continued ...

The past climates in the Arctic including glacial, and warmer interglacial periods occur because of fluctuations in solar and geothermal (composite interior nuclear reactor) heat inputs to the biosphere. Greenhouse gases follow these energy fluctuations but are in no way causal to them. How could they be, they are NOT prima facie an energy source in a biosphere that is continually ravaged by energy fluctuations.

By studying natural data loggers such as ice cores and marine sediments, scientists do NOT have a good idea what the “natural envelope” for Arctic climate variations has been, because compaction and contamination within core strata blur or average peak measurements and disprove that 'peak now' current measurements are unique.

Until people like Overpeck bone up on their thermodynamics 101 I suggest they keep their permafrost melting predictions to themselves. They have no basis, other than if they could measure solar and geothermal changes, to predict permafrost melting based on current regional redistributions of heat in the biosphere, where some ices are melting and others are thickening.

QUOTE: Second Law Of Thermodynamics: All energy in the Universe moves from heat sources to heat sinks, hot to cold, ordered to disordered.
If mankind creates persistent and growing pollution heat sinks in strategic oceanic zones across the globe, heat sources will come and they will bring destruction the likes of which clearly, no one here is yet capable of imagining. And when its all over, the biosphere will go on, unwarmed, unfrozen, as it has done for 41/2 billion years.
None of us has the 'global warmer' luxury of the next 100 years to plan for these changes. They will begin within the next 10 years and the looming 2006 US hurricane season will just be openers.

It is amusing that the salaries for worldwide global warmer scientists, diplomats and their flunkies total up to enough for the creation of sufficient Engineered Wetlands across the globe to clean coastal runoffs and halt climate change in its tracks.

What I find interesting with these comments by KAEP and MikeM is just how confused and uncertain it all is. Well here is some more for readers to ponder.
http://mclean.ch/climate/Arctic_ice.htm

It is pertinent to remember that IPCC/AGW theory has it that AGW will first appear in the polar regions. This is an article of faith with the alarmists.

Us cynics and realists want to know why, if the Arctic is warming, why isnt the same happening in the Antarctic, which by all accounts is inceasing in thickness, and extent.

When that has been dealt with, the author and readers of this blog article might like to explain how all this is more certain and/or more damaging in the short term to humanity than the imminent threat of a mad mullah some where (and there are plenty of them) letting go with an atomic bomb in a container in a western harbour, or any number of other equally devastating terrorist activity, all of which could happen tomorrow.

I note that Mike M hasnt not come back and explained his ignorance of the antics of the maddest of all the mullahs namely Ahmadinejad, who incidentally believes that he was put on earth to prepare the way for the 12th Mahdi, and that Isreal should be wiped off the map.

But then as an academic he wouldnt be aware of real world matters, they never are.

These are excellent points Bigmal, but when it comes to Mad Mullahs, The grand Ayatollah proclaimed also to be a prophet of Allah, and also married a nine year old child, so chronic delusions and criminality comes in abundance- maybe there is a link in Pathological traits? Yes perhaps a neurological disorder through a Polygamists existence? I wonder when Islam and the Left – departed this world, what do they see? Smog or Virgins?

MikeM I found the satellite of the artic ice interesting and alarming.
The data about the Greenland glacier flow also alarming as this ice falling into the sea raises sea levels.

gecko what makes you think that everyone believes the earth is not flat? The evidence showing it to be round (almost)is only a few hundred years old so some have not had the chance to absorb it.

Religous fundamentalists (both sides) are a great threat to us all,they kill people in the name of God the same as they did when the world was flat and the sun moved round the earth.

I am well aware of the belligerent posture of Iran's president as I am of North Korea's president and of rumours that the US and Israel are planning to attack Iran.

A small, 1 kiloton nuclear device might wipe a few thousand people (the Hiroshima death toll from a 20 kiloton device is estimated, http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp10.shtml to have been 66,000 and Nagasaki 39,000, although other estimates put it at rather more than twice that.)

A few suitcase atomic bombs won't stop a nation in its stride. Global warming could.

KAEP assures that scientists are "the least competent" to extrapolate what is happening to the world's climate.

I don't know what KAEP is (astrologist? water diviner?), but presumably he is far more competent than a scientist - my word then, we are SO lucky to have him in this forum.

Just a small quibble though: he seems to be about a century behind the times in understanding the second law of thermodynamics, http://www.complexsystems.net.au/content/irreversibility

QUOTE
... most systems are not isolated: they are open in various ways, being subject to mass, energy, entropy, (and, more abstractly, information fluxes across their boundaries). Although the total entropy of a system plus its environment (which together constitute an isolated system) must increase, we emphasise again that it does not follow that the entropy of an open system must increase. Instead, there are many remarkable instances of self-organization of such systems into coherent structures, ranging from tropical cyclones through individual biological organisms to human civilizations...
END QUOTE

If KAEP's statement of the theory were correct, refrigerators would be thermodynamically impossible.

Big Mal, I'm not a scientist nor a beaurucrat, and only have my own observations. I understand where your coming from and even though I think otherwise I agree with your supposition from a viewpoint that there is no apparent correlation. The last thing I wish to see is our ecology collapse, because if it does then all the stats in the world will make no difference.

The workings of our universe are in a state of chaos, yet that chaos in most cases appears to be localised and randomly placed. We all know that a flood in most cases begins with rises and falls of the river before moving into full flood.

If we put all the isolated cases of climate change and ecological breakdown together, they may have the desired effect of bringing about what people fear. I don't think it's one cause, KAEP has this agenda about coastal water warming as a big cause, and it has its place as does mine and many others in the country that see changes that certainly aren't normal. Where I live, we are growing avocados and have tropical sea life being found in our waters. Thats weird considering we sit on the edge of the southern ocean and the water used to be so cold, now its not to bad. The local salmon farms are struggling with rising water temperatures. So there are a lot of isolated little bits happening, that combined to tip us quickly over the edge.

When you add that to the religious cranks that are trying to take over the world for the 2000th time, what can we expect. On one side we have the warmongers called religion overflowing throughout the world and the other, ecological changes caused by the combination of thousands of detrimental actions against the ecology of this planet.

Think I'll catch the next passing neutrino to another universe.