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Ice at the North Pole melted at an unprecedented rate last week, with leading scientists warning that the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by 2013. Satellite images show that ice caps started to disintegrate dramatically several days ago as storms over Alaska's Beaufort Sea began sucking streams of warm air into the Arctic. As a result, scientists say that the disappearance of sea ice at the North Pole could exceed last year's record loss. More than a million square kilometres melted over the summer of 2007 as global warming tightened its grip on the Arctic. But such destruction could...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Forget about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright or John McCain's war record. If you tell me how the economy is doing now, I'll tell you who will be president next January. Unfortunately for John McCain's chances, the economy is very weak, and almost everything else is going against him as well, which means Barack Obama will almost certainly be elected president. That's the view of the overwhelming majority of social scientists who make it their business to peer into the future. With four months to go until Election Day, the outcome is set in stone, barring some sort...

'Well Above-average' Hurricane Season Forecast For 2008Hurricane Katrina. The Colorado State University team's forecast now anticipates 15 named storms forming in the Atlantic basin between June 1 and Nov. 30. Eight of the storms are predicted to become hurricanes, and of those eight, four are expected to develop into intense or major hurricanes. (Credit: NOAA) ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2008) — The Colorado State University forecast team upgraded its early season forecast today from the Bahamas Weather Conference, saying the U.S. Atlantic basin will likely experience a well above-average hurricane season. "Current oceanic and atmospheric trends indicate that we will likely...

Joe D’Aleo posted this chart on icecap.us a while back and I wanted to make sure you see it. Click on the chart for full size. “This is the latest decadal plot from February 1998 to February 2008 of global temperatures from Satellite (UAH MSU lower troposphere) (blue) and land and ocean variance adjusted surface (Hadley CRU T3v) (rose) plotted with Scripps monthly CO2 from Mauna Loa (green).”You can easily see the downward trend in temperatures over the past decade and the increase in CO2 over the same time period of about 6%. A decade definitely is not a long...

The Job

Mobile no. 1 Friday, February 01, 2008By JEFF AMYBusiness Reporter Mobile County will have the fastest growing economy over the next five years among all 363 American metropolitan areas, according to a new forecast by Moody's Economy.com, growing 34.31 percent from 2007 through 2012. Forbes.com highlighted that projection in a story published Wednesday. The Web site arm of the business magazine credited the $3.7 billion ThyssenKrupp AG steel mill, Austal USA's continued growth in shipbuilding, and the possible Northrop Grumman/EADS airplane assembly plants as among Mobile's strengths. Forbes also cited the city's port and highway access as positives. Such an...

Don't count on a 'normal' recession Wall Street expects financial innovations and global growth to keep any U.S. slowdown in 2008 short and shallow. But the stock market is likely to be seriously disappointed. By Jim Jubak January 02, 2008 The stock market doesn't much care whether a 2008 slowdown in the U.S. economy is an official recession or not. As far as Wall Street is concerned, there's just not much difference between economic growth falling to 1% or to minus-0.5%. As long as the slowdown, recession, whatever, is short. No more than two quarters. Over and done with by...

The nation's housing doldrums will drag on at least through 2009, dampening U.S. economic growth and job creation, but the slowdown won't push the economy into a recession, according to a new economic report. Despite plunging housing values, rising oil prices and the credit crunch that battered Wall Street, the nation's job market is unlikely to suffer the kind of steep losses that would tip the economy into a recession, according to the quarterly Anderson Forecast by the University of California, Los Angeles. "We still think an official recession is not in the immediate future," concluded Edward Leamer, director and...

AOL News has the figures from the Thanksgiving weekend start to the Christmas shopping season, and early indications are that shoppers have not been paying attention to gloomy media and political candidates' forecasts about the state of the economy. Retail sales for Friday and Saturday combined rose by 7.2% over last year to a staggering $16.4 billion. Sales on Black Friday alone rose a very healthy 8.3% over last year to $10.3 billion, according to ShopperTrak RCT Corp, which tracks sales at over 50,000 retailers nationwide. The news was even better online, as consumers drove sales up 22% over last...

VALENCIA, Spain - Global warming is "unequivocal" and carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere commits the world to an average rise in sea levels of up to 4.6 feet, the world's top climate experts warned Saturday in their most authoritative report to date. "Only urgent, global action will do," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, calling on the United States and China — the world's two biggest polluters — to do more to slow global climate change. "I look forward to seeing the U.S. and China playing a more constructive role," Ban told reporters. "Both countries can lead in their own...

MIAMI - Government forecasters minimally reduced their prediction for the Atlantic hurricane season Thursday, but said that up to nine hurricanes and up to 16 tropical storms are expected to form, still a busier-than-average season. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintained its estimate that three to five of the hurricanes will be major storms of Category 3 strength or stronger. The original report forecast up to 17 tropical storms, with up to 10 becoming hurricanes. Despite the slight reductions and a harmless season so far, NOAA said atmospheric and oceanic conditions mean that the season likely will be more...

FORT COLLINS, Colo., May. 31, 2007 (AP) With the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season just a few hours away, researcher William Gray released his newest forecast Thursday still showing an expection for 17 major storms and nine hurricanes, five of them intense. Gray, based at Colorado State University, described it as a very active season. He said there was a 74 percent chance of a major hurricane making landfall on the U.S. coast. The forecast was largely unchanged from his team's forecast released in early April.

Forget "summer rally" — with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up a remarkable 1,400 points since mid-March, this market has been a spring spectacular. It's little wonder that finding a bear these days on Wall Street is about as difficult as scoring a $40,000 summer rental in the Hamptons. As the industrials have clocked more than two dozen record closes this spring, one stalwart bear after another has capitulated. [Snip] It's such soaring optimism ... that has the few remaining pessimists on red alert these days. They see a severe market pullback on the horizon. What could be the trigger?...

IWIC 2007 Atlantic Basin Hurricane Season Forecast By Rob Mann and Jason Moreland As of May 25, 2007 ABSTRACT Data obtained throughout the past several months indicates that 2007 Atlantic Basin hurricane activity will be somewhat above the long-term average, with an estimated 13 named storms, 8 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes. An abnormally high number of tropical cyclones will form east of the Lesser Antilles during the bimonthly period of August and September, with at least one significant hurricane striking the northeast Caribbean. The Yucatán Peninsula also faces a high risk of a major hurricane strike during the final...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil price bull Goldman Sachs has cut its 2007 US crude forecast for a second time in as many weeks after persistently warm winter weather and a commodities-wide sell-off knocked prices hard last week. Goldman said it was cutting its average price forecast by $3.50 to $69 a barrel, keeping it among the top 10 in a Reuters poll of more than 30 analysts. "Although some of this warm weather was already embedded in our price forecasts, the weather deviation since mid-December ... through first part of January will likely reduce oil demand by a further 46...

US scientists unveiled a new system they hope will improve the accuracy in forecasting the likelihood of earthquakes in the long-term. In a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, researchers revealed a method which combines geological records with GPS tracking to help assess earthquake risk. "This is the most realistic model to date," said Kaj Johnson, a geophysicist from the University of Indiana. "This is something that people have been asking for years now - it's the next step." Earthquake probability assessment requires accurate determination of how fast a fault moves. Prior to the advent of...

PARIS (AFP) - After a lull this year, the Atlantic hurricane season in 2007 will see "a return to high activity," scientists have forecast. "Based on current and projected climate signals, Atlantic basin and US landfalling tropical cyclone activity are forecast to be 60 percent above the 1950-2006 norm in 2007," said Tropical Storm Risk (TSR), a London-based consortium. "There is a high (around 80 percent) likelihood that activity will be in the top one-third of years historically," it added in its press release. It gave the rough forecast of more than 15 tropical storms, of which nearly nine would...

There used to be a TV commercial for a stock brokerage named E.F. Hutton. Their tag-line motto was, "When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen." The segway here is to talk about Ed Mahmoud's gift for weather forecasting. Last year, more than a week before Hurricane Katrina made landfall Ed made this very startling forecast: POSSIBLE COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS NEXT WEEK (Lets hope not, we just got our new well online just West of MSY and inside Bonne Carret spillway), GAS PRICES COULD RISE $0.25 OR MORE NEXT 10 DAYS!....The possible Gulf action may be named...

DENVER - The Colorado State University hurricane forecast team Friday called for a slightly below-average hurricane season with only five hurricanes instead of the seven earlier forecast. It is second time in a month the team had revised downward its forecast. "Despite the lower predictions, residents living along the U.S. coastline should always be prepared for major storms," forecaster William Gray said. Two of the hurricanes will be intense, the team predicted. Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Ernesto was scheduled to be downgraded to a rain storm at 11 a.m. EDT, said Frank Lepore of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Hurricane...

The CBS “Evening News” may want to change its theme music to R.E.M.’s “End of the World As We Know It.” Nearly two months into a quiet hurricane season, CBS’s Michelle Miller alarmed viewers of the July 30 broadcast with ominous warnings of a “long overdue Northeast hurricane” that “could devastate the region and cripple the U.S. economy.” Invoking the “Long Island Express” hurricane of 1938, Miller warned that as devastating at that storm was in lives lost and property damage, the economic hit today would be much worse, as “real estate values from Maryland to Maine are among the...

30-year weather forecast by Japan By Colin Joyce in Tokyo (Filed: 20/07/2006) Japan's science ministry hopes to harness the power of a supercomputer called the Earth Simulator to deliver forecasts 30 years into the future. The computer, which occupies a warehouse in Yokohama, is one of the most powerful in the world. Scientists will use it to analyse long-term trends using data such as atmospheric pressure, global air and sea temperatures, crust movements and currents. The forecasts will tell which areas are likely to experience recurring disasters such as typhoons, storms, heavy snow, coastal erosion and droughts. The government may...

Scientists Issue Unprecedented Forecast of Next Sunspot Cycle March 6, 2006 The next sunspot cycle will be 30 to 50 percent stronger than the last one, and begin as much as a year late, according to a breakthrough forecast using a computer model of solar dynamics developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. The research results, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA, were published on-line on March 3 in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters. Scientists now predict that the next cycle, known as Cycle 24, will produce...

With the clock quickly ticking down to a Friday deadline, political observers are offering a June gloom forecast on the odds that California voters will see an infrastructure bond on the primary ballot. Many note that just last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger took a significant step backward from his earlier position that a bond measure aimed at shoring up California's crumbling infrastructure must move forward this spring. "The key thing here is that, if you're lucky you can do it for the June ballot," Schwarzenegger told reporters at a Capitol news conference Thursday. "Both parties agree that we should not...

According to the latest housing price forecasts from Fiserv Lending Solutions, a provider of mortgage and consumer lending services, Las Vegas real estate will tumble a whopping 8.2 percent in 2006, the largest predicted fall among the 379 metro areas studied. Fiserv forecasts a significant stagnation in housing prices for the United States in 2006 -- median home prices overall will inch up only 1.5 percent this year. And many metro areas will experience drops, including some of the largest, and most expensive, ones such as New York (down 2.43 percent), Los Angeles (down 3 percent) and Washington (down 1.9...

Omens, Good and Bad The market held to a familiar pattern last year, but S&P sees little reason to believe that is a meaningful sign for 2006 Last year wasn't great for the S&P 500, which finished 2005 with a modest price gain of 3%. But it was true to form: Stocks finished higher in a year ending in 5. That's been the case for all such years over the past eight decades, though there is no logical explanation for the phenomenon. Over the same time period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average exhibited the same behavior in those years, until...

SAN FRANCISCO - Pacific Gas & Electric Co. customers can expect significantly higher heating bills in December compared with the same time last year, but the increase won't be quite as severe as previously forecast. PG&E, which serves most of Northern California, said Thursday that natural gas bills will probably rise 25 percent this month compared with a year ago, which is down from the utility's previous estimate of a 38-percent increase. The average bill is now expected to be $110.55, compared with $88.10 last year at this time, according to the San Francisco-based utility. Mild weather has helped reduce...

ABSTRACT Information obtained through 31 August 2005 shows that we have already experienced 110 percent of the average full season Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC)4 activity. In an average year, 33 percent of the seasonal average NTC of 100 occurs before the end of August. Our September-only forecast calls for five named storms, four hurricanes, two major hurricanes and NTC activity of 80 which is much above the mean September-only average value of 48. Our October-only forecast calls for three named storms, two hurricanes, one major hurricane and NTC activity of 30 which is much above the mean October-only average value...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. employers added 157,000 workers overall to their payrolls in December, bringing the year-end total of new jobs to 2.2 million, the best showing in five years. The unemployment rate held steady at 5.4 percent. The Labor Department reported Friday that the 2.2 million new jobs created in 2004 were the most in any year since 1999, when employers added 3.2 million positions, based on a government survey of businesses. In 2003, there was a net 61,000 reduction in payroll jobs. President Bush called it "a very positive set of numbers" that are proof the economy is...

I just found this Nov 5, 2004 reprint on Diplomad of an article they wrote in SEPTEMBER 2004 - warning what the RATS would do if they lost the 2004 election. They were amazingly on target!!: Friday, November 05, 2004 Another Reprise We promise not to do this too often. Below we have reprinted our September 18 posting re our concerns about the treatment a second Bush term would receive. We think this has more urgency now than we originally ran it (and now we have more readers!) We re-post it intact, including our almost accurate vote prediction. Bush in...

ZCZC MIATCPAT4 ALL TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM BULLETIN HURRICANE IVAN ADVISORY NUMBER 25 NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL 11 AM AST WED SEP 08 2004 ...Dangerous Hurricane Ivan heading for the central Caribbean Sea... A hurricane warning remains in effect for Aruba...Bonaire...and Curacao. A hurricane watch and a Tropical Storm Warning remain in effect for The Guarjira Peninsula of Columbia...and for the entire Northern Coast of Venezuela. At 11 AM AST...1500z...the Government of Haiti has issued a Hurricane Watch for the entire Southwest peninsula of Haiti from the border of the Dominican Republic Westward...including Port Au Prince. A Tropical Storm...

Forecast: Record Lows Possible Overnight Beautiful Weekend In Store POSTED: 4:37 pm EDT August 6, 2004 COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Record lows are possible Friday night in Central Ohio, according to 4 Warn Storm Team chief meteorologist Jym Ganahl. Skies will be clear Friday night, and the temperature could drop to 49 degrees in Columbus and into the mid-40s in southeastern Ohio, Ganahl said. Columbus' record low is 51, set in 1994. Saturday will be sunny with a high of 76. It will be sunny again Sunday with a high of 81 and a low of 55. Clouds will increase Monday...

KEY FINANCIAL EFFECTS OVERLOOKED FLAWED ECONOMIC METHODS, Part 1Economic analysis is just plain hard as heck. This is the first in a series of essays intended to expose why economic forecasts are so unbelievably poor or “quality challenged.” Today a personal touch will be shared from my experiences and contacts. This is not an exact science, but rather a social science, one which contains an element of art. The craft has sadly become more complex by financial market factors and subverted by political motives. The topic explored is key financial effects, which are commonly overlooked in economic analysis. The collective...

    Why killer tornado caught meteorology team by surprise By Dave Orrick Daily Herald Staff WriterPosted Thursday, April 22, 2004 No one saw them coming. Shortly before 5 p.m. - only an hour before a legion of as many as 14 tornadoes marched through the southwestern reaches of the suburbs, killing eight - six National Weather Service meteorologists in Romeoville were preparing for a night of scattered thunderstorms. Nothing more. The national Storm Prediction Center's most recent "Convective Outlook," issued at 3 p.m., showed west-central Illinois stood a "slight" risk of tornadoes. Then in Lincoln, the central Illinois office...

KABUL, Afghanistan - The U.S. military pulled back Saturday from an earlier prediction that Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) would be captured this year, even while preparing its largest force to date for operations along the Pakistani border where the al-Qaida chief is suspected to be hiding. Catching bin Laden and other top fugitives remains a priority of the expanding American operation in Afghanistan (news - web sites), a spokesman said, but the growing mission is "not about just one or two people," a spokesman said. "We remain committed to catching these guys. It's pretty much ... just...

This is the fantasy of every Washington politician: You wake up one morning, and the Social Security crisis has vanished. ... Now a moderate economist in the Democratic camp may have forged the magic bullet. ...

Continued Paring of Airlines Predicted Aviation Week & Space Technology 12/15/2003, page 70 By Vaughn Cordle Like the pterodactyls, 'adapt or perish' is the likely scenario for bloated players in the airline industry today If a man gives no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand. Confucius No one can predict the future with enough certainty to make the exercise completely worthwhile. But, as Confucius implies, thinking about the future is required in order to change it. But first we must understand where we are. Travelers have access to the world at fare levels...

The year 2004 will be a "good year" for the US economy, with a "gradual" increase in employment and continued recovery from lean years past, Anthony Santomero, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, said. "Despite December's disappointing payroll numbers, the recovery continues to gain traction, and we seem to be moving toward a well-balanced and self-sustaining economic expansion," he told a meeting of the South Jersey Bankers Association in Cherry Hill. "I expect economic growth to continue in 2004, with GDP (news - web sites) (gross domestic product) growing at a healthy pace and with labor market conditions...

For the last 10 days, I have been reviewing over 500 pages of forecasts, predictions, and data from a wide variety of sources. Some have been extremely bullish and others make you want to just slit your wrists and get it over with. But even ignoring the extremes, which are almost always universally wrong, never in all my years have I seen such a wide range of opinion and disagreement accompanied by an increased hardening of those opinions. With a few notable exceptions, there are a lot of analysts who seem more sure of their view of the future than...

<p>Economists are nudging higher their projections for economic growth early next year, suggesting they are becoming more confident the recovery is sustainable.</p> <p>Among 53 economists who participated in The Wall Street Journal Online's November economic-forecasting survey, the average forecast for the inflation-adjusted, annualized growth rate of the nation's gross domestic product during the first quarter of 2004 was 4.1%. That was revised up from the 3.9% rate predicted when the group was last surveyed in October.</p>

As President Bush lined his bulging campaign coffers with another $1.85 million from an Alabama fund-raiser yesterday, his chief pollster warned loyalists that Bush will trail his Democratic rival at some point next year. "This race is likely to be very tight and go down to the wire," chief strategist Matthew Dowd wrote in a memorandum released by the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign. "This race will be decided within a four-or five-point margin, not the 18- to 20-point margins like 1984 or 1972." While a recovering economy has helped shore up Bush's approval numbers, he said, "the country is very evenly...

Based on a theory of cooperative herding and imitation working both in bullish as well as in bearish regimes, we have detected the existence of a clear signature of herding in the decay of the US S&P500 index since August 2000 with high statistical significance, in the form of strong log-periodic components.Please refer to the following paper for a detailed description: D. Sornette and W.-X. Zhou, The US 2000-2002 Market Descent: How Much Longer and Deeper? Quantitative Finance 2 (6), 468-481 (2002) (e-print at http://arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0209065). For a general presentation of the underlying concepts, theory, empirical tests and concrete applications, with...

Last week's performance by the U.S. government National Weather Service in providing data and warnings about Hurricane Claudette raises important questions about National Weather Service priorities and its ability to fulfill its core mission to provide complete and timely data and protect life and property, according to AccuWeather, Inc, the world's leading commercial weather service. The National Weather Service received and utilized critical observations by government aircraft reconnaissance during an 11-hour period the day before Claudette hit Texas, but did not make these observations available to the commercial weather industry, emergency preparedness agencies or the public. The National Weather Service...

<p>The Bush administration is expected to forecast record deficits for this year and next exceeding $400 billion, perhaps reaching $450 billion, congressional Republicans said on Monday.</p> <p>The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and many private analysts, have been expecting shortfalls of that magnitude, but Tuesday's projection by the White House would be the first time it has acknowledged that amount of red ink.</p>

Americans Wonder When Sun Will Rise on Economic Recovery Like TV meteorologists blissfully announcing sunny skies while it's raining, economic forecasters are declaring that the moment of rebound is at hand. That has a lot of umbrella-carrying workers and executives wondering, "So where is the economic sunshine?" It's a good question. For the past two quarters, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate no better than 1.75%, so slowly that the unemployment rate kept rising. But forecasters say the pace of growth is quickening now. They predict the U.S. will grow at a 3.5% or 4% annualized pace in...

<p>The long-term prospects for California's sputtering economy to return to prosperity look bright, a Palo Alto research group predicted Wednesday.</p> <p>But there's one dark cloud hovering over the road to recovery: The partisan bickering that has all but paralyzed the state Capitol.</p>

High-tech CEOs have seen the future, and it is rosy, a survey says. Despite the continued economic downturn, the CEOs of North America's fastest-growing technology companies remain confident their companies will maintain the record-high growth rates they have enjoyed over the past five years, the 2003 Deloitte Touche's Technology Fast 500 report reported. The survey of more than 200 CEOs included 16 chief executives of Canadian companies. Of the respondents, 59 per cent said they are very or extremely confident their companies will maintain their high levels of growth. Companies in the Fast 500 posted an average growth rate of...

Drought forecast looks ugly By Allison Fashek Published in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle CHEYENNE – Gov. Dave Freudenthal got the details about Wyoming’s drought during a meeting Wednesday at the state Capitol. It was not pretty picture. The new governor’s response: “The drought is a much more immediate and significant threat to the economy of the region than bioterrrorism or homeland security.” Members of the state’s Drought Management Task Force gave Freudenthal a report on what is being called one of the worst droughts in state history. They also made recommendations for community assistance. According to statistics from state climatologist Jan...

<p>California's state budgeting system -- if something so chaotic deserves that name -- has been plagued for decades by a chronic inability to accurately forecast tax revenues.</p> <p>The state's economy is more volatile than those of most other states, and the official forecasts have tended to underestimate revenue gains during economic upturns and, by the same token, underestimate revenue declines during recessions.</p>

According to the Extended weather forecasts at AccuWeather for Tuesday 11/5/02: Out of all the cities I researched, only the following cities are predicted to be SUNNY: Los Angeles, San Franciso, Seattle???, Las Vegas The following cities are predicted to be CLOUDY: Des Moines, Detroit, Minneapolis, Pierre The following cities are predicted to be CLOUDY... BUT have a possibility of RAIN and/or SNOW on Mon and/or Wed: Boston, St. Louis, Portland, Concord, Montpelier, Indianapolis, Augusta, Hartford, Phoenix, Milwaukee, Chicago The following cities are predicted to have SHOWERS: Atlanta, Denver The following cities are predicted to have RAIN: New York, Baltimore,...