Climate & Environment Review: July 11, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
July 11, 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.

The Skeptic - Bill Gray
Galileo got crosswise with Pope Urban VIII. Robert Oppenheimer didn't see eye-to-eye with Edward Teller. Every original thinker has a bête noire who torments and goads him.
For William Gray, a lean, six-foot-five emeritus professor at Colorado State University and one of the world's leading experts on tropical storms, the bugaboo on the horizon is another tall, charismatic fellow named Albert Arnold Gore Jr. You can call him Al... >>Read More<<

Don't Believe the Hype
Al Gore is wrong. There's 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<<

CENSORING SCIENTISTS? LESSONS OF THE JAMES HANSEN AFFAIR
The latest high-profile controversy over the proper relationship between science and politics involves James Edward Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, who claims he was muzzled by the Bush administration... >>Read More<<

The misdeeds of EPA
EPA Rule Is Making Ozone Smog Worse The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which forces Americans to spend billions of dollars per year to address ozone air quality, is actually making the situation worse, says Joel Schwartz of the American Enterprise Institute... >>Read More<<

The Energy Challenge: Europe's Image Clashes With Reliance on Coal
SCHWARZE PUMPE, Germany - In the shadow of two hulking boilers, which spew 10 million tons of carbon dioxide a year into the air, the Swedish owners of this coal-fired power station recently broke ground on what is to be the world's first carbon-free plant fueled by coal... >>Read More<<

Former UVM researcher sentenced for falsifying work
BURLINGTON, Vt. --A former University of Vermont College of Medicine professor was ordered Wednesday to serve a year and a day in federal prison for using false data to obtain federal research grants... >>Read More<<

An Outdated Ban - It's time to allow more offshore drilling.
Wash Post editorial, June 28, 2006
FOR THE PAST quarter of a century, the federal government has banned oil and gas drilling in most U.S. coastal waters. Efforts to relax the ban have been repelled on environmental grounds, but it is time to revisit this policy... >>Read More<<

What Americans 'Know' about Air Pollution Is False
"Smog is out of control in almost all of our major cities." The Sierra Club penned these words in November 2001 after the nation had achieved its two lowest smog years ever... >>Read More<<

BLAME GLOBAL WARMING? - FIRST TIME IN 50 YEARS, NO TORNADOES IN NEBRASKA-KANSAS
LINCOLN, Neb. -- Meteorologists at the National Weather Service office in Hastings are feeling lucky this year.
The 30-county area they serve in central Nebraska and north-central Kansas hasn't had a confirmed tornado for the first six months of this year. That hasn't happened since 1950... >>Read More<<

Solar Activity, Cosmic Rays and Earth's Temperature
The authors compared various sets of terrestrial temperature data with two parameters derived from 10Be and 14C data: (1) the sunspot number, which is related to total solar irradiance and UV flux, and (2) the flux of galactic cosmic rays impinging on the Earth's atmosphere... >>Read More<<

Taking a Molecule to Court
The Supreme Court, by agreeing to hear a case on whether the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must take steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, will finally judge on the alleged threat of global warming. The stakes are huge. Should the Court find in favor of the plaintiffs, it would put the EPA in control of the U.S. economy for the foreseeable future... >>Read More<<

Letter to Editor, AMS Bulletin
The devastating impact of hurricane Katrina (August 29/30, 2005) on the great city of New Orleans has once again rekindled the global warming debate with environmentalists, science writers and policymakers churning out opinions and words of wisdom in various news and print media... >>Read More<<

Linear Aggression
The climate usually behaves in an unpredictable and irregular fashion. Weather forecasters do their best to discover the influence of the seasons, the air and sea currents and anything else they can monitor. They have models, but they have to be continually tested and adjusted, and they are still often wrong... >>Read More<<

Time's Climate Change Issue Rife with Deception
The cover of Time magazine's April 3, 2006 issue, featuring a "special report" on global warming, tells readers to "be very worried" about climate change.
Time's special report, however, is not a report but a diatribe--one-sided advocacy from start to finish. Scientists who take a non-alarmist view of global warming do not get a word in edgewise. Neither do economists who view the costs of regulatory climate policies as greatly out of proportion to any potential benefits... >>Read More<<

Bucolic Apocalypse
Discovery Channel’s upcoming July 16 special -- “Tom Brokaw’s Global Warming: What You Need To Know,” is a masterful version of the theory of human caused global warming. And well it should be since it features two of the Grand Master Warmers -- James Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer -- who have been telling the story for 20 years or more... >>Read More<<

A Historical Perspective on Environmental Sense and Nonsense
It serves no useful purpose to blame previous generations for lack of foresight, ruthlessness, or greed in their use of the environment. They had as many thoughtful, public-minded individuals as we now have, but the most pressing issues of the day were not environmental... >>Read More<<

'Consensus science' hot air
I appreciate the comments of Terence Corcoran about science. Getting climate change information from politicians and those who hold political or quasi-religious beliefs is nonsense. As far as consensus science is concerned, elections are settled by votes, but science is settled by data. Please do not confuse the two... >>Read More<<

US beats Europe over CO2 control
THE United States has frozen its carbon dioxide emissions at a time when signatories of the Kyoto Protocol are conceding that they cannot meet their own targets, according to official figures released last week... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - Cuyamaca, CA
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<<

PDO-ENSO Interactions Over the Past Four Centuries
The authors used "proxy climate records derived from paleoclimate data to investigate the long-term behaviour of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)."... >>Read More<<

Misplaced autism worries fuel measles outbreak
England is experiencing its biggest measles outbreak in 20 years, fuelled by the reluctance of some parents to have their children immunised because of now-discredited claims of a link between the MMR jab and autism... >>Read More<<

On Professor Bill Gray and the Debate on Climate Change" On Professor Bill Gray and the Debate on Climate Change
There has been considerable discussion regarding Professor William Gray of Colorado State University regarding his views on climate change, and hurricane trends, as affected by human activity, in particular... >>Read More<<

NAS report on "Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2000 Years"
The June 22, 2006 NAS report on climate reconstruction is a fairly reasonable technical document, although it is less than up-to-date and less than competent in some subjects. Regrettably, the Summary and press release are somewhat inconsistent with the Report and exhibit some bias; and the June 22 verbal comments of the panel exhibited strong pro-AGW bias by some members and should be ignored as not representative of the committee report... >>Read More<<