Some scientists, journalists and activists see a direct link between the post-1995 upswing in Atlantic hurricanes and global warming brought on by human-induced greenhouse gas increases. This belief, however, is unsupported by long-term Atlantic and global observations.

Consider, for example, the intensity of U.S. land-falling hurricanes over time—keeping in mind that the periods must be long enough to reveal long-term trends. During the most recent 50-year period, 1957 to 2006, 83 hurricanes hit the United States, 34 of them major. In contrast, during the 50-year period from 1900 to 1949, 101 hurricanes (22% more) made U.S. landfall, including 39 (or 15% more) major hurricanes.

If global warming isn’t the cause of the increased Atlantic hurricane activity seen over the past dozen years, what is? My Colorado State University colleagues and I attribute the increase in hurricane activity to the speed-up of water circulating in the Atlantic Ocean. This circulation began to strengthen in 1995—at exactly the same time that Atlantic hurricane activity showed a large upswing.

See full story here.

The June issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (a peer-reviewed journal) has a couple of interesting articles about the climate network here in the United States. I am posting these articles not to claim that warming has not occurred, because it has, but to shed further light on how much uncertainty there is not only in the data but in the future of the network itself. Roger Pielke Sr. from The University of Colorado at Boulder, along with 14 other coauthors has an article titled: Documentation of Uncertainties and Biases Associated with Surface Temperature Measurement Sites for Climate Change Assessment.  The conclusion of the authors’ analysis is: “…there are large uncertainties associated with the surface temperature trends from the poorly sited stations. Moreover, rather than providing additional independent information, the use of the data from poorly sited stations provides a false sense of confidence in the robustness of the surface temperature trend assessments.”

USHCN Station Hopkingsville, KY

Read more on this story and another on problems with the precipitation measurement network as well as an open letter to congress from the American Association of State Climatologists about the slow collapse of the 116 year climate observing network on Craig’s blog here.

Climate alarmists are always talking about abrupt climate changes resulting from earth’s rising temperature passing some ominous “tipping point” that triggers the occurrence of more numerous and severe storms, floods and droughts. One need only look to Al Gore’s testimony of 21 March 2007 before the United States Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee for confirmation of this fact, wherein he states - without equivocation - that “droughts are becoming longer and more intense,” but, of course, without offering any evidence in support of his contention.
To fill this gaping void with respect to drought, we here report the findings of Narisma et al. (2007), who analyzed “global historical rainfall observations to detect regions that have undergone large, sudden decreases in rainfall [that] are statistically significant at the 99% level, are persistent for at least ten years, and .. have magnitudes that are [mostly] 10% lower than the climatological normal (1901-2000 rainfall average).”

With respect to the temporal distribution of the 30 severe and persistent droughts identified by Narisma et al., seven of them occurred during the first two decades of the 20th century (1901-1920), seven occurred during the next two decades (1921-1940), eight during the middle two decades of the century (1941-1960), but only five during the next two decades (1961-1980), and a mere three during the final two decades of the century (1981-2000), which is not at all what one would have expected if the climate-alarmist thesis that is propounded by Gore and his followers was correct.

Read the full review here.

Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter:

“The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4%) in atmospheric carbon dioxide. “Second, lower-atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17%).”

One of the most contentious areas of climate-change science involves computer General Circulation Models (GCMs), the predictive tool that generate most of the scary scenarios that arouse public alarm. Prof. Carter has long been a critic of these models, which claim to project for us what the climate will be in the year 2100.

In the past, Prof. Carter has drawn the ire of global-warming proponents with his GCM critiques. Now, to his satisfaction, he has support in his critique from an unlikely source—Kevin Trenberth, whom he thinks of as “one of the advisory high priests of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

As Dr. Trenberth recently acknowledged to Nature journal’s Climate Feedback blog, IPCC models cannot predict future climate because they don’t reflect reality: “None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate,” he stated.

Read more here.

Bordering the North Atlantic Ocean, North America would logically be expected to provide considerable proxy evidence for the existence of the millennial-scale oscillation of climate that is so clearly revealed in the meticulous work of Bond et al. (1997, 2001). And it does!

Note: The Idso’s go on to report on 13 such studies and reference a total of 28 papers that support this historical variability.

In light of these observations, all responsible people must confront what we call the problem of the three difficulties. First, it is difficult to deny the existence of the pervasive millennial-scale oscillation of climate that alternately produces periods of relative warmth and coolness (such as the Modern Warm Period and Little Ice Age) at regular intervals throughout both glacial and interglacial periods alike. Second, it is difficult to deny that the phenomenon responsible for the extreme regularity of the climatic transitions that produce these alternating warm and cool periods has its origin somewhere beyond earth. Third, it is difficult to deny that the other-worldly place of origin of this phenomenon is the sun.

Of course, it is no problem at all if one does not deny the reality of these observations; but one must then conclude that 20th-century global warming was most probably just the most recent phase of this natural climatic oscillation that is totally independent of the historical increase in the air’s CO2 content. But that, of course, would be politically incorrect. Hence, it would appear that one must make a choice in this matter between science and political agenda. We prefer the former. How about you?

To read more of this important research summary, see the detailed paper here.

The author, Warren Meyer, a small business owner, has the academic background and experience needed to handle the science used to explain global warming, and the ability to put into words statements that expose the weakness of the case for anthropogenic warming (AGW) of the atmosphere. His undergraduate major at Princeton included basic physics courses as he completed a degree in engineering. His MBA at Harvard included work in forecasting economic futures.  In the foreword of his book, he says that his effort is not an attempt to materially advance climate science, but rather to present the case against the proponents of human-caused global warming in a clear and understandable manner.  He has succeeded in that goal and with a good editor and some changes in the topics that he covers could produce a volume that would be a major contribution to the literature on global climate change and counteract some of the damage that Al Gore and James Hansen have done to climate science. One should note that he considers his current book a first step on the way to acquiring a greater understanding of climate science.

One of the best chapters is entitled “Is It OK to Be a Skeptic?” in which he takes on the charges of the AGW enthusiasts of bias and discusses their need to exaggerate the effects of global warming.

In the section in which he discusses the global warming movement he has identified most of the groups that have joined the fight to save the world, but did not include the rather large number of religious groups that have become followers of Gore. He might also include a discussion of the 1000 apostles trained by Gore in Nashville to go out into the wilderness to spread the word to the “heathens” who have yet to be converted into changing their life styles. The author covers the fundamentals of the global warming theories and the frightening stories about the effects of climate change very well. These chapters include most of the recent findings of scientists working in the field. Read more here. You can see the on-line PDF of the book here.

The earth has been subjected to many warming and cooling periods over millions of years, none of which were of human origin. Data from many independent sources have mutually corroborated these effects. They include data from coring both the Antarctic ice cap and sediments from the Sargasso Sea, from stalagmites, from tree rings, from up-wellings in the oceans, and from crustaceans trapped in pre-historic rock formations.

The onset of each 100,000-year abrupt warming period has been coincident with emissions into the atmosphere of large amounts of both carbon dioxide and methane greenhouse gases, which absorb additional heat from the sun, a secondary warming effect. Solar radiation would appear to be the initial forcing event in which warming oceans waters release dissolved carbon dioxide, and melt methane hydrates, both of which are present in the oceans in vast quantities. Subsequent declines in radiation are associated with long cooling periods in which the green house gases then gradually disappear (are re-absorbed) into terrestrial and ocean sinks, as reflected in the data from coring the Antarctic Ice Cap and Sargasso Sea.

The current 100 year solar radiation cycle may now have reached its peak, and irradiation intensity has been observed to be declining. This might account for the very recent net cessation of emission of green house gases into the atmosphere starting about 1988, in spite of increasing generation of anthropomorphically-sourced industrial-based green house gases.

While it seems likely that solar radiation, rather than human activity, is the “forcing agent” for global warming, the subject surely needs more study. Read whole story here. Dr. D. Bruce Merrifield is a former Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs and Professor Emeritus of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds Masters and Doctoral degrees in physical organic chemistry and currently is a member of the Visiting Committee for Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Three Canadian Scientists responded to a letter criticizing an Op Ed in the Hill Times by Dr. Harris and Dr. Tim Ball.  Dr. Madhav Khandekar, one of the respondees says it this way

Dr. John Stone while criticizing the opinion piece seems to naively believe that the climate change documents prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the last word in the complex science of climate change. Nothing could be further from the truth. The IPCC uses a flawed peer-review process which is unacceptable in the scientific community.

As an invited expert reviewer for the IPCC 2007 Documents, I provided comprehensive review for the first order draft (FOD) and the second order draft (SOD) of one chapter, November 2005 and July 2006, respectively. In my review, I pointed out several recent peer-reviewed studies which were completely ignored by the IPCC authors. To my dismay, IPCC authors ignored all my comments and suggestions for major changes in the FOD and sent me the SOD with essentially the same text as the FOD. None of the authors of the chapter bothered to directly communicate with me (or with other expert reviewers with whom I communicate on a regular basis) on many issues that were raised in my review. This is not an acceptable scientific review process.

I have been an editorial board member for two international journals (Climate Research-Germany and Natural Hazards-Netherlands) and have reviewed more than 100 manuscripts submitted to these journals in the last 10 years. In no case was the manuscript accepted without full exchange of communication with the authors through the editorial offices in Germany and Netherlands, respectively. This is the essence of peer-reviewed process and is the standard procedure for any scientific journal. Unfortunately IPCC bypasses this process by claiming United Nations immunity. This is unacceptable. 

Dr. Stone and other adherents of the IPCC science like to insist that the debate over climate change science is over and it is now time for action. I urge Dr. Stone to browse through recent issues of major international journals in climate and related science. Hardly a week goes by without a significant paper being published questioning the science.  The science of climate change is continuously evolving. The IPCC and its authors have closed their minds and eyes to this evolving science which points to solar variability as the prime driver of earth’s climate and not the human-added greenhouse gases.  See the full story here.