The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower.

2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year’s 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.

Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year’s 90 days (87%).

It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: “We’re experiencing a very deep solar minimum,” says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.

“This is the quietest sun we’ve seen in almost a century,” agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

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If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Louis Charbonneau
Reuters
March 13, 2009

The Obama administration will work with the United Nations to reach a climate change deal acceptable to the world community by the end of 2009, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday.

Speaking to reporters after a two-day trip to Washington earlier this week, Ban said he and the new American leader agreed completely on the urgency of tackling the problem of global warming.

“President Obama and I share a fundamental commitment — 2009 must be the year of climate change. That means reaching a comprehensive agreement in Copenhagen by year’s end,” the U.N. chief said at a monthly news conference.

“With U.S. leadership, in partnership with the United Nations, we can and will reach a climate change deal that all nations can embrace,” he added.

The U.N. hopes to have a new global treaty on climate change in place at a conference in Copenhagen in December. Some experts warn that the world will face more droughts, floods and rising seas if global warming is not addressed soon.

Ban will attend the G20 leaders’ summit in London next month amid fears that the issue could be pushed far down the agenda by the global economic crisis and the need to restore faith in shattered financial markets.

The U.N. chief had planned to invite Obama and other leaders to New York this month for what was dubbed a “mini summit” on climate change, hoping that the U.S. president would use the occasion to announce a reversal on the issue.

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EIR
March 13, 2009

Yesterday, Dr. Arthur Robinson, Director of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the originator of the petition against Al Gore’s global warming hoax which as of now 32,000 scientists have signed, told the 2nd International Conference on Climate Change, that the people like Al Gore who promote global warming alarmism are committing genocide by the withdrawal of technology from the developing world. Speaking at the conference hosted by the Heartland Institute in New York City, he said, “there is a current example of genocide by the removal of technology, and that is the ban on DDT, and that has resulted in the deaths of 30 to 40 million people and has left half a billion infected with malaria.”

The three-day conference is the second annual event sponsored by The Heartland Institute. The speakers include Lord Christopher Monckton, who prepared the “Global Warming Swindle” video tape, MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen, and Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist.

Dr. Lindzen said that “the process of co-opting science on behalf of a political movement has had an extraordinarily corrupting influence on science—especially since the issue has been a major motivation for funding. Most funding for climate would not be there without this issue. And, it should be added, most science funded under the rubric of climate does not actually deal with climate, but rather with the alleged impact of arbitrarily assumed climate change.

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Andrew Alderson
Telegraph
March 10, 2009

The Prince spoke at a dinner in hosted by Michelle Bachelet, the President, for 300 guests from the world of politics, business and the arts.

“How can we begin to address poverty if we haven’t first ensured our planet is habitable?” he said.

“If we do nothing, the consequences for every person on this earth will be severe and unprecedented - with vast numbers of environmental refugees, social instability and decimated economies: far worse than anything which we are seeing today.”

The Prince said Chile was witnessing “the terrifying effects of global warming, including the shrinking of nearly 90 per cent of your glaciers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, in the light of such evidence, and so much more from across the globe, I find it incomprehensible that there are those who doubt the science of climate change.”