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SALEM, Ore., April 3, 2014 – Another new solar sunspot record peak of 73.2 was set for Cycle 24 last month. It smashed the old 68.9 record peak set the previous month. In a big surprise, the number is now over six spots higher than the first sunspot peak set in early 2012 and will probably go higher. A secondary peak above the first this much is almost unheard of. The new sunspot peak is unusual for two conflicting reasons: The secondary peak is higher than the first Current physics suggests the solar cycle should be weakening Conflicting signals coming...

Joe explains how this summer's El Nino will be mild because the setup before the El Nino has been cool rather than warm. A warm setup would precede an El Nino spike.

Get Ready For One Of The Worst El Niños Ever Eric HolthausApril 22, 2014, 11:52 AM With apologies to Game of Thrones fans, there’s a new climate menace on the prowl: El Niño is coming. New data released late last week added to the mounting evidence. To be declared an official El Niño, surface water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean must warm by half a degree Celsius averaged over three months and maintain that level for five consecutive three-month periods. That’s an arbitrary definition, sure, but it gives us the ability to crunch the numbers on weather patterns that...

Joe has an attitude. :-) The winter that doesn't end.

Slowest start to #tornado season on record through 4/17 http://twitpic.com/e1huhr based on inflation adjusted tornado trends. https://twitter.com/wxbrad/status/457374046020440064

STRAITS OF MACKINAC, MI - At least one ferry service is predicting delayed trips to Mackinac Island due to ice that still covers a portion of the Great Lakes. Shepler's Mackinac Island Ferry has announced it will be starting its 2014 season later than anticipated after temporarily relocating its ferry starts to St. Ignace, rather than Mackinaw City, as a result of the ice blockages which remain in the Straits of Mackinac. "The straits have completely frozen over, except for a shipping channel," said Misty Martinchek, Shepler's group sales manager, who said all local ferries have been affected by the...

Sorry, you in the East, more snow. Snow in the Rockies. Low tornado activity. Global warming prediction vs. Real World.

BERLIN (AP) — The head of the United Nations scientific panel on climate change urged diplomats and scientists to show "enlightenment" Monday, as they began a weeklong meeting aimed at spelling out in plain terms what options the world has if it wants to prevent catastrophic global warming. Delegates at the closed-doors meeting in Berlin need to tackle a number of sensitive issues, including how best to cut carbon emissions and how to share the cost of shifting away from the fossil fuels that are largely blamed for producing the gases that are heating the planet. Their conclusions will feed...

Temp/Precipitation forecast for summer/fall/winter.

All about hurricanes.

Keeping score is an American sport. We want to know if our favorite baseball player has hit another home run or if our politicians really do as they promised or if the National Weather Service got the forecast correct. We cheer the winners and lament the losers. Its part of our competitive spirit and our success. The recent front page Oregonian article “Fall Chinook salmon run expected to be huge...” pointed out the enormous rebound of our local fisheries from the lows of a few years back to the record highs recently.

OSLO (Reuters) - A little-known technology that may be able to take the equivalent of China's greenhouse gas emissions out of the carbon cycle could be the radical policy shift needed to slow climate change this century, a draft U.N. report shows. Using the technology, power plants would burn biomass - wood, wood pellets, or plant waste like from sugar cane - to generate electricity while the carbon dioxide in the biomass is extracted, piped away and buried deep underground. Among techniques, a chemical process can strip carbon dioxide from the flue gases from combustion. The process - called bio-energy...

The White House will launch a new online initiative on Wednesday that will provide users access to climate data to spread awareness about the effects of global warming in an effort to improve climate-change preparedness across the country. As part of the initiative, the Obama administration will make federal data on climate change accessible to citizens, businesses and local governments in a new section within the data.gov website -- called climate.data.gov -- that will be jointly run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and NASA.

If you’re like me this will send chills down your spine. Nature Climate Change recently published a paper that contends that temperate zones will see reduced crop yields by 2030, presumably plunging the world into a man-caused famine not seen since the last time communists were in charge. From Blue and Green Tomorrow: “As more data have become available, we’ve seen a shift in consensus, telling us that the impacts of climate change in temperate regions will happen sooner rather than later,” said Professor Andy Challinor, lead author of the study.Yes, any time I see the word “consensus” in the...

Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent? Lawrence Torcello, PHILOSPHY professor thinks so. "The importance of clearly communicating science to the public should not be underestimated. Accurately understanding our natural environment and sharing that information can be a matter of life or death. When it comes to global warming, much of the public remains in denial about a set of facts that the majority of scientists clearly agree on. With such high stakes, an organised campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent.

An assistant philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology wants to send people who disagree with him about global warming to jail. The professor is Lawrence Torcello. Last week, he published a 900-word-plus essay at an academic website called The Conversation. Torcello, who has a Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, explains that there are times when criminal negligence and “science misinformation” must be linked. The threat of climate change, he says, is one of those times. Throughout the piece, he refers to the bizarre political aftermath of an earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, which saw six scientists imprisoned for six...

Senate Democrats are about to burn the midnight oil to make their case on climate change. The previously rumored all-night session on the effects of climate change will take place Monday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse confirmed. “It’s locked in,” the Rhode Island Democrat told CQ Roll Call. “An all-nighter is an all-nighter. We’re going to go all the way through to eight or nine in the morning or whenever they need to clean it up for the next day.” That would clearly meet the established definition of an all-night session. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and Whitehouse are coordinating the campaign. Whitehouse...

Washington (AFP) - US Secretary of State John Kerry has called on American ambassadors around the world to make the fight against climate change a top priority ahead of new UN talks next year. In his first department-wide policy guidance statement since taking office a year ago, he told his 70,000 staff: "The environment has been one of the central causes of my life." "Protecting our environment and meeting the challenge of global climate change is a critical mission for me as our country's top diplomat," Kerry said in the letter issued on Friday to all 275 US embassies and...

Washington, D.C. may have the highest number of certified green buildings in the country, but research by Environmental Policy Alliance suggests it might not be doing much good.The free-market group analyzed the first round of energy usage data released by city officials Friday and found that large, privately-owned buildings that received the green energy certification Leadership in Energy Design (LEED) actually use more energy than buildings that didn’t receive this green stamp of approval.LEED is the brainchild of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a private environmental group.

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is driving ahead with a dramatic reduction in sulfur in gasoline and tailpipe emissions, declaring that cleaner air will save thousands of lives per year at little cost to consumers. Public health groups and automakers cheered the new rules, finalized Monday by the Environmental Protection Agency, with some insisting they could prove to be President Barack Obama's signature environmental accomplishment in his second term. The oil and gas industry, meanwhile, panned the move, calling it gratuitous and accusing the government of grossly underestimating the increased cost at the pump. "The benefits far outweigh the costs," said EPA...