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.

The historical record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the justification for greenhouse gas reduction, is a fraud.  Research by a Freiburg, Germany professor, Ernst-Georg Beck of the Merian-Schule, shows that the IPCC construed and concocted the pre-1957 CO2 record from measurements on recently drilled ice cores, ignoring more than 90,000 direct measurements by chemical methods from 1857 to 1957. [fn. 1]

The IPCC’s hoked-up record attempts to prove that CO2 concentrations have been steadily increasing with the progress of human industrial civilization. Beck’s work confirms a wealth of previous investigations which demonstrate that the IPCC cherrypicked its data in an attempt to prove that we must stop industrial development and return to the horse-and-buggy age, or face oppressive heat and melting of the polar ice caps.

It shows that the Kyoto Treaty on reduction of greenhouse gases was based on a scientific fraud which violates the laws of the universe, denying the well-established determination of climate by cyclical variations in the EarthSun orbital relationship and in the Sun’s heat output.

In a thorough review of 175 scientific papers, Professor Beck found that the founders of modern greenhouse theory, Guy Stewart Callendar and Charles David Keeling (a special idol of Al Gore’s), had completely ignored careful and systematic measurements by some of the most famous names of physical chemistry, among them several Nobel prize winners.

Measurements by these chemists showed that today’s atmospheric CO2 concentration of about 380 parts per million (ppm) have been exceeded in the past, including a period from 1936 to 1944, when the CO2 levels varied from 393.0 to 454.7 ppm.

(NaturalNews) While the debate rages on about whether or not vaccines cause autism, a confidential document has surfaced that makes clear what science has led Natural News readers to believe: Yes, vaccines are linked to autism. 

The document,^[PDF] which runs over 1,000 pages, is from the fraudulent and corrupt GlaxoSmithKline. Several hundred pages in, it’s revealed that vaccines are tied to autism. It’s blatantly outlined in a chart, along with a long list of other conditions caused by vaccines, including “motor development delay,” “tremor” and “altered state of consciousness.” Autism is listed in this chart as a nervous system and mental impairment disorder associated with receiving GSK’s Infanrix hexa vaccine.⁽¹⁾

A major inquiry has been launched into the reliability of official global surface temperature records following widespread allegations that data has been manipulated to prove that global warming is happening. 

According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), from which the US government draws official statistics, 2014 was the hottest year globally since records began in 1880. However, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), both of which rely on satellite systems to gauge global temperatures, show no such warming.

NOAA gathers its data from a network of more than 3,000 weather stations known as the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).However, in the light of the different pictures being painted by the satellites and weather stations, analysts have examined the data and point to hundreds of examples of data from the weather stations being “adjusted”, potentially exaggerating global warming.

Writing in the Telegraph, Christopher Booker explained: “Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified.”