NASA Raises Prospect of Detectable Life in our Solar System

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Two veteran NASA missions are providing new details about icy, ocean-bearing moons of Jupiter and Saturn, further heightening the scientific interest of these and other "ocean worlds" in our solar system and beyond. The findings are presented in papers published Thursday by researchers with NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn and Hubble Space Telescope.

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April 15, 2017 at 12:29AM

Post-Easter Frost And Snow To Grip Central Europe As Temps To Fall 12°C Below Normal!

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Some years ago German warmist climatologist Mojib Latif complained over our changing climate, reminding us how in Germany we used to get snow sometimes for Easter.

Well this year, in mid April, Easter is relatively late, and the forecast is now calling for snow to hit large parts of Europe as a low pressure system (OTTO) centered over the Baltic sea will pump polar air across the continent — thus ushering in a nasty and possibly protracted spell of winter.

Germany’s DWD forecast for April 15. Otto’s cold front will pump in cold and moist polar air to kick off an unusual wintery April cold wave: Source: http://ift.tt/2ohtV77.

German weather and climate site wobleibtdieerderwaermung.de here provides a good analysis of the situation. Ahead for the coming days are frost and snow. What follows are the GFS snow forecast charts from wetteronline.de for April 17, 18 and 19, which show widespread snowfall across Central Europe, even reaching down to the Mediterranean by Wednesday:

Chart sources: wetteronline.de

According to the WBDE site, temperatures in Europe will plummet by up to 12°C below normal.

NOAA caught by surprise, revise forecast

The April cold wave took the NOAA by surprise. The US weather and climate organization had predicted an outright balmy April back on March 22, 2017:

CFSv2 April temperature prognosis of March 22, 2017. Source: http://ift.tt/2oh7ejo

Obviously the NOAA weather models had some major blind spots back in March (which is understandable), as much of Europe was projected to be 2°C warmer than the long-term mean.

But later on when the cold became obvious, the NOAA was forced to update its April 2017 forecast:

CFSc2 temperature forecast for April 2017. Much of the forecast was corrected significantly downward. Source: http://ift.tt/2oh7ejo

On the other hand March 2017 across Central Europe was very warm, and had a umber of media outlets blaming it on global warming. Germany even saw a new warm record set for the month of March. Perhaps that skewed the forecasters into thinking the warmth would continue, all in line with the global warming beliefs.

Trend: spring in fact coming later and later

The German DWD then added that spring was starting earlier and earlier – due to climate change, yetdid not mention that you have to go back some 60 years to get an overall warming trend line. However over the past 30 years, German springs have in fact been starting later and later – a fact that the DWD conveniently omitted.

Now it appears winter will be pushing spring back to May this year. Midterm forecasts show the cold wave will persist at least another week.

Warmists, however, will naturally be quick to point that late-April snow in Central Europe is really nothing that unusual, which is true — if the cold spell lasts only a matter of days. However, as Wetter24 here notes, what is about to hit the continent will persist and thus be indeed unusual. It writes of April weather in Germany:

On the other hand what is unusual is a longer-lasting phase with significantly below or above normal temperatures. And it is such a phase that is now approaching with an anticipated long period of below normal temperatures.”

The bottom line: “thing-of-the-past” snow and frost are still ignoring “global warming” and are still showing up in April. Earlier predictions that they wouldn’t are wrong.

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April 15, 2017 at 12:00AM

Ireland ‘doomed’ to face emissions fines

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By Paul Homewood

 

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From The Times (with obligatory fake images of black steam):

 

Ireland is unlikely to avoid having to pay multimillion-euro fines for missing emissions targets, the Environmental Protection Agency has warned.

Emissions from the agriculture and transport sectors are increasing at a rapid pace, the watchdog said yesterday. It forecasted that by 2020 the country would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by only 4 to 6 per cent from 2005 levels, despite a 20 per cent target it is legally bound to achieve.

Environmentalists and opposition parties condemned the government yesterday for failing to act and said that the country was “doomed” to face hundreds of millions of euros in sanctions.

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If I was the Irish Govt, I would tell the EU where to stick their fines!

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April 14, 2017 at 10:06PM

Antarctic Peninsula Cooled Nearly 1°C During 1999–2014

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By Paul Homewood

 

The Antarctic Peninsula has widely been reported as one of the fastest warming places on Earth, and therefore evidence of global warming.

As I have pointed out before though, the warming actually stopped in the mid 1990s, and was actually a weather related event, due to changing wind patterns.

 

Now, as the GWPF report, scientists have confirmed that the region has actually been cooling since 1990:

 

Climate alarmists generally contend that current temperatures are both unnatural and unprecedented, as a result of global warming caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions; and they claim that this “unnaturalness” is most strongly expressed throughout the world’s polar regions. In this regard, they often point to warming on the Antarctic Peninsula (typically the Faraday/Vernadsky station) as the proverbial canary in the coal mine, where over the past several decades it has experienced warming rates that are among the highest reported anywhere on Earth.

However, in recent years two studies have challenged this assessment. Carrasco (2013) reported finding a decrease in the warming rate from stations on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula between 2001 and 2010, as well as a slight cooling trend for King George Island (in the South Shetland Islands just off the peninsula). Similarly, in an analysis of the regional stacked temperature record over the period 1979-2014, Turner et al. (2016) reported a switch from warming during 1979-1997 to cooling thereafter (1999-2014). And now, in 2017, we have a third assessment of recent temperature trends on the Antarctic Peninsula confirming that the canary is alive and well!

As their contribution to the debate, Olivia et al. (2017) report in the journal Science of the Total Environment how they “complete and extend [the study of Turner et al.] by presenting an updated assessment of the spatially-distributed temperature trends and interdecadal variability of mean annual air temperature and mean seasonal air temperature from 1950 to 2015, using data from ten stations distributed across the Antarctic Peninsula region.” And what did that assessment reveal?

In describing their findings, the eight European researchers write “we show that [the] Faraday/Vernadsky warming trend is an extreme case, circa twice those of the long-term records from other parts of the northern Antarctic Peninsula.” They also note the presence of significant decadal-scale variability among the ten temperature records, which they linked to large-scale atmospheric phenomenon, such as ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Southern Annular Mode. Perhaps most important, however, is their confirmation that “from 1998 onward, a turning point has been observed in the evolution of mean annual air temperatures across the Antarctic Peninsula region, changing from a warming to a cooling trend,” especially over the last decade (see figure below). This cooling has amounted to a 0.5 to 0.9 °C decrease in temperatures in most of the Antarctic Peninsula region, the only exception being three stations located in the southwest sector of the peninsula that experienced a slight delay in their thermal turning point, declining only over the shorter period of the past decade. It is also pertinent to note that, coincident with the above findings, Olivia et al. cite independent evidence from multiple other sources in support of the recent cooling detected in their analysis, including an “increase in the extent of sea ice, positive mass-balance of peripheral glaciers and thinning of the active layer of permafrost.”

In light of all the above, the evidence is clearly mounting against those who point to warming on the Antarctic Peninsula as proof of CO2-induced global warming. For in the most incredible manner, warming trends that were once among the highest recorded on earth have slowed and even reversed to show cooling.

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April 14, 2017 at 10:06PM