The Cooler Heads Coalition and the George C. Marshall Institute

+10F  -  Are the UNs Global Warming Forecasts based on Faulty Economics?

In the letter, the climate experts respond to statements made in the ACIA that temperature changes in the Arctic provide an early indication of global warming. The signers of the letter point out that sediment and ice core samples show that the arctic has experienced past warming that can not be attributed to greenhouse gas concentrations. There is also a history of strong year-to-year variability of Arctic temperatures. The letter also calls for the need for advances in Arctic climate science in both models and measurements in order to assess a more complete picture of Arctic climate understanding.

The following climate experts signed the letter: R. Tim Patterson, PhD, Professor of Geology at Carleton University; Tim Ball, PhD, Retired - Professor of Climatology at University of Winnipeg; Anthony Lupo, PhD, Professor of Atmospheric Science at University of Missouri - Columbia; David Legates, PhD, Associate Professor in Climatology at University of Delaware; Pat Michaels, PhD, Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia; George Taylor, M.S. Meteorology; Gary D. Sharp, PhD Scientific Director, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study; Roy W. Spencer, PhD Principal Research Scientists, The University of Alabama in Huntsville; Jon Reisman, Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy; University of Maine at Machias/ Maine Public Policy Institute Scholar, Willie Soon, PhD, Science Director, Tech Central Station and Sallie Baliunas, PhD, Enviro- Science Editor, Tech Central Station.

    November 16, 2004
    The Honorable John McCain
    United States Senate
    Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator McCain:

As you know, climate varies in the Arctic more than globally-averaged measures reveal, prompting not inconsiderable ecosystem responses.

The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report by the Arctic Council documents significant ecosystem response to surface temperature warming trends that occurred in some areas since the mid-19th century and in the last thirty years.

Estimates of the amount of surface warming trends over those periods and their causes relies on scientific knowledge of natural and anthropogenic effects, the latter including landscape modification, urbanization, plus the air’s concentration of aerosols and greenhouse gases. Moreover, Arctic climate varies dramatically from one region to another, and over time in ways that cannot be accurately reproduced by climate models. The quantitative impacts of natural and anthropogenic factors remain highly uncertain, especially for a region as complex as the Arctic.

For example, for Greenland’s instrumental surface temperatures a team of experts headed at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently found:

     Since 1940, however, the Greenland coastal stations data have undergone
     predominantly a cooling trend. At the summit of the Greenland ice sheet,
     the summer average temperature has decreased at the rate of 2.2 degrees C
     per decade since the beginning of the measurements in 1987. This suggests
     that the Greenland ice sheet and coastal regions are not following the
     current global warming trend.(1)

Analysis of ice corings of the Penny Ice Cap on Baffin Island show that the recent warming trend is unexceptional compared to natural variability in centuries past, when the enhanced greenhouse effect cannot have had much impact:

     Our sea-salt record suggests that, while the turn of the [21st] century

     was characterized by generally milder sea-ice conditions in Baffin Bay,
     the last few decades of sea-ice extent lie within Little Ice Age
     variability and correspond to instrumental records of lower temperatures
     in the Eastern Canadian Arctic over the past three decades.(2)

From a detailed study of sea core sediment from the last 10,000 years in the Chukchi Sea, researchers concluded that, “in the recent past, the western Arctic Ocean was much warmer than it is today.” They also found that “during the middle Holocene [approximately 6,000 years ago] the August sea surface temperature fluctuated by 5 degrees C and was 3-7 degrees C warmer than it is today,”(3)

The relatively recent discovery of the PDO, or Pacific Decadal Oscillation,(4) points to a strong natural component of the recent warming trend. Researchers noted in 1997:

     Our results add support to those of previous studies suggesting that the
     climatic regime shift of the late 1970’s is not unique in the century-
     long instrumental climate record, nor in the record of North Pacific
     salmon production. In fact, we find that signatures of a recurring
     pattern of interdecadal climate variability are widespread and detectable
     in a variety of Pacific basin climate and ecological systems. This
     climate pattern — hereafter referred to as the Pacific (inter)Decadal
     Oscillation, or PDO (following co-author S.R.H.’s suggestion) — is a
     pan-Pacific phenomenon that also includes interdecadal climate
     variability in the tropical Pacific.

The Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1976-1977 is typical in the documented pattern of natural climate fluctuations going back at least several centuries. In Alaska in particular, although the onset of the 1976-1977 shift ended the several-decades-long period of cold in the middle of the 20th century recorded by many of Alaska’s good weather station records, it returned temperatures to warmth seen in the early decades of the 20th century. Thus, it is unsurprising that Alaskan ecosystems have responded to recent warmth, which has the characteristic step-upward shape of the PDO, but not the gradual but large warming trend implied by the enhanced greenhouse effect.

The PDO may have shifted back in 1998-99 to its mid-20th century state, which would tend to deliver sharply cooler temperatures in the next several decades to the western U.S., including western and southern Alaska. For example, scientists from British Columbia’s Institute of Ocean Sciences, Fisheries and Oceans and Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences found recent cooling of the North Pacific:

     Subsurface upper ocean waters off Oregon and Vancouver Island were about
     1 degree C cooler in July 2002 than in July 2001. The anomalously cool
     layer coincides with the permanent halocline which has salinities 32.2 to
     33.8, suggesting an invasion of nutrient-rich Subarctic waters. The
     anomalously cool layer lies at 30-150 m.(5)

Surface air temperatures (SAT) going back 125 years were studied from “newly available long-term Russian observations of SAT from coastal stations, and sea-ice extent and fast-ice thickness from the Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, and Chuckchi seas.”(6) Those researchers found “strong intrinsic variability, dominated by multi-decadal fluctuations with a timescale of 60-80 years.” Comparing those measures of Arctic regional variability to that of computer simulations, the researchers concluded that observations do “not support amplified warming in Polar Regions predicted by GCMs [General Circulation Models].”

A comprehensive study of Arctic temperature records(7) found that “in the Arctic in the period 1951-90, no tangible manifestations of the greenhouse effect can be identified.” However, strong year-to-year variability is present, as the researcher notes that “a more recent analysis of mean seasonal and annual air-temperature trends in the Arctic (Przybylak, in press) shows that in the mid-1990s there occurred quite a large rise in air temperature,” and as a consequence, “the areally averaged annual air temperature for the whole Arctic for the last 5 year period of the 20th century was the warmest since 1950 (1.0 degree C above the 1951-90 average).”

Those examples demonstrate that Arctic climate has and will continue to exhibit intricate patterns not reliably reproduced by global climate simulations, thus underscoring their scientific incompleteness and need for advances in Arctic climate science, in measurements, theory and models.

The history of the Arctic and its ecosystems remains complex, a fact too often perceived by reporters under deadline or extremists as irrelevant nuance. Ecosystems and humans survived the warming at the beginning of the 20th century, as they survived the warmth from A.D. 900 to 1200, when Thule people migrated from Alaska across the Arctic while Vikings farmed in Greenland soil now permafrost and sailed in Arctic waters now permanent pack ice. They survived the warming of the last 15,000 years as earth emerged from the last glacial period, whose termination produced much more radical temperature shocks than those observed in the last several decades.

As Professor Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IPCC author concluded in testimony before your May 1, 2001 Commerce Committee hearing:

     The question of where do we go from here is an obvious and important one.
     From my provincial perspective, an important priority should be given to
     figuring out how to support and encourage science (and basic science
     underlying climate in particular) while removing incentives to promote
     alarmism. The benefits of leaving future generations a better
     understanding of nature would far outweigh the benefits (if any) of ill
     thought out attempts to regulate nature in the absence of such
     understanding.

We appreciate your efforts to support scientific fact-finding concerning responses of Arctic ecosystems to climate variability. 

    Sincerely,
    R. Tim Patterson, PhD
    Professor of Geology
    Carleton University

    Tim Ball, PhD
    Retired - Professor of Climatology
    University of Winnipeg

    Anthony Lupo, PhD
    Professor of Atmospheric Science
    University of Missouri - Columbia

    David Legates, PhD
    Associate Professor in Climatology
    University of Delaware

    Pat Michaels, PhD
    Professor of Environmental Sciences
    University of Virginia
    Virginia State Climatologist

    George Taylor, M.S. Meteorology
    Oregon State Climatologist

    Gary D. Sharp, PhD
    Scientific Director
    Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study

    Roy W. Spencer, PhD
    Principal Research Scientists
    The University of Alabama in Huntsville

    Jon Reisman
    Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy
    University of Maine at Machias/ Maine Public Policy Institute Scholar

    Willie Soon, PhD
    Science Director, Tech Central Station

    Sallie Baliunas, PhD
    Enviro-Science Editor Tech Central Station

    (1) P. Chylek, J.E. Box and G. Lesins 2004 Global warming and the
        Greenland ice sheet, Climatic Change 63 201-221

    (2) N. S. Grumet, C.P. Wake, P.A. Mayewski, G.A. Zielinski, S.I. Whitlow,
        R.M. Koerner, D.A. Fisher, and J.M. Woollett, 2001, Variability of
        sea-ice extent in Baffin Bay over the last millennium, Climatic
        Change,49, 129-145

    (3) D. Darby, J. Bischof, G. Cutter, A. de Vernal, C. Hillaire-Marcel, G.
        Dwyer, J. McManus, L. Osterman, L. Polyak and R. Poore  2001, New
        record shows pronounced changes in Arctic Ocean circulation and
        climate.  EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 82, 601 and
        607

    (4) N. J. Mantua, S. R. Hare, Y. Zhang, J. M. Wallace and R. C. Francis
        1997, A Pacific interdecadal climate oscillation with impacts on
        salmon production  Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 78,
        1069-1079

    (5) H. J. Freelnad, G. Gatien, A. Huyer,  and R. L. Smith 2003, Cold
        halocline in the northern California Current: An invasion of subarctic
        water. Geophysical Research Letters 30: 10.1029/2002GL016663.

    (6) I. V. Polyakov, G.V. Alekseev, R.V. Bekryaev,U.  Bhatt, R.L. Colony,
        M. A. Johnson, V.P. Karklin, A.P. Makshtas, D. Walsh, A. V. Yulin
        2002, Observationally based assessment of polar amplification of
        global warming.  Geophysical Research Letters 29:
        10.1029/2001GL011111.

    (7) R. Przybylak  2002,  Changes in seasonal and annual high-frequency air
        temperature variability in the Arctic from 1951-1990,  International
        Journal of Climatology 22, 1017-1032

Washington, D.C. According to a new study appearing in the August 13 issue of the journal Science, We already have the technology we need to take the world off the path toward dramatic climate change. But a cursory glance at the advance summary reveals that the study, conducted by Princeton Environmental Institutes Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI), is completely out of touch with economic, political, and environmental reality.

The forthcoming study claims that each of 15 recommended strategies could eliminate up to 1 billion tons annually of carbon emissions by 2054, though by not considering their costs the authors make their recommendations useless as public policy proposals. The study basically says that if you coerce everybody to use a lot less energy and dont care about the cost, you can significantly reduce emissions, said Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis. We needed Princeton University to tell us that?

CMIs Strategy 1 is to double the fuel efficiency of 2 billion cars from 30 to 60 mpg. However, the average passenger car in the U.S. got 21.4 mpg in 1999, and the average light truck 17.1 mpg, so CMI is really proposing to triple fuel economy. Dont they know how politically difficult it is to mandate even small mpg increases? Their proposal would either eliminate todays most popular vehiclesSUVs, pickups, and large sedansor price them out of reach of working families, said Lewis.

CMIs Strategy 2 is to decrease the number of car miles traveled by half. But the U.S. population could easily increase by half or more by 2054. This strategy is tantamount to rationing carscommuters and soccer moms should just love it.

CMI Strategy 5 is to replace 1,400 coal electric plants with natural gas-powered facilities. But America is already facing a multi-billion dollar natural gas supply crunch. This strategy would wreak havoc upon consumer electricity bills.

CMI Strategy 9 is to add double the current global nuclear capacity to replace coal-based electricity. This proposal should go over big with the no-nukes environmental establishment.

CMI Strategy 10 is to increase wind capacity by 50 times relative to today, for a total of 2 million large windmills. The word boondoggle was invented for just such proposals, and in case CMI has not heard, theres a growing grassroots backlash against wind farms.

CMI Strategy 13 is to increase ethanol production 50 times by creating biomass plantations with an area equal to 1/6^th of world cropland. This strategy is a prescription for decimating millions of acres of forest and other wildlife habitat. I thought environmentalists liked trees and wildlife, but I guess these days anyone can qualify as long as they embrace the Kyoto agenda of climate alarmism and energy rationing.

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government.  For more information about CEI, please visit our website at www.cei.org

Scientists explain why killer weather in film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ is fiction

Contact for Interviews:    
Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273

Washington, D.C., May 12, 2004The upcoming movie, The Day After Tomorrow, depicts the cataclysmic events that supposedly would be triggered by global warming induced climate change.  Under the tagline Where will you be?, The Day After Tomorrow shows harrowing images of New York City covered in snow and ice, the Sydney opera house being consumed by a mammoth tidal wave and Los Angeles being destroyed by tornadoes.  Unfortunately, the blockbuster fails to employ sound science to back up the special effects. 

Scientists around the world have begun to question and counter the scientific facts depicted within the movie.  Attached is a list of scientists that are available to reveal the truth behind the science fiction of The Day After Tomorrow.  The movie is scheduled for release on Memorial Day weekend, May 28th:

Dr. David Legates, Director, Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware
(302) 831-4920
legates@udel.edu

Dr. Ian Clark, Professor, Isotope Hydrogeology and Paleoclimatology, Department of Earth Sciences (Arctic specialist), University of Ottawa
(613) 562-5800
idclark@uottawa.ca

Dr. Madhav Khandekar, Environmental Consultant, 25 years with Environment Canada in Meteorology
(905) 940-0105
mkhandekar@rogers.com

Dr. Robert Balling, Director, Office of Climatology at Arizona State University
(480) 965-7533
robert.balling@asu.edu

Dr. Robert E. Davis, Associate Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Virginia, Editor of Climate Research, Chair of the Committee of Biometeorology and Aerobiology of the American Meteorological Society
(434) 924-0579
red3u@virginia.edu

George Taylor, Faculty Member at Oregon State Universitys College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, State Climatologist of Oregon
(541) 737-5705
taylor@coas.oregonstate.edu

Dr. Sallie Baliunas, Enviro-Sci Host
www.techcentralstation.com
(202) 546-4242
sbaliunas@techcentralstation.com

Dr. Christopher Essex, Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Western Ontario
(519) 661-3649
essex@uwo.ca
 
Dr. Ross McKitrick, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Guelph, Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, B.C., Coauthor of the Canadian bestseller Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming
(519) 824-4120 x52532
rmckitri@uoguelph.ca
 
Dr. James J. O’Brien, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, Meteorology & Oceanography, Director, Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies, Florida State University
(850) 644-4581   
jim.obrien@coaps.fsu.edu
 
Dr. Pat Michaels, professor of Environmental Science, University of Virginia, State Climatologist of Virginia
(434) 924-0549
pjm8x@Virginia.EDU

For Additional Information:
Dr. Roy Spencer, (256) 961-7960
Dr. John Christy, (256) 961-7763
Phillip Gentry, (256) 824-6420

HUNTSVILLE, AL (May 5, 2004) — A new study of global temperature data reports this week the discovery that significant global warming can be found by subtracting from the temperature record more cooling than was actually there.

“You can’t subtract more signal than is there, but that’s what they’ve done,” said Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). “They’ve subtracted more than is actually there.”

The study in question, by Fu et al., is published this week in Nature. The authors claim to find significant atmospheric warming over the past 25 years when cooling that has taken place in the stratosphere during that time is removed from the tropospheric temperature data gathered by instruments aboard NOAA satellites.

The problem, says Spencer, is that the study uses a negative “weighting” function that removes more stratospheric cooling than actually appears in the data, thus creating a spurious warming signal.

“Simply put, this method over corrects for stratospheric cooling,” said Dr. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at UAH and director of the ESSC. “We tried this same technique in the early 1990s but it didn’t work.  Instead, Roy developed a method for accurately removing stratospheric temperatures from the data and we published that in 1992.”

Spencer and Christy were the first to use data from microwave sounding units aboard NOAA satellites to track global temperature trends. Over the past 13 years they have made several corrections to their dataset as different problems have been identified.

The satellite sensors, which have been in service since late November 1978, show a long-term lower atmosphere global warming trend of about 0.08 C (0.14 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade in the past 25 years. This trend has been corroborated by U.S., British and Russian studies comparing the satellite data to temperature data gathered by weather balloons.

– 30 –

The Cooler Heads Coalition

invites you to a

Congressional and Media Briefing on

The Impacts of Global Warming
Why the Alarmist View is Wrong

A Scientific Appraisal of Tropical Diseases, Sea Level Rise,
Storms and Severe Weather Events, and Species Extinction
                                           
with

Dr. Paul Reiter, Pasteur Institut, Paris
Prof. Nils-Axel Morner, Stockholm University
Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar, Environment Canada (ret.)
Prof. Patrick Michaels, U. Va. & Cato Institute
                                         

Monday, May 3rd
10 AM-1:30 PM
1334, Longworth House Office Building

Refreshments and lunch will be provided.

Reservations are required.
Please RSVP by e-mail to mebell@cei.org
or by calling Myron Ebell at CEI at (202) 331-2256.

Few issues generate more debate or emotion from activists than global warming. This Earth Day, the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) examines whether fears of human-induced climate change are based on sound science and what impact proposed solutions will have on the climate and the economy.

Come hear leading scientists and policy analysts set the record straight about the reality of climate change.

               For more information or to RSVP, please contact Matt Moore or Anna Frederick; 

Phone: 202-628-6671; Email: mmoore@ncpa.org  Visit us online at www.ncpa.org

The George C. Marshall Institute will host two briefings by Dr. David Legates, director of the University of Delawares Center for Climatic Research, speaking on “Global Warming and the Hydrologic Cycle: How is the Occurrence of Floods, Droughts, and Storms Likely to Change?” The first is at noon on Monday, April 12, in Room 406 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building. The second begins at noon on Wednesday, April 14, in Room 2325 of the Rayburn House Office Building. Lunch is provided. Reservations are required and may be made by phoning (202) 296-9655 or by e-mail to info@marshall.org.

Comments needed: The U. S. Climate Change Science Program is inviting interested parties to provide comments on the draft guidelines for the synthesis and assessment products that are being prepared by the Program to “support both policymaking and adaptive management.” Comments are due by May 3. See www.climatescience.gov for further details.

At a briefing in Capital Hill on October 5 Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, once a member of Greenpeace, argued that predictions of the world heading for ruin are wrong. In 1997 he set out to challenge acclaimed economist Julian Simon who refuted environmentalist claims that the world was running out of resources. Lomborg discovered that the data on a whole supported Simon. “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” Lomborg’s new book is a composite of graphs, charts and statistics that factually show the earth’s environment is steadily improving.

His book asserts among other things that the global warming issue is overblown. In short he attests, “Things are getting better.” In his presentation, Lomborg said that global warming is a real issue, but suggested that the prime danger is the Kyoto Treaty, which he cites as a grand waste of money. He said, “Essentially Kyoto will do very little to change global warming. On the other hand Kyoto will be very expensive. It will cost anywhere from $150-350 billion a year, and that’s a lot of money when compared to the total global aid of $50 billion a year. Basically, just for one year of Kyoto, we could give clean drinking water and sanitation to every person on earth. This would avoid 2 million deaths a year, and assist half a billion people from not getting seriously ill each year.”

Environmentalists tend to be ecologically pessimistic about the future. Veterans of the environmental movement such as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University and Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute have formed a litany of fears. These fears include depletion of natural resources, ever-growing population, extinction of species and pollution of the planet’s air and water. However, Lomborg’s approach is decidedly different. He says, “We must remove our myths about an imminent doomsday and remember we do not have to act in total desperation. Essential information is necessary to making the best possible decisions. Statistics tell you how the world is. Resources have become even more abundant and things are likely to progress in the future.”

The briefing was sponsored by the Cooler Heads Coalition, made up of 23 non-profit organizations that work on global warming issues.