New research that integrates seismic recordings with Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements indicates that a 7,000-square-mile region of the Whillians Ice Stream in West Antarctica moves more than two feet twice every day in an earthquake-like pattern equivalent to a Magnitude 7 temblor.

The findings were published in this week's edition of the journal Nature by a group of scientists that includes investigators from Washington University in St. Louis, Penn State University and the University of Newcastle in Great Britain. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the U.S. researchers.

Seismologists use the magnitude scale to describe the seismic energy released by an earthquake. An earthquake measured at between 7.0 and 7.9 on the scale is considered "major," and can cause serious damage over large areas in populated regions of the world. Not including the events described in the new findings, there are an estimated 20 such quakes worldwide each year.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking on global warming and CO2 regulation to a group of eighth graders — a change of pace from my usual speaking engagements. Prior to my visit, the class wrote papers on whether man-made global warming is occurring. Half the class was assigned the pro-MMGW argument and half the con. Afterward, the class debated the issue.

This balanced look at climate change, along with a rational debate, is what is missing in today’s global warming hysteria. Where’s the debate? Where is the acknowledgement of the anti-alarmists’ arguments? Why does research funding flow overwhelmingly to those connecting you-name-it to anthropogenic global warming? 

The presentation concludes:

So where does that leave us?

In my opinion, there are serious and probably fatal problems with the main proxies used as supposed evidence against a warm MWP – the Graybill strip bark chronologies, Briffa’s adjustment to the Tornetrask series, the inconsistency between Briffa’s Yamal substitution and the updated Polar Urals series and so on. For every proxy that supposedly shows a MWP cooler than the present, there seems to be one that is just as good or better evidencing the opposite. For the California and Urals proxies so fundamental to the Hockey Stick, the ecological evidence is further evidence against the Graybill and Briffa chronologies being interpretable as temperature proxies.

Sometimes we wonder if authors of papers are not outright campaigning for coverage in World Climate Report. Chose a title like “Ocean surface warming: The North Atlantic remains within the envelope of previous recorded conditions” and you will be guaranteed coverage by our skeptical scientists!

The latest article, with the title above, appeared recently in Deep-Sea Research which if you don’t know is published by Elsevier (one of the largest publishers of academic journals in the world). The research of interest here was conducted by a team of oceanographers from the United Kingdom’s Swansea University, and Australia’s University of Darwin, the University of Queensland, and CSIRO. Victoria Hobson and her three associates begin the article noting “There is increasing evidence that warming global temperatures will have profound effects on the Earth’s ecosystems, with the global mean air surface temperature rising by around 0.6°C during the 20th century, with 11 of the last 12 years (1995–2006) ranking amongst the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature since 1850.” They could win an award from Al Gore with that mouthful! Turning attention to the ocean, they write “Oceans may play a crucial role in regulating the climate, and since the 1950s the heat content of the world’s oceans has increased by ~2 x 10^23 J, equivalent to a mean volume warming of 0.06°C. While this increase is an order of magnitude less than that observed for terrestrial systems it may be even more important as water heats at a much slower rate than air because of its heat capacity.”

Readers following recent threads know that I've been looking for instances where scientists make claims that some observations are "inconsistent with" the results from climate models. The reason for such a search is that it is all too easy for modelers to claim that anything and everything under the sun is "consistent with" their predictions, sometimes to avoid the perception of a loss of credibility in the political battle over climate change.

I am happy to report that claims of "inconsistent with" do exist. Here is an example from a paper just out by Knutson et al. in Nature Geoscience: