Article

NewScientist

14 April 2010 by Stuart Clark

BRACE yourself for more winters like the last one, northern Europe. Freezing conditions could become more likely: winter temperatures may even plummet to depths last seen at the end of the 17th century, a time known as the Little Ice Age. That's the message from a new study that identifies a compelling link between solar activity and winter temperatures in northern Europe.

The research finds that low solar activity promotes the formation of giant kinks in the jet stream. These kinks can block warm westerly winds from reaching Europe, while allowing in winds from Arctic Siberia. When this happens in winter, northern Europe freezes, even though other, comparable regions of the globe may be experiencing unusually mild conditions.

Telegraph.co.uk 17 April 2010

From Macbeth to Watergate, it’s not the act that leads to nemesis, but the attempts to 'trammel up the consequence’ , writes Christopher Booker.

If you were faced with by far the biggest bill of your life, would you not want to be confident that there was a very good reason why you should pay it? That is why we need to know just how far we can trust the science behind the official view that the world is threatened with catastrophe by global warming – because the measures proposed by our politicians to avert this supposed disaster threaten to transform our way of life out of recognition and to land us with easily the biggest bill in history. (The Climate Change Act alone, says the Government, will cost us all £18 billion every year until 2050.)

Aardvark Daily  16 April 2010

You've got to feel sorry for those folks living in Northern Europe right now.

They've just learned that they could be headed into a mini-iceage thanks to an unusually low level of sunspot activity and now, to make things even worse, an erupting volcano in Iceland is filling their skies with a dimming haze of ash.

The ash problem is currently so bad that they've had to close much of the area's airspace to avoid the risk of airliners falling from the sky with ash-clogged engines.

The huge cloud now stretches over 1,000 Kms from the volcano and has risen to a height of 11,000m, the altitude at which most modern passenger jet aircraft are most efficient.

It's not unheard of for large volcanic eruptions (such as Mount Pinatubo in 1991) to result in reduced temperatures, as their ash dims the skies and reduces the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth.

In fact, in the two years following the Pinatubo eruption, the average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere fell by 0.6 degrees C and the global average temperature dropped by an astonishing 0.5 degrees C.

 Pastural Farming Climate Research newsletter  8 April 2010

So writes Alister Doyle, Environment correspondent from Reuters

Source: Reuters

OSLO, April 7 (Reuters) - Grazing by cows or sheep can cut emissions of nitrous oxide — a powerful greenhouse gas — in grasslands from China to the United States, according to a study that overturns past belief that farm animals stoke releases.

Adding to understanding of links between agriculture and global warming, the report in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature said livestock can help to limit microbes in the soil that generate the gas, also known as laughing gas.

TBR.cc

Investigate magazine's breaking news forum  -by Ian Wishart 8 April 2010

The Royal Society of New Zealand has again nailed its sorry little tail to the mast of a sinking global warming ship, with a statement designed to convince news media, politicians and the public that the science behind climate change is sound.

The latest paper comes in the wake of embarrassing errors discovered in the UN's AR4 report, and of course the Climategate disaster which revealed scientists conspiring to prevent studies they disagreed with from being published.

What makes the latest RSNZ paper embarrassing are some basic errors and cobbled together assumptions. Let's take a look at a couple.

Telegraph.co.uk    3 April 2010

The Commons committee seemed unable even to understand the evidence, says Christopher Booker

To anyone who watched or read the hearings of the Commons committee looking into "Climategate", the scandal over leaked documents from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, two things might have been obvious. The first was that all but one of the MPs (Labour's Graham Stringer) were hopelessly out of their depth in their efforts to understand this not very complex story. The other was that their chief purpose was to find that the CRU and its director, Professor Philip Jones, had done nothing wrong and that the case for man-made global warming remained intact.

"The Guardian," London, 26 March 2010 -- David Adam, environment correspondent 

IPCC chair accuses politicians and sceptics of portraying scientists as 'criminals' through attacks on their credibility.

The head of the UN's climate change panel has accused politicians and prominent climate sceptics of "a new form of persecution" against scientists who work on global warming.

If you think the Emissions Trading Scheme doesn’t apply to farming until 2015, think again, says ACT MP John Boscawen.

From July 1 costs on most farms will rise by thousands of dollars due to an ETS induced 4c/litre rise in fuel prices, and a 5% hike in electricity charges.

New Zealand now stands alone in implementing such a scheme and he says he would like to see farmers and the public protesting in the streets to persuade Government to ditch it.

“Why are we penalising our farmers? Our farmers have enough problems competing internationally without this,” he told Rural News.

James Delingpole blog

24th February, 2010

Heroic, monotesticular UKIP MEP Nigel Farage was bumped off the BBC Question Time panel at the last minute last week. Shame. That particular edition was broadcast from Middlesbrough and it would have been fascinating to hear the audience’s response to the choice things he was planning to say about the closure of their local steelworks.

Here is how he describes it in a letter:

Sir

Corus’ steelworks at Redcar, near Middlesbrough, “Teesside Cast Products”, is to be closed (”mothballed” is the euphemism). It is Britain’s last great steelworks and an essential national resource. Without it, we are at the world’s mercy.

The Wall Street Journal

23 March 2010

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted for the first time last month that it is facing a crisis of confidence. But the IPCC's failings go far beyond the recent spate of errors identified in its reports. The problem began with the global political climate that led to the formation of the IPCC two decades ago.

Contrary to popular perception, the IPCC is not a scientific organization. It does no research of its own. Composed of scientists nominated by different governments, its key function is to collate evidence of human-induced climate change, not just changes in climate.

It is hardly surprising that with such an inherently biased objective the scientists lost their objectivity. Many of them went on a crusade to support the political goal of proving anthropogenic global warming. Concerns about scientific objectivity and critical discourse were thrown overboard.