Climate & Environment Review: September 6, 2006 (1st Edition)

Climate & Environment Review: 1st Edition
September 6, 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.

Near-Normal 2006 Hurricane Season Blamed on Global Warming
The suprisingly quiet 2006 hurricane season is consistent with global warming theory, claims global warming expert Prof. Simon Ivorytower... >>Read More<<

More Evidence for Antarctic Ice Sheet Mass Gain
Results of model-simulated Antarctic surface mass balance (SMB) - derived from a regional atmospheric climate model (RACMO2/ANT) for the time period 1980 to 2004 that used ERA-40 fields as lateral forcings - were compared with "all available SMB observations [our italics] from Antarctica (N=1900)" in a recalibration process that ultimately allowed the authors "to construct a best estimate of contemporary Antarctic SMB... >>Read More<<

Analysis - Algae may produce biofuels
BINYAMINA, Israel, Aug. 28 (UPI) -- The newest source of biofuel, an oil alternative, could be algae that feed off of polluting factory emissions, researchers say... >>Read More<<

Health Effects of Temperature (Hot vs. Cold Weather - South America) – Summary
In light of the great publicity given the excess deaths attributed to the summer heat of 2006 throughout much of North America, and since we have previously summarized the bulk of the results we have reported about the relative impacts of heat and cold on human mortality for Asia, Europe... >>Read More<<

Global warming boost to glaciers
Global warming could be causing some glaciers to grow, a new study claims.
Researchers at Newcastle University looked at temperature trends in the western Himalaya over the past century... >>Read More<<

GLOBAL WARMING CANNOT BE STOPPED
THE world must be more realistic about the chances of preventing climate change and prepare for the inevitability of global warming, the head of one of Britain's foremost scientific societies will urge today... >>Read More<<

A Precipitation History of the Southwestern United States
The authors have previously demonstrated that "speleothems from the Guadalupe Mountains in southeastern New Mexico are annually banded, and variations in band thickness and mineralogy can be used as a record of regional relative moisture (Asmerom and Polyak, 2004)." Here, they continue this tack, concentrating on "two columnar stalagmites collected from Carlsbad Cavern (BC2) and Hidden Cave (HC1) in the Guadalupe Mountains... >>Read More<<

Continued bias at the American Meteorological Society?
Can Multi-decadal Temperature Trends from Poorly Sited Locations Be Corrected?
An article has appeared in the August 2006 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society entitled “Examination of Potential Biases in Air Temperature Caused by Poor Station Locations” Thomas C. Peterson, pages 1073–1089. This article was motivated by the article Davey, C.A., and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2005: Microclimate exposures of surface-based weather stations - implications for the assessment of long-term temperature trends... >>Read More<<

MIT's inconvenient scientist
Speech codes are rare in the industrialized, Western democracies. In Germany and Austria, for instance, it is forbidden to proselytize Nazi ideology or trivialize the Holocaust. Given those countries' recent histories, that is a restraint on free expression we can live with... >>Read More<<

Exxon's Tillerson Urges Governments to Relax Barriers
Aug. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Exxon Mobil Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson urged governments around the world to open more territory to oil and gas exploration to boost supplies and satisfy rising world demand.
``By providing timely access to resources, governments enable energy companies to bring the full extent of their technology and know-how to bear to new supply opportunities,'' Tillerson said today at an oil conference in Stavanger, Norway, according to a text of his remarks... >>Read More<<

KYOTO ISN'T WORKING, PREPARE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, SAY SCIENTISTS
The Kyoto agreement to cut greenhouse emissions is "ineffectual" and the world should prepare for the effects of climate change, the nation's biggest general science meeting will be told tonight... >>Read More<<

Comments from Richard S Courtney on “The End of Eden”
James Lovelock Says This Time We've Pushed the Earth Too Far
Lovelock is reported to have said;
"Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return... >>Read More<<

Ceres is Misrepresenting Our Work
A while back we documented in some detail how a publication in Science by Evan Mills grossly misrepresented existing research to make the claim that human-caused climate change was observable in the economic record of disasters. In a just-released report by the group Ceres, an advocacy group focused on the insurance industry, Mr. Mills is again misrepresenting existing research, and this time it is mine... >>Read More<<

Earth is too crowded for Utopia
The global population is higher than the Earth can sustain, argues the Director of the British Antarctic Survey in the first of a series of environmental opinion pieces on the BBC News website entitled The Green Room. Solving environmental problems such as climate change is going to be impossible without tackling the issue, he says... >>Read More<<

The End of Eden
Through a deep and tangled wood lies a glade so lovely and wet and lush as to call to mind a hobbit's sanctuary. A lichen-covered statue rises in a garden of native grasses, and a misting rain drips off a slate roof. At the yard's edge a plump muskrat waddles into the brush... >>Read More<<