Climate & Environment Review: March 22, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
March 22, 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.

Global Warming Not Featured in New Hurricane Study
The latest Science magazine features a paper linking increasing sea-surface temperatures to global increases in the most severe hurricanes, but it does NOT mention global warming as the cause. Think the newspapers won't?... >>Read More<<

Fish and mercury hazards revisited
BELFAST (March 20): In my last column, I discussed the subject of environmental mercury poisoning and the danger to unborn children from mercury containing fish consumed during pregnancy... >>Read More<<

"CO2 RISE OVER THE LAST 8,000 YEARS WAS NATURAL, NOT ANTHROPOGENIC"
In view of the wide attention received by the suggestion that the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) over the last 8000 years is anthropogenic rather than natural in origin [Ruddiman, 2003], this claim should be carefully examined... >>Read More<<

Exxon meets petro-paranoia
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an alleged Jewish plot to control the world, was exposed long ago as a fraud. A recent documentary of the same name, by American filmmaker Marc Levin, examined the continued tendency of people to find Jewish conspiracies and to cite such "facts" as that "no Jews died on 9/11."... >>Read More<<

COSMIC RAYS SET CLIMATE CHANGE ON EARTH, EXPERT SAYS
Stars, not greenhouse gases, are heating up the Earth. So says prominent University of Ottawa science professor Jan Veizer... >>Read More<<

It's raining hurricane papers! Is it global warming or not?
In my spare time I'm a hurricanes expert. NOT!! (I'll let others keeping pretending they are, though.) But my phud is in phys. oceanography and climatology, so I keep my eye on all this hurricane busyness... >>Read More<<

Ga. Tech study adds to debate on warming
Rising ocean temperatures are directly linked to a worldwide increase in hurricane strength over the last 35 years, a Georgia Tech research team reported Thursday --- a finding that could add fuel to the debate over possible links between global climate change and hurricanes... >>Read More<<

Malaria, DDT and Human Death
Besides being a film producer, I have a preventive medicine practice in Los Angeles. As it happens, California is currently leading the Nation in West Nile virus and I was being asked about it more frequently by my patients... >>Read More<<

El Niños - Good, Bad or Indifferent?
Climate alarmists typically contend that global warming increases the frequency of El Niños, and that El Niños exacerbate climate- and weather-related disasters. In an eye-opening analysis that repudiates the latter of these claims, Goddard and Dilley (2005) explore the subject in a paper that was published a few months back in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate... >>Read More<<

Cry of ‘political science’ a two-edged sword
One senator’s inquiry into the inner workings of Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, and its parent organization, the University Center for Atmospheric Research, is being construed by some as an act of political intimidation... >>Read More<<

Malaria Scores a Three-Pointer
On Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden malaria became a high profile cause. Hip Hop founder Fab Five Freddy was on New York Knicks TV along with Lance Laifer, the founder of Dunk Malaria, to raise awareness of the disease... >>Read More<<

Does the Gulf of Mexico Hold as Much Oil as Saudi Arabia?
Mexico’s giant Cantarell oil field, in the Gulf of Mexico off the Yucatan, was supposedly discovered in 1976 after a fisherman named Cantarell reported an oil seep in the Campeche Bay... >>Read More<<

Former Sierra Club head contends the environmental movement has lost its way
[Note: It has been widely observed that it seems lost on McCloskey and current professional environmentalists that a reason for present relative lack of accomplishment and public support – if that is the case – is the successes over the past thirty years by their predecessors... >>Read More<<

Climate Disasters - Reactions to Searching for a Signal
I would love to be the first person to conclusively identify the signal of increasing greenhouse gases in the historical record of disaster losses... >>Read More<<

AMSTERDAM & NEW ORLEANS: TALES OF TWO CITIES
Like New Orleans, this city has had periods of past glory -- evident in its many well preserved buildings from centuries back. But it has also been subject to major floods and other calamities over the last 900 years... >>Read More<<

Forbidden Fruit - Justifying Energy Policy via Hurricane Mitigation
We’ve on occasion discussed a paper that we did in 2000 on the relative contributions to future damage of changes in intensity of hurricanes (called tropical cyclones worldwide) and changes in societal vulnerability, under the assumptions of the IPCC to 2050... >>Read More<<

"HOW PREHISTORIC FARMERS SAVED US FROM NEW ICE AGE" (NOT)
Ancient man saved the world from a new Ice Age. That is the startling conclusion of climate researchers who say man-made global warming is not a modern phenomenon and has been going on for thousands of years... >>Read More<<

Comments to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change
1. These comments respond to your invitation to submit comments on the discussion paper (DP) issued 31 January 2006... >>Read More<<

Methane (Temperature Implications) – Summary
Following water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) are the next most powerful greenhouse gases of earth's atmosphere; and both have experienced large concentration increases over the course of the Industrial Revolution... >>Read More<<

How Global Warming Research is Creating a Climate of Fear
Gone are the days when climate researchers would be content to sit in their ivory towers, packed to the gills with supercomputers, crunching numbers... >>Read More<<

CENTURY OF DATA SHOWS INTENSIFICATION OF WATER CYCLE BUT NO INCREASE IN STORMS OR FLOODS
A review of the findings from more than 100 peer-reviewed studies shows that although many aspects of the global water cycle have intensified, including precipitation and evaporation, this trend has not consistently resulted in an increase in the frequency or intensity of tropical storms or floods over the past century... >>Read More<<