Prof Warns Mini Ice Age has Started

As the UK shudders under temperatures 5 to 10 degrees Celsius below normal levels for this time of year a Russian scientist has repeated warnings that we are heading for a mini Ice Age.

The Met Office has warned that temperatures will remain below average until about 20 April nit just here but in the rest of the world.

German meteorologists say that the start of 2013 is now the coldest in 208 years - and now German media has quoted Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov from the St. Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory as showing it is proof as he said earlier that we are heading for a "Mini Ice Age."

Talking to German media the scientist who first made his prediction in 2005 said that after studying sunspots and their relationship with climate change on Earth, we are now on an "unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop."

Building on observations made by English astronomer Walter Maunder, Dr Abdussamatov, said he had found that the Earth cools and warms in a 200-year cycles.

The last big freeze known as the Little Ice Age was between 1650 and 1850 which he said coincided with Maunder’s findings that there had been no sunspots between 1645 and 1715.

Writing in his blog, Abdussamatov said: "The last global decrease of temperature (the most cold phase of the Little Ice Age) was observed not only in Europe, North America and Greenland, but also in any other part of the world during the Maunder minimum of sunspot activity and of the total solar irradiance in 1645–1715 years.

"All channels in the Netherlands were frozen, glaciers were on the advance in Greenland and people were forced to leave their settlements, inhabited for several centuries.

"The Thames river in London and Seine in Paris were frozen over every year. Humanity has always been prospering during the warm periods and suffering during the cold ones. The climate has never been and will never be stable."

His warning that cold weather would hit prosperity follows news that Britain is heading for an unprecedented triple-dip recession as economists warned that the severe weather gripping much of Britain threatened a second successive quarter of falling national output.

Just days after the chancellor predicted that the UK would narrowly avoid a second successive quarter of negative growth – the official definition of recession – experts warned that the combination of heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures might be a crucial factor in whether the economy expanded in the first three months of 2013.

Now the Russian scientists says the new mini Ice Age will begin next year and will last for 200 years.

"The tendency of decrease in the global Earth temperature started in 2006–2008 will temporarily pause in 2010–2012.

"The increase in TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) within a short 11-year cycle 24 is expected to temporarily compensate the decrease in TSI within the ongoing 2-century variation.

Only the decrease in TSI within the ongoing 11-year cycle 24 accompanied by continued decrease of its 2-century component in 2013–2015 will lead to stable subsequent cooling of our planet, which is expected to reach its minimum in the phase of a deep cooling by 2055–2060.

"The cooling can be similar to the one observed in the whole Europe, North America and Greenland in 1645–1715 in the period of Maunder minimum of solar luminosity and sunspot activity when the temperature will fall by 1–1.5 Celsius degrees down to the mark of the so-called Maunder minimum.

"The regular period of climatic minimum (the stage of global cooling) will last for approximately 45–65 years and the new warming will eventually come afterwards within the regular 2-century solar cycle.

"The deep cooling is expected to be regularly replaced by warming only by the beginning of 22nd century.

"A forecast of the global cooling by the middle of the 21st century and of the new 200-year cycle followed by global warming in the beginning of the 22nd century is shown on the figure."

Presentation By London Based Astrophysicist Piers Corbyn

http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews11No5a.pdf

Read More At www.iceageearth.com

Unusually cold spring in Europe and the Southeast U.S. due to the Arctic Oscillation

Article posted by www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters

Please note whilst reading that the Jet Streams behaviour is a direct result of solar output NOT GW!


The article reads....

During March 2013, residents of Europe and the Southeast U.S. must have wondered what happened to global warming. Repeated bitter blasts of bitter cold air invaded from the Arctic, bringing one of the coldest and snowiest Marches on record for much of northern Europe. In the U.K., only one March since 1910 was colder (1962), and parts of Eastern Europe had their coldest March since 1952. A series of exceptional snowstorms struck many European locations, including the remarkable blizzard of March 11 - 12, which dumped up to 25 cm (10") of snow on the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey in the U.K., and in the northern French provinces of Manche and Calvados. The entire Southeast U.S. experienced a top-ten coldest March on record, with several states experiencing a colder month than in January 2013. Despite all these remarkable cold weather events, global temperatures during March 2013 were the 9th warmest since 1880, said NASA. How, then, did such cold extremes occur in a month that was in the top 8% of warmest Marches in Earth's recorded history? The answer lies in the behaviour of the jet stream. This band of strong high-altitude winds marks the boundary between cold, polar air and warm, subtropical air. The jet stream, on average, blows west to east. But there are always large ripples in the jet, called planetary waves (or Rossby waves.) In the Northern Hemisphere, cold air from the polar regions spills southward into the U-shaped troughs of these ripples, and warm air is drawn northwards into the upside-down U-shaped ridges. If these ripples attain unusually high amplitude, a large amount of cold polar air will spill southwards into the mid-latitudes, causing unusual cold extremes. This was the case in Europe and the Eastern U.S. in March 2013. These cold extremes were offset by unusually warm conditions where the jet stream bulged northwards - over the Atlantic, the Western U.S., and in China during March 2013. In fact, the amplitude of the ripples in the jet stream reached their most extreme value ever recorded in any March during 2013, as measured by an index called the Arctic Oscillation (AO).

The monthly Arctic Oscillation (AO) index from 1950 - March 2013 shows that three of the six most extreme negative cases have occurred since 2009. Note that all of the six most negative AO indices on record were associated with historic cold waves and blizzards over Europe or the Eastern U.S. Image created using data from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.
Measuring the jet stream's contortions: the Arctic Oscillation (AO)

One measure of how extreme the ripples in the jet stream are is by measuring the difference in pressure between the Icelandic Low and the Azores High. An index based in this pressure difference is called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). When this index is strongly negative, it means that the pressure difference between the Icelandic Low and the Azores High is low. This results in a weaker jet stream, allowing it to take large, meandering loops. These loops allow cold air to spill far to the south from the Arctic into the mid-latitudes. A more general index that looks at pressure patterns over the entire Arctic, not just the North Atlantic, is called the Arctic Oscillation (AO). The AO and NAO are closely related about 90% of the time. According to a 2010 paper by L'Heureux et al., a strongly negative AO pattern that allows cold air to spill southwards into the mid-latitudes does nothing to the average temperature of the planet. Fluctuations in the jet stream as measured by the AO simply act to redistribute heat. It's kind of like turning off your refrigerator and leaving the refrigerator door open - the cold air from the refrigerator spills out into the room, but is replaced inside the refrigerator by warm room air. No net change in heat occurs. During March 2013, the AO index hit -3.2. Not only was this the most extreme negative March value of the AO since record keeping began in 1950, it was also the sixth lowest AO index ever measured. It was also the first time the AO index had been that extremely negative in a non-winter month (because the circulation patterns are stronger in the winter, we tend to see more extreme values of the AO index in December, January, and February.) This unusual contortion of the jet stream in March 2013 allowed Europe to have exceptional cold weather in a month when the global average temperature was among the warmest 8% of Marches on record. Why did the AO index get so extreme in March 2013? Part of the blame goes to the sudden stratospheric warming event that began in January (wunderblogger Lee Grenci has a detailed post on this event.) Sudden stratospheric warming events tend to push the atmosphere into a more negative AO configuration. Another major factor was the very active Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO), a pattern of increased thunderstorm activity near the Equator that moves around the globe in 30 - 60 days. When the area of increased thunderstorms associated with the MJO is located in the Pacific Ocean, as occurred during much of March 2013, this tends to create negative AO conditions. Finally, wintertime Arctic sea ice loss has been tied to more negative AO patterns, and sea ice was well blow average again during March.

The Arctic Oscillation (AO) is a pattern of varying pressure and winds over the Northern Hemisphere that can strongly influence mid-latitude weather patterns. When the AO is in its positive phase, jet stream winds are strong and the jet stream tends to blow mostly west to east, with low-amplitude waves (troughs and ridges.) Since the jet stream marks the boundary between cold Arctic air to the north and warm subtropical air to the south, cold air stays bottled up in the Arctic. When the AO is in its negative phase, the winds of the jet stream slow down, allowing the jet to take on more wavy pattern with high-amplitude troughs and ridges. High amplitude troughs typically set up over the Eastern U.S. and Western Europe during negative AO episodes, allowing cold air to spill southwards in those regions and create unusally cold weather.
Are jet stream patterns getting more extreme?

We've had some wildly variable jet stream patterns in recent years in the Northern Hemisphere. Just last year, we had a strongly positive AO in March, when our ridiculous "Summer in March" heat wave brought the warmest March on record to the U.S. The first day of spring in Chicago, IL on March 20, 2013 had a high temperature of just 25°F - a 60 degree difference from last year's high of 85°F on March 20! During the past five years, we've set new monthly records for extreme negative AO index for six of the twelve months of the year:
-4.3: February 2010
-3.4: December 2009
-3.2: March 2013
-1.5: October 2009, 2012
-1.4: June 2009
-1.4: July 2009
Note that four of these months with an extremely negative AO occurred in one year - 2009. This unusual event was "unprecedented in the 60-year record", according to L'Heureux et al. (2010.) Despite the unusually large negative AO in 2009, the authors found that the AO index between 1950 - 2009 had actually trended to be more positive, in both the winter and annual mean. This is in agreement with what many climate models predict: the AO index should get increasingly positive, due to increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, since this tends to make the stratosphere cool and increase the strength of high altitude winds over the Arctic. However, a number of papers have been published since 2009 theorizing that the record loss of Arctic sea ice in recent years may be significantly altering Northern Hemisphere jet stream patterns. Many of these studies show a link between Arctic sea ice loss and an increasingly negative AO and NAO index in winter. Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers has authored several of these papers, and wrote a very readable explanation of the theory linking Arctic sea ice loss to extreme weather in the mid-latitudes for our Earth Day 2013 microsite. Her post was called, "The Changing Face of Mother Nature." The most recent technical paper connecting Arctic sea ice loss to extreme weather was a March 2013 paper by Tang et al., "Cold winter extremes in northern continents linked to Arctic sea ice loss". The paper argued that unusual jet stream contortions in winter have become increasingly common in recent years. The scientists found a mathematical relationship between wintertime Arctic sea ice loss and the increase in unusual jet stream patterns capable of bringing cold, snowy weather to the Eastern U.S., Western Europe, and East Asia, typical of what one sees during a strongly negative Arctic Oscillation. They theorized that sea ice loss in the Arctic promotes more evaporation, resulting in earlier snowfall in Siberia and other Arctic lands. The earlier snow insulates the soil, allowing the land to cool more rapidly. This results in a southwards shift of the jet stream and builds higher atmospheric pressures farther to the south, which increases the odds of cold spells and blocking high pressure systems that can cause extended periods of unusually cold and snowy weather in the mid-latitudes. The research linking climate change impacts in the Arctic to more extreme jet stream patterns is still very new, and we need several more years of data and additional research before we can be confident that this is occurring. But if the new research is correct, the crazy winter weather we've been seeing since 2009 may be the new normal in a world with rapid warming occurring in the Arctic.

How does an ice age start? With one snowflake - FROM THE TOP OF THE PILE

By Brian Zinchuk

Hindsight is 20/20, they say. So looking back several decades, the scientists agreed – if they had to pick a date when it all started, it was 2013.

Thirteen is aptly considered unlucky, for it was the year with no summer. Scratch that. It was the first year with no summer.

Moods were glum throughout Western Canada that spring. April showers were supposed to bring May flowers. Instead, all the precipitation would come as the “white stuff.” Regina kept reporting another centimetre every few days. Roofs started collapsing. Brendenbury lost the roof of its rink. Still, these things can happen any given year.

But by the May long weekend, people really began to worry. There was still snow on the ground. No farmer could plant a crop. Half-million dollar tractor-and-air seeder combinations sat idle. Premiers called emergency cabinet sessions to deal with the crisis. Without a spring planting, for anyone, the economy wasn’t just going to take a tailspin, it was going to crash and burn much worse than the 1930s. Farmers not seeding meant the base industry was in total collapse. While that was hard on the pocketbooks, it was worse for the stomach.

While much of the people’s food was imported– vegetables from California, fruit from overseas, you couldn’t truck in enough hay to feed the beef industry, nor grain to feed the pigs. With no hay crop that year, and a severe drought in the United States the previous year, there was no surplus to feed the animals. By July, three-year-old bales that were used for wind protection were fetching $200 a piece, if you could find them. By September, the beef herd had been culled by 75 per cent. There was no food, anywhere, to feed the cattle. After a brief time when stores couldn’t give away all the recently slaughtered beef, and pork, North America suddenly found itself on a vegan diet, deprived of most of its milk, too. After all, you couldn’t drink milk if you couldn’t feed the cows.

World grain prices quadrupled over four months with the realization that there would be no grain production from the Canadian West, and substantially less from the American plains.

Natural gas prices also shot up, well beyond their 2007 peaks. With people running their furnaces year round, stockpiles dried up and, by fall, drilling resumed in earnest.

“Climate change,” the people were told. “This is what happens when we drive gas-guzzling SUVs and burn coal. The world is getting warmer.”

But it wasn’t.

Statistical arguments can be made for anything, given enough numbers. For the past 30 years, climate scientists told anyone who would listen that the world was going to warm up. Sea levels would rise. Coastal populations would flee inland as massive cities the world over became inundated. But what they neglected to mention was that back in the 1970s, the same scientists had other concerns. Back then, they were concerned about another ice age coming.

What is an ice age? The math was simple, really. It snows more than it melts, and the snow stays year over year. Eventually it accumulates to form ice sheets. Over thousands of years, these ice sheets grow to be miles thick. Precious little can live on them, and nothing can live under them.

Yet this was the natural state for nearly all of Canada for roughly 80,000 of the past 100,000 years, and countless cycles before that. Mankind, for all of its recorded history from the time Abraham left Ur in Mesopotamia, had been living during the peak of the interglacial period. No one had written on clay tablets of the great ice age. So it was conveniently forgotten, even though the evidence of it was all around. Nearly every piece of land north of the 49th parallel around the world had been sculpted by those massive glaciers, everything from the hills to the rivers that flowed from them.

This time, the scientists could be more definitive. It started in 2013, when the snow stayed. The high reflectivity of snow prevented the ground’s absorption of the sun’s rays. The air is warmed by the ground radiating heat originally absorbed from the sun. The result was snow instead of rain.

Three years on, Canada was a shambles. Two thirds of the nation was out of work and on the run, almost all of them to the south. The rest were packing. The Americans welcomed them with open arms, at first. After all, if a million or so Mexicans came across the Rio Grande every year, surely they could absorb some Canucks. But they faced pressures too. With a shortened growing season, corn, one of the most caloric-intense foods on the planet, and the staple of the American diet, could no longer be grown. Millions would go hungry.

Of the Canadians who remained, they soon realized it was a losing battle. There’s only so much snow you can push. You can only build a snowblower so big. All trains were equipped with massive snowblowers, the types that previously had been seen only in the mountains. A few years later, trains could no longer run. The snow and ice had accumulated to the point where a track was simply a blown-in tunnel in a 15-foot tall snow bank.

By 2020, 85 per cent of Canada was no longer inhabitable. The capital for those that remained was moved to Vancouver. Most provinces ceased to exist, their borders erased by the ice sheets.

The funny thing is, in the earlier years, popular culture was enthralled with zombie apocalypses. Too bad they never realized the simple snow flake was their undoing. Like a zombie, it, too, would never yield.

— Pipeline News editor Brian Zinchuk drives a gas-guzzling SUV and lives within six miles of two coal-fired power plants, yet he still has nearly two feet of snow in his front yard. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.

Why Has There Been So Much Snow This Spring?

Duluth, Minn., for example, has seen 51 inches (130 centimeters) of snow this April. That's not only the most snow the town has seen in any April — breaking the old mark of 31.6 inches (80 cm) — but the most snow the town has received in any month, ever, according to government records. As of Monday (April 22), a total of 995 snowfall records have also been broken so far this month, according to AccuWeather. Over the same time period last year, 195 snowfall records had been broken.

More than 91 percent of the upper Midwest also has snow on the ground as of today (April 24), meteorologist Jason Samenow wrote at the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog. "Snow cover in the previous 10 years on this date hasn't even come close to reaching this extent (ranging from 19 percent to much lower)," he wrote.

So why has spring failed to take hold? Blame the jet stream.

The record snow and below-average cold is due to a trough or dip in the jet stream, which has brought blasts of freezing air as far south as the Mexican border, said Jeff Weber, a scientist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
Whence the snow?

This dip in the jet stream has also brought moisture from the Pacific to the Eastern Rockies. Boulder, Colo., for example, saw 47 inches (119 cm) of snow in April, breaking the old record of 44 inches (112 cm).

From the dip, the jet stream then swoops up to the north toward Minnesota, bringing new moisture with it from the Gulf of Mexico, Weber said. That has made for snowy conditions throughout the region.

This persistent trough has largely stayed in place during much of April, due in part to a stubborn mass of warm air over Greenland and the North Atlantic, Weber said. A similar system was also responsible for the record cold seen in March throughout much of the Eastern United States.
This mass of air has blocked the normal eastward progression of the jet stream, which normally brings warm air from the south and west into the central United States. Instead, this "buckled" jet stream has been stuck in place, bathing the Rockies and Upper Midwest in cold, and often moist, air, Weber said.

Warming up

But now, the mass of warm air over the North Atlantic is finally dissipating, and higher temperatures are expected by this weekend from Colorado to Minnesota, Weber said. While temperatures have recently dipped into the single digits (below 10 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 12 degrees Celsius), they should reach above 80 F (27 C) by the weekend throughout much of this region, he said. [6 Signs that Spring Has Sprung]

This will lead to a lot of melted snow, which could cause some of the worst flooding ever seen in the Upper Midwest, Weber said.

The persistent cold has helped tamped down severe weather and tornadoes, which thrive on the interaction of warm, moist air with cold, dry air, Weber said. However, he expects to see a lot more severe weather and tornadoes in the near future, particularly in the Southeast.

Temperature Nose Drives As C02 Is On The Up!

Atmospheric carbon levels nearing historic threshold (remember, NASA confirmed earlier in the week that C02 drives cooling due to radiation blocking.)

8 hrs ago from Physorg.com
(Phys.org) - For the first time in human history, concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) could rise above 400 parts per million (ppm) for sustained lengths of time throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere as soon as May 2013.

To provide a resource for understanding the implications of rising CO2 levels, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego is providing daily updates of the "Keeling Curve," the record of atmospheric CO2 measured at Hawaii's Mauna Loa. These iconic measurements, begun by Charles David (Dave) Keeling, a world-leading authority on atmospheric greenhouse gas accumulation and Scripps climate science pioneer, comprise the longest continuous record of CO2 in the world, starting from 316 ppm in March 1958 and approaching 400 ppm today with a familiar saw-tooth pattern. For the past 800,000 years, CO2 levels never exceeded 300 parts per million.

"I wish it weren't true, but it looks like the world is going to blow through the 400-ppm level without losing a beat," said Scripps geophysicist Ralph Keeling, who has taken over the Keeling Curve measurement from his late father. "At this pace we'll hit 450 ppm within a few decades."

The website keelingcurve.ucsd.edu offers background information about how CO2 is measured, the history of the Keeling Curve, and resources from other organizations on the current state of climate. An accompanying Twitter feed, @keeling_curve, also provides followers with the most recent Keeling Curve CO2 reading in a daily tweet.

Dave Keeling began recording CO2 data at Mauna Loa and other locations after developing an ultraprecise measurement device known as a manometer. Ralph Keeling took over the program in 2005 and also heads a program at Scripps to measure changes in atmospheric oxygen. The Scripps O2 and CO2 programs make measurements of CO2 and other gases at remote locations around the world, including Antarctica, Tasmania, and northern Alaska. The Scripps programs are complementary to many other programs now measuring CO2 and other greenhouse gases worldwide.

Scientists estimate that the last time CO2 was as high as 400 ppm was probably the Pliocene epoch, between 3.2 million and 5 million years ago, when Earth's climate was much warmer than today. CO2 was around 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution, when humans first began releasing large amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels. By the time Dave Keeling began measurements in 1958, CO2 had already risen from 280 to 316 ppm. The rate of rise of CO2 over the past century is unprecedented; there is no known period in geologic history when such high rates have been found. The continuous rise is a direct consequence of society's heavy reliance on fossil fuels for energy.

Each year, the concentration of CO2 at Mauna Loa rises and falls in a sawtooth fashion, with the next year higher than the year before. The peak of the sawtooth typically comes in May. If CO2 levels don't top 400 ppm in May 2013, they almost certainly will next year, Keeling said.

"The 400-ppm threshold is a sobering milestone, and should serve as a wake up call for all of us to support clean energy technology and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, before it's too late for our children and grandchildren," said Tim Lueker, an oceanographer and carbon cycle researcher who is a longtime member of the Scripps CO2 Group.

More Warmist B***SH*t - March Global Temperature Report: 10th warmest March on record...."Apparently"

1 day ago from WTVR-TV
RICHMOND, Va. (WTVR) - Even though March 2013 was abnormally cool, wet and snowy in Richmond, and in much of the Mid-Atlantic, globally that was not the story. In fact, we were the anomaly. (No you was not - March was freezing globally so cut the b***sh*t, we have reported freezing temperatures world wide all winter - Editor - Damion Hampton.)

The B***SH*t Continues..........

The rest of the Earth (both land and sea) recorded its tenth warmest March on record. The National Climatic Data Center report states, "The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for March 2013 tied with 2006 as the 10th warmest on record, at 0.58°C (1.04°F) above the 20th century average of 12.3°C (54.1°F)." (..... Right... And NOAA says B***Sh*t - Editor.)

And On And On.............

So what explains our regionally cooler weather? You may recall us talking about the negative Arctic and North Atlantic Oscillation during the month of March. The NCDC global report explains:
"Globally, land surface temperatures were 1.06°C (1.91°F) above average (11th warmest on record), but there were some marked temperature anomaly differences around the world. The Arctic Oscillation (AO), a large-scale climate pattern that can influence temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, was strongly negative during the month, and in fact reached a monthly-averaged record low for March. This negative phase was associated with frigid Arctic air spilling southward into the Northern Hemisphere middle latitudes."

But that same pattern that made us feel like Winter wouldn't let go also led to record warmth in parts of northeastern Canada, southeastern Greenland and a large swath of China.

The March 2013 data continues to show our prolonged trend of global warming, particularly over recent decades. Here is the look at just the period of January through March temperatures changing over time:

CLICK HERE to read the full analysis.

Meteorologist Carrie Rose
Follow Carrie on Facebook & Twitter.

Winter's Last Gasp: April Yields Snow, Cold Records

A series of April snowstorms has caused many records to fall and extreme temperature swings from Colorado to Minnesota. The latest storm to impact the Plains early this week appears to be the caboose of the storm train with the weather pattern expected to ease.

"There are no more major cold outbreaks in the pipeline," AccuWeather Expert Senior Meteorologist Jim Andrews said. "So, it looks like the end of record-breaking April snowfall and also the extreme temperature swings over the Plains, where it is nearly summery on one day and downright wintry on the next day."

It is still cold in western Canada, and cooler air may still be unleashed over the northern Plains at times into May, according to AccuWeather Lead Long-Range Forecaster Paul Pastelok. However, the temperature swings that occur into May will be more typical of spring compared to the recent extremes.

One sign of the changing pattern is the threat of major flooding along Red River of the northern U.S. as surging warmth this weekend threatens to melt unusually deep late-season snowpack.

"Well, spring in here on the calendar, whether it has been in reality or not. You can only hold back reality for so long. And that reality is that daytime temperatures should be well above freezing in North Dakota and Minnesota. We have held back reality with repeated rounds of cold. The sudden return of reality [this weekend] means that the snow is going to disappear very fast," Andrews said.

"By the end of the week, the normal high in Fargo is 64 degrees, so if it reaches 70 it's not that unusual," Andrews said.

Statistics on the Cold and Snow in the Plains April 2013
A total of 995 daily snowfall records have been broken during the month so far as of April 22, 2013, according to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). As a comparison, last year during the same timeframe, 195 snowfall records had been broken.

According to NOAA, 91.9 percent of the Upper Midwest is covered by snow currently, whereas only 0.4 percent of the Upper Midwest was covered by snow on April 23, 2012.

The map above (from the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center) shows that 91.9 percent of the Upper Midwest is covered by snow on April 23, 2013.

Duluth, Minn., had a record daily snowfall of 8.2 inches on Monday. The old record of 7.8 inches was set in 1972.

April Snow Statistics:
The latest storm in Duluth has allowed April to go down in the record books as the snowiest month ever with a total 51.0 inches. Previously, the snowiest month on record for Duluth was November 1991 when 50.1 inches fell.
A record April snowfall has been recorded at Pierre, S.D., with 20.8 inches so far this month. The old record April snowfall was 17.5 inches set in 1986.
Rapid City, S.D., has received a total of 43.4 inches of snow so far in April. That is more snow than the city typically receives during the entire season, which is 41.4 inches.

Snow and cold made it all the way down into Texas on Tuesday morning.

Childress, Texas, had a high of 92 degrees on Monday before temperatures plunged into the 30s overnight with snow arriving.

Climate Scientists Struggle to Explain Warming Slowdown

9 hrs ago from Daily Policy Digest
Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions. Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon, says Reuters.

Getting this right is essential for the short and long-term planning of governments and businesses ranging from energy to construction, from agriculture to insurance. Many scientists say they expect a revival of warming in coming years.

Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.
The change may be a result of an observed decline in heat-trapping water vapor in the high atmosphere, for unknown reasons.
It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say.
Some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to correct a 2007 report that exaggerated the pace of melt of the Himalayan glaciers and wrongly said they could all vanish by 2035.

A rapid rise in global temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s - when clean air laws in developed nations cut pollution and made sunshine stronger at the earth's surface - made for a compelling argument that human emissions were to blame.
The IPCC will seek to explain the current pause in a report to be released in three parts from late 2013 as the main scientific roadmap for governments in shifting from fossil fuels toward renewable energies such as solar or wind power.
Temperature records since 1850 show fluctuations, and the IPCC has consistently said that fluctuations in the weather, perhaps caused by variations in sunspots or a La Nina cooling of the Pacific, can mask any warming trend and the panel has never predicted a year-by-year rise in temperatures.

"Experts" say short-term climate forecasts are vital to help governments, insurers and energy companies to plan.

Source: "Climate Scientists Struggle to Explain Warming Slowdown," Reuters.

This Article From The Australian Is A Massive Contradiction From The Article Released By NASA A Couple Of Days Ago!

Another B***SH*t global warming story, this time from the Australian....

It reads.......

Earth was cooling until a century ago when it began to warm!

EARTH was cooling until the end of the 19th century and a hundred years later the planet's surface was on average warmer than at any time in the previous 1400 years, according to climate records.

In a study spanning two millennia published in Nature Geoscience, scientists say a "long-term cooling trend" around the world swung into reverse in the late 19th century.

In the 20th century, the average global temperature was 0.4C higher than that of the previous 500 years, with only Antarctica bucking the trend.

From 1971-2000, the planet was warmer than at any other time in nearly 1400 years.

This measure is a global average, and some regions did experience warmer periods than that - but only for a time. Europe, for instance, was probably warmer in the first century AD than at the end of the 20th century.

The investigation is the first attempt to reconstruct temperatures over the past 2000 years for individual continents./

It seeks to shed light on a fiercely contested aspect in the global warming debate.

Sceptics have claimed bouts of cooling or warming before the Industrial Revolution - including two episodes in Europe called the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age - are proof that climate variations are natural, not man-made.

The new study does not wade into the debate about greenhouse gases, but points to two planetary trends.

The first is a clear, prolonged period of cooling. It may have been caused by a combination of factors, including an increase in volcanic activity, with stratospheric ashes reflecting the sunlight, or a decrease in solar activity or tiny changes in Earth's orbit, both of which would diminish sunlight falling on the planet.

The cooling - between 0.1-0.3C per thousand years, depending on the region - went into reverse towards the end of the 19th century, and was followed by an intensifying period of warming in the 20th, the paper said.

Previous research into climate change has pointed to a warming spurt in the 20th century and attributed it to the rise of heat-trapping carbon gases emitted by burning coal, oil and gas.

The warming trend shifted up a gear in the middle of the 1970s, in line with record-breaking levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), according to this past research.s

Historical Snowfall Records For Duluth, MN

Top 3 Snowiest Aprils
1. 31.6" in 1950
2. 24.4" in 1961
3. 23.7" in 1983
As of April 19th, 2013....41.7" (1st)

Top 3 Snowiest
February-March-April Periods
1. 68.5" in 1950
2. 66.4" in 1965
3. 65.5" in 1917
As of April 19th, 2013....86.6" (1st)

Top 5 Snowiest Years
1. 135.4" in 1995-1996
2. 131.8" in 1949-1950
3. 128.2" in 1996-1997
4. 121.0" in 1968-1969
5. 117.1" in 1988-1989
As of April 19th, 2013....120.3" (5th)

Latest April Climate Report: Duluth, MN / International Falls, MN

(April Records and Normals can be Found Below)

Average Ice Out dates in Minnesota (from MN DNR)


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At Duluth:
~ There has been at least 1" of snow on the ground since December 9th, 2012. (133 days as of April 20th)
~ The record length for having 1" of snow depth is 172 days, set in 1956.
~ There has been at least 5" of snow on the ground for 91 consectutive days (as of April 20th).
~ There has been at least 10" of snow on the ground for 59 consectutive days (as of April 20th).
~ The morning low temperature of 11 degrees on April 20th, 2013 broke the old daily low record of 14 degrees set in 1928
~ The morning low temperature of 8 degrees on April 14th, 2013 tied the old daily low record set in 1926
~ The last time Duluth recorded a temperature of at least 60 degrees was October 16th, 2012
~ The latest occurance of at least 60 F degrees was on May 11th, 1950.
~ As of April 20th, there was 27 inches of snow on the ground.
~ The greatest snow depth observed in April is 41" on April 1st, 1965.
~ The previous record for the latest observed snow depth of at least 20" was April 15th, 1950 & 1975.
~ The previous record for the latest observered snow depth of at least 12" was April 18th, 1975.
~ The current record for the greatest snow depth obsevered in the month of May is 9 inches recorded in 1950.

At International Falls, MN:
~ There has been at least 1" of snow on the ground since December 9th, 2012. (133 days as of April 20th)
~ The record length for having 1" of snow depth is 169 days, set in 1996.
~ There has been at least 5" of snow on the ground for 126 consectutive days (as of April 20th).
~ There has been at least 10" of snow on the ground for 99 consectutive days (as of April 20th).
~ The morning low temperature of 4 degrees on April 20th, 2013 broke the old daily low record of 18 degrees set in 1966
~ The last time International Falls recorded a temperature of at least 60 degrees was October 16th, 2012.
~ The current record for the latest occurance of at least 60 F degrees is May 10th, 1950.
~ The current record for the greatest snow depth obsevered in the month of May is 12 inches recorded in 1954

** April Records and Normals **
The monthly climate normals are from a 30 year period defined by the Climate Prediction Center as 1981-2010.
The official temperature and precipitation records for the month are from a “Threaded” data set.
For more information please refer to www.weather.gov/dlh/?n=behindtheclimate

Duluth, MN
The Normal, Monthly Average Temperature (degrees F)
39.6
The Normal, Monthly High Temperature (degrees F)
49.2
The Normal, Monthly Low Temperature (degrees F)
30.0

Normal Monthly Precipitation (inches)
2.43
Normal Monthly Snowfall (inches)
6.9
Normal number of days with Measurable Precipitation
11
Normal number of days with snow depth of 1 inch or greater
2
Normal Heating Degree Days
762
Normal Cooling Degree Days
0

Warmest Month (Monthly Average Temperature)
46.1 in 1987
Coldest Month (Monthly Average Temperature)
28.7 in 1950
Highest Observed Temperature (degrees F)
88 on the 27th 1952
Lowest Observed Temperature (degrees F)
-5 on the 3rd 1954

& on the 4th 1975
Greatest Monthly Precipitation (inches)
8.18 in 2001
Least Monthly Precipitation (inches)
0.24 in 1987
Greatest 24 hr Precipitation (inches)
2.61 on 19th 1948


Greatest Monthly Snowfall (inches)
OLD RECORD 31.6 in 1950
Least Monthly Snowfall (inches)
T in 2010
Greatest 24 hr Snowfall (inches)
12.1 on 3rd in 2007
Greatest Measured Snow Depth (inches)
41 on 1st in 1965
=============================================================================
International Falls, MN
The Normal, Monthly Average Temperature (degrees F)
39.3
The Normal, Monthly High Temperature (degrees F)
51.5
The Normal, Monthly Low Temperature (degrees F)
27.1
Normal Monthly Precipitation (inches)
1.38
Normal Monthly Snowfall (inches)
6.4
Normal number of days with Measurable Precipitation
9
Normal number of days with snow depth of 1 inch or greater
2
Normal Heating Degree Days
772
Normal Cooling Degree Days
1
Warmest Month (Monthly Average Temperature)
49.4 in 1915
Coldest Month (Monthly Average Temperature)
29.5 in 1950 & 1920
Highest Observed Temperature (degrees F)
93 on the 27th 1952
Lowest Observed Temperature (degrees F)
-14 on the 3rd 1954

Greatest Monthly Precipitation (inches)
4.53
Least Monthly Precipitation (inches)
0.08 in 1987
Greatest 24 hr Precipitation (inches)
1.68 on 28th 1895

Greatest Monthly Snowfall (inches)
23.5 in 2008
Least Monthly Snowfall (inches)
0
Greatest 24 hr Snowfall (inches)
13.9 in 1950
Greatest Measured Snow Depth (inches)
25 in 1975

The monthly climate normals are from a 30 year period defined by the Climate Prediction Center as 1981-2010.
The official temperature and precipitation records for the month are from a “Threaded” data set.

Is it still freezing where you are? Let us know.....

For more information please refer towww.weather.gov/dlh/?n=behindtheclimate

NASA - New Study Shows C02 Cools Atmosphere - THE MOST IMPORTANT REPORT OF THIS YEAR.... Finally The Truth!

A recent NASA report throws the space agency into conflict with its climatologists after new NASA measurements prove that carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in Earth's atmosphere.
NASA's Langley Research Center has collated data proving that “greenhouse gases” actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun. The data was collected by Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry, (or SABER). SABER monitors infrared emissions from Earth’s upper atmosphere, in particular from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances thought to be playing a key role in the energy balance of air above our planet’s surface.

NASA's Langley Research Center instruments show that the thermosphere not only received a whopping 26 billion kilowatt hours of energy from the sun during a recent burst of solar activity, but that in the upper atmospheric carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide molecules sent as much as 95% of that radiation straight back out into space.
The shock revelation starkly contradicts the core proposition of the so-called greenhouse gas theory which claims that more CO2 means more warming for our planet. However, this compelling new NASA data disproves that notion and is a huge embarrassment for NASA's chief climatologist, Dr James Hansen and his team over at NASA's GISS.
Already, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been in full retreat after having to concede a 17-year stall in global warming despite levels of atmopheric CO2 rising almost 40 percent in recent decades. The new SABER data now forms part of a real world double whammy against climatologists' computer models that have always been programmed to show CO2 as a warming gas.

The SABER evidence also makes a mockery of the statement on the NASA GISS website (by Hansen underling Gavin Schmidt) claiming, "the greenhouse effect keeps the planet much warmer than it would be otherwise." [1]

As NASA's SABER team at Langley admits:
"This is a new frontier in the sun-Earth connection," says associate principal investigator Martin Mlynczak, "and the data we’re collecting are unprecedented."
Over at Principia Scientific International (PSI) greenhouse gas effect (GHE) critic, Alan Siddons is hailing the findings. Siddons and his colleagues have been winning support from hundreds of independent scientists for their GHE studies carried out over the last seven years. PSI has proved that the numbers fed into computer models by Hansen and others were based on a faulty interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics. PSI also recently uncovered long overlooked evidence from the American Meteorological Society (AMS) that shows it was widely known the GHE was discredited prior to 1951. [2]
Pointedly, a much-trumpeted new book released this month by Rupert Darwall claims to help expose the back story of how the junk GHE theory was conveniently resuscitated in the 1980's by James Hansen and others to serve an environmental policy agenda at that time. [3]
As the SABER research report states:
A recent flurry of eruptions on the sun did more than spark pretty auroras around the poles. NASA-funded researchers say the solar storms of March 8th through 10th dumped enough energy in Earth’s upper atmosphere to power every residence in New York City for two years.
“This was the biggest dose of heat we’ve received from a solar storm since 2005,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA Langley Research Center. “It was a big event, and shows how solar activity can directly affect our planet.”
As PSI's own space scientists have confirmed, as solar energy penetrates deeper into our atmosphere, even more of its energy will end up being sent straight back out to space, thus preventing it heating up the surface of our earth. The NASA Langley Research Center report agrees with PSI by admitting:
“Carbon dioxide and nitric oxide are natural thermostats,” explains James Russell of Hampton University, SABER’s principal investigator. “When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.”
To those independent scientists and engineers at Principia Scientific International this is not news. The “natural thermostat” effect of CO2 has long been known by applied scientists and engineers how have exploited it's remarkable properties in the manufacturer of refrigerators and air conditioning systems. The fledgling independent science body has repeatedly shown in it's openly peer reviewed papers that atmospheric carbon dioxide does not cause global warming nor climate change.
Some diehard climate alarmists will still say that in the lower atmosphere the action of carbon dioxide is reversed, but there is no actual proof of this at all. PSI suggests it is time for the SABER team to have a word with James Hansen. Watch the full NASA video on Youtube.
----------------------
[1] Schmidt, G., 'Taking the Measure of the Greenhouse Effect,' (October, 2010), http://www.giss.nasa.gov (accessed online: March 26, 2013).
[2] Brooks, C.E.P. (1951). “Geological and Historical Aspects of Climatic Change.” In Compendium of Meteorology, edited by Thomas F. Malone, pp. 1004-18 (at 1016). Boston: American Meteorological Association. It shows the American Meteorological Society had refuted the concept of a GHE in 1951 in its Compendium of Meteorology. The AMS stated that the idea that CO2 could alter the climate “was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation [that would be] absorbed by CO2 is [already] absorbed by water vapor.”

Carbon bubble will plunge the world into another financial crisis - report

This article titled "Carbon bubble will plunge the world into another financial crisis - report" was written by Damian Carrington, for The Guardian on Thursday 18th April 2013 23.07 UTC

The world could be heading for a major economic crisis as stock markets inflate an investment bubble in fossil fuels to the tune of trillions of dollars, according to leading economists.

"The financial crisis has shown what happens when risks accumulate unnoticed," said Lord (Nicholas) Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics. He said the risk was "very big indeed" and that almost all investors and regulators were failing to address it.

The so-called "carbon bubble" is the result of an over-valuation of oil, coal and gas reserves held by fossil fuel companies. According to a report published on Friday, at least two-thirds of these reserves will have to remain underground if the world is to meet existing internationally agreed targets to avoid the threshold for "dangerous" climate change. If the agreements hold, these reserves will be in effect unburnable and so worthless - leading to massive market losses. But the stock markets are betting on countries' inaction on climate change.

The stark report is by Stern and the thinktank Carbon Tracker. Their warning is supported by organisations including HSBC, Citi, Standard and Poor's and the International Energy Agency. The Bank of England has also recognised that a collapse in the value of oil, gas and coal assets as nations tackle global warming is a potential systemic risk to the economy, with London being particularly at risk owing to its huge listings of coal.

Stern said that far from reducing efforts to develop fossil fuels, the top 200 companies spent $674bn (£441bn) in 2012 to find and exploit even more new resources, a sum equivalent to 1% of global GDP, which could end up as "stranded" or valueless assets. Stern's landmark 2006 report on the economic impact of climate change - commissioned by the then chancellor, Gordon Brown - concluded that spending 1% of GDP would pay for a transition to a clean and sustainable economy.

The world's governments have agreed to restrict the global temperature rise to 2C, beyond which the impacts become severe and unpredictable. But Stern said the investors clearly did not believe action to curb climate change was going to be taken. "They can't believe that and also believe that the markets are sensibly valued now."

"They only believe environmental regulation when they see it," said James Leaton, from Carbon Tracker and a former PwC consultant. He said short-termism in financial markets was the other major reason for the carbon bubble. "Analysts say you should ride the train until just before it goes off the cliff. Each thinks they are smart enough to get off in time, but not everyone can get out of the door at the same time. That is why you get bubbles and crashes."

Paul Spedding, an oil and gas analyst at HSBC, said: "The scale of "listed" unburnable carbon revealed in this report is astonishing. This report makes it clear that "business as usual" is not a viable option for the fossil fuel industry in the long term. [The market] is assuming it will get early warning, but my worry is that things often happen suddenly in the oil and gas sector."

HSBC warned that 40-60% of the market capitalisation of oil and gas companies was at risk from the carbon bubble, with the top 200 fossil fuel companies alone having a current value of $4tn, along with $1.5tn debt.

Lord McFall, who chaired the Commons Treasury select committee for a decade, said: "Despite its devastating scale, the banking crisis was at its heart an avoidable crisis: the threat of significant carbon writedown has the unmistakable characteristics of the same endemic problems."

The report calculates that the world's currently indicated fossil fuel reserves equate to 2,860bn tonnes of carbon dioxide, but that just 31% could be burned for an 80% chance of keeping below a 2C temperature rise. For a 50% chance of 2C or less, just 38% could be burned.

Carbon capture and storage technology, which buries emissions underground, can play a role in the future, but even an optimistic scenario which sees 3,800 commercial projects worldwide would allow only an extra 4% of fossil fuel reserves to be burned. There are currently no commercial projects up and running. The normally conservative International Energy Agency has also concluded that a major part of fossil fuel reserves is unburnable.

Citi bank warned investors in Australia's vast coal industry that little could be done to avoid the future loss of value in the face of action on climate change. "If the unburnable carbon scenario does occur, it is difficult to see how the value of fossil fuel reserves can be maintained, so we see few options for risk mitigation."

Ratings agencies have expressed concerns, with Standard and Poor's concluding that the risk could lead to the downgrading of the credit ratings of oil companies within a few years.

Steven Oman, senior vice-president at Moody's, said: "It behoves us as investors and as a society to know the true cost of something so that intelligent and constructive policy and investment decisions can be made. Too often the true costs are treated as unquantifiable or even ignored."

Jens Peers, who manages €4bn (£3bn) for Mirova, part of €300bn asset managers Natixis, said: "It is shocking to see the report's numbers, as they are worse than people realise. The risk is massive, but a lot of asset managers think they have a lot of time. I think they are wrong." He said a key moment will come in 2015, the date when the world's governments have pledged to strike a global deal to limit carbon emissions. But he said that fund managers need to move now. If they wait till 2015, "it will be too late for them to take action."

Pension funds are also concerned. "Every pension fund manager needs to ask themselves have we incorporated climate change and carbon risk into our investment strategy? If the answer is no, they need to start to now," said Howard Pearce, head of pension fund management at the Environment Agency, which holds £2bn in assets.

Stern and Leaton both point to China as evidence that carbon cuts are likely to be delivered. China's leaders have said its coal use will peak in the next five years, said Leaton, but this has not been priced in. "I don't know why the market does not believe China," he said. "When it says it is going to do something, it usually does." He said the US and Australia were banking on selling coal to China but that this "doesn't add up".

Jeremy Grantham, a billionaire fund manager who oversees $106bn of assets, said his company was on the verge of pulling out of all coal and unconventional fossil fuels, such as oil from tar sands. "The probability of them running into trouble is too high for me to take that risk as an investor." He said: "If we mean to burn all the coal and any appreciable percentage of the tar sands, or other unconventional oil and gas then we're cooked. [There are] terrible consequences that we will lay at the door of our grandchildren."

The Climate Circus Leaves Town

If you had told environmentalists on Election Day 2008 that four years later there'd be no successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, that a Democratic Congress would not have enacted any meaningful climate legislation, that domestic oil production would be soaring even after a catastrophic offshore oil spill, and that the environmental community would be having a lively internal debate about whether it should support reviving nuclear power, most might have marched into the ocean to drown themselves. Yet that's the state of play four months into President Obama's second term.

Gary Locke

Start with climate change. Early in March, the hacker or leaker of the two email caches from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that rocked the climate science world in 2009 and again in 2011 released the remaining batch of material. The news produced barely a shrug even among climate skeptics, partly because the file contains 220,000 emails and documents (as opposed to about 1,000 in round one, and 5,000 in round two), making it impossible to review comprehensively. But it also appears unnecessary, as the climate change story has been overtaken by facts on the ground. Most significant: The pause in global warming​​ - ​​now going on 15 years​​ - ​​has become so obvious that many of the leading climate scientists are grudgingly admitting that global warming has stopped. James Hansen, who recently stepped down as NASA's chief climate scientist to become a full-time private sector alarmist, is among those admitting that the recent temperature record has flatlined.

After two decades of steady and substantial global temperature increase from 1980 to 1998, the pause in warming is causing a crisis for the climate crusade. It wasn't supposed to happen like this. The recent temperature record is falling distinctly to the very low end of the range predicted by the climate models and may soon fall out of it, which means the models are wrong, or, at the very least, something is going on that supposedly "settled" science hasn't been able to settle. Equally problematic for the theory, one place where the warmth might be hiding​​ - ​​the oceans​​ - ​​is not cooperating with the story line. Recent data show that ocean warming has noticeably slowed, too.

These inconvenient data are causing the climate science community to reconsider the issue of climate sensitivity​​ - ​​that is, how much warming greenhouse gases actually cause​​ - ​​as I predicted would happen in these pages three years ago: "Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate's sensitivity to greenhouse gases?"

A steady stream of scientific studies (often government-funded) published in peer-reviewed scientific journals that conclude climate sensitivity is overestimated were ignored by the media, with the notable exception of New York Times science blogger Andrew Revkin. But the media blackout was broken in dramatic fashion by the Economist in its March 30 edition, with a long feature about the growing doubts over the catastrophic warming projections that have been the lifeblood of the climate campaign. The Economist reviewed a number of new findings that conclude the likely range of future warming will be much more modest​​ - ​​and manageable​​ - ​​than the Al Gores of the world have been claiming.

That the Economist would break with the pack is significant because the august British newsweekly had been among the most prominent media voices beating the drum for climate catastrophe and radical action to suppress hydrocarbon energy. Now it offers this zinger: "If climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, climate sensitivity would be on negative watch." A Reuters story last week notes that scientists are "struggling" to explain the pause in warming. Expect other media to follow​​ - ​​if they continue to give the issue much coverage at all. The New York Times shut down its environment news desk in January and discontinued its Green Blog in March, concessions to the fact that readers are thoroughly bored with the issue. Recent opinion surveys find that public concern about climate change is at 20-year lows, not just in the United States but almost everywhere.

Cold Blast Drops Autumn Snow, Do You Have Snow Where You Are?

1 hour ago from The Hobart Mercury
THE first dusting of snow on Mt Wellington and other southern Tasmanian peaks marks the unofficial start to the state's cold season.

Bureau of Meteorology meteorologist Ray Evans said a blast of cold air across the state was driven by a high pressure system to the state's southwest coinciding with a low pressure system off the NSW coast.

Snow began falling on Thursday afternoon.

It settled on southern peaks, as far north as Mt Field and parts of the Central Highlands.

Mr Evans said Tasmania appeared to be settling into its typical autumn weather pattern – cold fronts moving through from the west in rapid succession.

Brittany, 14, and John McGill, 12, of Sydney, who are visiting Tasmania for the first time with their family, enjoyed the snow on Mt Wellington yesterday, having snowball fights and making snow angels.

"We certainly didn't expect to see snow," Brittany said.

"It's a real blast."

Police warned motorists to avoid Pinnacle Rd today because snow had created hazardous conditions down to the Springs.

Hobart City Council staff will review conditions this morning and decide whether to close the road.

Yellowstone's volcano plumbing bigger than thought

National Park Service

Yellowstone is an active volcano. Surface features such as geysers and hot springs are direct results of the region's underlying volcanism.

By Becky Oskin
LiveScience

SALT LAKE CITY — Yellowstone's underground volcanic plumbing is bigger and better connected than scientists thought, researchers reported here Wednesday at the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting.

"We are getting a much better understanding of the volcanic system of Yellowstone," said Jamie Farrell, a seismology graduate student at the University of Utah. "The magma reservoir is at least 50 percent larger than previously imaged."

Knowing the volume of molten magma beneath Yellowstone is important for estimating the size of future eruptions, Farrell told OurAmazingPlanet.

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Supervolcano trail
Geologists believe Yellowstone sits over a hotspot, a plume of superheated rock rising from Earth's mantle. As North America slowly drifted over the hotspot, the Yellowstone plume punched through the continent's crust, leaving a bread-crumb-like trail of calderas created by massive volcanic eruptions along Idaho's Snake River Plain, leading straight to Yellowstone. The last caldera eruption was 640,000 years ago. Smaller eruptions occurred in between and after the big blasts, most recently about 70,000 years ago. [Infographic: Geology of Yellowstone]

The magma chamber seen in the new study fed these smaller eruptions and is the source of the park's amazing hydrothermal springs and geysers. It also creates the surface uplift seen in the park, said Bob Smith, a seismologist at the University of Utah and author of a related study presented at the meeting.

The volcanic plume of partly molten rock feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano. Yellow and red indicate higher conductivity, green and blue indicate lower conductivity. Made by University of Utah geophysicists and computer scientists, this is the first large-scale "geoelectric" image of the Yellowstone hotspot.

Jamie Farrell, University of Utah

Scientists have updated this image of Yellowstone volcano's underground magma chamber. Instead of two big yellow blobs, they have a clearer picture that looks like a knobby banana.

"This crustal magma body is a little dimple that creates the uplift," Smith said. "It's like putting your finger under a rubber membrane and pushing it up and the sides expand."

Clearer picture
A clearer picture of Yellowstone's shallow magma chamber emerged from earthquakes, whose waves change speed when they travel through molten or solid rock. Farrell analyzed nearby earthquakes to build a picture of the magma chamber.

The underground magma resembles a mutant banana, with a knobby, bulbous end poking up toward the northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park, and the rest of the tubular fruit angling shallowly southwest. It's a single connected chamber, about 37 miles (60 kilometers) long, 18 miles (30 km) wide, and 3 to 7 miles (5 to 12 km) deep.

Previously, researchers had thought the magma beneath Yellowstone was in separate blobs, not a continuous pocket.

The shallowest magma, in the northeast, also matches up with the park's most intense hydrothermal activity, Farrell said. The new study is the best view yet of this zone, which lies outside the youngest caldera rim.

Additional molten rock, not imaged in this study, also exists deeper beneath Yellowstone, scientists think.

More B***SHit, The Warmist Claims The Globe Will Warm 6 Degrees By The End Of The Century

The global effort to produce less carbon-intensive completely stalled over the last two decades, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency. The paper put together a measure of carbon intensity — how much carbon is released per unit of energy created — and found its essentially been flat in the United States since 1990, while dropping slightly for Europe and rising for China

The combined result was that the carbon intensity of the world’s energy production dropped 6 percent from 1971 to 1990, but then flat-lined afterwards.

But because world energy consumption doubled between 1971 and now, that meant a massive increase in carbon emissions. If things continue as they have, the planet will be well on its way to warming six degrees Celsius by 2100 (B***SH*t - Editor.) That would mean life-threatening sea level rise, extreme heat waves, extreme storms, extreme droughts, massive collapses in land and marine-based food supplies, yeh yeh yeh the list goes on and on. If we’re going to get below two degrees of warming — the level scientists have cohered around as the bare minimum for avoiding catastrophe — world carbon intensity will have to be cut by 5.7 percent from its 2010 levels by 2020, and by over 60 percent by 2050. Jesus - someone just shoot these people - Editor - Damion Hampton.

This will not be easy, to put it mildly. The IEA report concluded that renewable power generation, taken on its own terms, was on track for the two degree goal — solar capacity grew 42 percent in 2012, and wind grew 19 percent, for example. Electric vehicle and hybrid vehicle sales doubled in 2012, and if they keep to that growth rate they’ll be on track for the two degree goal by 2020 as well. But for every other facet of the climate solution mix, the world is falling badly behind.

The opportunities for smart grid technology, more energy efficient buildings, more energy efficient industrial processes, better fuel economy standards, and for shifts to nuclear and natural gas power are all being badly underutilized, according to the IEA’s metrics. The biggest problem is the continued growth in coal use: half the coal-fired power plants constructed around the world in 2011 used inefficient technologies, and coal-based power generation overall increased six percent from 2010 to 2012. The coal sector is so large that this increase alone left its power production 28 percent higher in 2010 than all power production from non-fossil fuel sources combined. (Based on what science? - Editor.)

The emerging and developing world is the big driver here: China and India alone accounted for 95 percent of the growth in global demand for coal between 2000 and 2011. In fact, while the carbon intensity of the United States’ energy sector remained virtually unchanged since 1990 — and Europe’s declined — it steadily rose for both China and India over the same time period.

This gets to one of the fundamental obstacles to reducing carbon emissions. Economic development is producing an astonishing reduction in global poverty, lifting hundreds of millions of human beings out of misery. But as a matter of technological necessity, this accomplishment has so far required a massive increase in carbon-intensive energy production. China and India — along with parts of Africa — are ground zero for this paradox.

That, in turn, gets to why America’s failure to put together ambitious climate change legislation is not just a political or policy failure, but a massive moral failure. Certainly, we need to reduce our carbon intensity for its own sake. But more importantly, as the world’s most advanced economy, with living standards that are already incredibly high in a global context, we can afford any disruptions from a wholesale shift off of fossil fuels and onto renewables. Indeed, we ought to show the rest of the world how to do it. And we have a moral obligation to do so as the biggest cumulative carbon polluter in the world.

Instead, thanks to our refusal to put a price on carbon, America remains the single largest subsidizer of fossil fuels in the world. Instead of doing the heavy lifting on renewables ourselves, we’re leaving the less fortunate of the world to carry the burden. (Please, feel free to go and help them then, if you care so much - Editor - C02 IS A GOOD THING - Damion Hampton.)

GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT MAN MADE

Is Global Warming Man-Made? The Majority of Christian Pastors Don't Think So

As scientists continue to sound the alarm on global warming and its alleged discontents, it seems at least one sector is unconvinced that the phenomenon is actually unfolding. In sum, 54 percent of Protestant pastors consulted by LifeWay Research rejected the notion that "global warming is real and man-made," with 43 percent agreeing with this sentiment.

Not surprisingly, there are some partisan differences worth noting. While 75 percent of Democratically-aligned faith leaders strongly agree that global warming is real and man-made, only 20 percent of Independents and seven percent of Republican pastors believe the same.

Photo Credit: LifeWay Research

GOP-aligned preachers are also the most likely to strongly disagree, with 49 percent falling into this category; only five percent of pastors who call themselves political Democrats strongly reject global warming as a man-made phenomenon. Here are some of LifeWay's other demographic findings:

Pastors in large cities (32 percent) are more likely to strongly agree with the statement than pastors in small cities (20 percent) and rural areas (18 percent);
Southern pastors are less likely (18 percent) to strongly agree with the statement than pastors in the Northeast (30 percent) and West (25 percent);
Self-identified mainline pastors are more likely than self-identified evangelical pastors to strongly agree (35 percent vs. 15 percent) with the statement.
Photo Credit: LifeWay Research

Overall, though, 63 percent of faith leaders reported having an active recycling program at their churches. And 45 percent of those interviewed said that their house of worship was taking action to curb carbon impact. Of course, demographics play a role in determining these results as well (read the complete explanation of findings here).

Conducted between Sept. 26 and Oct. 3, 1,000 phone interviews with a random sample of Protestant faith leaders were used in gathering the results. Sampling error did not exceed +/- 3.2 percentage points.

Us at iceageearth.com believe global warming is a natural cycle. What do you think? Is global warming real? Is it man-made? Take our poll, below.

Road crews finish clearing snow along East Entrance Road in Yellowstone Park

Workers look on as two rotary snowplows enter Yellowstone National Park earlier this month to begin removing snow along the East Entrance Road. (Ruffin Prevost/Yellowstone Gate – click to enlarge)

By Ruffin Prevost

CODY, WYO. - State and federal road crews plowing snow in Yellowstone National Park met Wednesday along the East Entrance Road, completing a job that was funded with help from Wyoming businesses and residents.

Snow plows from the Wyoming Department of Transportation pushing into the park from the East Entrance met up before noon with National Park Service plows moving east from Fishing Bridge, according to WYDOT spokesman Cody Beers.

Beers said the two teams met about 15 miles inside the park from the East Gate.

The effort was wrapped up on time and under budget, despite recent spring snowstorms that closed highways in other parts of the state.

Another WYDOT crew is working to clear snow from the South Entrance Road from Jackson.

Yellowstone managers had announced in March that the park's spring opening would be delayed by 1-2 weeks across various gates as snow plowing would be scaled back to save money under budget cuts resulting from the Congressional sequester.

But local businesses and other private donors in Cody and Jackson raised funds to cover the cost of WYDOT personnel and equipment used to supplement plowing efforts from outside the parks, ensuring the entrances would open on time.

"When we thought the federal sequestration was going to shut the public out of Yellowstone and slow down tourism in our gateway communities Wyoming came together and solved the problem," Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead said in a statement released Wednesday.

“The two crews have had great support in Park and Teton Counties. I thank them and everyone in Cody and Jackson who have rallied to make it possible for Wyoming to welcome the world to America's first national park again this spring,” Mead said.

Mead also thanked Yellowstone officials for working with Wyoming and the gateway communities to accomplish this task.

The Cody Country Chamber of Commerce helped fund the East Gate plowing effort, along with the City of Cody, Park County and private donors.

The park’s East Gate is expected to open on schedule, May 3, while the South Gate is expected to open May 10.

Contact Ruffin Prevost at 307-213-9818 or ruffin@yellowstonegate.com.

Plans to drop climate change from national curriculum "unacceptable" OR Not, Just Sensible

Leading environmental figures, including broadcaster Sir David Attenborough and mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington, have condemned government plans to drop debate about climate change from the national curriculum for children under 14 as "unfathomable and unacceptable".

In a letter to the Sunday Times, also signed by academics, politicians and business leaders, they warn the proposals are short-sighted, coming at a time when the loss of wildlife and habitats is ongoing, and evidence suggests many children are missing out on the benefits of spending time in nature.

"Under the new draft national curriculum for England, education on the environment would start three years later than at present and all existing references to care and protection would be removed," the letter states. "This is both unfathomable and unacceptable. Today's children are tomorrow's custodians of nature.

"There is a duty to ensure that all pupils have the chance to learn about threats to the natural world, to be inspired to care for it and to explore ways to preserve and restore it.

"These proposals not only undermine our children's understanding and love of nature, but ultimately threaten nature itself."

The letter, signed by 96 people, also including broadcasters Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Chris Packham, says the government has a commitment "to nurturing our children's love and respect for nature" under two binding international agreements - the UN convention on the rights of the child and the convention on biological diversity's Aichi targets.

Sir Chris Bonington has condemned the proposals. Photograph: Mark Pinder
The Guardian revealed last month that draft guidelines for children in key stages 1 to 3 had removed discussion of climate change in the geography syllabus, with only a single reference to how carbon dioxide produced by humans affects the climate in the chemistry section. All references to sustainable development have also been dropped in a move widely interpreted as the result of political interference.

The plans caused alarm among climate campaigners and scientists, with teachers and student groups also criticising the draft guidelines.

A 15-year-old girl started a petition to the education secretary, Michael Gove, to keep climate change in the national curriculum for under 14s, which has attracted more than 28,000 signatures.

Critics have pointed out that one of the dangers of waiting until GCSE courses to teach about climate change in any depth is that only a minority of pupils study geography at that level. The government's former science adviser, Prof Sir David King, denounced the government proposals as "major political interference with the geography syllabus".

The proposed changes have been broadly welcomed by some groups, including the Geographical Association, which represents more than 6,000 geography teachers, and the Royal Geographical Society, which said the guidelines provided for a better grounding in geography before students tackle climate change.

The Department for Education has dismissed the idea that climate change is being excised from the national curriculum, insisting "climate and weather feature throughout the geography curriculum".

It is consulting on the proposed changes but the letter warns that "the place of the natural environment in the national curriculum is more critical than ever".

More B***Sh*t - Cutting Specific Pollutants Would Slow Sea Level Rise

Newswise - BOULDER - With coastal areas bracing for rising sea levels, new research indicates that cutting emissions of certain pollutants can greatly slow down sea level rise this century.

The research team found that reductions in four pollutants that cycle comparatively quickly through the atmosphere could temporarily forestall the rate of sea level rise by roughly 25 to 50 percent.

"To avoid potentially dangerous sea level rise, we could cut emissions of short-lived pollutants even if we cannot immediately cut carbon dioxide emissions," says Aixue Hu of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the first author of the study. "This new research shows that society can significantly reduce the threat to coastal cities if it moves quickly on a handful of pollutants."

The study, a collaboration of the Scripps Institution for Oceanography, NCAR, and Climate Central, is being published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change. It was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

"It is still not too late, by stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and reducing emissions of shorter-lived pollutants, to lower the rate of warming and reduce sea level rise," says Veerabhadran Ramanathan of Scripps, who led the study. "The large role of the shorter-lived pollutants is encouraging since technologies are available to drastically cut their emissions."

- Protecting the coasts -

The potential impact of rising oceans on populated areas is one of the most concerning effects of climate change. Many of the world's major cities, such as New York, Miami, Amsterdam, Mumbai, and Tokyo, are located in low-lying areas by the water.

As glaciers and ice sheets melt and warming oceans expand, sea levels have been rising by an average of about 3 millimeters annually in recent years (just more than one-tenth of an inch) (actually they have been falling 5mm yearly, according to NOAA - Editor - Damion Hampton.) If temperatures continue to warm, sea levels are projected to rise between 18 and 59 centimeters (7 to 23 inches) this century, according to a 2007 assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Some scientists, however, feel those estimates are too conservative.

Such an increase could submerge densely populated coastal communities, especially when storm surges hit.

Despite the risks, policy makers have been unable to agree on procedures for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide. With this in mind, the research team focused on emissions of four other heat-trapping pollutants: methane, tropospheric ozone, hydrofluorocarbons, and black carbon. These gases and particles last anywhere from a week to a decade in the atmosphere, and they can influence climate more quickly than carbon dioxide, which persists in the atmosphere for centuries.

Previous research by Ramanathan and Yangyang Xu of Scripps, a co-author of the new paper, has shown that a sharp reduction in emissions of these shorter-lived pollutants beginning in 2015 could offset warming temperatures by up to 50 percent by 2050.

Applying those emission reductions to sea level rise, the new research found that the cuts could dramatically slow rising sea levels. Their results showed that total sea level rise would be reduced by an estimated 22 to 42 percent by 2100, depending on the extent to which emissions were reduced.

However, the new study also found that delaying emissions cuts until 2040 would reduce the beneficial impact on year-2100 sea level rise by about a third.

If society were able to substantially reduce both emissions of carbon dioxide as well as the four other pollutants, total sea level rise would be lessened by at least 30 percent by 2100, the researchers concluded.

The researchers used mostly percentage changes for sea level rise, rather than actual estimates in centimeters, because of uncertainties over future temperature increases and their impacts on rising sea levels.

"We still have some control over the amount of sea level rise that we are facing," Hu says.

Another co-author, Claudia Tebaldi of Climate Central, adds:

"Without diminishing the importance of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the long term, this study shows that more immediate gains from shorter-lived pollutants are substantial. Cutting emissions of those gases could give coastal communities more time to prepare for rising sea levels. As we have seen recently, storm surges in very highly populated regions of the East Coast show the importance of both making such preparations and cutting greenhouse gases."

To conduct the study, Hu and his colleagues turned to the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model, as well as a second computer model that simulates climate, carbon, and geochemistry. They also drew on estimates of future emissions of heat-trapping gases under various social and economic scenarios and on computer models of melting ice and sea level rise.

The study assumes that society could reduce emissions of the four gases and particles by 30 to 60 percent over the next several decades. That is the steepest reduction believed achievable by economists who have studied the issue at Austria's International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, one of the world's leading research centers into the impact of economic activity on climate change.

"It must be remembered that carbon dioxide is still the most important factor in sea level rise over the long term," says NCAR scientist Warren Washington, a co-author. "But we can make a real difference in the next several decades by reducing other emissions."

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Geoengineering and abatement: A "flat" relationship under uncertainty

Implementing comprehensive policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions has proved to be difficult. Such sluggishness has increasingly led analysts and researchers to consider geoengineering - the deliberate reduction of the incoming solar radiation - as a viable alternative. Geoengineering used to be seen as somewhat of a "last resort" in terms of climate policy because its implementation would reduce the urgency for current abatement efforts. However, under uncertainty, research suggests that substantial abatement in the short and medium term remains optimal due to the long lead-in time needed for geoengineering projects.

The slow progress in climate-change mitigation policies aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions has fuelled the discussion about alternative policy options in order to cope with the impacts from climate change. The better known one is adaptation, but most recently "climate geoengineering" has begun to attract increasing attention. Geoengineering counteracts the temperature increase caused by climate change, e.g., by deliberately reducing incoming solar radiation (known as Solar Radiation Management). Preliminary research has shown that Solar Radiation Management could be a cost-effective solution since it can reduce the effects of global warming in a matter of just a few years (Matthews and Caldeira 2007). This fast action distinguishes Solar Radiation Management from traditional policies such as mitigation, and has led many to wonder whether this could turn out to be a feasible strategy should the damages of climate change turn out to be higher than expected.

The most widely discussed strategy of reducing solar radiation is through stratospheric aerosols. The reduction in solar radiation after volcanic eruptions have provided natural "experiments" as a basis for this strategy. In 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo led to the injection of around 20 megatons of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere leading to a decrease of global temperature of about 0.5°C in the years after the eruption (Soden et al. 2002). Based on these experiences, a large scale Solar Radiation Management geoengineering scheme could offset global warming at a fraction of costs of abatement of greenhouse-gas emissions (McClellan et al. 2012). It thus provides a potential game-changer for climate policy which has led to a polarising debate, focussing on the cost-efficient potential to offset climate change and the political difficulties in climate-policy negotiations on the one hand, or on the potentially severe consequences such as increased ozone depletion and continued damages from a higher CO2 concentration on the other.

Economists have contributed to the debate about risks and virtues of geoengineering, unsurprisingly finding mixed results and mostly relying on numerical simulations, see (Klepper and Rickels 2012) for an overview. The fundamental driver of the divergence of opinion in this debate reside in the assumptions about relative costs, damages, and the uncertainty about the parameters characterising geoengineering (Sterck 2011). Very few papers, though, have provided an explicit modelling of the uncertainty of geoengineering, with the exception of Moreno-Cruz and Keith (2012). In recent research (Emmerling and Tavoni 2013), we use standard economic models of dynamic decision theory under uncertainty in order to assess the optimal climate policy under uncertainty with geoengineering. We deliberately take an optimistic view about the costs of geoengineering vis à vis with abatement to study how much abatement should still be implemented even with a geoengineering option available in the future.

We analyse the optimal climate policy by means of abatement and geoengineering, where the latter is only available in the future and with uncertainty characterising both the uncertainty of geoengineering as well as the climate. Our results suggest that under fairly general conditions, today's mitigation effort is decreasing but concave in the probability of success of geoengineering. Geoengineering does provide an alternative to abatement, but the uncertainty around its effectiveness makes abatement today respond slowly to the probability of success of geoengineering. The following graph illustrates the results for a reasonable calibration. If geoengineering were a certain option in the future, optimal abatement in the short run would be very low as soon as the effectiveness of geoengineering is slightly above zero, as shown by the green curve. Under uncertainty (brown curve), however, the curve is concave in the probability of geoengineering showing a rather "flat" relation as long as the probability of geoengineering being implemented and effective is not close to one. This shows that significant abatement reductions are optimal only if Solar Radiation Management is very likely to be effective.

Figure 1. Share of first-period abatement of "business as usual" emissions for different probabilities of geoengineering

We also investigate the potential insurance effect of geoengineering modelling uncertainty on both geoengineering and the climate response, and are able to confirm the results for reasonable correlation structures between the climate and the effect of geoengineering. An "insurance" effect arises only if the relatedness between geoengineering becoming effective and severe impacts from climate change is very high and moreover if the probability of Solar Radiation Management becoming a viable option is large enough. The overall results are moreover confirmed using a full-fledged integrated assessment model ("WITCH") for a wide range of parameters specification.

Our research provides a strong argument for maintaining mitigation policies even when considering a very optimistic viewpoint on the potential of geoengineering. Even if we were to attach a 50% probability to the possibility that geoengineering will work at large scale, at low costs and with no side effects, the optimal carbon tax today should decrease only from 29 $/tCO2 to 19$/tCO2 if geoengineering is possible. While further research is a prerequisite to assess whether there will be a viable geoengineering option at some point in the future, the results suggest that for the time being, geoengineering does not warrant to be taken as a reason to significantly delay abatement effort from an economic point of view, even under optimistic scenarios about its feasibility and acceptability.