By Paul Hudson

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

 
Recent research has ruled out solar influences on temperature increases
Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth’s warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

The scientists’ main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

And the results were clear. “Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can’t have been caused by solar activity,” said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

Read the rest of this article at BBC News.

From Zomblog

In 1971, John Holdren edited and contributed an essay to a book entitled Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man. He wrote (along with colleague Paul Ehrlich) the book’s sixth chapter, called “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide.” (Click here to view a photograph of the table of contents, showing Holdren’s essay on pages 64-78; click on the image to the left to view the cover). In their chapter, Holdren and Ehrlich speculate about various environmental catastrophes, and on pages 76 and 77 Holdren the climate scientist speaks about the probable likelihood of a “new ice age” caused by human activity (air pollution, dust from farming, jet exhaust, desertification, etc).

John Holdren is now not only the “Science Czar” for the United States, but he’s also one of the original leaders of the “alarmist” wing of the Global Warming debate — and he now promotes the notion that the current climate data points to a looming planetary overheating catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions (he helped make the charts and graphs for Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, for example).

Read the rest of this story at Zomblog.

By Lorne Gunter

Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn’t marry. That might generate the odd headline, no?

Or if Don Cherry claimed suddenly to like European hockey players who wear visors and float around the ice never body-checking opponents.

Or Jack Layton insisted out of the blue that unions are ruining the economy by distorting wages and protecting unproductive workers.

Or Stephen Harper began arguing that it makes good economic sense for Ottawa to own a car company. (Oh, wait, that one happened.)

But at least, the Tories-buy-GM aberration made all the papers and newscasts.

When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it’s usually newsworthy.

So why was a speech last week by Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute not give more prominence?

Prof. Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.

Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN’s World Climate Conference — an annual gathering of the so-called “scientific consensus” on man-made climate change — Prof. Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.”

The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.

But as Prof. Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years. “How much?” he wondered before the assembled delegates. “The jury is still out.”

Read the rest of this story at National Post.

By Tony Hake

A new peer-reviewed study calls into question the so-called ‘consensus’ on the causes of global warming by saying that “Nature, not man, responsible for recent global warming.”  The new study authored by three Australian scientists and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research says that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) accounts for the vast majority of temperature variability.

Authored by Chris de Freitas (University of Auckland in New Zealand), John McLean (Melbourne) and Bob Carter (James Cook University), the new study is sure to cause waves among those debating the causes of global warming.  Completely contrary to the mainstream media’s portrayal of climate change, the study says, “little or none of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to human activity.”

Lead author de Freitas said in a press release, “The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely.”

Read the rest at Examiner.

A Cooling World

By Debra J. Saunders

No wonder skeptics consider the left’s belief in man-made global warming as akin to a fad religion — last week in Italy, G8 leaders pledged to not allow the Earth’s temperature to rise more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

For its next act, the G8 can part the Red Sea. The worst part is: These are the brainy swells who think of themselves as — all bow — Men of Science.

The funny part is: G8 leaders can’t even decide the year from which emissions must be reduced. 1990? 2005? “This question is a mystery for everyone,” an aide to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said.

And while President Obama led the charge for the G8 nations to agree to an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in industrial nations by 2050, the same Russian aide dissed the standard as “likely unattainable.”

No worries, the language was non-binding. Global-warming believers say that they are all about science, but their emphasis is not on results so much as declarations of belief.

Faith. Mystery. Promises to engage in pious acts. Global warming is a religion. While Obama was in Italy preaching big cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, he was losing some of his flock in Washington. The House may have passed the 1,200-page cap-and-trade bill largely unread, but Senate Democrats are combing the fine print and not liking what they see. As Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said of the bill, “We need to be a leader in the world but we don’t want to be a sucker.”

Read the rest of this piece at Rasmussen Reports.

As temperatures fail to meet alarmist predictions, and ever-increasing dire warnings of catastrophic, accelerating runaway warming are being refuted by simple observation, the global warming apologists keep rolling out the excuses. Here’s an article from Discovery News.

By Michael Reilly

For those who have endured this winter’s frigid temperatures and today’s heavy snowstorm in the Northeast, the concept of global warming may seem, well, almost wishful.

But climate is known to be variable — a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn’t mean the planet is cooling. Still, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.

Earth’s climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.

“This is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. “Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn’t have one.”

Read the rest of this article at Discovery News.

It was snowing irony in Washington on Monday when global warming activists descended on the District like a storm — but got beaten to the punch by a blast of wintry weather that incapacitated the city.

By Joseph Abrams 

Global warming activists stormed Washington Monday for what was billed as the nation’s largest act of civil disobedience to fight climate change — only to see the nation’s capital virtually shut down by a major winter storm.

Schools and businesses were shuttered, lawmakers cancelled numerous appearances and the city came to a virtual standstill as Washington was blasted with its heaviest snowfall of the winter.

It spelled about six inches of trouble for global warming activists who had hoped to swarm the Capitol by the thousands in an effort to force the government to close the Capitol Power Plant, which heats and cools a number of government buildings, including the Supreme Court and the Capitol.

The snowy scene, with temperatures in the mid-20s, was reminiscent of a day in January 2004, when Al Gore made a major address on global warming in New York — on one of the coldest days in the city’s history.

Protest organizers said about 2,500 people braved the blizzard to oppose greenhouse gas emissions, but the shroud of snow wasn’t the only wet blanket in the nation’s capital Monday.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who called on the architect of the Capitol to stop burning coal at the power plant last week, cancelled her appearance at the rally because her flight to Washington was cancelled.

Michelle Obama canned a public “Read Across America” event and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan canceled a meeting with the Democratic Caucus because the members of Congress couldn’t get to D.C. An honor cordon at the Pentagon for Afghanistan’s defense minister also had to be called off.

Some protesters couldn’t make it as dozens of flights in the area were delayed or called off, and some couldn’t face the dangerous roads or blustery weather, leaving hundreds safe, if sorry, back at home.

One protester named Kat had planned to get arrested and be bailed out Monday but decided to stay put and donate her money to a good cause instead.

“I don’t want to travel in the snow today. However, I am donating my bail money to fight mountaintop removal,” she wrote to the Climate Action Web site.

Read the rest of this story at Fox News.

Jym Ganahl

Published in The Other Paper, Columbus OH -  

Just when you thought it was safe to assume that everyone had pretty much accepted climate change and moved on, here comes rogue NBC 4 chief meteorologist Jym Ganahl to blow your freaking mind.

“Just wait 5 or 10 years, and it will be very obvious. They’ll have egg on their faces,” Ganahl said this week of global warming advocates.

The “global warming hoax” is an obvious fallacy, Ganahl said in a YouTube video posted Jan. 23.

In the video, taped at a meet-up of the Ohio Freedom Alliance, Ganahl chats with Dave, the self-proclaimed No. 1 biker talk show host on radio, and—still odder—Robert Wagner, a former candidate for the 15th congressional district.

Although global warming is clearly “a fallacy,” Ganahl told the dudes, “It is remarkable how many people are being led like sheep in the wrong direction.”

Evoking Orwellian mind-control power of the media, Ganahl said it’s remarkable how easy it is to panic the unwashed masses.

Ganahl continued to evangelize offline this week.

Sunspots—and not carbon emissions—are to blame for the slow warming of the globe, Ganahl said. “It has nothing to do with us.”

“When there are sunspots, like freckles on the sun—dark spots—these are like turning on a furnace and the earth warms. When there are no sunspots, it is like the furnace is in standby and the earth cools.

“I have always thought we should celebrate and be thankful we live in a time when it is warmer, not curse it,” Ganahl said. “It allows us to grow food and feed the population—and the warming is slow and we can adapt to it.”

Cold, on the other hand, is to blame for a whole host of worldly disasters, including death of the Aztecs, the Vikings, and who knew?— the bubonic plague.

“Instead of screaming global warming, we should be preaching global cooling,” he said.

But with a new president who apparently buys into the whole carbon emission demonizing scam, Ganahl said, “It’s very scary,” and admittedly “very difficult,” to fight the mob mentality.

Read the rest of this story at The Other Paper (Columbus, OH News & Entertainment Weekly).

By Deroy Murdock

SAN FRANCISCO — So-called “global warming” has shrunk from problem to punch line. And now, Leftists are laughing, too. It’s hard not to chuckle at the idea of Earth boiling in a carbon cauldron when the news won’t cooperate:

Nearly four inches of snow blanketed the United Arab Emirates’ Jebel Jais region for just the second time in recorded history on Jan. 24. Citizens were speechless. The local dialect has no word for snowfall.

Dutchmen on ice skates sped past windmills as canals in Holland froze in mid-January for the first time since 1997. Defense Minister Eimert van Middelkoop, who inhabits a renovated 17th Century windmill, stumbled on the ice and fractured his wrist.

January saw northern Minnesota’s temperatures plunge to 38 below zero, forcing ski-resort closures. A Frazee, Minnesota dog-sled race was cancelled, due to excessive snow. Snow whitened Surf City, North Carolina’s beaches. Days ago, ice glazed Florida’s citrus groves.

As Earth faces global cooling, both troglodyte right-wingers and lachrymose left-wingers find Albert Gore’s simmering-planet hypothesis increasingly hilarious:

“In terms of (global warming’s) capacity to cause the human species harm, I don’t think it makes it into the top 10,” Dr. Robert Giegengack, former chairman of University of Pennsylvania’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, told the Pennsylvania Gazette. Giegengack voted for Gore in 2000, and says he likely would again.

Commentator Harold Ambler declared Jan. 3 on HuffingtonPost.com that he voted for Barack Obama “for a thousand times a thousand reasons.” He added that Gore “owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming.” He called Gore’s assertion that “the science is in” on this issue “the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of mankind.”

“Not only is it false that human activity has any significant effect on global warming or the weather in general, but for the record, global warming is over,” retired Navy meteorologist Dr. Martin Hertzberg wrote on carbon-sense.com. The physical chemist and self-described “scientist and life-long liberal Democrat” added: “The average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere has declined over the last 10 years. From the El Nino Year of 1998 until Jan. 2007, it dropped a quarter of a degree Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit). From Jan 2007 to the spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping three-quarters of a degree Celsius (1.35 degrees Fahrenheit). Those data further prove that the fear-mongering hysteria about human-caused global warming is completely unjustified and is totally counterproductive to our Nation’s essential needs and security.”

“It is a tribute to the scientific ignorance of politicians and journalists that they keep regurgitating the nonsense about human-caused global warming,” veteran Left-wing commentator and Nation magazine columnist Alexander Cockburn wrote. “The greenhouse fear mongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind’s sinful contribution — and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism, and greed.”

Read the rest of this piece at Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

NY Times Environmental Reporter, Andrew Revkin

By Andrew C. Revkin 

A new poll suggests that Americans, preoccupied with the economy, are less worried about rising global temperatures than they were a year ago but remain concerned with solving the nation’s energy problems.
The findings are somewhat at odds with President Obama, who has put a high priority on staving off global warming and vowed Tuesday in his Inaugural Address to “roll back the specter of a warming planet.”

In the poll, released Thursday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, global warming came in last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists. Only 30 percent of the voters deemed global warming to be “a top priority,” compared with 35 percent in 2008.

“Protecting the environment,” which had surged in the rankings from 2006 to 2008, dropped even more precipitously in the poll: only 41 percent of voters called it a top priority, compared with 56 percent last year.

In contrast, dealing with the nation’s energy problems ranked sixth in the poll — just behind education and social security — with 60 percent of voters endorsing it as a top priority.

The declining interest in global warming and other environmental issues might be unsurprising at a time when Americans face far more imminent threats to their jobs and homes. “Strengthening the nation’s economy” was the top-ranked concern of voters in the Pew poll. A relatively cool year and a harsh winter in North America and Europe have not helped, inspiring some commentators and a small cluster of scientists to make skeptical remarks about “global cooling.”

Social scientists say that environmental concerns are often the first to fall off the table when any more immediate threat surfaces. Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center, said a similar pattern was seen in the Pew poll after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when second-tier issues faded in voters’ minds.

“Concern for terrorism overshadowed all else,” Mr. Kohut said.

The public’s waning interest in global warming poses a challenge for Mr. Obama, who emphasized climate change throughout his campaign and pledged to seek a cap on emissions in the United States of heat-trapping gases, led by carbon dioxide, which come mainly from burning coal and oil. Such a cap, even if it includes various mechanisms intended to ease the cost, would by design raise the price of energy coming from those fossil fuels, which still underpin the American and the global economies.

Mr. Obama’s political foes have already seized on the cooling of public concern.

Marc Morano, the communications director for the Republican minority on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has been sending out e-mail alerts, sometimes several a day, highlighting stories on winter weather and other surveys suggesting a shift in public attitudes.

Read the rest of this story at the New York Times.

A Cooling World

But a professor of geological sciences at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, characterized the report as telling a “rather sensational story.”

By Paul Walsh

Earth is “on the brink of entering another Ice Age” that will last for the next 100,000 years, reports the Russian Pravda Online newspaper, attempting to counter the widespread view that human activity is contributing to an unwanted and dangerous warming of the planet.

Based on a “large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science,” Pravda reports this week, “many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change” indicate that the current 12,000-year-long warming trend is coming to an end.

Pravda points to three astronomical “Milankovich cycles” for the coming cool-down:

• The tilt of the Earth, which varies over a 41,000-year period.

• The shape of the Earth’s orbit, which changes over a period of 100,000 years, “separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.”

• The Precession of the Equinoxes, also known as the earth’s “wobble,” which gradually rotates the direction of the earth’s axis over a period of 26,000 years.

Read the rest of this story at Star Tribune.

Jason Lewis today, who in turn was filling in for Rush Limbaugh. Most discussion on the program centered on Global Warming. In the first hour, Sue’s guest was Chris Horner, author of Red Hot Lies. I followed to talk about GlobalClimateScam.com in the second hour and came back to discuss Minnesota Majority in the last half-hour. Listen here:

Sue Jeffers

Sue Jeffers filled in for

• Hour 1: Sue’s guest Christopher Horner discusses his new book disputing global warming.
• Hour 2: Sue continues the global warming discussion with Dan McGrath of Minnesota Majority.
• Hour 3: Sue talks about running for office with Jim Schottmueller and Dan McGrath.

Notes on the “Hockey Stick:” Global Warming Bombshell; Breaking the Hockey Stick; Documenting Global Warming Fraud; Hockey Stick a New Low in Climate Science; Hockey Sticks, Principal Components and Spurious Significance (McIntyre / McKitrick report)

Study: Half of warming due to Sun! –Sea Levels Fail to Rise? - Warming Fears in ‘Dustbin of History’

POZNAN, Poland - The UN global warming conference currently underway in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.  Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

The U.S. Senate report is the latest evidence of the growing groundswell of scientific opposition rising to challenge the UN and Gore. Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists. The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists’ equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices and views of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. [See Full report Here: & See: Skeptical scientists overwhelm conference: '2/3 of presenters and question-askers were hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC' ]

Full Senate Report Set To Be Released in the Next 24 Hours – Stay Tuned… 

A hint of what the upcoming report contains:    

“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” - Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.   

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.” -  Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology  and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”  

Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” - UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.  

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.  

“The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC “are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” - Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico  

“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” - U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA. 

“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.

“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” - Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.  

“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” - Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Read the rest at the United State Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works.

By Victoria Guay

While a large number of people, including some scientists, believe that we are in an unprecedented period of global warming caused primarily by humans, Dr. James Koermer, a meteorology professor at Plymouth State University, would beg to differ.

During a presentation at the university on Wednesday, Koermer explained why there are a growing number scientists, such as himself, who don’t subscribe to the popular theory on global warming.

Koermer said the Earth’s climate has always changed and has experienced alternate warming and cooling trends long before the dawn of man.

Koermer said most research suggests that at the beginning of the last millennium, there was a global warming period that ended around 1600, when a significant cooling trend — which he called a mini ice age — lasted for approximately 100 years.

The most recent global warming trend picked up during the 1700s, which coincides with the start of the Industrial Age, Koermer said.

Going back millions of years, some research suggests the Earth has had much more extreme climate changes than are occurring today.

“Over millions of years there have been periods when we have been hotter than we are today,” Koermer said.

He added that while humans do have an impact on the climate, it is minimal compared to natural phenomena. He also said that humans are not the biggest producers of carbon dioxide and that the gas is not the most abundant green house gas in the atmosphere. That title goes to water vapor, which is produced by the world’s oceans.

Koermer said that water vapor is responsible for 95 percent of the green house gas effect in a given year while another 4.72 percent is caused by a mix of other greenhouse gases, including methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide, which are naturally produced.

Humans are only responsible for .28 percent of all greenhouse gases produced during a year, he said.

Koermer said just because he doesn’t think man-made carbon dioxide is contributing significantly to climate change, it does not mean he is opposed to the increased use of renewable fuel sources. He said that fossil fuels are a limited resource, so finding alternatives is necessary.

Koermer said scientists are not yet sure what has caused climate change in the past, but factors may include shifts in the Earth’s axis as well as changes in the orbit of the Earth around the sun. Over time, Koermer said, the Earth’s yearly path around the Sun changes from circular to more elliptical before changing back.

Sunspots and solar flares may also effect the Earth’s climate. Koermer said solar flares and spots seem to increase and decrease on an 11-year cycle. He noted that there was a marked decrease in solar flares during the mini ice age of the 1600s.

Read the rest of this story at The Citizen.

By Barry Brown 

Canadian researchers studying the Arctic´s ancient permafrost have discovered 700,000-year-old ice wedges buried in the soil that have survived earlier periods of global warming, adding complexity to predictions about the impact of contemporary climate change. Duane Froese, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science at the University of Alberta, found what he describes as “the oldest ice in North America” in the Klondike region of Canada’s Yukon Territory about 10 feet below the surface.

Because these ice wedges were found under a layer of volcanic ash, researchers from the University of Toronto and the Geological Survey of Canada were able to use a technique known as “fission track dating” of the ash to date it at roughly 700,000 years old.

This means the ice was older than the ash and older than the previous record holder - 120,000-year-old ice wedges found in Alaska.

“The fact that this ice survived the interglacials about 120,000 and 400,000 years ago, which we think were warmer than present, really illustrates how stubborn permafrost can be in the face of climate warming,” Mr. Froese said.

Read the rest of this story at Washington Times.