Climate Weekly: March 24, 2005

Climate & Environment Weekly
March 24, 2005

Climate & Environment Weekly is brought to you by The Center for Science and Public Policy (CSPP). CSPP is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy organization.

CSPP relies on scientific experts in many nations and the vast body of peer-reviewed literature to help lawmakers, policy makers, and the media distinguish between scientific findings that are agenda-driven and those that are based on accepted scientific methods and practices. In a timely manner, the Center's Science Watch Team alerts policy makers, the media, and the public to unreliable scientific claims and unjustified alarmism which often lead to public harm. We strive for a fair and balanced examination of science.

People in Our World
Yet the writing may be on the wall for academics hoping to frighten society into coughing up research funding. In the wake of the Sudan 1 scare, which led industry to spend £100 million protecting the public from an unproven cancer risk, there is growing concern about the economic cost of misplaced fears.
--Robert Matthews, The Sunday Telegraph, 13 March 2005
>>Read More<<

Windpower opposition in Australia, England, Scotland; Wind farms are fashionable, ugly and of low practical utility.
Greens are pushing for increased development of renewable energy sources. Facing political and financial pressure, the federal government has been conned into subsidising wind power by forcing generators to effectively buy it twice. Before Canberra commits more money to the mandated renewable energy targets scheme, someone should look at what has been happening in Germany. >>Read More<<

Has The IPCC Lost All Credibility?
The recent resignation of Dr. Christopher Landsea, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, has cast new doubt on the integrity of the IPCC's policies and procedures. >>Read More<<

APOCALYPSE NOW (AGAIN)
If you don’t like scary stories at bedtime, make yourself a milky drink and turn in before 9 o’clock tonight.
Then you won’t lose any sleep over the drama-documentary being screened on BBC1 about the latest - and scariest - Threat to Civilisation As We Know It. >>Read More<<

Global Warming Fiction Vs. Facts
The famed novelist, Michael Crichton, may achieve what mountains of scientific data produced by meteorologists and others have not. He may get the public to understand that the UN Kyoto Climate Control Protocol is, itself, a work of fiction.>>Read More<<

OPINION: ‘I HAVE A NIGHTMARE’
When environmentalists are writing tracts like “The Death of Environmentalism,” you know the movement is in deep trouble. That essay by two young environmentalists has been whirling around the Internet since last fall, provoking a civil war among tree-huggers for its assertion that “modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live.” Sadly, the authors, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, are right. >>Read More<<

A 400-Year Temperature History Derived from Glacial Data
According to the author of this intriguing paper (Oerlemans, 2005), "a temperature history for different parts of the world [was] constructed from 169 glacier length records." This is a well-crafted statement; for being based on glacial data only, there is no guarantee that the result applies to the globe as a whole, as glaciers are found over only a tiny portion of it. >>Read More<<

Global Warming in a Politically Correct Climate: How Truth Became Controversial.
Considering that M. Mihkel Mathiesen's book has the term global warming in its title, one might expect it to begin with an assessment of that politically-charged and controversial subject. Much to my surprise, however, when I looked at the Table of Contents, I found the first global warming chapter beginning on page 69. A full five chapters preceded "Chapter VI - On the Global Warming Scare." >>Read More<<

Overdue Cooling
Throughout marine isotope stages 5 and 7 encompassing the prior two interglacial periods, the pattern has been for rapid warmings to occur, followed by gradual and then more rapid coolings, which are abruptly terminated by rapid warmings that set the stage for the cycle to be repeated. >>Read More<<

The Dark Ages Cold Period in the Central United States
Follett et al. report that their data "indicate a change from C4 plants to increasing C3 plant dominance (as a surrogate of cooler temperature) at ~1,500 yr B.P." More specifically, they say that "the yr B.P. when δ13C was least negative was 1560," and that "δ13C was more negative before or after that time." >>Read More<<

The Climatic History of the Phanerozoic
Boucot et al. report finding "many inconsistencies between the two approaches, such as the moderate global climatic gradient from the Middle Cambrian through the earlier Middle Devonian (Eifelian) versus the very high level of atmospheric CO2 during the same time interval provided by the geochemical model [Berner, 1997] which suggests an exceptionally low global climatic gradient." >>Read More<<