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To put it another way, an area the size of Alaska, America’s biggest state, was open water two years ago, but is again now covered by ice. The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres. This was the highest level recorded on that...

Halper believes that the Clintons’ effort to in effect keep their friends close while turning enemies into friends has been a masterful and hugely overlooked part of the rebuilding of their machine: "What has been little understood in the past decade, from 2001 to the present, is how successfully the Clintons undertook a systematic, comprehensive, and sustained effort to win over leaders in the GOP, especially figures who were once the biggest critics. In return, both Clintons were able to develop a bipartisan, statesmanlike image that had eluded them through eight years in the White House."

The EU advisers have been telling the U.N. secretary-general that the process of annual agreements by which individual states have already signed away much of their sovereignty and independence has now gone far enough for the final stage to be achieved without anyone really fighting back. The one thing neither the EU nor the U.N. has sufficiently understood is the wisdom and prescience of your Founding Fathers. Mr. Obama may mark his “X” on the draft world-government treaty (it won’t be called that, of course, but that is what it will be). But unless two-thirds of the Senate can be...

President Obama is planning to use some legislative trickery to write a new climate change accord and bypass the Senate's historic responsibility to approve treaties. Hey! At least he's consistent in his lawbreaking.

President Obama reportedly plans to do an end-run around Congress to forge an international climate change deal, effectively bypassing the Constitution's requirement to get the Senate's approval for a treaty. The New York Times reported that the agreement is slated to be signed at a United Nations meeting next year in Paris. However, because the U.S. Senate is unlikely to ratify any international climate treaty, Obama’s negotiators reportedly are working toward an alternative agreement – a “politically binding” deal that would serve in lieu of a bona-fide treaty.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Global warming is here, human-caused and probably already dangerous — and it's increasingly likely that the heating trend could be irreversible, a draft of a new international science report says. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday sent governments a final draft of its synthesis report, which combines three earlier, gigantic documents by the Nobel Prize-winning group. There is little in the report that wasn't in the other more-detailed versions, but the language is more stark and the report attempts to connect the different scientific disciplines studying problems caused by the burning of fossil...

It’s been a cool summer so far for many across the U.S. as 1,097 record low temperatures were set in August, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) temperature data. NOAA reports that 1,097 “low maximum” temperature records were broken between Aug. 1 and Aug. 23 at locations across the country this year. This means that these temperatures on the day they were recorded were the coolest on record. After a particularly long and frigid winter, summer for much of the U.S. has been cooler than normal, according to NOAA data. The average temperature for July was just 73.3...

I see that both the Farmer’s Almanac and Joe Bastardi (the other Joey B) are predicting another El Nino winter, which means a stormier and colder than normal winter, especially along the east coast. That could prove to be a bit of a problem since power companies apparently took Barry at his word that “if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them.”  So they didn’t. And they’re closing the coal plants they do have: “In order to comply with the new Obama era EPA regs, American Electric Power, which supplies...

The unbearable sadness of climate activism: Nicole Thornton remembers the exact moment her curious case of depression became too real to ignore. It was five years ago and the environmental scientist – a trained biologist and ecologist – was writing a rather dry PhD on responsible household water use. Fair enough. That would make anyone depressed. Thornton had always been easily upset by apathy towards, and denial of, environmental issues. But now she began to notice an oddly powerful personal reaction to "the small stuff" – like people littering, or neighbours chopping down an old tree. So, she's a bossy...

Climate key to Sphinx's riddle JEREMY WATSON GLOBAL warming is one of the greatest threats to present day civilisation but work by a team of Scots scientists suggests the ancient Egyptians may have been earlier victims of climate change. The pharaohs ruled their empire for hundreds of years, spreading culture, architecture and the arts before it collapsed into economic ruin. Why that happened is one of the great mysteries of history. Now a team of scientists from Scotland and Wales believe the answer lies beneath the waters of Lake Tana, high in the Ethiopian Highlands, and the source of the...

The header link goes to the article on space.com. Basic story is that an Italian guy who sounds like a hobbyist (former curator of a science museum) found the feature while tooling around on GoogleEarth. Since it's in the remote desert, it's hardly changed since impact -- even has ejecta rays. There's a problem here; most models indicate that an object the likely size of this object should disintegrate in the atmosphere. This one obviously didn't. Abstract in Science magazine (you'd have to pay to read the whole thing) The Kamil Crater in Egypt Fresh crater in Egypt -- increases...

...the fall of the great Egyptian Old Kingdom may have been helped along by a common problem which remains with us now -- drought... a severe period of drought around 4,200 years ago may have contributed to the demise of the civilisation. Using seismic investigations with sound waves, along with carbon dating of a 100-metre section of sediment from the bed of Lake Tana in Ethiopia, the team were able to look back many thousands of years. They were able to see how water levels in the lake had varied over the past 17,000 years, with the sediment signalling lush...

A newly discovered water source could supply half of Africa's driest sub-Saharan country with 400 years of water, reports Matt McGrath of BBC. The new aquifer – called Ohangwena II – flows under the border between Angola and Namibia, covering an area of about 43 miles by 25 miles on Namibia's side. The water is up to 10,000 years old and cleaner to drink than many modern sources. Project manager Martin Quinger told BBC that the stored water could last 400 years based on current rates of consumption. Currently the 800,000 people living in the northern part of the country...

Source: University of Chicago Date: July 20, 2007 Ice Age Survivors Found In Iceland Science Daily — Many scientists believe that the ice ages exterminated all life on land and in freshwater in large parts of the Northern Hemisphere, especially on ocean islands such as Iceland. Crymostygius thingvallensis, the only species in a recently described family of groundwater amphipods Crymostygidae. (Credit: photograph by Thorkell Heidarsson) Scientists at Holar University College and the University of Iceland have challenged that belief, at least when looking at groundwater animals. They have discovered two species of groundwater amphipods in Iceland that are the only...

OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a tiny shift back towards greener conditions in parts of the Sahara, apparently because of OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a...

Once Lush Sahara Dried Up Over Millennia, Study SaysJames Owen for National Geographic NewsMay 8, 2008 The grassy prehistoric Sahara turned into Earth's largest hot desert more slowly than previously thought, a new report says—and some say global warming may turn the desert green once again. The new research is based on deposits from a unique desert lake in remote northern Chad. Lake Yoa, sustained by prehistoric groundwater, has survived for millennia despite constant drought and searing heat. The body of water contains an unbroken climate record going back at least 6,000 years, said study lead author Stefan Kröpelin of...

Reconstructing the climate of the past is an important tool for scientists to better understand and predict future climate changes that are the result of the present-day global warming. Although there is still little known about the Earth's tropical and subtropical regions, these regions are thought to play an important role in both the evolution of prehistoric man and global climate changes. New North African climate reconstructions reveal three 'green Sahara' episodes during which the present-day Sahara Desert was almost completely covered with extensive grasslands, lakes and ponds over the course of the last 120.000 years. The findings of Dr....

Space Data Unveils Evidence of Ancient Mega-lake in Northern Darfur Researchers at the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing used recently acquired topographic data from satellites to reveal a now dry, ancient mega-lake in the Darfur province of northwestern Sudan. Drs. Eman Ghoneim and Farouk El-Baz made the finding while investigating Landsat images and Radarsat data. Radar waves are able to penetrate the fine-grained sand cover in the hot and dry eastern Sahara to reveal buried features. Segments of the lake’s shoreline were identified at the constant altitude of 573 ± 3 meters above sea level. Ghoneim incorporated these segments...

Ancient drought 'changed history' By Roland Pease BBC science unit, San Francisco The sediments are an archive of past climate conditions Scientists have identified a major climate crisis that struck Africa about 70,000 years ago and which may have changed the course of human history.The evidence comes from sediments drilled up from the beds of Lake Malawi and Tanganyika in East Africa, and from Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana. It shows equatorial Africa experienced a prolonged period of drought. It is possible, scientists say, this was the reason some of the first humans left Africa to populate the globe. Certainly,...

African Ice Core Analysis Reveals Catastrophic Droughts, Shrinking Ice Fields, Civilization Shifts COLUMBUS, Ohio – A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. Lastly, the analysis also supports Ohio State University researchers' prediction that these unique bodies of ice will disappear in the next two decades, the victims of global warming. These findings were published today in the journal...