Climate & Environment Review: July 18, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
July 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.

INHOFE SAYS NAS REPORT REAFFIRMS ‘HOCKEY STICK’ IS BROKEN
Washington, D.C.-Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Chairman of the Committee on Environment
and Public Works commented on today’s congressionally commissioned review by the National
Academy of Sciences that shows that Dr. Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” study was flawed,
specifically refuting some of its most often-cited conclusions... >>Read More<<

OPINION - GLOBAL WARMING MIGHT NOT BE OS BAD, IF WE KEEP OUR COOL
All panics are equal. But some are more equal than others. Present-day government warns us to be very, very afraid, successively of Aids, Saddam Hussein, BSE, terrorists, Sars, bird flu and now global warming. Rulers were once elected to free us from fear, not to increase it. Now they cry wolf every day and use it to demand more power and money into the bargain... >>Read More<<

OPINION - INCONVENIENT UNCERTAINTIES AND MORAL AMBIGUITIES
An Inconvenient Truth, the new movie centered on former vice-president Al Gore's famous global warming slide show, will open in select theaters on May 24th. The movie trailer warns: "If you live on this planet: If you love your children: You have to see this film... >>Read More<<

Scientists refute Gore's "opportunistic lies" on global warming
Issue: Here are more quotes from scientists refuting the claims Gore's movie
"An Inconvenient Truth" makes: "When CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now,
about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson in the Canada Free Press... >>Read More<<

IS MODERN CIVILISATION FRAGILE?
Caltech - Our ancestors made themselves and us more vulnerable to the vagaries of nature and the weather once they switched from hunting and gathering to farming. So says Brian Fagan, emeritus professor of anthropology from University of California at Santa Barbara, who spoke on the impact of climate change on ancient societies at the Environmental Wars conference of the Skeptics Society last weekend... >>Read More<<

Earth's Terrestrial Environment is Becoming More Like a Gardener's Greenhouse
In an insightful article that lay undiscovered in a pile of papers on one of our desks for over a year, Roderick and Farquhar (2004) say "there has long been an expectation, e.g. by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others, that potential evaporation will increase as the average air temperature near the surface increases... >>Read More<<

CLIMATE STRATEGY: BETWEEN AMBITION AND REALISM
There are strong indications that the climate is undergoing change, partly under the influence of human activity. A substantial reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases is needed in order to slow down the rate of climate change sufficiently... >>Read More<<

OPINION: CLIMATE CONSENSUS AND THE END OF SCIENCE
It is now firmly established, repeated ad nauseam in the media and elsewhere, that the debate over global warming has been settled by scientific consensus. The subject is closed. It seems unnecessary to labour the point, but here are a couple of typical statements: "The scientific consensus is clear: human-caused climate change is happening" (David Suzuki Foundation); "There is overwhelming scientific consensus" that greenhouse gases emitted by man cause global temperatures to rise (Mother Jones)... >>Read More<<

NO SIGNIFICANT CHANGES TO ENGLISH COAST DURING LAST 50 YEARS
Newswise - Shoreline to the northeast of London has dispelled some of the concern caused by research that predicts that sea levels have risen and will continue to rise to a degree that will threaten human and wildlife communities. Evidence from a new study indicates that relatively little change in shoreline position has occurred since World War II. The study is published in the latest issue of Journal of Coastal Research... >>Read More<<

MOST AMERICANS REMAIN COOL ON WARMING HYPE
Half of Americans chilling out over global warming, but many hot under the collar about pandemic, terrorists... >>Read More<<

OPINION - CAN WE AFFORD TO HEED AL GORE
Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, is already making waves, not surprisingly. Lately, you cannot pick up a newspaper or watch the news without some headline about greenhouse gases, global warming or efforts to combat it... >>Read More<<

More on the Greening of the Sahel
Herrmann et al. provide addition support for the newer findings as a result of their investigation of "temporal and spatial patterns of vegetation greenness and rainfall variability in the African Sahel and their interrelationships based on analyses of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series for the period 1982-2003 and gridded satellite rainfall estimates... >>Read More<<

HOW TO THINK SENSIBLY, OR RIDICULOUSLY, ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
The crusade to fight global warming with tough reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions has entered its war-room phase. Already we are seeing the fruits of a multi-million dollar PR campaign: lavish cover stories in Time magazine ("Be Worried, Be Very Worried"), Vanity Fair, and Wired; multiple global-warming scare specials on PBS, HBO, and the network news; and, finally, the imminent release of Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Soon the Ad Council will begin airing TV spots pulling on the usual heartstrings: We have to stop global warming for the children! One of these ads--featuring a montage of kids counting down "tick, tick, tick"--is reminiscent of the infamous 1964 anti-Goldwater ad... >>Read More<<

OPINION - GLOBAL WARMING FEVER
THERE IS A CONCEIT among the American Left that the American Right cleaves to bad science out of deference to religion, while the left is all-science all-the-time. Former Veep Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," however, shows how unscientific -- and downright faith-based -- the left has become... >>Read More<<

NAS PANEL - WHAT INTERESTED OBSERVERS SHOULD BE LOOKING FOR
The NAS Panel is scheduled to issue its report, "Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years" at 11 a.m. on Thursday. I suspect that many people would expect me to be worried about what the panel will say... >>Read More<<

Reducing Night Flights May Ease Winter Global Warming, Report Says
Clouds of ice formed in the trails of jet exhaust trap heat and prevent the earth from cooling.
Contrails from winter night flights may be most responsible for the global warming caused by air traffic, even though they constitute a fraction of commercial flights, meteorologists at the University of Reading reported Wednesday... >>Read More<<

Measles Mumps Rubella and mercury-based immunizations cleared as causes of autism
Montreal 4 July 2006 -- Pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) like autism and Asperger Syndrome have been on the rise for years. Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccines and thimerosal–containing vaccines (which are approximately 50 percent ethylmercury) have been suggested as possible causes... >>Read More<<

Deaths Associated with Unseasonable Cold and Warmth in Monterrey and Mexico City, Mexico
The authors assessed the influence of air pollution and respiratory epidemics on empirical associations between apparent temperature, which "represents an individual's perceived air temperature," and daily mortality in Mexico's largest and third largest cities: Mexico City and Monterrey, respectively... >>Read More<<

Rachel Goreson
Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth is a powerful visual rendering of a variety of natural events that are claimed to prove that manmade global warming is upon us and rapidly getting worse. We all know that a well-done film can have a powerful emotional impact. This is a well-done film... >>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<<

ANOTHER DOOMSDAY-SCARE DEBUNKED: GULF STREAM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR EUROPE'S MILD CLIMATE
If you grow up in England, as I did, a few items of unquestioned wisdom are passed down to you from the preceding generation... >>Read More<<

OPINION - AL GORE'S PROPAGANDA MELTDOWN
A FRIEND invited me to a screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's film about global warming, when it arrived in Chicago recently. It was sponsored by an environmental group and the theater was filled with Gore fans. They seemed to love it. I found it frightening... >>Read More<<

INSURERS MAY CASH IN ON CLIMATE CHANGE
Climate change isn't just a crisis. It's a business opportunity--at least in the view of insurance industry leaders, who are mapping out a strategy that could force the rest of the economy to grapple with global warming as never before... >>Read More<<