British Antarctic Survey: Harsh Antarctic Sea Ice Threatens Emperor Penguins With Starvation

British Antarctic Survey: Harsh Antarctic Sea Ice Threatens Emperor Penguins With Starvation

http://notrickszone.com/2013/08/04/british-antarctic-survey-harsh-antarctic-sea-ice-threatens-emperor-penguins-with-starvation/

Every sane, half-way educated person knows that a warmer planet is better than a colder one. During the ice ages, when CO2 concentration was just 180 ppm, much life on the planet stood on the brink of extinction. When the planet was a hot-house and CO2 was over 1000 ppm, the Earth was a literal garden of Eden teeming with life. Hat-tip: reader Manfred.

Meet Knut the emperor penguin (center)! Record sea ice in the Antarctic due to South Pole cooling means poor little penguins like Knut are facing starvation. Photo credit: Ian Duffy from UK, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
So it’s no surprise that the British Antarctic Survey tells us in a fascinating report that the emperor penguin faces starvation should Antarctic sea ice grow, as it is doing right now.
The British Antarctic Survey writes at the very end of its report:
They have a high survival rate compared to other penguins, with an average of 95% surviving the year. However, if it is a harsh sea-ice year, many chicks will die of starvation. Emperors are the least common Antarctic penguin, with only about 200,000 breeding pairs.”
Antarctica has seen a whole bunch of harsh years recently, and it doesn’t look like things are going to improve anytime soon.

Source: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/jpg.
Of course the extra sea ice we’ve been seeing at the South Pole doesn’t mean these dignified birds will become extinct any time soon. Like polar bears, they’ve survived far worse conditions. But it does mean the weaker ones aren’t going to fare as well and some will have to make an agonizing, early departure from Earth.
Already I’m seeing emperor penguins falling from the sky to their death! Must be those damn man-made aerosols cooling the southern hemisphere.
 

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Solar Cycle 24 Weakest In Almost 200 Years – Shows Signs Of An Even Weaker Upcoming Cycle 25

Solar Cycle 24 Weakest In Almost 200 Years – Shows Signs Of An Even Weaker Upcoming Cycle 25

http://notrickszone.com/2013/08/05/solar-cycle-24-weakest-in-almost-200-years-shows-signs-of-an-even-weaker-upcoming-cycle-25/

The website of geologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, authors of the new book: “The Neglected Sun“, has a general solar activity progress report with some interesting observations on solar cycle 24 and comments about upcoming solar cycle 25.
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The Sun In July 2013 – News and Some Statistics
By Frank Bosse
According to the Solar Influences Data Analysis Center (SIDC) in Brussels, the “official” solar sunspot number (SSN) last month was 57.0. Thus it reached only 57% of the mean value of cycles 1-23 in the corresponding time period, see graph below: “Average Solar Cycle”:

The chart is a plot of sunspot number (SSN) versus months after the start of the cycle.dark blue: mean value of cycles 1-23, red curve is the current cycle 24, and the gray curve is cycle no. 5.
If you calculate using the entire Cycle 24. then we get an activity level that is only about 45% of the mean value. The comparison of all cycles up to the current month:

You have to go back all the way to 1827 (SC 7) to find a comparably small activity like what we have seen since 2009. Leif Svalgaard once called the sun a “messy place” in order to tell us that our mother star is always full of surprises. Could there be an unexpected increase in Solar Cycle 24 activity coming up and what is the probability of that happening? Here the solar sunspot number anomalies of the previous chart (ASSA 56 – the accumulated solar sunspot anomaly after 56 months after the start of the cycle) is compared to the total sum of the anomalies (ASSA acc) of the previous cycles 1-23:

Result: There’s a very high probability (average 88%) that we will continue to see an extremely weak solar cycle. A lot indicates an anomaly of -2400 at the end of Cycle 24. Signs show that we are already past the maximum. Also renowned the website spaceweather.com determined this on 26 July 2013. Readers of our monthly Sonneninfo already suspected this earlier (see “The sun in June 2013 – on the way to a grand minimum? New work on the possible consequences“). Here the polar solar fields were depicted. Last month also confirmed the measurement data: The polarity has switched …

Revisiting bombshell ClimateGate email 207 from hockey stick co-author Raymond Bradley: “it may be that Mann et al simply don’t have the long-term trend right”

Revisiting bombshell ClimateGate email 207 from hockey stick co-author Raymond Bradley: “it may be that Mann et al simply don’t have the long-term trend right”

http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2013/08/revisiting-bombshell-climategate-email.html

Email 207[Hocky stick co-author Raymond Bradley in July 2000] there are real questions to be asked of the paleo reconstruction…Indeed, in the verification period, the biggest “miss” was an apparently very warm year in the late 19th century that we did not get right at all. This makes criticisms of the “antis” difficult to respond to (they have not yet risen to this level of sophistication, but they are “on the scent”). Furthermore, it may be that Mann et al simply don’t have the long-term trend right, due to underestimation of low frequency info…Whether we have the 1000 year trend right is far less certain (& one reason why I hedge my bets on whether there were any periods in Medieval times that might have been “warm”, to the irritation of my co-authors!). So, possibly if you crank up the trend over 1000 years, you find that the envelope of uncertainty is comparable with at least some of the future scenarios, which of course begs the question as to what the likely forcing was 1000 years ago. (My money is firmly on an increase in solar irradiance…)

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‘You can fight global warming by having a PB&J for lunch’ – Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein continues to endorse insanity

“you can fight global warming by having a PB&J for lunch”: Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein continues to endorse insanity

http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2013/08/you-can-fight-global-warming-by-having.html

Could a test-tube burger save the planet?The most expensive burger ever made was served in London today. It cost more than $300,000 — thanks, Google’s Sergey Brin — and didn’t taste very good. But the texture was right, and it saved a cow. Maybe one day it can save the Earth.That’s the real play behind the test-tube burgers. The hope, according to Dutch scientist Mark Post, who led the team, is that they can eventually help stop global warming….Meat is simply a huge, huge contributor to climate change…Telling people to give up burgers doesn’t poll well. Ben Adler, an urban policy writer, explored that in a December 2008 article for the American Prospect. He called environmental groups and asked them for their policy on meat consumption. “The Sierra Club isn’t opposed to eating meat,” was the clipped reply from a Sierra Club spokesman. “So that’s sort of the long and short of it.” …That is the whole point behind the cheery PB&J Campaign, which reminds that “you can fight global warming by having a PB&J for lunch.” Given that PB&J is delicious, it’s not the world’s most onerous commitment.

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New paper finds climate sensitivity to CO2 is ‘close to zero’ — Study ‘finds there is no agreement between observations and climate model predictions during the last two decades of the 20th century’

New paper finds climate sensitivity to CO2 is ‘close to zero’

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/08/new-paper-finds-climate-sensitivity-to_5.html

A new peer-reviewed paper published in Energy & Environment finds there is no agreement between observations and climate model predictions during the last two decades of the 20th century. According to the author, “This finding is shown to put constraints on surface [temperature] trend and Climate Sensitivity, limiting them to values close to zero.”The full paper is paywalled, but a 2011 paper by the same author [S. Fred Singer] is available here and comes to similar conclusions.Inconsistency of Modeled and Observed Tropical Temperature TrendsS. Fred Singer
1Science & Environmental Policy Project, University of Virginia, Arlington, VA 22202

Abstract: Consistency or lack thereof between observed temperature trends and those predicted by Global Circulation Models (GCMs) are a contentious though important issue. The lack of consistency between observed and modeled temperature trends has frequently been used to argue against a significant human contribution to global warming – and vice versa. We present here additional and independent evidence that there is no agreement between observed and modeled warming trends in the tropical troposphere during the last two decades of the 20th century. This finding is shown to put constraints on surface trend and Climate Sensitivity, limiting them to values close to zero.

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Warmist Retreat: Water shortage alarm from Himalayan melt called off

Warmist Retreat: Water shortage alarm from Himalayan melt called off

http://junkscience.com/2013/08/05/warmist-retreat-water-shortage-alarm-from-himalayan-melt-called-off

E&E reports: One of the big unknowns of climate change predictions — and one that has led to considerable contention — lies in knowing the future of water runoff from the Himalayas. The snow- and ice-rich region supplies water for billions of people in Asia and is sometimes referred to as the Earth’s “Third Pole.” […]…

New paper finds climate sensitivity to CO2 is 73% less than claimed by IPCC

New paper finds climate sensitivity to CO2 is 73% less than claimed by IPCC

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/08/new-paper-finds-climate-sensitivity-to.html

A new peer-reviewed paper published in Gondwana Research finds from paleoclimate proxies that climate sensitivity is only 0.8°C for a doubling of CO2 concentration from 280 to 560 ppm, 73% less than claimed by the IPCC. The paper adds to many other peer-reviewed papers finding the IPCC estimates of CO2 climate sensitivity are greatly exaggerated.
The paper is summarized by the Swedish climate site The Stockholm Initiative [Google translation from Swedish + light editing]:

Climate sensitivity 0.8 ° C for a doubling of CO2

07/18/2013 by Ingemar Nordin .

Guest Post from Larry Huldén :

Summary: In a new review article in July by Gregory Retallack presents for the first time empirical paleoproxy results for mean temperature change at a doubling of CO2 concentration from 280 to 560 ppm. Climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 concentration was 0.8 ° C, which is significantly lower than previous estimates.

No cost, but the abstract is available. I reproduce here some key elements and conclusions of the article, which is available electronically to employees at the University of Helsinki.

The methodology is based on 19 carefully dated and analyzed the CO2 peaks at the transition between Perm and Triassic (300-200 one million years before present) from 51 non-marine lime and kolavlagragingar from around the world. It has been compared klyvöppningsindexet in leaves of the ancient ginkgo tree in two different ways. Partly by experiments under greenhouse conditions and partly with herbarie-specimens from various post-industrial times with known CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The index is low at high CO2 concentration and high at low CO2 content. Fossil Ginkgo is also known from the Late Triassic and klyvöppningsindexet can be used as a reference to jump to Perm. Fröormbunken Lepidopteris were both during Perm and Trias and it had a similar profile in klyvöppningsindex with Ginkgo during late Trias. Analogous to Ginkgo has klyvöppningsindexet in fossil Lepidopteris leaf from Perm early Triassic calculated from different deposits of varying CO2 concentration.

Temperature Variations during Perm-Trias was calculated in different ways depending on the latitude. I will not go into the methods here, but notes that such Utah New Mexico showed annual average temperatures between 24 and 37 ° C. CO2 concentration in the Perm early Trias has varied between 1000 and 7800 ppm, and in the late Triassic between …