Climate & Environment Review: June 15, 2007

Climate & Environment Review
June 15, 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.

Intense hurricane activity over the past 5,000 years controlled by El Nino and the West African monsoon
The process that control the formation, intensity and track of hurricanes are poorly understood. It has been proposed that an increase in sea surface temperatures caused by anthropogenic climate change has led to an increase in the frequency of intense tropical cyclones...>>Read More<<

No Easy Answers for Global Warming, MIT Professor Says
Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the debate about global warming can point out risks, but assertions of impending catastrophe can’t be proven with mathematical certainty... >>Read More<<

Food For Thought — General Mills Raising Prices, Shrinking Cereal Boxes
What's the connection between Lucky Charms and the Dow Jones Industrial Average? Well, lately the price of one has been going up, while the price of the other has tumbled... >>Read More<<

Arctic Plants Have Adjusted to Climate Changes
Many Arctic plant species have readily adjusted to big climate changes, repeatedly re-colonizing the rugged islands of Norway’s remote Svalbard archipelago through 20,000 years of warm and cool spells since the frigid peak of the last ice age, researchers say... >>Read More<<

Increasing Corn Production for Ethanol May Fuel Dead Zone in Gulf, Official Says
NEW ORLEANS — Growing corn in the Midwest for green fuel could increase pollution downriver and contribute to a "dead zone" that forms each summer in the Gulf of Mexico, a national agriculture expert said Tuesday... >>Read More<<

Call their tax
After much effort, G8 leaders last week agreed to "stabilize greenhouse-gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." This is the same wording as in Article Two of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed in 1992. In other words, after months of negotiations, world leaders agreed on a text they had already ratified 15 years earlier... >>Read More<<

Scientists rally around NASA Chief after global warming comments
"NASA’s top administrator, Michael Griffin, speaking on NPR radio made some refreshingly sensible comments about the present global warming scare,” said Robert Ferguson, Director of the Science and Public Policy Institute. “Many rationalist scientists agree with him, clearly demonstrating there is no scientific consensus on man-made, catastrophic global warming,” said Ferguson... >>Read More<<

Global Warming Not Behind Kilimanjaro Meltdown
It's bad science to use Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro as a poster child for global warming’s nefarious effects, two researchers say, pointing to other mechanisms causing the melt of the tropical glacier at the mountain’s summit... >>Read More<<

Freedom, not climate, is at risk
We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now... >>Read More<<