Minnesota State Senator Tom Neuville

2007 has turned out to be a pretty cold year. It seems whenever we have a “hot day” someone claims that is proof of global warming. So why isn’t cold or frigid temperatures evidence that global warming is not at a “tipping point” ?

Here is an interesting article from the Washington Times entitled, “Year of Global Cooling” which provides some evidence that earth may be getting colder on a global basis. As usual, I invite comment. But, the author clearly has his own belief in the soundness of global warming theory. The final sentance of the article is:

“Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.”
 

Here is a critical, but well documented and footnoted article which looks into the workings of the IPCC.
The Article is entitled: ” Politics Posing as Science: A Preliminary Assessment
of the IPCC’s Latest Climate Change Report “.
The article includes this sentence, “The people of the world should not let themselves be steamrolled by a report that reflects the IPCC’s interest in promoting climate change fears, rather than in conveying the weight of the scientific evidence.”
It’s an interesting read and I invite comments.

I also read another interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor entitled, ” Let Policy follow Science: Tie a Carbon Tax to Actual Warming. ” The article is Linked here. The article makes a case for “dynamic” global warming strategy, which allows change in policies based upon new scientific observations in the future. Many scientists believe that sunspot activity, or the lack thereof, has more impact on global temperature, than carbon emissions. Better evidence of the effect of sunspots will be known by 2010, when the model projects the beginning of global cooling.

Here is a good article from the Wall Street Journal today. The article discusses the “cascade effect” of global warming “consensus”.  The study of “cascade effect” was also the subject of a Nobel Prize in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman.  “Availability cascade” has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; “informational cascade” for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs; and “reputational cascade” for the rational incentive to do so.

It’s an interesting article and I invite comments.

John Coleman is the founder of the weather channel. He has studied climate and weather for many years. Recently, he called the global warming movement a “scam” on his blog. His article is Linked Here from ICECAP. Will anyone listen to John Coleman ?

I just discovered the ICECAP website. It looks informative and I encourage people to visit the site.

I also came across this very interesting lecture from Bob Carter, an Australian research professor. You can listen to his fascinating lecture (37 minutes in length), presented in Sept, 2007, in 4 parts at these Links.

Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 Link 4

Here is a related article by Professor Carter entitled: ” The Myth of Dangerous Human-Caused Climate Change”.

Arctic ice is melting today. There is no doubt about it. Many people are alarmed that ships might actually be able to travel through arctic waters in 20-30 years, or sooner. The Washington Post has written about melting glaciers and the disappearance of Arctic sea ice before. Here is a copy of the article. The only thing is: the article was written in 1922 ! One thing the Post did not do was blame the warmer temperatures observed in 1922 on CO2 concentrations.
The 1922 article puts some perspective on what is occurring in the Arctic today. Only 50 years after the Post article, it was global cooling, and the possibility of excess Arctic ice that many people were concerned about.

Radio Commentator Dennis Prager visited with William Gray, a pioneer in the area of forecasting hurricanes, and Professor Emeritus in Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University.

The Link to the radio interview is Linked Here. The interview can be heard during the first 15 minutes of the 34 minute segment.

Dr. Gray is a knowledgeable skeptic on the topic of Global Warming. (by the way, he hasn’t taken research money from petroleum interests). He believes that the panic over global warming is greatly exaggerated. Dr. Gray also explains the peer pressure confronting many scientists today not to depart from the politically driven orthodoxy on the issue of global warming. Peer reviews are harder to come by from scientists who depend upon government grants for their research.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting Article describing a different approach to the issue of Global Warming. Linked Here.
It’s called “Climate Geo-Engineering”. This approach suggests that we could add particles to earth’s upper atmosphere and reflect 1-2% of the Sun’s rays back into space. We know that the approach would work. Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991 and cooled most of the Earth for a few years, erasing for a short time roughly half of the global warming that took place during the entire 20th century.

In 1992, a report by the National Academy of Sciences found the prospect of stratospheric albedo enhancement “feasible, economical, and capable.” And there are a great many geo-engineering options apart from adding sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere.

This approach doesn’t depend upon “winning” the political argument about the question  of whether man is the cause of global warming. Even scientists who believe the earth is warming due to natural causes, would welcome further research of climate geo-engineering models.

Michael Asher, of the Daily Tech blog, reported a survey today which revealed that less than one half of all scientists who have written peer reviewed scientific articles about Global Warming between 2004 and  February,2007 believe that global warming is caused by humans.
Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category  (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis.  This is no “consensus.”

The article is Linked Here, and is entitled, ” Comprehensive survey of published climate research reveals changing viewpoints“. It’s an interesting read.

The Wall Street Journal just came out with an editorial commenting on the significance of the recent revisions of NASA surface temperature measurements.

The Journal’s article raises some good points, and is Linked here .

I have no doubt that if the mistake in temperature readings went the other way, the main stream media would be trumpeting the story. Other than the internet blogs, there hasn’t been too much written about the fact that, with the new revisions, it is no longer accurate to say that six of the ten warmest years on record occurred since 1990. Actually, that happened in the 1930’s and 1940’s, well before CO2 from industrial growth became an issue.

Today, Robert Samuelson of Newsweek Magazine (see right) chastised his own magazine only one week after Newsweek printed a cover story designed to discredit global warming critics. The Samuelson Article, Linked Here, and entitled “Greenhouse Simplicities”, is highly unusual because of the strength of its criticism so soon after the Original article was published. The original article, entitled “The Truth About Denial”, by Sharon Begley, is Linked Here.

An excerpt from the Samuelson article says:

But the overriding reality seems almost un-American: We simply don’t have a solution for this problem. As we debate it, journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale — as Newsweek did — in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society.

I give much credit to Mr. Samuelson. He is right to call Newsweek’s Story a “highly contrived story”. We must continue to have an honest scientific debate about global warming in this country. It is the media’s duty to honestly report scientific facts in a manner which people can fairly understand, and does not cause unfounded alarm.