Climate Weekly: June 9, 2005

Climate & Environment Weekly
June 9, 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.

Madhav L Khandekar: Need for re-assessment of global warming science
The present debate on Global Warming (GW) and the review of the book "The Discovery of Global Warming" appearing in Physics Today (June 2004) has prompted me to write this letter and make a case for re-assessment of the science of GW... >>Read More<<

NZCLIMATE TRUTH NEWSLETTER NO 74
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was jointly established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) in 1988. Its terms of reference include: (1) To assess available scientific and socio-economic information on climate change and its impacts and on the options for mitigating climate change and adapting to it, and... >>Read More<<

Norm Kalmanovitch: SOME KYOTO BASICS THAT HAVE BEEN MISSED
As a member of Friends of Science in Canada I am regularly exposed to your wonderful work in debunking Kyoto at a high scientific and academic level... >>Read More<<

Gretchen Randall: With summer driving season ahead, will gasoline prices rise or fall?
Issue: As reported in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, while global demand for crude oil has risen dramatically over the last year, the capacity to refine it has not kept up with demand. In the U.S. no new refineries have been
built in almost thirty years, which forces the U.S. to import refined gasoline. We now import 12.5 percent of the gasoline we use ‹ an increase of nearly 300 percent in the last ten years... >>Read More<<

Benny Peiser: The Dangers of Consensus Science
Six eminent researchers from the Russian Academy of Science and the Israel Space Agency have just published a startling paper in one of the world's leading space science journals. The team of solar physicists claims to have come up with compelling evidence that changes in cosmic ray intensity and variations in solar activity have been driving much of the Earth's climate. They even provide a testable hypothesis, predicting that amplified cosmic ray intensity will lead to an increase of the global cloud cover, which, according to their calculations, will result in "some small global cooling over the next couple of years."... >>Read More<<

The Future of the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets
In an Editorial Essay in Climatic Change, Oppenheimer and Alley (2005) discuss what they call a key issue, i.e., "the degree to which warming can affect the rate of ice loss by altering the mass balance between precipitation rates on the one hand, and melting and ice discharge to the ocean through ice streams on the other," with respect to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS)... >>Read More<<

The Roman Warm Period and Dark Ages Cold Period in China
As in the study of Wei et al. (2004), the authors derived high-resolution Sr/Ca ratios for two Porites lutea coral samples taken from the coast of the Leizhou Peninsula (20°12'N, 109°55'E) in the northern South China Sea, while determining their ages by means of U-Th dating. The transfer function relating the Sr/Ca ratio to temperature was established on a modern Porites lutea coral in the same location by calibrating against sea surface temperatures (SSTs) measured from 1960 to 2000 at the nearby Haikou Ocean Observatory... >>Read More<<

What do we know about the Dark Ages Cold Period as it was experienced in Europe?
McDermott et al. (2001) derived a δ18O record -- with a time resolution they say is "approximately an order of magnitude better than in the North Atlantic cores that record evidence for quasi-periodic (1475 ± 500 year) ice rafting during the Holocene" -- from a stalagmite discovered in Crag Cave in southwestern Ireland, after which they compared this record with the δ18O records from the GRIP and GISP2 ice cores from Greenland... >>Read More<<