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Taken July 12, 2008, Original image is here – 1 kilometer/pixel resolution.
Flashback June 27: CTV – “For the first time in modern history, the North Pole may be iceless this summer….”

Late last month;

… leading climatologists and meteorologists met in New York at the Energy Business Watch Climate and Hurricane Forum. The theme of the forum strongly suggested that a period of global cooling is about emerge, though possible concerns for a political backlash kept it from being spelled out.
However, the message was loud and clear, a cyclical global warming trend may be coming to an end for a variety of reasons, and a new cooling cycle could impact the energy markets in a big way.
Words like “highly possible,” “likely” or “reasonably convincing” about what may soon occur were used frequently. Then there were other words like “mass pattern shift” and “wholesale change in anomalies” and “changes in global circulation.”
Noted presenters, such as William Gray, Harry van Loon, Rol Madden and Dave Melita, signaled in the strongest terms that huge climate changes are afoot. Each weather guru, from a different angle, suggested that global warming is part of a cycle that is nearing an end. All agreed the earth is in a warm cycle right now, and has been for a while, but that is about to change significantly.

“A 2005 prediction of solar activity. The sunspot number should now stand close to 100, instead it is zero.”

Plants eat C02. Who knew?

Increasing exposure to carbon dioxide appears to boost crop yields, Hans-Joachim Weigel of the Johann Heinrich von Thuenen Institute for rural areas, forestry and fisheries in the central city of Brunswick told AFP.
“Output increased by about 10 percent for barley, beets and wheat” when the plants were subjected to higher levels of carbon dioxide, Weigel said.

“Millinocket, Maine once had its temperature station in a parking lot until it was run over by a car.”

h/t to Fred.
More at Climate Audit – “Sea Ice – the stretch run”

Climate Change through Color Change;

… the two models show the areas of warming and cooling to be occurring in widely different sections of the United States. The [United States Global Change Research Program’s] solution to this conundrum was to alter the temperature color scale by eliminating yellow and green, and extending the color orange into negative temperature ranges as low as -1.0°F, thereby implying warming, when in fact the models were showing no temperature change or cooling for some localities.

Related: “Painting by numbers” – a video showing the USHCN adjustments in action.

If James Hansen is beginning to sound like he’s coming unhinged…

James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer. Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress – in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming – to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the “perfect storm” of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable

… it may be because things aren’t turning out the way he hoped.

(Graphic by Joe D’Aleo.)

And where, oh where have we heard this before? “He urged today’s youth to speak out against politicians complicit in climate change, even suggesting they look for a legal way to throw our current political leaders in jail for ignoring science – drawing rounds of cheering and applause. Suzuki said that politicians, who never see beyond the next election, are committing a criminal act by ignoring science.” Yeah, that’s where.

More, including audio, here

IPCC policies state:

“All written expert, and government review comments will be made available to reviewers on request during the review process and will be retained in an open archive in a location determined by the IPCC Secretariat on completion of the Report for a period of at least five years.”

Despite this, IPCC Review Editor John Mitchell of the UK Met Office claimed to have destroyed all their working documents and correspondence pertaining to his duties as Review Editor and the Met Office also claims to have expunged all records.

“You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling CO2”

Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.

Reid Bryson passed away on June 11th. You’ll enjoy the link, originally posted here last May.

Hans Schreuder(PDF)

Based on UN IPCC dogma and according to this Australian website for children, the greenhouse effect is “caused by gases in our atmosphere (especially water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane). They trap energy from the sun’s light and reflect it back to Earth, so we just keep on getting warmer.”
As Alan Siddons points out: “You might as well believe that your image in a mirror can
burn your face”. It is palpably absurd, and yet it is an accurate depiction of the theory that the IPCC has foisted on the public – a theory that IPCC critics won’t even attack because, presumably, they believe it too.
Moreover, the actual trapping of heat cannot raise an object’s temperature in the first place. It only slows down heat loss. For instance, a polar bear is a living thermos bottle. Its internal body temperature is much the same as ours. But its surrounding fat and fur are such that – and this is remarkable – a polar bear is virtually invisible to a thermal camera.
Just like coffee in a thermos, you can’t tell how hot the inside of a polar bear is by
looking at it from the outside. But neither does coffee in a thermos get hotter because its heat is trapped. It just retains its temperature for a longer time. Otherwise, both the polar bear and the thermos would self-ignite.
In short, the earth absorbs enough energy from the sun to reach a certain temperature. Since it radiates the same amount, its temperature obviously isn’t raised by carbon dioxide absorbing some infrared – for CO2 simply releases that energy at the same pace, as satellites attest. But even if CO2 did trap thermal energy, as insulation does (creating an emission discrepancy that would be quite observable to satellites), the earth’s temperature could go no higher than what it began with. To repeat, coffee doesn’t get hotter in a thermos.”

(Related – if you haven’t already read Taken By Storm, I strongly recommend you do so. )

“This can only mean one things. CAPITALISTS ARE CONTROLLING THE GLOBAL WARMING …”

The Chinese surge ahead!

China has now clearly overtaken the United States as the world’s leading emitter of climate-warming gases, a new study has found. The increasing emissions from China – up 8 percent in the past year – accounted for two-thirds of the growth in global greenhouse gas emissions in 2007, the study found.
The report, released Friday by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, is an annual study. Last year, for the first time, the researchers found that China had edged ahead of the United States as the world’s leading emitter.

And there’s no end in sight.

Everything I know about our planet, I lurned* from a science magazine;

“…solar physicists aren’t like weather forecasters; They can’t predict the future.”

Hey, you can’t change what you can’t predict!
(*And timely, too.)

CBC:

Some of the world’s top athletes had to seek medical attention after competing in what may have been the coldest swim in World Championship Triathlon history in downtown Vancouver. The preliminary sprint distance race kicked off early Friday morning in unseasonably cool weather when about 600 competitors — lashed by wind and rain — hit the 11-degree water for a 750-metre swim in English Bay.

Then, with the air temperature hovering around eight degrees, the athletes jumped on their bikes for a 20-kilometre ride followed by a five-kilometre run through Stanley Park wearing only light Lycra triathlon suits.
That’s when things really got chilly, according to Jeff Hayne, one of the dozens of athletes shivering under a reflective Mylar blanket in the medical tent after the race.
“”It was about as cold as I have done in Canada… even Fort McMurray 12 years ago wasn’t this cold. To get out and get on a fast downhill is what really got you in a bad spot. [During] the run, you finally warm up a little bit,” said Hayne.
Dr. Sam Gutman said it was controlled mayhem in the medical tents at the finish line where many athletes collapsed from hypothermia.
Ambulances had to be used to warm up the athletes because the warming tents were too cold. It got close to the point where it was not safe to continue the event, said Gutman.

Note: resident CBC Fruit Fly Guy was not quoted for this report.

Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present the cutting edge of scientific research in this, the year 2008 – fully 300 years since Sir Isaac Newton was knighted for his contributions in the fields of physics and mathematics.
Sheep flatulence inoculation developed;

Scientists in New Zealand have been working around-the-clock to reduce emissions from agriculture, such as changing the way fertilisers are used on pasture land, Mr Goff added.
Sheep, cattle, goats and deer produce large quantities of gas through belching and flatulence, as their multiple stomachs digest grass.
Ruminants are responsible for about 25 per cent of the methane produced in Britain, but in countries with a large agricultural sector, the proportion is much higher.
The 45 million sheep and 10 million cattle in New Zealand burped and farted about 90 percent of that country’s methane emissions, according to government figures.

We’re doomed. We’re positively doomed.

Via Anthony Watts:

Abstract: We have observed spectroscopic changes in temperature sensitive molecular lines, in the magnetic splitting of an Fe I line, and in the continuum brightness of over 1000 sunspot umbrae from 1990-2005. All three measurements show consistent trends in which the darkest parts of the sunspot umbra have become warmer (45K per year) and their magnetic field strengths have decreased (77 Gauss per year), independently of the normal 11-year sunspot cycle. A linear extrapolation of these trends suggests that few sunspots will be visible after 2015.

Watts explains “Let us all hope that they are wrong, for a solar epoch period like the Maunder Minimum inducing a Little Ice Age will be a worldwide catastrophe economically, socially, environmentally, and morally.”
Much more at the link.