Climate & Environment Weekly (1st edition): January 5, 2006

Climate & Environment Weekly
January 5, 2006

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.

A murky deal ends the Russian gas row
Russia and Ukraine seem to have ended their row over the price of gas, which had briefly threatened energy supplies across Europe. But the deal they have reached is a murky one—and doubts remain over Russia's reliability as an energy supplier... >>Read More<<

CONCERN GROWS IN EU AND US OVER GAS DISRUPTION
Gazprom's decision to cut off gas supplies to the Ukraine is cause for growing concern among European Union and US policymakers, as supplies were disrupted on Monday... >>Read More<<

Drought (Asia) – Summary
One of the tenets of modern climate alarmism is that global warming comes with a lot of bad baggage, including a propensity for more frequent and more severe droughts. We here explore this claim as it pertains to Asia, beginning with a long historical perspective and working our way to the present... >>Read More<<

EUROPE FRETS ABOUT RUSSIAN ENERGY RELIANCE
VIENNA, Austria - Russian natural gas surged through Ukraine to countries across Europe on
Tuesday, banishing the specter of immediate and prolonged shortages because of Moscow's price
dispute with Kiev... >>Read More<<

The Claim: Fish Is Brain Food
THE FACTS Some old bromides - like the one that holds that chocolate causes acne - were just plain wrong... >>Read More<<

Global warming 55 million years ago shifted ocean currents
An extraordinary burst of global warming that occurred around 55 million years ago dramatically reversed Earth's pattern of ocean currents, a finding that strengthens modern-day concern about climate change, a study says... >>Read More<<

Insects (Natural Ecosystems) – Summary
Increases in per capita consumption of foliage by insect herbivores in CO2-enriched air have periodically been observed in laboratory and greenhouse studies (Bezemer and Jones, 1998; Coviella and Trumble, 1999; Hunter, 2001), leading to periodic claims that earth's forests will suffer severely at the mandibles of ravenous hordes of leaf-chewing insects in the years and decades to come, unless, of course, something is done to stop the ongoing rise in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration... >>Read More<<

Journal to retract Korean stem cell paper
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The journal Science said on Wednesday it will retract a paper written by disgraced Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk and colleagues, accused of faking part of a study on tailored embryonic stem cells... >>Read More<<

KREMLIN MOVE 'WAS ILLEGAL'
As President Vladimir Putin's economics adviser, Andrei Illarionov was known as the one senior official prepared to criticise his boss.... >>Read More<<

Multi-Decadal Modes of Pacific Sea Surface Temperature Variability
Previous studies of a Rarotonga coral-based sea surface temperature (SST) reconstruction from the Cook Islands, South Pacific Ocean, have focused on documenting and interpreting decadal and interdecadal variability without separating distinct modes of variability within this frequency band (Linsley et al. 2000, 2004; Evans et al. 2001).... >>Read More<<

Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming
[CSPP note: This is another example of slanted alarmism from the Times. There seems no effort to balance the reporting, making the “story” appear preconceived. The story turns to an alarmist view for one of his fanciful “flippable climate switches”: “including natural repositories of carbon, like boggy tundra, that could emit vast amounts of greenhouse gases should the current warming trend pass certain points, said Jonathan T. Overpeck, the director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona.”... >>Read More<<

REPORT, RESPONSE AND REVIEW - THE ARGUMENT IN BRITAIN ON CLIMATE CHANGE ISSUES*
In early July 2005 a report on 'The Economics of Climate Change' was issued by the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs: the report was the subject of a commentary by Peter Senker in Energy & Environment (Vol. 16, No. 6)... >>Read More<<

Russia, Ukraine to Resume Gas Talks
Russian and Ukrainian officials agreed Tuesday to resume talks on resolving a dispute over the price of natural gas that has reverberated across the continent and left Ukraine cut off from its supplies... >>Read More<<

RUSSIA'S PLACE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
At first glance, Russia bears many of the hallmarks of a great power. It possesses a large arsenal of nuclear weapons, a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, enormous reserves of oil and other minerals, a recent record of robust economic growth and more territory than any other country despite being only three-fourths the size of the former Soviet Union... >>Read More<<

"SOLAR ACTIVITY IS PRIMARY DRIVING FORCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE"
During the past 6000 years, the temperature variation trend inferred from d18O of peat cellulose in a peat core from Hongyuan (eastern Qinghai-Tibet plateau, southwestern China) is similar to the atmospheric 14C concentration trend and the modeled solar output trend... >>Read More<<

Solar-Powered Millennial-Scale Climatic Change
Many palaeoclimate records from earth's North Atlantic region depict a millennial-scale oscillation of climate, which during the last glacial period was highlighted by Dansgaard-Oeschger events that regularly recurred at approximately 1,470-year intervals... >>Read More<<

Temperature Reconstructions of the Past Millennium
In this Viewpoint article, several authors who have previously published temperature reconstructions covering all or portions of the past millennium weigh in with their thoughts on why there are differences among such reconstructions and what it will take to reduce present uncertainties to gain a more complete and correct understanding of temperature changes over the past thousand years... >>Read More<<

THE LATEST ICE AGE SCARE
Ice ages come every 11,000 years. A mega ice age comes every 105,000 years. Both are due between now and 2012. The 11,000 year cycle happens because of increase and decrease of cyclical underwater volcanic eruption. The 105,000 mega ice age happens because of the changing shape of the orbit of the earth around the sun - circular to elliptical and then back to circular every 105,000 years... >>Read More<<

The Return of Blue Mussels to Svalbard
The authors describe and discuss the significance of what they refer to as "the first observations of settled blue mussels Mytilus edulis L. in the high Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard for the first time since the Viking Age."... >>Read More<<

TURNING OFF THE PIPES THREATENS TO LEAVE PUTIN OUT IN THE COLD
RUSSIA'S action has caused an immediate political and economic crisis in both Eastern and Western Europe, dramatically underlining the key role energy supplies now play in power politics... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - Bastrop, LA
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<<