GLOBAL WARMING: Sierra Final Snowpack Measured at 188% of Average...

GLOBAL WARMING: Sierra Final Snowpack Measured at 188% of Average...

Sierra Snowpack Is Measured at 188% of Average in Final Survey of the Year

Posted 3:12 PM, May 2, 2019, by Associated Press, Updated at 06:06PM, May 2, 2019

https://youtu.be/zSXpbFQ1HnQ

California cities and farms can expect ample water supplies this summer after winter storms blanketed the Sierra Nevada, nearly doubling the snowpack average for this time of year, state water officials said Thursday.
The fifth and final survey of the season at Phillips Station recorded 47 inches of snow depth and a snow water equivalent of 27.5 inches, the Department of Water Resources said. That’s 188% of average for the location near Lake Tahoe.
Just four years ago, then-Gov. Jerry Brown found a field at Phillips Station barren of any measureable snow amid an historic drought.
The April 1 measurement, which is typically the largest and is used by the state to make decisions about water supplies, measured 106.5 inches and 51 inches of snow water content. Snow water equivalent is the depth of water that theoretically would result if the entire snowpack melted instantaneously.
The amount of snow is measured monthly through winter and spring at more than 260 locations to help managers plan for how much they can deliver to customers later in the year.
The snowpack feeds California reservoirs and supplies about 30% of the state’s water needs. This year it is especially dense, officials said, and will produce runoff into late summer.
Increased runoff brings a slight risk of localized flooding and minor debris flows, especially in areas scorched by recent wildfires, said DWR spokesman Chris Orrock
Blizzards pounded the Sierra Nevada all winter, burying the towering mountain range in massive amounts of snow. On the eastern side of the range, for example, the Mammoth Mountain resort reported nearly 57 feet of snow at the summit during the season.

Related stories

• ‘California Water Supply Dream’: Key Survey Shows Sierra Snowpack Measures 162%
• Sierra Snowpack at 156% as Some CA Ski Resorts Get Over 550 Inches of Snow This Season
• Sierra Snowpack Is Currently Fifth-Deepest Ever Recorded, Latest Measurement Shows

https://ktla.com/2019/05/02/sierra-s...y-of-the-year/

Greenland ice glacier GROWING as climate alarmists go into mass hysteria that defies real-world measurements

Thursday, May 02, 2019 by: Isabelle Z.

530 Views
https://www.naturalnews.com/wp-conte...c-Atlantic.jpg (Natural News) If you listen to the mainstream media and the global warming alarmism that dominates discussions of the environment there, you’d be forgiven for being convinced that glaciers are melting into the sea. However, real-world measurements fail to back that notion up – in fact, what they’re showing is that the exact opposite is happening.

The Jakobshavn glacier, which was once considered one of the fastest-retreating masses of ice and snow on the planet, has reversed its fortunes in recent times and is actually growing back! Unusually cold currents in the ocean have caused it and other glaciers situated in western Greenland to grow, not melt.
Until recently, it had been the biggest source of periodic ice mass loss in the past two decades, and it has created a tenth of the country’s icebergs. The study attributes the glacier’s growth spurt to a cycle of cooler water to the south of the glacier in the North Atlantic. The water there is now 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit colder than it was a few years ago.
A study that was published in Nature said that the glacier has been “re-advancing, slowing and thickening.” Interestingly, the researchers identify cooler temperatures as the reason for these surprising changes, stating: “We link these changes to current cooling in ocean waters in Disko Bay that spill over into Ilulissat Icefjord. Ocean temperatures in the bay’s upper 250 meters have cooled to levels not seen since the mid-1980s.”
Mainstream media portrays this as bad news for the environment

Not only has this fact been largely ignored by the mass media, but those outlets that have admitted it are trying to paint it in a negative light. For example, CNN used the headline, “Greenland’s most critical glacier is suddenly gaining ice, but that might not be a good thing.” No matter how they try to portray it, one fact remains: Those gloom and doom predictions that it would continue to shrink were wrong, and that means that many of their other hysteria-inducing predictions could be equally flawed.
Incredulous scientists resisted the news at first, with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Ala Khazendar saying: “At first we didn’t believe it. We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years.”
Jakobshavn has become somewhat of a poster child for climate change alarmists, who used its thinning as evidence that global warming exists. In 2012, it was reportedly thinning by 130 feet per year. It’s also famous for being the source of the legendary iceberg that sank the Titanic.
Not wanting this news to hurt the climate change narrative, some scientists are claiming this somehow will be bad news in the long run. It is incredible how they can paint glaciers melting and the direct opposite action – glaciers growing – as both being signs that catastrophic climate change is occurring. It really doesn’t matter what happens in the real world; they’ll find a way to twist it to support their narrative. This should erase all doubts that the concept of climate change is not just scientific – it’s also quite political.

Sources for this article include:
NewsMax.com
News.Yahoo.com


https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-05-...-hysteria.html

Rains like no other: Iraq is tested in era of climate change

https://www.kob.com/APImages/AP1f264...a2b30a4a78.jpg
Photo: AP

By PHILIP ISSA
May 02, 2019 05:52 AM

YOUSSIFIYAH, Iraq (AP) — After years of meager rains and scorching summers, the wettest winter in a generation has revived Iraq's famous rivers and filled its lakes, bringing welcome relief to a country facing severe water challenges in the era of climate change.

The rains have restored freshwater marshes of southern Iraq — a region some scholars see as the biblical Garden of Eden — and transformed lands once parched for water into fields of grain and cereal.

But the deluge has also tested a country more familiar with droughts than downpours and raised questions about whether Iraq's 20th century infrastructure can adapt to an unpredictable, 21st century climate.

Swelled by local rains and snowmelt from Turkey and Iran, both the Tigris and Euphrates and their many tributaries burst their banks and flooded plains and cities in Iraq, despite the country's considerable networks of dams and canals. And despite a trend toward a hotter and drier climate, an unseasonably chilly April and high humidity damaged crops on the farmlands around Baghdad.

Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi called it imperative to revamp infrastructure and water policies to prepare for more extreme weather events, though the rains this year pose a policy dilemma as unpredictable climate stresses may lead to both droughts and floods.

"This will be a very important lesson for us in the next year, and the coming years," Abdul-Mahdi told a press conference in April

Outside the town of Buhriz in eastern Diyala province, where Sirwan River flows into Iraq from neighboring Iran, Nouri Kudaier waded through his waterlogged citrus grove to see what he could salvage of this season's harvest.

"We're asking for compensation from the government for the damage," Kudaier said. "It's our only source of livelihood."

Iraq has not seen as much precipitation in a single winter since 1988, according to the Ministry of Water Resources, which reported 47 billion cubic meters of water in the country's reservoirs. That's three times what was there at the same time last year, when water levels were so dire that the government banned farmers from growing seasonal crops during the summer months.

In Youssifiyah, a farming region just south of Baghdad, canals that were empty last year are flush with water, and wells that were dug 24 meters (79 feet) deep now come up with water at a depth of just 6 meters (20 feet).

Salah al-Saidey said he planted twice as much wheat this year but the heavy rains and cold ruined a portion of his cucumber and tomato crop.

"We have a fungus growing," said al-Saidey, pointing to the brittle, yellow leaves on the vines. "We weren't expecting it. We're trying to fight it, but we can't keep pace."

Spring floods used to be common in Iraq. For millennia, farmers relied on the floods to inundate their fields and grow rice, wheat and other grains.

But the floods were unpredictable, and every so often the rivers would burst their banks in Baghdad and elsewhere, with calamitous results.

Modernization projects in the 20th century saw Iraq build dams along the Tigris and its tributaries, and canals to divert water. Upstream, Turkey, Iran and Syria did the same, and the inundations became a distant memory, especially as rising temperatures brought weaker rains and faster evaporation from lakes and reservoirs.

Last year, desperate shortages of clean water led residents to riot in Basra, Iraq's main oil hub and its largest city in the south. The flow of the Euphrates and Tigris grew so weak that creeping seawater from the Persian Gulf reached the Chibayish freshwater marshes about 180 kilometers (112 miles) upstream, contaminating them with salt.

This year, that won't be a problem, said the head of Basra's provincial council — the revived rivers flushed the salt away and filled the marshes with fresh water.

"We have enough water for this year and one after, God willing" said Sabah al-Bazouni.

But securing water for future generations will depend on more than favorable weather, says Iraq's water resources minister, Jamal al-Adily.

It will require a collaborative effort between Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran, he said. Some 70% of Iraq's water flows from the three upstream countries, though no formal water sharing agreement exists between them.

"Iraqis have a right to water," al-Adily told The Associated Press. "The rivers were here before the borders."

With reservoirs flush with water, there may be no better time to start discussions in earnest.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said his country would soon send a special representative of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Baghdad to discuss water administration.

And as Iraq simultaneously plans to expand its own oil production, it has a vital resource to leverage in water negotiations. Turkey is expected to rebalance its oil supplies after the U.S. announced it was ending the waivers that have allowed Turkey to import oil from Iran despite sanctions imposed by Washington.

Iraq is one of Turkey's leading suppliers of crude oil, and the two countries already make approximately $10 billion in bilateral trade.

"Water should be a link to open trade between the two countries," said al-Adily. "Turkey will stand to benefit from cooperating with Iraq."

https://www.kob.com/news/rains-like-...hange/5337767/

Unexpected Source Fuels Rapid Melt at World’s Biggest Ice Shelf

A hole in nearby sea ice allows sunlight to warm the ocean water in contact with the ice

• By Chelsea Harvey, E&E News on April 30, 2019

https://static.scientificamerican.co...3CF020E050258D
The Ross Polynya where solar heat is absorbed by the ocean. The vertical wall of the ice front stretches a distance of 600 kilometers. Credit: Poul Christoffersen


Part of Antarctica’s Ross ice shelf—the largest ice shelf in the world—appears to be melting 10 times faster than the ice around it. And researchers say a new process, one that was only rarely considered by scientists in the past, is the likely culprit.

The findings, published yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience, point to warm ocean water, heated up by the sun at the surface of the sea, as the driver behind the melting.

It sounds deceptively simple, but it’s actually a process that hasn’t been well documented until now. Scientists know the ocean has an important influence on the melt rates of some Antarctic glaciers, but most recent research has focused on deep-sea currents rather than surface water. Scientists are finding that some deep currents—potentially driven by processes influenced by climate change—are helping drive masses of relatively warm water up to the edge of the ice sheet in certain regions of Antarctica, melting glaciers from the bottom up (Climatewire, April 10, 2018).

But in this case, the researchers are pointing instead to the simple influence of the sun.

Near the front of the Ross ice shelf, there’s a round patch of ocean that tends to remain relatively clear of sea ice, even while the rest of the water around it is covered. It’s a natural phenomenon known as a “polynya” that occurs in various parts of both the Arctic and Southern oceans, typically formed by polar wind patterns.

Sea ice helps to block sunlight from reaching the water it covers. But when the water is clear, as in the case of polynyas, it tends to soak up more heat. The Ross polynya is a prime example, as the new research demonstrates.

The researchers, led by Craig Stewart of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, relied on a combination of radar mapping to measure the rate of melting on the Ross ice shelf and direct observations of the ocean from instruments they deployed in the sea. They found that a particularly vulnerable region of the Ross ice shelf, close to the ice front, is melting at intense rates—about an order of magnitude faster than the rest of the ice shelf.

The area with the highest melting happens to be a thin, but important, section of the ice shelf that helps stabilize the flow of the ice behind it. If it were to give way, the region’s rate of ice loss could substantially accelerate.

The ocean instruments suggest that the melting is largely influenced by the flow of warm, sun-heated surface water from the nearby Ross polynya, particularly during the Antarctic summer.

‘OVERLOOKED, BUT POTENTIALLY IMPORTANT’

Measurements of sea surface temperatures around Antarctica suggest that few parts of the Southern Ocean warm up to the temperatures observed near the Ross ice shelf. As a result, the scientists write, “this process does not seem to be widespread at present.”

But that could change with future warming.

As temperature continue to rise, “the projections are for a reduction in the amount of sea ice around Antarctica,” said climate scientist Laurence Padman, a senior scientist with nonprofit Earth & Space Research, who commented on the new research for E&E News. With more of the liquid ocean exposed to radiation from the sun, the water could potentially absorb enough heat to speed up melting on other parts of the Antarctic ice sheet.

There are plenty of other climate-related factors to take into account, as well, Padman added. Potential changes in Antarctic clouds, wind patterns or ocean currents may also affect the amount of heat the water is able to absorb in the future.

But in general, he said, “if the sea ice was to thin out in front of another ice shelf, then there would be more opportunity for this type of melting to occur.”

It’s a process the authors of the new study say represents a “frequently overlooked, but potentially important, factor” in the future stability of Antarctic ice shelves.

The concept itself isn’t completely new. According to Padman, researchers have hypothesized for decades that warming surface waters could have an impact on Antarctic melt rates. Some scientists have even begun trying to incorporate the process in models of the ice sheet’s response to climate change.

But scientists are just beginning to document the phenomenon in the field. Padman has conducted similar research on the Ross ice shelf and has also found that sun-heated surface waters are playing a key role in some of its regional melting. He presented some of those findings in December at the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union.

As far as the Ross ice shelf is concerned, research generally suggests that it’s stable for the time being, despite the high melt rates in some regions. The ice that’s being lost is still largely being replaced by accumulating snowfall and more ice flowing in from farther inland, keeping the region in a relatively steady state.

Still, a substantial increase in future melting could potentially throw the region out of balance. And in general, the influence of declining sea ice and warming surface waters is an important emerging consideration, according to Padman.

“It is something to be worried about in terms of it’s a way of changing basal melt rates quickly in the future, and ... it doesn’t really come up very often in Antarctic studies, or at least in the press versions of Antarctic studies,” he told E&E News. “And so it’s worth highlighting and having people get motivated to think about it.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...est-ice-shelf/

Highest CO2 levels recorded in 3 million years still don’t budge global temperatures… official climate change narrative collapses in the face of real science

Friday, May 03, 2019 by: Isabelle Z.
1,140 Views

https://www.naturalnews.com/wp-conte...ched-Decay.jpg

(Natural News) Is carbon dioxide the driving force behind climate change? That’s what many climate change alarmists would have you believe, but when you look at real-world data, that narrative collapses.

If, as they claim, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are now higher than they’ve been at any point during the past three million years, and if higher carbon dioxide levels raise temperatures dramatically as they also claim, then we should be seeing a spike in global temperatures – and that just isn’t happening.
Instead, it looks like atmospheric carbon dioxide isn’t impacting the climate very much at all. Their arguments that carbon dioxide is the main driver of Earth’s climate fall apart when you realize that the climate isn’t nearly as warm as it was the last time CO2 levels were this high. If that were true, the sea levels would be 65 feet higher and most of the ice on Greenland would be gone. Do you see any forests in Antarctica?
In fact, the opposite is happening. NASA data shows that the ocean levels around the world have just dropped for two years in a row. A different NASA study shows that the rise in snow accumulation in Antarctica is adding enough ice to outweigh the losses of thinning glaciers. That study showed that the Antarctic ice sheet noted net gains of 112 billion tons of ice per year from 1992 to 2001 and 82 billion tons of ice a year from 2003 to 2008.
There’s also the fact that the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland, which was once used by climate change alarmists to show how global warming is melting glaciers, has reversed course and is now actually growing back thanks to unusually cold ocean currents.

Put quite simply, carbon dioxide is not a poison that we should fear. Instead, what we should fear is a dramatic reduction in it because it’s what gives our planet life. Without carbon dioxide, we wouldn’t have plants, which means there wouldn’t be oxygen and humans would eventually die out.
In the past, carbon dioxide levels have been significantly higher than they are now, yet life still managed to exist and plants, not surprisingly, thrived. Indeed, experts say that if carbon dioxide levels drop too much, many plants and other vegetal species would become extinct.
Another fact that is often conveniently overlooked is that global temperature analysis across several centuries has shown that the Earth would actually have warmed by the same amount that it has even in the absence of industrialization.
In that study, researchers Dr. John Abbot and Jennifer Marohasy found that global temperatures, which have risen by 1 degree Celsius since the 1830s when the Industrial Age began, would have risen by that amount even if human industrialization had not occurred. Their research involved using artificial neural networks to determine rainfall and estimate global temperatures.
Unfortunately, most people simply don’t have the scientific background needed to understand these basic concepts, and the government and media use this as another way to control people’s lives on the pretense of “protecting the planet.”

Sources for this article include:
ClimateDepot.com
Climate.NASA.gov

https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-05-...peratures.html