Tag Archives: Climate Change

News

Scientists go to Antarctic to prove global warming, get trapped in ice

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From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

In an event chock-full of bitterly cold irony, perhaps even Al Gore has noticed that multiple icebreakers couldn’t free a boat stuck in Antarctic ice that global warming was supposed to have melted.

Few of the media reports on the plight of the Russian-flagged research vessel MV Akademik Schokalskiy have noted the irony of a ship full of climate scientists getting stuck in an Antarctic ice sheet so thick that early attempts at breaking through the ice to free them were failures.

“We’re stuck in our own experiment,” the Australasian Antarctic Expedition said in a statement. “We came to Antarctica to study how one of the biggest icebergs in the world has altered the system by trapping ice. We … are now ourselves trapped by ice surrounding our ship.”

In a statement only climate-change die-hards could make, the group said, “Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up.”

A Chinese icebreaker was unable to reach the ship, and another vessel, the Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis, got within 10 nautical miles of the stranded ship but couldn’t see it through a driving blizzard and had to turn back to open water, Fox News reported.

A makeshift helicopter pad on the ice sheet was being readied for a helicopter rescue.

[…]Expedition leader Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at Australia’s University of New South Wales, dismissed the irony of their situation, claiming the ice they were trapped in was old ice likely formed from an iceberg that broke away years ago, and proves nothing.

The rest of the article contains a brief listing of the facts on global warming and ice extents:

Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record-large extent for a second straight year.

A review of the Icesat satellite data from 1992 to 2008 showed a net gain in ice mass in Antarctica — not a decline.

In 2013, the ice reached 19.51 million square kilometers, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center website.

That number topped the record-high level set in 2012 of 19.48 million square kilometers. The Australasian Antarctic Expedition has now found itself trapped in some of that ice as its leaders try to explain away the ice’s presence.

Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, a professor of geology at Western Washington University, points out that the East Antarctic sheet, which contains about 90% of the world’s fresh water, is not melting, but expanding.

That, together with the 16 years of no significant warming, should be enough to finish off the global warming hypothesis. It would be nice if the government had to refund all the money to the taxpayers that they spend on this ridiculous enviro-mythology, but somehow, I think that the money is gone for good. The only way to stop government waste on pseudo-science is to shrink government.

News

New Yale University Press book: fertility rates are in decline worldwide

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I saw this article about a new Yale University Press book on demographics, posted at Yale University’s web site.

Excerpt:

It’s no surprise that the world’s population is at an all-time high – exceeding 7 billion – although many might not know that it increased by 5 billion during the past century alone, rising from less than 2 billion in 1914. And many people would be surprised – even shocked –  to know that over the past three decades, fertility rates have plummeted in many parts of the world, including China, Japan and even significant regions of India.

These Asian giants have not been alone. In much of Europe, North America, East Asia and elsewhere, the average number of children born to women during the course of their childbearing years has fallen to unprecedentedly low levels.

Our new book, The Global Spread of Fertility Decline: Population, Fear, and Uncertainty (Yale University Press, 2013) analyzes these trends and the demographic, political and economic consequences and uncertainties as low fertility has become a global phenomenon. Like other facets of globalization, low fertility rates are by no means universal: High fertility persists in sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of the Middle East, but elsewhere low fertility is more the rule than the exception. These underlying trends in childbearing mean that in the near future the rate of population growth both in Europe and Asia are likely to decline. The world is not on a path of unrestrained demographic growth, as some believe. People all over the world have hit the brakes.

It’s strange because a lot of people on the secular left are worried about overpopulation, which is one of the factors causing them to push for abortion. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the same people who are worried about overpopulation in the teeth of declining fertility rates are the ones who are worried about global warming even though there has been no significant warming for the last 17 years.

Something to think about when people on the secular left claim to be “reality-based”. The universe is eternal, aliens seeded the Earth with life, the planet is burning to a crisp, fatherless children do as well as children of married couples, you can keep your health care plan, you can keep your doctor, and… fertility rates are too high. I think we need to change our perception of people on the left to reflect how deluded they really are.

News

Number of states with white Christmas highest in 11 years

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From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

 Those humming the words to “White Christmas” got their wish big-time as snow covered more than half the lower 48 states as of mid-December, putting snowless winters on the pile of failed climate predictions.

More than half of the continental U.S. had snow cover as of Dec. 15, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the most in 11 years. That exposes as worthless the predictions of the climate scammers of snowless winters as far as the eye can see. In 2006, by comparison, snow covered just 12% of these states.

[…]We recall the prediction in 2000 by Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, that winter snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event” and claiming, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Of course, we all remember that researchers with the CRU at East Anglia were responsible for omitting climate data with the purpose, according to uncovered email, to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.

The temperatures that have flatlined over the last 15 years can no longer be hidden, and neither can the whir of snowblowers all across America this Christmas, as state after state gets hit with bitter cold and snow.

Using computer models seemingly based on that old computer adage “garbage in, garbage out,” models that cannot even predict the past, the climate Chicken Littles are prone to predict snowless winters, glacier-free Himalayas and an ice-free North Pole. Polar bears would drown and Santa would have no place to land.

In his Dec. 10, 2007, “Earth has a fever” speech as he accepted his Nobel Prize, climate extremist Al Gore mentioned a prophecy of doom by U.S. climate scientist Wieslaw Maslowski.

Maslowski said the Arctic’s summer ice could “completely disappear” by 2013 due to global warming arising from carbon emissions. He was off by only a little. The Arctic had 920,000 square miles of ice more than it had in 2012, the largest year-to-year increase on record.

German scientists Carl-Otto Weiss and Horst-Joachim Luedecke of the European Institute for Climate and Energy reported recently that two naturally occurring cycles would combine to lower global temperatures this century and that temperature levels would decline to levels similar to the “little ice age” of 1870.

I’m not sure how the lefties are going to spin this news, but I’m pretty sure that the only solution to our ongoing “climate crisis” is going to be more government control of corporations and individuals. It always is.