Alaska’s glaciers grew this year, after shrinking for most of the last 200 years. The reason?  Global temperatures dropped over the past 18 months. The global mean annual temperature has been declining recently because the solar wind thrown out by the sun has retreated to its smallest extent in at least 50 years. This temperature downturn was not predicted by the global computer models, but had been predicted by the sunspot index since 2000.

The solar wind normally protects the earth from 90 percent of the high-energy cosmic rays that flash constantly through the universe. Henrik Svensmark at the Danish Space Research Institute has demonstrated that when more cosmic rays hit the earth, they create more of the low, wet clouds that deflect heat back into outer space. Thus the earth’s recent cooling.

Below you'll find the latest journal reviews from CO2 Science . Check them out as each is a good read:

Tropical Cyclone Genesis: How is it affected by rising sea surface temperatures, according to a recently modified model?

Australian-Region Tropical Cyclone Characteristics: How have they varied over the last 3.5 decades?

Rapid Evolution of a Plant in Response to a Change in Climate: What life history traits were altered? ... and how rapid were the alterations?

The Carbon Balance of Old-Growth Forests: Is it positive, neutral or negative?

Leaf-Galls and Leaf-Mines of Mature Oak Trees: How are they affected by medium-term atmospheric CO2 enrichment?

Tree rings are widely used for reconstructing climate and past climates are critical for putting the current climate (including global temperatures) into the proper perspective. Is current warming unusual? Only a comparison to the past can tell.

To help gain a better understanding of the past and how global temperatures may have behaved, researchers frequently try to extract climate information that may be stored in the annual growth ring of trees. The standard practice is to calibrate annual tree ring width (and/or wood density) to the temperature under which the trees were growing using a linear model based on recent (e.g., 20th Century) data, and then interpret past rings widths as indicators of temperature. A linear model is one in which a unit change in temperature produces a corresponding unit change in the tree ring attributes—and a linear model assumes that this relationship applies over the entire range of temperatures.

In response to a question concerning the likelihood of our oceans becoming acidic from global warming Ian Plimer, University of Adelaide, has replied:

THE oceans have remained alkaline during the Phanerozoic (last 540 million years) except for a very brief and poorly understood  time 55 million years ago.

Rainwater (pH 5.6) reacts with the most common minerals on Earth (feldspars) to produce clays, this is an acid consuming reaction, alkali and alkaline earths are leached into the oceans (which is why we have saline oceans), silica is redeposited as cements in sediments, the reaction consumes acid and is accelerated by temperature (see below).

This report provides a review of Alabama’s climate history and reveals that there is no observational evidence of unusual long-term climate changes taking place that could be linked to anthropogenic “global warming” — despite scientifically unsupportable claims and frequent prognostications of gloom and doom.

Instead of rising temperatures, the state’s annual average temperature has declined over the past century.

When the statewide average temperature history for Alabama is broken down into the four seasons, it can be seen that the same general patterns persist throughout the year. The warmest decades were typically prior to the mid-20th century, and recent decades show nothing unusual — fluctuating from year to year on either side of the long-term average.

Instead of an increasing frequency of drought, the state’s moisture conditions have improved over the long run.