From 1850 to 1950 the glacier retreated very quickly. Since 1950, retreat has been considerably slower.

http://www.climate4you.com

Historian Erik Conway did two things this week that might seem counterintuitive, if not downright odd.

He voluntarily left the warmth of Pasadena, Calif., where he works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to come to Edmonton during the middle of a bitter cold snap. And while here, as thousands of Edmontonians coaxed their cars to life for the frigid commute home through snow-choked roads, Conway entered a lecture hall at the University of Alberta to present a lecture on global warming.

Conway understands, as do climate scientists around the world, that a cold snap in Edmonton does not negate the science of global warming that takes into account the worldwide climate over a span of a century and a half.

But he also understand how it’s simple human nature for each of us to focus on the evidence under our noses — and in Edmonton on Thursday that evidence included frozen cars, ice scrapers and frost nip. Just thinking of global warming seemed counterintuitive.

For people with a shaky notion of climate change, frigid days like this probably raise doubt. That doubt is exploited by those who deny the science of climate change, (people such as U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe whose family built an igloo during the blizzard in Washington, D.C., last year and sarcastically labelled it “Al Gore’s New Home”).

But there’s another kind of doubt that doesn’t rely on the vagaries of Mother Nature. It is manufactured by man, specifically by a small group of influential libertarians in the U.S. who have led a decades-long ideological fight, first against the communists and then the health community and now environmentalism.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com

http://www.theblaze.com/

h/t to MikeThe Denier

If Lovelock is correct, the outlook is grim for the human race, and for the planet.

“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,” Lovelock writes.

http://environment.about.com

We should all chip in and buy Lovelock a one-way ticket to the tolerable Arctic.

http://www.wunderground.com/

“As soon as one predicted disaster doesn’t occur, the doomsayers skip to another… why don’t [they] see that, in the aggregate, things are getting better? Why do they always think we’re at a turning point — or at the end of the road?”

– Julian Simon

Thousands of SUV drivers are killed every day, when struck by reckless bicycles.

http://www.nj.com/

Temperatures are more than 0.5C cooler than early 2002.

GISS temperatures were all over the place last year, rising during a record cold La Nina and then falling in December. But miraculously, 2010 came in as the hottest year by 0.01 degrees. Who ever would have predicted that result from Hansen?

Never mind that they don’t have any data for about 20% of the planet and that they have lost most of their stations, they can still measure the planet’s temperature with incredible precision.

Climatologists have recently discovered that cold and snow is due to disappearing ice in the Arctic.

During the 1970s, the cold, snowy winters were due to excess ice in the Arctic. Climatologists wanted to melt the ice caps to make the winters warmer, but now we know that melting the ice caps would have also made it cold and snowy.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm

Summarizing, cold and snow is due to deficient or excess ice in the Arctic. It can also be due to normal ice in the Arctic.

h/t to Amino