With skiing and snowboarding continuing at a few European ski areas all year round, it is difficult to know when last winter ends and this winter begins. But some glacier resorts that closed in the Spring or Summer re-open in September and stay open right through to next Spring 2009, so September seems the best candidate for the month of the year in which to declare the new ski season 2008-9 officially underway!

Fortunately, mother nature is playing ball too, with snow in the Alps last weekend. Although it is not yet open, www.Skiinfo.com reported that Val d’Isere received 9cm (just under four inches) of fresh snow at the weekend with more forecast later this week, building up their base ready for the season. It was a similar story across many other ski areas and www.Skiinfo.com works in partnership with the resorts to deliver the latest conditions several times daily.

Elsewhere in the Alps, some ski areas haven’t really closed since last winter, are still open today and will stay open through to next winter. These include the Tux and Kitzsteinhorn glaciers in Austria.

Pitztal ski area is now also open for the season.

Austria’s Stubai ski area will open for winter 2008-9 on Saturday, 27th September.

Meanwhile unseasonably cold weather in Poland this week appears to have been curtailing or hampering the Tour of Poland bicycle race.

Well to the south in the southern hemisphere, snow and record cold hit South Africa.

This is unusual. A live media teleconference on the sun. Even more unusual is this statement: “The sun’s current state could result in changing conditions in the solar system.”

As you may recall, I posted an entry about the Ulysses mission back on June 16th and the findings of a lowered magnetic field in the sun, from the JPL press release then: “Ulysses ends its career after revealing that the magnetic field emanating from the sun’s poles is much weaker than previously observed.  This could mean the upcoming solar maximum period will be less intense than in recent history.” Here is the Media Advisory:

Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Sept. 18, 2008
MEDIA ADVISORY : M08-176

NASA To Discuss Conditions On And Surrounding The Sun

WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a media teleconference Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 12:30 p.m. EDT, to discuss data from the joint NASA and European Space Agency Ulysses mission that reveals the sun’s solar wind is at a 50-year low. The sun’s current state could result in changing conditions in the solar system. Ulysses was the first mission to survey the space environment above and below the poles of the sun. The reams of data Ulysses returned have changed forever the way scientists view our star and its effects. The venerable spacecraft has lasted more than 17 years - almost four times its expected mission lifetime.

The panelists are:
- Ed Smith, NASA Ulysses project scientist and magnetic field instrument investigator, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
- Dave McComas, Ulysses solar wind instrument principal investigator, Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
- Karine Issautier, Ulysses radio wave lead investigator, Observatoire de Paris, Meudon, France
- Nancy Crooker, Research Professor, Boston University, Boston, Mass.

Reporters should call 866-617-1526 and use the pass code “sun” to participate in the teleconference. International media should call 1-210-795-0624. To access visuals that will the accompany presentations, go here. Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live here.

See post and comments here.

EDITOR:

Larry Venner’s column (His Voice, Saturday, “The icy truth about global warming") is wrong and shows a lack of knowledge of the facts.

A recent report said that a huge chunk of sea ice had broken off an island in the Arctic, and all the “man-made” global-warming extremists jumped up and started crying about how we are all doomed, and how this sea ice was just another sign of the end of the world.

But if they had bothered to read to the end of the article, it also reported that the island had at one time been free of sea ice about 1,000 years ago. What does that mean? Well, it means that Earth was once so warm that that island had no sea ice attached, and that the increase or decrease of sea ice is not connected to man’s impact on Earth.

How many cars were driving around 1,000 years ago? How many coal plants were running? Only ignorant, uninformed people believe that man is causing global warming.

The effect of the sun is the major reason for global warming, to the exclusion of all others. Solar flares and sun spots are the real reason Earth gets warmer or cooler.

If you chart the cycle of Earth’s rising and falling temperatures and superimpose a chart of the solar temperature increases and decreases, they match perfectly.

See larger image here

The “man-made” global-warming crowd wants America to spend billions to reduce a naturally occurring gas (carbon dioxide) that has a virtually zero effect on global warming. This is insane. People who willfully set aside common sense and allow themselves and their children to be brainwashed and never question what they are hearing are without excuse.  See story here.

Warming and cooling cycles are more directly tied in with astronomical influences than they are with human-caused carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, some scientists now say. Recent observations point to a strong link between “solar variability” - or fluctuations in the sun’s radiation - and climate change on Earth, while other research sees the sun as just one of many heavenly bodies affecting global warming in the later half of the 20th century.

Contrary to what has been stated in a “Summary for Policymakers” attached to the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007) report—and in subsequent press coverage of the report—there is scant evidence in favor of human-caused global warming, according to geologists, astrophysicists, and climatologists who have released updated studies.

An examination of warming and cooling trends over the last 400 years shows an “almost exact correlation” between all of the known climate changes that have occurred and solar energy transmitted to the Earth, while showing “no correlation at all with CO2,” Don J. Easterbrook, a geologist with Western Washington Univers ity in Bellingham, Wash., told CNSNews.com.

The isotopes located in Greenland’s ice core, along with layering features, make it possible to date and track some of the climate changes that have occurred, he explained. Consequently, he has identified about 30 warming and cooling cycles that have taken place reaching back over the past several hundred years. “Only one in 30 shows any correlation with CO2,” he said. “So if you’re a baseball player with 30 at bats, that’s not a very good average.” The ice core records also show that after the last Ice Age ended, temperatures rose for about 800 years before CO2 increased, Easterbrook pointed out in a recent paper. This demonstrates that “climatic warming causes CO2 to rise, not vice-versa,” he wrote.

“There is no actual physical evidence you can point to that would say CO2 is causing climate change,” he said in the interview. “If CO2 was causing global warming, you would be able to detect this warming in the lower part of the atmosphere (called the troposphere) but there is no warming here, so the answer for some is to look the other way.”

Unfortunately, the media at large is reticent to report on any evidence that contradicts human-caused global warming because there is a lot of money and political influence tied up with the theory, Easterbrook said. As it turns out, this warming trend could be over anyway, according to Easterbrook. A slight cooling period that began to take hold in 1998 could endure for the next 30 years, he forecasts. A phenomenon known as the “Pacific Decadal Oscillation” (warming and cooling modes in the Pacific Ocean) points the way, in his view. “It’s practically a slam dunk that we are in for about 30 years of global cooling,” he said. Read more here.

The precise timing of the origin of life on Earth and the changes in life during the past 4.5 billion years has been a subject of great controversy for the past century. The principal indicator of the amount of organic carbon produced by biological activity traditionally used is the ratio of the less abundant isotope of carbon, 13C, to the more abundant isotope, 12C. As plants preferentially incorporate 12C, during periods of high production of organic material the 13C/12C ratio of carbonate material becomes elevated. Using this principle, the history of organic material has been interpreted by geologists using the 13C/12C ratio of carbonates and organics, wherever these materials can be sampled and dated.

While this idea appears to be sound over the last 150 million years or so, prior to this time there are no open oceanic sediment records which record the 13C/12C ratio, and therefore, geologists are forced to use materials associated with carbonate platforms or epicontinental seas.

In order to test whether platform-associated sediments are related to the global carbon cycle, a paper by University of Miami Professor Dr. Peter K. Swart appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This paper examines changes over the past 10 million years at sites off the Bahamas (Atlantic Ocean), the Maldives (Indian Ocean), and Great Barrier Reef (Pacific Ocean). The variations in the 13C/12C ratio are synchronous at all of the sites studied, but are unrelated to the global change in the 13C/12C ratio.

It appears that records related to carbonate platforms which are often used throughout the early history of the Earth are not good recorders of the 13C/12C ratio in the open oceans. Hence, the work presented suggests that assumptions made previously about changes in the 13C/12C ratios of carbonate sediments in the geological record are incorrect.

“This study is a major step in terms of rethinking how geologists interpret variations in the 13C/12C ratio throughout Earth’s history. If the approach does not work over the past 10 million years, then why would it work during older time periods?” said Swart. “As a consequence of our findings, changes in 13C/12C records need to be reevaluated, conclusions regarding changes in the reservoirs of carbon will have to be reassessed, and some of the widely-held ideas regarding the elevation of CO2 during specific periods of the Earth’s geological history will have to be adjusted.” Read full story here.