Climate Weekly: September 01, 2005

Climate & Environment Weekly
September 01, 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.

IS GLOBAL WARMING FUELING KATRINA?
The people of New Orleans are surely not thinking about wind vortices, the coriolis effect or the dampness of the troposphere as they hunker down during hurricane Katrina this morning. They're mostly thinking about the savage rains and 140 mph winds that have driven them from their homes. But it's that meteorological arcana that's made such a mess of the bayou, and to hear a lot of people tell it, we have only ourselves-and our global-warming ways-to blame... >>Read More<<

Katrina Should be A Lesson To US on Global Warming
Seems like everything is President Bush's fault. One day after Katrina hammered the Gulf Coast, German commentators are laying into the US for its stubborn attitude to global warming and Kyoto... >>Read More<<

STORM TURNS FOCUS TO GLOBAL WARMING
Though some scientists connect the growing severity of hurricanes to climate change, most insist that there's not enough proof. Is the rash of powerful Atlantic storms in recent years a symptom of global warming?
Although most mainstream hurricane scientists are skeptical of any connection between global warming and heightened storm activity, the growing intensity of hurricanes and the frequency of large storms are leading some to rethink long-held views... >>Read More<<

HURRICANES AND GLOBAL WARMING - IS THERE A LINK?
I could see this one coming.
The other day a lady in my department saw me and said, "Well, George, with all these hurricanes it's pretty clear that global warming is happening, right?" I think Jane was just being playful, because she's heard me talk about global warming and knows of my "politically incorrect" viewpoint on this issue, Yet she raises a question that a lot of people have been asking: does the busy hurricane year in the Atlantic have anything to do with global warming?... >>Read More<<

STORMS VARY WITH CYCLES, EXPERTS SAY
Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming... >>Read More<<

OPINION - TOUGH QUESTIONS ON HURRICANES AND GLOBAL WARMING?
Over at GristMill (http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/8/29/12237/4650) Dave Roberts discusses hurricanes and global warming and asks some "tough questions." The first of these questions focus on whether or not greens should misuse science to achieve their political goals... >>Read More<<

A PERFECT STORM FOR GREEN AND RELIGIOUS PROPHETS OF DOOM
What caused Hurricane Katrina to slam the U.S. Gulf Coast? Was it a typical late-summer tropical storm caused by wind, water, and heat? Mother Nature crying out on behalf of the earth's pain? An angry God?... >>Read More<<

Speech at the Promotion of Western Alienation Rally at the Steps of the Alberta Legislature Building
I am here today to only represent myself and the knowledge I have built up about major environmental issues. The Kyoto agreement is one of several environmental issues that are very poorly understood, and generally misrepresented, among Albertans. The Kyoto agreement is an issue that may not have a solution for Alberta within Canada. So a rally supporting Alberta Independence and Western Alienation is a good forum for my topic.
... >>Read More<<

Reconstructing 1000 Years of Precipitation in China
Climate models have long predicted that global warming will increase the variability and amount of precipitation the world receives as a result of global warming. In order to test such predictions, long-term records of the natural variability of precipitation from many places across the globe are needed to determine if recent trends are truly unprecedented and the result of global warming...>>Read More<<

The Emphasis on Man-made Global Warming
The possibility that CO2 may affect climate was first put forward nearly 100 years ago. More recently, James Hansen focused attention on anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 as a cause of global warming. In that same year (1988) the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Panel has issued three Assessment Reports, in 1990, 1996 and 2001, hefty collections of scientific papers by individual researchers with a variety of opinions... >>Read More<<

Warming El Niños giving way to cooling La Niñas
A new study of California elephant seal pups and their weaning weights suggests a 25-year Pacific Ocean warming has ended and the second half of a 50-year cycle has begun to cool the northern Pacific. Historical fish catch data indicate the ocean cooling trend is likely to last until about 2025... >>Read More<<

Global warming flashback: GLOBAL WARMING ALERT: GORE BURNS 439,500 LBS OF FUEL TO ATTEND SUMMIT
"The most vulnerable part of the Earth's environment is the very thin layer of air clinging near to the surface of the planet, that we are now so carelessly filling with gaseous wastes that we are actually altering the
relationship between the Earth and the Sun - by trapping more solar radiation under this growing blanket of pollution that envelops the entire world," Vice President Gore told the U.N. Global Warming conference of 159
nations this morning in Koyto, Japan... >>Read More<<

Climatologists Reject Media Claims of Global Warming Consensus
Leading climatologists spent the month of June fighting false proclamations from non-scientists claiming scientists have reached agreement that catastrophic global warming is occurring... >>Read More<<

The Other Hockey Stick
Disaster losses have increased dramatically in recent decades. Yet as discussed here frequently there is no scientific evidence showing that any part of this increase can be attributed to changes in climate, whether anthropogenic in origin or not. This is a long post on this subject. It contains a lot of gory detail on what I consider to be a major misuse of science in the climate debate, viewed through the lens of a recent paper in Science... >>Read More<<

HOT OR NOT
George Taylor shouldn't scare anybody. He has been a vegetarian since the 1970s. He commutes to work by bicycle. He's an ex-hippie and an ex-surfer. He recycles. He likes trees and salmon... >>Read More<<

Federal Judge OKs Global Warming Lawsuit
A federal judge here said environmental groups and four U.S. cities can sue federal development agencies on allegations the overseas projects they financially back contribute to global warming... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week- Logan, UT
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<<

Katrina crushes vulnerable oil and gas industry
As a result of Hurricane Katrina, which struck in the Gulf of Mexico, 615 oil platforms have shut down as well as pipelines that normally send supplies to the Northeast, mid-Atlantic coast and Midwest. Major refineries in Louisiana and Mississippi were also shut down depriving the U.S. of about ten percent of its supply of gasoline.
... >>Read More<<

THE IPCC AND TECHNICAL INFORMATION. EXAMPLE: IMPACTS ON HUMAN HEALTH
INTRODUCTION
1. This evidence is presented to the Select Committee to provide a perspective on the role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in compiling and assessing technical information.
2. I am a specialist in the natural history and biology of mosquitoes, the epidemiology of the diseases they transmit, and strategies for their control. My entire career, more than thirty years, has been devoted to this complex subject. My research has included malaria, filariasis, dengue, yellow fever, St Louis encephalitis and West Nile encephalitis, and has taken me to many countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Pacific. ... >>Read More<<

Bush Revisions of Air Pollution Rules Valid, Appellate Court Rules
The Bush administration won a significant federal court victory, according to environmental policy analysts, when on June 24 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia validated substantial portions of the administration's revisions to the New Source Review (NSR) provisions of the Clean Air Act... >>Read More<<

Russian Science Director Refutes Warming Claims
Yury Izrael, director of the Russian Academy of Science's Global Climate and Ecology Institute, issued a scathing indictment of global warming alarmism, published June 28 by the Russian News and Information Agency. The following are excerpts from Izrael's comments. "According to 10,000 meteorological stations, average temperatures have increased by just 0.6 degrees in the last 100 years. But there is no scientifically sound evidence of the negative processes that allegedly begin to take place at such temperatures... >>Read More<<

The Mercury Amalgam Scam:
More than half a century ago, Orson Welles panicked his radio audience by reporting that Martians had invaded New Jersey. On December 23, 1990, CBS-TV's "60 Minutes" achieved a similar effect by announcing that toxins have invaded the American mouth... >>Read More<<

Land Use Changes and Surface Warming in Eastern China
Zhang et al. utilized the approach of Kalnay and Cai (2003) to determine the impacts of land-use changes on surface air temperature throughout eastern China (east of 110°E), where rapid urbanization, deforestation, desertification and other changes in land use have occurred over the last quarter-century, focusing on daily mean, maximum and minimum air temperatures from 259 stations over the period 1960 to 1999... >>Read More<<

Conterminous United States Temperature Trends – Summary
Has the global warming of the past century, and especially that of the past few decades, been as dramatic as climate alarmists claim it has been, leading to unprecedented high temperatures and unsurpassed temperature variability? We here explore this question as it applies to the conterminous United States by summarizing the results of a number of scientific papers that have broached this subject... >>Read More<<

Climate Models and the Sun-Climate Connection: Why the Two are Currently Incompatible
In a review of the temporal variability of various solar phenomena, Judith Lean of the Naval Research Laboratory's E.O. Hulburt Center for Space Research in Washington, DC, USA makes the following important but disturbing point about climate models and the sun-climate connection: "a major enigma is that general circulation climate models predict an immutable climate in response to decadal solar variability, whereas surface temperatures, cloud cover, drought, rainfall, tropical cyclones, and forest fires show a definite correlation with solar activity (Haigh, 2001, Rind, 2002)." So what's going on here?... >>Read More<<