Climate & Environment Review: February 16, 2007

Climate & Environment Review
February 16, 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.

Scenes from the Climate Inquisition
On February 2, an AEI research project on climate change policy that we have been organizing was the target of a journalistic hit piece in Britain’s largest left-wing newspaper, the Guardian... >>Read More<<

CLOUDS A PUZZLE FOR UN GLOBAL WARMING PANEL
OSLO - Predicting how clouds will form in a warmer world remains a haze in a UN climate report due on Friday, affecting projected rises in temperatures and sea levels, scientists say... >>Read More<<

The Open Society and its Enemies
Open and shut
Sir, I listened on Thursday to Melvin Bragg’s excellent programme on Karl Popper. Afterwards I heard of David Milliband’s remark that the scientific debate on global warming was now closed... >>Read More<<

Comments on EU’s Climate Change Strategy
Thanks to one of the readers of Climate Science [Eric Harmsen] with alerting me to the release of the EU climate change strategy... >>Read More<<

EUROPE'S CO2 WARS – ‘PROPOSED EMISSION TRAGETS ARE ARBITRAY AND TOO SEVERE’
The European car industry cannot agree with the proposals made by the European Commission today on CO2 emissions from passenger cars... >>Read More<<

THE ANTARCTIC CLIMATE ANOMALY AND GALACTIC COSMIC RAYS
It has been proposed that galactic cosmic rays may influence the Earth's climate by affecting cloud formation. If changes in cloudiness play a part in climate change, their effect changes sign in Antarctica... >>Read More<<

Antarctic Ablation Areas Assessed
In a study designed to answer these important questions, the authors employed the regional atmospheric climate model RACMO2/ANT, with snowdrift-related processes calculated offline, to calculate the flux of solid precipitation (Ps), surface sublimation (SU), sublimation from suspended (drifting/saltating) snow particles (SUds), horizontal snow drift transport (TRds) and surface melt (ME)... >>Read More<<

OPINION: NO FACTS, JUST EMOTION
Nothing corrupts intellectual power like the abuse of the language. Free speech becomes an endangered species when powerful words, misused, become shortcuts for specious argument and repetitious cliches trivialize noble ideas... >>Read More<<

EC BOWS TO INDUSTRY PRESSURE OVER CAR EMISSIONS
The European commission is set to propose looser emissions limits for new cars today in the face of fierce pressure from the EU auto industry and German ministers to water down its legislative plans... >>Read More<<

EU CLIMATE CHANGE EFFORTS FAILING, SAYS US ENVOY
Europe's carbon emissions trading system "simply isn't working", according to America's top diplomat to the EU, who has poured cold water on the idea that California might try to join a transatlantic scheme. In a defence of George Bush's record, C Boyden Gray, said the US was doing its share in tackling global warming and leading the world in developing technology to beat climate change... >>Read More<<

Drought (North America - United States: Entire) – Summary
What do studies that have focused on the entirety of the conterminous United States reveal about the moisture status of the 20th century and its relationship to global warming?... >>Read More<<

THE CHILLING STARS - A NEW THEORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
On a clear, starry night you can catch a cold, and our ancestors were sometimes tempted to think that the Moon and the stars sucked heat from the Earth and made people ill. It was good observation but dodgy theorizing... >>Read More<<

20th-Century Drying of the Sahel and Southern Africa
In a study that "explores the nature and causes for the regional downward trajectories of African rainfall," Hoerling et al. compared real-world measurements with the rainfall simulations of 18 climate models employed in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change... >>Read More<<

EDITORIAL: WARMING THREAT STOKES AUSTRALIAN ELECTION
Labor's strengths on climate change will quickly swing to liabilities once their implications are understood
AT the end of the first parliamentary week of the new election year, Australia's political planet is both warming and turning on its axis. In this topsy-turvy world, the key political battleground has moved from John Howard's comfort zone to what resembles quasi-religious environmentalism... >>Read More<<