Climate & Environment Weekly (Science edition): December 29, 2005

Climate & Environment Weekly
December 29, 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.

Are there trends in hurricane destruction?
Since the record impact of Hurricane Katrina, attention has focused on understanding trends in hurricanes and their destructive potential... >>Read More<<

Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment Effects on Pharmacological Substances Produced by Plants
The authors grew well watered and fertilized tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) and jimson weed (Datura stramonium L.) plants from seed (one plant per 0.6-L pot filled with promix for tobacco and vermiculite for jimson weed) in controlled environment chambers maintained at atmospheric CO2 concentrations of either 294, 378 or 690 ppm and mean air temperatures of either 22.1 or 27.1°C for 50 and 47 days after planting for tobacco and jimson weed... >>Read More<<

Extinction - Some Plants Refuse to Go Quietly into the Night
The authors quantified the temporal evolution of the productivity and "staying power" of fourteen species of plants across an experimental grassland diversity gradient that was established in the spring of 1994 at the Cedar Creek Natural History Area in central Minnesota, USA... >>Read More<<

Fifteen Hundred Years of Precipitation in the Ukraine
The authors present the first tree-ring reconstruction of spring (April-July) precipitation for the Crimean peninsula, located on the northern coast of the Black Sea in the Ukraine, for the period 1620-2002. They then utilize this tree-ring chronology to correctly date and correlate with an earlier precipitation reconstruction derived from a sediment core taken in 1931 from nearby Saki Lake, thus ending up with a proxy precipitation record for this region that stretches all the way back to AD 500... >>Read More<<

Global Change Consequences of the Thawing of Peatland Permafrost
Global warming-induced thawing of subarctic peatland permafrost has been predicted to turn boreal and tundra biomes into carbon sources extraordinaire. According to this climate-alarmist hypothesis, the exposure and subsequent decay of vast stores of newly-thawed organic matter will release long-sequestered carbon back to the atmosphere as CO2, possibly freeing enough carbon at a sufficiently rapid rate to rival more direct anthropogenic CO2 emissions... >>Read More<<

Hurricanes and Global Warming – FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How are hurricanes affected by global warming?
There are some different opinions among scientists who study hurricanes about the influence of historical emissions of greenhouse gases on the behavior of tropical cyclones, or as they are called in the Atlantic, hurricanes. Some think that the effect is not discernible, while others believe that they have seen a large effect... >>Read More<<

Insects (Other Species) – Summary
As the air's CO2 content continues to rise, it is important to determine what effect this phenomenon may have on the delicate balance that exists between various plants and the insects that feed upon them. We treat this subject in some detail with respect to aphids, butterflies and moths in other sections of our website devoted to this general topic, while here we review the results of studies that have been reported for other types of insects... >>Read More<<

Unresolved Questions About the North Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation
We discuss the results of a recent observational study (Bryden et al., 2005) and a recent modeling study (Knight et al., 2005) of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), concluding that we really don't know how it may change (or not!) in the future. Here, we review the findings of another recent study (Schmittner et al., 2005) that broaches the same question, but via an analysis of the simulations of many climate models... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - Hopkinsville, 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<<

Variations in North Atlantic Surface Pressure
In the past few years researchers have begun to explore the relationship between solar activity, galactic cosmic rays and earth's climate in much greater detail, and we have reviewed a number of such studies in the Extraterrestrial Climatic Effects section of our website. Continuing along the lines of these earlier works, Veretenenko et al. examine the potential influence of galactic cosmic rays (GCR) on the long-term variation of North Atlantic sea level pressure over the period 1874-1995... >>Read More<<