Climate & Environment Review: March 27, 2007

Climate & Environment Review
March 27, 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.

A Tale of Two Cultures and Their Changing Climates
The authors derived a 16,200-year-long palaeoclimatic record with nearly annual time-resolution from a sediment core extracted from Lake Huguang Maar (21°9'N, 110°17'E) in southeast China, based on continuous measurements of sediment titanium content and magnetic susceptibility and the acquisition of accelerator mass spectrometry 14C dates of five leaves and four bulk sediment sample... >>Read More<<

Range Expansion (Woody Plants: Arctic) – Summary
As the air's CO2 content continues to rise, the vast majority of earth's plants will likely lose less water to the atmosphere via transpiration while producing increasingly greater amounts of biomass, the latter of which phenomena is generally more strongly expressed in woody perennial species than in annual herbaceous plants. Consequently, in concert with future increases in the air's CO2 concentration, bushes, shrubs and trees will likely expand their ranges more than will non-woody species... >>Read More<<

Effects of Elevated CO2 on a Nitrogen-Fixing Tree
The authors grew well-watered one-year-old seedlings of nitrogen-fixing alder (Alnus hirsuta Turcz.) trees in five-liter pots filled with a 1:1 mixture of pumice and clay loam supplied with three concentrations of soil-nitrogen (N) - 52.5 mg N/pot/week (High-N), 5.25 mg N/pot/week (Low-N), and (No-N) - for 100 days within phytotron chambers exposed to natural daylight and maintained at atmospheric CO2 concentrations of either 360 ppm (ambient) or 720 ppm (elevated). On day 59 of the study, they measured the trees' leaf net photosynthetic rates; while at the end of the experiment the trees were harvested and the dry mass and N content of each plant organ determined. In addition, leaf litter from each seedling was collected daily as leaves senesced when temperatures declined from September to November... >>Read More<<

Dae-Am San Moor, Korean Peninsula
The authors analyzed the carbon isotopic composition of sediment cores taken from the Dae-Am San high moor (38.22°N, 128.12°E), located on the north-facing slope of Mount Dae-Am, Korean Peninsula. Results indicated upward increases in the δ13C of organic carbon in the sediment core, reaching a maximum at around AD 1100. These findings, according to the authors, suggest that the climate of the Korean Peninsula was "warm during the Medieval Warm Period," adding that if their interpretation is correct, the Medieval Warm Period was likely a global event... >>Read More<<

The Impact of Recent Warming on Global Crop Yields
Using yield data obtained from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, growing season temperature and precipitation data obtained from the Climate Research Unit (Mitchell and Jones, 2005), and the spatial distribution of crop area obtained from Leff et al. (2004) for the six most widely grown crops in the world (wheat, rice, maize, soybeans, barley and sorghum), the authors plotted year-to-year changes in global yields against similar changes in growing season temperature and precipitation for the period 1961-2002... >>Read More<<

CLIMATE OF FEAR: 'ECO-ANXIETY' LATEST WORRY FOR AMERICANS
Global warming, pesticides in food, nuclear waste - it's enough to keep a
person up at night. Indeed, a growing number of people have literally worried themselves sick over
various environmental doomsday scenarios. Their worry even has a name: eco-anxiety... >>Read More<<

BRITAIN - DO AS WE SAY, NOT AS WE DO
The diplomat charged by the Government with lecturing the world on global
warming has been revealed as one of the biggest contributors to it... >>Read More<<

The Tenacity of Greenland Ice
To hear Al Gore and his acolytes talk nowadays, one would think the Greenland Ice Sheet was teetering on the verge of extinction, melting rapidly and all but "slip-sliding away" into the ocean, where its water would raise global sea levels to heights that would radically alter continental coastlines and submerge major cities. However, the recent study of Eldrett et al. (2007), which was published in the 8 March 2007 issue of Nature, provides important new evidence that suggests Mr. Gore's view of the matter may well be poles away from the truth... >>Read More<<

The Modeling of Global Soil Wetness
The authors compared soil moisture simulations made by eleven different models within the context of the Second Global Soil Wetness Project (a multi-institutional modeling research activity intended to produce a complete multi-model set of land surface state variables and fluxes by using current state-of-the-art land surface models driven by the 10-year period of data provided by the International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project Initiative II) against real-world observations made on the top meter of grassland and agricultural soils located within parts of the former Soviet Union, the United States (Illinois), China and Mongolia that are archived in the Global Soil Moisture Data Bank... >>Read More<<

No Consensus on Hurricanes and Global Warming
To provide some context to the lively and ongoing debate over whether or not CO2-induced global warming leads to increases in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, the authors report that "two papers in 2005 indicated a large increase in power dissipation index for the northwestern Pacific and north Atlantic basins since the 1970s (Emanuel, 2005) and a nearly 50% increase in global category 4-5 hurricanes since the mid-1970s, respectively (Webster et al., 2005)." However, they note that "other papers question the validity of these findings due to potential bias-correction errors in the earlier part of the data record for the Atlantic basin (Landsea, 2005)," and that "while major hurricane activity in the Atlantic has shown a large increase since 1995, global tropical-cyclone activity, as measured by the accumulated cyclone energy index, has decreased slightly during the past 16 years (Klotzbach, 2006)." Hence, they go on to more fully describe their non-CO2-influenced view of the subject... >>Read More<<