Earth’s Climate is see-sawing

Lund University in Sweden has just released a very interesting research summary titled: “The Earth’s climate is seesawing”.

Here is the short opening summary:

“During the last 10,000 years climate has been seesawing between the North and South Atlantic Oceans. As revealed by findings presented by Quaternary scientists at Lund University, Sweden, cold periods in the north have corresponded to warmth in the south and vice verse. These results imply that Europe may face a slightly cooler future than predicted by IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

“…during the last 9000 years we can identify a persistent “seesaw” pattern. When the South Atlantic was warm it was cold in the North Atlantic and vice verse.”

As many know, the “great conveyor belt” of the Atlantic is major factor in Northern Hemisphere Climate. It seems to be driven by ocean salinity changes, which are the result of periodic ice freeze/melt cycles.

“This is known to have happened repeatedly during the present Interglacial (the warm period since the last Ice Age). Minor disturbances have taken place in recent time, such as the Great Salt Anomaly in the 1970s, which seriously affected the cod population around the Faroe Islands.”

This lines up well with the cooling trend seen in surface temperature data from about 1940 to the late 1970’s, when “global cooling” was a big concern for scientists. Now it appears that we are in the flip side of the salinity cycle, and ice is melting again.

This is a good illustration that scientists don’t fully understand Earth’s complex climate system and its myriad of interactions and cycles, and that there are things yet to be discovered about what drives climate.

Major Daily Newspapers in Circulation Decline

I’m very distressed to read this. Newspapers are the life blood of a community. Television news has also been in decline, but television doesn’t become the record for the community, as TV is more transient, and not considered a searchable news resource. People can’t go to a TV station and search archives, for example. The Enterprise Record recently had to lay off staff, not so much for circulation decline, which has been flat, but for declining advertising revenue.

From the American Thinker:

Newspaper industry collapse intensifying
Thomas Lifson
The Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) has released the latest circulation numbers for big city dailies, and the news is almost uniformly bad for big newspaper publishers. The sole bright spot continues to be the New York Post, whose weekday circulation is up an impressive 7.6% to 724,748 in the six month period. The Post has a winning combination of a low cover prices and lively non-liberal writing. Oddly enough, no other papers seem to copying the successful tactics, something which ought to concern shareholders of the collapsing businesses.

Some key newspapers are in real trouble:

The Dallas Morning News hemorrhaged 14.2% of daily circ to 411,919.

The San Diego Union-Tribune slipped 6.5% to 296,331

The San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, daily circ declined 4.9% to 230,870

The Los Angeles Times lost 4.2% of its weekday circ to 815,723

The Chicago Tribune slipped 2.1% to 566,827

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported daily circ dropped 4.8% to 345,252.

Small circulation gains were reported by the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Daily News.

The New York Times, which has reported small overall circulation gains in recent years, thanks to the roll-out of new regional printing plants for its national edition, compensating for the loss of metropolitan circulation in New York, reported a loss of circulation this term, down 1.9% to 1,120,420.