As many of you know from watching blog postings here, I have made it my mission to photograph, survey, and catalog every USHCN station for the purposes of doing a qualitative analysis on the near surface temperature data produced by the USHCN dataset. To that end, I have created http://www.surfacestations.org which links to a separate photographic database server that I have set up. It was designed from the start to be collaborative.

Therefore I’m writing today to ask your assistance in this project. What are the goals?
1. To provide a standardized method for site survey and reporting so that interested individuals can gather site survey data, pictures, and anecdotal history of climate recording sites worldwide, and upload to a publicly searchable photographic database, (2) To provide a repository for screened and approved qualitative and quantitative site survey data, pictures, and anecdotal history, (3) To provide a publicly searchable database of such information for USHCN and GHCN climate station sites, (4) To photographically document sites that have been well preserved and maintained through their history and (5) To photographically demonstrate examples of sites that may introduce biases and errors through faulty siting, encroachments, or maintenance issues, and to identify specific issues when possible.

To see what you can do to help with this critical process, see the weblog here.

"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.” So said Al Gore ... in 1992. Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent.

My series set out to profile the dissenters—those who deny that the science is settled on climate change—and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world’s premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop—the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists—the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects—and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction.

Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position. See full story here.

Reference: Gerten, D., Schaphoff, S. and Lucht, W. 2007. Potential future changes in water limitations of the terrestrial biosphere. Climatic Change 80: 277-299.

Climate-alarmists typically predict increasing drought for many parts of the world as the air’s CO2 content continues to climb; and they claim that this phenomenon will have huge negative consequences for earth’s terrestrial plants. However, that seemingly simple conclusion ignores some important mitigating circumstances and feedback phenomena that suggest a significantly different outcome. After completing all of their analyses, Gerten et al.’s “main finding” was that “the final CO2 effect on LTA, an index that quantifies the degree to which transpiration and photosynthesis are co-limited by soil water shortage, is a positive one, which led them to further conclude that “LTA is a better proxy for limitation of plant growth and net primary production than soil moisture itself or precipitation.

Consequently, even in a world of declining soil moisture content - which is itself just the opposite of what is observed in the real world (see Soil (Water Status - Field Studies) in our Subject Index) - the physiological benefits provided by the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content tend to overpower whatever negative effects global warming might have on earth’s plant life; and this is one of the reasons why the Greening of the Earth continues unabated over the entire planet.  See full report here

There will be more flooding and less drought than has been forecast in widely used projections of global warming, according to a new study. The study using measurements taken by NASA weather satellites compared ocean rainfall from 1987 to 2006 to earlier climate model projections of what that precipitation would be. The models, based on physics equations, were found to be off the mark, according to the study released Thursday by the journal Science.

Projections have suggested that rainfall will rise in coming decades, but not as fast as temperature, leading to drier days and droughts worldwide. In February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cited studies showing “extreme drought increasing from 1% of present-day land area to 30% by the end of the century.” The new study suggests models are flawed, underestimating how increased humidity in a warmer climate produces more rain clouds, Wentz said by e-mail. The new findings suggest climate modelers are overstating how much rainfall will dry up in a warmer climate, says Wentz. “With respect to severe weather events like hurricanes, I am not sure what the implications are. But this much more rain worldwide could certainly pose one of the most serious risks (from flooding) associated with climate change,” he says. See full USA TODAY story here

Hurricanes over the past 5,000 years appear to have been controlled more by El Nino and an African monsoon than warm sea surface temperatures, such as those caused by global warming, researchers said Wednesday. The study, published in the journal Nature, adds to the debate on whether seas warmed by greenhouse gas emissions lead to more hurricanes, such as those that bashed the Gulf of Mexico in 2005.

Some researchers say warmer seas appear to have contributed to more intense hurricanes, while others (like Dr. William Gray and Dr Chris Landsea in stories on Icecap) disagree. The U.N. International Panel on Climate Change said this year it was more likely than not that humans contribute to a trend of increasingly intense hurricanes.

Frequent strong hurricanes thrived in the Western Atlantic during times of weak El Ninos, or warming of surface waters of the Eastern Pacific Ocean, and strong West African monsoons even when local seas were cooler than now, the study said. “Tropical sea surface temperatures as warm as at present are apparently not a requisite condition for increased intense hurricane activity,” Jeffrey Donnelly, the lead author and researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said in the study. Intense hurricanes made landfall during the latter half of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling that occurred approximately from the 14th to mid-19th centuries, he said.  Changes in intense hurricane activity should be better predicted with more study of the Eastern Pacific and West African climate patterns, it said. See full story here.

Also see CO2 Science review of Kossin,et al. in GRL 2007 paper “A globally consistent reanalysis of hurricane variability and trends.” In the words of the five scientists who conducted the work, “using a homogeneous record, we were not able to corroborate the presence of upward trends in hurricane intensity over the past two decades in any basin other than the Atlantic,” and they say that “since the Atlantic basin accounts for less than 15% of global hurricane activity, this result poses a challenge to hypotheses that directly relate globally increasing tropical sea surface temperatures to increases in long-term mean global hurricane intensity.” See full story here.