Scientists at Germany’s Kiel University predict the Earth’s temperature will stay roughly the same in the coming decade as the planet’s natural climate cycle enters a cooling phase. But thereafter, the researchers expect temperatures to begin rising quickly by about 2020. – unless they don’t. The forecast centers around the ocean’s natural temperature cycles, called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is closely associated with the warm currents that carry heat from the tropics to European shores. “One message from our study is that in the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),” Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University told BBC News.

Read the entire article in the Journal Science.

Prepare for the big chill. Notwithstanding the near hysteria over global warming the earth cooled 0.7C in 2007, the fastest decline in the age of instrumentation, putting us back to where the Earth was in 1930.

Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut, and who served as mission specialist on the Apollo 14 lunar mission writes the same solar phenomenon that doomed Napoleon’s army may soon stop Al Gore’s march to glory cold.

The sun goes through a series of 11-year cycles in which sunspots fluctuate in both number and intensity, greatly influencing Earth’s climate and weather. The end of each cycle is called a solar minimum, where sunspot activity is at a low point. Activity usually picks up after that as each new cycle begins. The most recent minimum occurred in March 2007. Sunspot activity should have increased shortly after that but sunspot activity has remained at a virtual standstill.

If you log on to www.spaceweather.com, you will see a current picture of the sun from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) with but a single tiny sunspot, dubbed number 992. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this, according to Chapman, was during what was called the Dalton Minimum, a particularly cold period that lasted several decades starting in 1790. “Northern winters became ferocious,” he says.

Solar researchers report no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate another repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth. Were that to continue at that rate for 20-years a drop of 14 degrees Celsius would trigger glaciation and an ice age would return.

Chapman and increasing numbers of other scientist are asking the rhetorical question “What’s wrong with this picture.”

April 22, 2008 is EARTH DAY or EARTHDAY that appear to be separate groups. Earth Day was founded in 1970 and the Environmental Protection Agency’s official birthday, listed on its website, is December 2, 1970. EARTHDAY’s website says it promotes environmental citizenship and year round “progressive action” worldwide. Twenty million people across America celebrated the first Earth Day and the number has remained constant. The EARTHDAY website says 1 billion worldwide are involved to some degree.

The ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY EARTH DAY website focuses on domestic issues and events and shares in the EPA’S federal taxpayer budget specifically allocated $3 million for the day exclusive of indirect costs that may add another $20 million to the figure. The EPAs spends nearly $1 million an hour. For fiscal year 2009 it requested $7.1 billion for 17,000 full-time equivalent employees.

EPA’s website credits Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, with an epiphany of conservation calling it “This exhaustively researched, carefully reasoned, and beautifully written attack on the indiscriminate use of pesticides.” More recently Carson’s core allegation that wild bird’s eggshells were being thinned due to DDT has been debunked and much of its 1972 ban has been rolled back amid estimates its banning unnecessarily costs 20 million human death mostly from malaria. A REASON magazine study puts it in summary this way, “Carson’s concerns about the effects of synthetic chemicals on human health were not completely unwarranted. Along with other researchers, she was simply ignorant of the facts. But after four decades in which tens of billions of dollars have been wasted chasing imaginary risks without measurably improving American health, her intellectual descendants don’t have the same excuse.”

President Bush announced his plan this week to limit greenhouse gases — he said he will ban all greenhouses. — Leno

In mind numbingly complex mathematical article in the March issue of PHYSICS TODAY by DUKE UNIVERSITY researcher Nicola Scafetta, and Bruce West chief scientist at the US Army Research office concludes that “the Sun could account for 69% of the earth’s average temperature increase” of 0.8 +/-0.1 degree Celsius since 1900.

It also says that “since 2002 the temperature data suggest global cooling, not a warming.” They conclude, “Furthermore, if the Sun does cool off, as some solar forecast predict over the coming to decades. That cooling would stabilize Earth’s climate and avoid the catastrophic consequences predicted by the IPCC report (on global warming).“

Such studies suggest much of the current hysteria about global warming is just that — so much non-scientific bunkum based on political agendas; promoted by talking media heads with no science backgrounds, and secularist progressives willing to have the USA finance global economic redistribution regardless or perhaps because of deleterious impacts on America.

A February 18 U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report says almost all the allegedly “lost” arctic ice has come back and is almost back to original levels. Plus, a Feb. 18 report in the London Daily Express showed that there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than usual.

The Express also points out the Al Gore touted photograph of polar bears clinging on to a melting iceberg which has been widely hailed as proof of the need to fight climate change was taken in August. In fact the northern Hemisphere has endured its coldest winter in decades. Around the world, vast areas have been buried under some of the heaviest snowfalls in decades, and a copyrighted NEWSMAX article snidely says, “If global warming gets any worse we’ll all freeze to death.”

I believe mankind should immediately and seriously embark on a goal, to be driven by technology, not market based trading schemes as they have unintended consequences, to reduce worldwide use of and dependence of most of the world on so many carbon based energy sources. This should be done without political hysteria (ha) or business resistance (ha), in order to bring change to the oil based tensions in the world, to stimulate intellectual processes and learning, to create new economic businesses to create jobs and as an important byproduct to reduce our contribution of green house gases into the atmosphere, whether or not our use is determinative to short term climate change. Still an open question in science.

Most importantly for the US, national security is on the line and our unnecessary budget deficits are ballooned by our attempts to keep oil flowing to the entire world, not just to the US.

Keep up on the news at a number of important sites such as Taipei Times

For the English point of view try Ft.com.

For additional background check Wikipedia Here.

How could Davos 2008 get along without YouTube?

Chris Rock cracked up the audience at his New Year’s Eve show with a few quips about Hillary Clinton. “I think America’s ready for a woman president . . . just not that woman,” Rock told the crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

“Being married to somebody doesn’t make you good at their job. I’ve been with my wife 10 years now. If she got up here right now, y’all wouldn’t laugh.

Eighty-four year old Paul Smokov doesn’t need radar or other high-tech stuff to forecast weather on the North Dakota prairie. He consults pig spleens. The editor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac in Dublin, N.H., said she had heard of at least one other pig spleen weather prognosticator but he died. “The spleens are 85 percent correct, according to my figures,” Paul said. As for the “scientific” weathermen, “Those guys aren’t any better.”