NatGeo: Sun Oddly Quiet – Hints at Next “Little Ice Age”?

4 05 2009

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Excerpts printed below, see full story here (h/t to David Archibald)

Anne Minard for National Geographic News

May 4, 2009 A prolonged lull in solar activity has astrophysicists glued to their telescopes waiting to see what the sun will do next—and how Earth’s climate might respond.

The sun is the least active it’s been in decades and the dimmest in a hundred years. The lull is causing some scientists to recall the Little Ice Age, an unusual cold spell in Europe and North America, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850.

…

But researchers are on guard against their concerns about a new cold snap being misinterpreted.

“[Global warming] skeptics tend to leap forward,” said Mike Lockwood, a solar terrestrial physicist at the University of Southampton in the U.K.

He and other researchers are therefore engaged in what they call “preemptive denial” of a solar minimum leading to global cooling.

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Comments : 338 Comments »

Categories : Science, climate_change, solar

Sugar coated consumerism or just plain crap?

4 05 2009

I’m truly sorry for the title, but it says what I think about this succinctly. I tried half a dozen variations and kept coming back to the one word.

There are days when I think I just won’t see anything stupider cross my inbox. Then, today brings a new surprise on the winds of change. Carbon Free Sugar. Let me repeat that.  Carbon Free Sugar – certified even.

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Click image to be whisked away to an alternate chemical reality

Those of you who remember their basic high school chemistry might remember this simple and indelible truth: sugar contains carbon.

There is no getting around that. Don’t believe me? Try frying up some sugar in  a sauce pan and watch the results. Or just pick up a used mass spectrograph on Ebay and run an analysis.

Or just consult any number of chemical handbooks. Sucrose is common table sugar (as pictured in the bag) and has the chemical formula:  C12H22O11

Looks like twelve atoms of carbon combined with eleven molecules of H2O doesn’t it? That’s why it is called (drum roll please) a carbohydrate.

Eating and digesting sugar turns it into water and carbon dioxide that we exhale, so for it to be truly “carbon free” as the label says, we have to get those twelve molecules of Carbon out.  So how do they get the carbon out of that sucrose anyway? It’s really easy, all we need is a catalyst. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 179 Comments »

Categories : Science, economy-health, ridiculae

NSIDC vs. NANSEN vs. AMSR-E

4 05 2009

Guest post by Steven Goddard

In my May 1st piece, Dr. Walt Meier at NSIDC hypothesized that differences in algorithm between NSIDC and NANSEN (NORSEX) were causing the gap between the NSIDC interpretation of normal and the NANSEN interpretation of normal, as seen below.  They use different baseline periods which introduces some difference – but the discrepancy should go the other way due to the fact that the NANSEN base period (1979-2007) includes more low ice extent years from the current decade.

So I tried an experiment to test this out, where I overlaid NANSEN on top of NSIDC for the entire winter – and found that they are nearly identical.  This would tend to discount the theory that differences in the algorithm are to blame.  It appears from this more likely that one or the other has an error in their historical database which is affecting the interpretation of “normal.”  Dr. Meier has stated that he is confident about the accuracy of the NSIDC database.

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Comments : 53 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, sea ice

A question for the Catlin Arctic Survey: what happens to the fuel drums?

4 05 2009
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Abandoned fuel drums on Ellesmere Island Source: CIEL.org

An interesting question has arisen. Is it OK to pollute the Arctic Sea so long as the quest is “noble”? The Catlin Arctic Ice Survey likes to promote their trek as having a low carbon footprint because they are walking on the ice, rather than doing the more efficient flying ice survey (such has already been done), or driving to the north pole with vehicles.

What we don’t see much of from Catlin is how much fuel it takes to support their walking endeavor. They have to get resupplied by aircraft. And, because they have to get “rescued” at some point, refueling is needed for that too since the planes can’t make the flight on one tank. They have to leave a fuel cache on the sea ice.

So what happens to the empty fuel barrels? Or even worse, what happens to full barrels?

WUWT reader Richard Henry Lee writes:

On 26 April at http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/from_the_ice.aspx, the report was:

Yesterday, the plane took off from Resolute Bay, flew north for 3 hours to the weather station at Eureka. The CAS support team hopped off, the pilots re-fuelled and then flew out onto the Arctic Ocean, in order to cache fuel in advance of tomorrow’s flight out to the Ice Team. Once sufficient fuel had been cached, the pilots then flew back to Eureka where they spent the night.

On 3 May, they report: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 161 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, ridiculae