It was news worldwide last July. “A huge ice dam on Argentina’s Perito Moreno glacier broke apart for the first time during the southern hemisphere winter”. The news got great attention and all-news cable TV stations in Argentina transmitted the event live. The claiming that the rupture was caused by global warming was fast and furious in the media and part of the meteorological community. At that time we published here at ICECAP the opinions of local experts dismissing the global warming connection. For example, Victor Jorge Leis, operational director of the National Weather Service of Argentina, expressed doubt last July about global warming as the cause of the last rupture of the glacier. “It is too difficult to establish a connection with the greenhouse effect because temperature has not been much above normal in the region in the last few months. Besides, temperature is just one factor in the ice behavior and wind and oceans tide should not be ignored”, he told. Also, Ricardo Villalba, director of the Argentinean Institute of Glaciology, Snow and Enviromental Sciences (Ianigla) told the Los Andes newspaper at the time that the position of the ice and the tides could be blamed for the unusual breakup in the winter.

Well, six months have passed since the unusual breakup of the Perito Moreno and this morning I was surprised to read a Reuters news agency report that the glacier is expanding, The Perito Moreno ice field, known as “The White Giant”, is gaining as much as 3 meters (10 feet) a day in some parts, pushed forward by heavy snowfalls in the Patagonia region. “Glaciers don’t respond solely to temperature changes,” said Martin Stuefer, a Patagonian expert from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He said the area’s heavy precipitation has apparently increased along with the world’s recent climatic shifts, combining with strong, cold Patagonian winds to reinforce the glacier. The creaking Perito Moreno is one of the largest glaciers in South America and by far the most famous because it is so accessible to tourists. There are limits to the Perito Moreno’s aggressive advance, however. It periodically reaches as far forward as it can toward the Magallanes Peninsula and then sheds a large section of its front in a spectacular phenomena known as “la ruptura” or the rupture. That what happened last July and despite massive media reporting, it was not caused by global warming. It took only six months to the alarmist theory regarding Perito Moreno to fail, or if you prefer, to be frozen.  Read full pdf here.

An Irish filmmaker says despite the recent record snowstorm in Britain, there are still those who are calling for government action against “manmade global warming.”

Phelim McAleer, director of the soon-to-be-released feature-length documentary Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria. He says three parallel universes exist in Europe. “You have the people who are claiming we are all going to die because of global warming,” he shares. “Then we have the parallel universe of the coldest winter and the heaviest snowfall and heaviest rainfall on record—and these are consistent weather patterns that show we are not going to have global warming. “And then the third parallel universe where we are in the middle of a recession, and Britain and Ireland are two of the countries that are going to be affected the most.”

Yet despite the record cold and the recession, McAleer says the “greenies” are still calling for a reduction in carbon emissions and a slowing down of the economy. “Yeah, we tried that,” he says. “It’s called a recession and it’s not fun—we don’t like it.”

McAleer’s film documents how global-warming hysteria is hurting humans around the globe, and how environmentalists are ignoring the facts and science that disprove manmade global-warming theory. A release date for the film has yet to be revealed, but a trailer for the film can be viewed at NotEvilJustWrong.com

The UK Met Office forecast last Autumn “the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average.” We have now passed the 2/3 mark of the meteorological winter, and it is time for another report card to send home. Yesterday’s press release was titled “Wintry start to February” which stated “So far, the UK winter has been the coldest for over a decade” and “Met Office forecasters expect the cold theme to the weather to continue well into next week with the chance of further snow.”

The UK is expecting the heaviest snow in about 20 years tomorrow.  “Snow and freezing weather threaten to shut down Britain Arctic blizzards are set to cause a national shutdown on Monday as forecasters warn of the most widespread snowfall for almost 20 years.” “Now is the time you’d expect to see the daffodils coming out but we’re not expecting them for two or three weeks at best if it warms up.”

So why is this important?  Climate is not weather, after all.  The Met Office is one of the most vocal advocates of human induced global warming, and they have gotten into a consistent pattern of warm seasonal forecasts which seemingly fall in line with that belief system.  Is it possible that their forecasts are unduly influenced by preconceived notions about the climate?  It is worth remembering that London had it’s first October snow in 70 years this past autumn.

Or perhaps they know exactly what they are doing, and are just having a several year run of extremely bad luck with their long term forecasting. See post here.

Snowy road posted on Wunderground.

Icecap Note: As of this morning London had 4.7 inches of snow with much more on the way. Up to 10 inches has fallen in parts of the UK. Snow was halting ground, rail and air travel in other European cities such as Paris and Madrid. Recall when it was cold early, the UKMO promised a warm January. When extreme cold and snow fell in January, Britons were reassured the warmth would come in February. Now they are experiencing more arctic cold and what may be an historic snowstorm, a throwback to the days of Dickens in the early 1800s (the Dalton Minimum - hmmm). 

See BBC video here. See story here. See UK Telegraph story “Snow: Schools, airports, motorways and railways all closed”here.

As the first director of meteorology for TV’s Weather Channel, Hudson resident Joseph D’Aleo, 61, knows a lot about skepticism and mistaken long-range forecasts. When the fledgling cable outfit started broadcasting in 1982, skeptics forecasted that it wouldn’t last.

Almost 30 years later, “the Internet has become people’s primary source for weather information,” D’Aleo says. He operates his own Web site, www.icecap.us, containing 2,500 articles that contradict claims by Al Gore and “mainstream media” types that carbon-dioxide emissions are threatening our—and the polar bears’—existence.

CNN talk host Lou Dobbs interviewed D’Aleo at his Hudson home this week. In early March, D’Aleo will address 1,000 scientists and fellow global-warming skeptics at an international conference in New York City. In the 2009 Old Farmer’s Almanac, he authored a six-page article, Is Global Warming on the Wane? D’Aleo makes this long-range prediction, based on his study of natural solar and oceanic cycles: Last winter, the world embarked on the coldest two-decade stretch in 200 years.

Q: When you started at The Weather Channel in 1981, did you know how popular it would become?
A: A lot of critics laughed at us when we first started, saying people weren’t going to watch weather for 24 hours. But the important thing was, we gave people weather when they wanted it. This was before the Internet. So that worked in our favor.

Q: Does New England really have the world’s quirkiest weather?
A: I travel around the country a lot, and often hear people say, “We have a saying around here in Oklahoma: If you don’t like the weather, just wait a little while.” So we think it’s a New England quirky thing, but in much of the country they say the same thing. But we do have lots of extremes here, and it’s one of the toughest places to forecast for.

Q: Why did global-warming proponents change the preferred phrasing to climate change?
A: Because there’s been no warming for eight years. Since 2001, temperatures around the globe have cooled off by a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit. Climate-change advocates know it, but the mainstream media won’t report it.

Q: Except for Lou Dobbs of CNN? Is that what he came to your house to talk about?
A: His point, and I agree, is that we have to get the science right before spending all this money, before we invest a trillion dollars to combat “global warming”—especially in this economy. People are pushing, especially Al Gore, that we have to spend the money now. And it is not necessary.

Q: What’s the percentage of meteorologists who believe in global warming versus skeptics?
A: Global-warming proponents would have you believe it’s 99 percent in favor. It’s much smaller than that. The skeptics may even be in the majority. Certainly, the believers include the university professors and those people in the federal-grant gravy train. Also, the environmental groups have done very well (in capitalizing) on this issue. You’ve got politicians on the national and local level espousing it. The scary thing is, the people who end up paying are low and middle-income folks, the consumers.

Q: President Obama is in the believer camp. Are you dismayed by that?
A: President Obama wants to decrease carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States by 80 percent by 2030. Let’s say he got very aggressive about that in his first term. It would basically shut down our economy, because sufficient alternative-energy sources are just not there. Just the growth in the rest of the world would replace all the carbon we’d saved through very punitive measures on our own industry. We’d certainly not be a world leader anymore—China and India would be. Our economy would have suffered a great deal of pain for no gain.

See full story and comments here.

A report claims that many of the top employees of the National Science Foundation spent long periods during their work day looking at Internet pornography, according to USA Today.

The National Science Foundation’s semi-annual report has evidence of numerous investigations into employees’ use of the Internet - during work hours - to look at pornography. The report states that one of the senior NSF staff members spent nearly 20% of his work time looking at explicit material or engaged in sexual chat rooms, USA Today reported. The report alleged that other NSF employees also looked at porn.

USA Today also reported the following details: Senator Charles Grassley, the ranking GOP member of the Senate Finance Committee, wants Congress to reconsider the $3 billion in funding to the NSF that is a part of the current stimulus bill until these charges are answered. Grassley, R-Iowa has already asked the foundation’s Office of Inspector General for all documents related to this matter. Agency spokesman Jeff Nesbit said NSF is taking steps to address these concerns.

“NSF immediately implemented additional IT systems controls to focus in particular on enforcement of the foundation’s long-standing policy prohibiting the use of its IT systems to access sexually explicit, gambling and other inappropriate websites,” Nesbit said in a written statement.

According to the USAToday, the foundation was created as an independent federal agency in 1950 to promote science. It has an annual budget of more than $6 billion and funds, by its own estimate, about 20% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the nation’s colleges and universities. He also added that the NSF has already disciplined and/or fired employees caught looking at porn during work hours.

You suppose that is why they believe the earth is getting hotter and are giving so much of their funding dollars to global warming researchers?

Since Nobel Prize-winner Al Gore produced his movie An (Incomprehensible Untruth) Inconvenient Truth predicting the imminent end of the world through frying and drowning caused by man-made global warming, things haven’t exactly gone according to plan. The generally accepted prediction has been that as carbon dioxide levels continue to go through the roof (or should that be the stratosphere) the climate would continue to warm as a result, ice caps would continue to melt (with the North Pole becoming ice-free by 2008), polar bears would become extinct, glaciers would disappear and seas would continue to rise (by 20 feet in the near future, said Gore); and with an unchallengeable scientific consensus that life on earth would gradually succumb to the catastrophic consequences of greed, big oil and the cosmic and diabolical evil of western capitalism.

A whole new industry has grown up of ‘carbon trading’ to reduce those fatal emissions, which threatens to cripple the economies of the west. Global warming protection measures have brought California to the edge of bankruptcy. In Britain, where climate change is now a Cabinet portfolio, climate change policies already account for about 14% of the average domestic electricity bill and 21% of the average business electricity bill, with an expected rise to 55% of the average business electricity bill by 2020; now the aim is to cut carbon emissions by a crippling 80 per cent.

But according to satellite data the earth has cooled—with 2008 the coldest for ten years; global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago; sea level rise has slowed down by 20 per cent; of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number; in Greenland, said by Gore to be facing an ice Armageddon, outlet glacier flows have returned to the levels of 2000; and last December, 650 prominent climate scientists were recorded by a US Senate Minority Report dissenting from man-made global warming theory, with more and more prominent scientists joining their ranks virtually every week.

Russian scientists, for example, have rejected the very idea that carbon dioxide was responsible for global warming, having discovered that, throughout history, CO2 levels in the air rose 500 to 600 years after the climate warmed up. Therefore, higher concentrations of greenhouse gases were the result, not the cause, of global warming.

Exactly as some of us have been saying since 1988.  Since then, the Great Global Warming Terror - with sceptics even compared to Holocaust deniers - has intimidated many scientists into silence and cost other braver souls their jobs. With the global financial crisis likely to bring the green fantasy of crippling the capitalist world to a crashing halt, it is possible that the greatest scientific scam in history will simply fade away without the charlatans who perpetrated it being brought to book. But their names are on record; and no-one should take seriously what they say about anything at all ever again.  Read full story here.

Such has been the fear of Greenland’s melting glaciers that well known Australian science journalist Robyn Williams has claimed sea levels could rise by 100 metres within the next 100 years. Mr Williams, and other journalists, have been quick to report on what has become known as the “Greenland Ice Armageddon”.

Last Friday there was an article in one of the most read science journals, Science, entitled “Galloping Glaciers of Greenland have Reined Themselves In” by Richard A. Kerr.  Yes, as the title suggests, the article explains that a wide-ranging survey of glacier conditions across south eastern Greenland, indicates that glacier melt has slowed significantly and that it would be wrong to attribute the higher rates of melt prior to 2005 to global warming or to extrapolate the higher melt rates of a few years ago into the future.

Mr Kerr was reporting on a presentation by glaciologist Tavi Murray at the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco last December. The paper by Dr Murray was co-authored by many other members of the group at Swansea University in the UK, a team often quoted by Al Gore and others.

When I read the article last Friday I wondered how Robyn “100 metres” Williams and other journalists in the mainstream media (MSM) might report the story. To my amazement they have simply ignored it.

It seems that the mainstream media is a shameless exaggerator of global warming, and unable to report anything really significant that contradicts the established storyline.

Perhaps I should not be surprised, as a lecturer in journalism explained to me some time ago: journalists only add to narratives, as one might add to a large tapestry. Yep, so, the mainstream media’s news has to all fit together like a picture.  What is reported tomorrow is expected to accord with what was reported yesterday.  But the real world is so much more complicated.

See Jennifers full post with notes, links, references and comments here.

Recently a 98-year-old lady named Irena Sendler died.

During WWII, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive.

Being German, she KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews. Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of her tool box she carried, and she also carried in the back of her truck a Burlap sack, (for larger children).

She also had a dog in the back of the truck that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog, but the barking covered the children/infants noises.

During her time and course of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 children/infants.

She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs and arms and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the children she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her backyard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it, and reunited the families. Most, of course, had been gassed.

Those children she helped were placed into foster family homes or adopted out.

Last year, Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

She LOST.

Al Gore won for doing a slide show on Global Warming.

See Coleman’s Corner here. Read more here and here.