them.

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. 

In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 45th anniversary of  Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 15 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970?

The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a statement todaythat carbon dioxide levels have reached a new global level of 400 parts per million for March, even though global temperatures have not risen for nearly 19 years.  This means that for March 2015, carbon dioxide levels across the globe remained at 400 ppm* for the entire 31-day period with no increase in global mean temperatures as measured by RSS satellites.

NOAA began tracking its own carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in May 1974 concomitantly with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The first measurement of atmospheric CO2 levels was started by C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1958 on Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Prior to that, NOAA has relied on ice core samples and sediment for earlier reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 levels. The International Energy Agency, however, reported on March 13 that global emissions from the burning of fossil fuels stalled in 2014, never rising above 2013 levels.

On her web site, Climate Etc., Judith Curry (pictured) posted her notes on her latest presentation of what she calls the Uncertainty Monster. 

Temperatures on a nearby “super Earth” exoplanet varied dramatically recently, suggesting that large and very active volcanoes may exist on the alien world’s surface, a new study reports. 

Researchers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope found that temperatures on 55 Cancri e — a planet eight times more massive than Earth that lies 40 light-years away — swung between about 1,832 to 4,892 degees Fahrenheit (1,000 to 2,700 degrees Celsius) from 2011 to 2013.

“This is the first time we’ve seen such drastic changes in light emitted from an exoplanet, which is particularly remarkable for a super Earth,” study co-author Nikku Madhusudhan, of the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy in England, said in a statement. “No signature of thermal emissions or surface activity has ever been detected for any other super Earth to date.” [The Strangest Alien Planets (Gallery)]

This atmospheric variability was observed on the “day side” of 55 Cancri e, which lies so close to its host star that it completes one orbit every 18 hours. The planet is tidally locked, meaning one side always faces the star and the other always faces away.

The researchers said they aren’t sure what’s behind the huge temperature shift, but they’ve got a leading candidate in mind.

“We think a likely explanation for this variability is [that] large-scale surface activity, possibly volcanism, on the surface is spewing out massive volumes of gas and dust, which sometimes blanket the thermal emission from the planet, so it is not seen from Earth,” lead author Brice-Olivier Demory, of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, said in the same statement.

If this interpretation is correct, volcanism on 55 Cancri e would likely be even more intense than it is on Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active body in Earth’s solar system, researchers said.

The rationale for the crop loss prediction in SSRC Press Release 2-2015 is as follows:

1. Recent trends have been affirmed the predicted shift of global climate from the past era of global warming to a new period of intense global cooling. This climate shift was also defined in detail in the December 10, 2014 Global Climate Status Report (GCSR), an SSRC publication, and the schedule for the next phase of global temperature decline in the November 20, 2014, SSRC Press Release 4-2014. 

2. The ongoing reduction in energy output from the Sun has been confirmed including: a. NASA and the Royal Observatory of Belgium verified this month (April) that the current 11-year solar cycle has recently peaked and that the second of two small peaks at the top of this cycle was the stronger of the two. Importantly, sunspot records going back to 1750 shows this stronger second sunspot peak only occurs in a long term declining period of solar activity just prior to an historic cold epoch.

Even though the overall solar cycle was weak, this strong secondary solar peak was brief, yet powerful resulting in a temporary spike in global temperatures 2014-2015. b. NASA and the broader solar physics community have acknowledged that this current solar cycle (number 24) is the weakest in 100 years, as was correctly predicted by the SSRC. See SSRC Press Release 1-1015.

It is expected to weaken further in the next two 11 year solar cycles, number 25 and 26. The SSRC believes this next cold epoch which has already begun, will last until the 2040’s and will produce the same global crop devastation as the Dalton Minimum (1793-1830). The following Figure 1, depicts the SSRC predicted decline in solar activity over the next two decades with the lowest level of sunspots and global temperatures in 2031.