Horse Feathers

.
Sadly, co2 doesn't drive warming. Co2 is free fertilizer. Warming is good. Warming means less pollution, more stable weather. Once the climate has fully adjusted to the new regime, we will have less crop wipe-outs. More food for free due to global warming. Co2 is a climate stabilizer.

And on the next day, Yahoo, presumably making up ground for informing the good news about rice yields, gave us synchronized feather waving from AP and AFP. A more permanent copy of the article is on NYT.
Every time the tropical sea temperatures were about 7 degrees warmer than they are now and stayed that way for millions of enough years, there was a die-off. How fast extinctions happen varies in length. [Don't forget, milll-yuns of years]
Add the magic Hansenesque touch and...
And scientists fear it may be about to happen again -- but in a matter of several decades, not tens of millions of years./quote
Scientists here presumably being Hansen with a model that says polar bears are going extinct and believes this is in total agreement with reality, even though polar bears are so populace they have to be culled when they become a dangerous nuisance.

On Collier Glacier, its more rapid decline than other local glaciers strongly suggests different circumstances. Soot has to be the main first consideration as this appears to be the principle component of polar surface melt. Land use change, even mentioned in the article has to play a big part. Winter precipitation and summer mean temperature are the underlying control factors. The number of moraines indicate this is hardly a static glacier, and given its location on the west coast, I would be surprised to find no correlation with El Nino events. But anthropogenic global warming aka climate change has a broad back.
Article.

Looking at trends in newspaper reporting over the last 100 years, the previous scares alternated between warming and cooling, obviously, the next one has to be cooling. Looking at the duration of the scares, perhaps 20 years per, around 2012 would be a reasonable guess for the next swing to occur. Give or take a few due to the oceans' moderating influence. We should have at least four more climate scares before the next century. Subtract the media impact on social awareness of global warming-cooling-changing, you are left with a storm in a teacup.

I suppose the next newsworthy feature of the polar sea ice melt will be the tussle over who owns which bit of sea floor. Russia got in first while Canada was dithering about green issues. There is a convention about the law of the sea, UNCLOS, that most countries have subscribed to, the US should be joining soon. It will be the basis for the carve-up.
Interestingly, the Canadian Coast Guard has been liaising with Russia about guarding the passage and is looking to set up operations around Barrow, the most northerly town. "Ultimately, he hopes to set up a cooperative relationship with Russia's border guard in the Arctic." (Article.) The world quietly gets on with its business while alarmists strut and posture.

Oil will stay high in the news and not just from an environmental aspect, pump prices will continue to creep up while the Middle East has control of the flow. That situation is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.
It is not just produced from organic matter, it is basically hydrogen and carbon being in the right place in the sufficient volume. Inorganic oil exists but has not yet been found in amounts suitable for exploitation. That leaves open the idea there may be vast reserves of inorganic oil created by the planet, we just haven't been looking in the right places. Another distant ray of hope, the oil making process will be discovered and found to be replicable on an economically viable scale. I think oil has a good long life ahead of it but who knows? Ethanol without subsidies would vanish as a pretender to the energy throne. Do we actually want to use a fuel that causes economic harm and more atmospheric damage than oil?

More down to earth, Mt St. Helens has a lava dome that is growing. Worth keeping an eye on as it could erupt anytime. An eruption would cause more dark particles to be deposited on glaciers and polar ice, accelerating melting. This link http://volcano.wr.usgs.gov/cvo/current_updates.php leads to a frequently updated page about activity in the Cascades.

Today's worth a visit - volcanoes.