Maybe our poor friend should try reading the newspaper. From the New York Times, Jan. 22:

Study Finds New Evidence of Warming in Antarctica
That is the conclusion of scientists analyzing half a century of temperatures on the continent, and the findings may help resolve a climate enigma at the bottom of the planet.

Some regions of Antarctica, particularly the peninsula that stretches toward South America, have warmed rapidly in recent years, contributing to the disintegration of ice shelves and accelerating the sliding of glaciers. But weather stations in other locations, including the one at the South Pole, have recorded a cooling trend. That ran counter to the forecasts of computer climate models, and global warming skeptics have pointed to Antarctica in questioning the reliability of the models.

In the new study, scientists took into account satellite measurements to interpolate temperatures in the vast areas between the sparse weather stations.

"We now see warming is taking place on all seven of the earth's continents in accord with what models predict as a response to greenhouse gases," said Eric J. Steig, a professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, who is the lead author of a paper to be published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Because the climate record is still short, more work needs to be done to determine how much of the warming results from natural climate swings and how much from the warming effects of carbon dioxide released by the burning of fossil fuels, Dr. Steig said.

But Drew T. Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who is another author of the paper, said, "It's extremely difficult to think of any physical way that you could have increasing greenhouse gases not lead to warming at the Antarctic continent."

Dr. Steig and Dr. Shindell presented the findings at a news conference on Wednesday. They found that from 1957 through 2006, temperatures across Antarctica rose an average of 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, comparable to the warming that has been measured globally.

In West Antarctica, where the base of some large ice sheets lies below sea level, the warming was even more pronounced, at 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit, though temperatures in this area are still well below freezing and the warming will not have an immediate effect on sea level.

In East Antarctica, where temperatures had been thought to be falling, the researchers found a slight warming over the 50-year period. With the uncertainties, East Antarctica may have indeed been cooling, but the rise in temperatures in the west more than offset the cooling. The average temperature for Antarctica is about minus 58 degrees.

"There is very convincing evidence in this work of warming over West Antarctica," said Andrew Monaghan, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who was not involved with the research.

As with earlier studies, the scientists found that more recently, since the late 1970s, temperatures had actually cooled in East Antarctica, a phenomenon that many atmospheric scientists attribute to emissions of chlorofluorocarbons, a family of chemicals used as coolants that destroyed high-altitude ozone. Because those chemicals have since been phased out, the ozone hole is expected to heal, and the cooling trend may reverse.

The region of East Antarctica, which includes the South Pole, is at a much higher elevation and extends farther north than West Antarctica. While the scientists said the ozone hole most likely had a significant influence on Antarctic temperatures, other factors, including sea ice and greenhouse gases, may play a larger role.

"Obviously the situation is complex, resulting from a combination of man-made factors and natural variability," said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton, who was not involved in the research. "But the idea of a long-term cooling is pretty clearly debunked."

Dr. Monaghan, who had not detected the rapid warming of West Antarctica in an earlier study, said the new study had "spurred me to take another look at ours — I’ve since gone back and included additional records."

That reanalysis, which used somewhat different techniques and assumptions, has not yet been published, but he presented his revised findings last month at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

"The results I get are very similar to his," Dr. Monaghan said.

Suicidal conspiracy

A conspiracy stratagem was openly presented by Maurice Strong, a godfather of the global environmental movement, and a former senior advisor to Kofi Annan, the U.N. Secretary-General. In 1972 Strong was a Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which launched the world environment movement, and he has played a critical role in its globalization. In 1992 Strong was the Secretary-General of the "World Summit" conference in Rio de Janeiro, where on his instigation the foundations for the Kyoto Protocol were laid.

In an interview Strong disclosed his mindset: "What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group's conclusion is "no." The rich countries won't do it. They won't change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about? This group of world leaders form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse." (Wood,1990) .

The climatic issue became now perhaps the most important agenda of the United Nations and politicians, at least they say so. It became also a moral issue. In 2007 addressing the UN General Assembly Gro Harlem Brundtland, the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy on Climate Change, pointing at climatic skeptics stated: "It is irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral to question the seriousness of the real danger of climate change". But earlier "scare them to deaths!" morality of "climatists" was explained by Stephen Schneider, one of their top gurus: "On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but... On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well...we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have ...Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest" (Schneider, 1989) .

The same moral standard is offered by Al Gore: "I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are" (Gore, 2006) . In similar vein Rajendra K. Pauchari, the chairman of IPCC, commented in the last Fourth PCCC Report: "I hope this will shock people and governments into taking more serious action" (Crook, 2007) . Thus IPCC does not have ambition to present an objective climatic situation, but rather "to shock" the people to take actions which would bring no climatic effects (NIPCC, 2008) , but rather disastrous global economic and societal consequences. Implementation of these actions would dismantle the global energy system, the primary driving force of our civilization. This is what Maurice Strong and other leaders of Green Movement apparently have in mind.

The political and business scale of the problem is reflected by sums planned or already spent to counter the blessed natural Modern Warm Period, one of several similar periods enjoyed by the biosphere over the current interglacial. According to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, during the past 10 years funds for the promoters of the man-made global warming hypothesis received in the United States alone more than $50 billion.

The International Energy Agency announced in June that cutting by half the CO2 emission will cost the world $45 trillion up to 2050, i.e. 1.1% of the global GNP each year (Kanter, 2008) . For this expenditure one may expect a trifle climatic effect. Even if a substantial part of global warming were due to CO2 – and it is not – any control efforts currently contemplated, including the punctiliously observed Kyoto protocol, would decrease future temperatures by only 0.02oC, an undetectable amount (NIPCC, 2008) .

Recent and Future Cooling

Both surface and troposphere observations suggest that we are entering a cool phase of climate. These observations are in a total disagreement with IPCC climatic model projections, based on an assumption that the current Modern Warm Period is due to anthropogenic emissions of CO2 (IPCC-AR4, 2007) . The annual increment of global industrial CO2 emission increased from 1.1% in 1990-1999 to more than 3% in 2000- 2004 (Raupach et al., 2007) , and is still increasing. Thus, according to IPCC projections the global temperature should be increasing now more rapidly than before, but instead we see a cold spell. It is clear that cooling is not related to the rapidly increasing CO2 emission. Its cause is rather the Sun’s activity, which recently dropped precipitously from its 60 year long record in the second half of the 20th century, the highest in the past 11 centuries (Usoskin et al., 2003) , to an extremely low current level.

Sun activity is reflected in the number of sunspots, which normally shows an 11-year periodicity (or 131 month plus or minus 14 month). The current sunspot cycle no. 23 had a maximum in 2001 (150 sunspots in September). NASA officially declared it over in March 2006, with a forecast that the next cycle no. 24 will be 20 to 50 % stronger than the old. But until now the Sun remained quiet, with only few sunspots sighted both from the old cycle, and from the new one declared again by NASA to start on December 11, 2007. However, the Sun’s activity was still low in the first part of 2008 (NOAA, 2008) , and August 2008 was (probably) the first month without sunspots since 1913 (some observations noticed not a "spot" but a tiny short-lived "pore" on 21-22 August). It seems that we still remain in the cycle 23.

The unusually long low activity of Sun suggests that we may be entering a next Maunder Minimum, a period from 1645 to 1715, when almost no sunspots were visible. This was the coldest part of the Little Ice Age (1250—1900), when rivers in Europe and America were often frozen, and the Baltic Sea was crossed on ice by armies and travelers. Other authors suggest that the Earth will be facing a slow decrease in temperatures in 2012-2015, reaching a deep freeze around 2050-2060, similar to cooling that took place in 1645-1715, when temperature decreased by 1 to 2oC (Abdussamatov, 2004; Abdussamatov, 2005; Abdussamatov, 2006) . Another analysis of sunspot cycles for the period 1882-2000, projected that the cooling will start in the solar cycle 25, resulting in minimum temperature around 2021-2026 (Bashkirtsev and Mashnich, 2003) . A long-term cooling, related to Sun's activity, was also projected for the period around 2100 and 2200 (Landscheidt, 1995; Landscheidt, 2003).

The current Modern Warm Period is one of innumerous former natural warm climatic phases. Its temperature is lower than in the 4 former warm periods over the past 1500 years (Grudd, 2008) . Unfortunately it seems that it comes to an end, and the recent climatic fluctuations suggest that perhaps a new, full scale ice age is imminent. It may come in the next 50 to 400 years (Broecker, 1995; Bryson, 1993) , with ice caps covering northern parts of America and Eurasia.

http://www.nzcpr.com/guest116.htm#_ftnref3