Sharks FREEZE and Niagara Falls turns to ice as US temperatures hit staggering -37 degrees

by Will Kirby, December 31, 2017 in SundayExpress


More than 220 million Americans are preparing for the coldest New Year in living memory as the cold snap that has swept across the northern states prompts chaos across the country.

Temperatures atop the highest peak in the north-east, Mount Washington, hit a shocking -37 degrees celsius – breaking the previous record at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire of -35C which was set in 1933.

Wandering Thru The Tides

by Willis Eschenbach, December 30, 2017 in WUWT


I got to thinking about the records of the sea level height taken at tidal stations all over the planet. The main problem with these tide stations is that they measure the height of the sea surface versus the height of some object attached to the land … but the land isn’t sitting still. In most places around the planet the land surface is actually rising or falling, and in some places, it’s doing so at a surprising rate, millimeters per year.

2017 in review: polar bear prophesies of doom more at odds with current reality

by Polar Bear Science, December 29, 2017


Tales of doom and gloom about polar bears reflect what some people think might happen in the future, not what is happening right now.  Currently, polar bears are doing just fine despite the low summer sea ice coverage they’ve experienced since 2007 (Crockford 2017a; York et al. 2016). In other words, there has been no global population decline as predicted: officially, the numbers were 22,000-31,000 (or 26,500 average) in 2015 (Wiig et al. 2015) but about 28,500 when estimates published since then are included (Aars et al. 2017; Dyck et al. 2017; Matishov et al. 2014; SWG 2016), up from about 22,500 in 2005).

Elsevier retracting 26 papers accepted because of fake reviews

by Victoria Stern, December 21, 2017

Elsevier has retracted 13 papersand says it will retract 13 moreafter discovering they were accepted because of fake reviews.

A spokesperson for Elsevier told us that the journals are in the process of retracting all 26 papers affected by the “peer-review manipulation” and “unexplained authorship irregularities.” Most share one corresponding author, a physical science researcher based in Iran.

So far, 13 of the papers were retracted this year: 10 in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy and three in Results in Physics. Of the remaining 13 papers, four others were published in Results in Physics, four in Journal of Crystal Growth, three in Journal of Alloys and Compounds, and one each in International Journal of Thermal Sciences and Fusion Engineering and Design.

Carbon isotopes, Part 2 : The Delta Notation

by David Kirtley, December 28, 2017, in SkepticalScicence


In Part 1, we learned about carbon isotopes: how 14C forms in the atmosphere, how different isotopes move through the Carbon Cycle, and how isotopic measurements reveal clues about our changing climate. In this post we will look at how measurements of changing isotopic ratios are described.

(…)

Check out this NOAA link for more. And if you have more time check out the entire series on isotopes. I can’t recommend it enough!

NINE YEARS AGO… Al Gore Predicted North Pole Would Be Completely Ice Free by Today

by Jim Hoft, December 28, 2017 in GatewayPundit


NINE YEARS AGO THIS MONTH—
Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice free in five years.
Gore made the prediction to a German audience in 2008. He told them that “the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years.”

This wasn’t the only time Gore made his ice-free prediction. Gore’s been predicting this since 2007.

See also here

Seven New Papers Forecast Global Cooling, Another Mini Ice Age Soon

by K. Richard, December 28, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch


During 2017, 120 papers linking historical and modern climate change to variations in solar activity and its modulators (clouds, cosmic rays) have been published in scientific journals.

It has been increasingly established that low solar activity (fewer sunspots) and increased cloud cover (as modulated by cosmic rays) are highly associated with a cooling climate.

In recent years, the Earth has unfortunately left a period of very high solar activity, the Modern Grand Maximum.  Periods of high solar activity correspond to multi-decadal- to centennial-scale warming.

Solar scientists are now increasingly forecasting a period of very low activity that will commence in the next few years (by around 2020 to 2025).  This will lead to climate cooling, even Little Ice Age conditions.

Thirteen recently-published papers forecasting global cooling are listed below.


Glaciers and Sea Level Rise

by Andy May, December 28, 2017 in WUWT


This is the seventh and last post in my series on the hazards of climate change. In this post we examine the effects of climate change on glaciers and sea level rise. The first six examined the effect of humans on the environment, the effect of the growing human population, climate change and the food supply, the cost of global warming, the effect of man and climate change on extinctions, climate (or weather) related deaths, and extreme weather and climate change.

GLOBAL TEMPERATURE FOR NOVEMBER 2017 CONTINUES DECLINE

by Dr David Whitehouse, December 24, 2017 in GWPF


The data for November 2017 HadCRUT4 (click on image to enlarge) has just been released by the UK Met Office. It is 0.547, better expressed as 14.55 +/- 0.10 °C. Given the substantial monthly variability evident in this database one has to be careful in drawing many conclusions about it. Given that, it is interesting to note that November 2017 is statistically the same as most Novembers of the so-called pause years, i.e. 1997, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2010, 2012, 2014 and even 2016.

Media Silence: Flurry Of Recent Papers Show Warming Likely Will Lead To LESS STORM ACTIVITY!

by P Gosselin, December 26, 2017 in Lining and Vahrenholt, No TricksZone


What follows are 6 recent studies presented by Lüning and Vahrenholt, which dump cold water on the claim storms will get more frequent and intense.

The studies fly in the face of a recent Nature editorial piece, one filled with the usual worn out alarmist propaganda language of climate doom we’ve been seeing for over a quarter century. The editorial claims some scientists have already found the link between “weird weather” and greenhouse gases.

2018 GLOBAL TEMPERATURE POLL

by Dr David Whitehouse, December 22, 2017 in GWPF


We know that prediction is difficult, especially about the future as the saying goes, but as an entertainment in the festive season we are asking for your 2018 global temperature forecast.

Every year at this time the UK Met Office issues its forecast of the global annual temperature for the following year. This time it says that 2018 will be another very warm year globally, but it is unlikely to be a new record due to the cooling effect of about 0.1 °C from a moderate La Niña in the Pacific.

Carbon Loophole: Why Is Wood Burning Counted as Green Energy?

by Fred Pearce, December 19, 2017 in Yale Environment360


In September, some 200 scientists wrote to the EU insisting that “bioenergy [from forest biomass] is not carbon-neutral” and calling for tighter rules to protect forests and their carbon. Yet just a month later, EU ministers rubber-stamped the existing carbon accounting rules, reaffirming that the burning of wood pellets is renewable energy.

Where The Temperature Rules The Total Surface Absorption

by Willis Eschenbach, December 22, 2017 in WUWT


Reflecting upon my previous post, Where The Temperature Rules The Sun, I realized that while it was valid, it was just about temperature controlling downwelling solar energy via cloud variations. However, it didn’t cover total energy input to the surface. The total energy absorbed by the surface is the sum of the net solar energy (surface downwelling solar minus surface reflections) plus the downwelling longwave infrared, or DWIR. This is the total energy that is absorbed by and actually heats the surface.

CONTAMINATED ICE CORES: EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT PALEO-CLIMATE MAY BE WRONG

by University of York, December 20, 2017 in GWPF

For the first time scientists have directly observed living bacteria in polar ice and snow — an environment once considered sterile. “As microbial activity and its influence on its local environment has never been taken into account when looking at ice-core gas samples it could provide a moderate source of error in climate history interpretations.”

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

See also here

SEA LEVEL: Rise and Fall – Part 3 – Computational Hubris

by Kip Hansen, December 19, 2017 in WUWT


There have been so many very good essays on Global Sea Level Rise by persons all of whom have a great deal more expertise than I.   Jo Nova hosts a dozen or so excellent essays, which point at another score of papers and publications, for the most part clearly demonstrating that there are two contrarian positions on sea level rise in the scientific community:  1) Sea level has risen, is rising and will continue to rise at a rate approximately 8-12 inches (20-30 centimeters) per century — due to geological and long-term climatic forces well beyond our control;  and 2a) Other than explicit cases of Local Relative SLR, the sea does not appear to be rising much over the last 50-70 years, if at all.  2b) If it is rising due to general warming of the climate it will not add much to position 1.

Increased ionization supports growth of aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei

by H. Svensmark et al., December 19, 2017 in NatureCommunications


 (…)In conclusion, a mechanism by which ions condense their mass onto small aerosols and thereby increase the growth rate of the aerosols, has been formulated theoretically and shown to be in good agreement with extensive experiments. The mechanism of ion-induced condensation may be relevant in the Earth’s atmosphere under pristine conditions, and able to influence the formation of CCN. It is conjectured that this mechanism could be the explanation for the observed correlations between past climate variations and cosmic rays, modulated by either solar activity or supernova activity in the solar neighborhood on very long time scales. The theory of ion-induced condensation should be incorporated into global aerosol models, to fully test the atmospheric implications.

See also here