posted June 03, 2006 03:38 PM            

The world knew all about cold weather in the 1800s. America and Europe had escaped a 500-year period of cooling, called the Little Ice Age, around 1850. So when the Times warned of new cooling in 1895, it was a serious prediction.

On Feb. 24, 1895, the Times announced “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again.” The article debated “whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period.” Those concerns were brought on by increases in northern glaciers and in the severity of Scandinavia’s climate.

Fear spread through the print media over the next three decades. A few months after the sinking of the Titanic, on Oct. 7, 1912, page one of the Times reported, “Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age.”

Scientists knew of four ice ages in the past, leading Professor Nathaniel Schmidt of Cornell University to conclude that one day we will need scientific knowledge “to combat the perils” of the next one.

The same day the Los Angeles Times ran an article about Schmidt as well, entitled “Fifth ice age is on the way.” It was subtitled “Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.”

That end-of-the-world tone wasn’t unusual. “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada,” declared a front-page Chicago Tribune headline on Aug. 9, 1923. “Professor Gregory” of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out.”

Gregory’s predictions went on and on. Switzerland would be “entirely obliterated,” and parts of South America would be “overrun.” The good news – “Australia has nothing to fear.” The Washington Post picked up on the story the following day, announcing “Ice Age Coming Here.”

Talk of the ice age threat even reached France. In a New York Times article from Sept. 20, 1922, a penguin found in France was viewed as an “ice-age harbinger.”

Even though the penguin probably escaped from the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, it “caused considerable consternation in the country.”

Some of the sound of the Roaring ’20s was the noise of a coming ice age – prominently covered by The New York Times. Capt. Donald MacMillan began his Arctic expeditions in 1908 with Robert Peary. He was going to Greenland to test the “Menace of a new ice age,” as the Times reported on June 10, 1923.

The menace was coming from “indications in Arctic that have caused some apprehension.” Two weeks later the Times reported that MacMillan would get data to help determine “whether there is any foundation for the theory which has been advanced in some quarters that another ice age is impending.”

On July 4, 1923, the paper announced that the “Explorer Hopes to Determine Whether new ‘Ice Age’ is Coming.”

The Atlanta Constitution also had commented on the impending ice age on July 21, 1923. MacMillan found the “biggest glacier” and reported on the great increase of glaciers in the Arctic as compared to earlier measures.

Even allowing for “the provisional nature of the earlier surveys,” glacial activity had greatly augmented, “according to the men of science.” Not only was “the world of science” following MacMillan, so too were the “radio fans.”

The Christian Science Monitor reported on the potential ice age as well, on July 3, 1923. “Captain MacMillan left Wicasset, Me., two weeks ago for Sydney, the jumping-off point for the north seas, announcing that one of the purposes of his cruise was to determine whether there is beginning another ‘ice age,’ as the advance of glaciers in the last 70 years would seem to indicate.”

Then on Sept. 18, 1924, The New York Times declared the threat was real, saying “MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age.”

posted June 03, 2006 03:40 PM            

According to the LA Times on April 6, 1924, he claimed there was “scientific ground for believing” that the conditions “when all winds will bring snow, the sun cannot prevail against the clouds, and three winters will come in one, with no summer between,” had already begun.

That ice age talk cooled in the early 1930s. But The Atlantic in 1932 puffed the last blast of Arctic air in the article “This Cold, Cold World.” Author W. J. Humphries compared the state of the earth to the state of the world before other ice ages. He wrote “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age.”

Concluding the article he noted the uncertainty of such things, but closed with “we do know that the climatic gait of this our world is insecure and unsteady, teetering, indeed, on an ice age, however near or distant the inevitable fall.”

Cooling and Warming Both Threats to Food
Just like today, the news media were certain about the threat that an ice age posed.

In the 1970s, as the world cooled down, the fear was that mankind couldn’t grow enough food with a longer winter. “Climate Changes Endanger World’s Food Output,” declared a New York Times headline on Aug. 8, 1974, right in the heat of summer.

“Bad weather this summer and the threat of more of it to come hang ominously over every estimate of the world food situation,” the article began.

It continued saying the dire consequences of the cooling climate created a deadly risk of suffering and mass starvation.

Various climatologists issued a statement that “the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade,” reported the Dec. 29, 1974, New York Times. If policy makers did not account for this oncoming doom, “mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence” would result.

Time magazine delivered its own gloomy outlook on the “World Food Crisis” on June 24 of that same year and followed with the article “Weather Change: Poorer Harvests” on November 11.

According to the November story, the mean global surface temperature had fallen just 1 degree Fahrenheit since the 1940s. Yet this small drop “trimmed a week to ten days from the growing season” in the earth’s breadbasket regions.

The prior advances of the Green Revolution that bolstered world agriculture would be vulnerable to the lower temperatures and lead to “agricultural disasters.”

Newsweek was equally downbeat in its article “The Cooling World.” “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically,” which would lead to drastically decreased food production, it said.

“The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten years from now,” the magazine told readers on April 28 the following year.

This, Newsweek said, was based on the “central fact” that “the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.” Despite some disagreement on the cause and extent of cooling, meteorologists were “almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

Despite Newsweek’s claim, agricultural productivity didn’t drop for the rest of the century. It actually increased at an “annual rate of 1.76% over the period 1948 to 2002,” according to the Department of Agriculture.

That didn’t deter the magazine from warning about declining agriculture once again 30 years later – this time because the earth was getting warmer. “Livestock are dying. Crops are withering,” it said in the Aug. 8, 2005, edition. It added that “extremely dry weather of recent months has spawned swarms of locusts” and they were destroying crops in France. Was global warming to blame? “Evidence is mounting to support just such fears,” determined the piece.

U.S. News & World Report was agriculturally pessimistic as well. “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” That was just 13 years ago, in 1993.

That wasn’t the first time warming was blamed for influencing agriculture. In 1953 William J. Baxter wrote the book “Today’s Revolution in Weather!” on the warming climate. His studies showed “that the heat zone is moving northward and the winters are getting milder with less snowfall.”

Baxter titled a chapter in his book “Make Room For Trees, Grains, Vegetables and Bugs on the North Express!” The warming world led him to estimate that within 10 years Canada would produce more wheat than the United States, though he said America’s corn dominance would remain.
It was more than just crops that were in trouble. Baxter also noted that fishermen in Maine could catch tropical and semi-tropical fish, which were just beginning to appear. The green crab, which also migrated north, was “slowly killing” the profitable industry of steamer clams.

posted June 03, 2006 03:42 PM            

In 1895, geologists thought the world was freezing up again due to the “great masses of ice” that were frequently seen farther south than before.

The New York Times reported that icebergs were so bad, and they decreased the temperature of Iceland so much, that inhabitants fearing a famine were “emigrating to North America.”

In 1902, when Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to ride in a car, the Los Angeles Times delivered a story that should be familiar to modern readers. The paper’s story on “Disappearing Glaciers” in the Alps said the glaciers were not “running away,” but rather “deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation.”

The melting led to alpine hotel owners having trouble keeping patrons. It was established that it was a “scientific fact” that the glaciers were “surely disappearing.” That didn’t happen. Instead they grew once more.

More than 100 years after their “final annihilation” was declared, the LA Times was once again writing the same story. An Associated Press story in the Aug. 21, 2005, paper showed how glacier stories never really change. According to the article: “A sign on a sheer cliff wall nearby points to a mountain hut. It should have been at eye level but is more than 60 feet above visitors’ heads. That’s how much the glacier has shrunk since the sign went up 35 years ago.”

But glacier stories didn’t always show them melting away like ice cubes in a warm drink. The Boston Daily Globe in 1923 reported one purpose of MacMillan’s Arctic expedition was to determine the beginning of the next ice age, “as the advance of glaciers in the last 70 years would indicate.”

When that era of ice-age reports melted away, retreating glaciers were again highlighted. In 1953’s “Today’s Revolution in Weather!” William Baxter wrote that “the recession of glaciers over the whole earth affords the best proof that climate is warming,” despite the fact that the world had been in its cooling phase for more than a decade when he wrote it. He gave examples of glaciers melting in Lapland, the Alps, Mr. Rainer and Antarctica.

Time magazine in 1951 noted permafrost in Russia was receding northward up to 100 yards per year. In 1952, The New York Times kept with the warming trend. It reported the global warming studies of climatologist Dr. Hans W. Ahlmann, whose “trump card” “has been the melting glaciers.” The next year the Times said “nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat.”

U.S. News and World Report agreed, noted that “winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” on Jan. 8, 1954.

In the ’70s, glaciers did an about face. Ponte in “The Cooling” warned that “The rapid advance of some glaciers has threatened human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union.”

Time contradicted its 1951 report and stated that the cooling trend was here to stay. The June 24, 1974, article was based on those omnipresent “telltale signs” such as the “unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland.”

Even The Christian Science Monitor in the same year noted “glaciers which had been retreating until 1940 have begun to advance.” The article continued, “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.”

The New York Times noted that in 1972 the “mantle of polar ice increased by 12 percent” and had not returned to “normal” size.

North Atlantic sea temperatures declined, and shipping routes were “cluttered with abnormal amounts of ice.”

Furthermore, the permafrost in Russia and Canada was advancing southward, according to the December 29 article that closed out 1974.

Decades later, the Times seemed confused by melting ice. On Dec. 8, 2002, the paper ran an article titled “Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say.” The first sentence read “The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades.”

Was the ice melting at record levels, as the headline stated, or at a level seen decades ago, as the first line mentioned?

On Sept. 14, 2005, the Times reported the recession of glaciers “seen from Peru to Tibet to Greenland” could accelerate and become abrupt.

This, in turn, could increase the rise of the sea level and block the Gulf Stream. Hence “a modern counterpart of the 18,000-year-old global-warming event could trigger a new ice age.”

posted June 03, 2006 03:43 PM            

The Kyoto treaty, new emissions standards and foreign regulations are but a few examples.

Getting the government involved to control the weather isn’t a new concept. When the earth was cooling, The New York Times reported on a panel that recommended a multimillion-dollar research program to combat the threat.

That program was to start with $18 million a year in funding and increase to about $67 million by 1980, according to the Jan. 19, 1975, Times. That would be more than $200 million in today’s dollars.

Weather warnings in the ’70s from “reputable researchers” worried policy-makers so much that scientists at a National Academy of Sciences meeting “proposed the evacuation of some six million people” from parts of Africa, reported the Times on Dec. 29, 1974.

That article went on to tell of the costly and unnecessary plans of the old Soviet Union. It diverted time from Cold War activities to scheme about diverting the coming cold front.

It had plans to reroute “large Siberian rivers, melting Arctic ice and damming the Bering Strait” to help warm the “frigid fringes of the Soviet Union.”

Newsweek’s 1975 article “The Cooling World” noted climatologists’ admission that “solutions” to global cooling “such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers,” could result in more problems than they would solve.

More recently, 27 European climatologists have become worried that the warming trend “may be irreversible, at least over most of the coming century,” according to Time magazine on Nov. 13, 2000. The obvious solution? Bigger government.

They “should start planning immediately to adapt to the new extremes of weather that their citizens will face – with bans on building in potential flood plains in the north, for example, and water conservation measures in the south.”

Almost 50 policy and research recommendations came with the report.

The news media have given space to numerous alleged solutions to our climate problems.

Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh had some unusual ideas to repel an effect of global warming. In 2002 he had the notion of creating a rainmaker, “which looks like a giant egg whisk,” according to the Evening News of Edinburgh on Dec. 2, 2002.

The Atlantic edition of Newsweek on June 30, 2003, reported on the whisk. The British government gave him 105,000 pounds to research it.

Besides promoting greater prosperity and peace, it could “lift enough seawater to lower sea levels by a meter, stemming the rise of the oceans – one of the most troublesome consequences of global warming.” The rain created would be redirected toward land using the wind’s direction.

Instead of just fixing a symptom of global warming, Salter now wants to head it off. He wants to spray water droplets into low altitude clouds to increase their whiteness and block out more sunlight.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has considered other ways to lower temperatures and the media were there to give them credence.

Newsweek on May 20, 1991, reported on five ways to fight warming from the National Research Council, the operating arm of the NAS.

The first idea was to release “billions of aluminized, hydrogen-filled balloons” to reflect sunlight. To reflect more sunlight, “fire one-ton shells filled with dust into the upper atmosphere.” Airplane engines could pollute more in order to release a “layer of soot” to block the sun. Should any sunlight remain, 50,000 orbiting mirrors, 39 square miles each, could block it out.

With any heat left, “infrared lasers on mountains” could be used “to zap rising CFCs,” rendering them harmless.

posted June 03, 2006 03:47 PM            

Global warming has replaced the media’s ice age claims, but the results somehow have stayed the same – the deaths of millions or even billions of people, widespread devastation and starvation.

The recent slight increase in temperature could “quite literally, alter the fundamentals of life on the planet” argued the Jan. 18, 2006, Washington Post.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times wrote a column that lamented the lack of federal spending on global warming.

“We spend about $500 billion a year on a military budget, yet we don’t want to spend peanuts to protect against climate change,” he said in a Sept. 27, 2005, piece.

Kristof’s words were noteworthy, not for his argument about spending, but for his obvious use of the term “climate change.” While his column was filled with references to “global warming,” it also reflected the latest trend as the coverage has morphed once again.

The two terms are often used interchangeably, but can mean something entirely different.

The latest threat has little to do with global warming and has everything to do with … everything.

The latest predictions claim that warming might well trigger another ice age.

The warm currents of the Gulf Stream, according to a 2005 study by the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, U.K., have decreased 30 percent.

This has raised “fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age,” as the Gulf Stream regulates temperatures in Europe and the eastern United States. This has “long been predicted” as a potential ramification of global warming.

Hollywood picked up on this notion before the study and produced “The Day After Tomorrow.” In the movie global warming triggered an immediate ice age. People had to dodge oncoming ice. Americans were fleeing to Mexico. Wolves were on the prowl. Meanwhile our hero, a government paleoclimatologist, had to go to New York City to save his son from the catastrophe.

But it’s not just a potential ice age. Every major weather event becomes somehow linked to “climate change.”

Numerous news reports connected Hurricane Katrina with changing global temperatures. Droughts, floods and more have received similar media treatment.

Even The New York Times doesn’t go that far – yet.

In an April 23, 2006, piece, reporter Andrew C. Revkin gave no credence to that coverage. “At the same time, few scientists agree with the idea that the recent spate of potent hurricanes, European heat waves, African drought and other weather extremes are, in essence, our fault. There is more than enough natural variability in nature to mask a direct connection, they say.”

Unfortunately, that brief brush with caution hasn’t touched the rest of the media.
Time magazine’s recent cover story included this terrifying headline:

“Polar Ice Caps Are Melting Faster Than Ever... More And More; Land Is Being Devastated By Drought... Rising Waters Are Drowning Low-Lying Communities... By Any Measure, Earth Is At ... The Tipping Point The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame. Why the crisis hit so soon —and what we can do about it”

That attitude reflects far more of the current media climate. As the magazine claimed, many of today’s weather problems can be blamed on the changing climate.

“Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast — when the emergency becomes commonplace —something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming,” Time said.

Methodology
The Business & Media Institute (BMI) examined how the major media have covered the issue of climate change over a long period of time. Because television only gained importance in the post-World War II period, BMI looked at major print outlets.

There were limitations with that approach because some major publications lack the lengthy history that others enjoy. However, the search covered more than 30 publications from the 1850s to 2006 — including newspapers, magazines, journals and books.

Recent newspaper and magazine articles were obtained from Lexis-Nexis. All other magazine articles were acquired from the Library of Congress either in print or microfilm.

Older newspapers were obtained from ProQuest. The extensive bibliography includes every publication cited in this report. BMI looked through thousands of headlines and chose hundreds of stories to analyze.

Dates on the time periods for cooling and warming reporting phases are approximate, and are derived from the stories that BMI analyzed.

posted June 03, 2006 03:51 PM            

Certainly, their record speaks for itself. Four separate and distinct climate theories targeted at a public taught to believe the news. Only all four versions of the truth can’t possibly be accurate.

For ordinary Americans to judge the media’s version of current events about global warming, it is necessary to admit that journalists have misrepresented the story three other times.

Yet no one in the media is owning up to that fact. Newspapers that pride themselves on correction policies for the smallest errors now find themselves facing a historical record that is enormous and unforgiving.

It is time for the news media to admit a consistent failure to report this issue fairly or accurately, with due skepticism of scientific claims.

Recommendations

It would be difficult for the media to do a worse job with climate change coverage. Perhaps the most important suggestion would be to remember the basic rules about journalism and set aside biases — a simple suggestion, but far from easy given the overwhelming extent of the problem.

Three of the guidelines from the Society of Professional Journalists are especially appropriate:

“Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.”

“Give voice to the voiceless; official and unofficial sources of information can be equally valid.”

“Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.”

That last bullet point could apply to almost any major news outlet in the United States. They could all learn something and take into account the historical context of media coverage of climate change.

Some other important points include:

Don’t Stifle Debate: Most scientists do agree that the earth has warmed a little more than a degree in the last 100 years. That doesn’t mean that scientists concur mankind is to blame. Even if that were the case, the impact of warming is unclear.

People in northern climes might enjoy improved weather and longer growing seasons.

Don’t Ignore the Cost: Global warming solutions pushed by environmental groups are notoriously expensive. Just signing on to the Kyoto treaty would have cost the United States several hundred billion dollars each year, according to estimates from the U.S. government generated during President Bill Clinton’s term.

Every story that talks about new regulations or forced cutbacks on emissions should discuss the cost of those proposals.

posted June 03, 2006 04:06 PM            

Oct. 7, 1912
New York Times
Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age
Still encroaching…

June 28, 1923
Los Angeles Times
The possibility of another Ice Age already having started… is admitted by men of first rank in the scientific world, men specially qualified to speak.

Must be a slow starter.

Aug. 9, 1923
Chicago Tribune
Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe outCanada

Still there last time we checked.

December 1932
The Atlantic
We must be just teetering on an ice age which some relatively mild geologic action would be sufficient to start going.

Still teetering.

Feb. 20, 1969
New York Times from Col. Bernt Bachen
The Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two.

Santa still is safe.

February 1974
Fortune magazine from Reid Bryson
There is very important climatic change going on right now… It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth – like a billion people starving.

World population increased by 2.5 billion.

March 1, 1975
Science News
The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed, and we are unlikely to quickly regain the "very extraordinary period of warmth" that preceded it.

If "not soon be reversed" means "reversed by the next decade," then yes.

March 1, 1975
Science News
The temperature has already fallen back some 0.6 degrees, and shows no sign of reversal.

So much for climatologists reading the signs correctly.

July-August 1975
International Wildlife
But the sense of the discoveries is that there is no reason why the ice age should not start in earnest in our lifetimes.

There’s still time.

1992
Al Gore, "Earth in the Balance"
About 10 million residents of Bangladesh will lose their homes and means of sustenance because of the rising sea level, due to global warming, in the next few decades.

While periodic monsoons still cause flooding, rising seas have not been a problem.

Feb. 2, 2006
The Daily Telegraph
"Billions will die," says Lovelock, who tells us that he is not normally a gloomy type. Human civilisation will be reduced to a "broken rabble ruled by brutal warlords", and the plague-ridden remainder of the species will flee the cracked and broken earth to the Arctic, the last temperate spot, where a few breeding couples will survive.

Even Malthus must be turning over in his grave over this one.

posted June 07, 2006 09:17 AM              

Forget Gregg Easterbrook's confession on Slate that he has finally been persuaded by the science. Never mind Michael Shermer's "cognitive flip" at Scientific American . All the many recent conversions of global warming skeptics to global warming believers pale in comparison to this one: The latest climate contrarian to come around is pollster Frank Luntz.

You read that right. The author of the infamous memo coaching the Republicans to exploit whatever uncertainties remained in the science of global warming now tells the BBC that he accepts the scientific consensus. (It comes just a few minutes into the video.)

Luntz: "It's now 2006. I think most people would conclude that there is global warming taking place and that the behavior of humans are (sic) affecting the climate."

BBC: "But the administration has continued taking your advice. They're still questioning the science."

Luntz: "That's up to the administration. I'm not the administration. What they want to do is their business. It has nothing to do with what I write. It has nothing to do with what I believe."

Nice how he can just walk away from it like that, eh?

The main focus of the BBC program is not Luntz, but on efforts by the administration to carry out his directive of quashing the consensus view while courting the naysayers.

posted June 07, 2006 10:13 AM              

Can I reply for you, jwhop?

quote:

---

What a bunch of leftist BS propaganda! Where'd you get this information? American-Hating-Commie.com? (prox's note: Nope, Sierra Club.com...but that's probably the all the same to you ) You keep up with your great deceit, and bring your mealy-mouthed, waffling "scientists" with you!

---

Heeeeey, that was kind of fun...I think I see why you do it all day

posted June 14, 2006 08:20 PM            

Yikes

Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe
"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists
By Tom Harris
Monday, June 12, 2006

"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?

No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.

Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."

This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.

So we have a smaller fraction.

But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."

We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.

Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:

Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"

Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.

Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier," says Winterhalter. "In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form."

Dr. Wibjörn Karlén, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."

But Karlén clarifies that the 'mass balance' of Antarctica is positive - more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the 'calving' of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans. When Greenland and Antarctica are assessed together, "their mass balance is considered to possibly increase the sea level by 0.03 mm/year - not much of an effect," Karlén concludes.

The Antarctica has survived warm and cold events over millions of years. A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future.

Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."

Karlén explains that a paper published in 2003 by University of Alaska professor Igor Polyakov shows that, the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise. "For several published records it is a decrease for the last 50 years," says Karlén

Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down. The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. A sharp drop of 30% occurred again 1996-1998 and since then there has been a steady increase to reach near normal conditions since 2001."

Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."

Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records," he says. "The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual."

Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

posted June 15, 2006 06:04 PM              

I'll try for this weekend though.

posted June 15, 2006 09:21 PM              

quote:

---

"It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records,"

---

how ironic you should highlight that statement jwhop....seeing as thats exactly the argument you and your original newsmax farticle was trying to make, until i pointed out they were just making up numbers.....

pointing at an individual record low doesnt disprove global warming any more than pointing out individual record highs proves it......as i stated earlier

thats why i posted the global averages which are again higher than average this year.....

***********

The Global Warming Denial Lobby
Harper: Canada is key to defeating Kyoto
The people out to 'poison the debate on climate change.'
By Donald Gutstein
Published: May 2, 2006

In early April, the Financial Post published a letter addressed to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and signed by 60 "accredited experts in climate and related scientific disciplines," as they describe themselves. They want Harper to begin a debate on the Kyoto Protocol.

Begin a debate? What do they think has been happening since 1988, when US National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist James Hansen testified before the US Congress that he was "99 percent certain that global warming was here." That statement has been subjected to extensive, prolonged and worldwide scrutiny ever since.

The point of their letter is to deny "alarmist forecasts" of global warming and to attack "the confident pronouncements of scientifically unqualified environmental groups" whose goal is to capture "sensational headlines."

The letter is classic climate change denial and among the 60 signatories -- only 19 of whom are Canadian -- are the most prominent climate change sceptics, as they are frequently called.

The deniers' letter was followed two weeks later by one from 90 supporters of Kyoto. This group calls itself "climate science leaders from the academic, public and private sectors across Canada." No foreigners, no weasel phrases like "related scientific disciplines" (economics? agronomy?). Their point? The evidence is conclusive that warming has occurred and most of it is attributable to human activity.

These conclusions, they say, are supported by the vast majority of the world's climate scientists. Harper's assignment is to get on with developing an "effective national strategy" to deal with climate change.

More debate or action?
100 - Mile Diet

Financial Post editor Terence Corcoran seems to think that more debate is required. He did run the letter from the Kyoto supporters but accompanied it with an editorial attacking their credibility. Their crime is that some of them are federal government scientists and some have received peer-reviewed government grants. Therefore, what they have to say must be rubbish.

The problem with libertarians like Corcoran is that they can be so blinded by their ideology -- anything government does is bad -- that they don't see the problems a powerful corporate sector can cause. Call it a case of libertarian looneyism.

Funded by Exxon Mobil

The 60 deniers had no Corcoran editorial accompanying their letter. A question Corcoran might have asked is how many of the deniers are funded by Exxon Mobil and the coal industry?

It's a natural question to pose. The fossil fuel industry doesn't want mandatory limits on CO2 emissions because they would affect profits. It wants Canada and the rest of the world to do what George W. Bush did, establish voluntary standards and provide government subsidies to develop cleaner technologies.

To update his knowledge on this issue, Corcoran could read the works of Ross Gelbspan, who has been covering climate change for more than a decade as a reporter for the Boston Globe. Gelbspan discovered in 1995 that some of the leading skeptics were funded by the coal industry. He wrote a book in 1997, The Heat is On, and runs the companion web site, The Heat is Online. Gelbspan's recent book is Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists are Fueling the Climate Crisis -- and What We Can Do to Avoid Disaster.

Corcoran could also check out the May/June 2005 issue of Mother Jones, which tabulated the organizations that received funding from Exxon Mobil between 2000 and 2003 to fight CO2 emission controls.

And he could look at the SourceWatch site created by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.

Using these sources, Corcoran could put together some interesting profiles of the skeptics. Sallie Baliunas is a non-Canadian signatory to the deniers letter. She is a Harvard-Smithsonian Institute astrophysicist who has been giving global warming deniers scientific cover since the mid-1990s. She is a senior scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute (received $310,000 from Exxon Mobil). She co-wrote (with colleague Willie Soon, who did not sign the skeptics letter) the Fraser Institute pamphlet "Global warming: a guide to the science." (The Fraser Institute receives $60,000 a year from Exxon Mobil.) Baliunas is "enviro-sci" host of TechCentralStation.com (received $95,000 from Exxon Mobil) and is on science advisory boards of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy ($427,500). She has given speeches before the American Enterprise Institute ($960,000) and the Heritage Foundation ($340,000). The Heartland Institute ($312,000) publishes her op-ed pieces.

Why is Exxon Mobil so taken with Baliunas? With her colleague Willie Soon, she first claimed that solar effects could account for the earth's warming. When that theory was debunked, they next wrote a paper, partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute says Mother Jones, that claims the twentieth century hasn't been all that warm. The paper quickly became a mini-bible for deniers. But the editor of the journal where the paper was published resigned, saying it never should have been published because of a deficient peer-review process.

Exxon Mobil has been astonishingly successful in delaying action on global warming for more than a decade. During that time, oil revenues soared, Exxon took over Mobil for US $82 billion and in 2005, the combined company earned the largest profit in human history at $36 billion.

That was the year Exxon Mobil CEO Lee Raymond retired. As thanks for his work on behalf of shareholders -- the stock price soared over 500 percent over the decade -- he received a retirement package valued at nearly $400 million.

Sceptic in demand

Closer to home, one of the 19 Canadian signatories to the skeptics letter is Tim Ball, a retired professor of climatology from the University of Winnipeg, now living in Victoria. As a global-warming sceptic, he is in high demand by the front groups sponsored by the fossil fuel industry.

Ball's particular niche is the argument that since 1940, the world's climate has actually been cooling. The conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reached by over 2,000 climate scientists, that the world is heating up is wrong, he says, because it used "distorted records."

Undistorted records in hand, Ball is promoted by the National Center for Public Policy Research ($225,000 from Exxon Mobil), and Tech Central Station (which also receives support from General Motors). He's a hot topic on the Coalblog web site, sponsored by the coal companies. In the past year, he's given policy briefings to the Fraser Institute and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg.

You could have found him and Baliunas at a conference in Ottawa in November 2002, just days before parliament ratified the Kyoto Protocol. That conference, urging the government not to proceed with ratification, was paid for by Imperial Oil (Exxon Mobil's Canadian subsidiary) and Talisman Energy and put together by public relations firm APCO Worldwide.

APCO's assignment for Imperial Oil was to bring together a roster of climate change skeptics to reveal Kyoto's "science and technology fatal flaws."

An APCO specialty is supporting rogue scientists who are financed by industry and purport to challenge established scientific thinking. APCO organized The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which was originally funded by the Philip Morris Company, to attack epidemiological studies which implicated environmental tobacco smoke in slightly increased rates of lung cancer in non-smokers. Such studies could not be allowed to stand, given the tobacco industry's claim that harm from smoking was regrettable but due to individual choice, not second-hand smoke. This work was essential in Philip Morris' efforts to limit the impact of passive smoking regulations. APCO then widened the financial catchment to include other companies with poisoning or polluting problems. The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was so successful that it was assigned a lead role in opposing Kyoto.

Vancouver PR whistleblower

And that makes Jim Hoggan mad. Hoggan runs one of the largest PR firms in Western Canada. PR practitioners rarely criticize the work of their colleagues, but Hoggan pulls no punches in his scathing denunciation of the global warming deniers and their public relations advisors.

In December 2005, he set up his blog, which he calls deSmogBlog. In his personal manifesto, "Slamming the Climate Skeptic Scam," he writes "it is infuriating -- as a public relations professional -- to watch my colleagues use their skills, their training and their considerable intellect to poison the international debate on climate change."

It's powerful reading.

Hoggan recently broke the story that one of the 19 Canadian deniers had recanted, saying he was misled about the letter's content when he signed on.

True, the Hoggan firm does work for organizations that do not spring to mind when thinking about environmental protection -- Delta Land Development and Sea-to-Sky Highway Improvement Project, for instance. And organized labour would be no fan of his. He has an "extensive" background representing companies involved in labour disputes. And he has Partnerships BC as a client. But he's not afraid to list his clients on his web site, in contrast to many PR firms.

And Hoggan has a large pro bono practice in which he represents clients like the David Suzuki Foundation, one of the most consistent targets of the deniers. He's also creating a market niche around the issue of sustainability.

In a recent post, Hoggan discusses a column by Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson, who complains that here's a letter from 90 scientists urging action; there's a letter from 60 scientists urging Harper to ignore calls to action. "What's a layman to do?" Ibbitson whines.

His solution? Forget about global warming and instead work with the US to improve air quality. "After all," he writes, "a continental agreement on air quality would do far more to improve the lives of both Americans and Canadians than any actions specifically targeted at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions."

It's called bait and switch. We're alarmed about the health of the planet our grandchildren will inherit. But (thanks to the lies and deceptions of the deniers) nobody can agree on what's happening, let alone what should be done. So let's do something that we can all agree on instead.

Ibbitson's column makes clear the political purpose of the deniers' letter -- to help Harper out of a tight corner. His goal of capturing a majority government depends on winning seats in Ontario and Quebec, the provinces where support for Kyoto is strongest. He could court their support by giving them Kyoto, but this would infuriate his oil industry masters.

These are people like Gwyn Morgan, retired CEO of EnCana Corp., long-time Fraser institute trustee and generous Conservative Party funder who Harper placed in charge of vetting all senior government appointments.

So obfuscate, confuse and divert attention to clean air is the order of the day.

Why Canada is key

Why would 41 foreign deniers be concerned about what happens in Canada? Because what happens in Canada will shift the momentum towards or away from Kyoto.

There's a larger issue, too. In 2007, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is expected to warn governments that global warming could drive the Earth's temperature far higher than previously forecast.

The UK's Royal Society, in a confidential internal memo leaked to The Guardian last month, predicts that the lobbyists will try to undermine the IPCC's report. "There are already signs these groups will be targeting European countries and Canada to seek to provoke opposition to the Kyoto protocol."

And thanks to deniers for hire and newspapers like the National Post that spread their baloney, their task will be made that much easier.

Donald Gutstein, a senior lecturer in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University
http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2006/05/02/PaidtoDenyGlobalWarming/

posted June 19, 2006 12:28 PM            

Who, besides Al Gore, would be surprised that Mars' ice caps are shrinking? And how about this: Jupiter is brewing up new, monster, hurricane-like storms because of measured increases in Jovian temperatures. Why is it I don't believe "greenhouse gases" are at fault?

Here's the deal, one of God's great creations – the Sun – is going through another one of its on-again, off-again solar cycles. Sometimes it burns a little brighter, other times it emits a little less energy. The result? Every planet in our solar system either gets a little warmer or cooler depending on our sole energy source. The massive furnace in the center of our solar system is pretty consistent, but it isn't perfectly constant.

Earth's scientists have determined that every globe, I mean, every planet, in the solar system is currently experiencing a warming trend – including Earth. I was surfing the Internet recently and came across two fascinating articles from Space.com. The first headline reads, ''New Storm on Jupiter Hints at Climate Change.'' Here's what planetary scientists have discovered:

Little is known about how storms form on the giant planet. They are often described as behaving similar to hurricanes on Earth. Some astronomers believe that the spots dredge up material deep below Jupiter's clouds and lift it to where the Sun's ultraviolet light chemically alters it to give it a red hue.

The latest images could provide evidence that Jupiter is in the midst of a global change that can modify temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit on different parts of the globe.The study was led jointly by Imke de Pater and Philip Marcus of University of California, Berkeley.

''The storm is growing in altitude,'' de Pater said. ''Before when they were just ovals they didn't stick out above the clouds. Now they are rising.''

''This growth signals a temperature increase in that region," she said. "Of course it signals a temperature increase. Of course it signals a temperature increase. When temperatures rise, gases rise. Clouds (made up of gases) rise. This is basic physics.''

The other article was written several years ago. The thrust of this scientific writing was Mars' ice caps have been observed to be shrinking.

Here's a quick Martian weather report:

In the other study, led by Michael C. Malin, features at the South Pole were observed to retreat by up to 10 feet (3 meters) from one Martian year to the next. The odd shapes – circular pits, ridges and mounds – were first photographed in 1999. Since then, the features have eroded away by up to 50 percent. Two good, straight-forward science articles that prove Jupiter and Mars are warming. No politics to get bogged down in. No agendas to sort out. Simple facts: Temperatures on Jupiter and Mars are rising.

Now, is anyone surprised the Earth is also experiencing a warming trend? Please, I'm begging you; tell me why these articles weren't splashed across the front pages of every newspaper in the country? Aren't these scientific observations shocking considering the massive amounts of press, television specials, radio broadcasts, classroom time, and dining room conversations this country has devoted to the misnomer, ''global warming''? The most prominent news story on the planet Earth in the new millennium has been that man and his evil combustion engine have begun the cooking of the planet by the suffocating amounts of carbon dioxide – a (GASP!) greenhouse gas – we've pumped into our atmosphere.

Fast fact: Did you know when the Earth was in the grips of one of its great Ice Ages, carbon dioxide levels were significantly higher than they are today?

Take a deep breath. All is well. Our climate has changed due to the efforts of the Sun of God, not people like the son of Senator Al Gore, Sr.

Why not put the guilt trip back in the closet? Why not let yourself off the hook? We have discovered one of God's great creations, the Sun, is throwing off a little more energy these days and warming all the planets in our solar system. That's worthy of a global celebration, right?

And, with the information we now have, can we get rid of the phrase, ''global warming,'' and start using the more appropriate, ''solar warming''?

Look, the Sun of God is an unimaginably powerful furnace. Take a moment to learn a little bit about the closest star to the Earth and re-educate yourself about how tiny and insignificant we are. It will also help when politicians and those with a purely political agenda stop scaring us with the threat of imminent death as a result of man-made global warming.

Just for kicks, next time one of these hysterical, science-challenged scare-mongers spews their voo-doo environmentalism your way, ask them if they know what the No. 1 greenhouse gas is. It is water vapor. Let me repeat that so you don't forget. Water vapor, not carbon dioxide, is, by far, the most prevalent of all the greenhouse gasses. Water vapor! In fact, water vapor accounts for about 95 % of the greenhouse effect on our planet.

Why doesn't everyone know this?

Why not teach science, instead of political hysteria in our schools?

The Sun of God, not the by-products of man's combustion engines, is responsible for the mild increases in temperature on Earth, Mars and Jupiter. And that's only inconvenient to Al Gore, Jr.

posted June 19, 2006 12:44 PM              

that's hot..

very interesting!

funny..I was just talking to some people at the Diner..about this..thay really believe all this Global Warming crap..and yes..they are democrats..
speaking about hot..it was 119 degrees in the
kitchen today..Oh My!

posted June 19, 2006 01:01 PM              

and it's 92 here today! So hot. ...

thanks for asking..how are things going with you?

posted June 19, 2006 01:18 PM              

sounds very interesting, meeting and interacting with people...you sound happy.

posted June 22, 2006 01:57 AM              

Hawking: I like Chinese culture, women
(AP)
Updated: 2006-06-21 17:23

Stephen Hawking charmed a group of Chinese students on Wednesday, telling them he liked Chinese culture and women while warning that global warming might turn the Earth into a fiery planet.

Before an audience of 500 at a seminar in Beijing, the wheelchair-bound celebrity cosmologist said, "I like Chinese culture, Chinese food and above all Chinese women. They are beautiful."

Stephen Hawking from the University of Cambridge, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, is greeted by a Chinese student in Beijing June 21, 2006. Hawking said on Wednesday he feared global warming could have a devastating effect on Earth.

Stephen Hawking from the University of Cambridge, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, is greeted by a Chinese student in Beijing June 21, 2006. [Reuters]

The audience of mostly university students and professors and a smattering of journalists applauded.

Asked about the environment, Hawking, who suffers from a degenerative disease and speaks through a computerized voice synthesizer, said he was "very worried about global warming." He said he was afraid that Earth "might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid."

An occasional visitor to China, Hawking was in Beijing to attend a conference on string theory, an area of physics that attempts to explain and model the universe.

Hawking has near-superstar status in China, and the Chinese government preaches that scientific prowess is crucial to the country's future power.

"In the world there's only one like him. I very much respect his personality and strong spirit," said Liu Fei, 24-year-old doctoral candidate at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Physics in Beijing.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-06/21/content_622829.htm

posted June 22, 2006 09:26 AM            

Scientific truth, says that 450,000,000 years ago the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were 10 times higher than they are now....and that was one of the COLDEST periods on earth in the last 500,000,000 years.

Any and I do mean ANY honest, reputable, scientist would conclude the relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperature cannot be established.

posted June 22, 2006 12:55 PM            

With An Inconvenient Truth, the companion book to former Vice President Al Gore’s global-warming movie, currently number nine in Amazon sales rank, this is a good time to point out that the book, which is a largely pictorial representation of the movie’s graphical presentation, exaggerates the evidence surrounding global warming. Ironically, the former Vice President leaves out many truths that are inconvenient for his argument. Here are just 25 of them.

1. Carbon Dioxide’s Effect on Temperature. The relationship between global temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2), on which the entire scare is founded, is not linear. Every molecule of CO2 added to the atmosphere contributes less to warming than the previous one. The book’s graph on p. 66-67 is seriously misleading. Moreover, even the historical levels of CO2 shown on the graph are disputed. Evidence from plant fossil-remains suggest that there was as much CO2 in the atmosphere about 11,000 years ago as there is today.

2. Kilimanjaro. The snows of Kilimanjaro are melting not because of global warming but because of a local climate shift that began 100 years ago. The authors of a report in the International Journal of Climatology “develop a new concept for investigating the retreat of Kilimanjaro’s glaciers, based on the physical understanding of glacier–climate interactions.” They note that, “The concept considers the peculiarities of the mountain and implies that climatological processes other than air temperature control the ice recession in a direct manner. A drastic drop in atmospheric moisture at the end of the 19th century and the ensuing drier climatic conditions are likely forcing glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro.”

3. Glaciers. Glaciers around the world have been receding at around the same pace for over 100 years. Research published by the National Academy of Sciences last week indicates that the Peruvian glacier on p. 53-53 probably disappeared a few thousand years ago.

4. The Medieval Warm Period. Al Gore says that the “hockey stick” graph that shows temperatures remarkably steady for the last 1,000 years has been validated, and ridicules the concept of a “medieval warm period.” That’s not the case. Last year, a team of leading paleoclimatologists said, “When matching existing temperature reconstructions…the timeseries display a reasonably coherent picture of major climatic episodes: ‘Medieval Warm Period,’ ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Recent Warming.’” They go on to conclude, “So what would it mean, if the reconstructions indicate a larger…or smaller…temperature amplitude? We suggest that the former situation, i.e. enhanced variability during pre-industrial times, would result in a redistribution of weight towards the role of natural factors in forcing temperature changes, thereby relatively devaluing the impact of anthropogenic emissions and affecting future temperature predictions.”

5. The Hottest Year. Satellite temperature measurements say that 2005 wasn't the hottest year on record — 1998 was — and that temperatures have been stable since 2001 (p.73). Here’s the satellite graph:

6. Heat Waves. The summer heat wave that struck Europe in 2003 was caused by an atmospheric pressure anomaly; it had nothing to do with global warming. As the United Nations Environment Program reported in September 2003, “This extreme wheather [sic] was caused by an anti-cyclone firmly anchored over the western European land mass holding back the rain-bearing depressions that usually enter the continent from the Atlantic ocean. This situation was exceptional in the extended length of time (over 20 days) during which it conveyed very hot dry air up from south of the Mediterranean.”

7-25..................click the link.

posted June 24, 2006 11:45 PM              

By J.R. Pegg

WASHINGTON, DC, June 22, 2006 (ENS) - The Earth is hotter today than it has been in four centuries and likely warmer than it has been in the past 1,000 years, according to a review of surface temperature research released Thursday by the U.S. National Academies of Science.

The 155 page report provides additional evidence that "human activities are responsible for much of the warming," the authors said.

The study, written by a panel of 12 climate experts, assesses the state of scientific efforts to reconstruct surface temperature records for the Earth over approximately the last 2,000 years.

Widespread reliable instrument records of global temperatures are available only for the last 150 years, leaving scientists to estimate past climatic conditions by analyzing proxy evidence from sources such as tree rings, corals, ocean and lake sediments, cave deposits, ice cores, boreholes, and glaciers.

Committee chair Gerald North said the panel’s review of instrument and proxy data affords "a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries."

North
Dr. Gerald North is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and Holder of the Harold J. Haynes Endowed Chair in Geosciences at Texas A&M University. (Photo courtesy Texas A&M)
"This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies," said North, a geosciences professor at the University of Texas A&M.

The committee said average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about one degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) during the 20th century.

The report was requested last year by House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican, in a bid to silence global warming skeptics critical of a surface temperature reconstruction widely known as the "hockey stick" study.

Boehlert
Congressman Sherwood Boehlert of New York is House Science Committee Chairman. (Photo courtesy Office of the Congressman)
Published in 1998 by climate scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, the study suggested average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere during the late 20th century were higher than at any time in the past 1,000 years.

The upward curve of a graph illustrating the research indicates that temperatures were relatively flat from A.D. 1000 to 1900 before sharply rising after 1900 – the chart resembles a hockey stick.

The graph appeared in the 2001 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and emerged as oft-cited evidence that human greenhouse gas emissions are driving an increase in global temperatures.

Some scientists questioned the statistical methods used by the researchers and the findings of the study. Climate skeptics have latched onto this criticism and repeatedly attacked the study as flawed in a bid to cast doubt on humanity’s contribution to climate change.

Last June, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, attempted to launch a probe into the background of the authors – a move that drew sharp criticism from Boehlert and several scientific organizations worldwide.

Barton
Congressman Joe Barton of Texas is Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee (Photo courtesy Office of the Congressman)
The controversy prompted Congressman Bohlert to ask the National Academies, an independent organization chartered by Congress to advise the government on scientific matters, to review the study as well as other research on surface temperatures.

North said the panel largely endorsed the findings of the hockey stick study.

The conclusions of the study have "subsequently been supported by an array of evidence," including large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in proxy indicators, North said.

Some of these changes, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, "appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years," North told reporters at a briefing in Washington, DC.

The panel said it had less confidence that warming was unprecedented over the last thousand years because of a lack of precisely dated proxy evidence for temperatures prior to 1600, in particular in the Southern Hemisphere.

"The picture is much murkier before 1600 and considerably murkier when you go further back in time," said committee member Kurt Cuffey, a geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "We start losing sources of information … and start relying more and more on data from fewer and fewer geographic locations."

Mann
Dr. Michael Mann is Associate Professor in the Department of Meteorology at Pennsylvania State University and Director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center. (Photo courtesy Penn State)
The study by Mann and his colleagues also concluded that the 1990s were the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year in 1,000 years – the panel said larger uncertainties in temperature reconstructions for decades and individual years precluded it from outright support of those conclusions.

Questions about the statistical methods used by the authors of the hockey stick study should not cast doubt on its primary conclusions, said committee member Peter Bloomfield, a statistics professor at North Carolina State University.

"All of the statistical choices made were reasonable at the time," Bloomfield said. "I saw nothing that spoke to me of any manipulation … it was an honest attempt to construct a data analysis."

The panel said its review of other research gave it "very little confidence" in statements about average global surface temperatures prior to A.D. 900 because the proxy data for that time frame are sparse.

The panel stressed that global temperature records are only one piece of the global climate picture and not the primary evidence of climate change.

"Human activities are increasing the concentrations of certain greenhouse gases and these gases inevitably cause warming," Cuffey said. "That is not up for debate."

Boehlert praised the work of the committee and said it "shows the value of Congress handling scientific disputes by asking scientists to give us guidance."

Scientists need to do more work to develop a better sense of what global temperatures were prior to 1600, Boehlert said, and "Congress ought to let them go about that work without political interference."
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2006/2006-06-22-10.asp