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The multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished, a startling development that will make it easier to open up polar shipping routes, an Arctic expert said on Thursday. Vast sheets of impenetrable multiyear ice, which can reach up to 80 meters (260 feet) thick, have for centuries blocked the path of ships seeking a quick short cut through the fabled Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They also ruled out the idea of sailing across the top of the world. But David Barber, Canada's Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, said...

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out - in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

LONDON (AFP) – The Arctic ice cap will disappear completely in summer months within 20 to 30 years, a polar research team said as they presented findings from an expedition led by adventurer Pen Hadow. It is likely to be largely ice-free during the warmer months within a decade, the experts added. Veteran polar explorer Hadow and two other Britons went out on the Arctic ice cap for 73 days during the northern spring, taking more than 6,000 measurements and observations of the sea ice. The raw data they collected from March to May has been analysed, producing some stark...

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out — in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

Polar Bear Spotted Riding On Its Mother's Back [Pic in URL] Polar bear cubs ride 'piggy back' on their mother's back to avoid falling into the freezing waters of the Arctic, according to new scientific evidence. By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent 05 Oct 2009 A British holidaymaker visiting Duvefjorden, Nordaustlandet, spotted the mother bear with a seven-month-old cub hitching a ride. Photo: Angela Plumb The behaviour has been observed in the wild before by polar bears emerging from the den for the first time or crossing open water. However there was little research into the phenomenon and no photographic evidence....

Which may explain why a polar bear cub has recently been seen riding on the back of its mother as the bears swim across parts of the Arctic Ocean. The cub then briefly rode her back as she clambered out of the icy water, a unique event photographed by a tourist. Experts have rarely seen the behaviour, and they say the latest find suggests it may be a more common practice than previously thought.

Carbon-dioxide emissions are turning the waters of the Arctic Ocean into acid at an unprecedented rate, scientists have discovered. Research carried out in the archipelago of Svalbard has shown in many regions around the north pole seawater is likely to reach corrosive levels within 10 years. The water will then start to dissolve the shells of mussels and other shellfish and cause major disruption to the food chain. By the end of the century, the entire Arctic Ocean will be corrosively acidic. "This is extremely worrying," Professor Jean-Pierre Gattuso, of France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, told an international...

Competition for resources in the Arctic Circle could provoke conflict between Russia and Nato, a newly appointed commander at the alliance warned today. Russia has recently been aggressive in its pursuit of claims to parts of the regions and in February sent a submarine to the floor of the sea in order to symbolically plant a flag. In March Russia announced plans to establish military bases along its northern coastline. Admiral James Stavridis said that military activity and trade routes would also both be potential sources of competition around the polar cap. Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)...

This year's cooler-than-expected summer means the Arctic probably won't experience ice-free summers until 2030 or 2040, scientists say. Some models had previously predicted that the Arctic could be ice free in summer by as soon as 2013, due to rising temperatures from global warming. However, that scenario required Arctic sea ice to shrink at the record-setting pace of summer 2007, when sea ice coverage dropped to 1.6 million square miles (4.13 million square kilometers), said Walter Meier, a scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. This summer Arctic sea ice shrank to only 1.97...

From the NSIDC, Sea ice reaches it’s annual minimum extent growing by 370,000 square miles over 2007. An area 1 1/2 times the size of Texas. The recovery is 220,000 sq miles above last year alone yet the NSIDC claims below that the scientists don’t consider this a recovery. They cite younger thinner ice again and a lower level than the 30 year mean as the reasons this is not a recovery. I have difficulty ignoring a near 400,000 sq mile increase in ice level. So I hope they don’t mind if I do consider it at least a partial...

This summer's melt of Arctic sea ice has not been as profound as in the last two years, scientists said as the ice began its annual Autumn recovery. At its smallest extent this summer, on 12 September, the ice covered 5.10 million sq km (1.97 million sq miles). This was larger than the minima seen in the last two years, and leaves 2007's record low of 4.1 million sq km (1.6 million sq miles) intact. But scientists note the long-term trend is still downwards. Arctic temperatures have been cooler this year than last year, researchers said, and winds have helped...

Russia has retrieved its Arctic Sea shipping vessel that was hijacked and charged the offenders. The story doesn’t end there, though, as reports continue to surface alleging the “hijacking” were Israeli operatives sent to intercept missiles headed to Iran.. Other reports indicate the Russians staged their own hijacking after being notified of the ship’s contents by Israel. Regardless of who the hijackers were, they have thwarted a shipment of weapons that would have raised the stakes in the region for Israel and possibly even provoked military conflict. On July 24, the Arctic Sea was hijacked by eight individuals while it...

MOSCOW — For hundreds of years, mariners have dreamed of an Arctic shortcut that would allow them to speed trade between Asia and the West. Two German ships are poised to complete that transit for the first time, aided by the retreat of Arctic ice that scientists have linked to global warming. The ships started their voyage in South Korea in late July and will begin the last leg of the trip this week, leaving a Siberian port for Rotterdam in the Netherlands carrying 3,500 tons of construction materials. Russian ships have long moved goods along the country’s sprawling Arctic...

WASHINGTON – The Arctic is warmer than it's been in 2,000 years, even though it should be cooling because of changes in the Earth's orbit that cause the region to get less direct sunlight. Indeed, the Arctic had been cooling for nearly two millennia before reversing course in the last century and starting to warm as human activities added greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. "If it hadn't been for the increase in human-produced greenhouse gases, summer temperatures in the Arctic should have cooled gradually over the last century," said Bette Otto-Bliesner, a National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist and co-author...

Arctic temperatures are now higher than at any time in the last 2,000 years, research reveals. Changes to the Earth's orbit drove centuries of cooling, but temperatures rose fast in the last 100 years as human greenhouse gas emissions rose. Scientists took evidence from ice cores, tree rings and lake sediments. Writing in the journal Science, they say this confirms that the Arctic is very sensitive both to changes in solar heating and to greenhouse warming. The 23 sites sampled were good enough to provide a decade-by-decade picture of temperatures across the region. The result is a "hockey stick"-like curve...

UN chief Ban Ki-moon visited Wednesday a vault carved into the Arctic permafrost, filled with samples of the world's most important seeds in case food crops are wiped out by a catastrophe. "The world faces many daunting challenges today, one of the greatest of which is how to feed a growing population in the context of climate change," a bundled-up Ban told reporters after he toured the site in the Svalbard archipelago some 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) from the North Pole. "The seeds stored here in Svalbard will help us do just that. Sustainable food production may not begin in...

Please click the link to the IRAC-JAXA web site to reference the chart at this site. The important thing about this chart is the trend of Arctic sea ice extent from 2007 to 2009 as we approach the Summer minimum (mid-Sept). Note the yellow, orange and red lines which represent the years 2007, 2008 and 2009 respectively. The trend is going back to greater sea ice coverage, where 2007 was the lowest coverage, last year had increased coverage while it looks like 2009 will have more sea ice coverage than the previous two years. So clearly, the trend is not...

It's a good time to be a polar bear. Unusually cool temperatures in the northern climes last winter produced thicker-than-usual polar ice. This gave the lucky bears an extra two weeks to roam the ice floes to hunt ringed seals. As a result, adult bears are better fed and more cubs are surviving their first year. The bears will go into the winter with greater energy stores, which will mean a better chance of survival and even more cubs. ~snip~ The global-warming religion is highly resistant to facts. This came home to us recently when Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Michigan Democrat,...

Energy: With Ahab-like determination, environmentalists have once again blocked oil exploration in the American Arctic. They may just have succeeded in putting the American economy on ice.On Friday, a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals Court panel in Washington, D.C., struck down the Bush administration's five-year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing off Alaska's northern coast. The plan was vacated, the panel ruled, because of allegedly insufficient environmental review because its "environmental sensitivity rankings are irrational." What is irrational is that despite a more than three-decade long record of environmental sensitivity at Prudhoe Bay and elsewhere, and despite booming polar...

The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has admitted his organization’s recent claim that the Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was “a mistake.” Greenpeace made the claim in a July 15 press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts,” which said there will be an ice-free Arctic by 2030 because of global warming. Under close questioning by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on the “Hardtalk” program, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, said the claim was wrong.

Environmentalists and the media have successfully bamboozled half the populace and every school child in America into believing large numbers of polar bears are starving and drowning in the Arctic because of global warming. But it's obviously not even close to being true. How do we know this? Because if even just one emaciated drowned polar bear's body had been fished from Arctic waters in the last five years, we'd have seen its sorry carcass a thousand times on TV and on the covers of Time and Vanity Fair. By now the poor dead bear would have been given a...

As the U.S. Senate now prepares to consider the cap-and-trade climate bill recently passed by the house, they will want to consider all the facts related to this landmark spending program. So far we have learned that the Environmental Protection Agency has suppressed an internal report skeptical about the wild global warming claims and now, from across the pond, we find out that a polar bear expert has been forbidden by global warming alarmists from reporting that most of those animals have actually been increasing in population during the past few years or are at optimum levels. Although you won't...

MOSCOW, June 15 (RIA Novosti) - The creation of the Russian Arctic nature reserve could compensate for the damage to the dwindling polar bear population from global warming, the director of WWF-Russia said on Monday. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a decree on establishing the nature reserve on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, in the Arctic Ocean, earlier on Monday. The reserve is expected to cover an area of more than 8 million hectares. Speaking on the nature reserve, Putin said this is a "unique space with high biodiversity and high bioproductivity." "This is essential for polar bears as there...

When International Business Daily's editors first interviewed a little-known governor named Sarah Palin ten months ago, she told them about Alaska's Chukchi Sea resources and emphasized that these energy assets should be developed. At the time it was thought that there were sufficient oil and gas resources there to meet America's needs for a decade. Palin told IBD that it was "nonsensical" for the U.S. to beg the Saudis to ramp up crude oil production while Alaska was sitting virtually on top of those resources. She saw development of the Chukchi as a significant step toward U.S. energy security. All...

Update: May 26 2009 The daily image update has been temporarily suspended because of large areas of missing data in the past week. NSIDC currently gets its data from the SSM/I sensor on the DMSP F13 satellite, which is nearing the end of its operational life and experiencing intermittent problems. NSIDC has been working on a transition to a newer sensor on the F17 satellite for several months. At this time, we have more than a year of data from F17, which we are using to intercalibrate with F13 data. The F17 data are not yet available for near-real-time updates....

The beaver is starting to push back against the bear in the debate over who controls the top of the world. Federal officials are confirming to The Canadian Press that Canada's Arctic mapping flights have ventured beyond the North Pole into areas claimed by Russia. The flights are the first step towards building a case that Canada's Arctic sovereignty could reach past the Pole despite Russia's determination to extend its own northern footprint.

Russia raised the prospect of war in the Arctic yesterday as nations struggle for control of the world’s dwindling energy reserves. The country’s new national security strategy identified the intensifying battle for ownership of vast untapped oil and gas fields around its borders as a source of potential military conflict within a decade. Graphic: the very cold war “The presence and potential escalation of armed conflicts near Russia’s national borders, pending border agreements between Russia and several neighbouring nations, are the major threats to Russia’s interests and border security,” stated the document, which analysed security threats up to 2020. “In...

UNITED NATIONS, May 8 (OneWorld.net) - Environmental groups and indigenous rights activists are calling for the White House and U.S. Congress to ratify an international treaty against the use and production of certain hazardous chemicals. "Time is running out. The Congress has to take a stand and fight for the lives of the contaminated people and environment of the North," said Andrea Carmen, executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council. Carmen and other activists, who are attending international talks on the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in Geneva this week, say they have grave concerns about the...

Environmentalists fear pollution risk as firms try to exploit ocean's untapped oil and gas reserves Russia is planning a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves, causing widespread alarm among environmentalists. A prototype floating nuclear power station being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk is due to be completed next year. Agreement to build a further four was reached between the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, and the northern Siberian republic of Yakutiya in February

TROMSO, April 29 (RIA Novosti) - Russia has no plans to increase its military presence in the Arctic or to deploy weapons in the region, the Russian foreign minister said on Wednesday. "We [Russia] are not planning to increase our military presence in the Arctic and to deploy armed forces there," Sergei Lavrov said following a ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council in Norway's Tromso. The Russian Security Council posted on its website last month a document entitled: The Fundamentals of Russian State Policy in the Arctic up to 2020 and Beyond. The document outlines the country's strategy in the...

1st paragraph (with link to abstract): "Our recent paper “Climate response to regional radiative forcing during the twentieth century”, has generated some interesting discussion (some of it very 'interesting' indeed). So this post is an attempt to give a better context to the methods and implications of the study." Yet more aerosols: Comment on Shindell and Faluvegi Most intriguing paragraph: "In the absence of increasing greenhouse gases, our large historical emissions of sulfate precursors would have led to substantial cooling from sulfate, and the subsequent reduction in emissions would have brought temperatures back towards their previous level. So reduced sulfate...

ST. PETERSBURG, April 21 (RIA Novosti) - Russia is planning to complete the construction of a third-generation nuclear-powered icebreaker by 2015, the head of the state nuclear corporation Rosatom said on Tuesday. Responsibility for Russia's nuclear icebreaker fleet was handed over to Rosatom from the Murmansk Shipping Company on August 27, 2008. "A federal program has allocated 17 billion rubles [$500 mln] for the development of a new-generation icebreaker," Sergei Kiriyenko said. Kiriyenko said the Iceberg Design Bureau in St. Petersburg would prepare the design of the icebreaker by 2010. "This should be a double-hull icebreaker capable of moving in...

MOSCOW, April 20 (RIA Novosti) - Russia is to submit to the UN new data on the boundaries of its continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean, an ambassador at large said Monday. "To bring to a close matters relating to the Arctic Ocean, we need to convince 21 members of the UN commission on the continental shelf that sections of the sea bed...are of a continental nature and are a continuation of the continent," said Anton Vasilyev, who is also a high-ranking official on the Arctic Council. High Arctic territories, seen as the key to huge untapped natural resources, have...

Willie Soon, a Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist with scores of peer-reviewed papers and books to his credit, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers asserting the Earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming. Soon told the second International Conference on Climate Change on March in New York City, “We have a system [of peer reviewing scientific literature] that is truly, truly appalling.” Soon’s criticisms echoed an earlier presentation at the 2-1/2-day conference that was attended by about 700 scientists, economists, and policymakers considering the issue of “Global Warming: Was it ever really...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Cutting greenhouse gases by 70 percent this century would spare the planet the most traumatic effects of climate change, including the massive loss of Arctic sea ice, a study said Tuesday. Warming in the Arctic would be almost halved, helping preserve fisheries, as well as sea birds and Arctic mammals like polar bears in some regions, including the northern Bering Sea, according to scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). But the massive cuts of greenhouse gas emissions advocated by the researchers would only "stabilize the threat of climate change and avoid catastrophe," said NCAR...

Turns out there is such a thing as being too young and too thin. Arctic ice continued its decline this winter, with hearty old ice increasingly being replaced with quick-to-melt young ice, according to a new report by NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Some 80 percent of Arctic ice may disappear in 30 years, not 90 as scientists had previously estimated, according to a new study on the impact of global warming. "The amount of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice at the end of summer by then could be only about 1 million square kilometers, or about 620,000 square miles," said US researchers who authored the study published Thursday. "That's compared to today's ice extent of 4.6 million square kilometers, or 2.8 million square miles," they added, warning the development "raises the question of ecosystem upheaval." The scientists made...

MOSCOW, March 30 (RIA Novosti) - Russia will prioritize the strengthening of its border guards while creating a special Arctic force in line with a new strategy to protect its regional interests, a senior parliamentary member said Monday. The Russian Security Council posted on its website last Friday a document entitled "The fundamentals of Russian state policy in the Arctic up to 2020 and beyond." The document outlines the country's strategy in the region, including the deployment of military, border and coastal guard units "to guarantee Russia's military security in diverse military and political circumstances." According to the document, Russia...

MONTREAL — Canada will not be bullied by the Russians in the Arctic, a tough-talking Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Friday. Responding to news reports the Kremlin is planning to create a dedicated military force to help protect its interests in the disputed Arctic region, Cannon said Canada will not back down from asserting its own sovereignty in the North.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will not allow itself to be left behind in the race to exploit the resources of the Arctic now being opened up by global warming, the Kremlin's special representative for the region said in an interview. Scientists say the ice is receding so fast that drilling for oil and gas high in the Arctic will soon become routine and cargo ships could sail between the Atlantic and Pacific along a new shipping lane much shorter than the routes used now.

Arctic sea ice extent, at the lowest in the last eight years, is now the third highest and is in position to move into second place if current cool conditions persist. This graphic is updated daily - please use to confound your carbon-emitting friends:

So-called "environmentalists" insist on making polar bears the centerpiece for their fight against capitalism. They insist that polar bears are nearing extinction because of man-made global warming. It's not theory to them .. it's etched-in-stone fact. Right now the Bush administration is being sued by environmental groups claiming the Fish and Wildlife Service is in breach of its own mandate – its failure to protect the polar bear as an endangered species. Well, yes ... there actually has been a delay to determine whether or not polar bears are actually endangered species. The fact of the matter is that they...

MOSCOW, March 19 (RIA Novosti) - The Russian Air Force has launched a four-day exercise near the city of Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle, a spokesman said on Thursday. Lt. Col. Vladimir Drik said Tu-160 Blackjack and Tu-95 Bear-H strategic bombers were test launching cruise missiles and dropping precision guided bombs at the Pemboi test range. He did not say what types of missiles were involved, but a Russian deputy defense minister previously said a new long-range missile would soon enter service with the Air Force. The launches are part of a command-and-staff exercises supervised by Maj. Gen. Pavel...

In a new national directive, Russia has asserted claims on large sections of the Arctic Ocean. The tone of the document is openly aggressive, prompting fears of increasing international tension over who has the right to exploit the mineral-rich territory. Under that plan, geologists will first study the Barents Sea and the Kara Sea. They expect to find at least two to four large oil or gas fields beneath the ocean floor in each of these two seas. According to Russia's environment minister, a petroleum engineer by trade, the fields contain an estimated 3.3 billion tons of oil and up...

NORWAY plans to resume the search for South Pole conqueror Roald Amundsen's plane 81 years after it vanished during an Arctic rescue mission, the Royal Norwegian Navy has announced. Amundsen was on board a French Latham 47 flying boat that disappeared in the Barents Sea on 18 June, 1928. The plane was searching for the airship Italia, which crashed while returning from a North Pole expedition led by Umberto Nobile, an Italian aeronautical engineer. "We want to find the plane and help solve the mystery," said Commander Frode Loeseth of the Norwegian navy. In 1926, Amundsen and a crew that...

MOSCOW - Russia will respond to any attempts to militarize the Arctic, the head of the country's armed forces was quoted as saying on Monday during a visit to Abu Dhabi. "Overall, we are looking at how far the region will be militarized. Depending on that, we'll then decide what to do," Interfax news agency quoted General Nikolai Makarov, the head of the General Staff, as saying.

Eco-warriors and media hype aside, the fact is, as we head into 2009, that the world's ice mass has been expanding not contracting. Which will surprise evening news junkies fed a diet of polar bears floating about on ice floes and snow shelves falling into the oceans. But if a whole series of reports on ice growth in the Arctic, the Antarctic and among glaciers are right, then it is truth in the mainstream media (MSM) that's in meltdown not the polar ice caps. The problem for the MSM is that it long ago nailed its colors to the climate...

Barack Hussein Obama will propose a massive business tax on greenhouse gases in his FY 2010 federal budget to be presented this week.The massive tax increase and power grab was buried at the end on article on Obama's forthcoming budget proposal in The New York Times:On energy policy, Mr. Obama’s budget will show new revenues by 2012 from his proposal to require companies to buy permits from the government for greenhouse gas emissions above a certain cap. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the permits would raise up to $300 billion a year by 2020. Since companies would pass their...

At least 235 types of cold-loving creatures have been discovered thriving at the bottom of the Arctic and Antarctic seas, puzzling scientists about how they got to both ends of the earth. Until now, the warm tropics have been seen as a barrier keeping polar bears in the Arctic separate from penguins in the Antarctic. Only a few creatures have been known to live in both polar regions, such as long-migrating grey whales or Arctic terns. 'At least 235 species live in both polar seas despite an 11,000-km (6,835 miles) distance in between,' a decade-long international project to map the...