Climate & Environment Review: March 23, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
March 23, 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.

Comment on Scientific Issues in the Stern Review Papers
The scientific sections of the Review’s Discussion Paper (DP) and Technical Annex (TA), as well as Sir Nicholas Stern’s Oxonia Lecture (OL), contain serious gaps and errors... >>Read More<<

No News Is Bad News
A World Meteorological Organization (WMO) bulletin on Tuesday revealed some startling news: that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are at an all time high(!) From the press it received, you would think it was the kind of evidence that put the final nail in the coffin of skepticism over climate catastrophe... >>Read More<<

Nuclear power for India is good for us all
If the deal to supply India with nuclear technologies goes through, future generations may remember it for quite different reasons than the debate over nuclear proliferation... >>Read More<<

Spring Snowstorm Blamed on Global Warming
The first day of spring arrived today with widespread cold and snow, an event that some say is just one more sign of global warming... >>Read More<<

The Significance of Long-Term-Persistence in Surface Air Temperature Data
The authors analyzed "statistical trend tests of hydroclimatological data ["such as discharge and air temperature"] in the presence of long-term persistence (LTP)," in order to determine "what LTP, if present, implies about the significance of observed trends."... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - Circleville, OH
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<<

REPORT, RESPONSE AND REVIEW
In early July 2005 a report on ‘The Economics of Climate Change’ was issued by the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs: the report was the subject of a commentary by Peter Senker in Energy & Environment (Vol. 16, No. 6). Senker described the report as ‘generally well-balanced and objective’, and a similar line was taken in articles by Sir Samuel Brittan (‘a level-headed summary’) and John Kay (‘balanced in its approach and conclusions’)... >>Read More<<

The Dark Ages Cold Period in Pacific North America
The authors compiled and analyzed new and previously published glacial geological data obtained from 17 glacier fields in coastal and near-coastal British Columbia (Canada) and Alaska (USA), including evidence pertaining to "overridden forests in glacier forefields, buried paleosols and forest vegetation in lateral moraines, lichen- and 14C-dated moraines, and glacier-dammed lake sediments."... >>Read More<<

THE ENVIRONMENTAL WARS
Why are we still debating climate change? How soon will we hit peak oil supply? When politics mix with science, what is being brewed? Join speakers from the left & the right, from the lab & the field, from industry & advocacy, to talk about the health of our planet... >>Read More<<

Solar Warming?
Just when you were starting to believe that variations in the amount of energy coming from the sun weren’t responsible for much of the observed surface warming during the past 20 years, comes along a paper in Geophysical Research Letters from two researchers at Duke University, Nicola Scafetta and Bruce West, that concludes otherwise... >>Read More<<

THE STERN REVIEW 'OXONIA PAPERS': A CRITIQUE
In this note we comment on the three related documents (the 'Oxonia papers') that were issued at the end of January 2006 as the first fruits of the Stern Review of the economics of climate change... >>Read More<<

THE LESSONS OF CYCLONE LARRY (Misc.)
Throughout human history, natural disasters such as cyclones and hurricanes have had devastating impacts on human life and societies. Until fairly recently, tens of thousands of people around the world were killed each year as a result of tropical mega-storms... >>Read More<<

THE K/T IMPACT AND THE ABIOTIC THEORY OF OIL
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. Last week, Mexico announced finding another giant oil field off Veracruz, the Noxal, estimated to hold more than 10 billion barrels of oil... >>Read More<<

Scientist Alleging Bush Censorship Helped Gore, Kerry
(CNSNews.com) - The scientist touted by CBS News' "60 Minutes" as arguably the "world's leading researcher on global warming" and spotlighted as a victim of the Bush administration's censorship on the issue... >>Read More<<

NO EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR INCREASED FREQUENCY OR INTENSITY TREND OF TROPICAL STORMS
One of the more important questions in hydrology is: if the climate warms in the future, will there be an intensification of the water cycle and, if so, the nature of that intensification?... >>Read More<<

More Hope for Corals in a Warming World
The authors review what is known about the responses of real-world coral reefs to high-temperature-induced bleaching, focusing primarily on the Arabian Gulf, which they say "has recently experienced high-frequency recurrences of temperature-related bleaching (1996, 1998, 2002)."... >>Read More<<

Rewriting The Science
(CBS) As a government scientist, James Hansen is taking a risk. He says there are things the White House doesn't want you to hear but he's going to say them anyway... >>Read More<<