By Oleg Nekhai

Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless. Some experts warn that a change in the climate may affect the ambitious projects for the exploration of the Arctic that have been launched by many countries.

Just recently, experts said that the Arctic ice cover was becoming thinner while journalists warned that the oncoming global warming would make it possible to grow oranges in the north of Siberia. Now, they say a cold spell will set in. Apparently, this will not occur overnight, Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory, says.

“Journalists say the entire process is very simple: once solar activity declines, the temperature drops. But besides solar activity, the climate is influenced by other factors, including the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the ocean, the glaciers. The share of solar activity in climate change is only 20%. This means that sun’s activity could trigger certain changes whereas the actual climate changing process takes place on the Earth.”

Solar activity follows different cycles, including an 11-year cycle, a 90-year cycle and a 200-year cycle. Yuri Nagovitsyn comments.

“Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years. The period of low solar activity could start in 2030-2040 but it won’t be as pervasive as in the late 17th century.”

Read the rest at The Voice of Russia.

According to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), 2013 brought us the second latest start to spring spring in US history. The only recorded year in which the beginning of spring was colder was 1975. Probably not coincidentally, it was in April of 1975 when Newsweek published its infamous “The Cooling World” feature.

See the NOAA data at Real Science.

by Anthony Watts

In the continental USA, there were 137 high temperature type records versus 857 low temperature type records this past week , a 6-1 difference. Last week there were 1154 low temperature type records putting the two week total for October at 2011. There were also 24 new snowfall records set this week in the upper plains.

Read the rest at: WUWT

Hat-tip to Climate Depot.

A couple interesting articles popped up today about tampering with the historical temperature data at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). It seems that the real, unfudged data shows a steady cooling trend from 1930 to 1999.

Have a look a these articles from the Real Science Blog:

Why (James) Hansen had to corrupt the Temperature Record

Uncorrupted Temperature Data Showed Cooling from 1930-1999

GISS Blocking Access to Archived Data

By Ian Johnston

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.

Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared.

He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

However, the professor admitted in a telephone interview with msnbc.com that he now thinks he had been “extrapolating too far.”

Read the rest at MSNBC.com

“THE CO2 LIES … pure fear-mongering … should we blindly trust the experts?”

By P. Gosselin

That’s what Germany’s leading daily Bild (see photo) wrote in its print and online editions today, on the very day that renowned publisher Hoffmann & Campe officially released a skeptic book – one written by a prominent socialist and environmental figure.

This is huge. More than I ever could have possibly imagined. And more is coming in the days ahead! The Bild piece was just the first of a series.

Mark this as the date that Germany’s global warming movement took a massive body blow.

Today, not one, but two of Germany’s most widely read news media published comprehensive skeptical climate science articles in their print and online editions, coinciding with the release of a major climate skeptical book, Die kalte Sonne (The Cold Sun).

Read the rest at No Tricks Zone – Climate News from Germany in English

By David Rose

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Read the rest at UK’s Daily Mail.

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate

By Devin Powell

By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries.The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.

“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” says Nevle, who described the consequences of this change October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting.

Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries. This depletion of a key greenhouse gas, in turn, may have kicked off Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages.

Read the rest at Science News.

Snowmobile on Roof

By James Taylor

Sitting in on a March 1 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) press conference regarding global warming and heavy snowfalls, I couldn’t help feeling like the chairman of the Senate committee questioning mafia capo Frank Pentangeli in Godfather II. The chairman, listening incredulously as Pentangeli contradicts a sworn written statement he had earlier given to the committee, waves the written statement in the air and protests, “We have a sworn affidavit – we have it – your sworn affidavit…. Do you deny that confession, and do you realize what will happen as a result of your denial?”The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report was as straightforward as Frank Pentangeli’s earlier confession that he had killed on behalf of Michael Corleone. “Milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms,” IPCC reported.

That was in 2001. Now, however, with an unprecedented number of major winter snowstorms hitting the northeastern U.S. during the past two winters, the alarmists are clamming up and changing their tune faster than Tom Hagen can fly in Vincenzo Pentangeli from Italy to aid his brother in his time of trouble.

Read the rest at Forbes.

Brought to you by our friends at Minnesotans for Global Warming.

By Paul Yeager

A massive snowstorm is slamming America’s midsection — again. New York City just set a record for January snowfall. The South has experienced bitter cold, snow and ice this winter.If the Earth is getting warmer, why’s it so darn snowy and cold?

Are the U.S. winter extremes proof that global warming isn’t happening or is even a hoax, as some skeptics suggest? Or are the winter extremes a product of a warming atmosphere, as many climate change advocates assert?

While opinions about climate change vary greatly, even among experts in climate science, the consensus is that short-range weather events have little to do with the climate change debate.

There’s no debating that it’s been cold, especially in January. According to Deke Arndt of the federal National Climatic Data Center, “January 2011 will rank among the coldest 20 percent of Januarys on record since 1895.” December brought the coldest temperatures on record to parts of South Florida, although the month averaged near normal for the nation as a whole because the Southern cold was balanced by warmth elsewhere.

Read the rest at AOL News.

By Angela Fritz

After big snow and ice events in the Southeast, Plains, and Midwest this week, 49 out of the 50 states currently have snow on the ground – yes, even Hawaii, where snow falls in Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea all winter.The only state that has avoided this icy blast is Florida. Does that make you want to go on a nice, warm vacation to the Sunshine State? You’re not alone.

Put another way, that means snow is present in 69.4 percent of the lower 48, which is more than double than December. This is extremely unusual, though it’s hard to put a date on when this last happened because records aren’t kept on this kind of event.

Read the rest at CNN.

By Steve McIntyre

I don’t feel hugely energetic right now in terms of writing anything very complicated. As a simple exercise, I decided to quickly revisit the everchanging Hansen adjustments, a topic commented on acidly by E.M. Smith (Chiefio) in many posts – also see his interesting comments in the thread at a guest post at Anthony‘s, a post which revisited the race between 1934 and 1998 – an issue first raised at Climate Audit in 2007 in connection with Hansen’s Y2K error.

As CA readers recall, Hansen’s Y2K error resulted in a reduction of US temperatures after 2000 relative to earlier values. The change from previous values is shown in red in the graphic below; the figure also shows (black) remarkable re-writing of past history since August 2007 – a rewriting of history that has increased the 2000-6 relative to the 1930s by about 0.3 deg C.

This impacts comparisons made in 2007 between GISS and CRN1-2 stations. At the time, it was noted that GISS adjustments for UHI resulted in the GISS US temperature anomaly having quite a bit in common with a TOBS average from Anthony’s CRN1-2 stations. Critics of Anthony’s surfacestations.org project commented on this rather smugly – too smugly given the large differences with NOAA and CRU versions in the US and the incoherence of Hansen’s adjustments outside the US. The post-2007 adjustments to GISS adjustments change this. The increased trend in the GISS US statistic comes at the expense of reconciliation with CRN1-2 stations: the trends no longer cohere.

Read the rest at Climate Audit.

By James Delingpole

Bilderberg. Whether you believe it’s part of a sinister conspiracy which will lead inexorably to one world government or whether you think it’s just an innocent high-level talking shop, there’s one thing that can’t be denied: it knows which way the wind is blowing. (Hat tips: Will/NoIdea/Ozboy)

At its June meeting in Sitges, Spain (unreported and held in camera, as is Bilderberg’s way), some of the world’s most powerful CEOs rubbed shoulders with notable academics and leading politicians. They included: the chairman of Fiat, the Irish Attorney General Paul Gallagher, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Dick Perle, the Queen of the Netherlands, the editor of the Economist…. Definitely not Z-list, in other words.

Which is what makes one particular item on the group’s discussion agenda so tremendously significant. See if you can spot the one I mean:

The 58th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Sitges, Spain 3 – 6 June 2010. The Conference will deal mainly with Financial Reform, Security, Cyber Technology, Energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, World Food Problem, Global Cooling, Social Networking, Medical Science, EU-US relations.

Yep, that’s right. Global Cooling.

Which means one of two things.

Either it was a printing error.

Or the global elite is perfectly well aware that global cooling represents a far more serious and imminent threat to the world than global warming, but is so far unwilling to admit it except behind closed doors.

Let me explain briefly why this is a bombshell waiting to explode.

Read the rest at the London Telegraph.

From C3 Headlines

Read here. Map source here. Brand new peer-reviewed study that analyzes subfossils from a Swiss lake confirms what hundreds of previous peer-research have found: that the Medieval Warming had temperatures significantly warmer than modern ones.

Read the rest at C3 Headlines.