Climate Weekly: May 5, 2005

Climate & Environment Weekly
May 5, 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.

ANTARCTIC ICE SHEETS ARE GROWING
The West Antarctic peninsula only covers one tenth of the South Pole’s ice. There are rarely spectacular reports about the much larger parts of the continent. These do not provide a uniform scientific picture. In total, however, the ice masses of the continent, which hold about 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water resources, seem to be growing. This conclusion was reported at the Earth Observation summit in Brussels in the middle of February by Antarctic researcher Duncan Wingham (University College London)... >>Read More<<

Celebs Ignore Death, Poverty on MTV Enviro Series
(CNSNews.com) - A new MTV series features Hollywood celebrities praising the developing world’s primitive lifestyles as earth-friendly—despite those poor nations’ high infant mortality rates and short life expectancies... >>Read More<<

GLOBAL WARMING CLEARED ON ICE SHELF COLLAPSE RAP
The high-profile collapse of some Antarctica's ice shelves is likely the result of natural current fluctuations, not global warming, says a leading British expert on polar climates. This surprising finding is supported by analysis of data from the European Space Agency's ERS-1 satellite, according to Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London. The data, measuring changes in ice thickness across the Antarctic ice sheet using the polar orbiting satellite, show areas of growth from snowfall are as common as areas of decline... >>Read More<<

CLIMATE CATASTROPHE CANCELLED
At a news conference held in Ottawa, some of North America's foremost climate experts provided evidence demonstrating that the science underlying the Kyoto Protocol is seriously flawed; a problem that continues to be ignored by the Canadian government. Scientists called on the Canadian government to delay implementation of the Kyoto Protocol until a thorough, public review of the current state of climate science has been conducted by climate experts. Such an analysis has never been organized in Canada despite repeated requests from independent, non-governmental climate scientists... >>Read More<<

HAPPY 35TH EARTH DAY
Born 35 years ago in a fever of political activism, Earth Day is now a Hallmark Holiday. Earth Day and its traditional pieties about recycling and conservation now engender all of the public passion of Arbor Day...
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EPW FACT OF THE DAY
In the latest attempt to scare the American public into voting Democrat, the Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) held a mock ”hearing” on the issue of mercury, criticizing the recent mercury rule implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency. At the “hearing” the DPC set its sights directly on the likes of Michelle Cottle, who recently wrote an essay for Time Magazine about newfound uncertainties when pregnant...>>Read More<<

EXTREME WEATHER TRENDS VS. DANGEROUS CLIMATE CHANGE: A NEED FOR CRITICAL REASSESSMENT
The ongoing debate on global warming and increasing concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases (CO2 in particular) highlights the possibility of increased incidences of extreme weather events world-wide, as the earth’s mean temperature is expected to rise steadily in future. Several recent technical and scientific conferences have focused on the general theme of “dangerous climate change” and on avoiding or reducing this danger. However, a careful analysis of observed data on world-wide extreme weather events does not reveal any increasing trend in these events, thus suggesting a mismatch between reality and the hypothesis of dangerous climate change. There is a definite need to critically re-examine the hypothesis of dangerous climate change in the context of observed trend (or lack of it) in the extreme weather events worldwide... >>Read More<<

INHOFE DELIVERS THIRD OF FOUR SPEECHES ON CLIMATE CHANGE
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Chairman of the Environment & Public Works Committee, delivered the third of four major speeches today on the issue of climate change. Inhofe, a prominent skeptic of the science behind global warming, is engaging in a series of four speeches to debunk what he calls the “four pillars of climate change alarmism.” The third speech, given on the floor of the United States Senate, examined the recently released international Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report, which alarmists claim supposedly provides irrefutable evidence of global warming “consensus.”... >>Read More<<

Frisbee Science Again: The Antarctic
One must admire the marketing skills of today’s science spinmeisters. And worry about the credulity of writers such as Leigh Dayton, who swallows their propaganda whole to produce a page-top headline and four pictures on “vanishing Antarctic glaciers”... >>Read More<<

GLOBAL WARMING AND DATA
Steve Verdon, Outside the Beltway, 25 April 2005 http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/10200
A new paper (http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2005/2005-014.pdf) from the St. Luis Federal Reserve Bank has an interesting point on how important it is to archive not only the data but the code for empirical papers. While the article looks mainly at economic research there is also a lesson to be drawn from this paper about the current state of research for global warming/climate change. One of the hallmarks of scientific research is that the results can be replicable. Without this, the results shouldn’t be considered valid let alone used for making policy.
... >>Read More<<

Mercury: Grain of Truth, Gram of Nonsense
You have probably heard or read the oft-repeated statement, “One gram of mercury can contaminate an entire 20-acre lake.” It shows up in the environmental advocates’ literature as well as in EPA and state agency documents and various fact sheets on mercury. The statement is meant to scare us into believing that mishandling a thermometer or emitting even one gram of mercury would have irreversible negative consequences. And you won’t be able to eat the fish, either... >>Read More<<

Global Warming? What a load of poppycock!
Whatever the experts say about the howling gales, thunder and lightning we’ve had over the past two days, of one thing we can be certain. Someone, somewhere - and there is every chance it will be a politician or an environmentalist - will blame the weather on global warming... >>Read More<<

The Maldives: Past, Present and Future
Based on "detailed morphostratigraphic analysis and radiometric dating of three islands in South Maalhosmadulu Atoll," in the words of the authors, they say they developed a "model of reef-island formation in the Maldives that has significant implications for the physical stability of islands with anticipated sea-level rise."
... >>Read More<<

Point of View
Chemistry Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir related in a landmark 1953 speech his visit to the laboratory of J.B. Rhine at Duke University where Rhine was claiming results of ESP experiments that could not be predicted by chance, and which he ascribed to psychic phenomena... >>Read More<<

Nature Mimics Industry
Who's to blame for carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, persistent dioxins, PCBs, vinyl chloride, perchlorates, elevated concentrations of nitrates in stream water throughout the world, and unusual fish kills? The initial knee-jerk reaction is to lay the blame on present-day humans (read: ourselves), endlessly accused of fouling our own nest, and there's some truth to this. No doubt we humans are responsible for many egregious environmental actions, but here's something new. Recent research has shown that some of the pollutants heretofore blamed on industrial activities can now also be laid at the doorstep of Mother Nature... >>Read More<<

North Atlantic Storminess
The authors examined 120- to 225-year records of gale-days per year from five locations scattered across Scotland, northwest Ireland and Iceland, which they discuss and compare with a much longer 2000-year record for the same general region... >>Read More<<

People in Our World
Ideally, investigators should be willing to share their data and programs so as to encourage other investigators to replicate and/or expand on their results. Such behavior allows science to move forward in a Kuhn-style linear fashion, with each generation seeing further from the shoulders of the previous generation... >>Read More<<

The Phoenix Group
George Soros told a carefully vetted gathering of 70 likeminded millionaires and billionaires last weekend that they must be patient if they want to realize long-term political and ideological yields from an expected massive investment in “startup” progressive think tanks... >>Read More<<

HOW SCIENCE BECOMES POLITICS
The climate issue provides an incredibly rich and textured body of experience to explore issues of science and politics. All participants in the political debate over climate policy work hard to define the issue in terms of science. This by itself is of course not so surprising, as anyone who has seen the old television commercial claiming that “4 out of 5 dentists recommend Acme gum for their patients who chew gum” will be familiar with the appeal to scientific authority. What is most interesting to me in the case of the climate debate is the different roles that scientists might play in the political debate over climate, and how scientists have chosen to position themselves and their institutions on the climate issue... >>Read More<<

"SCIENTISTS UNRAVEL 8,200-YEAR-OLD CLIMATE RIDDLE"
Palaeoceanographers from the Southampton Oceanography Centre have shed new light on the world's climate behaviour over 8,200 years ago. In an article published this week in Nature, they demonstrate that a sudden drop in temperature lasting 200 years cannot be used as a template for the modern day threat of rapid climate change. ... >>Read More<<

Global Warming Skeptic Argues U.S. Position in Suit
The U.S. government has enlisted an outspoken skeptic of global warming in a legal fight with environmental groups over U.S. funding for overseas energy projects. The move has angered several prominent climate researchers, however, who say the government’s arguments fly in the face of scientific consensus about both the causes and possible consequences of global warming... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week: Allegan, MI
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. This issue's temperature record of the week is from Allegan, Michigan. During the period of most significant greenhouse gas buildup over the past century, i.e., 1930 and onward, Allegan's mean annual temperature has cooled by 2.50 degrees Fahrenheit. Not much global warming here!... >>Read More<<