Energy Probe

A New University of Waterloo study finds CFCs, not CO2, to be the cause of recent global warming.

Thank your lucky stars to be alive on Earth at this time. Our planet is usually in a deep freeze. The last million years have cycled through Ice Ages that last about 100,000 years each, with warmer slivers of about 10,000 years in between.

If a new Little Ice Age soon sets in, as many scientists believe, Arctic shipping will not happen in our lifetimes.

Lawrence Solomon, an anti-nuclear environmentalist, has written an important new book which explains how politics has has deviously mixed with science to drastically distort what "facts" are getting out to the public.  Dennis Miller interviews him in what turns out to be a very interesting discussion.

How does a new Nature study conclude that Antarctica is warming when actual temperature readings show it is not?

In yet another sign that the Earth could be heading in to a period of global cooling, NASA reports that the solar wind is now at a 50-year low, the lowest that NASA has seen. This change in solar activity, which began to occur about a decade ago, coincides with the end of the climb in global temperatures that had been underway for decades.

"What we're seeing is a long term trend, a steady decrease in pressure that began sometime in the mid-1990s," explains Arik Posner, NASA's Ulysses Program Scientist in Washington DC.

Those who view the Sun, and not CO2, as a driver of temperatures on Earth look to various measures of solar activity for explanations of climate change. For one such measure -- radio waves from the Sun, or solar flux -- they look to Canada's Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in the Okanagan valley, near Penticton, British Columbia. What they find supports the view that another Little Ice Age could be coming.

You probably haven’t heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don’t. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse.

In the 1970s, leading scientists claimed that the world was threatened by an era of global cooling.

Based on what we've learned this decade, says George Kukla, those scientists – and he was among them – had it right. The world is about to enter another Ice Age.

Climate change is a much, much bigger issue than the public, politicians, and even the most alarmed environmentalists realize. Global warming extends to Mars, where the polar ice cap is shrinking, where deep gullies in the landscape are now laid bare, and where the climate is the warmest it has been in decades or centuries.