Free Republic

It might seem like the weather’s getting warmer here on Earth, but Mars appears to have an even bigger global warming problem. High-resolution images snapped by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor show that levels of frozen water and carbon dioxide at the Red Planet’s poles have dwindled dramatically — by more than 10 feet — over a single Martian year (equivalent to 687 days or about two Earth years).

All scientist Erin Pettit could see when she looked at the satellite photos of the ice shelf in front of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica was the giant crack that stretched across most of the image. Two years before, when she and her colleagues were deciding where to put their research camp, the entire floating ice shelf—a tongue of ice poking out from the enormous glacier behind it—was solid. It was plenty safe to plan a camp there, they thought...... The size of Florida, the Thwaites Glacier holds enough ice to raise global sea levels two feet. It’s also...

Off the coast of England, there's a tiny, wind-swept island with the remains of a lifeboat rescue station from the mid-1800s. The workers who once ran the station on Hilbre Island did something that, unbeknownst to them, has become crucial for understanding the future of a hotter climate: They recorded the tides. The data, scrawled in long, handwritten ledgers, is just one example of the tens of thousands of pages of tidal measurements stored in archives around the world. Now, scientists and historians are racing to digitize them in an effort to understand how fast oceans are rising. The aging...

Hardcore warmist's amazing admission One of the world's most firmly global-warmist scientists has put his name to a scientific paper which says that even if humanity deliberately sets out to burn all the fossil fuels it can find, as fast as it can, there will be no troublesome sea level rise due to melting Antarctic ice this century. Dr Ken Caldeira's credentials as a global warmist are impeccable. He is not a true green hardliner - he has signed a plea to his fellow greens to get over their objections to nuclear power, for instance, and he doesn't totally rule...

Washington (AFP) - Secretary of State John Kerry will visit the Arctic Circle next week for key ministerial talks on climate change amid global concerns about rising seas and accelerating ice melt. Global warming is happening twice as fast in the Arctic than elsewhere on the planet and many fear not only devastating impacts of warming but also from an influx of people and industry on the pristine environment, wildlife and Inuit culture. Kerry will attend a meeting of the Arctic Council in the northwestern Canadian town of Iqaluit, on Baffin Island. The United States on April 24 formally takes...

Arctic storms swirling around the top of the world are more common than previously thought with about 1,900 in the first decade of the century, researchers say. As they churn across the top of the globe each year they leave warm water and air in their wakes, melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, scientists at Ohio State University reported Wednesday.

Arctic sea ice has melted to a level not recorded since satellite observations started in 1972 – and almost certainly not experienced for at least 8,000 years, say polar scientists. Daily satellite sea-ice maps released by Bremen university physicists show that with a week's more melt expected this year, the floating ice in the Arctic covered an area of 4.24 million square kilometres on 8 September. The previous one-day minimum was 4.27m sq km on 17 September 2007. The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, which also tracks the extent of sea ice, has not...

While Harold Camping spends this week trying to wipe egg off his face after real-world events spectacularly falsified his prediction that the Christian rapture would occur on May 21, global warming alarmists are similarly trying to wipe egg off their faces after real-world events spectacularly falsified their predictions of an imminent polar ice rapture. This week, a 1979 Palm Beach Post article resurfaced in which Steven Schneider, who for the past 30 years was one of the most prominent global warming alarmists, claimed the west Antarctic ice sheet could melt before the year 2000 and inundate American coastlines with up...

Efforts to remove climate-warming carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere appear to be getting a helping hand from a surprising source: the iron in meltwater from Antarctic icebergs. Icebergs calving off of Antarctica are shedding substantial iron — the equivalent of a growth-boosting vitamin — into waters starved of the mineral, a new set of studies demonstrates. This iron is fertilizing the growth of microscopic plants and algae, transforming the waters adjacent to ice floes into teeming communities of everything from tiny shrimplike krill to fish, birds and sometimes mammals.

STOCKHOLM (AP) -- A new assessment of climate change in the Arctic shows the ice in the region is melting faster than previously thought and sharply raises projections of global sea level rise this century. The report by the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, or AMAP, compiles the latest science on how climate change has impacted the Arctic in the past six years. A summary of the key findings obtained by the AP on Tuesday shows Arctic temperatures during that period were the highest since measurements began in 1880.

As the world heats up and polar ice melts, different types of bears, whales and seals could meet and mate — but these unions may be far from happy, researchers said Wednesday........ At least 22 species are at risk of hybridizing in 34 different combinations, according to a team led by Brendan Kelly, an Alaska-based evolutionary biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The pairings include polar bears and grizzlies, narwhals and beluga whales, and various assortments of seals. Some of those species are listed as endangered or threatened. Kelly said the report "is sort of a call-to-arms to...

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out - in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out — in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

CHICAGO (AFP) – While a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet will have devastating impacts on global sea levels, a study published Thursday found the anticipated impact has been seriously overestimated. Using new measures of the ice sheet's geometry, British and Dutch researchers predict its collapse would cause sea levels to rise by 3.2 meters (11 feet) rather than previous estimates of five to seven meters. However, the study published in the journal Science found that even a one meter rise in sea levels would be significant enough to weaken the Earth's gravity field in the southern hemisphere and...

WASHINGTON -- U.S. government scientists Friday said the long-term outlook for global warming may be more dire than suggested by this week's United Nations' report, which they say doesn't fully address the impact of clouds and melting glaciers. Recent evidence of accelerated melting of glaciers in Greenland and the Antarctic ice cap came too late to be included in the report released Thursday by the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Glaciers are among the largest sources of fresh water in the world and are contributing to rising ocean levels. Rising sea levels could expose population centers bordering the ocean...

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a slim summary today trimming down thousands of pages of its massive overall Fourth Scientific Assessment on global warming, which will be released in May. It is hoped that the "Summary for Policymakers" will be an accurate distillation. Hundreds of scientists have been involved in the review process, and it is safe to say that means hundreds of bored scientists, because there is very little in it that is scientifically new. For example, it will report with increasing certitude that humans are responsible for most of the surface warming that began in...

WASHINGTON - Later this week in Paris, climate scientists will issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures. But that may be the sugarcoated version. Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report. Many top U.S. scientists reject these rosier numbers. Those calculations don't include the recent, and dramatic, melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations: They "don't take into account the gorillas — Greenland and Antarctica," said Ohio State University...