In the food-versus-fuel debate, there’s little doubt where Norman Borlaug’s heart lies. The father of the “Green Revolution,” Borlaug’s life has been dedicated to increasing the food supply in the developing world. His work with grains is credited with saving millions of lives, and in 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Today’s food-versus-fuel debate has a new element since 1970: growing concern about global climate change. Count Borlaug as a skeptic. “I do believe we are in a period where, no question, the temperatures are going up,” he said.  “But is this a part of another one of those (natural) cycles that have brought on glaciers and caused melting of glaciers?”

So Borlaug, now 93, watches with dismay as ever-greater amounts of the world’s grain are turned into motor fuel for developed nations. It isn’t going to solve our energy problems, and it’s going to disrupt our food system,” Borlaug said Thursday.  See full story here (you will need to create a free account).

Mars has gone through 40 ice ages during the past five million years that regularly send the planet’s permanent ice sheets cascading toward the equator, then melting backward, a new theory suggests. The climate changes are likely driven by cyclical fluctuations in the planet’s orbit that alter the amount of sunlight that falls on the planet’s surface, says astronomer Norbert Schörghofer of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Understanding the sun’s exact role in the Martian ice ages could help solve longstanding puzzles about the red planet. It could also help scientists better understand Earth’s complex
climatic systems, which are also affected by orbital variations. The new theory appears in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. See National Geographic News story here.

In recent years extensive amounts of ice have been discovered below the surface of Mars. Much of the ice mysteriously survives far from the planet’s poles. (Related photo: “‘Frozen Sea’ Seen on Mars [February 23, 2005].)

A first examination of the theory will arrive with the Phoenix lander, already en route to Mars for a 2008 landing. The craft will try to sample Martian ground ice, and the results could make or break Schörghofer’s theory. (Related photo gallery: ”Phoenix Lander’s Search for Mars Water” [August 3, 2007].)

Imagine basing a country’s energy and economic policy on an incomplete, unproven theory — a theory based entirely on computer models in which one minor variable is considered the sole driver for the entire global climate system.

This is precisely what former Vice President Al Gore, Senate Environment Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer and others want their nation to do. They expect Americans to accept on blind faith the thesis that human carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are causing catastrophic climate change. Boxer, Gore and their allies readily resort to emotional bullying against anyone who dares question this dogma.

The scientific method, which even grade-schoolers know, provides that science advances through hypotheses based on a set of assumptions. Other scientists challenge and test those assumptions in what philosopher Karl Popper called the practice of “falsibility.” Trying to disprove hypotheses is what real science is all about. Yet the hypothesis that human addition of CO2 would lead to significantly enhanced greenhouse warming was quickly accepted without this normal scientific challenge.

As Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences said, consensus was reached before the research had even begun. Adherents to the hypothesis began defending the increasingly indefensible by launching personal attacks, essentially trying to frighten scientific opponents into silence.

Much to the frustration of alarmists, however, solid scientific evidence continues to mount against the flawed notion that human CO2 emissions are a problem. For instance, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) just made significant changes to its temperature records, downgrading the magnitude of recent rises.  Read more here.

The debate over global warming has taken a pretty odd twist in Northern California. Up on Mount Shasta, the glaciers are not behaving like you’d expect.

Big mountains often produce their own weather patterns. Mount Shasta, at 14,162 feet seems to have a mind of its own these days. Shasta has seven glaciers. The biggest is the one on the middle, Whitney Glacier. What has surprised scientists about the glacier is that if the theories about global warming are true, the glacier ought to be shrinking, but it’s not.

“Unlike most areas around the world, these glaciers are advancing, they are growing. Thirty percent in the last fifty years,” says scientist Erik White. So why are the glaciers larger today than they were a century or more ago?  “Mount Shasta is right at the very northern end of areas influenced by El Nino and we’re at the southern end of areas affected by La Nina. So between the two we get to see the benefits of that which means more snow and rain in this area,” says White.

Read more here.

Whitney and Bolam Glaciers - photo by Linda Freeman, 1998

A very embarrassing chapter in the history of our nation’s scientific establishment has been unfolding thanks to a creative new website www.SurfaceStations.org set up and run by Anthony Watts. This site is providing unwelcome scrutiny to the United States’ surface temperature measurement network, supposedly the most reliable in the world. The reputation has been built over the years in part because of our government’s purported insistence on uniformity of technology as well as siting (putting the gauges where they will gather the most accurate data) and maintenance standards.

But if you place your measuring equipment in the wrong place you could help start a global warming panic. Which is, apparently, just what government bureaucrats are doing. Recently, evidence increasingly made its way to people who pay attention to such things that that our network’s reliability was not all that it was cracked up to be, that there just might be misplacement of measurement instruments enhancing a mild warming trend begun in the late 1970s that otherwise seems to have stopped. Now, a full-blown scandal is erupting, exposing the expensive U.S. surface measurements as quite possibly not much more than yet another tool in the global warming alarmists’ kit to frighten taxpayers into accepting a radical eco-lifestyle agenda.

It seems fair to conclude that siting thermometers in Arizona parking lots, overhanging black asphalt pads, near cell towers and hot-air blowing air conditioner exhausts or next to trash burn barrels has to result from either a complete breakdown of scientific discipline or an intent to skew the data to produce evidence of global warming.  But what can you say about setting one just away from a chimney directly above a Weber barbecue grill? That’s just what they did in Hopkinsville, KY. These practices would be hilarious if they didn’t result in large amounts of corrupted data upon which our policymakers desperately seek to base an energy scarcity regime.

Read more here.