Climate & Environment Review: May 18, 2006

Climate & Environment Review: 2nd Edition
May 18, 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.

(Mercury) Warning on Tuna Cans Is Rejected
The 118-page decision is loaded with science testimony and discussions. One of the key findings by Judge Dondero was that, on balance, the science demonstrates that "virtually all of the MeHg in tuna originates from natural sources," and that the fishing industry cannot control the level of MeHg in their products... >>Read More<<

Polar bear worries unproven, expert says
Polar bears are becoming the poster-species for "doomsday prophets" of climate change, even though groups pushing for higher protection for the animals don't have the evidence to prove their case, Nunavut's manager of wildlife says... >>Read More<<

Getting Warmer
True, it needs close reading; and true, it comes from an obscure and mostly powerless institution. But it's possible to detect subtle shifts in the EU's position on the Kyoto Protocol... >>Read More<<

The Paleoenvironment of Petaluma Marsh, Northern California, USA
The authors conducted isotopic (18O/16O and 13C/12C) and elemental chemical analyses (Sr/Ca and Mg/Ca ratios) of sediment cores taken from Petaluma Marsh, San Francisco Bay, Northern California, USA, in an effort to develop a record of paleoenvironmental change in this region over the past 700 years... >>Read More<<

Sea-surface temperatures and tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin
Whereas there is a significant relationship between overall sea-surface temperature (SST) and tropical cyclone
intensity, the relationship is much less clear in the upper range of SST normally associated with these storms... >>Read More<<

Climate Change Drives Disease To New Territory
TORONTO -- Valere Rommelaere, 82, survived the D-Day invasion in Normandy, but not a mosquito bite. Six decades after the war, the hardy Saskatchewan farmer was bitten by a bug carrying a disease that has
spread from the equator to Canada as temperatures have risen. Within weeks, he died from West Nile virus... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - Parowan, UT
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<<

Don't blame storms on warming U.Va. researcher says temperature isn't only factor for hurricanes
Global warming by itself cannot be blamed for the increase in severe Atlantic hurricanes, University of Virginia climate researchers report. "It is too simplistic to only implicate sea-surface temperatures in the dramatic increase in the number of major hurricanes," said the study's lead author, Patrick J. Michaels.
Warm water fuels tropical cyclones. Some hurricane researchers have related warming in the Atlantic basin with greater hurricane severity, pointing to greenhouse-induced atmosphere warming as the cause for the ocean heating... >>Read More<<

A UK Modeler's Personal Perspective on the Status of Climate Modeling
Dr. Paul D. Williams of the University of Reading's Centre for Global Atmospheric Modelling presents "a personal perspective of the current state of knowledge regarding the problem of unresolved scales in climate models."... >>Read More<<

Little Ice Age (Solar Influence - Other) – Summary
Many researchers have examined historical proxy temperature changes over the past millennium in an attempt to quantify the magnitude, frequency and causes of natural climate variability... >>Read More<<

Global Warming Will Be Core Focus Of Gore-Led Group
An educational group that former Vice President Al Gore is helping to launch intends to spend millions of dollars convincing Americans that global warming is an urgent problem... >>Read More<<

North and South Polar Sea Ice Extents
The authors present and discuss the time series of satellite observed monthly sea ice extents for earth's north and south polar regions based on the work of Cavalieri et al. (2003) plus monthly updates through 2004... >>Read More<<

Clouds of Global-Warming Hysteria Finally starting to lift?
Ever since the debate broke out over climate change, the world’s attention has been riveted on computer-driven horror stories and the positively silly idea of establishing global-weather control by actively managing the atmosphere’s greenhouse-gas emissions... >>Read More<<

Volatile Gases
The European emissions trading scheme (ETS) was launched with great fanfare last year. The idea was to require certain energy-intensive industries to have a permit for each ton of greenhouse gases they emitted. Each industry would be allocated a certain number of permits... >>Read More<<

Major Hurricanes - More, but not Stronger
We have a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters in which we find that it is plausible that a future rise in sea surface temperatures (SST) in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean will lead to a greater number of major hurricanes (categories 3 through 5), but that it should not lead to an increased intensity of these storms... >>Read More<<

Giant Wind Turbines
The author, Richard Courtney, comments on the story below:
“Winds are stronger and more constant at sea than on land, and the noise pollution from wind turbines would not be a problem at sea. But large ocean waves would be likely to displace the turbines from their moorings unless the turbines’ mountings were very expensive, and these mountings would destroy the sea bottom where they were sited... >>Read More<<

Solar Forcings during 3500 Years of West-Central European Climate History
Holzhauser et al. (2005) "for the first time," in their words, present high-resolution records of variations in glacier size in the Swiss Alps together with lake-level fluctuations in the Jura mountains, the northern French Pre-Alps and the Swiss Plateau in developing a 3500-year climate history of west-central Europe, beginning with an in-depth analysis of the Great Aletsch glacier, which is the largest of all glaciers located in the European Alps... >>Read More<<

What Rising CO2 Concentrations May Be Saving Us From
To fill the important research void noted above, the five Swiss scientists conducted the first-ever study to use, in their words, "a newly designed, chamberless free-air fumigation system...to determine the long-term response, in terms of productivity and functional group composition, of a 30-year-old temperate grassland community under low intensity management to moderately increased O3 exposure [1.5 x ambient] based on a 5-year study (1999-2003)."... >>Read More<<