Global Cooling: Alaskan Glaciers Grow For First Time In 250 Years
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, October 17, 2008
Plans to implement a worldwide carbon tax in the name of saving the planet from global warming have taken another blow after it was revealed that Alaskan glaciers have grown for the first time in 250 years after an abnormally cool summer.
Temperatures 3 degrees below average caused winter snow to remain for longer, prompting the increase in glacial mass, reports the Daily Tech.
“Since 1946, the USGS has maintained a research project measuring the state of Alaskan glaciers. This year saw records broken for most snow buildup. It was also the first time since any records began being that the glaciers did not shrink during the summer months,” according to the report.
The biggest shrinkage witnessed in the region occurred between 1741 and 1900, during which the glaciers lost about 15 per cent of their total mass as the earth began to exit the climatological period coined the Little Ice Age.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but CO2 spewing cars and jumbo jets were not too prevalent in the 18th and 19th centuries.
And now that the planet has naturally exited a warming trend and is heading towards a new “big chill,” as evidenced by the near complete halt in sunspot activity, the glaciers are expanding once again.
Years more growth in the Alaskan glaciers “might mark the beginning of another Little Ice Age,” notes the report.
The expansion of the glaciers follows a similar occurrence in the Arctic, which has undergone an ice cover growth twice the size of Germany in the past year, a gain of about thirteen percent following a colder than usual year.
Man-made global warming adherents have attempted to downplay such instances as aberrations that defy a wider warming trend, but in reality no global warming has been observed since at least 1999 or even 1995, as University of Finland professor Jarl R. Ahlbeck maintains.
Evidence that the planet is tip-toeing towards the onset of a new mini ice age continues to present itself following unprecedented ice storms in Kenya as well as Sydney experiencing its coldest August for 60 years.
The cold snap arrives on the back of the Sun reaching a milestone not observed in nearly 100 years - the entire month of August passed without a single sunspot being noted.
Lack of solar activity in 2008 has coincided with evidence of a cooling trend across the world.
Earlier this year, China experienced its coldest winter in 100 years while northeast America was hit by record snow levels and Britain suffered its coldest Easter in decades as late-blooming daffodils were pounded with hail and snow on an almost daily basis. The British summer also left many yearning for global warming, with temperatures in June and July rarely struggling to get over 16 degrees and on one occasion even dropping as low as 9 degrees in the middle of the afternoon.
Many parts of the U.S. suffered their coldest April on record. Canada had its third coldest April since 1970.
“Summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century’s opening decade,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That’s by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.”
According to an Associated Press report, The Farmers Almanac is now also predicting “below-average temperatures for most of the U.S.” The publication boasts of an 85 per cent accuracy rate for its forecasts which are given two years in advance.
According to a report from the World Meteorological Organization last month, the first half of 2008 was the coolest for at least five years, adding that it may actually be the coolest since 2000.
Man-made advocates have been losing credibility in recent months on the back of bizarre proposals to fight climate change that include blocking out the sun with spaceships as well as eviscerating pristine old growth forests, despite wider evidence of a cooling trend that is just beginning to manifest itself.
Meanwhile...
Arctic temperatures hit record high
By Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Temperatures in the Arctic last fall hit an all-time high — more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Centigrade) above normal — and remain almost as high this year, an international team of scientists reported Thursday.
"The year 2007 was the warmest year on record in the Arctic,'' said Jackie Richter-Menge, a climate expert at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H, and editor of the latest annual Arctic Report Card.
"These are dynamic and dramatic times in the Arctic,'' she said. "The outlook isn't good.''
Arctic temperatures naturally peak in October and November, after sea ice shrinks during the summer. The shrinkage lets more of the sun's rays heat the ocean rather than be reflected back into space.
As a result, the ocean is warming and causing global sea levels to rise even faster than predicted, according to the Arctic Report Card, the product of 46 scientists from 10 countries.
Summer 2007 set a record low for sea ice in the Arctic, threatening reindeer, walruses and polar bears and opening shipping lanes above the Arctic Circle, the report said. This summer's ice melt was only slightly smaller.
"There has been a massive loss of sea ice starting in the 1990s,'' said one of the authors, James Overland, an Arctic expert at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. "In 2008, we've lost so much multi-year old ice, it's very difficult for the ice cover to go back to where it was 20 years ago.''
The Arctic Report Card's authors attributed the temperature spike to a combination of long-term global warming and short-term, natural variations in ocean currents and winds above the Arctic Circle.
"Global warming by itself wouldn't cause this much sea ice loss,'' Overland said. Nor would changes in wind and ocean currents alone.
"Changes in the Arctic show a domino effect of both natural variation and the emerging global warming signal,'' he said. "Both are necessary to put us in this strange new world. Once we're in this place, it's very hard to go back.''
Although the Arctic is warming overall, its effects vary from place to place. The Bering Sea, for example, is in a cooling spell, and an unusually severe winter has bulked up Alaska's glaciers.
At the same time, the huge Greenland ice cap shrank by 88 square miles (220 square kilometers) as a result of an unusually warm spring and summer, according to Jaxon Box of the Byrd Polar Research Center in Columbus, Ohio.
Greenland dumped at least 24 cubic miles (100 cubic kilometers) of melted ice into the ocean. The report said the result was an "unprecedented'' rise of nearly 0.1 inch per year.
The Arctic warming trend began in the 1960s and has been accelerating in the past decade.
Scientists say these changes in the Arctic are early warning signs of what may be coming for the rest of the world's climate.
"Obviously, the planet is interconnected, so what happens in the Arctic does matter.'' Richter-Menge said she said. "It's a really good indicator of what's going on.''
"Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music"
