Climate & Environment Review: February 9, 2007

Climate & Environment Review
February 9, 2007

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.

Forty-Eight Years of Tropical Cyclone Activity Over China
Ren et al. analyzed tropical cyclone (TC) precipitation (TCP) data from 677 Chinese weather stations for the period 1957 to 2004, searching for evidence of long-term changes in TCP and TC-induced torrential precipitation events... >>Read More<<

Climatic Effects on Oceanic DMS Producers
From 1996 to 2001 the authors recorded DMS concentrations and physical oceanographic data at ocean stations P26 (50°N, 145°W) and P20 (49°34'N, 138°40'W) in the Gulf of Alaska in the Northeast Pacific Ocean, after which they analyzed the data in a number of different ways... >>Read More<<

Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment and Mosquito-Born Diseases
The seven researchers (1) took leaf litter from Populus tremuloides (Michaux) trees (the most abundant tree species in Michigan, USA, where the work was conducted) that had been grown out-of-doors in open-bottom root boxes located within open-top aboveground chambers maintained at atmospheric CO2 concentrations of either 360 or 720 ppm for an entire growing season, (2) incubated the leaf litter for 14 days in a nearby stream, and (3) fed the incubated litter to four species of detritivorous mosquito larvae to assess its effect on their development rates and survivorship... >>Read More<<

Climatic Change and Atopic Eczema
Thirty children, 4 to 13 years of age with severe atopic eczema, were transported from their homes in Norway to the Canary Islands, where they stayed for a period of four weeks before returning, while 26 similarly-infected children of the same age group stayed at home in Norway the entire time. All were evaluated for various disease characteristics (1) at the start of the study, (2) at the conclusion of the group-of-30's four-week period of stay in the Canary Islands, and (3) three months after the 30 children left the islands to return home to Norway. The specific disease parameters employed in the evaluation were the Scoring of Atopic Dermatitis, the Children's Dermatology Life Quality Index, skin colonization by Staphylococcus aureus, and pharmacological skin treatment... >>Read More<<

A Significant "Hole" in "Unprecedented" 20th-Century Global Warming
For an area they denote the Central United States (CUS), which they describe as "one of the most agriculturally productive regions of the world and roughly defined around what is known as the 'Corn Belt'," Kunkel et al. used a data set of 252 surface climate stations with less than 10% missing temperature data over the period 1901-1999 to construct the CUS temperature time series plotted in the figure below, where mean global temperature as determined by Hansen et al. (2001) is also plotted. Then, for comparative purposes, they examined 55 coupled general circulation model (CGCM) simulations driven by "modern estimates of time-varying forcing," plus 19 pre-industrial unforced simulations, all derived from 18 CGCMs... >>Read More<<

Climate and Forest Fires in Ontario, Canada
In a study designed to provide important long-term context, Girardin et al. inferred past area burned in Ontario by regressing various tree-ring chronologies against actual area burned data and developing transfer functions that they used "to estimate annual area burned at times during which there were no instrumental data"... >>Read More<<

Sea Level (Global Measurements) – Summary
Periodically, individual scientists and groups of scientists analyze global sets of sea level data to see if there is any indication of a dramatic increase in the mean rate-of-rise of the global ocean surface in response to the supposedly unprecedented warming of the planet over the course of the 20th century, which climate alarmists claim should be accelerating sea level rise and leading to catastrophic coastal flooding around the world. Hence, we here provide a brief summary of the findings of such studies that we have reviewed over the past few years... >>Read More<<

Key Feature of Negative Climate Feedback Phenomenon Confirmed
Dimethylsulfide or DMS, in the words of the authors of an important new paper (Vallina and Simo, 2007), "represents the largest natural source of atmospheric sulfur and [is] a major precursor of hygroscopic (i.e., cloud-forming) particles in clean air over the remote oceans, thereby acting to reduce the amount of solar radiation that crosses the atmosphere and is absorbed by the ocean"... >>Read More<<

Chrysler questions climate change
Chrysler's chief economist Van Jolissaint has launched a fierce attack on "quasi-hysterical Europeans" and their "Chicken Little" attitudes to global warming... >>Read More<<

The Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool
Working with a sediment core collected at 5°12.07'S, 117°29.20'E in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (one of the warmest regions in the modern oceans), Newton et al. analyzed planktonic foraminiferal (Globigerinoides ruber) Mg/Ca and δ18O data to derive high-resolution summer sea surface temperature (SST) and salinity histories extending back in time about a thousand years... >>Read More<<