Climate & Environment Review: September 20, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
September 20, 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.

Producers Move to Debunk Gloomy 'Peak Oil' Forecasts
Leading players in the petroleum industry, including Saudi Arabia and Exxon Mobil Corp., are aggressively arguing that plenty of crude oil remains for world consumption, in an effort to counter critics who contend crude output is about to plateau... >>Read More<<

New Paper On The Climate of Mount Kilimanjaro
According to the most recently published research findings, the melting of ice and snow fields on Mount Kilimanjaro – erroneously attributed to 20th century, human-induced global warming is actually the result of regional climate variability in the 19th century, aided perhaps by local agricultural practices... >>Read More<<

THE CLIMATE CHANGE LEARNING CURVE
The purpose of this paper is to confront economic models of climate change with the reality that limited information exists with which to form expectations about the evolution of the climate... >>Read More<<

Temperature-Related Mortality in London
The authors write that "temperature-related mortality is of current scientific and public health interest in the United Kingdom because of the persistently high number of excess winter deaths [our italics and bold] ... and also, more generally, because of debates about the vulnerability of European and other populations to the projected increased frequency of heat waves under global climate change... >>Read More<<

SCIENTISTS DEBATE ROLE CLIMATE CHANGE PLAYS IN CREATING CIVILIZATIONS
One of archaeology's "big questions" is explaining the origins of civilization. In anthropology, "civilization" has a technical definition... >>Read More<<

Whence Peak Oil?
I appreciate the opportunity to speak today about the role technology plays in meeting the world’s growing energy needs... >>Read More<<

Solar Control of Climate: Lessons from the Tropical Andes
Working with data - biogenic silica, magnetic susceptibility, total organic carbon (TOC), total nitrogen (TN), δ13CTOC, δ15NTN and C/N ratios - derived from sediment records of two Venezuelan watersheds that they obtained from cores of Lakes Mucubaji and Blanca, along with ancillary data obtained from other studies that had been conducted in the same general region, Polissar et al... >>Read More<<

On Modern Peer Review
“… Peer review is a good way to identify valid science. It was wonderfully well suited to an earlier era, when progress in science was limited only by the number of good ideas available... >>Read More<<

KYOTO GONE BONKERS
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew has been obliged to sign up to the European Union-wide scheme to reduce emissions of harmful greenhouse gases... >>Read More<<

William Kininmonth - Don't be Gored into going along
CLIMATE change is again making headlines as the world becomes mesmerised in the public relations glare of Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth. For critics and reviewers alike, the movie is further proof in their minds that we are heading for a climate catastrophe. But what's missing from the debate is sober, rational analysis of some scientific facts... >>Read More<<

Trends in 20th-Century U.S. Droughts
The authors examined 20th-century trends in soil moisture, runoff and drought over the conterminous United States with a hydro-climatological model forced by real-world data for precipitation, air temperature and wind speed over the period 1915-2003... >>Read More<<

RITE and Honda Jointly Develop New Technology To Produce Ethanol From Cellulosic Biomass
TOKYO, Japan, September 14, 2006–Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (RITE) and Honda R&D Co., Ltd., the Honda Motor Co., Ltd. subsidiary responsible for research and development, announced that their cooperative research has resulted in ethanol production technology from soft-biomass*, a renewable resource of plant-derived material... >>Read More<<

SCIENTISTS PREDICT SOLAR DOWNTURN, GLOBAL COOLING
It is known as the Little Ice Age. Bitter winters blighted much of the northern hemisphere for decades in the second half of the 17th century... >>Read More<<

Not nearing peak oil production say Saudi Arabia and Exxon Mobil
Issue: Both Saudi Arabia and Exxon Mobil have recently argued that we are not nearing peak oil production as some claim... >>Read More<<

MEALEY’S Pollution Liability Report Vol. 19, #11 August 2006
August 31 is the deadline for filing the petitioners’ brief with the Supreme Court in Massachusetts et al.
v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Plaintiff s, who include the attorneys general (AGs) of 12 states,
are suing the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from new motor vehicles... >>Read More<<

North American Summer Soil Moisture Availability
Using the self-calibrating Palmer (1965) drought severity index (SCPDSI), as described by Wells et al. (2004), the authors constructed maps of summer moisture availability across a large portion of North America (20-50°N, 130-60°W) for the period 1901-2002 with a spatial resolution of 0.5° latitude x 0.5° longitude... >>Read More<<

Letter to Nature on biotic genesis of petroleum
The article published in Nature to which reference is given above, is willfully dishonest and gratuitously untruthful. Clarke and Nature substantially misrepresent our article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences... >>Read More<<

Saudi Oil Exec: World Has Used Just 18% of Oil
Despite talk that Hubbert’s peak has been reached - the point at which half of the world’s oil is discovered and supplies begin to diminish - one Saudi oil executive says that we have used just 18 percent of the world’s reserves... >>Read More<<

The Economist and the Greenpeace glacier photo stunt
The pictures appeared to be the most shocking evidence so far of the devastating effects of global warming. But last night scientists who work on the spot where they were taken dismissed them as a misconceived publicity stunt. The two photographs, taken 84 years apart, were released by Greenpeace International last week. They appear to show a radical shrinking of the Blomstrandbreen glacier, on Svalbard, 375 miles north of Norway... >>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<<

THE IPCC AND A FRENCH CLIMATE SKEPTIC
Skeptical voices in the international global warming debate are predominantly Anglo-Saxon, with occasional smatterings of Nordic, Russian, Italian and Dutch. But the French are conspicuously absent. How come?... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week: Bunkie, LA
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<<

THE MISSING ELEMENTS IN THE "SCIENCE" OF GLOBAL WARMING
Ignoring global warming isn't a sign of scientific illiteracy or of ideologically induced stupidity... >>Read More<<

CROP CIRCLES IN THE DESERT: THE STRANGE CONTROVERSY OVER SAUDI OIL PRODUCTION
Ever since its rich reserves were discovered more than a half-century ago, Saudi Arabia has pumped the oil needed to keep pace with rising needs, being the mainstay of the global energy markets. But the country’s oil fields now are in decline, prompting industry and government officials to raise serious questions about whether the kingdom will be able to satisfy the world’s thirst for oil in coming years... >>Read More<<