Climate & Environment Review: July 25, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
July 25, 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.

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week: St Bernard, AL
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<<

Solar-Induced Warming Over the 20th Century
Scafetta and West developed "two distinct TSI [total solar irradiance] reconstructions made by merging in 1980 the annual mean TSI proxy reconstruction of Lean et al. (1995) for the period 1900-1980 and two alternative TSI satellite composites, ACRIM (Wilson and Mordvinov, 2003), and PMOD (Frolich and Lean, 1998), for the period 1980-2000," after which they used what they deemed to be appropriate climate sensitivity transfer functions to transform the TSI histories they developed into 20th-century temperature histories... >>Read More<<

Venice In the Balance
This week, Venice in Peril, the British charity for the preservation of Venice, hosted a debate in London on the resolution, "Enough money has been spent saving Venice." The motion didn't pass, but in the world outside there is a worrying current of defeatism in the face of the sea... >>Read More<<

The Medieval Warm Period in the Tropical Andes of South America
For parts or all of the period AD 500-2000, the authors derived continuous decadal-scale records of a number of climate-relevant parameters related to precipitation/evaporation balance - and, hence, glacier activity - from sediment cores extracted from Laguna Blanca (8°20'N, 71°47'W) and Laguna Mucubaji (8°47'N, 70°50'W), while data they obtained from the nearby Piedras Blancas peat bog yielded "pollen histories that chronicle vegetation change in response to climate... >>Read More<<

THE NEW WITCH-HUNT - GREEN CAMPAIGNERS CALL FOR SCIENTISTS' HEADS TO ROLL
May 31, 2006 — - To anyone who spent time watching hurricane forecasts last summer, Max Mayfield may seem like a hero. The director of the National Hurricane Center predicted many of the season's worst storms... >>Read More<<

The Media Adapt
The cover story of the June 5th US News and World Report is about global warming, but the story is not quite the usual doom and gloom (as seen recently, for instance, in the Time cover story, "Be Worried. Be Very Worried.")... >>Read More<<

The Common Lizard's Response to Predictions of Impending Mass Extinctions Due to Habitat Changes Driven by Global Warming
The authors studied four unconnected populations of the common lizard (Lacerta vivipara), a small live-bearing lacertid that lives in peat bogs and heath lands scattered across Europe and Asia, concentrating on a small region near the top of Mont Lozere in southeast France, at the southern limit of the species' range... >>Read More<<

Trends in Daily Temperature Extremes - 1951-2003
The authors developed what they call "the most up-to-date and comprehensive global picture of trends in extreme temperature," using results from a number of workshops held in data-sparse regions and high-quality station data supplied by numerous scientists from around the world, after which several seasonal and annual temperature indices for the period 1951-2003 were calculated and gridded, and trends in the gridded fields were computed and tested for statistical significance... >>Read More<<

Tick-Borne Diseases: Jumping to Climate Change Conclusions
Sarah Randolph of the University of Oxford's Department of Zoology writes that "over the past two decades, tick-borne diseases have increased and now constitute a major health problem in many parts of Europe," and that "because climate has changed globally over the same decades, the common assumption is that climate change is the cause of increased incidence of these, and many insect-borne, infections, but this has rarely been tested by appropriate retrospective analyses... >>Read More<<

Studies show that rockfish thrive with offshore platforms as their home base
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) --- While some observers consider offshore oil and gas platforms to be an eyesore on the horizon, new data shows they are performing a critical function for marine life. For the first time, scientists have documented the importance of oil and gas platforms as critical nursery habitat for some species of rockfishes on the California coast... >>Read More<<

WHEN THE CANADIAN ARCTIC WAS 5°C WARMER THAN TODAY
Reconstructions of past environmental changes are critical for understanding the natural variability of Earth's climate system and for providing a context for present and future global change... >>Read More<<

THE FIRE THIS TIME: MORE PERSPECTIVE NEEDED
Some prominent scientists are becoming increasingly restive about the shrill portrayal of global warming science in popular media. The latest round concerned a paper by A. L. Westerling (Scripps Institute of Oceanography) relating an dramatic increase in western forest fires to regional warming and changes in the onset of snowmelt... >>Read More<<

Thermal Conditions at Major Coral Reef Sites Prior to the Late-20th-Century's "Unprecedented" Global Warming
Working with the ERSST (Smith and Reynolds, 2003), HadISST1 (Rayner et al., 2003), and GISST2.3b (Rayner et al., 1996) global sea surface temperature (SST) data sets, the authors reconstructed time series of an important sea-surface thermal stressor - degree heating months (DHMs) - for the time period 1871-2002 at grid sites around the world, analyzing the results in considerable detail for several locations of notable coral cover, including the Caribbean, Northwest Hawaiian Islands (NWHI), and parts of other regions such as the Great Barrier Reef (GBR)... >>Read More<<

Global Warming
I was invited to review the upcoming two-hour July television special presentation on the Discovery Channel entitled “GLOBAL WARMING” which is hosted by award-winning journalist Tom Brokaw and produced by the Discovery Channel, the BBC and NBC News Productions... >>Read More<<

The gods are laughing
Albert Einstein once said, "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - Laramie, WY
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<<

Sea Surface Temperatures and Atlantic Hurricanes
In an effort designed to answer this important question, the three researchers used weekly-averaged 1° latitude by 1° longitude SST data together with hurricane track data (developed by the National Hurricane Center) that provide hurricane-center locations (latitude and longitude in tenths of a degree) and maximum 1-minute surface wind speeds (both at six-hour intervals) for all tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin that occurred between 1982 (when the SST data set begins) through 2005... >>Read More<<

Steve McIntyre on NAS report
The early rumors on the NAS Panel was that it was “two handed” – on the one hand, …, on the other hand, … with something for everyone. I’d characterize it more as schizophrenic. It’s got two completely distinct personalities. On the one hand, they pretty much concede that every criticism of MBH is correct. They disown MBH claims to statistical skill for individual decades and especially individual years... >>Read More<<

The Inconvenient Truth is indeed inconvenient to alarmists
"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?.. >>Read More<<

The Sun Never Rests
In the words of the authors, "paleoenvironmental proxy data for ocean properties, eolian sediment input, and continental rainfall based on high-resolution analyses of sediment cores from the southwestern Black Sea and the northernmost Gulf of Aqaba were used to infer hydroclimatic changes in northern Anatolia and the northern Red Sea region during the last ~7500 years," after which the cyclical periodicities evident in their reconstructed hydroclimatic history were compared with Δ14C periodicities evident in the tree-ring data of Stuiver et al... >>Read More<<