Climate & Environment Review: February 27, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
February 27, 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.

BAN BOTTLED WATER? YES, MINISTER!
"Have you seen this report in The Times today? They say that mineral water is contributing to climate change...here, have a read: Despite its pure image, bottled water is making a significant contribution to climate change. The industry produces as much greenhouse gas as the electricity consumption of about 20,000 homes in a year, according to research by The Times... >>Read More<<

Eating Some Crow on Fat
Of all the beautiful hypotheses in the temple of preventive medicine, the claim that low-fat diets could prevent cancer and heart disease is perhaps the most central. But the last few weeks have been more than a little unkind to the beautiful hypotheses of the lifestyle medicine crowd. In fact the ugly facts have been piling up fairly quickly... >>Read More<<

CULTURE OF FEAR - DEALING WITH CULTURAL PANIC ATTACKS
Earlier this week, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, held a remarkably
interesting conference titled "Panic Attack: The New Precautionary Culture, the Politics of
Fear, and the Risks to Innovation."... >>Read More<<

River Runoff - The Effect of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment
In a paper published in the 16 February issue of Nature, Gedney et al. (2006) claim to have detected "a direct carbon dioxide effect in continental river runoff records."... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - New England, ND
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<<

Effects of Temperature on Human Mortality in Scotland
Carder et al. report that they observed "an overall increase in mortality as temperature decreases," which "appears to be steeper at lower temperatures than at warmer temperatures," while they say "there is little evidence of an increase in mortality at the hot end of the temperature range."... >>Read More<<

TROPICAL STORMS AND CLIMATE CHANGE
The number of named tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic set a new record in 2005, and today an international panel of scientists will be presenting findings on whether there is a link between recent tropical cyclone activity and climate change... >>Read More<<

Reconstructing Summer Temperatures in Central Europe
Using the regional curve standardization technique applied to ring-width measurements from both living trees and relict wood, the authors developed a 1052-year summer (June-August) temperature proxy from high-elevation Alpine environments in Switzerland and the western Austrian Alps... >>Read More<<

ABOUT GREENLAND'S GLACIERS
For starters the acceleration appears to be occurring at a few glaciers in the west - Jakobshavn Isbrae, Nordenskiold and some "unsurveyed" glacier(s) for which the melting was estimated but lacks verification - and in the south east. By my calculation of the given figures, the "SMB 2005" values for glaciers in northern Greenland should total -0.4, not -2.3 and this new figures indicates a deceleration since year 2000... >>Read More<<

Science And Fiction
Climate Change: Environmentalists are ridiculing President Bush for meeting with novelist Michael Crichton and for being "in near-total agreement" with his skepticism of global warming. But Crichton isn't just spinning tales... >>Read More<<

CONSENSUS STATEMENT ON HURRICANES AND GLOBAL WARMING
Under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization's Commission on Atmospheric Sciences, its Tropical Meteorology Research Program Panel has just issued a statement on hurricanes and global warming... >>Read More<<

Climate Model Inadequacies (Soil Moisture) – Summary
Climate models have long indicated that CO2-induced global warming will increase evapotranspiration, causing decreases in soil moisture content that may offset modest increases in continental precipitation and lead to greater aridity in both water-limited natural ecosystems and lands devoted to agriculture... >>Read More<<

ONE YEAR LATER, KYOTO-ENTHUSIASTS STRUGGLE TO MEET TARGETS
(CNSNews.com) - Europe's top environment official marked the one-year anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol on Thursday by accusing the U.S. of not doing enough to combat climate change -- despite the fact that many of the treaty's most enthusiastic supporters have done significantly worse than America in dealing with "greenhouse gas" emissions.... >>Read More<<

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week
A warmer and drier interval identified from the type and amount of pollen found in a sediment core with bi-decadal resolution retrieved from Piermont Marsh (41°00'N, 73°55'W) on the western shore of the Hudson River, New York, USA, revealed the MWP to have held sway in that area from AD 795 to 1290... >>Read More<<

Spring Barley Production in a CO2-Enriched and Warmer Central Europe
The crop growth model CERES-Barley version 2.1 (Otter-Nacke et al., 1991) was used to assess the direct biological effect of a doubling of the air's CO2 concentration (from 350 to 700 ppm) on the growth and yield of spring barley in the Czech Republic, along with the indirect effect on growth and yield produced by the climate changes that are predicted to accompany such a CO2 increase, as simulated by several GCMs, including ECHAM4, HadCM2, NCAR-DOE and seven other GCMs available from the IPCC-DDC... >>Read More<<

CALIFORNIA CAN MEET GREENHOUSE GAS REDUCTION TARGETS AT NO
NET COST WHILE CREATING 20,000 JOBS AND EXPANDING STATE'S ECONOMY BY $60 BILLION
California's ambitious plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions could create tens of thousands of new jobs and dramatically boost the economy in coming years, according to two independent analyses released in January 2006... >>Read More<<

Basics Instinct
Well, the latest research on the relation between nutrition and health has just been released and the fur is flying. Turns out the largest study ever done to assess the impact of a low fat diet on some of our major killer diseases has found that the diet has no effect... >>Read More<<

Temperature: Fair?
This Sunday, "60 Minutes" aired a piece on global warming. The piece, which featured correspondent Scott Pelley, largely took the existence of global warming as a given. But there are those who claim that global warming and, specifically, the notion that human's are responsible for it is a myth... >>Read More<<

Evidence of 20th-Century Declining Pan Evaporation in China
Lui et al. report that "for China as a whole, pan evaporation decreased over the past half century," noting that "the decline is statistically significant (at the 99% level)," and that "the downward trend of pan evaporation in China was -29.3 mm/decade, similar to the findings reported in several other countries."... >>Read More<<

What is the ‘Hockey Stick’ Debate About?
The hockey stick graph appears to show that the Earth’s climate was very stable from AD1000 to 1900,
then suddenly began to change, with temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rising dramatically... >>Read More<<