2004

British science advisor goes beyond parody

by William Yeatman on May 11, 2004

in Politics

The alarmism of Sir David King, the British governments chief scientific adviser, has become even more hysterical in recent days. Not content with repeatedly calling global warming a bigger threat than terrorism even after the Madrid attacks of March 11 and publicly criticizing the U. S. administration, he has now gone, as the British say, “completely off the deep end.”

On May 2, the Independent on Sunday reported King as saying that, “Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked. He said that the Earth was entering the first hot period since 60 million years ago, when there was no ice on the planet and the rest of the globe could not sustain human life.”

The report went on, “Sir David says that there is plenty of evidence to back up his warning. Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the main green-house gas causing climate change were already 50 per cent higher than at any time in the last 420,000 years. The last time they were at this level 379 parts per million and rising was 60 million years ago during a rapid period of global warming in the Palaeocene epoch, he said. Levels soared to 1,000 parts per million, causing a massive reduction of life on earth.

“No ice was left on earth. Antarctica was the best place for mammals to live, and the rest of the world would not sustain human life,” he said. Sir David warned that if the world did not curb its burning of fossil fuels we will reach that level by the end of the century.”

In a separate story in the Independent (May 13), King said that he thought the upcoming sci-fi movie, The Day after Tomorrow, would make a valuable contribution to the public debate on global warming. He even praised certain aspects of the film as realistic: “The opening scenes setting up the key scientific factors and introducing the viewer to the scientists and the scientific-political interface are in my view remarkably realistic. I think palaeoclimatologists can closely identify with the discussion. The sceptical reactions that the scientists received are also rather well depicted.”

As the BBC put it (May 13), “The blockbuster climate disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow contains badly flawed science and ignores the laws of physics, leading UK scientists believe.” It seems somewhat odd for the chief scientific adviser to praise the something that “ignores the laws of physics” for its political qualities. King, a professor of chemistry at Cambridge, has no expertise in climate science.

McCain vows another vote on energy rationing bill

by William Yeatman on May 11, 2004

in Politics

At a May 6 hearing, Senator John McCain (R-Az.) vowed to seek a second vote before the end of this Congress on his bill to cap greenhouse gas emissions. McCain is the chief co-sponsor along with Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) of the Climate Stewardship Act, S. 139, which would create the infrastructure necessary to ration hydrocarbon energy.

McCain made the remarks at a May 6 hearing of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which he chairs. The purpose of the hearing was to promote global warming alarmism. Notable was the testimony of Paul Epstein, M.D., the well-known expert on anything that might further his political agenda. Epstein tried to associate the increasing incidence of childhood asthma with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, although he never made the connection clear.

S. 139 does not have the votes to be passed out of the Environment and Public Works Committee, yet McCain secured a vote for it on the Senate floor last October 30, when weaker version of the bill was defeated 43 to 55. McCain forced Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to schedule this vote on S. 139 in exchange for McCains agreement to allow the Domenici energy bill to be replaced by the Daschle energy bill from the previous Congress. That switch required unanimous consent under Senate rules.

Rumors are circulating on Capitol Hill that McCain plans to force another vote on S. 139 by using the same tactics if his party leadership requires his vote on some key procedural matter this summer. It is also rumored that Senator John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) is urging his ten Democratic colleagues who voted no on S. 139 last October to switch their votes and thereby pass the bill. It is surmised by some Senate staff that the Kerry presidential campaign believe this outcome would help Kerry and hurt President Bush in the election.

Are global warming disasters really on the way?

by William Yeatman on May 11, 2004

in Science

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

Will global warming bring on the new Ice Age?

by William Yeatman on May 9, 2004

in Science

The forthcoming Hollywood movie, The Day After Tomorrow stars Dennis Quaid as an earnest climatologist trying to save the world from catastrophic global coolingbrought on by burning fossil fuels. The special effects are said to be spectacular, but the film is no more realistic than Planet of the Apes.

One of the movies big dramatic elements is that the meltwater from globally warmed polar ice caps has overwhelmed the Gulf Stream, so London and New York are turning into ice cubes.

The last time such a thing happened was 12,800 years ago, when the last Ice Age ended and we had an extra trillion tons of ice to melt. The Laurentide Ice Sheet then covered all of Canada, and the U.S. into Ohio. Similar ice sheets covered much of northern Europe and Asia. There was so much water tied up in ice that the ocean levels dropped 300 feet. Stone Age hunters walked to America across the Bering Sea with dry feet.

Has anybody noticed an ice sheet a mile thick over Chicago recently?  Where did Hollywood get the extra trillion tons of ice to shoot this movie?

The other problem for Mr. Quaids credibility is that the Gulf Stream isnt what keeps Britain warm. Its the Rocky Mountains.

The textbooks say the Gulf Stream is what keeps Britain from being sub-Arctic, but theyre wrong. Theyre based on nothing more substantial than a statement by a U.S. Navy lieutenant, Matthew Maury in1856.

One of the benign offices of the Gulf Stream is to convey heat from the Gulf of Mexico, where otherwise it would become excessive, and to disperse it in regions beyond the Atlantic for the amelioration of the climates of the British Isles and of all Western Europe, wrote Maury.

He wasnt wrong. He just wasnt very right.

The Gulf Stream does carry heat from the tropics to the shores of Britainin fact, 27,000 times as much heat as UKs powerplants generate. The warm current helps keep London 25 to 35 degrees F warmer than Newfoundland, which is at the same latitude.

However, new climate research shows that only about 10 percent of Britains winter warming comes from the Gulf Stream. Half of the rest comes from the Atlantic Ocean itself, which holds heat longer than the land.

The rest of the warming for Britain is delivered by west-to-east winds from the Americas Rocky Mountains.

Dr. Richard Seager, of Columbia Universitys Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, says, Belief in the benign role of the Gulf Stream is so widespread that it has become folklore.  But Seager and his research team used weather data from the past 50 yearsand a powerful computer model to describe how heat is shifted around the globe. They found the key to Britains climate was the warm wind from southern North America. The American wind is forced into a giant meander as it flows southeast around the Rocky Mountains.

This vast kink in the atmosphere circulation helps to explain the winter temperature contrast across the North Atlantic, says Seager. Winds, going to eastern North America, flow north around the Rockies and carry cold air to New York. The southern air flow moves over the American southwest and on to Europe. When the scientists flattened the U.S. topography by removing the Rockies from their computer models, British winter temperatures fell radicallyand the summer temperatures became suffocatingly hot.

The other big problem for the Quaid movie is that even major, abrupt climate change isnt very dramatic by Hollywood standards.

Icelanders colonized their island about 850 AD, and lived through the Medieval Warming (9001300 AD), which had the highest temperatures the earth has seen in 5,000 years. Then they suffered through the chillingly colder winters of the Little Ice Age (13001850 AD) with their winds and storms coming straight from the Polar Ice Cap.

As of 1917, after 1500 years of constant major climate changes, the Icelanders argued they hadnt seen any! They thought theyd just had periodic bad weather. But theres so much bad weather in the good (warmer) phases of the climate cycle that it takes a century of weather data to reliably spot a bad trend. The Icelanders didnt have thermometersor movies.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Indianapolis and the Director for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org).  He was formerly a senior analyst for the U.S. Department of State. 

Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421

New climate study finds ‘global warming’ by subtracting cooling that wasn’t there

by William Yeatman on May 4, 2004

in Science

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 —

New book, ‘Adapt or Die,’ launched in DC

by William Yeatman on May 3, 2004

in Kyoto Negotiations, Politics, Science

Jami

The Marshall Institute put on an event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC today to announce the new book, Adapt Or Die: The science, politics and economics of climate change.

Adapt or Die is a project of the International Policy Network, edited by IPN’s Kendra Okonski. At the event today, Okonski introduced several contributors to the book, who each gave remarks on pressing issues in climate change.

Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institut in Paris spoke about the history of malaria. Reiter pointed out that malaria was present during the Little Ice Age, at longitudes ranging all the way up to the Arctic Circle. This historical perspective severely undercuts the manic arguments insisting that malaria is a tropical disease poised to explode with any semi-significant climate warming.

Professor Nils-Axel Morner of Stockholm University discussed his research on sea level in the Maldives which contradicts dire predictions of sea-level rise in the the next century. Morners humorous remarks emphasized the need for scientists to not go too far astray from their respective specialties lest their research come off more like a summer blockbuster than a serious scientific effort.

Barun Mitra of the Liberty Institute in New Delhi, India talked about the effect proposed global warming policies could have in forcing “energy poverty” on the worlds poor, leaving them far worse off than under any theorized climate warming where they could afford amenities such as air conditioning

Rounding out the program were IPNs Julian Morris and Indur Goklany, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Simon discussed the Kyoto Protocols impact on trade and Goklany focused on the wisdom of mitigation versus adaptation as a strategy for dealing with global warming.

Okonski emphasized that the book does not take any one side on the scientific debate concerning anthropogenic global warming. Adapt or Die is available from Amazon UK and from IPN.

Impacts of Global Warming: Why the Alarmist View is Wrong

by William Yeatman on May 2, 2004

in Politics, Science

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.

Poor people dont need to fly

by William Yeatman on April 27, 2004

in Politics

In a peculiar echo of the Duke of Wellingtons famous remark that the railways were a bad idea because they let the poor move around the country, Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley suggested on April 15 that something had to be done about poor and middle class Britons flying too much. 

 

She wrote, And yes, it would meancharging the real environmental cost of cheap air travel, either levied on airports or aviation fuel, or both.  We should recognise that this reduces human happiness for the millions who benefit from it.  As with the congestion charge, we should accept that this would hit some poorer people’s mobility, stealing a recent freedom away from them.  But we should remember that the boom in air travel is mainly fuelled by middle-class people flying more frequently.

 

The UKs Friends of the Earth has taken up the challenge, pointing out that the poor flying abroad for holidays is not necessary.  Richard Dyer told the BBC (Apr. 27), The vast majority of flights are discretionary, for leisure.   These are not essential.

Day After Tomorrow will never come

by William Yeatman on April 27, 2004

in Science, Students

Following on from the comments by MITs Carl Wunsch that the Gulf Stream is safe as long as the wind blows and the Earth turns, several other scientists have used the pages of Science magazine (Apr. 16) to pour scorn on the conceit behind the forthcoming movie, The Day After Tomorrow.  The movie is predicated on the idea that unchecked global warming will cause an abrupt climate shift that will cause a new ice age in the United States.

 

Canadian scientists Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria and Claude Hillaire-Marcel of the Universit de Quebec Montreal tackled the subject in a Perspectives article entitled, Global Warming and the Next Ice Age.  They pointed out that the view of global warming causing an ice age prevails in the popular press despite a relatively solid understanding of glacial inception and growth.

 

The scientists review of the literature concluded that, It is certainly true that if the AMO [Atlantic Meriodonal Oscillation] were to become inactive, substantial short-term cooling would result in western Europe, especially during the winter.  However, it is important to emphasize that not a single coupled model assessed by the 2001 IPCC Working Group I on Climate Change Science (4) predicted a collapse in the AMO during the 21st century.  Even in those models where the AMO was found to weaken during the 21st century, there would still be warming over Europe due to the radiative forcing associated with increased levels of greenhouse gases.

 

Pointing out that models that do show AMO collapse are not flux-adjusted like newer models, they conclude, Even the recent observations of freshening in the North Atlantic (a reduction of salinity due to the addition of freshwater) appear to be consistent with the projections of perhaps the most sophisticated nonflux adjusted model.  Ironically, this model suggests that such freshening is associated with an increased AMO (16).  This same model proposes that it is only Labrador Sea Water formation that is susceptible to collapse in response to global warming.

 

In light of the paleoclimate record and our understanding of the contemporary climate system, it is safe to say that global warming will not lead to the onset of a new ice age.  These same records suggest that it is highly unlikely that global warming will lead to a widespread collapse of the AMOdespite the appealing possibility raised in two recent studiesalthough it is possible that deep convection in the Labrador Sea will cease.  Such an event would have much more minor consequences on the climate downstream over Europe.

 

In the same issue, pioneering oceanographer Wallace Broecker dismisses the recent report rejected by the Pentagon that is predicated on a similar scenario.  He comments in his letter, Exaggerated scenarios serve only to intensify the existing polarization over global warming.

IPCC faces criticism for bad economics in UK House of Lords

by William Yeatman on April 27, 2004

in Politics

Lord Lawson, a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, took the opportunity of an April 21 debate in the United Kingdoms House of Lords to accuse the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of operating an environmentalist closed shop that is unsullied by any acquaintance with economics, statistics or, indeed, economic history.  The debate was initiated by Lord Taverne, a former minister in previous Labour governments, who asked the government whether they were satisfied by the economic and statistical work of the IPCC.   

Lawson said that Taverne had put his finger on what is potentially a major scandal.  The basis for this assessment is the criticism made by Ian Castles and David Henderson of the economic assumptions used by the IPCC (see lead story).  This view is upheld by a new report from the International Policy Network, which assesses the way in which the IPCC predicts future climate change. 

 According to the IPN report, the IPCC appears to have exaggerated its estimates of temperature increases by using highly implausible scenarios of future growth in emissions of greenhouse gases.  It has done so by underestimating technological advancement and greatly overestimating gains in economic growth.  In order to gain credibility, the report argues that the IPCC should rely more heavily on the work of economic historians and statisticians.  (International Policy Network, Apr. 23).

 

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →