It never ceases to amaze me how people think when it comes to the Arctic. Somehow there is this pervasive belief that “if we just go there and document it, we’ll be able to demonstrate how climate change is affecting the arctic”.  This is the second team with such dubious aspirations this year, the first being failed kayaker Lewis Gordon Pugh who spun his dismal and embarrassing failure into an “accomplishment”, and then would not even take valid questions about his false claim of being the person who “kayaked furthest north”.

I have no sympathy for these people. Nature is teaching them hard lessons, let us hope they retain the material. - Anthony

The AP covers the new reports of rapidly increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere:

The world pumped up its pollution of the chief man-made global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists’ projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said Thursday.

The new numbers, called “scary” by some, were a surprise because scientists thought an economic downturn would slow energy use. Instead, carbon dioxide output jumped 3 percent from 2006 to 2007.

That’s an amount that exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.

As expected, the climatological statistics recently issued by Met Éireann show that this summer's rainfall was well above normal everywhere. Mean temperatures for the summer were a little higher than normal, by amounts varying in an irregular pattern between zero and 0.8 degrees Celsius across the country.

A first observation to be made is that the summer's rainfall pattern was the opposite of what is predicted by all climate models to result from the global warming associated with enhanced greenhouse gases. The model predictions are for warmer and drier Irish summers, with this trend being particularly marked in the east and southeast. Must we conclude from this lack of agreement between the predicted and observed rainfall that global warming isn't really occurring, or that the model predictions of the consequences of global warming are misleading?

"The bottom line is that we're definitely going to be living in a warmer Southern California," said Bill Patzert, a NASA Jet Propulsion Lab climatologist and oceanographer who co-authored a study that examined Los Angeles' daily temperature data for a hundred year period.

What they found was that "the number of extreme heat days (above 90 degrees Fahrenheit in downtown LA) has increased sharply over the past century," the study's summary explains. "A century ago, the region averaged about two such days a year; today the average is more than 25. In addition, the duration of heat waves (two or more extreme heat days in a row) has also soared, from two-day events a century ago to one- to two-week events today."

With all the focus on human-triggered global warming, it may be hard to imagine that the world is riding a 50-million-year-long cooling trend.

But it is, and blame the trend on a continental-scale collision, say geophysicists Dennis Kent of Rutgers University and Giovanni Muttoni of the University of Milan in Italy.

Researchers say there is strong evidence that increases in atmospheric CO2 contributed to a warm spell 50 million years ago dubbed the Early Eocene climate optimum – the warmest period in 65 million years. But over the following 15 million years, deep sea temperatures fell by about 10.8 degrees F., reflecting a significant cooling at the surface. This cooling ultimately allowed the cycle of ice ages to emerge.

Drs. Kent and Muttoni have mined paleomagnetic and other data and suggest that atmospheric CO2 dropped because India collided with Eurasia, shutting down a productive, natural CO2 factory.