Prince Edward Island - yellow in the inset
Temperatures dropped to a record low in Prince Edward Island overnight Tuesday, with reports of frost throughout the province.
An official record low of 3.8 C was set early Wednesday morning at Charlottetown airport.
The previous record for that date was 5.1 C, set in 2005.
Bob Robichaud, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, said that to his knowledge, frost has never been reported before in July in P.E.I. Read the rest of this entry »
Legislating temperature limits to 2°C will surely be more effective than legislating alcohol. Right?
Developing Nations Rebuff G-8 on Curbing Pollutants
L’AQUILA, Italy — The world’s major industrial nations and newly emerging powers failed to agree Wednesday on specific cuts in heat-trapping gases by 2050, undercutting an effort to build a global consensus to fight climate change, according to people following the talks.
As President Obama arrived for three days of meetings, negotiators for the world’s 17 leading polluters dropped a proposal to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by mid-century, and emissions from the most advanced economies by 80 percent. But both the G-8 and the developing countries agreed to set a goal of stopping world temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels. Read the rest of this entry »
More civil disobedience and vandalism along the thinking of Dr. James Hansen of NASA GISS, who advocates such things.
From Ecorazzi and Treehugger
Greenpeace took a unique approach today and sent several climbers up Mt. Rushmore in the middle of the night to deploy a giant 75lb sixty-five feet high by thirty-five feet wide banner calling for Climate Action. Featuring an unfinished portrait of the President, it read “America honors leaders not politicians: Stop Global Warming.” The demonstration came as President Obama meets other G8 leaders in l’Aquila, Italy today to discuss the global warming crisis in the lead-up to UN climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen this December.
The banner managed to stay up on Mt. Rushmore for about an hour before being cut at around 1:17 PM est. Greenpeace was quick to point out that they respect American monuments and the banner was not installed in any way detrimental to the carvings on Mt. Rushmore. For more information, jump to the official Greenpeace posting on the event here. Read the rest of this entry »
According to Wikipedia, the Medieval Warm Period was a time of warm weather around AD 800-1300 during the European Medieval period. Initial research on the MWP and the following Little Ice Age (LIA) was largely done in Europe, where the phenomenon was most obvious and clearly documented. It was initially believed that the temperature changes were global. However, this view has been questioned; the 2001 IPCC report summarises this research, saying
“…current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this time frame, and the conventional terms of ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Medieval Warm Period’ appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries”.
Of course, there’s many researchers, such as Michael Mann and his thoroughly discredited “hockey stick” that try mightily to make the MWP disappear.
News flash to IPCC. Now a scientist has linked the MWP to success of the Inca civilization in the southern hemisphere. It is not going away any time soon, it is spreading.
The new study is called “Putting the Rise of the Inca within a Climatic and Land Management Context” and was prepared by Alex Chepstow-Lusty, an English paleo-biologist working for the French Institute of Andean Studies, in Lima. Link to paper (PDF) is here (h/t to WUWT reader Corey)
Here is the abstract:
The rapid expansion of the Inca from the Cuzco area of highland Peru produced the largest empire in the New World between ca. AD 1400–1532. Although this meteoric rise may in part be due to the adoption of innovative societal strategies, supported by a large labour force and standing army, we argue that this would not have been possible without increased crop productivity, which was linked to more favourable climatic conditions. A multi-proxy, high-resolution 1200-year lake sediment record was analysed at Marcacocha, 12 km north of Ollantaytambo, in the heartland of the Inca Empire. This record reveals a period of sustained aridity that began from AD 880, followed by increased warming from AD 1100 that lasted beyond the arrival of the Spanish in AD 1532. These increasingly warmer conditions allowed the Inca and their predecessors the opportunity to exploit higher altitudes from AD 1150, by constructing agricultural terraces that employed glacial-fed irrigation, in combination with deliberate agroforestry techniques. There may be some important lessons to be learnt today from these strategies for sustainable rural development in the Andes in the light of future climate uncertainty.
Here is a news article about it that talks of the findings. (h/t to WUWT reader “cotwome”) - Anthony
Huayna Picchu towers above the ruins of Machu Picchu
Opportunity knocks, again, in the Andes
The four centuries coincided directly with the rise of this startling, hyper-productive culture that at its zenith was bigger than the Ming Dynasty China and the Ottoman E
mpire, the two most powerful contemporaries of the Inca.
“This period of increased temperatures,” the scientists say, “allowed the Inca and their predecessors to expand, from AD 1150 onwards, their agricultural zones by moving up the mountains to build a massive system of terraces fed frequently by glacial water, as well as planting trees to reduce erosion and increase soil fertility. Read the rest of this entry »
Or if you like, fling funds
to help keep the www.surfacestations.org project going.
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