In this week's Headline Earth video, host Katie Fehlinger finds out what the job of an environmental planner is all about.

It looks like there will not be a new record minimum Arctic sea ice extent this year.

Much of this summer it looked like there would probably not be a new record minimum, but then late in August there was a sudden drop in sea ice extent according to the NSIDC graph and the 2007 record seemed to be threatened. But, over the past few days, the loss of Arctic sea ice has almost completely leveled off, possibly signaling the ending of the summer melt season.

Here is the latest chart..........

This kind of reminds me of the original classic movie 'The Fog', which is one of my all-time favorite horror flicks.

I just saw this story from the Times Online, about a professor from the University of Edinburgh who proposes using a fleet of 1,500 unmanned cloud making ships in the oceans to reduce global warming. Say what?

According to professor Steven Salter, the rotary-sail technology would be operated by computer. The ships would spray tiny droplets of seawater into existing clouds in order to enlarge and thereby whiten them, which will send more radiation back into space, cooling the lower atmosphere.

Where would these ships be deployed? The best locations would be off of Nambia, California and the southern Ocean.

You can read a shorter, more detailed article with images on this proposed solution right here.

The above image is courtesy of Wikipedia.

A closeup of the latest sea ice concentration around the Northwest Passage. Image courtesy of the University of Bremen.

NASA satellite images taken last week now show that the Arctic has become an island for the first time in man's history as both the north-west and north-east-passages have been opened due to melting ice, according to the Telegraph article.

Strong words........

Prof Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in the US said the images suggested the Arctic may have entered a "death spiral" caused by global warming.

UPDATE

Andrew Revkin of the New York Times posted a blog yesterday disputes this story. According to Revkin, the National Ice Center operated by the Navy, says flatly that the satellites are misreading conditions in many spots and that there is too much ice in a critical spot along the Russian coast to allow anything but ice-hardened ships to get through. Here is the article. Mark Serreze of the NSIDC also concurred with this information.

Another Ice shelf breaks away

The 4,500 year old 50 sq/m Markham Ice shelf in Canada has broken completely away from Ellesmere Island and drifted into the Arctic Ocean, according to the Canwest News Service. The break up occurred in early August, which leaves just 4 Canadian Arctic ice shelves intact.

Here is some solid data on longer term sea level changes that can be usually difficult to find.........

Warming water and melting ice have raised global sea levels an average of 1.7 inches (4.5 cm) from 1993-2008, but as you can see from the image below, the rise is far from uniform, according to the NASA News article.

This image was made possible by the detailed record of sea surface height measurements begun by Topex/Poseidon and continued by Jason-1.

Why are there so many differences in sea level change across the world? Variation of winds, currents and long term changes in atmospheric circulation patterns. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has certainly had an impact on the higher rise in the western Pacific due to the warming of the ocean water.

Key

The light blues indicate fairly constant sea level since 1993.

The light green indicates a moderate rise in sea level during the period.

The white, red and yellow colors indicate regions where sea levels have risen most rapidly during the 15-year period (up to 10 mm a year).

Here is the latest Remote Sensing Systems global temperature anomaly image for August, using microwave sounding units mounted on NOAA satellites, which measures the temperature of the lower troposphere.

August 2008.

Observations.....

1. Well above the 1979-1998 mean from Hudson Bay, Canada to west of Greenland and also over northern Siberia.
2. Cool compared to normal once again over Alaska and also over Australia.

For fun comparison, here is the image from August, 1998 (Strong El Nino year).

And August, 1988 (That was a very hot/dry summer in the Eastern U.S. as I recall)

Actual statistics for August, 2008

Global land/sea temperature anomaly: +0.146 K

Northern Hemispheric temperature anomaly: +0.315 K

Arctic region temperature anomaly (60N to 82.5 N): +0.935 K

Year so far globally.......+0.041 K by my calculations

Acknowledgement

MSU/AMSU data are produced by Remote Sensing Systems and sponsored by the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program. Data are available at www.remss.com

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

Update (UAH data)...................

The University of Alabama at Huntsville has posted their latest global temperature anomaly map for August. These are measured against the 20-year average from 1979-1998.

UAH also gathers their data through microwave sounding units on NOAA satellites, but their version covers more of the polar regions compared to RSS.

Here are the UAH temperature anomaly results for August, but they are still preliminary.

Global: -0.01 C or -0.02 F
Northern Hemisphere: +0.17 C or +0.31 F
Southern Hemisphere: -).19 C or -0.34 F

Researchers previously associated with the famous and controversial "Hockey stick" temperature diagram have determined that the last decade ending in 2006 was the warmest such period in the Northern Hemisphere for at least the last 1,300 years and possibly longer.

The research team utilized a much wider variety of sources compared to the "Hockey stick" study, which led to a congressional investigation in 2005. In addition to tree rings, the team also looked at sediments, stalactites and stalagmites, which in their opinion provides much more reliable conclusions.

"We sort of removed that asterisk," because the new study's conclusion didn't depend as much on one kind of data, said Michael Mann, director of Penn State's Earth System Science Center.

The decade ending in 2006 in the Northern Hemisphere was a bit more than .5 degree F warmer than the decade-long average dating back 1,300 to 1,700 years.

According to the Arizona Daily Star article, the paper is "one brick in the wall" of the case for saying that human-induced causes such as greenhouse-gas emissions are raising temperatures, said Malcolm Hughes, a dendrochronologist at the UA's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

The study will be published on September 9th in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences. It was authored by Malcolm Hughes, a dendrochronologist at the University of Arizona.

The is a short summary of the study and results on the right side of the Arizona Star article in the grey box.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Update

Steve McIntyre from climate audit has a detailed critique of this study. Here is the link.

Image courtesy of the United Nations Environment Program.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) just released their latest preliminary data on the continuous mass balance values for 30 glaciers across the world for the year 2006. Obviously, it takes a while to gather this information.

The latest WGMS data shows the continued trend in accelerated ice loss during the past 25 years.

This bottom graph from the report clearly illustrates the steady decline in mean cumulative net balance.

Here is a link to some of the latest facts and figures on global glaciers from the United Nations Environment Program

An older power station at Kingsnorth. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

He's back!

Dr. James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently joined a protest against the construction of a new coal plants (The first one being Kingsnorth) in the UK.

In an interview with stop Kingsnorth, which you can watch right here, courtesy of YouTube, Hansen says that there really is no such thing right now as "clean" coal technology since only a small fraction of carbon dioxide is captured.

Hansen favors renewable and alternative energy and that trying to actually make coal technology "clean" would be too expensive anyway.

In the interview, Hansen talks about how some of the poorest nations would be impacted by global warming due to sea level rise and a reduction of fresh water due to glacier melt.

Speaking of sea level rise, Icecap posted a graph of sea level rise going back to 1993.

In a letter from July of 2007, Hansen wrote the following from NewScientist.........

As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting adds 1 centimetre to sea level for the decade 2005 to 2015, and that this doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by 2095.

Of course, I cannot prove that my choice of a 10-year doubling time is accurate but I'd bet $1000 to a doughnut that it provides a far better estimate of the ice sheet's contribution to sea level rise than a linear response. In my opinion, if the world warms by 2 °C to 3 °C, such massive sea level rise is inevitable, and a substantial fraction of the rise would occur within a century. Business-as-usual global warming would almost surely send the planet beyond a tipping point, guaranteeing a disastrous degree of sea level rise.

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

From what I can tell, based on the graph, I do not see any indication of his 10-year doubling time showing up yet. It is is still early in the century though.

Global sea ice analysis as of September 11th, 2008. Image courtesy of NOAA.

I know I have been discussing the status of Arctic sea ice a lot recently as it approached the record minimum set back in 2007. In addition to another Arctic update, I think it is a good time to look at the Antarctic and the current global status of sea ice.

Arctic sea ice

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) revealed last week that the month of August set a record for rate of ice loss. Arctic sea ice extent is still second lowest on record after 2007. According to the NSIDC, there is still another week left in the melt season, but it still looks like it will come up short of the record as the loss has almost leveled out.

The Cryosphere today site from the University of Illinois at Champaign also confirms that the Northern Hemispheric sea ice area is just slightly greater than what it was last year at this time, but still almost 2 million sq/km below normal.

Antarctic

The latest graph from the Cryosphere today shows that the Southern Hemispheric sea ice area anomaly is right at normal. Much of last winter and into the first half of this summer the Antarctic sea ice anomaly was close to 1 million sq/km above normal.

Globally

Finally, here is the latest Cryosphere today graph showing the status of the total global sea ice area. At this time, it appears that the sea ice globally is running close to 2 million sq/km below normal thanks to the situation in the Arctic. Also, despite the notable anomaly increase late last year and early this year, there is currently a slight downward trend that began late in 2004.

Mark Paquette, who is a new colleague of mine here at AccuWeather.com came to me last month and wanted to get involved with the global warming blog. In addition to being one of our new early morning forecasters, Mark has a particularly strong interest in climate change. Mark will pop in from time to time with a blog, especially during one of the weekend days when I normally would not post anything new. Brett.

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

As a new meteorologist at AccuWeather I am not going to be pretend to be an expert at global warming, or maybe more appropriately named, climate change. This subject has interested me since grade school, and I even considered studying it at the graduate school level.

I recently came across a research report written by Don J. Easterbrook, a Professor of Geology at Western Washington University that explains his theory of global cooling, which he says began in 2002, was interupted by the El-Nino of 2005, and will continue, by his projections until 2040. For the whole time period of 2002-2040, he expects a drop in temperature of about 0.5 C. Curiously, his projection is only for the Northern Hemisphere. This article stood out to me simply because since the late 80's, 1988 in particular, we have been bombarded with media stories warning of the dangers of global warming. Our more experienced readers may remember that in the 70's, there were many an article about global cooling and even an impending return to ice age conditions. So, an article on global cooling in this day and age, which may be seen as being more appropriate 30 years ago, piqued my interest. Also interesting is his explanation why he has the earth cooling. There have been recent studies and observations of a lack of (or at least not as may) sunspots. Professor Easterbrook says that the recent lack of sunspot activity may be part of a bigger trend of lower sunspot activity ( possibly similiar to what happened in the Maunder Minimum from about 1600-1700 AD where there was almost a complete lack of sunspots altogether), and lower sunspot activity signifies a slight reduction in the amount of energy being put out by the sun, and thus received by the earth. This was at leat part of the reason (if not the main reason) for the "Little Ice Age" that occured from about 1300-1800 AD. So the Professor basically says, if cooling happened back then from a decrease in the amount of the sun's energy hitting the earth, why couldn't it happen now? I personally think this is a possibility, the scientific reasoning looks sound, but I question where he gets his temperatures. The earth has been cooling since 2002, only briefly interrupted by El Nino in 2005? I'm not sure about that. How does he get his temperatures for his projection? I think his theory needs to be looked at, but his methods may need to be scrutinized more closely.

Easterling also has a number of graphs in his report.

Global Albedo. Image courtesy of NASA.

A study from the Berkeley National Laboratory proposes switching to highly reflective material on the roof and pavement of 100 major cities. Doing this would offset 44 metric gigatons of greenhouse gases and offset more than 10 years of emissions growth without cutting industrial pollution.

The Heat Island Group, led by Hashem Akbari, estimate that there could be 50 billion a year savings by using cool roofs, cool pavements and shade trees to save energy.

There is also a short article on this from the Los Angeles Times.

The opening of a moulin on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Image courtesy of NASA.

An increase in global sea level of more than 2 meters (6.6 feet) by the year 2100 is implausible, according to scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The team, led by Professor Tad Pfeffer, estimated the volume of ice that all glaciers and ice sheets across the globe could lose through ice melt and the release of icebergs into the ocean, according to the short Nature Reports article.

In order for a greater than 2 meter (6.6 feet) by 2100 the discharge of icebergs into the ocean would need to increase more rapidly than ever observed at rates that are probably not feasible.

The below exerpts are from the more in depth ScienceDaily article................

"For Greenland alone to raise sea level by two meters by 2100, all of the outlet glaciers involved would need to move more than three times faster than the fastest outlet glaciers ever observed, or more than 70 times faster than they presently move," said Pfeffer. "And they would have to start moving that fast today, not 10 years from now. It is a simple argument with no fancy physics."

"In my opinion, some of the research out there calling for 20 or 30 feet of sea rise by the end of the century is not backed up by solid glaciological evidence," said Pfeffer.

Arctic sea ice extent will most likely not reach the record minimum set back in September 2007 as you can see by the latest NSIDC plot below, and the fact that the summer melt season is most likely over.

However, according to climate experts from the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) International Arctic Program, Arctic sea ice may have reached its lowest level of total volume ever recorded this year when you combine the overall thickness of the ice and the extent. (At this time, I could not find anything online to confirm this or can this be confirmed at all?)

"If you take reduced ice thickness into account, there is probably less ice overall in the Arctic this year than in any other year since monitoring began," said Martin Sommerkorn, WWF International Arctic Programme’s Senior Climate Change Advisor.

I found this graph showing a combined experimental simulation of Arctic sea ice volume vs. time (1950-2050) from NOAA/GFDL.

The National Climatic Data Center just released the global temperature data for this past August and the boreal summer (Jun-Aug).

According to the Smith and Reynolds temperature analysis, the combined land/sea global temperature anomaly for August 2008 was 10th warmest on record (tied with 1995).

The land/sea global temperature anomaly for the boreal summer (June/July/Aug) was 9th warmest on record. Records for both go back to 1880.

A computer graphic image of the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer. Image courtesy of the ESA.

A new, low altitude satellite project that aims to produce an extremely accurate map of the earth's gravitational field will soon be launched.

By comparing the surface shape of the oceans with the undulations in the gravitational field, scientists can arrive at a more accurate picture of the oceans' currents - the flows that transport vast amounts of heat around the planet and so have a profound impact on the global climate, according to the Guardian article.

By having much more accurate information about ocean currents, climate scientists hope that this information will help them improve their long-term predictions.

A new map will be produced once every 70 days for the next year and a half.

Just a one-centimeter difference in ocean height generated a current flow of 1 cubic meters a second, according to Chris Hughes of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool, England.

Here is a link to the project site.

Even if greenhouse gas concentrations would remain constant at 2005 levels for the next century, which is a highly optimistic scenario, according to a group of researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the earth will still warm about 4.3 degrees F (2.4 C) above pre-industrial levels.

According to Climate Sciences professor V. Ramanathan and co-author Yan Feng, 90% of this warming will most likely be experienced in the 21st century.

Below are exerpts from the ScienceDaily article...............

"This paper demonstrates the major challenges society will have to face in dealing with a problem that now seems unavoidable," said Ramanathan. "We hope that governments will not be forced to consider trade-offs between air pollution abatement and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions."

The authors point out that the real problem is not the reduction of air pollution, but it is the lack of comparable reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to offset the reductions in the surface cooling effect of fog. The paper also offers potential solutions.

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

Professor Ramanathan is the chairman of the National Academy of Sciences panel n has published over 175 peer-reviewed articles in major journals. He was also a lead editor on the IPCC.

Here is the link to the abstract of the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Upstate New York after a spring lake-effect storm.

Welcome to my second posting. Hopefully you enjoyed my first, and it is the first of many future blogs. Last week, I came across an article about global cooling due to a decrease in sunspot activity and thus a decrease in the output of energy from the sun. I chose this week's article because it talks about the same thing, but it has a different cause for the cooling. The reason in this article is that changes in huge ocean currents, such as El Nino/ La Nina, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation are absorbing the excess heat in the atmosphere due to the increase in greenhouse gases and forcing it deep in the ocean and causing cooler deep ocean water to the surface, thus cooling the atmosphere. This article from The Tyee made me think about two main ideas, and I would like to read your comments and thoughts about these subjects.

First off, as mentioned by some of you in last week's comments, is there a way to get an accurate read of the temperature and thus temperature change of the earth? If we are not sure if how we measure temperature of the earth is accurate, how can we even debate whether or not climate change is occuring? With "urban heat islands" growing in size, are they influencing our weather stations, causing them to have a warm bias, and ruining our temperature data? Does moving weather stations, adding new ones, and removing some influence temperature data? Is satellite observation of temperature accurate and reliable? I think there can be a spirited debate on whether or not our current readings of the earth's temperature are an accurate representation of what is actually the earth's temperature and thus whether or not the temperature is changing.

Secondly, let's assume that the earth's temperature is changing. What is causing this change? Our climate and atmospheric systems are so complex that would we be able to pick out one thing and say that this or that is causing climate change? Would we be able to say that the change is natural? Man-made? Let's assume that it is a natural cause behind climate change. Would we be able to point out one thing and say that this THE cause, or is there more than one natural cause, or it is a combination of man-made and natural causes? Or are changes dependent on one another, ie. does one change lead to another, and then another? Do these "steps" balance each other out, or do they contribute to one another and "steamroll" in one direction or another? My point here is that, assuming that we can figure out the first problem mentioned (ie. an accurate way to measure temperature and thus temperature change) would we be able to pinpoint what is causing climate change? And, if we get to this point, what can we do to stop it and fix the problem? No wonder why there is so much debate and so many feathers ruffled when climate change is talked about.

Note: Mark Paquette is a fellow meteorologist here at AccuWeather.com with a big interest in global warming.

The retreat of the Jakobshavn Glacier.

Those famous yellow, rubber ducks that we played in the tub as young children (We have 2 of them in the tub for our infant daughter) are now being put to work by NASA of all places, according to an article from The Telegraph.

NASA recently dropped a total of 90 ducks (no joke) into the Jakobshavn Glacier, which is between Greenland and Canada. This particular glacier is Greenland's fastest moving glacier in Baffin Bay and discharges nearly 7% of all ice coming off of Greenland.

The ducks, if found, will provide crucial information on how water moves through the ice and provide information about the movement of glaciers. There are still lingering questions on why glaciers speed up and head towards sea during the summer.

On each duck it is written "science experiment", reward and an email address in different languages. So far nobody has contacted NASA about the now missing ducks. Maybe they should have increased the reward and written the amount on the duck. Just kidding!

Greenland Glacers.

I will have an update on this developing story when it is announced that some ducks were found, but I have a feeling that might not be till next summer.

By the way, welcome to autumn!

Sea ice surrounding Antarctica in 2005. Image courtesy of NASA.

Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey explain that the slight increase in Antarctic sea ice over the past 30 years is actually an unusual side-effect of global warming, not cooling.

According to a NewScientist story from a couple weeks ago, wintertime sea-ice in the Antarctic has increased 0.6% per decade from 1979-2006. The reason for this may be shifts in winds, sea currents and snowfall. These same reasons have been used by some as an explanation for the widespread loss of sea ice in the Arctic basin.

Here is a link to the Southern Hemispheric sea ice anomaly courtesy of The University of Illinois at Champaign going back to 1979. There is no trend line on this graph, but from eyeballing the graph it does look like a very slight upward trend since 1979. Over the past couple of months the Antarctic sea ice anomaly has come back to near normal.

Below are exerpts directly taken from the September 12th NewScientist article...............

"What's happening is not unexpected...Climate modellers predicted a long time ago that the Arctic would warm fastest and the Antarctic would be stable for a long time," says Ted Maksym, a sea ice specialist at the British Antarctic Survey.

A key difference is that Arctic ice floats on an ocean and is warmed by shifting currents and winds from the south. By contrast, Antarctica is an isolated continent bigger than the US that creates its own deep freeze.

Another theory was that warmer air absorbs more moisture and means more snow and rainfall, he says. That could mean more fresh water at the sea surface around Antarctica – fresh water freezes at a higher temperature than salt water.

Maksym predicted that global warming would eventually warm the southern oceans, and shrink the sea ice around Antarctica. "A lot of the modellers are predicting the turning point to be right about this time," he says.

The Arctic summer melt season is over as sea ice has already begun to increase in coverage as the daylength rapidly diminishes. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) released a report yesterday detailing the 2008 melt season and compared it to the record-low season of 2007.

Arctic sea ice September 23, 2007. Images courtesy of the University of Bremen.

Arctic sea ice September 24, 2008 (accounting for leap year)

Here are some of the main points from the report of why 2008 did not break 2007's record low.......

--Higher-than-average retention of first-year sea ice as more thin ice survived this melt season than is typical.

--The summer of 2008 was cooler than 2007.

--Much of this thin, first-year ice was located at higher latitudes compared to 2007.

--Wind patterns in 2008 as shown below were different from 2007, leading to less compacted ice, which does no melt as quickly compared to compacted ice.

Image courtesy of the NSIDC.

Illustration of the influence on the Earth's magnetic field when solar wind approaches the Earth. White lines represent the solar wind and the blue lines surrounding the Earth represent its magnetic field. Image courtesy of NASA.

Solar physicists stated Tuesday that the solar wind is losing power and has hit a 50-year low. This is from a NASA release.

How unusual is this event?

"It's hard to say. We've only been monitoring solar wind since the early years of the Space Age—from the early 60s to the present," says Arik Posner. "Over that period of time, it's unique. How the event stands out over centuries or millennia, however, is anybody's guess. We don't have data going back that far."

In addition to weakened solar wind, "Ulysses also finds that the sun's underlying magnetic field has weakened by more than 30% since the mid-1990s," says Posner. "This reduces natural shielding even more." This has also lead to a 20% increase in cosmic rays around the earth.

"The solar wind isn't inflating the heliosphere as much as it used to," says Dave McComas. "That means less shielding against cosmic rays."

According to this report, there are controversial studies linking cosmic ray fluxes to cloudiness and climate change on earth. Here is a report from 2006 that supports the link. Here is a more recent one that argues against the link.

Browsing the web, looking for a topic for my third blog I came across this opinion piece from a South Carolina newspaper called the "Island Packet". Michael J. Myers, an analytical chemist from Hilton Head Island who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, basically says that the man made increases in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so small compared to the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere that mathematically the amount of increase is insignificant. Thus, carbon dioxide's increase in the atmosphere has almost nothing to do with the earth's warming (getting back to last week, IF the earth is even warming) A few thoughts about his article:

-His idea is a valid point, since a modest increase in a greenhouse gas that by his numbers contributes only 3.6% to the greenhouse effect does not seem like a big deal.

-Looking at his numbers on the internet, however, I have found a range of percentage contribution to the greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide of between 9-26%, and the number for water vapor between 36-70%. Maybe someone can explain to me the discrepancy in the numbers, both in terms of the range I found and the difference between that range and his numbers?

-Assuming the numbers I found are correct, and his incorrect, the calculations he performed would obviously be wrong. However, if you have to double, triple, or multiply by 6 (his number of carbon dioxide approx. 4% as compared to 26%) the percent increase in absorption of the sun's radiation by carbon dioxide is still very small. This is assuming too that his math and physics are correct.

Anyways, this opinion piece may have raised more questions than answers for me. Your opinions and knowledge on this subject would be appreciated by me. Thanks to Wikipedia for the diagram below. Mark Paquette.

Dr. Roy Spencer.

Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist from the University of Alabama at Huntsville and Dr. James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies were both in Kansas earlier last week, but at different venues. Spencer is a noted man-made global warming skeptic while Hansen has been warning the public of the dangers of human induced climate change for years.

I have talked about Dr. Hansen on a number of occasions and just recently about his actions in the UK in regards to a proposed coal power plant, so I will focus this blog on Dr. Spencer, who is the author of Climate Confusion.

Dr. Spencer was invited to the Kansas Chamber of Commerce Business and Energy Summit. Spencer acknowledges that the planet is warming, but it is natural, and not due to man-made greenhouse gas emissions. According to Spencer, the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide can be absorbed by the environment and can increase agricultural production.

Many scientists, including Dr. Hansen disagree with Spencer, but Spencer said there is scientific reason to doubt the majority of his colleagues. He said scientists ignore earlier climatic changes that had nothing to do with humans, and fail to understand how cloud cover and other factors regulate the atmosphere, according to the Wichita Eagle article.

Spencer also advised the several hundred people in attendance not to trust the mainstream media on the topic of carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. “You will be misled on what is out there in the scientific literature," he said. From the Lawrence Journal and World News.

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

Note: The Kansas Chamber of Commerce has urged the construction of two coal-fired power plants in southwestern Kansas, but governor Kathleen Sebelius has rejected the proposed project. A day later Dr. James Hansen had dire warnings for the Kansas Wind and Renewable Energy Conference about climate change if humans don't act.

A global view of areas where methane hydrates are believed to reside among seafloor sediments and within permafrost.

Scientists aboard a Russian research ship along Russia's northern coastline have recently found an extensive area of intense methane release. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

In an email from the ship written by Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University he notes the following......Courtesy of The Heat is Online article and the Guardian:

"Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These 'methane chimneys' were documented on echo sounder and with seismic instrument."

Gustafsson added: "The conventional thought has been that the permafrost 'lid' on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place.

"The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leaking methane."

But, some climate experts urge caution with this news.......

"The problem is that in the Russian or in the Siberian Arctic on land and in the sea there is very little coverage by hard data and there are hardly any measurements. And therefore there is a lot of speculation going on," said Dr. Lorenz Schwark of the University of Cologne.

"As long as the scientists in the Siberian Arctic are not able to report very strong increases in submarine landslides and slope failures, I wouldn't expect that the release into the atmosphere is so severe that it is really very serious at the moment," Schwark added.