EVEN MORE PROOF AGW IS BS: EARTH'S ELLIPTICAL ORBIT, VOLCANISM AND WARMING OCEANS

SCIENCE DAILY:

The Earth's orbital behaviors are responsible for more than just presenting us with a leap year every four years. According to Michael E. Wysession, Ph.D., associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, parameters such as planetary gravitational attractions, the Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun and the degree of tilt of our planet's axis with respect to its path around the sun, have implications for climate change and the advent of ice ages.

People often think of orbits as circular, but they're not that smooth and simple. They are often a less-than-perfect eccentric circle.

"All planets travel in an ellipse around the sun, but the shape of that ellipse oscillates," he explains. "When the Earth's orbit is more elliptical, the planet spends more time farther away from the sun, and the Earth gets less sunlight over the course of the year.

These periods of more-elliptical orbits are separated by about 100,000 years.

Ice ages occur about every 100,000 years, and they line up exactly with this change in the Earth's elliptical shape."

Er um... how does curbing our carbon-"footprint" change our orbit? IT DOESN'T!

REUTERS:

Rises in the sea level around Antarctica in the past decade are almost entirely due a warming ocean, not ice melting, an Australian scientist leading a major international research program said.

The 15-year study of temperature and salinity changes in the Southern Ocean found average temperatures warmed by about three-tenths of a degree Celsius.

Satellites also measured a rise of about 2 centimeters (about an inch) in seas in the southern polar region over an area half the size of Australia, Rintoul told Reuters.

"The biggest contribution so far has been from warming of the oceans through expansion," said Steve Rintoul, Australian leader of an Australian-French-U.S. scientific program.

Melting sea ice or Antarctic ice shelves jutting into the ocean do not directly add to sea level rises.

Er um... why is the water down there getting warmer!? VOLCANISM:

A volcano beneath Antarctica’s icy surface has been detected for the first time.

Under the frozen continent's western-most ice sheet, the volcano erupted about 2,300 years ago yet remains active, according to a study published Sunday in an online issue of the journal Nature Geosciences.

"We believe this was the biggest eruption in Antarctica during the last 10,000 years," said study co-author Hugh Corr, a glaciologist for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). "It blew a substantial hole in the ice sheet, and generated a plume of ash and gas that rose around 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) into [the] air."

Brooding giant

Although ice buried the unnamed volcano, molten rock is still churning below. David Vaughan, a glaciologist with the BAS and a co-author of the new study, said the discovery might explain the speeding up of historically slow-moving glaciers in the region.

SOMEONE TELL AL GORE TO STFU. PLEASE.

BOTTOM-LINE: climate change is natural.