Climate & Environment Review: March 23, 2006

Climate & Environment Review: 2nd Edition
April 14, 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.

Scaring for money
If you're a scientist working for private industry, it helps to invent something useful. But if you're a scientist trying to get funding from the government, you're better off telling the world how horrible things are... >>Read More<<

Scientist Forecasts 'super El Niño'
One of the country's leading climate scientists says there is "a good chance" for a "super El Niño" next winter, a powerful warming in the Pacific Ocean linked to wet winters in the Southwest. In a draft paper circulated to colleagues, NASA climate researcher James Hansen blames global warming for increasing the chance of extreme El Niños... >>Read More<<

Solar-Climate Links Discerned From Tree-Ring Periodicities in Brazil and Chile
Tree rings from species sensitive to fluctuations in temperature and precipitation from the southern region of Brazil and Chile were studied along with sunspot data via harmonic spectral and wavelet analysis in an effort to obtain a greater understanding of the effects of solar activity, climate and geophysical phenomena on the continent of South America, where the time interval covered by the tree-ring samples from Brazil was 200 years and that from Chile was 2500 years... >>Read More<<

When You're in a Bad Mood, Eat Fish
When you're in a bad mood or just feeling blue, eat fish. It turns out that omega-3 fatty acids have more of an influence on mood, personality and behavior than ever before realized... >>Read More<<

TREE RINGS INADEQUATE PALEO-CLIMATE PROXIES
Quantitative analysis of growth rings in pre-Quaternary fossil woods is commonly used as a paleoclimatic indicator... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - Harrisburg, PA
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<<

There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998
For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco... >>Read More<<

OPINION - FATE OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, NOT GLOBAL WARMING, IS THE BIG WORRY
I guess the 60 climate experts who wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper this week imploring him to "examine the scientific foundation of the federal government's climate-change plans" hadn't read Time magazine's declaration in last week's special edition that "the debate over climate change is over"... >>Read More<<

OPINION - THE END IS NOT NEAR
There's good news, more good news and then, unfortunately, some bad news, on the subject of climate change. What would you like first? Right, the good news it is then... >>Read More<<

SHOCK, HORROR - CLEANER AIR ADDS TO GLOBAL WARMING
"In the "You Can't Win For Losing" department, an article on the BBC web site (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4880328.stm) is reporting that reduced air pollution and increased water evaporation appears to be adding to man-made global warming... >>Read More<<

SPAIN FACES EUR20 BILLION KYOTO BILL
The European Commission has opened the process necessary to fine Spain for not fulfilling two of the commitments it acquired when it signed the Kyoto protocol... >>Read More<<

Ocean Acidity
For some time now, the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content has been predicted to raise havoc with earth's coral reefs in two different ways: (1) by stimulating global warming, which has been predicted to dramatically enhance coral bleaching, and (2) by lowering the calcium carbonate saturation state of seawater, which has been predicted to reduce coral calcification rates... >>Read More<<

Who Knew Eating Fish Had This Effect?
Eat fish and you're less likely to die from a sudden heart attack. People who dine on fish regularly have lower heart rates and that helps prevent sudden death from a heart attack, according to new research from the Institut Pasteur de Lille in France reported by the Ivanhoe Newswire... >>Read More<<