Climate & Environment Review: October 13, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
October 13, 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.

Droughts (North America - Mexico) – Summary
Climate alarmists warn of all sorts of weather disasters, including droughts, as the earth recovers from the debilitating chill of the Little Ice Age and begins to experience the more benign temperatures of the Current Warm Period. Does history vindicate them? We here explore this question via a brief review of recent papers that are relevant to this question as it pertains to the occurrence of droughts in Mexico... >>Read More<<

Climate Change in Alaska: What a Difference a Year Makes!
The authors used near-surface air temperature data obtained from all 19 first-order U.S. National Weather Service stations scattered among six regions of Alaska to study the thermal history of the state over the period 1951-200... >>Read More<<

Butterfly Biodiversity in Britain
In an important study of this subject, Menendez et al. "provide the first assessment, at a geographical scale, of how species richness has changed in response to climate change," concentrating on British butterflies. This they do by testing "whether average species richness of resident British butterfly species has increased in recent decades, whether these changes are as great as would be expected given the amount of warming that has taken place, and whether the composition of butterfly communities is changing towards a dominance by generalist species... >>Read More<<

The Little Medieval Warm Period in Northern Fennoscandia
The authors developed a high-resolution quantitative history of temperature variability over the past 800 years based on analyses of diatoms found in a sediment core retrieved from a treeline lake - Lake Tsuolbmajavri (68°41'N, 22°05'E) - in Finnish Lapland... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week - Grand Meadow, MN
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<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week: Columbia, MS
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<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week: Clinton, MO
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<<

Questions for Al Gore
Dear Mr. Gore:
I have just seen your new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," about the threat that global warming presents to humanity. I think you did a very good job of explaining global warming theory, and your presentation was effective. Please convey my compliments to your good friend, Laurie David, for a job well done... >>Read More<<

What Motivates the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change?
“Where do you get your funding?" This is a common inquiry we frequently receive. Our typical response is that we never discuss our funding. Why? Because we believe that ideas about the way the world of nature operates should stand or fall on their own merits, irrespective of the source of support for the person or organization that produces them... >>Read More<<

Antarctic Temperatures of the Past Two Centuries
In order to assess the uniqueness of the current temperature regime in any part of the world, it is important - nay, necessary - to know its past temperature history; and to determine if a region's current temperature regime may validly be attributed to CO2-induced global warming, it is important that its temperature history stretch as far back in time as possible... >>Read More<<

Droughts (North America: Canada) – Summary
Knowledge of the past is extremely important when it comes to contemplating future climatic possibilities; for what's happened before can happen again. Hence, we here briefly review the history of Canadian droughts with respect to how they varied over the past several centuries in response to changes in global air temperature. This exercise provides some idea of what we may expect to occur with Canadian droughts in the post-Little Ice Age world we call the Current Warm Period... >>Read More<<

Six Thousand Years of Climate Change in China
The authors compared temperature variations inferred from δ18O in peat cellulose found at Hongyuan (32°46'N, 102°30'E), which were obtained by Xu et al. (2002) on the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau of southwestern China, with solar activity inferred from atmospheric 14C and 10Be concentrations measured in a South Pole ice core, after which they performed cross-spectral analyses to determine the relationship between temperature and solar variability, comparing their results with similar results obtained by Hong et al. (2000) for peat found 2400 km away at Jinchuan, China (42°20'N, 126°22'E), as well as with the findings of other researchers around the world who have studied solar-climate relationships... >>Read More<<