Climate & Environment Review: December 15, 2006

Climate & Environment Review
December 15, 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.

Greening of the Earth (Observations - Africa) – Summary
Over two decades ago, Idso (1986) published a small item in Nature advancing the idea that the aerial fertilization effect of the CO2 that is liberated by the burning of coal, gas and oil was destined to dramatically enhance the productivity of earth's vegetation... >>Read More<<

INDIE GOES NUCLEAR - IS THORIUM THE ANSWER TO OUR ENERGY CRISIS?
It could power the planet for thousands of years, the reactors would never blow up and the waste is relatively clean. So is thorium the nuclear fuel of the future?... >>Read More<<

COAL IS STILL KING
The reign of King Coal - and his royal cousins, crude oil and natural gas - is coming to its close, we are told, and the threat of climate change will finally terminate our on-off relationship with fossil fuels. It is a message that has become common currency nearly everywhere... but you write off fossil fuels at your peril, because there is life in the old king yet... >>Read More<<

Droughts (Africa) – Summary
One of the many dangers of global warming, according to the world's climate alarmists, is the predicted propensity for rising temperatures to produce more frequent, more severe, and longer-lasting droughts almost everywhere on earth. But just how realistic are the climate models upon which these claims are based?... >>Read More<<

Africa's Schoolchildren Should Not Have to Study by Candlelight
With only about ten percent of sub-Saharan Africa able to enjoy the enormous benefits of electricity, dozens of schoolchildren from the Kariobangi South Primary School in Nairobi participated this morning in a candlelight ceremony to dramatize the millions of children forced to do their homework by candlelight... >>Read More<<

Different Ways of Characterizing Global Temperature Change
In the words of the scientists who conducted the work, "monthly global temperature anomaly time series for the surface, for two tropospheric layers, and for two stratospheric layers were modeled using four simple statistical models incorporating linear slopes and instantaneous step changes," where "breakpoints were selected to be as few as possible" and where "their exact timing was determined using an objective statistical method," after which "the Schwarz Bayesian Information Criterion was used to determine which models provided the best fit to the observations"... >>Read More<<

Climate Regime Shifts of the Past Four Centuries
The authors developed a tree-ring-based reconstruction of the December-May North Pacific Index (NPI) - which is a measure of the atmospheric circulation related to the Aleutian low pressure cell - for the period 1600-1983, based on data derived from 18 tree-ring chronologies (selected from a total of 67 candidate chronologies) obtained from sites surrounding the North Pacific rim that calibrated "significantly at or above the 90% significance level" against winter/spring monthly values of the NPI derived from 20th-century instrumental data... >>Read More<<

GEO-ENGINEERING BECOMES SEXY - ANOTHER GLOBAL WARMING FIX
A simple sea creature could help to address the problem of global warming, a scientist claims... >>Read More<<

ABUNDANT FOSSIL FUELS, BUT 'CO2 EMISSIONS POSE RISK TO SOCIETY'
OTTAWA - Global oil and gas reserves are abundant, and even at lower prices companies could extract them profitably, Exxon Mobil Corp. said yesterday in its latest 25-year outlook... >>Read More<<

Ice-Storm Damage to Forests in a CO2-Enriched World
The authors determined that the non-intensively managed pine plantation that is home to the Duke Forest FACE study experienced an approximate 254 g C m-2 reduction in living biomass carbon during the single severe ice storm that affected much of the southeastern United States between 4 and 5 December of 2002... >>Read More<<