By Climate Progress
I am reasonably certain that authorities and investigators will find that the extreme heat of the last several days in Minneapolis had caused the expansion joints in the bridge to close completely. When this happens, the pressure building up between the sections of concrete can amount to thousands of pounds per square-inch. Read this story and see comments here.
Icecap note: MSP record highs have been over 100F historically on all but 6 days in July and August 1. It did not reach 100F this July or August so far. No record highs have been set this July or August thus far.
Actual highs this year in late July and early August 2007 versus daily records. Actual in purple, records in blue.
See the more detailed analysis of Minneapolis July and August temperature trends here.
By Clive Crook, Financial Times
“...to put it bluntly the IPCC ...is a seriously flawed enterprise and unworthy of the slavish respect accorded to it by most governments and the media. In the decisions which have already been made on climate-change mitigation, to say nothing of future decisions, the stakes are enormous. In guiding these momentous judgments, the flawed IPCC process has been granted, in effect, a monopoly of official wisdom. That needs to change and the IPCC itself must be reformed.
For a fully documented indictment, read the article by David Henderson in the current issue of World Economics. Mr Henderson, a distinguished academic economist and former head of economics at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has been tangling with the IPCC for some time. Five years ago, he and Ian Castles (a former chief of the Australian Bureau of Statistics) first drew attention to a straightforward error in the way emissions scenarios were being calculated...This mistake yielded projections for individual countries that were in some cases patently absurd.”
“...if governments are to get the best advice, they need information and analysis from an open and disinterested source - or else from multiple dissenting sources. With the environmental risks calmly laid out, framing the right policies demands proper political accountability and a much wider range of opinion and expertise than the IPCC currently provides. One incompetent institution, committed to its own agenda, should never have been granted this degree of actual and moral authority over the science, over public presentation of the science and over calls for “more serious action” that go well beyond the science.”
Read full story here.
By Marc Marano, EPW Blog
Newsweek Magazine’s cover story of August 13, 2007 entitled, “The Truth About Denial” contains very little that could actually be considered balanced, objective or fair by journalistic standards. The one-sided editorial, masquerading as a “news article,” was written by Sharon Begley with Eve Conant, Sam Stein and Eleanor Clift and Matthew Philips and purports to examine the “well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.”
The only problem is—Newsweek knew better. Reporter Eve Conant, who interviewed Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, was given all the latest data proving conclusively that it is the proponents of man-made global warming fears that enjoy a monumental funding advantage over the skeptics. (A whopping $50 BILLION to a paltry $19 MILLION for skeptics – Yes, that is BILLION to MILLION).
See full EPW blog and critique here.
Note: The Newsweek story contained blatant errors including “The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has already doubled in the last century.” This has been shown clearly by Dr. Bill Gray and Chris Landsea in stories and papers on this site to be very wrong.