Climate & Environment Weekly (1st edition): January 12, 2006

Climate & Environment Weekly
January 12, 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.

GREEN ANGST - GETTING DESPERATE DOWN UNDER
Things are not going well for the global warming alarmists. The first high level meeting of governments which account for the largest share of the world's economy, most of the world's population and most emissions of greenhouse gases will be held in Sydney, Australia, this week. But the greens decry the event... >>Read More<<

Plants the new methane culprits
RICE paddies do it, ruminating cows and sheep do it and now scientists have discovered that plants also emit the potent greenhouse gas methane... >>Read More<<

The Greening of the Sahel
"The Sahel," in the words of Anyamba and Tucker (2005), "is a semi-arid region stretching approximately 5000 km across northern Africa from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to near the Red Sea in the east and extending roughly from 12°N to 18°N," which "forms an ecological transition between the Sahara desert to the north and the humid tropical savanna to the south (Le Houerou, 1980)."... >>Read More<<

Agriculture (Our Greatest Challenge) – Summary
Humanity faces many challenges; we always have, and we always will. None of them, however, is as pressing as the need to be able to produce the food we will require to sustain ourselves in but a few short decades without usurping most of the planet's remaining arable land and freshwater resources in the process and thereby leaving precious little of either for the plant and animal components of the planet's natural ecosystems. In addition, no need is more essential to the preservation of world peace than for people everywhere to have sufficient food to eat... >>Read More<<

Drought (Europe) – Summary
Climate alarmists typically contend that as the world warms it should experience more frequent and severe droughts. A good reality check on this claim would be to see what happened over the 20th century, when climate alarmists claim that the world warmed at a rate and to a level that were both unprecedented over the past two millennia. Hence, we here investigate this subject as it pertains to Europe... >>Read More<<

Sky-Island Refugia from Global Warming
The authors "inferred the phylogeography of the alpine butterfly Colias meadii Edwards (Pieridae) and compared its genetic structure with that of another high elevation, co-distributed butterfly, Parnassius smitheus Doubleday (Papilionidae), to test if the two Rocky Mountain butterflies responded similarly to the palaeoclimatic cycles of the Quaternary," i.e., to the recurring cycles of glacial and interglacial climates, in the hope of "establishing a baseline for predicting the effects of future climate change."... >>Read More<<

The Lorenz paradigm and the limitations of climate models...
HERE in the Netherlands, many people have ranked me as a climate skeptic. It did not help much that I called myself a protestant recently. I protest against overwhelming pressure to adhere to the climate change dogma promoted by the adherents of IPCC. I was brought up in a fundamentalist protestant environment, and have become very sensitive to everything that smells like an orthodox belief system... >>Read More<<

A Pair of Two-Millennia-Long Climatic Records
A δ13C profile of Globigerinoides rubber was extracted from a shallow-water core in the Gulf of Taranto (39°45'53"N, 17°53'33"E) to produce a high-precision record of climate variability over the past two millennia. This high-precision record was then statistically analyzed, together with a second two-millennia-long tree-ring record obtained from Japanese cedars (Kitagawa and Matsumoto, 1995), for evidence of recurring cycles using Singular Spectrum Analysis and Wavelet Transform, after which both records were compared with a 300-year record of sunspots... >>Read More<<

What is the Meaning of a “Multi-Decadal Climate Projection”?
While as process studies, there is merit in this research, but to transfer the results as skillful projections to policymakers is inappropriate and misleading. Now only is there no value added in regional downscaling of mult-decadal projections beyond what can be achieved by just interpolating downscale a global model to finer scale surface terrain information, the global models themselves have not demonstrated skill at accurately predicting historic changes in the global climate... >>Read More<<

New source of global warming gas found - plants
German scientists have discovered a new source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is second only to carbon dioxide in its impact on climate change. The culprits are plants.
They produce about 10 to 30 percent of the annual methane found in the atmosphere, according to researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany... >>Read More<<

Dimming of Solar Radiation Received at the Earth's Surface - Global or Local?
For the 25-year period 1964-1989, the authors examined trends in the surface receipt of solar radiation at 144 urban sites (population greater than 100,000 persons) and 174 rural sites (population less than 100,000 persons) for various latitudinal bands as well as for the entire globe... >>Read More<<

EPA’s Faith-Based Pollution Standards
There is no question that high levels of air pollution can kill. About 4,000 Londoners died during the infamous five-day “London Fog” of December 1952, when soot and sulfur dioxide soared to levels tens of times greater than the highest levels experienced in the United States today, and visibility dropped to less than 20 feet... >>Read More<<

Beware how you meddle with climate change
Everyone knows trees are "A Good Thing". They take in the carbon dioxide that threatens our planet with global warming and turn it into fresh, clean oxygen for us all to breathe... >>Read More<<

Jumping To Conclusions: Frogs, Global Warming and Nature
Me and my apparently few friends have been ragging on the review process at Nature for some time, which was once the world’s most prestigious science periodical for all subjects. While it still may be the best for certain biochemical and genetic topics, it surely has lost it on global warming... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - Alma, 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... >>Read More<<

Warm weather 'to boost food bugs'
Britain could see a dramatic increase in food poisoning cases and waterborne disease as the warmer, wetter weather linked to climate change takes hold... >>Read More<<

Science Appears to Be in Retreat
Advocates of anti-science agendas keep trying to change physiological laws through litigation, regulation and pressure on corporations. This is illustrated by three recent health-news items that conspired to make me worry that the world has finally gone crazy... >>Read More<<