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The amount of floating ice in the Arctic's Bering Sea - which had long been expected to retreat disastrously by climate-Cassandra organisations such as Greenpeace - reached all-time record high levels last month, according to US researchers monitoring the area using satellites. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center announced last week that ice extent in the Bering for the month of March has now been collated and compared, and is the highest seen since records began.

UPDATE: 11:30AM 4/12/12 Predictably, Andrew Revkin from the New York Times joins in with the poo-pooing consensus saying it is “utterly unremarkable ” (yet he writes a article about it – go figure). From Revkin’s shuttered in world of living in the woods (he didn’t even know what the TV show Seinfeld was until I brought it to his attention in Climategate2), that’s probably true, but Andy, here is one of your favorite consensus buzzphrases that can be applied: it is an unprecedented letter. There’s no denying that. – Anthony ==========From the Daily Caller, in my opinion, a load of...

The Obama administration was more vocal about the supposedly dire need to combat climate change toward the beginning of their oh-so-eminent reign, with President Obama out championing the cause at such august events as the U.N. climate conference in 2009. There’s been a bit of a lull in their alarmist-enthusiasm rhetoric in the past year or so (maybe they’ve figured out that concern for climate change is a luxury good during times of economic recession), but it looks like they may be thinking about bringing back the meme to help sell their horrendous energy polices in the run-up to November....

NASA is swiping back at a group of nearly 50 of its former scientists and astronauts who wrote to accuse the space agency of advocating the “extreme” position that global warming is the result of man-made carbon dioxide.In a March 28 letter addressed to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, 49 former employees said the “unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.” But NASA responded on Wednesday by saying they don’t “draw conclusions and issue ‘claims’...

Joint letter from 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts to the current NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidence about global warming.

Looks like another GISS miss, more than a few people are getting fed up with Jim Hansen and Gavin Schmidt and their climate shenanigans. Some very prominent NASA voices speak out in a scathing letter to current NASA administrator Charles Bolden, Jr.. When Chris Kraft, the man who presided over NASA’s finest hour, and the engineering miracle of saving Apollo 13 speaks, people listen. Former NASA scientists, astronauts admonish agency on climate change positionFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEContact: Blanquita Cullum 703-307-9510 bqview at mac.comJoint letter to NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidenceHOUSTON, TX – April 10, 2012.49 former NASA...

The 85th Congress and President Eisenhower set up the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to explore space. Government bureaucrat James Hansen has used his position and NASA’s reputation to advance an unscientific agenda that calls for government restrictions on all major industries and any other human activity in the bane of controlling carbon dioxide production. This junk science has made him a millionaire through income outside the government. He is a rogue government agent who no one seems able to supervise. Now 50 top former and current astronauts and NASA scientists and engineers have had enough. They want this crackpot...

Joint Post by Tony Cox and Jo Nova Clouds cool the planet as it warms Clouds cover an enormous 65% of the planet and are responsible for about half of the sunlight that is reflected back out to space.[i] The effects of clouds are so strong that most of the differences between IPCC-favoured-models comes from the assumptions the models make about clouds. Cloud feedbacks are the “largest source of uncertainty”.[ii] Numerous studies show models project wildly different results for clouds, and yet few could correctly simulate clouds as recorded by satellites.[iii] One researcher described our understanding of cloud parameters as...

Given the high profile story today about the 49 NASA astronauts, engineers, and scientists who wrote a scathing letter to NASA director Charles Bolden, Jr. saying Jim Hansen and NASA GISS are exemplifying the “wrong stuff”, I thought I’d share this poster contributed by WUWT reader NickFromNYC:

According to WWJ Detroit, there was an explosion at the General Motors Tech Center in Warren, Mich., on Wednesday morning. Deputy Fire Chief Gary Wilkinson said the explosion most likely was related to a lithium battery. Wilkinson told Autoweek that a responder notified the HAZMAT team via radio that the explosion involved lithium batteries in the research facility's Alternative Energy Center. The fire was extinguished and portions of the facility were evacuated, but responders were still on the scene. Two people were taken to the hospital with nonlife-threatening injuries. Check out WWJ CBS Detroit for up-to-the-minute information. Read more: http://www.autoweek.com/article/20120411/CARNEWS/120419982#ixzz1rkOFfaeg

Copper -- the stuff of pennies and tea kettles -- is also one of the few metals that can turn carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels with relatively little energy. When fashioned into an electrode and stimulated with voltage, copper acts as a strong catalyst, setting off an electrochemical reaction with carbon dioxide that reduces the greenhouse gas to methane or methanol. Various researchers around the world have studied copper’s potential as an energy-efficient means of recycling carbon dioxide emissions in powerplants: Instead of being released into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide would be circulated through a copper catalyst and turned into...

BrightSource Energy of Oakland, a solar power-plant developer whose first project won $1.6 billion in federal backing, abruptly canceled its initial public stock offering Wednesday night, just hours before trading was scheduled to begin. The surprise move killed what had been the most hotly anticipated clean-tech IPO this spring. It casts doubt on investor appetite for similar offerings in the future. The cancellation could also revive the debate over federal support for renewable power companies. Solar-module maker Solyndra of Fremont, which received $528 million from the same government program that funded BrightSource's first power plant, also canceled a planned IPO...

Just as the Department of Energy gave A123 Systems a vote of confidence by extending a deadline until 2014 to spend down its $249 million stimulus grant, the deeply troubled electric vehicle supplier experienced another setback. One of their batteries caused an explosion. The blast occurred yesterday morning in Warren, Mich. at General Motors’ Alternative Energy Center – a research facility – while performing on an A123 battery “intensive tests designed to make it fail,” the Detroit News reported. GM confirmed to Crain’s Detroit Business that chemical gases released by the battery caused the explosion. One employee was sent...

The government spent at least $205,075 in 2010 to “translocate” a single bush in San Francisco that stood in the path of a $1.045 billion highway-renovation project that was partially funded by the economic stimulus legislation President Barack Obama signed in 2009. “In October 2009, an ecologist identified a plant growing in a concrete-bound median strip along Doyle Drive in the Presidio as Arctostaphylos franciscana,” the U.S. Department of Interior reported in the Aug. 10, 2010 edition of the Federal Register. The bush—a Franciscan manzanita—was a specimen of a commercially cultivated species of shrub that can be purchased from nurseries...

From the earliest days of the Wild West, water rights have always been a bone of contention and, no doubt, the cause of more than one gunfight. It’s still an issue to this day. But instead of being a dispute between farmer and rancher or cattleman and sheepherder, it’s now a battle between people and fish. Two years ago, the Delta smelt, a tiny, minnow-like fish, caused a brouhaha. In an effort to save this fish (which has no commercial value whatsoever), water supplies to California’s Central Valley were severely limited. As a direct result, this fertile agricultural center was...

There is a way to stop the EPA's abuse of science and prevent their continued aggressive regulatory activity that destroys the economy and causes harm to Americans. Primarily, we have to hold the EPA to good scientific principles and stop the EPA's overreaching and panic-mongering. The method that will work is a well-established judicial and legal demand for good scientific evidence as described in the Daubert supreme court opinion, explained in the book by the Federal Judicial Center -- the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The Supreme Court opinion in Daubert v. Merrell Dow, 509 U.S. 579 (1993) set out...

With the ongoing media coverage of a well-known scientist lying to get confidential documents from the Heartland Institute regarding global warming, there’s been consistent reporting in the media about the “scientific consensus” that climate change is manmade. Numerous articles on blogs and news sites cite that scientific “consensus” of man-made global warming without citing any reference. The phrase may be a reference to the body of work done over the years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which involves work done by thousands of scientists from more than 120 governments. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center...

Costs of Algae Biofuel* By: Larry Walker, Jr. *Detective Thorn: It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them! ~ Memorable quotes from Soylent Green * The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), reported that gasoline prices have risen from an average price of $1.61, in the week ending December 29, 2008, to $3.72, as of the week ending February 27, 2012 (see chart above). So with gasoline prices on a tear having risen by 131%...

Over at Bishop Hill there is a post titled A Study in Groupthink that looks at an exchange of Twitter comments between Maurizio Morabito ( @Omnologos ) and Bora Zivkovic ( @BoraZ ), the blogs editor at Scientific American. The author of the Bishop Hill blog, Andrew Montford, explains in his post that Zivkovic is clearly very much out of the same mould as Peter Gleick, which I take to mean an unswerving true believer, a rigid in his views who sees anyone dissenting from what he chooses to believe in and argue for as ultimately evil or corrupted by...

On one issue, President Barack Obama is depressingly consistent. Just this week, he once again sounded the alarm about the dangers of fossil fuels and the need to pursue alternative sources of energy. He is also determined to purse “green” energy projects, despite some well publicized disasters such as Solyndra. In spite of $535 million in federal government loans, the solar panel manufacturer went bankrupt. The administration was able to stage some nice photo opportunities, but the public’s money was wasted.