This is something that has been suspected for some time, and now it has been confirmed by observation. The reduction in albedo from snow and ice has resulted in differential warming of the polar regions.

Of course the next hazard is the offgassing of methane from Tundra permafrost as it thaws. Methane has about 8 times the greenhouse potential of carbon dioxide.

Holy Fracking Climate Frack!!

Now that's a positive temperature anomaly!

Bob Henson:

   Cold comfort: Canada's record-smashing mildness: Some fascinating weather has unfolded across the Northern Hemisphere over the last month... heavy snow that battered the mid-Atlantic and New England states in late December... the United Kingdom’s coldest December in at least the last century. Meanwhile, the sparsely populated Canadian Arctic basked in near-unprecedented mildness.
http://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f0800388340147e1e316af970b-pi

   It’s the second chapter of a tale that began a year ago, when Canada as a whole saw the warmest and driest winter in its history.  Much of the blame went to El Niño, which typically produces warmer-than-average weather across Canada.  So far, so good—but similar things are happening this winter, even with a La Niña now at the helm.

   Just how mild has it been?  The map at right shows departures from average surface temperatures for the period from 17 December 2010 to 15 January 2011, as calculated by NOAA’s Earth Systems Research Laboratory.  The blue blip along the southeast U.S. coast indicates readings between 3°C and 6°C (5.4–10.8°F) below average for the 30-day period as a whole. That’s noteworthy—and in fact, it was the coldest December in more than a century of record-keeping across south Florida.... Blue also shows up across the UK, where December averaged 5.2°C (9.4°F) below normal.

   What really jumps out, though, is a blob of green, yellow, orange, and red covering a major swath of northern and eastern Canada. The largest anomalies here exceed 21°C (37.8°F) above average, which are very large values to be sustained for an entire month.

   To put this picture into even sharper focus, let’s take a look at Coral Harbour, located at the northwest corner of Hudson Bay in the province of Nunavut. On a typical mid-January day, the town drops to a low of –34°C (–29.2°F) and reaches a high of just -26°C (–14.8°F). Compare that to what Coral Harbour actually experienced in the first twelve days of January 2011.... After New Year’s Day, the town went 11 days without getting down to its average daily high. On the 6th of the month, the low temperature was –3.7°C (25.3°F). That’s a remarkable 30°C (54°F) above average. On both the 5th and 6th, Coral Harbor inched above the freezing mark. Before this year, temperatures above 0°C (32°F) had never been recorded in the entire three months of January, February, and March....

   In mid-December, a vast bubble of high pressure formed in the vicinity of Greenland. At the center of this high, the 500-mb surface rose to more than 5.8 kilometers, a sign of remarkably mild air below. Stu Ostro (The Weather Channel) found that this was the most extreme 500-mb anomaly anywhere on the planet in weather analyses dating back to 1948.... Farther west, a separate monster high developed over Alaska last week....

   Why so freakishly mild?  One factor that both feeds and is fed by the warmth is the highly unusual amount of open water across seas that are normally frozen by late November. On the winter solstice (December 21), Hudson Bay was little more than half frozen... the Baffin/Newfoundland Sea fell weeks behind schedule in freezing up. As evident in the charts at bottom, these bodies of water remain in catch-up mode....

   The extraordinary Arctic warmth and the midlatitude chill and snow bear the fingerprints of a negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the pattern that prevailed for much of last winter as well. As opposed to a positive NAO, where the jet stream whisks mild air across the Atlantic, a negative NAO—which has predominated since October—features a blocked-up jet stream that allows cold air to plunge more easily southward and mild air to take hold in the Arctic. It seems plausible that the open water between Greenland and Canada has played a role in the record warmth observed at the surface and aloft and the associated negative NAO. However, the NAO’s causes remain mysterious, and its future is impossible to predict...

Link -
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/01/holy-fracking-climate-frack.html
===========
Change, Change & MORE Change!

The big floods in Queensland and Victoria have ebbed away, for now, but there may be more floods over the next 20 to 30 years or so thanks to a gigantic climate cycle in the Pacfic Ocean.

For a number of researchers point to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) or Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), as an over arching climate cycle which governs the number and duration of the shorter, better known La Niña and El Niño climate cycles that directly affect rainfall in eastern Australia.

After careful analysis of the historical weather records, as well as the likes of tree rings and ancient coral reefs they say that they have established a link back through thousands of years worth of rainfall changes.

The PDO had “flipped” into its cool mode, and researchers believe that means more and stronger la Ninas in coming decades.

The issue is still a matter of some scientific dispute, with the Australian Bureau of Meterology doubting the link and, above all, saying that there is not yet enough evidence to forecast changes in the sequence of el Ninos and la Ninas.

However, investigations into the link between the PDO and rainfall are, in turn, part of efforts to uncover patterns in the great oceanic cycles which seem to govern climate over decades.

As is well known, the El Niño and La Niña climate patterns are characterised by changes in sea surface temperatures that drive shifts in atmospheric circulation and cloud patterns. When a La Niña effect rules, as it does now, the sea surface in the central and western Pacific is generally cooler, and that shift in sea surface temperatures sweeps rain bearing clouds towards Australia.

In an El Niño the opposite occurs, resulting in drier weather that may turn into a drought.

An El Niño or La Niña cycle can be anywhere between six to 18 months long, and occur once every three to seven years, but are not predictable.

To date the best that scientists can do is give a few months warning of an onset of a new cycle by watching for telltale signs of changes in sea surface temperatures.

Together known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the cycles are tracked by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), which is the difference between air pressure readings in Tahiti and Darwin. When it is high a la Nina rules, when it is low an el Nino  brings drier weather.

In contrast to the comparatively short- lived ENSO phases, the PDO, first noticed as a pattern by salmon fishery researchers in the 1990s, "flips" between cool and warm modes every 20 to 30 years. In April 2008, after examining patterns of sea surface temperatures identified by satellite, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories announced the PDO had "flipped" into its cool mode.

The last time it flipped - from cool to warm - was in 1977, or three years after the last serious floods in Brisbane.

From examining historical weather records, scientists believe the PDO previously flipped (from warm to cool) in the mid-1940s, and around 1920 (from cool to warm).

The release from NASA stated the cool phase of the PDO was characterised by cooler water off the US west coast, stretching from Alaska to the equator, forming a horse shoe around a body of warmer water. In the PDO's warm phase, this pattern is reversed.

This has complex effects but the overall result, as noted in the NASA material, is that the cool phase intensifies La Niña or diminishes El Niño effects around the Pacific basin.

To put that in Australian terms, scientists point out when the PDO was in its warm phase between 1977 and 2008, a succession of severe El Niño cycles brought hot, dry weather to eastern Australia. Droughts in the Murray-Darling basin never seemed to end.

When the PDO was in its cool mode between 1945 and 1977, the rain-bearing La Niñas were strong and frequent.

The PDO is already of some notoriety in the sceptics versus warmists climate debate as sceptics occasionally point out that the cycle’s recently ended warm phase about coincides with a notable increase in temperatures, while its previous cool phase (from the 40s to the 70s) also coincided with a known dip in global temperatures.

The warmists have responded in detail to the sceptics, but this article will concentrate on the quite seperate and much less controversial link to on rainfall - which may or may not also be affected by human-induced global warming, if it exists.

Stewart Franks, an hydrologist and associate professor at the University of Newcastle, says now the PDO has flipped, Australia's climate on the eastern seaboard can be generally expected to return to the conditions that existed between the 1940s and mid-1970s.

Apart from the Brisbane floods in the 1970s, the era was characterised by severe floods around Maitland in NSW in the 1950s.

The correlation between the PDO and Australia's sequence of floods and droughts has been traced through centuries and is extremely strong, he says.

Link -
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11563&page=0

That's called seasonal change. It happens on Earth too. I'll explain it to you some day Sprint. Close, but no cigar.

Magnetic field may dip, flip and disappear
The Economist wrote a detailed article about the magnetic field and what's happening to it. In the article they noted:


"There is, however, a growing body of evidence that the Earth's magnetic field is about to disappear, at least for a while. The geological record shows that it flips from time to time, with the south pole becoming the north, and vice versa. On average, such reversals take place every 500,000 years, but there is no discernible pattern. Flips have happened as close together as 50,000 years, though the last one was 780,000 years ago. But, as discussed at the Greenland Space Science Symposium, held in Kangerlussuaq this week, the signs are that another flip is coming soon."

Discussing the magnetic polar shift and the impact on weather, the scholarly paper "Weather and the Earth's magnetic field" was published in the journal Nature. Scientists too are very concerned about the increasing danger of superstorms and the impact on humanity.

Superstorms will not only damage agriculture across the planet leading to famines and mass starvation, they will also change coastlines, destroy cities and create tens of millions of homeless.

Superstorms can also cause certain societies, cultures or whole countries to collapse. Others may go to war with each other.

A Danish study published in the scientific journal Geology, found strong correlation between climate change, weather patterns and the magnetic field.

"The earth's climate has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming.

"'Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth's magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics,' one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal.

"He and his colleague Peter Riisager, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), compared a reconstruction of the prehistoric magnetic field 5,000 years ago based on data drawn from stalagmites and stalactites found in China and Oman."

In the scientific paper "Midday magnetopause shifts earthward of geosynchronous orbit during geomagnetic superstorms with Dst = -300 nT" the magnetic intensity of solar storms impacting Earth can intensify the effects of the polar shift and also speed up the frequency of the emerging superstorms.

Pole reversal may also be initiating new Ice Age
According to some geologists and scientists, we have left the last interglacial period behind us. Those periods are lengths of time—about 11,500 years—between major Ice Ages.

One of the most stunning signs of the approaching Ice Age is what's happened to the world's precessional wobble.

The Earth's wobble has stopped
As explained in the geology and space science website earthchangesmedia.com, "The Chandler wobble was first discovered back in 1891 by Seth Carlo Chandler an American astronomer.

The effect causes the Earth's poles to move in an irregular circle of 3 to 15 meters in diameter in an oscillation. The Earth's Wobble has a 7-year cycle which produces two extremes, a small spiraling wobble circle and a large spiraling wobble circle, about 3.5 years apart.

"The Earth was in October 2005 moving into the small spiraling circle (the MIN phase of the wobble), which should have slowly unfolded during 2006 and the first few months of 2007. (Each spiraling circle takes about 14 months). But suddenly at the beginning of November 2005, the track of the location of the spin axis veered at a very sharp right angle to its circling motion.

"The track of the spin axis began to slow down and by about January 8, 2006, it ceased nearly all relative motion on the x and y coordinates which are used to define the daily changing location of the spin axis."

And the Earth stopped wobbling—exactly as predicted as another strong sign of an imminent Ice Age.

So, the start of a new Ice Age is marked by a magnetic pole reversal, increased volcanic activity, larger and more frequent earthquakes, tsunamis, colder winters, superstorms and the halting of the Chandler wobble.

Unfortunately, all of those conditions are being met.

Also, as a response to comments, Terrence added this:

* 2002 - Scientists may have detected the beginning of the field's next such reversal:
* 2005 - Movement of North Magnetic Pole is accelerating:
* 2008 - Earth's Core, Magnetic Field Changing Fast, Study Says
* 2008 - Magnetic Portals Connect Earth to Sun
* 2009 - North Magnetic Pole Moving Due to Core Flux
* 2009 - The earth's climate is significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field
# Jan 2011 - British Geological Survey *Possible Pole Shift Occurring* South Atlantic Anomaly is Growing
# 2009 - A strong, highly-tilted interstellar magnetic field near the Solar System
# 2009 - The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist

Links -
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/february042011/global-superstorms-ta.php
http://www.helium.com/items/2083868-magnetic-polar-shifts-causing-massive-global...
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muso wrote on Feb 10^th, 2011 at 10:26am:


Which part is fringe?

That the Magnetic Poles are shifting or the possible effects that may have on the earth?

The original paper by J W King was a very short paper. In fact, it was 2 sentences!

Btw, I have no problem with there being many other factors involved, I'm simply saying this may be another factor to consider.

From NASA:

Quote:


http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012.html