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It might seem like the weather’s getting warmer here on Earth, but Mars appears to have an even bigger global warming problem. High-resolution images snapped by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor show that levels of frozen water and carbon dioxide at the Red Planet’s poles have dwindled dramatically — by more than 10 feet — over a single Martian year (equivalent to 687 days or about two Earth years).

People who insist that climate change isn’t happening often try to disprove it by pointing to what they see as contradictory phenomena. One of their most visually compelling arguments has centered upon Antarctic sea ice, which expanded to reach record levels in 2014. If the planet really is warming, they ask, then shouldn’t the ice in the southern ocean be melting? But now, in a new, not-yet-published paper, James Hansen, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and colleagues push back even harder. They argue that the increase in Antarctic sea ice not only doesn’t refute climate...

you can see the best-ever images of Pluto, our solar system's most distant (dwarf) planet. The animation is made up of images taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft between April 12 and 18 from a distance of 69 to 64 million miles from Pluto. They capture one complete rotation of Pluto and its moon Charon... The images have already surpassed the Hubble's resolution, but there are plenty of features too subtle for the spacecraft to pick up. In fact, the images don't even show all of Pluto's known moons yet -- let alone any smaller ones we've yet to discover...

Are global warming skeptics simply ignorant about climate science? Not so, says a forthcoming paper in the journal Advances in Political Psychology by Yale Professor Dan Kahan. He finds that skeptics score about the same (in fact slightly better) on climate science questions. The study asked 2,000 respondents nine questions about where they thought scientists stand on climate science. On average, skeptics got about 4.5 questions correct, whereas manmade warming believers got about 4 questions right. One question, for instance, asked if scientists believe that warming would “increase the risk of skin cancer.” Skeptics were more likely than believers to...

Global warming hysterics at the BBC warned us in 2007 that by summer 2013, the Arctic would be ice-free. As with so many other doomsday predictions by warmists, the results turn out to be quite the opposite. The UK Daily Mail reports: A chilly Arctic summer has left 533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year - an increase of 29 per cent. (snip)...days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to...

The good news continues for the polar Ice Caps as through the beginning of April they continue to grow and are now approaching historic norms. The amount of sea ice covering the Arctic has dramatically increased during the cold winter, reaching levels not seen at this time of year for almost a decade.Of course our Moonbat friends in the Global Warming movement are throwing out excuse after excuse trying to convince us that it doesn't matter. Unusually cold weather, caused by the same patterns that have given Britain its coldest winter for decades, has resulted in levels of ice cover...

Climate Change: We can't stop terrorists from boarding planes with explosive undies, but the CIA has assets sufficient to monitor Arctic ice and look for signs of global warming? Is al-Qaida recruiting polar bears? One wouldn't think that the increasing polar bear population and the increasing rate of recidivism of former Guantanamo detainees released into the wild were related, but they are. At the urging of Al Gore, the administration is signing on to a plan to task vital intelligence assets to protect not the people of the United States, but the environment. The program, shot down by President Bush,...

The Watts Up With That website has a scary story about our melting polar ice caps. John Lockwood from Washington D.C. found an interesting article from the Washington Post. Here are some excerpts: The Arctic seems to be warming up. Reports ... all point to a radical change in climatic conditions, and hitherto unheard of high temperatures in that part of the earth's surface. Ice conditions were exceptional. In fact, so little ice has never before been noted. Dr. Hoel reports that he made a section of the Gulf Stream at 81 degrees north latitude and took soundings to a...

Former Vice President Al Gore made a startling announcement at the UN Climate Conference today: New computer modeling suggests the Arctic Ocean may be nearly ice-free in the summertime as early as 2014, Al Gore said Monday at the U.N. climate conference. This new projection, following several years of dramatic retreat by polar sea ice, suggests that the ice cap may nearly vanish in the summer much sooner than the year 2030, as was forecast by a U.S. government agency eight months ago. "It is hard to capture the astonishment that the experts in the science of ice felt when...

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday. The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row. Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years. In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the...

vanity

Core measurements and satellite data show that the polar ice caps (arctic and antarctic) are expanding, not shrinking. The Australian recently published an article on the fact that the antarctic ice cap is growing: ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap. . . . Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia’s Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The...

The United States suffered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province celebrated a white Christmas, something that hadn't happened in 37 years. At one point during the winter Europe had such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea.Three of the Great Lakes - Erie, Superior, and Huron - almost completely froze over. More bad news for the Church of Global Warming happened...

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...

They've got that global warming thing down coldPosted on Wed, Jul. 23, 2008 By GLENN GARVIN ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com • Penn & Teller's Bull----! 10-10:30 p.m. Thursday, Showtime I've seen lots of things on Penn & Teller's Bull----!, television's only investigative-journalism program run by comic magicians: Hidden-camera pranks where yuppie fools blather on about designer water that actually came from a garden hose. New Age health nuts allowing mollusks to crawl around on their faces to soak up the health benefits of slug slime. Naked people floating around in a zero-gravity chamber for a show on NASA. I don't actually know what...

NAIROBI, Kenya - Africa's two highest mountains — Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya — will lose their ice cover within 25 to 50 years if deforestation and industrial pollution are not stopped, environmentalists warned Thursday. Kilimanjaro has already lost 82 percent of its ice cover over 80 years, said Fredrick Njau of the Kenyan Green Belt Movement. Mount Kenya, one of the few places near the equator with permanent glaciers, has lost 92 percent over the past 100 years. "This is a major issue because declining ice caps mean the water tap is effectively going to be turned off and...

One worried bear - an apt symbol of the grim news from the planet's twin sentinels By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 30/09/2005) The white wastes at the Poles are often called the planet's sentinels; they provide an early warning system that will reveal what is in store for the rest of the world. For decades, scientists have predicted that if the effects of global warming took hold, they would first be measurable at the frozen extremes, where the impacts would be felt with a rapidity and intensity unlike anywhere else. The reason the Poles are a litmus of climate...

The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in at least a century of record keeping, continuing a trend toward less summer ice, a team of climate experts reported yesterday. The Cryosphere Today (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign) That shift is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, the team's members and other experts on the region said. The change also appears to be headed toward becoming self-sustaining: the increased open water absorbs solar energy that would otherwise be reflected back into space...

Link post, to alert interested FR readers to the post in the 'chat' section, where any comments should be posted: Geology Picture of the Week, June 13-19, 2004: Iceland

Links to larger images below this image: 500 meter resolution 250 meter resolution