When did the ice ages occur?
Several ice ages have occurred throughout our planet's history. Major periods of glaciations occurred during the late Proterozoic Era (between 600 and 800 million years ago), during the Pennsylvanian and Permian Eras (between about 250 and 350 million years ago), and the late Neocene to Quaternary Eras (the last 4 million years). Somewhat less extensive glaciations occurred during parts of the Ordovician and Silurian Eras (between about 430 and 460 million years ago). The most recent ice age began about 1.8 million years ago during the Pleistocene Era. During this time, giant ice sheets advanced and retreated many times in North America and Europe.
Recent cycles of advancing and retreating ice sheets have occurred approximately every 100,000 years. Each cycle consists of a long, generally cold period during which the ice sheets slowly reach their maximum size, and a relatively short, warm period during which the ice sheets rapidly retreat.
We are now in a warm period that has lasted more than 10,000 years, which is longer than many of the previous warm intervals. If the pattern of glacial cycles holds true, scientists believe the Earth is soon due for another cold period. In the 1800s, global temperatures began decreasing during a period known as the Little Ice Age. Currently, patterns indicate that the Earth is nearing the end of an interglacial period, meaning that another ice age is predicted in a few thousand years.


http://www.learner.org/courses/essen...6/closer1.html

 

Feb 8, 2010

Philadelphia and Washington each are about to have their snowiest winters since 1884, the first year records were kept.

The storm hit the Midwest early, closing schools and greeting commuters with slick, slushy roads from Minneapolis and Chicago to Louisville, Ky. Powerful winds and snow were expected to hit Mid-Atlantic states by the afternoon, and could leave as much as 20 inches of new snow in Washington and 18 inches near Philadelphia by Wednesday night.


Parts of the region were already buried under nearly 3 feet of snow.

 

Feb 01, 2010

Frosted oranges, strawberries encased in ice: the images of Florida’s freezes are familiar, sad and earthy. But just past the crop rows here in the state’s agricultural core, there swims another sizable industry that has suffered more than any other because of this year’s unusually long cold snap — tropical fish.

Workers at Urban Tropical covered ponds with plastic and used nets to remove angelfish that could be salvaged from the cold.

The little guys are dying by the millions.

A severe guppy shortage has already emerged, according to distributors, while fish farmers statewide expect losses of more than 50 percent as African cichlids, marble mollies, danios and other cheerful-looking varieties sink like pebbles to the bottom of freshwater ponds across Florida.


The freezing temperatures have come at the worst possible time. Florida provides about half of the tropical fish sold nationwide (Asia provides most of the rest), and like oranges, the colorful pets sell best in winter.

 

feb 01, 2010

Waters all around Florida are getting stinky as hundreds of thousands of fish killed by the recent and extended cold weather decompose and float to the surface. From the Panhandle to the Keys, from the Gold Coast north to the First Coast, anglers and fisheries scientists venturing out into chilly bays, estuaries, rivers, canals, and even the open ocean, are finding dead and stunned fish in a wide range of sizes and species, freshwater and saltwater.

 

From Phil Jones Date: Mon Jan 5 16:18:24 2009

Tim, Chris,
I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting
till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
press release with Doug's paper that said something like -
half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998!
Still a way to go before 2014.
I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying
where's the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal
scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.

So, it seems, the scientific uncertainty generated by not having good data from the mid-20th century is going to be repeated in the early 21st century



It appears that Mike MacCracken in a message to Phil Jones (and others) is suggesting that raising the acidity of the oceans is not a bad thing. I thought they told us that CO2 was killing the oceans by raising their PH levels? Which is guys, is the increased acidity from CO2 (and SO2) hurting the oceans or not? Sent: 03 January 2009 16:44

That there is a large potential for a cooling influence is sort of evident in the IPCC figure about the present sulfate distribution--most is right over China....Now, I am not at all sure that having more tropospheric sulfate would be a bad idea as it would limit warming--I even have started suggesting that the least expensive and quickest geoengineering approach to limit global warming would be to enhance the sulfate loading--or at the very least we need to maintain the current sulfate cooling offset while we reduce CO2 emissions (and presumably therefore, SO2 emissions, unless we manage things) or we will get an extra bump of warming. Sure, a bit more acid deposition, but it is not harmful over the ocean (so we only/mainly emit for trajectories heading out over the ocean)



Does Mr Phil Jones actually hope that global warming comes back? Of course he does, his funding depends on it! Sent: 05 January 2009

Tim, Chris,
I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting
till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
press release with Doug's paper that said something like -
half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on
record, 1998!



From: Mike MacCracken Sent: 03 January 2009 16:44, he seems awfully worried that their hypothesis is wrong as well as their predictions of warming. So a little damage control seems to be in order and they need to come up with an alternative excuse for the cooling.

In any case, if the sulfate hypothesis is
right, then your prediction of warming might end up being wrong. I
think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past
decade as a result of variability--that explanation is wearing thin.
I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also
do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a
quantified explanation in case the prediction is wrong. Otherwise,
the Skeptics will be all over us--the world is really cooling, the
models are no good, etc.



Mr. Schneider in response to FOIA and other requests for data. It looks like they'll just use the lawyers to hide any "glitches or unexplained bits of code". Stephen H Schneider is a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment.
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 10:50:56 -0800 (PST)

It would be odious requirement to have scientists do***ent every line of code...This continuing pattern of harassment, as Ben rightly puts it in my opinion, in the name of due diligence is in my view an attempt to create a fishing expedition to find minor glitches or unexplained bits of code--which exist in nearly all our kinds of complex work...Let the lawyers figure this out...
Cheers, Steve
PS Please do not copy or forward this email.



Quoted text in an email on "Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:13:21 -0800" from Phil Jones to Benjamin Santer. Does it bother anyone else that these scientists laughingly "make up statements" to support Obama's "openness in government"?

With free wifi in my room, I've just seen that M+M have
submitted a paper to IJC on your H2 statistic - using more
years, up to 2007. They have also found your PCMDI data -
laughing at the directory name - FOIA? Also they make up
statements saying you've done this following Obama's
statement about openness in government!



In an email message to a Mr. Smith, who is requesting Dr. Santer's modeling code, Dr. Santer rants about Mr. Steve McIntyre (of ClimateAudit) and about Mr. Smith for being critical of him for not releasing his data. So after this long rant he ends it by saying that Mr. Smith doesn't even have his permission to share this email message. This all seems a bit childish for a scientist.
From: Ben Santer To: Smithg Subject: Re: data request
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:33:53 -0800

Your email to George Miller and Anna Palmisano was highly critical of my
behavior in this matter. Your criticism was entirely unjustified, and
damaging to my professional reputation. I therefore see no point in
establishing a dialogue with you. Please do not communicate with me in
the future. I do not give you permission to distribute this email or
post it on Mr. McIntyre's blog.



Are they suggesting to fill in Antarctica data gaps with random data in order to have more convincing data for the IPCC?

From: "peter.thorne" To: Phil Jones Subject: Re: Visit to Met Office
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:54:16 +0000

Antarctic data first piqued my interest with the Science paper on raobs trends which was clearly non-physical but hard to nail down how wrong it was...

Its clear to me that Antarctica is a uniquely difficult environment to collect long-term homogeneous data in. So I have substantial doubts that all the manned station pegs in Steig et al. are adequate. Does this really matter? I'm not sure.

What Steig et al., satellites, and potentially reanalyses does do is allow us, in principle, at least to get around the no-neighbours issue in assessing homogeneity away from the peninsula. For example we could use a bootstrapping of the Steig et al approach by creating say 50 realisations of each station series using randomly seeded combinations of manned station pegs as the S et al. RegEM constraint (excluding the candidate station) to make a neighbour composite ensemble. We could then add in the available reanalysis field estimates and satellite estimates and make a reasonable punt about the existence and magnitude of any breaks based upon multiple lines of evidence (of course, we lose some of these before 1979 ...). We could use this information to assess in a more rigorous way than has been done to date the homogeneity of these sparse stations. Then cleaned up data could be fed back through Steig et al. afterwards to see how it impacts that analysis making for a nice clean self-contained study...

Of course, this doesn't resolve any fundamental methodological concerns about the S et al. approach that may exist but it does give us a reasonable chance of creating a much more homogeneous READER manned station dataset for next IPCC AR and our future products.



Phil Jones is having problems with the Editor of Weather (a RMS Journal) asking too many questions about his papers and requesting the "raw data" behind the papers. Here in his words to Dr. Ben Santer is the pressure he's exerting against the Editor:

From: Phil Jones To: santer1©xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Re: See the link below
Date: Thu Mar 19 17:02:53 2009

I'm having a dispute with the new editor of Weather. I've complained about him to the RMS Chief Exec. If I don't get him to back down, I won't be sending any more papers to any RMS journals and I'll be resigning from the RMS.

Here is Ben's reply:

If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available - raw data PLUS
results from all intermediate calculations - I will not submit any further papers to RMS
journals.



Phil Jones 24/06/2009 13:09 to Nick Pepin

I don't want to put off, but there is an awful lot of things
wrong with NCEP/NCAR.
They are probably OK for month-to-month variability, but if you look at some
of the figures in Simmons et al (2004) you'll see that for trends they are
practically useless before 1979.
There is just so much wrong with the sondes which together with the
introduction of satellite data in 1978/9 makes reanalyses awful.



http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/com...mment.news.126




.

 

Former IPCC Leader Says Climategate Scientists “Manipulated data.”

Dr. William Sprigg is research professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona and was head of the International Technical Review Panel for IPCC’s first report. The distinguished doctor slams the conduct of some of his global warming colleagues and accuses fellow IPCC scientists of “too much hubris.” He also told the Arizona conference, “climate data has been withheld and manipulated ”and that it is clear that “someone took out information.”



Federal preemption law forbids Penn State from hiding behind “FOIA Exemption”

Penn State University claimed they are exempt from the Freedom Of Information Act under Pennsylvania’s ‘Right To Know Law.’ U.S. constitutional law advisers have reliably informed climategate.com that Penn State’s latest scam to hide wrongdoing by their climatologist, Michael Mann, is contrary to the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.



United Nations to recruit new era of graduate climatologists after shake up

The United Nations may soon be advertising vacancies due to an unexpected crop of empty seats on its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Events have moved rapidly in recent weeks amongst climate science. But just as quickly as scientific careers disappear — so goes climate science in the blink of an eye, or the melt of a glacier.


Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has split ranks with other members of the discredited “hockey team” of climatologists exposed for fraudulently hiding and destroying data in the Climategate scandal that broke on November 19, 2009.


The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

---------------------------------------------


http://www.climategate.com/category/academia

 

Last month the BBC Trust announced that it would perform an internal investigation into charges of bias in the BBC in it’s coverage of climate change. The Daily Express has reported on the brewing scandal.

First, they address the little problem of eight billion pounds of investments that are counting on global warming and cap-and-trade:

The £8billion pension fund is likely to come under close scrutiny over its commitment to promote a low-carbon economy while struggling to reverse an estimated £2billion deficit.

Concerns are growing that BBC journalists and their bosses regard disputed scientific theory that climate change is caused by mankind as “mainstream” while huge sums of employees’ money is invested in companies whose success depends on the theory being widely accepted.

===========================

The Wall Street Journal.com has a must read that says the scandals just keep pouring from the laboratories. This quote about sums it up:

“The experiments never turned out the way they were supposed to, and so we were always having to fudge the results so that the projects wouldnt be screwy. I always felt guilty about that dishonesty, but now I feel like we were doing real science.”





.

 

the 1st chart is the 'manipulated' Jones Hockey stick chart that the world community has used to create laws
the 2nd chart is the Hadley chart, actual surface temps
the 3rd chart is the NASA chart, actual satellite temps.

------------------
compilation of various news bits on the world news today - 02-16-2010

------------------

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that show scientists were manipulating data.

The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analyzed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions. The infamous "jones hockey stick" chart shown below.

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organizational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.


"This remark has nothing to do with any 'decline' in observed instrumental temperature. The remark referred to a well-known observation, in a particular set of tree-ring data, that I had used in a figure to represent large-scale summer temperature changes over the last 600 years. The phrase 'hide the decline' was shorthand for providing a composite representation of long-term temperature changes made up of recent instrumental data and earlier tree-ring based evidence, where it was necessary to remove the incorrect impression given by the tree rings that temperatures between about 1960 and 1999 (when the email was written) were not rising, as our instrumental data clearly showed they were."

Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at England's East Anglia University


The scientist at the center of the Climategate email scandal, Phil Jones, conceded in an interview with the BBC that there has been no statistically significant data in the past 15 years that proves climate change is man-made.

But will this concession stop global warming hysteria?
Dont hold your breath.

 

- Rajendra Kumar Pachauri --- - Phil Jones-- - Al Gore

2007 - The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.

Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds. Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.

Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. Thousands of scientists and officials from over one hundred countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming. Whereas in the 1980s global warming seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced firmer evidence in its support. In the last few years, the connections have become even clearer and the consequences still more apparent.

Al Gore has for a long time been one of the world's leading environmentalist politicians. He became aware at an early stage of the climatic challenges the world is facing. His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change. He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

12 October 2007

-------------------------

The main activity of the IPCC is publishing special reports on topics relevant to the implementation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty that acknowledges the possibility of harmful climate change.

Implementation of the UNFCCC led eventually to the Kyoto Protocol. The IPCC bases its assessment mainly on peer reviewed and published scientific literature.

The IPCC is only open to member states of the WMO and UNEP. IPCC reports are widely cited in almost any debate related to climate change.

National and international responses to climate change generally regard the UN climate panel as authoritative.

---------------

Rajendra Kumar Pachauri has served as the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2002. He has also been director general TERI, a research and policy organization in India, and chancellor of TERI University. He has also been the chairman of the governing council of the National Agro Foundation (NAF), as well as the chairman of the board of Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society. Pachauri has been outspoken about climate change.

At the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony when the award was shared between Al Gore and the IPCC on December 10, 2007, Pachauri represented the IPCC