Climate & Environment Review: November 17, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
November 17, 2006 - 2nd Edition

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.

The Worst of Both Worlds?
Nov. 13, 2006 issue - It seems impossible to have an honest conversation about global warming. I say this after diligently perusing the British government's huge report released last week by Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and now a high civil servant. The report is a masterpiece of misleading public relations... >>Read More<<

What Do Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller Fear?
Nicolas Copernicus was condemned for suggesting that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center of our universe. The Catholic Church feared such knowledge could undermine the belief that Man was God's most important creation, and ultimately, undermine Church authority... >>Read More<<

Why relentless green drive may end up costing us the earth
SPRING in Malaysia is even more silent than it was when I reported how the indigenous jungle is being destroyed to provide palm oil for the Soil Association's "environmentally-friendly" pesticide soft soap... >>Read More<<

Was The 2003 European Summer Heat Wave Unusual In A Global Context?
We have a new paper accepted in Geophysical Research Letters by T. N. Chase, K. Wolter, R.A. Pielke Sr., and Ichtiaque Rasool entitled HYPERLINK "http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-310.pdf" “Was the 2003 European summer heat wave unusual in a global context?”... >>Read More<<

Will a Warmer World Be a Sicker World?
In a provocative paper that analyzes the potential effects of global warming on various animal diseases, Hall et al. (2006) begin their analysis of the subject by asking "Will an increasingly warmer world necessarily become a sicker world?... >>Read More<<

Tropical Cyclones of the North Atlantic Basin
The two Arizona State University (USA) researchers examined temporal patterns in the frequency of intense TCs, the rates of rapid intensification of TCs, and the average rate of intensification of hurricanes in the North Atlantic Basin, including the tropical and subtropical North Atlantic, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, where they say there was "a highly statistically significant warming of 0.12°C decade-1 over the period 1970-2003 ... based on linear regression analysis and confirmed by a variety of other popular trend identification techniques... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week: Pembina, ND
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<<

Wrong problem, wrong solution
Christopher Monckton created considerable controversy last week with his article questioning the science that claims human activity is responsible for climate change. Now he challenges the economic assumptions of the Stern report... >>Read More<<

Update on Hurricanes and Global Warming
This news story about an all-too-predictable spat between Kevin Trenberth and Bill Gray reminds me that we are overdue to provide an update on the issue of hurricanes and global warming... >>Read More<<

USHCN Temperature Record of the Week: Beatrice, NE
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 Snowe-Rockefeller Road to Kyoto
In a recent letter[1] to ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson, Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and John Rockefeller (D-WV) urge Tillerson to end his company's support of "climate change denial front groups." The only group they identify by name is the one for which I work -- the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). I guess the Senators haven't been keeping up with the news, because ExxonMobil stopped funding CEI months ago... >>Read More<<