GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL:
Here is a selection of events happening now:

BRYANT PARK, Manhattan (WABC) --Congrats, Big Apple! We've broken the record for the warmest Christmas in New York City history.
Temperature readings in Central Park reached 66 degrees at 12:31 a.m. Friday, breaking the previous record of 64 degrees set in 1982.
On Christmas Eve, New Yorkers in shorts and tube tops turned a winter morning into a summer day, embracing temperatures that soared into the 70s.
"Sometimes global warming is awesome," Meg Roedling said as she ran through Brooklyn Bridge Park in shorts and a T-shirt.
A noontime temperature in Central Park of 72 degrees Thursday crushed the previous record of 63 degrees, set in 1996. The 72 degrees was only 3 degrees cooler than it was on July Fourth.
High temperature records also tumbled across upstate New York as Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse topped 60 degrees. Albany's 58-degree temperature Thursday morning broke the record of 57, set in 1941.
A line stretched out the door in the late afternoon at a frozen yogurt shop on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
It was hardly traditional Christmas Eve fare, but "the weather made my friend want to get it," Talia Raven said as she waited in the weird warmth.
http://abc7ny.com/weather/surfers-hit-beach-in-queens-as-nyc-has-warmest-christmas-ever/1134498/

It was the day the floodwaters inexorably advanced across the Pennines, leaving much of the north of England sodden and beleaguered. From Greater Manchester in the north-west to parts of North Yorkshire some 50 miles to the east, Boxing Day 2015 will be remembered as the day the rains came.

In Todmorden, in West Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, Rebecca Marshall was last night facing the grim prospect of having to abandon her home as the floodwaters slowly rose around her house. The incessant rains had left the little town cut off after all the roads in and out were flooded.

By late afternoon the waters were “inches” from the top of the local defence wall and Marshall was stuck inside her home without electricity. Then floodwaters started to rise through her floorboards. “At the moment in our house it’s ankle-deep,” she said.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/26/flooding-havoc-britai...

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About half the community of Daly River (Naiyu) have spent the night in Darwin's Foskey Pavilion after being evacuated by helicopter and bus due to flood waters.

The remaining 234 people will be evacuated from the community today.

Acting Senior Sergeant Dean Barrett said the residents would stay in Darwin for as long as necessary.

"The length of time I am unsure of, it just depends on when they can return to their communities," he said.

"Obviously the damage has got to be assessed and other issues but obviously at some point in time they'll return to their country, where they want to live."

Andy Warton, Director Northern Territory Emergency Services said the river continued to rise, and the evacuation was labour-intensive due to the small capacity of helicopters.

"We're working very closely with the Bureau of Meteorology, and certainly overnight the river has continued to rise," he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-27/200-daly-river-residents-spend-the...

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A stocktake of waterbirds in eastern Australia has shown the lowest breeding level on record.

The annual aerial survey, conducted by the Centre for Ecosystem Science at the University of NSW, confirmed a dramatic long-term decline in the number of waterbirds.

Director Richard Kingsford said that over 33 years of counting, average numbers had fallen more than 60 per cent.

The trend continued in 2015 with a further drop compared to the previous three-to-five-year period.

"This is the second lowest number of waterbirds we've seen in that 33-year period and it's symptomatic of the real impacts of this drought that's occurring across the eastern half of the continent," Professor Kingsford said.

The survey covered all the major rivers, lakes and wetlands from Queensland down through New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, including the Murray-Darling Basin and the Riverina.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-27/a-stocktake-of-waterbirds-in-easte...

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The tornado destroyed or damaged 403 homes over a seven-county area, Flynn said. In addition, flooding left 50 homes uninhabitable and closed 40 roads in Monroe County, which got 10 to 12 inches (about 25 to 30 cm) of rain, he said.

The tornadoes also killed six people in Tennessee and one other in Arkansas, bringing the three-state total to 17. A twister in Birmingham, Alabama, late on Friday afternoon damaged several homes, uprooted trees and caused a handful of minor injuries, police and weather officials reported.

Alabama and Mississippi will get another round of rain on Monday night, said Evan Duffey, meteorologist for AccuWeather.

http://news.yahoo.com/stormy-weather-expected-u-post-holiday-travel-1552...

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A tropical depression that has weakened into a low pressure area brought rains to the central Visayas islands and Mindanao, the main southern island, according to the government weather station.

Cold monsoon winds blowing from the north-east brought rains to Luzon, the main northern island, where large farming communities have been submerged in mostly waist-deep floods from typhoon Melor, which hit at the start of the week.

Areas inundated by Melor have barely recovered from floods brought by typhoon Koppu in October.

“Almost the entire Philippines is experiencing rains. More floods are possible,” state weather forecaster Robert Badrina said on Saturday. “We expect the rains to peak today. The weather will start to improve tomorrow.”

President Benigno Aquino declared a state of national calamity to “hasten the rescue, recovery, relief and rehabilitation efforts”, according to his spokesman, Herminio Coloma.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/19/philippines-storm-death-tol...

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Tuesday is the winter solstice and temperatures are expected to reach 16C - compare that to the 18C recorded exactly six months ago in London.

Meanwhile, Scotland is balmier than parts of Spain, with temperatures in Edinburgh creeping into the low teens as Madrid struggles to reach double figures.

The story is different for northern Spain, where the unusually warm weather and lack of rain has sparked more than 130 wildfires.

Elsewhere, high temperatures across the Alps have left some resorts, including in Austria and Switzerland, lacking in snow.

Even the use of artificial snow has proved difficult in places because it is impossible to stop the snow melting.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/12/nature-state-confusion-europe-heat...

Apart from rabid denialists trying hard to tell you fibs about global warming, the internet and other electronic information platforms cannot be trusted:

Sometimes you have to do things by halves, they suggested.

The ferocious storm cell that spawned deadly tornadoes in the US over the weekend is expected to develop into what meteorologists call a "bomb cyclone", steering exceptionally warm air over the Arctic and more flooding rains into the UK.

One widely used computer model, the Global Forecast System, is predicting the storm to drop pressure levels sharply by Tuesday night, easily exceeding the "bomb cyclone" criteria of at least 24 millibars in 24 hours, according to the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang. 

"We've probably never seen weather like what's being predicted for a vast region stretching from the North Atlantic to the North Pole and on into the broader Arctic this coming week," said Robert Scribbler, an environmental blogger.  

...

The storm will also drag warm air over the high Arctic. with the North Pole temperatures likely to climb to 1-2 degrees above zero on Wednesday - or 41-42 degrees above average for this time of year...

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/bomb-cyclone-to-spike-arctic-temperatures-add-to-uks-flooding-woes--20151228-glw1u8.html#ixzz3vk28Ff4a 
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

It is already clear, though, that the year will be the hottest ever recorded at the surface of the planet, surpassing 2014 by a considerable margin. That is a function both of the short-term heat from the El Niño and the long-term warming from human emissions. In both the Atlantic and Pacific, the unusually warm ocean surface is throwing extra moisture into the air, said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Storms over land can draw moisture from as far as 2,000 miles away, he said, so the warm ocean is likely influencing such events as the heavy rain in the Southeast, as well as the record number of strong hurricanes and typhoons that occurred this year in the Pacific basin, with devastating consequences for island nations like Vanuatu.

“The warmth means there is more fuel for these weather systems to feed upon,” Dr. Trenberth said. “This is the sort of thing we will see more as we go decades into the future.”

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/science/climate-chaos-across-the-map.html?_r=0

The real bad news is not here yet, but the elements of the bad news have been pumped into the atmosphere... It will hit us when the least expected.

Rising global temperatures may be affecting the Greenland ice sheet - and its contribution to sea-level rise - in more serious ways that scientists imagined, a new study finds.

Recent changes to the island's snow and ice cover appear to have affected its ability to store excess water, meaning more melting ice may be running off into the ocean than previously thought.

That's worrying news for the precarious Greenland ice sheet, which scientists say has already lost more than 8.16 trillion tonnes of ice in the past century - and whose melting rate only continues to increase as temperatures keep warming up.

From Desmog:

From a certain angle and with a sympathetic camera positioned just right, a triumphant Marc Morano emerges from a stretch white limo and raises his hand to an out-of-shot Paris crowd as he hits the red carpet for the world premiere of his new movie Climate Hustle.

Behind him comes a gaggle of suited climate science deniers, the stars of a film that producer Morano promised would “rock the climate debate”. To many, the big night appears to be a roaring success.

But just like many of the arguments from professional climate science denialists, what at first might appear a cinematic coup d'état turns out to be little more than fakery and stage management.

How do I know?  I was there.

Marc Morano is one of the most recognisable faces of professionalized climate science denial in the United States. He is the communications director for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a think tank that claims human-caused climate change is either overblown alarmism or a hoax.

The Paris “premiere” took place on 7 December 2015 at the tiny Cinéma du Panthéon, about 15 kilometres away from the actual venue of the major United Nations COP21 climate talks, which were beginning their second week.

Following Morano out of the back of the Hummer limo was a guy dressed in a large white teddy bear costume (I’m guessing the costume store was all out of polar bears).

Then came the denialists — Dr Fred Singer (who doubts secondhand tobacco smoke causes cancer), Lord Christopher Monckton (who claims Barack Obama’s birth certificate is almost certainly fake, and also lots of other stuff), Dr Bob Carter (an Australian geologist who advises a string of climate science denial groups) and Dr Willie Soon (whose research is exclusively paid for by conservative causes and the fossil fuel industry).

What was odd about this scene was that these special guests turning up in the limo had, just 20 minutes earlier, walked away from the front door of the cinema to a bar about 150 metres away, to then be driven back to the place they had just come from for their apparent grand arrival in a stretch Hummer.

Earlier still, the scene in the front of the cinema had resembled a surrealist passion play as not one, but two sets of climate activist protestors turned up to ridicule the documentary. One group was dressed as coal barons, another as spoons (I really have no idea).

During the chaos, I asked Morano if he was worried that in light of how 2015 was likely to be declared the hottest year on record, people might dismiss the claims in his movie.

Morano said the “hottest year” was dealt with by scientists appearing in the film and that in any case, the declaration would only sneak above the margin of error for global land-based measurements.

But when I asked if I could have a seat in the premiere to see the arguments from these scientists myself, Morano said he would have loved for me to be able to watch, but they were full. I was given the same story by CFACT's executive director Craig Rucker, who also cited a fire marshal excuse about the theatre's capacity. 

I had previously asked a French group helping to organise the premiere, Institut Coppet, for a ticket.  They had accepted my RSVP, but a few days later said I wasn’t welcome. Other reporters at DeSmog and at the Irish Times had a similar experience of having a 'yes' turn to a 'no' days later.

Morano has told sympathetic media since the premiere that there were “hundreds” of people queuing down the street and that they had to turn people away. But one person who watched the Paris premiere, but asked not to be named, told me the cinema was “half empty” during the screening. An estimated 100 people had been inside for the cocktail reception, the source said. Another attendee told DeSmog after the film let out that the theatre was at best 70 percent full.

Those being “turned away” it seems were those most likely to criticise the film’s content. 

Morano also told me he would be at the Paris conference later that week, but complained that “we only have two passes for our organisation” — continuing a theme that denialists were being shut out.  

According to a list of Paris conference participants, the UN actually granted passes to six representatives from CFACT. Three (Morano and his CFACT colleagues Craig Rucker and David Rothbard) were accredited with a CFACT delegation and three more were listed as CFACT representatives in a ten-strong delegation from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, another conservative think tank that pushes climate science denial.

Morano has, of course, featured the movie premier on his ClimateDepot blog, where he has pictures of the “paparazzi” at the steps of the cinema.  Except these were not paparazzi, but a mixture of curious DeSmog staff, bemused onlookers armed with smartphones, a filmmaker from Latvia who was following the protestors, and Chris Rogers, the producer and director of Climate Hustle. The crowd was rounded out by a few Paris police on traffic duty to keep the narrow street clear, and a half dozen private security guards hired by CFACT.

British peer Lord Christopher Monckton, the self-titled crown prince of climate sceptics, was one of the first to emerge from the back of the Hummer limo. In typically vaudevillian manner, Monckton played to the cameras by pointing at the University of Queensland’s John Cook — who was there to interview sceptics — calling him a “crook” in French and English. Cook is the bête noire of denialists, being the lead author of a science study finding that 97 per cent of peer reviewed studies on climate change agreed that it was mostly caused by human activity.

When I asked Monckton for an interview, he briefly paused, asked my name, and then said: “I only give interviews to adults”. He said he would only answer questions about science. Perhaps childishly, I pointed out that I wasn’t a scientist and neither was he. This didn’t help.

Monckton did grant an interview that week to the most certainly adult Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Peter Hannam, in which the hereditary peer Monckton said the Paris talks were an attempt to set up a “nasty totalitarian kind of global governance”. Monckton also thinks the UN had plotted to overthrow former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who once described the science of climate change as “absolute crap”.

Climate Hustle is due to premiere back in the United States some time in the new year, although Morano and Rucker were cagey about details when asked by DeSmog.

Which brings me back to the red carpet itself — an odd spongy plastic stuck to the concrete steps of the cinema. Even Morano’s red carpet was a poor imitation.

http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/12/30/fakery-paris-red-carpet-premiere-marc-morano-s-climate-hustle-documentary

The Coppet institute is a French idealist outfit that believes in the good of humanity. It believes that humans can deal between themselves in a free and open social construct in which the forces of free markets are cordial. The Institute is famous for its defence of humanist ideals and human rights. Thus full of good intentions, the present Coppet institute is deluded. 

The participants base their present views on Austrian and American Liberal-Conservative think tanks which hate any form of control from government, unless they control the government to give them free reins to assault any markets in which way they can, through their multinationals. The game is not "freedom" but CASH.

The game of trade is ruthless.

Based on ideas from Madame de Stael and Benjamin Constant started in the 19th century. The Institute works concentrate on the creation of a responsible minimalist constitutional/republican government, on free-trade, on the questions of imperialism, on the French revolution, Freedom of expression, education, cultural affairs, the rise of socialism and of the nanny-state. 

All good so far, except a) a good-natured humanity is still on the drawing board and b) the planet has limits which should limit our free-burning of it by misunderstanding sciences. 

Sure, the Coppet Institute loves freedom but its cosy arrangement with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a think tank that claims human-caused climate change is either overblown alarmism or a hoax, should ring strong alarm bells.

I do not dispute the right of people to express themselves freely, but when serious dangers, especially to the planet, are looming, you don't want to sleep with ratbags. 

Either the Coppet institute is naive and think letting people express their skewed views no matter what is good, either the Coppet Institute is thick with the denialists. I would believe the latter considering in its freedom of expression charter, the Coppet Institute did not insists that the Desmog reporter be admitted to the viewing of the denialist movie Climate Hustle, after the Coppet institute had already given tickets to the reporter, but was rejected thereafter. Sulphur we smell. The bullshit is still warm.

According to the DeSmog reporter:

I had previously asked a French group helping to organise the premiere, Institut Coppet, for a ticket.  They had accepted my RSVP, but a few days later said I wasn’t welcome. Other reporters at DeSmog and at the Irish Times had a similar experience of having a 'yes' turn to a 'no' days later.

One could be forgiven to think that the Coppet Institute idealism has been highjacked by the Yankee Imperiumism, via infiltration of neononservatism disguised as a fight for freedom. Beware of agent inflitrators...

York was clear: “If sea ice loss continues at the same pace or faster than we have seen here over the last 30 years, this is definitely not sustainable and researchers predict polar bears could become regionally extinct by mid- to end of this century.”

The polar bear is an icon of climate change. What is happening near Churchill is a clear sign that change is taking place now. When I returned to Europe, the frost finally came. It should have been one month earlier. This is about much more than polar bears. If an animal that is designed to survive here can’t make it, we are in trouble. It’s really about us.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/20/churchill-canada-hud...

See toon and story at top...

In a few days the Arctic’s beleaguered sea ice cover is likely to set another grim record. Its coverage is on course to be the lowest winter maximum extent ever observed since satellite records began. These show that more than 2 million square kilometres of midwinter sea ice have disappeared from the Arctic in less than 40 years.

The ice’s disappearance – triggered by global warming caused by rising carbon emissions from cars and factories – is likely to have profound implications for the planet. A loss of sea ice means a loss of reflectivity of solar rays and further rises in global temperatures, warn researchers.

But there are other pressing concerns, they add. Sea ice loss is now posing serious threats to the Arctic’s indigenous species – its seals, fish, wolves, foxes and polar bears. “The Arctic food chain relies on a stable sea ice platform and that is now disappearing, putting the region’s wildlife at risk,” said marine ecologist Tom Brown, of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (Sams), in Oban.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/04/arctic-ecosystem-ice-disap...

MEANWHILE:

But last month, Hamilton quit the CCA after hearing a chorus of government ministers, led by the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, touting the oxymoron of “clean coal”.

Now Hamilton has spelled out his antipathy towards Turnbull – a politician who only six years ago was a climate change hawk, who advocated for a massive shift to renewable energy, and who was utterly sceptical of “clean coal”.

In an interview for my podcast, Positive Feedback, Hamilton gives a withering personal assessment of the prime minister and reveals what was going on inside the CCA before his resignation. 

“I wasn’t disappointed, or upset,” says Hamilton on Turnbull’s recent advocacy for building more coal plants, “I was disgusted.” 

“For Turnbull to be using that outrageous term [clean coal] to describe coal-fired power stations – I was disgusted.”

READ MORE:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2017/mar/10/its-a-trag...

see image at top and text below it...

MARC MORANO — one of the world’s most notorious climate science deniers — is heading to Australia to push his discredited documentary Climate Hustle.

Morano is the communications director at the mistitled Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) — one among a suite of U.S.-based conservative “free market” groups that helped convince President Donald Trump to pull the country out of the international Paris climate agreement.

Climate Hustle, first screened in late 2015 in Paris, claims human-caused climate change is a scare story and that scientists actually disagree that humans are causing global warming.

In reality, climate scientists and campaigners say the documentary is a rehash of long-debunked talking points, cherry-picked claims and misrepresentations promoted by a “fossil fuel salesman.”

According to promotional materials, the film will screen in Melbourne on xxxxx, in Brisbane xxxxxxxxxxxxx and then on xxxxxxxxxxxx Sydney .

Morano told DeSmog he wants to encourage Australia to withdraw from the United Nations Paris agreement — a step taken by the President Donald Trump, who has packed his administration with staff members who reject the conclusions of the world’s scientific community that greenhouse gases are causing climate change.

Climate scientists who have reviewed the film for DeSmog have described Climate Hustle as “muddled”, “misleading” and “the usual rubbish from the usual suspects”.

Anticipating that Morano and his two colleagues also travelling from the United States will seek media coverage, campaigners said the group should be ignored.

A Greenpeace spokesperson said:

“The last thing we need is another fossil fuel salesman."

read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/climate...

see also:

an artificial red carpet for lord monckton...

and read from top...

The Venta Maersk, carrying electronics from Busan, South Korea, and frozen fish from Vladivostok, will make its first stop in Bremerhaven, Germany, and end its record-breaking voyage in St. Petersburg in late September.

A "one-off sea trial," the Venta's summer trip around the northern coast of Russia is primarily intended as an exploratory voyage to gather data, according to a Maersk spokesperson, cited by the Washington Post.

Russian pilots will travel aboard the 200-meter ship to assist with navigation duties and 
four Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers will stand by if the specially-reinforced Venta gets into trouble.

The crucial nature of the test voyage by a big container ship is the length of the trip. A craft traveling from Germany to South Korea around South Africa's Cape of Good Hope requires an average of 46 days, while using the Suez Canal cuts that time down to 34 days, according to searoutes.com.

The same trip, however, using the Northern Sea Route across an Arctic free of ice is expected to take just 23 days for large modern container ships.

In July, Russia sent its first liquefied natural gas cargo — from the Yamal production facility above the Arctic Circle to Rudong, China — in just 19 days, a savings of 16 days by avoiding the Suez Canal.

Due in part to shallow seas north of Siberia, the Northern Sea Route is increasingly free of ice beginning earlier in the season — around mid-July — and staying clear deeper into autumn — mid October — than other Arctic regions, even as NASA has noted a 13.4-percent drop in Arctic ice over the past decade.

Although the rapid disappearance of ice in the north and south poles of the Earth, as well as from the massive ice shelf on Greenland, is a deeply disturbing trend resulting from global warming brought about by human-induced climate change, the value of faster shipping times is inescapable.

Rosatom, the Russian firm providing the world's largest ­nuclear-powered ice-breaking ships, has advertised to global shippers — in a poke at African terrorists in the Gulf of Aden — that its northern Arctic route has "no queues and no pirates."

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/business/201809101067886525-Ships-Save-2-Weeks-T...

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