Climate Weekly: April 14, 2005

Climate & Environment Weekly
April 14, 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.

Temperature (Urbanization Effects - Asia) – Summary
The warming of near-surface air over non-urban areas of the planet during the past one to two centuries is believed to have been less than 1°C. Warming in many growing cities, on the other hand, may have been a full order of magnitude greater. Thus, since nearly all near-surface air temperature records of this period have been obtained from sensors located in population centers that have experienced significant growth, it is absolutely essential that urbanization-induced warming be removed from all original temperature records when attempting to accurately assess what has truly happened in the natural non-urban environment... >>Read More<<

Coastal Storms of the North Atlantic Basin
The authors assess the "temporal variability of coastal storms (both tropical and extratropical) and the wave climatology in the North Atlantic Basin (NAB), including the Gulf of Mexico." >>Read More<<

Give me a break: A review of “State of Fear”
Michael Crichton's scary movies, like "Jurassic Park," have made billions. He has sold 100 million copies of his scary books. And now he's telling us: Don't be scared. >>Read More<<

The Dark Ages Cold Period in China
In a paper that testifies to the reality of the Dark Ages Cold Period (the existence of which climate alarmists are loathe to acknowledge, just as they deny the existence of the other cold and warm nodes of the millennial-scale temperature oscillation that produced the earlier Roman Warm Period and later Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and Modern Warm Period), Hsu (2004) recounts some fascinating climatic history of a region of China south of Inner Mongolia that lies some 380 km west of Beijing and 500 km north of Luoyang in Shanxi Province... >>Read More<<

Critical Assessment of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
Forgive me if I approach reports of impending doom with a certain amount of skepticism. This is especially true of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) prepared by “1360 scientists from 95 countries” under the direction of World Bank chief scientist Robert Watson, and released by the Royal Society in London...>>Read More<<

Natural Chemical Emissions:
In a recent article for the American Council on Science and Health's Health Facts and Fears, scientist Jack Dini looks at how some chemical contaminants thought to be solely industrial are in fact created in nature. Dini notes that dioxin has been found in 40-million year-old clay deposits, and has been released to the world throughout history by forest and grassland fires and wood and peat burning. And while such emissions are not quantified, he considers them to be an important source of dioxins in today's environment...>>Read More<<

Blog Letter from Bob Foster
My wife watched the “Global Dimming” program on ABC (government-funded) TV
last night, and said the second half was pure catastrophism. We will be subjected to a ‘double whammy’ of human-caused global warming about 2030. You can guess the rest... >>Read More<<

Green army warned on politicking
Environmental groups have been threatened with the loss of their tax deductible status if they engage in political advocacy... >>Read More<<

ENVIRONMENTAL HERESIES
Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani¬zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power. >>Read More<<

The Great Hockey Stick Debate
The famous graph used by the UN-IPCC claims average temperatures were stable for 900 years and then began to increase dramatically around 1900. The graph, of enormous importance in building global warming as a big public issue, was produced by several scientists including Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Virginia. >>Read More<<

ICE AGE OCEAN CIRCULATION REACTED TO, DID NOT CAUSE CLIMATE CHANGE
Scientists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) have provided new evidence that ocean circulation changes lagged behind, and were not the cause of, major climate changes at the beginning and end of the last ice age (short intervals known as glacial boundaries), according to a study published in the March 2005 issue of Science magazine. >>Read More<<

First “Four Pillars” on Global Warming Speech
As I noted in my last speech, there is a perception, especially among media and environmental elites, that the scientific community has reached a “consensus” on global warming. As Sir David King, the chief science adviser to the British government, recently said, “There is a very clear consensus from the scientific community on the problems of global warming and our use of fossil fuels.” >>Read More<<

Storm Watch
In late January, Christopher W. Landsea, a hurricane specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Miami, publicly announced that he would end his participation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group that comes together periodically under the auspices of the United Nations to report the latest advances in scientific understanding... >>Read More<<

Nation Descends into Mercury Madness
Mercury is all over the news these days, which is appropriate for an element named after the messenger of the gods. At some Maryland high schools, hazmat teams rush in to remove mercury that had gone unnoticed. In Washington D.C., a broken thermometer causes a school to close. And across the nation, environmental groups denounce the Environmental Protection Agency’s new proposed rules for reducing mercury emissions from power plants as inadequate to protect children. >>Read More<<

The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period in Inner Mongolia
The authors analyzed percent organic carbon and Rb/Sr ratios in a sediment core extracted from the deepest part of Daihai Lake (112°32'-112°48'E, 40°28'-40°39'N) in Inner Mongolia, which is described by them as being located "in the transitional zone between semi-arid and semi-humid conditions that is sensitive to East Asian monsoon variability." >>Read More<<

Will Farming Destroy Wild Nature?
In an article in Science entitled "Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature," Green et al. (2005) address a looming problem of incredible proportions and significance: how to meet the two- to three-fold increase in food demand that will exist by 2050 (Tilman et al., 2002; Bongaarts, 1996) without usurping for agriculture all the land that is currently available to what they call "wild nature." >>Read More<<

It never ends.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO)/United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will meet in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 6 to 8 April 2005 to finalize a special report on “Safeguarding the ozone layer and the global climate system: issues related to hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and perfluorocarbons (PFCs)”... >>Read More<<

GLOBAL WARMING WON’T SAVE NUCLEAR POWER
Unlike the burning of fossil fuels, nuclear power does not emit carbon dioxide. Fears about global warming have raised interest in nuclear power, with the government’s chief scientific adviser Sir David King recently giving support to an expansion of nuclear on the basis that it is ‘carbon-free’. He called for more investment in nuclear fusion research, and said that a new generation of existing fission technologies should be an ‘option’.
>>Read More<<

Western US States Plan Major Power System
SAN FRANCISCO - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the governors of Nevada, Utah and Wyoming have agreed to build an estimated $20 billion electricity transmission system to meet rising demand for power, Wyoming's governor said Monday. >>Read More<<

Free-Marketeers caution against EU precaution
All references to the precautionary principle as a basis for environment policy should be removed from the EU's draft constitution, Franco-Belgian free-market think-tank the Molinari Institute argues in a new report.
>>Read More<<

REALITY CHECK: MYSTERY CLIMATE MECHANISM MAY COUNTERACT GLOBAL WARMING
A new study by two physicists at the University of Rochester suggests there is a mechanism at work in the Earth's atmosphere that may blunt the influence of global warming, and that this mechanism is not accounted for in the computer models scientists currently use to predict the future of the world's temperature. The researchers, David H. Douglass and Robert S. Knox, professors of physics, plotted data from satellite measurements of the Earth's atmosphere in the months and years following the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. The results, published in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters (and now online), show that global temperatures dropped more and rebounded to normal significantly faster than conventional climate models could have predicted. >>Read More<<

GLOBAL WARMING: U.S. ADMINISTRATION SHIFTS ITS SLANT BUT NOT ITS POLICIES
The Bush administration is taking a new tack on global warming, finally conceding that human activities contribute to it. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t look as if any of its underlying policies are going to take a similar leap forward. >>Read More<<

A COLD, HARD LOOK AT A HOT TOPIC
Although heavily outnumbered, global-warming sceptics believe the stakes are so high they must step up their fight, as Michael Duffy reports. Members of a species widely believed extinct - scientists sceptical of human-produced global warming - met at a conference in Canberra on Monday. >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week: Frankfort, KY
To bolster our claim that "There Has Been No Net Global Warming for the Past 70 Years," each week we highlight the temperature record of one of the 1221 U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations from 1930-2000. >>Read More<<

“Dis” the Threat Industry
The CIA for decades overstated the size of the Soviet economy and thus its threat to the USA. Worldwatchers have yearly forecast a food crisis from the exhaustion of soil or oil since the early 1970s. The Wall Street Journal editorial pages daily scare entrepreneurs with multiplying regulations stifling markets. What should we make of currently touted threats such as germ warfare, global warming, and a graying population? >>Read More<<