Climate & Environment Review: March 16, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
March 16, 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.

UNDERSTANDING COMMON CLIMATE CLAIMS
The issue of man induced climate change involves not the likelihood of dangerous consequences, but rather their remote possibility... >>Read More<<

Montana: On the Verge of Collape?
In his latest book, Collapse: How Societies Succeed or Fail, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond attempts to explain how a number of small, isolated societies, from Easter Island to Greenland, destroyed their environments and disappeared... >>Read More<<

EPW Fact of the Day
Despite the assurance from the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that no climate change legislation would be forthcoming from his committee this year, some on Capitol Hill appear eager for another legislative battle over implementing mandatory controls on carbon dioxide... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week: Angelica, NY
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<<

Climate of superstition
There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted. Next week marks the deadline that has been set for reactions to the less than satisfactory discussion paper that has emerged from the government’s belated review of the important issue of the economics of climate change... >>Read More<<

Multi-Century Climatic Cycles of Equatorial Africa
Working with three sediment cores extracted from Lake Edward (0°N, 30°E) in Africa, the authors developed a continuous 5400-year record of Mg concentration and isotopic composition of authigenic inorganic calcite as proxies for the lake's water balance, which is itself a proxy for regional drought conditions in equatorial Africa... >>Read More<<

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE MIGRATION CAPACITY OF SPECIES - IT'S NOT ALL BAD NEWS
In a recent paper, McLachlan et al. presented evidence that migration rates of two tree species at the end of the last glacial (c. 10-20 thousand years ago) were much slower than was previously thought. These results provide an important insight for climate-change impacts studies and suggest that the ability of species to track future climate change is limited... >>Read More<<

Level of climate change gases hits record high
The atmosphere's level of greenhouse gases associated with climate change is hitting record highs, two prominent scientific organisations said yesterday... >>Read More<<

Tropical Forest Productivity Trajectories
In a study published online 13 February 2004 (the printout of which was lost for lo these many months in a pile of papers on one of our desks), Malhi and Phillips (2004) highlight key findings of a Theme Issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London on "Tropical Forests and Global Atmospheric Change," the evidence for which was gained from field studies of what they describe as "large-scale and rapid change in the dynamics and biomass of old-growth forests," which attempt to answer the question: What is actually being observed in tropical forests today?... >>Read More<<

An Extreme View of Global Warming
The notion that human-induced climate change will make for more extreme weather has become writ large on the public consciousness. It makes for good headlines, so surely it must be true. Well, new analyses suggest it might be false (at least for the United States)... >>Read More<<

Solar Activity, Cosmic Rays, Low Clouds and Climate Change
When solar activity is high, the magnetic field that is carried by the solar wind intensifies, providing more shielding of the earth from low-energy galactic cosmic rays. This effect may lead to a decrease in ion production in the lower atmosphere, possibly resulting in the creation of fewer cloud condensation nuclei and less low-level cloud cover; and this phenomenon, in turn, may allow more solar radiation to impinge upon the earth and drive global warming... >>Read More<<

The Urban Heat Island of Barrow, Alaska
Barrow, Alaska, which is situated on the Arctic Coastal Plain at the western edge of the Barrow Peninsula near the Chuckchi Sea at 71.3°N, 156.5°W, is described by the authors as "the northernmost settlement in the USA and the largest native community in the Arctic," the population of which "has grown from about 300 residents in 1900 to more than 4600 in 2000."... >>Read More<<

Fox Announces Major Mexico Oil Find
President Vicente Fox climbed aboard a drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday to formally announce a new deep-water oil discovery he said could eventually yield 10 billion barrels of crude oil... >>Read More<<

MONTANA - ON THE VERGE OF COLLAPSE?
Is Jared Diamond right about Montana? In his new book, Collapse: How Societies Succeed or Fail, Diamond writes that Montana's environmental problems "include almost all of the dozen types of problems that have undermined pre-industrial societies in the past, or that now threaten societies elsewhere in the world as well."... >>Read More<<

SPECULATION ALERT - "COSMIC IMPACT TRIGGERED GLOBAL WARMING"
I am frequently asked why CCNet features near earth objects and cosmic impacts as well as global warming (among other topics) - to which I respond that CCNet is a global forum that addresses all aspects of neo-catastrophism (which obviously includes climate- and paleo-climate catastrophism)... >>Read More<<

Running Out of Oil? History, Technology and Abundance
Are we running out of oil? That's what the doomsayers say. We are past our (Hubbert's) peak and it's downhill from here. War, famine, pestilence, perhaps even extinction – those are the apocalyptic scenarios posited by folks predicting the oil age is over and the era of stringency is nigh... >>Read More<<

Welcome to Indonesia
In September 2004, police in Indonesia handcuffed and arrested six employees of the Denver-based Newmont Mining Corporation, throwing them in jail for 32 days next to terrorists who had attacked the Australian embassy... >>Read More<<

REALITY CHECK AS COLD WEATHER TRIGGERS NEW ENERGY CRISIS IN BRITAIN
The National Grid, responsible for running Britain's gas and electricity pipes and wires, yesterday issued an unprecedented warning that the country was in danger of not having enough gas to meet demand... >>Read More<<