Climate & Environment Review: June 27, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
June 27, 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.

CO2 and Poison Ivy
Mohan, J.E., Ziska, L.H., Schlesinger, W.H., Thomas, R.B., Sicher, R.C., George, K. and Clark, J.S. 2006. Biomass and toxicity responses of poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) to elevated atmospheric CO2. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA: 103: 9086-9089... >>Read More<<

OPINION: THERE IS NO 'CONSENSUS' ON GLOBAL WARMING
According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms -- unless we change the way we live now... >>Read More<<

PANEL STUDY FAILS TO SETTLE DEBATE ON PAST CLIMATES
An expert panel called on to resolve a politically charged scientific debate said that the key conclusion of a widely cited study of past temperatures is "plausible" but not proved... >>Read More<<

DISASTERS, DEATH, AND DESTRUCTION: MAKING SENSE OF RECENT CALAMITIES
Remarks from the Seventh Annual Roger Revelle Commemorative Lecture. This lecture was created by the Ocean Studies Board of the National Academies in honor of Dr. Roger Revelle to highlight the important links between ocean sciences and public policy. This year the lecturer was Roger A. Pielke, Jr. and the lecture was held on March 15, 2006 at the Baird Auditorium in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C... >>Read More<<

Eco-misanthropes want better living through mass death
Most ecologists want to make life easy for butterflies and waterfalls. Who can argue with that? Some environmental extremists, however, think what Earth really needs is fewer people. In some cases, billions fewer... >>Read More<<

Environmental Heresy
OTTAWA - Opposition parties are attacking the Harper government for backing away from Kyoto targets. Environmental lobbyists are demanding the resignation of Environment Minister Rona Ambrose as chair of the United Nations discussions on climate change... >>Read More<<

GLOBAL WARMING - SOME INCONVENIENT GLACIERS
However, a new peer-reviewed study shows that in South America‘s Andes Mountains the glaciers’ advances and retreats have not been governed by CO2, but by small variations in the sun’s intensity... >>Read More<<

Hurricane - Global Warming Linkage Takes Another Hit
We have covered many papers in the recent scientific literature that do not support the hypothesis that global warming has led, or will lead, to large changes in the intensity of tropical cyclones... >>Read More<<

US DROUGHTS SHORTER, LESS FREQUENT AND LESS EXTENSIVE
We used a simulated data set of hydro-climatological variables to examine for 20th century trends in soil moisture, runoff, and drought characteristics over the conterminous United States (U.S.)... >>Read More<<

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow...
Much attention has been paid to the disappearance of ice and snow in the Polar Regions and mid-latitudes in the Northern hemisphere in recent years attributed to global greenhouse gas warming... >>Read More<<

More Evidence of Arctic Warmth (a long time ago)
There are a lot of folks running around shouting that recent Arctic warming is, to use a favorite alarmist word, “unprecedented”—which means, to them at least, that we are approaching “dangerous” levels of climate change... >>Read More<<

MUCH-HERALDED PLAN TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING FAILS
The most "inconvenient truth" about global warming is not -- as Al Gore tells us in his new movie -- that global warming will devastate our planet unless there is a major counter-offensive. It is that with the collapse of the European carbon-trading scheme last spring, there is no workable counter-offensive left... >>Read More<<

Medieval Warm Period (Solar Influence - Other) -- Summary
Clues to past climatic conditions may be found in a wide variety of proxy data pertaining to many more things than simply temperature and precipitation. In the paragraphs that follow, we review the findings of some recent studies of such data that tell us much about the genesis and demise of the Medieval Warm Period, along with what these things imply about the planet's current warmth... >>Read More<<

Hurricane Activity of the Past Two Decades
Klotzbach tabulated global TC activity using best track data for all TC basins (North Atlantic, Northeast Pacific, Northwest Pacific, North Indian, South Indian and South Pacific) - which he describes as "the best estimates of the locations and intensities of TCs at six-hour intervals produced by the international warning centers" - after which he determined trends of worldwide TC frequency and intensity over the period 1986-2005, during which time global SSTs are purported to have risen by approximately 0.2-0.4°C... >>Read More<<

SELF DESTRUCT
As with Hamlet's particular men, so whole nations, societies or even civilisations carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. Where various civilisations have foundered, though external factors play a major part, the decisive factor is the belief systems of the victims... >>Read More<<

Update: The Oreskes abstracts
Naomi Oreskes claims to have analysed abstracts she found listed on the ISI Web of Knowledge database (1993 – 2003) using the keywords "global climate change." However, this claim is incorrect: while the ISI database includes a total of 929 documents for the period in question, it lists only 905 abstracts. It is thus impossible that Oreskes analysed 928 abstracts... >>Read More<<

A FORECAST FOR ENERGY SECTOR THAT'S A DEAD CERT
SEVERAL readers have complained of late that my reviews of the American economy, its current state and its outlook, have been too inconclusive for their tastes... >>Read More<<

OPINION: THE GLOBAL SALVATIONIST CREED SHOULD BE CHALLENGED
It must come as no surprise that I regard the current lack of an open and balanced debate on climate change a deeply worrying one, driven as it appears to be more by quasi-religious fundamentalism than cool logic... >>Read More<<

Gorey Truths
With An Inconvenient Truth, the companion book to former Vice President Al Gore’s global-warming movie, currently number nine in Amazon sales rank, this is a good time to point out that the book, which is a largely pictorial representation of the movie’s graphical presentation, exaggerates the evidence surrounding global warming. Ironically, the former Vice President leaves out many truths that are inconvenient for his argument. Here are just 25 of them... >>Read More<<