2004

DETROITFord announced a Sept. 3 rollout date for its new Ford Foresight, a hydrogen-powered SUV that, if it reaches sales projections, will deplete the earth’s supply of hydrogen by 2070. “America has asked for a car that does not use fossil fuels, and we’ve delivered,” Ford CEO William Ford Jr. said Monday. “With an engine nearly 20 times as powerful as that of our gas-burning SUV, the 11-ton Foresight will be unaffected by the price-gouging whims of OPEC, as it uses water electrolysis to gather fuel from the oceans and the fresh mountain air.” Ford acknowledged that, when hydrogen supplies are depleted, the usefulness of the Foresight, as well as life on earth as we know it, will end. (The Onion, Americas leading parody news source, found on the web June 15).

A recent study conducted by G. Zhou and colleagues (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, 2004) suggests once again that no strong correlation exists between global warming and malaria outbreaks. This stands in stark contrast to the oft-repeated claims of self-described malaria experts, such as the physician Paul Epstein.

In seven study sites conducted in the East African Highlands, Zhou et al. found that “malaria dynamics are largely driven by autoregression and/or seasonality” and that “the observed large among-site variation in the sensitivity to climate fluctuations may be governed by complex interactions between climate and biological and social factors,” including “land use, topography, P. falciparum genotypes, malaria vector species composition, availability of vector control and healthcare programs, drug resistance, and other socioeconomic factors,” among which are “failure to seek treatment or delayed treatment of malaria patients, and HIV infections in the human population,” which they say have “become increasingly prevalent.”

It is becoming increasingly clear that the scientific consensus of malariologists, rather than climate change “experts,” is that climate is a minor factor in the recent spread of vector-borne diseases.

An overlooked study suggests that evidence from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia points to corals being strengthened, not weakened, by rising temperatures.

The study directly contradicts earlier findings by Kleypas et al. (1999) that received considerable media attention for its conclusion that the rising CO2 content of the Earths atmosphere would lower the saturation state of the carbonate mineral aragonite in the surface waters of the worlds oceans and lead to weaker, more fragile, and slower growing coral reefs.

The Center comments, “In light of these real-world empirical-based calculations, and in stark contrast to the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the world’s climate alarmists, Lough and Barnes thus conclude that coral calcification rates may have already significantly increased along the GBR in response to global climate change.  And they are likely to increase even more, we would add, if the air’s CO2 content and temperature continue to rise in the years ahead.”

This highly unusual admission comes as the result of an article by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, associate professor of economics at the University of Guelph, that exposed serious errors in data and methodology.  The editors of Nature agreed and required Mann et al. to fix their mistakes.

“Corrigendum: Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries” ends with an extraordinary statement: “None of these errors affect our previously published results.”  McIntyre and McKitrick dispute this statement: “We have done the calculations and can assert categorically that the claim is false. We have made a journal submission to this effect and will explain the matter fully when that paper is published.”

It is also important to realize that this correction was not published as an Addendum, which, according to Natures published policy, is the case when “Authors inadvertently omitted significant information available to them at the time” but which does “not contradict the original publication,” as would surely be the case if MBH are correct in their assertion. Corrigenda are only published, “If the scientific accuracy or reproducibility of the original paper is compromised.”

Up until this climbdown, Mann, an assistant professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, had ferociously defended his hockey-stick papers and had launched several ad hominem attacks on McIntyre and McKitrick.  The corrigendum listed five references, but not the paper by McIntyre and McKitrick (“Corrections to the Mann et al (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series,” Energy and Environment 14(6)) that first drew attention to his mistakes.

The hockey-stick purports to show that the global mean temperature was relatively constant through the first nine hundred years of the past millennium and then rose sharply in the twentieth century.  It was featured as proof of global warming in the U. N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report.  A number of papers have been published that challenge either the hockey sticks reconstruction of past temperatures (e.g., Esper et al., Science, 2002) or Manns handling of data in general (e.g. Chapman et al, Geophysical Research Letters, 2004).

Mann had to publish another correction to his published work in June in the Journal of Geophysical Results, following complaints from other paleoclimatologists that his methodology in another paper did not show as big a warming trend from the end of the Little Ice Age as is necessary. In other words, Mann underestimated how cold the Little Ice Age was.