Climate & Environment Review: September 18, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
September 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.

A Hot Case
This fall, the Supreme Court will consider perhaps its most important environmental case in recent history... >>Read More<<

Big Oil's New Conspiracy
We have heard much in recent months about the plot by oil companies to gouge consumers at the pump. Now, I am writing to report another insidious plot on the part of Big Oil. They are scheming to lower prices... >>Read More<<

A Hot Urban Legend
According to news reports, the recent heat wave in California was responsible for about 150 fatalities. Many people including the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believe this can only get worse with global warming, predicting a doubling or a tripling of heat-related deaths in North American cities in the next decade... >>Read More<<

A NASA Press Release On Arctic Sea Ice Areal Extent
There is a NASA press release on arctic sea ice trends that requires comment on Climate Science... >>Read More<<

California Retro
For nearly 100 years, Californians have claimed to be the innovators that the rest of the United States and the world ultimately follow. Not so on global warming. Instead, the California Legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger have just passed and signed global warming legislation that is an awful lot like a watered-down version of the failed Kyoto Protocol. That’s sooo 1990s... >>Read More<<

Canada's Kootenay Valley on the Path to Returning to Medieval Warm Period Conditions
In the centuries leading up to AD 800, Hallett and Hills report the development of "a more open landscape," and that "fire frequencies and summer drought appear to increase... >>Read More<<

Cargo Cult Science
From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974
Also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency... >>Read More<<

CLEAN ENERGY FOR TOMORROW
Ensuring access to ample, affordable, clean, and sustainable sources of energy is unquestionably one of the greatest challenges facing the modern world. The U.S. government and America's private sector and nongovernmental organizations are confronting it by building on a long tradition of clean energy research to develop transformational technologies that will reduce our reliance on oil and have far-reaching benefits for the entire world... >>Read More<<

Climate change can wait. World health can't
A city council has a £10m surplus, which it wants to allocate to a good cause. Ten groups clamour for the cash. One wants to buy new computers for an inner-city school. Another hopes to beautify a park. Each puts a persuasive case for the benefits they could achieve. What should the councillors do? The straightforward answer might seem to be to divide the cash into 10. But the obvious answer is wrong... >>Read More<<

Cognitive Processes and the Suppression of Sound Scientific Ideas
American and British history is riddled with examples of valid research and inventions which have been suppressed and derogated by the conventional science community... >>Read More<<

CRETACEOUS CLIMATE DECOUPLED FROM CO2 EVOLUTION?
The low thermal gradients and clement winters characterizing climates of the Cretaceous period reveal that the climate system has modes of behaviour quite different from the present... >>Read More<<

SENATE EPW COMMITTEE
THE HIGH COST OF CLIMATE CHANGE: MILLIONS STILL IN NEED OF ACCESS TO SAFE DRINKING WATER WHILE MONEY SQUANDERED ON CLIMATE CHANGE... >>Read More<<

Floods (General) – Summary
Climate alarmists predict there will be more frequent and severe flooding around the world in response to global warming. But are they correct?... >>Read More<<

A Sea Change in Global Warming?
For years now, we have been deluged with the news that the earth’s oceans are heating up as a result of changes in atmospheric composition resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels... >>Read More<<

ADAPT OR FRY: TIME TO ACCEPT THE INEVITABLE
Is it all over for Kyoto? Should we accept that global warming is inevitable and plan accordingly?... >>Read More<<

Against Nature
Characterising environmentalist ideology as unscientific, irrational and anti-humanist, this acerbic and polemical three-part series turns 'Green' ideas on their head... >>Read More<<

An Inconvenient Truth
It’s the rare bestseller that commits factual suicide in its first pages, but Al Gore has managed this feat in a big way in An Inconvenient Truth... >>Read More<<

ASIA SPURNS EUROPEAN PLEA FOR TIGHTER CURBS ON GREENHOSE GASES
The hard truth is that at Toronto, Kyoto’s “Procedures and mechanisms” simultaneously and quietly weakened Kyoto’s emission reduction promises and eviscerated Marrakech’s mandatory and costly enforcement provisions into at best mere discretionary incentives. In other words, no one in the entire world can be forced to comply with Kyoto, regardless of who signs on and what cuts they promise. The UN apparently cares more about political capital and image-building than about reduction results... >>Read More<<