Astronomers are excited: a new planet has been discovered, currently termed WOLF-1016c, a planet of the red dwarf star WOLF-1016.

It’s said to be the planet most similar yet discovered to Earth, both in size, trajectory and other features but a bit far away, about 15 light years or so. Let’s put that distance into perspective.

Speed of Light and Distance
With the speed of light roughly being 300,000 km/SECOND (or 190,000 miles/second), even a meteor falling on earth at a speed of “only” 50 km/second is a slowpoke in comparison. Of course, relative to common speed limits on highways of 100 km (60 miles) per HOUR, they do compare rather favorably, not to mention typical downtown stop-and-go traffic in the city near to you.

If you have ever seen any company’s press release or similar kind of announcement, the term “forward looking statement” will be quite familiar to you. It is a phrase that allows the originating party to claim nearly any size or kind of a potential future benefit without any obligation to ever meeting it at all.

Indeed, without such legal disclaimers, many companies would quickly be sued into financial ruin by the ever present litigious members of society.

However, there appear to be numerous exceptions to the rule as well. In particular, I am referring to claims involving next to “free energy” that “will” power future generations’ electric power requirements, etc.

by Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser

New European Union (EU) law intending to be ‘green’ by limiting electricity power usage in domestic vacuum cleaners turns out to be more wasteful in energy. Scientists and consumers baffled by Brussels lawmakers’ faux pas.

North Americans, don’t be afraid, your old vacuum cleaner is just fine but if you feel like buying a new one anyway, no problem either.

If you live across the pond in the EU, however, you might just want to hang on to your old vac. The good bureaucrats of the EU have prescribed a new ‘greener’ standard: new vacuum cleaners have been limited to a maximum energy use of 1.6 kW (as of September 2014) and 0.9 kW as of September 2017. That’s a major change in energy consumption, mandated by EU law; needless to say, some manufacturers are not happy and the consumers—they’ll have to find out.

Anyone can do this experiment and prove that carbon dioxide (CO2) increases the pH of natural water systems.

If you read the statements of carbon dioxide “war mongers”, including those from EPA, you are led to believe that CO2 causes acidification of water. That is true under aseptic conditions such as in a laboratory with distilled water, but not in nature. In nature, there are two crucial differences: the presence of nutrients and sun light. Together, they make a big difference as you will see for yourself by undertaking this simple experiment.

The Idea

The idea of this experiment is to prove that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere INCREASES the pH of water.

Supplies & Ingredients

You need:

1. A transparent glass or plastic container (flask, container) with a tight-closing lid. [I am using one of those 1-quart plastic containers used in supermarkets for bulk food items, etc.].

2. A small amount of common plant fertilizer. [I am using a 20-20-20 type all-purpose plant fertilizer].

3. Distilled or de-ionized water, available in any drug store and most supermarkets.

4. A way to measure pH of the water [I am using pH sticks; see also bottom note].

5. A sunny place near your home (inside or outdoors).

6. A few weeks of time.

What to Do

There is very little to do; the sun does most of the work. Also, please note all of the quantities and concentrations mentioned do not need to be exact; they are just general guidelines.

1. Fill your container about two-thirds with the water. Keep the lid off and let it stand a comfortable temperature for a few days.

2. Then measure the pH of the water. It should stabilize near pH 4.5 (weakly acidic).

3. Add fertilizer at the appropriate rate for the amount of water in your container as per instructions by the manufacturer (commonly a teaspoon for 4 liters or a gallon) and stir until it is dissolved.

4. Check the pH again; it should not have changed.

5. Add a smidgen (barely visible amount) of soil, or pond algae as an inoculum.

6. Tightly close the lid and place the container at a sunny spot.

7. Wait a few weeks (say 3 to 6 weeks, depending on area, temperature and sunshine).

8. Once you see obvious signs of algae growing in the container (discoloration of the dye coming with the fertilizer) and turbidity (slime or particles in the system), check the pH again. It will have increased to approximately pH 8.

9. You have finished the experiment.

Observations

You will have demonstrated the conversion of carbon dioxide (from the air) together with the nutrients (the fertilizer you added) and sun light (radiation energy) to plant matter. Of course, nature does this all over without you doing anything at all. Minerals in rocks and soils slowly dissolve and the sun does the rest.

Initially, the distilled water contained no minerals and its pH was determined solely by the dissolution of carbon dioxide from air into the water. The resulting solution of carbonic acid has a pH of approximately 4.5.

Once you added the nutrients (plant fertilizer), added a smidgen of inoculum and waited a few weeks, things had changed dramatically.

The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing an interesting case. It’s about your genes or, more accurately, the question as to who owns them.

As Jeffrey Tucker writes in Tomorrow in Review, the U.S. Supreme Court is soon going to decide on one of the most contentious issues in medical science: “Can human genes be patented and to what technologies can those patents be extended to cover?”

Background

A company claims to have unravelled the biochemical codes of certain human genes which are said to be specifically associated with breast and ovarian cancer in women. The mutation of such genes, so it is claimed, is responsible for increased risks to such cancers. The company which has determined the biochemical code wants to protect its turf, i.e. the right to sue any competitor using such information to cure, prevent, or mitigate the diseases. The American Civil Liberties Union is suing.

Lower court rulings have already been decided on both sides of the issue. Now the Supreme Court is deliberating it. Ultimately, the question to be decided is: Who owns your genes? A corollary of that is the question whether human genes or their biochemical codes can be patented at all.

Some operating systems for personal computers come with spectacular photographs for monitor backgrounds. The Seven Sisters scene in the Canadian Rocky Mountains is one of them (Fig. 1). Alberta’s Moraine Lake is in the foreground and the Seven Sisters mountain range in the background. You can see it all personally in Canada’s Banff National Park but the photograph will be familiar to many readers.

If you look closely at the picture (Fig. 1), you’ll notice distinct layers on the mountain sides, indicating various layers of stone. These layers are deposits of limestone that were once deep in the oceans and were uplifted by the tectonic forces pushing the American continents towards the west.

Fig. 1. Moraine Lake with the Seven Sisters mountain range, Banff National Park, Canada.

Sediment Layers

The sediment layers in this mountain are visible due the limestone deposits with different resistance to erosion. The harder layers erode slower and give rise to ledges upon which the snow accumulates. You may have seen similar mountain ranges elsewhere; for example in the European Alps. What do these mountains have in common?

They are Limestone Deposits

More specifically, they are all deposits of limestone and formed in the oceans many millions of years ago. Limestone and dolomite are carbonate-type rocks, consisting of calcium and magnesium carbonate. The crucial term here is carbonate, meaning a salt of carbonic acid (H2CO3). You may wonder where all that carbonic acid for those rocks came from? Well, that’s the real surprise: from the carbon dioxide in the air.

Carbonic Acid

Carbonic acid is nothing but carbon dioxide (CO2) dissolved in water. Of course, CO2 has been a constituent of the Earth’s atmosphere from the beginning. In fact, early on, it was a major component. However, once photosynthesizing algae came about and the photosynthesis process started doing its thing in earnest, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere began to decline substantially. This process also elevated the pH (a measure of acidity) of the oceans to alkaline (the opposite of acidic) conditions. Under such alkaline conditions, dissolved CO2 and calcium and magnesium ions form insoluble carbonate-type salts which precipitate and slowly sink to the bottom. This process of calcium carbonate precipitation is still continuing to this day, both in oceans and freshwater lakes. It can actually be observed on occasion as a “whiting” event in some lakes. The term describes the visible precipitation of white carbonate minerals in the water column.

The next question you may wonder about then is: how much of the (formerly atmospheric) carbon dioxide is locked-up in those mountain rocks?

CO2 Locked-up in Carbonate Rocks

The amount of carbon dioxide locked up in carbonate rocks around the world is staggering. Together with residues from biological origin, it is in the order of 10^20 tons, more than a thousand times the amount of all carbon in the entire world’s known plants, and all coal, oil and natural gas deposits COMBINED!

But what is really mind-boggling is the fact that all that limestone carbon was once in the atmosphere. All that carbon dioxide precipitated in the oceans and freshwater which is in the mountain rocks was once in the atmosphere before it became locked-up in these rocks. Numerous remnants of aquatic organisms prove that.

So, what then is the take-home lesson here?

Take-Home Lesson

The take-home lesson here is: Carbon dioxide is an important constituent of the Earth’s atmosphere. The world’s ecosystems need it to function. The CO2 levels in the earth’s atmosphere used to be much higher than now and, finally,

CO2 in the atmosphere is vital for survival and growth of nearly every organism on earth.

Agent 007 had it easy. In the movie From Russia with Love, all he had to do was to prevent a typewriter -(remember those?) -sized device falling into the hands of the other side. Now, the world is faced with a new and bigger problem, i.e. “From Russia – with Cold.”

It’s Cold in Siberia

Everyone knows, it’s cold in Siberia, at least some of the time, but Siberia is far away. Now comes the news that the Siberian temperatures may spread further. The Voice of Russia reports that ”Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling.” The Global Warming Policy Foundation warns says “A freezing Russian spring has reignited the climate change debate.” Even NASA states “The Sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now.” What a dreadful thought.

In case you forgot, the Maunder-Minimum was a 75-year long period starting in the mid 1600’s when the world experienced a dramatic cooling.

Sun-Spots

As has long been recognized, there is a strong correlation between the sun’s activity and the climate on earth. The sun’s activity is readily apparent from the number of sun-spots (measured for over 2,000 years), i.e. dark areas on its surface which commonly wax and wane in 11-year cycles. Superimposed on such short-term cycling are longer-term cycles, including a 200-year cycle which is to begin anew anytime.

Despite being somewhat counter-intuitive, fewer sun-spots translate into less sun-irradiance (less energy) hitting the earth, hence colder temperatures. The reason is that these (visibly dark spots) on the sun’s surface are actually areas from which strong electromagnetic fields and energy-impulses arrive here.

Declining Sun Activity

The declining sun activity is not unexpected. We are just coming off the latest 11-year cycle (Cycle-24) maximum and are going towards the next minimum. What’s different this time is that the next 200-year cycle is also kicking in and both the maxima and minima for the next several 11-year cycles are likely to be smaller than in the previous ones. It’s all coming together, as shown in Fig. 1.

  Fig. 1. Observed sun-spot numbers for the period 1749-2010, and predicted frequency thereafter.

According to the German Herald, Russian scientist Dr. Khabibullo Abdussamatov from the St. Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory it [recent cooling] is proof as he said earlier that we are heading for a “Mini Ice Age.” Abdussamatov who recently joined Principia Scientific International (PSI) is the head of space research at the Pulkovo and also Director of the Russian segment of the International Space Station. His predictions for solar irradiance for the next decades, published in early 2012, are given in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. Measured (1980-2011) and predicted (2011-2040) solar irradiance; source: H. Abdussamatov.

Even The Hindu reports that “March in Russia saw the harshest frosts in 50 years, with temperatures dropping to –25° Celsius in central parts of the country and –45° in the north. It was the coldest spring month in Moscow in half a century.” Moreover, NASA scientists Drs. Matt Penn and William Livingston predict that “By the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed.”

So, what’s Next?

For the next few months (in the northern hemisphere at least) spring is coming and perhaps a nice summer. Many have been eagerly awaiting it.

For the next few years the prognosis is not as good. If the solar irradiance declines further, as predicted by Abdussamatov and confirmed by NASA and others, the globe could be in for a severe bout of cooling.

Then, no amount of so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would change that; that carbon dioxide-global warming theory has been debunked for good. Not even Agent 007 will be able to change that.

Regardless of any prognostications though, time will tell.

 

Goiters used to be a status symbol and dental cavities were common in children.

Iodide Deficiency

The area I grew up in has very little in iodide-containing minerals. As a result, both water and food from the area had insufficient iodide which caused men and women to get much enlarged thyroid glands (hypothyroidism), visible as goiter. Because this deformity increases with the length of time (of deficiency) it becomes more apparent with age. In fact, in several alpine areas goiters actually became somewhat fashionable and a sort of “status symbol” for having achieved a certain age and seniority. Increasing longevity then also meant an increasing occurrence of goiters in many populations worldwide.

Ever since the cause of goiter formation was recognized, starting in the 1920’s, common table salt has been supplemented with trace amounts of sodium iodide and hypothyroidism has disappeared in those areas where it was prevalent before the iodide supplements. A teaspoon of iodized table salt (1.5 g) now contains 70{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of your daily iodide needs. Still, iodide deficiency appears to be a problem in many countries. For example, Wikipedia states that even now some 2 billion people are affected by iodide deficiency in their food and water.

Fluoride Deficiency

Fluoride deficiency is not much different from iodide deficiency. It just does not have the same effect. Some parts of our bodies, especially teeth are made up of fluoro-apatite (FA), a fluoride and phosphate containing mineral. Chemically, FA is similar to hydroxyl-apatite (HA) which makes up most of our bones.

In childhood, sufficient fluoride intake is vital to the formation of healthy teeth. Without it, FA is being replaced by HA, which is less resistant to the development of cavities. With that recognition, around the mid-1900’s, many societies began adding trace levels of fluoride minerals to potable water. The result was a seismic shift in the prevalence of caries-type cavities in such areas. Dentists observed much fewer cavities than before the introduction of fluoridation of water.

There is a unique rock formation at Norway’s northern coast. Well, the rock itself is not unique at all, but its age is – 1,000 million years old. Actually, that age is not remarkable either as much of the earth’s surface is covered with ancient rocks of that age and older. So, what is so special about that particular rock?

Old Rocks

The earth has lots of old rocks, from the “Granite Shield” covering much of North America’s northeast to Greenland, Scandinavia, large parts of Africa, India, South America, Australia and Antarctica. The formation of most of these granite type rocks dates back well over a billion years.

Those ancient rocks were formed deep in the earth and were pushed up to the surface through the tectonic forces pulling some continents apart and pushing others together. For example, along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge the American continents are steadily moving further west, relative to Europe and Africa. The rate of that movement is only 5 cm (a couple of inches) per year but over time it adds up. At that rate it only took 100 million years to widen the distance to its present 5,000 km.

To put the age of 1,000 million years into perspective, some 200 million years ago the dinosaurs began to evolve and lasted until the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event some 66 million years ago. One thousand million years ago, there were only bacteria, fungi and algae on the earth, no higher organisms. So what then is so remarkable about that Norwegian rock? The answer is: It is thought to be a moraine; at least that has been the “consensus” by all scientific experts who have studied it over the seven decades following Reusch’s discovery.

Moraines

By definition, moraines are glacial deposits. Reusch’s Moraine (RM) was named after its discoverer, the Norwegian geologist Hans Henrik Reusch (1852-1922) who found it in 1891 at the edge of the Varangerfjord near the northern tip of Norway. Reusch and dozens of expert geologists over the following 75 years concluded that this rock was an ancient breccia deposit of glacial origin. If there ever was a scientific consensus about anything, it was as hard as the rock of Reusch’s Moraine: The rock was about 1,000 million years old and the result of a glacial deposit. Period, end of discussion. When I visited the site with a friend (then an undergrad geologist) 50 years ago, he explained to me the great geological significance of the find.

Later in the 1960s new studies by Schermerhorn and other scientists indicated that the formation of RM was not necessarily of glacial origin but more likely to be a conglomerate (tillite) resulting from a massive sub-marine debris flow. A brief review describing all the reasons for the new theory was published in 1997 by M. J. Oard; it is available on the web. Quite surprisingly then, yet another, more recent study of the underlying rock has concluded the exact opposite. Once again, the idea of a glacial origin of RM is gaining weight.

A recent study found “Emperor penguin body surfaces cool below air temperature.” The authors claim that the penguins’ plumage radiates heat which results in their surface temperature cooling below the ambient air temperature.

Obviously, we need more penguins to radiate excessive heat into space.

Perhaps the increase of the Antarctic’s ice cover in the last few years is the result of the (unexpected) increase in the number of emperor penguins? (You may remember that global warming, pardon me, I mean climate change was supposed to have them nearly wiped out by now). What else can we deduce from this study?

The Study

University of Glasgow scientist DJ McCafferty and five coworkers used thermal imaging photography to study the emperor penguins breeding colony of Pointe Geologie, in Terre Adelie, Antarctica, from 4 June to 29 June 2008. The results were recently reported in the journal Biology Letters. Using a thermal imaging camera they measured the body, head, flippers and feet temperatures of penguins from a distance of about 10 m. In a subsequent radio interview with CBC, McCafferty mentioned that they had taken “hundreds of images,” however their published data are for 40 observations on individual penguins only.

Authors’ Findings

For the 40 recordings published, the mean body (trunk) surface, air and ice temperatures were -21.9, -17.6 and -29.1 °C, respectively. Hence the mean air temperature was warmer than the penguins’ body temperature mean by approximately 4 °C.

What may really surprise you though is that these scientists did not bother to actually measure the air temperature at the colony’s location. They used temperature recordings at the Dumont d’Urville research station (66° 39’ 45’’ S, 140° 00’ 05’’E), a distance of approximately 2 km away and a formula to calculate from those records the air temperature at the penguins.

Authors’ Conclusions

“The penguins’ most outer surfaces of the body were colder than surrounding sub-zero air owing to radiative cooling. In these conditions, the feather surface will paradoxically gain heat by convection from surrounding air.” The laws of physics, of course, dictate the corollary, namely that the penguins’ surface cools the air.

My Conclusions

Either the world needs more penguins to cool the global warming (hysteria) or scientists who – with the same thermal imaging setup – actually measure the air temperature close to the penguins as well.

Or maybe the world needs fewer scientists spending their time measuring things of little or no merit.

The European Union (EU) has a new law forbidding the sale of any cosmetic product that contains an ingredient tested on animals. What does it mean for you?

Cosmetic Products

Cosmetic products are defined in this context as “substances or mixtures of substances intended to be placed in contact with the external parts of the human body (epidermis, hair system, nails, etc.) or with the teeth and the mucous membranes of the oral cavity with a view exclusively or mainly to cleaning them, perfuming them, changing their appearance, protecting them, keeping them in good condition or correcting body odours.”

In practice, these regulations apply to any toothpaste, sunscreen lotion, skin cream, hair shampoo, and anything else which may be used on your body’s surface or parts thereof. It does not matter whether any such substance or product had been shown to have no detrimental effect in any standard animal test. Nor would it matter if any such product may have proven beneficial effects.

Animal Testing

In the context of the new law, the term “animal” has not been defined. Perhaps a definition can be found elsewhere in the myriad of existing and new regulations. Nevertheless, the term animal here would certainly include rats and mice, rabbits and the proverbial guinea pigs.

Among the tests routinely undertaken for cosmetic products in the past were skin and eye irritation tests. They are performed on small patches of shaved skin of live rats or mice and the appearance or lack of rashes or inflammations are determined. Similarly, the rabbit eye irritation test (also termed Draize test) is checking for irritation of the mucous membranes of eyes.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is the term used for the unusually large die-offs in honey bee colonies over winter. First observed about a decade ago, the “disorder” is back with a vengeance. While most prevalent in the US, European and other countries are starting to find similar problems though not yet at the same scale.

The Problem

The problem is that there are not enough bees around to guarantee pollination of a variety of agricultural crops. From almond groves in California to corn and soybeans farms in the Midwest, CCD is widespread and appears to be on the verge of becoming a global problem.

Theories

Numerous theories have been advanced in the hope of finding a cause for the problem. So far none has panned out.

For example, some types of chemical pesticides, known as neonicotinoids have been implicated. However, other studies have shown that there does not appear to be any cause-effect relationship of that kind.

Other theories implicated genetically modified (GM) plants such as GM-corn containing the gene of Bacillus thuringiensis. Again, that was disproven as a probable cause of CCD by tests showing that pollen from such plants had no detrimental effects on bees.

Naturally (pun intended), even climate change has been proposed as the cause for CCD, an effect yet to be listed on the warmlist’s collation of claimed effects. Pun aside, I have my own theory, backed by some relevant observations.

The death knell tolls for the Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Gas Theory (CO2-GHT). If the CO2-GHT ever was a plausible theory, it is rapidly turning into a giant hoax. The perceived scientific underpinnings of the theory are unravelling fast. It took a while to get the “Anti-CO2-Warmist-Theory” scientific camp on the right footing. Now, Principia Scientific Intl. (PSI) has taken the lead in dispelling the last of the CO2-GHT “consensus”-based vestiges.

The latest nail for the CO2-GHT coffin has been contributed by Dr. Charles R. Anderson with his article “The Most Essential Physics of the Earth’s Temperature and Why Carbon Dioxide is No Threat to the Earth.” This comes hard on the heels of a recent paper on “The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature” by Dr. Ole Humlum and coworkers. Their work showed conclusively that the regular seasonal variations in the atmospheric CO2 levels are lagging the sea surface temperatures by 9.5 to 12 months — not the other way.

For many the field of chemistry is a terra incognita, an unknown world. This is odd if one considers that humans are virtually chemistry factories, ingesting, processing and producing chemicals throughout our lives. We routinely use a wide variety of chemicals without ever thinking of them in those terms, from detergents to medications. Besides, with all kinds of wonderful electronic gadgets, who needs to know anything about chemistry or chemicals anyway? On top of that, we are constantly told that chemicals are dangerous to our health. Everything else, including meteorites are too.

 

Neanderthals

You might not believe it, but the Neanderthals (80,000 years ago) and their later cousins, the Cro-Magnon people (30,000 years ago) had an inkling of chemistry. Their cave paintings in France and Spain survived for tens of thousands of years simply because they used extremely stable, mineral-based pigments including mercury, iron and manganese type minerals. For example, just look at any of the many pictographs from ancient caves around the Pyrenees (Fig. 1). They appear to be done yesterday, clear and crisp. The lesson is to use stable pigments for your art; some knowledge of chemistry helps for that.

Fig. 1. Pregnant mare running through wild wheat; pictograph from the wall of a cave in Lascaux, France, dating to 15,000 to 10,000 BC; photo courtesy of http://frontiers-of-anthropology.blogspot.ca.

By Heinz Hug

(Nachrichten aus der Chemie, 61: 132 [2013)

Translated by Klaus L.E. Kaiser, 12 Feb. 2013

[sub-title] Heinz Hug questions the importance of CO2 for climate change

“According to our calculations, in the coming years, it should get warmer by leaps. But we do not trust that prognosis. Because the simulations should also have been able to predict the current standstill of the temperature increase – which did not happen.” That according to the climate researcher Jochen Marotzke of MPI-M in Hamburg, according to the Spiegel [magazine] of 9/2012. The reasons why climate models fail are obvious.

It is to be emphasized that the [discussion about the] greenhouse gas effect does not concern the absorption by IR-trace gases (CO2, CH4, H2O, and similar) but their emission, which warms the earth’s surface via “back-radiation” [Ruckstrahlung], [ref. 1]. In fact, satellite spectra of 667 cm^-1 show an impressive “funnel within the Planck curve” which is based on the impediment of the warmth-radiation from the earths body by the ν[nu]₂-band of CO2, [ref. 2].

By Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser

Cold Heat

Have Cold, need Heat. Global temperature means haven’t risen for 16 years now but some politicians still think the globe is experiencing runaway overheating. At the -50 C/F in mid latitude Canada right now even the polar bears are not frolicking on the beaches, but elsewhere, the heat is being turned on; namely on the climate prognostications previously given by the proponents of global treaties to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which have been claimed to be the mother of all evil.

Nomenclature

The climate debate suffers from many misconceptions, some of which arise from misleading terminology. For example, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls carbon dioxide (CO2) a “pollutant.” Nothing could be further from the truth. CO2 is an invisible gas without any smell, and non-toxic. In some environments, such as the air in submarines its concentration is typically several times that of the earth’s atmosphere where its level is approximately 400 ppm (parts per million).

Just to juxtapose CO2 with a real (air) pollutant, for example sulfur dioxide (SO2); SO2 is an entirely different kettle of fish. It has nothing to do with CO2. Sulfur dioxide burns your nostrils and lungs and causes respiratory illness, etc.

Vital Necessity

The fact is that CO2 is absolutely vital for all life on earth. All of the carbon in our food, in fact in our own bodies is entirely derived from the atmospheric CO2 through the photo-synthesis (PS) process. Apart from CO2, the PS process also requires some other nutrients (phosphorous, nitrogen, minerals and trace elements) and, of course, sunlight to function. Plant growers make use of that by artificially boosting the CO2 level in their greenhouses to 1,000 ppm and more as plants just thrive under high CO2 levels, from pine and citrus fruit seedlings, to cassava, corn and wheat. But, you say, the summer sea-ice in the Arctic is shrinking, supposedly due to increasing CO2 in our atmosphere…

Ice at the North Pole

The North Pole is a geographical point on the earth. It has no other redeeming features. In fact, it is not even on land, but covered by the water of the Arctic Ocean. The extent of Arctic sea-ice varies tremendously with the seasons, namely from an annual maximum of ~15 at the height of the Arctic winter to a mere ~4 million square kilometers at the end of the Arctic summer. In other words, its annual variation of ~11 million square kilometers is much greater than its average minimum extent. That fact alone should give you some food for thought.

Contrary also to widely-held beliefs, the North Pole has often been open water during the summer and not just in recent years. That is on record by a variety of submarines surfacing there over the last 50 years. If you don’t believe me, just check the newsreels and logs of the USS Skate which encountered much open water on its voyages there in 1958 and 1959.

Old Charts

Old charts of the Arctic typically show the extent of the Perennial Sea-Ice (PSI) in the Arctic Ocean. I have one of those, published in 1973 by the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, Canada. It shows the southern / eastern limit of the PSI being entirely being west and north of the Canadian Arctic island archipelago, as you can see in Fig. 1, below.

Fig. 1. Perennial Arctic sea-ice extent (light colored area), chart published in 1973.

Obviously, that ice cover is in stark contrast to the ice-coverage graphs published in recent years by National Geographic (NG) magazine and other publications. The latter typically show the maximum and minimum extent of ice cover at the height of the Arctic winter and summer periods, but never the PSI extent. To show you how misleading some articles can be, let’s look at an ice-chart published by NG in 2011 (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Minimum extent (white area) of Arctic summer se-ice, as per National Geographic magazine, July 2011.

As you can see, the minimum summer sea-ice extents vary substantially between the two graphs. NG’s graph (Fig. 2) has it extending through much of the Canadian Arctic archipelago islands, while the older map (Fig. 1) shows it entirely outside of the archipelago. You may wonder, why is there such a difference? Once again, it’s in the definition, this time of what is “ice.” According to the answer I received from NG, the PSI ice [Fig 1] is “more than 2 years old and tends to be thicker and more resilient than younger ice” [Fig. 2].

Are other claims as to a shrinking Arctic ice cover more trustworthy than those about the ice cover? What about the polar bears?

Polar Bear Range

Pictures of cuddly polar bear cubs have been a mainstay of many organisations wanting you to donate to their cause of “saving the polar bears” for many years. Polar bears live in the Arctic and are well adapted to that environment. The NG article “On Thin Ice” mentioned above also contains photographs of polar bears in their natural habitat. That’s where things really get interesting: most of these pictures were taken at Svalbard which is OUTSIDE even NG’s exaggerated minimum summer sea-ice extent, the other ones at unspecified locations, perhaps the local zoo.

The Gist

The gist of the message here is that the “climate change” agenda has been hyped in many reports, even in some outlets of high reputation and previously deemed to be reliable. No wonder that much of the public falls for such stories; after all very few people have ever to cope with chills of -50 C or less.

In short, there is a difference between a temperature of +50 F in Houston, TX and -50 F in International Falls, MN or further north in the “great white north” of Canada.