I don't know much about climate science, but I know what I like.

The Sun newspaper accompanies this article about global warming causing global cooling with an info-grapic, clearly labelled as follows:
Step 1. Air above Arctic warms
Step 2: Pushes cold air south towards us
Step 3: Jet Stream pushed south by heavy cold air over north hemisphere

Ho hum.

I was brought up to believe that warm air rises, so if anything, wamer air over the Artic would suck* air northwards rather than push it southwards. From our point of view, winds from the south and west are good (warmer) and winds from the north and east are bad (colder) and the further north the jet stream is, the better.

* Yes, I know that "suction" doesn't really exist either.

It's grim up North

Titanic: The True Story

They showed this documentary on Channel Five just now, in which the world's leading authority in ship-iceberg-related-incidents Dr Robert Gagnon (not to be confused with the fundamentalist Christian nutter), who actually crashes ships into icebergs for 'research purposes', confirmed what I had always suspected, i.e. if the Titanic hadn't tried to steer past the iceberg and instead just hit the damn' thing head-on, it wouldn't have torn a 300 ft gash down the side of the ship, causing five compartments to fill with water and hence causing the ship to sink.

He said there were plenty of examples of ships hitting icebergs head-on, for sure, the front compartment or two were split wide open and filled with water, but the rest of the compartments stayed water tight, he showed pictures of one or two such ships which had limped back into harbour.

Glad we've got that one cleared up, although it's still a tricky problem: do you try and steer round the iceberg; in which case you might miss it completely (best outcome) but risk hitting it sideways and sinking (worst outcome); OR do you just go full steam astern, accept the fact that you will hit the iceberg head-on and hope for the best (embarrassing and expensive to repair, but few fatalities)? Hmmmm.

BUT

From the BBC (by Richard Black, who by BBC standards is a 'climate denier'):

'Rapid' 2010 melt for Arctic ice - but no record.

Ice floating on the Arctic Ocean melted unusually quickly this year, but did not shrink down to the record minimum area seen in 2007.

That is the preliminary finding of US scientists who say the summer minimum seems to have passed and the ice has entered its winter growth phase. 2010's summer Arctic ice minimum is the third smallest in the satellite era. Researchers say projections of summer ice disappearing entirely within the next few years increasingly look wrong.

At its smallest extent, on 10 September, 4.76 million sq km (1.84 million sq miles) of Arctic Ocean was covered with ice - more than in 2007 and 2008, but less than in every other year since 1979...

The last 12 months have been unusually warm globally - according to Nasa, the warmest in its 130-year record. This is partly down to El Nino conditions in the Pacific Ocean, which have the effect of raising temperatures globally. With those conditions changing into a cooler La Nina phase, Nasa says 2010 is "likely, but not certain" to be the warmest calendar year in its record...

Terrible news for arctic seals!

... it seems that the bloody polar bears aren't dying out after all*:

"There are 19 populations of polar bears on the planet. At present we know that eight are decreasing, three are stable, seven we are not sure about, and the only one we know for sure that is growing is in Canada. But in my opinion the bear numbers in Svalbard are increasing."

* Which we all knew a year ago.

Global Warmenism is a religion: official

We are used to being bombarded with stories about Jesus or Mary appearing in slices of toast or the lids of Marmite jars.

That's absolutely fine, religion is all about looking for signs of divine intervention. What is now mightily chucklesome is the response of the Global Warmenists to the pictures of the iceberg that does indeed look a lot like a face with tears rolling down it:

... some think it shows Mother Nature in tears at the state of our planet. The stunning image shocked onlookers who felt the vivid pattern in the melting glacier looked like teary-eyed nature staring straight at them in a foreboding manner.

A funny thing happened on the way to The North Pole ...

... the punchline is over at Roger Thornhill's.

Arctic shrank to its smallest size on record ...

... in September 2007.

How come that's still news? Why don't they mention it's increased in size since then?

I must admit that their way of measuring thickness - measure height above sea level by satellite and times by ten - is pretty cunning, assuming that it's accurate.

Sarah Palin for Vice President (2)

Neil Craig explains why.

Ian_QT looks at that Bizarre Sarah Palin Rumour.

"Arctic sea ice melt even faster"

Another delightfully misleading headline from the BBC. I can see another way of interpreting the chart that they helpfully provide:How about "Arctic Ice coverage on the increase"?

Look chaps, history repeats itself:

House prices go up; a bubble forms; the bubble bursts; prices stabilise at a low affordable level; and then they start going up again...

Empires come and go. AFAIAC, the Irish rejection of the CON-stitution is more-or-less the high water mark of the EUmpire.

Global temperatures have stayed more or less the same for ages. Pointing out that temperatures are now higher than in the Little Ice Age is about as unhelpful as pointing out that temperatures are lower than they were in the Mediæval Warm Period. I'm guessing that the most recent high was about five years ago (note that the Wiki charts end at 2004!) and we're now on a cooling trend again.

See also: A chilling tale from North

Global warming causes global cooling!

Yada, yada, I don't believe any of this guff any more, the latest Shock! Horror! is that the Arctic Ice is melting* and that this will cause the oceans to cool down. As I live on a small island in the North Atlantic that is kept relatively warm for its latitude by the Gulf Stream, this, if true, would really piss me off. But by the same token, isn't this a glorious example of how the climate regulates itself?

See also "Global warming blamed for unusual cold spell", I shit ye not.

* Also from the article, this fascinating factoid: "Last winter, 15 million sq km of ice formed over the Arctic – a four per cent rise and the most since 2003".

Great news for international shipping (not!)

We all thought the damn' Arctic Ice was melting, reducing the risk of iceberg collisions and opening up the North-West Passage.

According to the 'Weather Eye' in Wednesday's Times (not available online), research carried out for a charity called Cape Farewell, strong winds have just blown some of the Arctic Ice a few miles south and jammed it all against the eastern coast of Greenland.

The good news is that the Gulf Stream is not affected, that keeps the UK relatively warm for its latititude.