On January 31, a two-day barrage of panels dealing with global warming issues concludes at Colorado State University. The sessions are part of an “unprecedented teach-in” taking place around the country coordinated by the Green House Network under the rubric Focus the Nation. But of the fifty CSU profs involved in the discussion, one is conspicuous by his absence.

No, it’s not philosophy professor Holmes Rolston, who’s hosting a thumbsucker on “The Ethics of Climate Change.” No, not Tom Dean, who teaches in something called the Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise Program, and weighs in today on “Economics and Climate Change,” nor chem prof Anthony Rappe, who addresses alternative energies, nor writer Laura Pritchett, who tackles the subject of dumpster diving. They’re all joining in, but as usual, professor emeritus Bill Gray finds himself, by choice or design, unincluded.

Gray, a forty-year veteran of CSU’s atmospheric sciences department and a leading hurricane researcher, is an outspoken skeptic of the manmade global-warming claims advanced by leading climatologists around the world, some of whom happen to be his former students. Gray acknowledges that the climate is changing but suggests that natural processes, including shifts in ocean circulation, are responsible.  To review how much heat he’s taken over that position, see our 2006 feature “The Skeptic”.

The teach-in presentations take manmade climate change, and particularly the insidious role of carbon dioxide in amplifying the greenhouse effect, as established science. Gray demurs, which is probably why you won’t find him on the premises. It’s too bad; he would have been an ideal panelist for a little give-and-take discussion scheduled for this afternoon, entitled “Doubting Thomases, Friends, Parents: Talking with the Unconvinced.” See blog here.

Many people believe the hype, hysteria and outright lies about man-made global warming. Some even get downright nasty if you dare question their belief.

However there are many flaws in the whole AGW (anthropogenic global warming) argument, the most basic ones being that C02 is a pollutant and that it drives climate change - neither of which are true. Then there is the argument that there is a consensus among scientists, that the debate is over. Actually, there are many scientists who question AGW and have written peer-reviewed articles on it. A recent Senate report lists more than 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who have criticized the climate claims made by the panel and former vice president Al Gore.

Many of these scientists say they have colleagues who share their views but are afraid to speak out because of fear of retribution. Recently five more scientists added their names to the list, including a Keene State College physics professor, Dr. Frederick Wolf. He has taught meteorology and climatology for 25 years.

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change will be held in New York in March. Hundreds of the world’s leading scientists, economists and policy experts will examine the skeptics’ side of the climate change debate. This conference will be historic and should go a long way toward bringing climate change out of the realm of hype and hysteria back to true science. See letter here.

Climate change has been ‘real’ on Earth and other planets for billions of years, for example - so has sunrise and gravity, but that doesn’t mean humans are causing them. And carbon dioxide, the ‘infrared absorbing gas’ blamed by climate campaigners for most of the past century’s modest warming, is no more a pollutant than is the major ‘greenhouse gas’ in the atmosphere, water vapour. Even the terms ‘greenhouse gases’ and the ‘greenhouse effect’ are misnomers since the Earth’s atmosphere behaves very differently to a greenhouse. Greenhouses use a solid barrier (the glass roof) to prevent heat loss by convection yet, lacking such a barrier, convection accounts for about half of the heat loss from the surface of the Earth.

Even as the impact of these phrases gradually diminishes among educated people, other equally misleading phraseology is coming to dominate the debate. One in particular has become so entrenched that even those who oppose fashionable thinking on climate change use it without thinking twice. We are told we must ‘reduce carbon’ or ‘carbon emissions’. To do this, we need to engage in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘carbon capture and storage’ and even build up ‘carbon credits’ to offset our ‘carbon liabilities’.

What on Earth is all that about? ‘Carbon’ is a solid, naturally occurring, non-toxic element found in all living things. Carbon forms thousands of compounds, much more than any other element. Everything from medicines to trees to oil to our own bodies and those of all other creatures are made of carbon compounds. Calling the gas ‘carbon’ encourages people to think of the gas as ‘pollution’ or something ‘dirty’, like graphite or soot. Calling CO2 by its proper name would help people remember that, regardless of whether its rise is causing climate problems (a point of strong debate in the climate science community), it is really an invisible gas essential to plant photosynthesis and so all life. Read more here.

A professor writing in the Medical Journal of Australia calls on the Australian government to impose a carbon charge of $5,000 on every birth, annual carbon fees of $800 per child and provide a carbon credit for sterilization.

A recent study from the Swedish Ministry of Sustainable Development argues that males have a disproportionately larger impact on global warming ("women cause considerably fewer carbon dioxide emissions than men and thus considerably less climate change").The Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that those who suggest that climate change is not a catastrophic challenge are no different than Hitler (he now claims that his words were taken out of context, but the reporter who conducted the interview, Lars From, stands by it). E. O. Wilson calls such people parasites. Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman writes that “global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.” There are always fringe articles and unfortunate comments in areas of active public debate. But the sheer volume of articles, the vicious language and the retranslation of so many social and cultural trends—divorce, obesity, gender conflict and much else—into terms of carbon footprint suggests that something more fundamental is going on.  Read more here.

This year is the 40th anniversary of Paul Ehrlich’s influential The Population Bomb, a book that predicted an apocalyptic overpopulation crisis in the 1970s and ‘80s. Ehrlich’s book provides a lesson we still haven’t learnt. His prophecy that the starvation of millions of people in the developed world was imminent was spectacularly wrong - humanity survived without any of the forced sterilisation that Ehrlich believed was necessary.  It’s easy to predict environmental collapse, but it never actually seems to happen.

The anniversary of The Population Bomb should put contemporary apocalyptic predictions in their proper context. If anything, our world - and the environment - just keeps getting better. Ehrlich was at the forefront of a wave of pessimistic doomsayers in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. And these doomsayers weren’t just cranks - or, if they were cranks, they were cranks with university tenure.

Despite what should be a humiliating failure for his theory of overpopulation, Ehrlich is still employed as a professor of population studies by Stanford University. Similarly, when George Wald predicted in a 1970 speech that civilisation was likely to end within 15 or 30 years, his audience was reminded that he was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist.

In retrospect, these fears seem a little bit silly. The green revolution that was brought about by advances in agricultural biotechnology came pretty close to eliminating the problem of food scarcity. Nor did the alarmists expect the large changes in demography and fertility rates that have occurred during the past few decades. Nevertheless, for people in the 1970s, predictions of apocalypse through overpopulation and famine were just as real as the predictions of an apocalypse caused by climate change are today. And, just like today, environmental activists and their friends in politics were lining up to propose dramatic changes to avert the crisis.

Optimism is in too short supply in discussions about the environment. But four decades after The Population Bomb, if we remember just how wrong visions of the apocalypse have been in the past, perhaps we will look to the future more cheerfully. Read full story here.

Sunday morning broke bright and clear. There was not a cloud in the sky, barely a breeze, and only 15 little degrees shivering in my porch thermometer. Please, Al, turn up the heat! I don’t know who else to ask. After all, the former vice president has been honored all over the world for having the most profound insight into the weather.

Last week, for the first time in modern memory, there was snow in Baghdad. A few days ago, NASA reported on the remarkable observation that more than 60 percent of 48 contiguous states were covered with snow. From Seattle to Bangor they were measuring the snowfall in feet instead of inches. Schools in Middle Tennessee took snow days. Children cheered. Parents wept. Please, Al, turn up the heat.

Air Force Snow Depth Analysis January 22nd. See how the Northern Hemisphere snowpack is well above normal here.

I have always enjoyed Gulf Shores, AL, with its white-as-sugar beaches, flocks of seabirds, leaping dolphins and Gulf breezes. Last weekend, the residents couldn’t see them through their frost-covered windows. The low temperature was 27 degrees. I would hazard a guess that sunbathers had no trouble finding a spot on the beach for their blankets. But then, it is rather difficult getting a suntan when you’re wearing a hooded fur parka, long johns, mittens and felt boots. Mr. Gore, please!  Read more here.

Excerpts: It is not so well known that the UN’s climate reports are also error-packed and misleading. To begin with, the UN denies that global temperatures were warmer than today in the medieval warm period. It overlooks the dozens of peer-reviewed papers that establish this fact, and continues to rely on the bogus and now-discredited “hockey-stick” graph by which its previous assessment in 2001 had tried to rewrite history. It was also warmer than today in Roman times, and in the Minoan warm period or Holocene climate optimum, when temperatures were warmer than today for 2000 years in the Bronze Age, firing the emergence of great civilizations worldwide. In each of the four previous interglacial periods, temperatures were 10F warmer than today’s. For most of the past half billion years, temperatures were nearly always 12.5F warmer than the present. So the warming that has now stopped (there has been no statistically significant warming since 1998) was well within the natural variability of the climate.

Interglacial periods courtesy of Bob Carter. Full size image here.

Next, the UN has unwisely repealed the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation, the fundamental astrophysical law that relates changes in radiant energy to changes in temperature. The entire debate is about exactly that matter. Yet in 1,600 pages the UN does not mention this crucial equation once. Result: the UN’s “no-feedbacks” value of lambda is way too high. As an eminent physics professor pointed out to me recently, if the UN were correct, global surface temperature would now be 20F higher than it is.

It gets worse. The UN’s computer models predict that in the tropics the rate of increase in temperature five miles above the surface will be three times the rate of increase down here. But 50 years of atmospheric measurement, first by balloon-borne radiosondes and then by satellites, show that the air above the tropics is not merely failing to warm at three times the surface rate: for 25 years it has been cooling. The absence of the tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot” indicates that the computer models—expensive guesswork—on which the UN’s rickety case is founded are, in a fundamental way, misunderstanding the way the atmosphere behaves (Douglass & Knox, 2004; Douglass et al., 2007). Read full op ed piece here.

So many thoughts swirled in my head at the unfolding of Al Gore’s narrative on the inevitable demise of the planet due to global warming. He presented alarming trends that would supposedly result in the melting of the polar ice caps, cataclysmic weather patterns, drought and floods. Yes, the climate is changing, that is true. I will not deny to feeling disturbed by allegations that the decimation of the human race is being caused by the burning of colossal amounts of fossil fuel. However and contrary to what is being driven in the documentary again and again, we have to be cognizant that climate change is a natural phenomenon.

As a geologist, I know that fluctuations in global temperatures are as old as the earth itself. For the past several million years, the pattern of rising temperatures often heralded the onset of a new ice age. It may seem incomprehensible but you can check the science. If the planet gets hotter, it does not mean that the rise will go on and on and cause the planet to self-destruct. If that were the case, we would have been annihilated millions of years ago. After some time, rising global temperatures actually instigate the earth to go on a self-conserving mode, causing it to cool down. In four thousand years or less, the planet will be covered by sheets of ice and some tropical countries may experience snow for the first time - it’s too bad we won’t be around to frolic in a winter wonderland. Read more here.