Free Republic

A meteorologist in the Taunton office of the National Weather Service today confirmed what anybody walking outside quicky realizes, which is, it is about as cold as it can be for the month of March. At 11 a.m. it was 3 degrees above zero with a wind child of about 20 degrees below zero, Meteorologist William Simpson said. The temperature at midnight was 16 degrees which is the March 6 record for the lowest maximum temperature for the date, according to Mr. Simpson. The record low maximum temerature for the month of March is 10 degrees, set on March 3,...

The tornadoes that tore across the south-eastern US on Thursday, killing at least 19 people, were devastating but not unprecedented, say tornado experts. However, the twisters did strike unusually early in the year. The tornado season in the US normally reaches its peak between mid-April and June. The tornadoes tend to get stronger as the year progresses because warming temperatures increase the amount of energy in the atmosphere. "Early March is a bit early for a severe tornado," says Nigel Bolton, national forecaster at the UK Met Office and member of the UK-based Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO). But...

Northern Michigan is having one of the top ten coldest beginnings of February in 100 years. Cambodia is seeing record lows, with the daily highs not getting out of the 40's on some days. Pakistan and India are both seeing very cold temperatures. Meanwhile, polar bears are using ice drifts to get out of Greenland because it has gotten too cold for them. And Iceland really is. This is all global warming's fault.

Average temperatures in the 48 contiguous states were the warmest ever in 2006, just surpassing a record set in 1998, partly because of a long-term warming trend linked to increases in greenhouse gases, forecasters said today. It wasn't clear how much of the warming could be attributed to a rise in global temperatures and how much was caused by an El Nino weather condition heating the Pacific Ocean and disrupting global climate patterns this year, forecasters at the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's National Climactic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, said. Global warming "has made warmer-than-average conditions more...

The scare du jour on global warming is a massive inundation of our coast caused by rapid loss of ice from Antarctica. It's a core point in Al Gore's science fiction movie, and it continues to be thumped by doomsayers around the world, in the echo chamber of the alarmist media. It's also a bunch of hooey. If you could take the boredom, you could have read hundreds of news stories on this since An Inconvenient Truth debuted on May 25. But you'll find very little mention of a paper that appeared a mere six weeks later, in the Proceedings...

That the Gulf Stream is responsible for Europe's mild winters is widely known and accepted, but...it is nothing more than the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend... The countries of northern Europe do indeed have curiously mild climates...why do so many people credit the Gulf Stream? Like many other myths, this one rests on a strand of truth. The Gulf Stream carries with it considerable heat when it flows out from the Gulf of Mexico and then north along the East Coast before departing U.S. waters at Cape Hatteras and heading northeast toward Europe. All along the way, it warms...

A 30-mile maze canyons in Antarctica was carved out of bedrock by the catastrophic draining of subglacial lakes during global warming between 12 million and 14 million years ago, according to university researchers who warn a similar event today could have serious environmental consequences. Although scientists have previously theorized that the Labyrinth region in southern Victoria Land was created by water released from lakes that had formed under glaciers, researchers at Syracuse University and Boston University say they found geological evidence to bracket the timing of the last major flooding and link it to a global warming trend at the...

Earth's protective ozone layer, which was notably thinning in 1980, may be fully recovered by mid-century, climate scientists said on Wednesday. Ozone in the stratosphere, outside the polar regions, stopped thinning in 1997, the scientists found after analyzing 25 years worth of observations. The ozone layer shields the planet from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation, but human-made chemicals -- notably the chlorofluorocarbons found in some refrigerants and aerosol propellants -- depleted this stratospheric ozone, causing the protective layer to get thinner. The scientists said the ozone layer's comeback is due in large part to compliance with an 1987 international agreement...

Stefan Magnusson lives at the foot of a giant, melting glacier. Some think he's living on the brink of a cataclysm. He believes he's on the cusp of creation. The 49-year-old reindeer rancher says a warming trend in Greenland over the past decade has caused the glacier on his farm to retreat 300 feet, revealing land that hasn't seen the light of day for hundreds of years, if not more. Where ice once gripped the earth, he says, his reindeer now graze on wild thyme amid the purple blooms of Niviarsiaq flowers. The melting glacier near Mr. Magnusson's home is...

One way to curb global warming is to purposely shoot sulfur into the atmosphere, a scientists suggested today. The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. It also releases sulfur that cools the planet by reflecting solar radiation away from Earth. Injecting sulfur into the second atmospheric layer closest to Earth would reflect more sunlight back to space and offset greenhouse gas warming, according to Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego. Crutzen suggests carrying sulfur...

E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version August 04, 2004, 8:53 a.m. No-Second-Thoughts "Science"A noticeable difference. By Iain Murray Two recent findings, one right next to Washington D.C., the other as far away as is possible to imagine, demonstrate the limits of what we can learn from scientific models. When researchers put together theories to predict what should happen, that's a model. When the model conflicts with reality, the model is flawed. Yet there are some scientists who don't accept that, which should give us pause to think about their claims. We saw it...

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- The massive amounts of heat and pollution that rise from the world's cities both delay and stimulate the fall of precipitation, cheating some areas of much-needed rain and snow while dousing others, scientists said. The findings support growing evidence that urbanization has a sharp and alarming effect on the climate, and those changes can wreak havoc with precipitation patterns that supply life's most precious resource: water... ...The relative contributions that urban heat and pollution make to altering the climate remains unclear, scientists said. It's also unclear what, if any, effect smaller cities might have.

This time last year, the rains were so heavy in central Europe, northern Italy and southern France that not merely crops, but whole buildings, indeed whole streets, were washed away. The Danube and Po rivers overflowed and flooded many of the cities on their banks, causing irreperable damage to historic buildings and destroying much of the year's agriculture.This year, those same regions are experiencing drought. The Po is now so low that in some regions it is possible to walk across it. London, Milan and a number of cities in Switzerland and France have experienced their hottest days since records...

Africa suffering worst effects of global warming By Steve Conno, Science Editor 29 July 2003 Global warming is affecting Africa more than the industrialised world despite being the inhabited continent least to blame for the greenhouse effect. A study by scientists at Britain's Hadley Centre has found that the tell-tale signature of global warming is significantly stronger in Africa than in other continents such as Europe and America. The researchers believe that industrial pollution, which emits the carbon dioxide that exacerbates the greenhouse effect, also offers some localised protection against climate warming. But because Africa is not as industrialised as...

Reference Paulsen, D.E., Li, H.-C. and Ku, T.-L. 2003. Climate variability in central China over the last 1270 years revealed by high-resolution stalagmite records. Quaternary Science Reviews 22: 691-701. What was done In the words of the authors, "high-resolution records of ð13C and ð18O in stalagmite SF-1 from Buddha Cave [33°40'N, 109°05'E] are used to infer changes in climate in central China for the last 1270 years in terms of warmer, colder, wetter and drier conditions." What was learned Among the climatic episodes evident in the authors' data were "those corresponding to the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and...

Middle Ages were warmer than today, say scientists By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent (Filed: 06/04/2003) Claims that man-made pollution is causing "unprecedented" global warming have been seriously undermined by new research which shows that the Earth was warmer during the Middle Ages. From the outset of the global warming debate in the late 1980s, environmentalists have said that temperatures are rising higher and faster than ever before, leading some scientists to conclude that greenhouse gases from cars and power stations are causing these "record-breaking" global temperatures. Last year, scientists working for the UK Climate Impacts Programme said that global temperatures...

LINK Source: American Association For The Advancement Of Science Date: 2003-02-17 Computer Models Forecast Sharp Increase In Temperature If Heat-trapping Emissions Continue To Rise DENVER, CO –- Powerful computer models predict that winter temperatures in the polar regions of the world could rise as much as 10 degrees centigrade in the next hundred years, if no efforts are made to control production of carbon dioxide, methane and other gasses. “With projections to the year 2100, we can show what will happen if we continue with business as usual—if we don’t do anything to curb emissions of greenhouse gasses,” said Warren...

When we encounter the latest alarmist litany in newspapers across the nation, we can't help inserting a few choice words in editor's brackets: [A serious misconception about] global warming is accelerating at a dramatic pace. For some reason, and it's not science, reporters at such esteemed rags as the Los Angeles Times are becoming [un]knowing environmentalist shills, as when Usha Lee McFarling writes that "groups that are concerned about climate change point out that the rate of warming is steeply increasing." The proof? McFarling quotes Lester Brown, author of 25 annual "State of the World" reports on how ecological doom...