Climate & Environment Weekly: February 6, 2006

Climate & Environment Weekly
February 6, 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.

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - Clarksdale, MS
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<<

Using Borehole Temperatures to Reconstruct Earth's Thermal History
Beltrami et al. analyzed high-quality borehole temperature data measured in four boreholes in quasi-steady state from a small region in northern Quebec, to ascertain whether records of surface air temperature collected nearby reproduce the subsurface temperature anomalies observed in the area... >>Read More<<

Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him
The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming... >>Read More<<

Global warming hasn't hit Fairbanks
Ask the citizens of Fairbanks, Alaska, if their earth is warming. January is expected to be the third coldest month in a century. The average high for the past week has been 40 degrees below, and the low, 48 below... >>Read More<<

We Have It Coming
Americans are about to learn the hard way about the unintended consequences of over-regulation and flawed policy initiatives... >>Read More<<

SCIENTISTS PLAY DOWN RISING SEAS - THE STORY THAT WAS ECLIPSED
MANCHESTER scientists studying global warming are predicting a much lower rise in sea levels than previously feared... >>Read More<<

Cheap flights threaten UK targets for carbon emissions
Also, how do Environmentalists get to all those endless environmental summits, World Bank meetings and protest sites around the world? Fuel cell aircraft? They certainly don’t travel on Japanese or Russian whalers... >>Read More<<

Global Warming Science or Policy?
A nasty little spat has arisen as a result of NASA's leading climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), speaking out on the Bush Administration's reluctance to begin imposing carbon dioxide restrictions to help slow global warming... >>Read More<<

HOW KYOTO WAS NEUTERED - AN ASSESSMENT OF MONTREAL COP/MOP 1
The December 2005 Montreal "COP-MOP" (1) Kyoto Protocol negotiation was widely hailed (2) for producing an "historic climate agreement". Such trumpeting was fairly ritualistic (3) from Kyoto's 1997 inception through the "emergency" meeting in Bonn, July 2001, the sole exception (4) to this run being a failed COP-6 which necessitated the Bonn COP-6 bis.(5) Reality has subdued reaction to more recent sessions... >>Read More<<

Extratropical North Atlantic and North Pacific Sea Level Trends - 1993-2003
Noting that satellite altimetry data have shown sea level change to be characterized by an uneven spatial structure, with positive trends in some regions and negative trends in others (Cazenave et al., 2004), the authors constructed maps of Sea Level Anomalies (SLAs) for the extratropical North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans that they obtained from merged Topex/Poseidon-Jason-1+ERS-1/2 altimetry data for the period October 1992 to July 2003, after which they used Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis to identify dominant modes of interannual SLA variability... >>Read More<<

A Global Warming Worksheet
How can a reasonably diligent citizen assess this claim? Measuring average global temperature is not an easy matter. It's a big planet, with lots of ways and places to take its temperature. Scientists, naturally, have to rely on record keepers in decades past, using different instruments, to produce what has become the conventionally accepted estimate of a one-degree rise over the past century... >>Read More<<

Hot Tip: Post Misses the Point!
Juliet Eilperin’s latest headline in the Washington Post (January 29, 2006) about how global warming is destroying the earth was “Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change.” The Post, which has been news-editorializing this story for a couple of years now, featured her article above the fold in the top-right corner of the Sunday paper. Obviously they are exercised. Our response: cool it... >>Read More<<

CO2 and Clouds – Their Relative Roles as Agents of Climate Change
Using the most up-to-date cloud amount data from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project, and following the protocols of Palle et al. (2004), the authors derived globally-averaged albedo anomalies and related solar radiative forcing anomalies that were supposedly experienced by the earth over the past two decades. In addition, they explored the impacts of observed changes in the amounts of low clouds and high plus mid-level clouds that occurred between 2000 and 2004 on total radiative forcing (solar plus thermal)... >>Read More<<

BRITAIN'S MOST FAMOUS, SCEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST COMES OUT FIGHTING
David Bellamy has been an environmental campaigner for 35 years and has written more than 40 books on the subject. Now 73, he married his wife Rosemary when he was 19. They live near Durham and have five children, four of whom are adopted... >>Read More<<

Hypotheses about IPCC and Peer Review
The IPCC is the 800 pound gorilla in the climate debate. It has been the locus of legitimate and credible climate science (salience is another matter, but I digress). It is increasingly coming under criticism in a number of dimensions for some very good reasons. In this post I’d like to suggest a few hypotheses about how the IPCC has indirectly contributed to the politicization of climate science in ways we’ve not discussed here. These are for discussion, and I’d welcome evidence for/against and other sorts of examples... >>Read More<<

RECENT TRENDS OF SEA-LEVEL RISE MAY BE DUE TO INTERDECADAL FLUCTUATIONS
Noting that satellite altimetry data have shown sea level change to be characterized by an uneven spatial structure, with positive trends in some regions and negative trends in others (Cazenave et al., 2004), the authors constructed maps of Sea Level Anomalies (SLAs) for the extratropical North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans that they obtained from merged Topex/Poseidon-Jason-1+ERS-1/2 altimetry data for the period October 1992 to July 2003, after which they used Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis to identify dominant modes of interannual SLA variability... >>Read More<<

Proving Science Bias
Two recent events underscore how predictable is the distortion of global warming by those who gain from exaggeration. The events were the Montreal “Conference of the Parties” which had signed the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. Both took place in early December... >>Read More<<

NEW MOON RACE FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL ENERGY MOONSHINE
On the assumption that The Independent's report on the proposed mining of the moon's surface
accurately reflects Russia's genuine intentions, I am happy at the prospect that humanity is about to pull a finger and penetrate into space again, this time with serious intent. I am even happier that the project is aimed at material gain; projects based on abstract ideals and politicians' histrionics are founded on something less than sand... >>Read More<<

Bush plans nuclear energy comeback
The Bush administration plans to expand the use of nuclear energy in an effort to reduce U.S. dependency on imported oil. The administration plans to upgrade and construct nuclear facilities over the next decade. This would mark the first new nuclear plants ordered in the United States in more than 30 years... >>Read More<<

Rising Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations Increase Soil Carbon
Many field-scale CO2-enrichment studies, in the words of Jastrow et al. (2005), "have failed to detect significant changes in soil C [carbon] against the relatively large, spatially heterogeneous pool of existing soil organic matter, leading to the general conclusion that the potential for increased soil C is limited (Hungate et al., 1997; Gill et al., 2002; Hagedorn et al., 2003; Lichter et al., 2005)."... >>Read More<<