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People who insist that climate change isn’t happening often try to disprove it by pointing to what they see as contradictory phenomena. One of their most visually compelling arguments has centered upon Antarctic sea ice, which expanded to reach record levels in 2014. If the planet really is warming, they ask, then shouldn’t the ice in the southern ocean be melting? But now, in a new, not-yet-published paper, James Hansen, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and colleagues push back even harder. They argue that the increase in Antarctic sea ice not only doesn’t refute climate...

you can see the best-ever images of Pluto, our solar system's most distant (dwarf) planet. The animation is made up of images taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft between April 12 and 18 from a distance of 69 to 64 million miles from Pluto. They capture one complete rotation of Pluto and its moon Charon... The images have already surpassed the Hubble's resolution, but there are plenty of features too subtle for the spacecraft to pick up. In fact, the images don't even show all of Pluto's known moons yet -- let alone any smaller ones we've yet to discover...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Passengers and crew aboard a Russian ship trapped for eight days in ice off Antarctica planned to ring in the New Year with dinner, drinks and song as they waited for a break in a blizzard to allow a Chinese helicopter to rescue them. But they can't party too hard because the rescue could come at any minute. The Akademik Shokalskiy, trapped since December 24 about 100 nautical miles east of a French Antarctic station, Dumont D'Urville, and about 1,500 nautical miles south of Tasmania, welcomes the New Year at 1100 GMT, two hours ahead of Sydney....

A chilly Arctic summer has left 533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year - an increase of 29 per cent. (snip) ...days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores. The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced...

A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent. The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013. Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores. The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked...

I spent 25 years of my life worried about global warming. And one of the best proofs that the scientists and the media both had to keep me convinced was warmer winters, with less snow. Al Gore talked about it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote about it. Dozens of scientists published papers showing that winters were getting warmer, with less snow. Well, in the midst of this kind of certainty about warmer winters, with less snow, some scientists, among them a Russian named Habibullo Abdussamatov, dared to question the idea that warmer winters, with less snow, were caused by carbon...

Measuring a person’s ecological footprint or carbon footprint is a popular tool among environmentalists. Many see it as a way to educate people about the damage they inflict on the environment on an everyday basis - information that may prompt them to change their behavior. But newly published research suggests that for many people - perhaps most - the receipt of such data may produce the opposite result. In an experiment described in the journal Social Influence, “Only people who had invested their self-esteem in environmentalism - a strong form of commitment - reacted to negative environmental-footprint feedback by engaging...

Have you noticed that you rarely hear “global warming” mentioned on radio or television and the term rarely occurs any more in the print media? One reason is that it has been replaced with “climate change” and the other reason is that the only people talking about climate change seem to be leaders of governments like the United States or Australia. To borrow a line from Shakespeare, I come to bury global warming, not to praise it. An early and unrelenting skeptic from the days it first debuted in the late 1980s, I rather instinctively knew that the only warming...

Colder winters could become the norm in Europe over the next 20 to 40 years, US-based forecaster Weather Services International said Tuesday. “We have recently noticed a change in [weather] patterns back to what we had in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe… We’ve had three cold winters in a row in the UK,” WSI's chief meteorologist Todd Crawford told Platts. “We believe there is a strong likelihood that it’s going to hang around for the next 20 to 30 years.” If true, the findings could have important implications for the European energy markets, where demand typically increases during winter...

PARIS (AFP) – There is no "tipping point" beyond which climate change will inevitably push the Arctic ice cap into terminal melt off, according to a study released Wednesday. The northern polar cap has shrunk between 15 and 20 percent over the last 30 years, unleashing concern that on current trends -- with regional temperature increases twice or triple the global average -- it could disappear entirely during the summer months by century's end. One of the factors in this calculation is a so-called positive feedback, in which a reduced area of floating ice helps to stoke global warming. As...

Climate: New study slashes estimate of icecap loss PARIS (AFP) - – Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually.Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches)...

Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists. In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually. Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches) annually in the early 1960s. But, according to the new...

Here's the tour around Iceland's Myrdalsjökull ice cap I promised; this ice cap is on top of Katla volcano, which has apparently erupted every time after Eyjafjallajökull erupted (historically). Katla is bigger and reputedly nastier. (click for full-size unless otherwise indicated) I Heart columnar basalt: Skogar stream (this one's full-size) 360-degree panorama of the Solheimajokull glacier: Hraftinnusker, looking like what I imagine the Martian polar regions look like: Myrdalsjökull from the air: from the side: Colored valleys and blue lake Axlafoss

This daily chart illustrates that the Arctic Ice Cap continues to expand its coverage and is now within less than 2 standard deviations from the 1979-2000 average. Global Warming Hoax, its over http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Climate Change: We can't stop terrorists from boarding planes with explosive undies, but the CIA has assets sufficient to monitor Arctic ice and look for signs of global warming? Is al-Qaida recruiting polar bears? One wouldn't think that the increasing polar bear population and the increasing rate of recidivism of former Guantanamo detainees released into the wild were related, but they are. At the urging of Al Gore, the administration is signing on to a plan to task vital intelligence assets to protect not the people of the United States, but the environment. The program, shot down by President Bush,...

Global Warming: The Alaskan governor who knew polar bears weren't endangered says the planet isn't either and challenges the oracle of climate change. Al Gore says despite the CRU e-mails, the situation is of the utmost gravity. In a Dec. 9 Washington Post op-ed, Sarah Palin noted that the Climate-gate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia "reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures and tried to silence their critics from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." This did not sit well with Gore. "The entire North...

LONDON (AFP) – The Arctic ice cap will disappear completely in summer months within 20 to 30 years, a polar research team said as they presented findings from an expedition led by adventurer Pen Hadow. It is likely to be largely ice-free during the warmer months within a decade, the experts added. Veteran polar explorer Hadow and two other Britons went out on the Arctic ice cap for 73 days during the northern spring, taking more than 6,000 measurements and observations of the sea ice. The raw data they collected from March to May has been analysed, producing some stark...

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate

Update: May 26 2009 The daily image update has been temporarily suspended because of large areas of missing data in the past week. NSIDC currently gets its data from the SSM/I sensor on the DMSP F13 satellite, which is nearing the end of its operational life and experiencing intermittent problems. NSIDC has been working on a transition to a newer sensor on the F17 satellite for several months. At this time, we have more than a year of data from F17, which we are using to intercalibrate with F13 data. The F17 data are not yet available for near-real-time updates....

Fossilised corals from tropical Tahiti show that the behaviour of ice sheets is much more volatile and dynamic than previously thought, a team led by Oxford University scientists has found. Analysis of the corals suggests that ice sheets can change rapidly over just hundreds of years – events associated with sea level rises of several metres over the same period. It also shows that a natural warming mechanism thought to be responsible for ending ice ages does not fit the timing of the end of the penultimate ice age, around 137,000 years ago. A report of the research appears online...