lorry driver is taking the Government to court over a film that he believes is biased and shouldn’t be shown to children in schools

‘The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over.” So said David Miliband in February. Mr. Miliband, who was then environment secretary, was responding to a report from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This left the minister so confident that there was nothing more to say on the matter that he and Alan Johnson, the then education secretary, announced that they would be sending a film about climate change to all 3,385 secondary schools in England.

Since ministers regarded the debate as well and truly over, they were “delighted” to send school children a polemic that took as its central thesis the argument that climate change - the increase in global temperatures over the past 50 years - was mainly the result of man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

This is indeed the view of the IPCC, and most of the world’s climate scientists. But other people disagree. One of them is Stewart Dimmock, 45, a lorry driver and school governor from Kent. His sons, aged 11 and 14, attend a secondary school in Dover which has presumably received a copy of Mr Gore’s film. “I care about the environment as much as the next man,” says Mr Dimmock. “However, I am determined to prevent my children from being subjected to political spin in the classroom.”

Read more here.

Fears that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will die off in the next 50 years are overblown, says Mitchell Taylor, the Government of Nunavut’s director of wildlife research. “I think it’s naïve and presumptuous,” Taylor said of the report, released by U.S. Geological Survey on Friday, which warns that many of the world’s polar bears will die as sea ice vanishes due to a warming climate.

“As the sea ice goes, so go the polar bears,” said Steve Amstrup, who led the study. In fact, the USGS predicts the only polar bears to survive by the end of the century will be those found in Canada’s Arctic archipelago, and on the west coast of Greenland. Those in Alaska and Russia, and in much of Nunavut and all of Nunavik, will have perished. But Taylor says the report is needlessly pessimistic.

He points to Davis Strait, one of the southern-most roaming grounds of polar bears. According to the USGS, Davis Strait ought to be among the first places where polar bears will starve due to shrinking seasonal sea ice, which scientists say will deprive the bears of a vital platform to hunt seals. Yet “Davis Strait is crawling with polar bears,” Taylor said. “It’s not safe to camp there. They’re fat. The mothers have cubs. The cubs are in good shape.”

Other than Davis Strait, which is hunted by Inuit from Pangnirtung, Iqaluit and Kimmirut, the USGS also predicts polar bears will perish in Baffin Bay, Foxe Basin, and South and West Baffin. The Government of Nunavut is conducting a study of the Davis Strait bear population. Results of the study won’t be released until 2008, but Taylor says it appears there are some 3,000 bears in an area - a big jump from the current estimate of about 850 bears. “That’s not theory. That’s not based on a model. That’s observation of reality,” he says. And despite the fact that some of the most dramatic changes to sea ice is seen in seasonal ice areas such as Davis Strait, seven or eight of the bears measured and weighed for the study this summer are among the biggest on record, Taylor said. See more here.

Environmental activist and An Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David received a very warm welcome, from the green-friendly anchors on the Wednesday “Today” show, when she came on to promote her children’s book, A Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming. During David’s interview NBC’s Natalie Morales noted that the book’s publisher, Scholastic, was trying to place the book into schools everywhere and proclaimed: “We hope to see it there.” Morales even bragged that her own son was already being indoctrinated: “They’re already talking and learning about this in school. I mean, my own son already knows, ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.’ You know the three ‘R’s.” No slouch herself, when it comes to preaching about global warming, Morales’ colleague Ann Curry also proudly showed off her own son’s concern about climate change in the following tease for the segment:

Natalie Morales: “And then explaining global warming to your kids and why it’s so important. We have Laurie David, who helped produce An Inconvenient Truth. She’s gonna be here to talk about that.”

Ann Curry: “We were watching Nightly News last night, my son and I watched Anne Thompson’s piece about global warming and he’s just, was just riveted, I mean, by this picture of the, of the melting Greenland. So I think we should be talking to our kids about that.”

Read more about this interview here.

Broadly speaking, there are two classes of academic scientists involved in environmental and safety issues. Group A are those who publish their research results and concepts mainly in scientific journals, but are seldom reported in the national news media. Before being published in a scientific journal, every article must be reviewed by fellow scientists (a process called peer review). Many articles are rejected. If accepted and published, they are still subjected to criticism by thousands of fellow scientists.

Among scientists, a person is judged objectively on the quality of research and the soundness of ideas and interpretations. But professional environmentalists are often judged by the media and some of their peers by whether their results and concepts support activist agendas.

Most professional environmentalists find themselves in Group B--those “scientists” who are often seen on TV, whose books are on bestseller lists, and whose opinions are widely found in popular magazines and newspapers. There are thousands of scientists in Group A, but a small number in Group B--people such as Lester Brown, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Stephen Schneider, Irving Selikoff, and Samuel Epstein, to name a few. This group avoids peer review.

They write books on controversial subjects and use the news media as a forum for their views, the more sensational the better, whether to sell books or to generate invitations for speeches and interviews. They are alarmists, and it pays very well to be an alarmist. Most are distinguished scientists within their fields of expertise. They then move into the eco-environmental or health arenas, where their expertise no longer holds water, but their reputations cloud that fact from public view.  Read more here.

Bacteria growing in the low-salinity Amazon River plume waters, which stretch 3,000 km into the tropical Atlantic Ocean, are found to absorb significant amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere1. Because tropical oceans are warm, they hold less dissolved carbon than oceans elsewhere and so typically emit CO2 to the atmosphere. But research now shows that communities of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, reliant on the nutrients contained in the Amazon river run-off, can shift the air–ocean balance so that instead of emitting CO2 the ocean absorbs it.

Sarah Cooley from the University of Georgia and colleagues measured levels of dissolved carbon in the Amazon River plume during April and May of 2003. Combining their observations of ocean and river composition with those from previous studies and with satellite observations of the plume, they calculated the total annual CO2 uptake by the plume waters.

They found the CO2 uptake, driven by bacterial consumption of carbon, to be about 15 million tonnes per year — emissions equivalent to about 20,000 return flights from London to Los Angeles. Carbon sequestration comes as a surprise in a region thought to emit CO2 to the atmosphere.
See story and reference here.

Japanese office workers are being forced to sweat in the name of global warming. But before Americans consume too much “Green” Kool-Aid and suffer a similar fate, they may want to consider this week’s global warming developments.

The Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page story (Sep. 11) that Japanese offices are keeping summertime office temperatures at a “steamy 82 degrees Fahrenheit” to help Japan use less energy and reduce its carbon dioxide emissions. Offices are now so uncomfortable that the traditional suit-and-tie dress code has been abandoned even though “82 degrees can only be comfortable if you’re thin, naked and stay still,” according to a Japanese physiology professor.

Who should be sweating instead, however, are the climate alarmists, as the purported scientific basis of their campaign continues to melt from underneath them. A new study published in the journal Nature (Sep. 13) crafted to support the notion that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide drive increases in global temperature actually, if read carefully, casts further doubt on that idea. Read why here.

Perhaps Japanese workers don’t mind sweating and stinking their way through the workday because of politicized science, but it remains to be seen whether American workers will be willing to suffer the same discomfort and degradation for the same bogus reasons.

A fundamental scientific error lurks in a book calculated to terrify schoolchildren about “global warming”, Robert Ferguson, SPPI president, announced today: “The Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming”, by Laurie David and Cambria Gordon, is intentionally designed to propagandize unsuspecting school children who do not have enough knowledge to know what is being done to them.  A new SPPI paper briefly examines a cardinal error, found on page 18 of the David book, where she mousetraps children: “The more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide, the more the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph. What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising CO2 to rising temperature scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution (sic) and global warming.”

What really makes the David-Gordon graph “amazing” is that it’s egregiously counterfactual. Worse, in order to contrive a visual representation for their claim that CO2 controls temperature change, the authors present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature.

Graph with reversed curves corrected

The manipulation is critical because David’s central premise posits that CO2 drives temperature, yet the peer-reviewed literature is unanimous that CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes.  Case in point, on page 103 of their book, David cites the work of Siegenthaler et al. (2005). However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite, that CO2 lags “with respect to the Antarctic temperature over glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial cycles.”

“Parents and teachers should be concerned enough to demand that the publisher, Scholastic Books, recall, pulp and correct the error before mores copies reach innocent children,” said Ferguson.

Icecap Note: Laurie David and Cambria Gordon have dedicated their new book, “The Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming” to their daughters, Mark Jabo thought that was such a great idea that he decided to write his own dedication to his only son to be used in his next book. See the two letters here.

FOR YEARS, supporters of global warming alarmism have repeated an odd refrain: Even if we’re wrong, we’re right.

Sen. Timothy E. Wirth, D-Colo., said it in 1988, as the National Journal reported. “What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is (to) try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

I regularly receive e-mails with similar arguments. Or as one reader put it, “If global warming is not real, and we spend money trying to fight it, what harm will come of our mistake? Cleaner air? If global warming is real, and we do nothing, what harm will come of our laxity? On which side should we err?”

The very question presupposes that the sacrifices that Americans will have to make are small. To go the distance supported by global warming alarmists requires big changes.
If the alarmists are right, the whole world will have to change and it will be onerous. If the global warming alarmists are wrong, much of the sacrifices they demand will have been for nothing.  Read more here.