Climate & Environment Review: March 8, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
March 8, 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.

Risk in Perspective
MATTERS OF THE HEART AND MIND: RISK-RISK TRADEOFFS IN EATING FISH CONTAINING METHYLMERCURY... >>Read More<<

Assessing Antarctica's Mass Balance Via Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity from Satellites
Using measurements of time-variable gravity from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, the authors determined mass variations of the Antarctic ice sheet for the 34 months between April 2002 and August 2005... >>Read More<<

The Lancet Pricks Itself
The term "medical journals" elicits automatic respect from most people. Not from me: I read them. I've found the editors to be increasingly hubristic and anti-business; and even worse, not to know what they don't know... >>Read More<<

La Nina weather phenomenon is coming: WMO
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said it saw unprecedented signs pointing to a looming La Nina, a phenomenon that originates off the western coast of South America but can disrupt weather patterns in many parts of the globe... >>Read More<<

Climate Change & Global Warming: How Hot is it?
It is a scientifically established fact that, all other things being equal, extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will tend to trap heat from the sun and warm our planet. But the real question is how much the carbon dioxide that has been added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels will really warm the earth... >>Read More<<

More Ice Melting Disputes
WASHINGTON (AP) New measurements show the ice in West Antarctica is thickening, reversing some earlier estimates that the sheet was melting. Scientists concerned about global warming have worried that higher temperatures could melt the massive ice sheet, causing a rise in sea levels worldwide... >>Read More<<

POPULAR MECHANICS DEBUNKS "SEVEN KATRINA MYTHS"
In its March issue, Popular Mechanics took on virtually all of the myths and misnomers that were so drilled into the citizenry that many have become part of the public psyche. Thankfully, its authors made it clear right in the first paragraph that they planned on pulling no punches... >>Read More<<

Antarctic Ice - The Cold Truth
This week Science Magazine's on-line SciencExpress reports that Antarctica has been losing large amounts of ice mass over the past three years, contributing to sea level rise at a rate of 0.4 ± 0.2 mm/year. This comes on the heels of a paper published by Science two weeks ago that reported that Greenland was also losing big chunks of ice and contributing to sea level rise at a rate of 0.57 mm/yr... >>Read More<<

TECHNOLOGIES TO FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE
With its CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme in place, Europe has resolutely opted for a 'market pull' approach to bring clean technologies onto the market in the short run. However, politicians realise new breakthrough technologies are also needed if deeper emission cuts are to be achieved in the long run (2020-2050 and beyond)... >>Read More<<

The Planet Can't Wait
The warnings are coming from frogs and beetles, from melting ice and changing ocean currents, and from scientists and responsible politicians around the world... >>Read More<<

Climatic Change
The Mann et al. (1998) Northern Hemisphere annual temperature reconstruction over 1400-1980 is examined in light of recent criticisms concerning the nature and processing of included climate proxy data... >>Read More<<

Dying from Heat and Cold in King County, Washington, USA
The authors examined the relationship between temperature and cardiac-related deaths in King County, Washington, USA, over the period 1980-2000 using Poisson regression analysis, based on information provided by the Washington State Department of Health on out-of-hospital deaths of all adults over the age of 54, plus historical meteorological data obtained from the National Climate Data Center for the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport... >>Read More<<

Oceans (Regime Shifts) – Summary
Is there a "natural " explanation for the supposedly "unprecedented" warming of the past quarter-century? ... and could the highly-hyped decadal-scale warming soon be coming to an end? We explore these questions via a review of what is known about natural but abrupt regime shifts in ocean temperature and biology, based on a number of studies that have been conducted over the past few years... >>Read More<<

Pristine Alaskan Glacier Turns Into Tropical Wasteland
(Frosty Cove, Alaska) Few places on Earth have suffered the ravages of global warming more than Alaska. While recent news reports have highlighted accounts of the native Inuits' snowmobiles falling through the ice, threatening their traditional way of life, there are isolated parts of Alaska have been completely transformed by global warming... >>Read More<<

The Accelerated Disintegration of Greenland's Glaciers
Considerable fanfare was recently accorded the study of Rignot and Kanagaratnam (2005), when "using satellite radar interferometry observations of Greenland," they detected "widespread glacier acceleration."... >>Read More<<

IN THRALL TO THE GREEN GOD
Environmentalism has become a religion, writes Martin Livermore in this week's Green Room; humans should take off their hair shirts, and enjoy the lifestyles which progress has created... >>Read More<<

Antarctic Ice Sheets Are Growing
[...] The West Antarctic peninsula only covers one tenth of the South Pole's ice. There are rarely spectacular reports about the much larger parts of the continent. These do not provide a uniform scientific picture. In total, however, the ice masses of the continent, which hold about 70 per cent of the world's fresh water resources, seem to be growing... >>Read More<<

Ice Storm
The latest issue of Science contains a paper by Eric Rignot and Pannir Kanagaratnam claiming that glaciers along the periphery of Greenland are melting at a rapidly increasing rate. Another paper on this subject was published by Science just last year. Ola Johannessen did not consider direct ice lost by glaciers into the ocean but instead only focused on elevations changes... >>Read More<<

Science journals delivering "political science"
Last May, a Korean report in Science magazine prompted headlines around the world by declaring it had made tremendous advances in the heretofore disappointing field of embryonic stem cell (ES cell) research. It has now prompted much soul-searching in media land. "How could we have been fooled?" reporters are asking themselves in print... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - Orogrande, NM
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<<

Solar flares may pack a bigger punch
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A new computer model suggests the next solar cycle will be more active than the previous one, potentially spawning magnetic storms that will be more disruptive to communication systems on Earth... >>Read More<<