Vice President Albert Gore took to the podium again on August 10 to
announce--once again--the hottest month in the history of the Earth.
Actually,
most scientists haven't had a chance to examine Gore's July data yet, but last
month his claim that June was the hottest ever required later qualification.
Dr. John Christy of the Earth System Science Laboratory, University of
Alabama,
Huntsville, took a look at the June temperatures over the United States. It
turned out that, despite the heat wave in Texas, June was COOLER than average,
as many people across the country have noticed. Summer temperatures here in
Washington, D.C., were typical. According to Bob Ryan, local NBC
weathercaster
and former president of the American Meteorological Society, D.C. temps are
running nearly 2 degrees F cooler than average for this time of year.
Something IS driving up global "average" temperatures, but it isn't global
warming and it isn't affecting most of the United States. As the satellite
data show, the warmer temperatures are virtually all in the tropics,
between 30
degrees north latitude and 30 degrees south latitude, or roughly between San
Antonio, Texas, and Santiago, Chile. If the Earth were experiencing
greenhouse
warming, as the computer models forecast, the tropical temperatures would
remain relatively steady and most of the warming would be at the higher
latitudes, such as over D.C. Warmer temperatures in the tropics point to the
waning effects of the recent El Nino.
Indeed this is confirmed in a July 16 report from the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and written up in the July 31 issue of the
journal Science. NOAA scientists point to the El Nino as the culprit behind
the heat wave in Texas, and say they expect its effects to linger for
another 6
weeks. NOAA scientists report being "surprised" and "puzzled" by how the El
Nino has tracked over the past several months, indicating that their
computerized attempts to forecast its behavior were wide of the mark.
Something to think about.
In any case, the possibility that droughts and heatwaves might be natural
events doesn't seem to faze Mr. Gore, who mistakenly believes he looks
manly at
these near-weekly global warming press briefings. We've got news for him.
The
number of major media reporters who still think these things are exciting has
dwindled to about four. In any case, for readers who'd like some interesting
historical data on heat waves, forest fires, and other extreme weather
phenomena in the United States, the National Center for Public Policy Analysis
has pulled together a very good report. You can access it at
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NP
A206.html. It puts recent claims by Mr. Gore (and the Sierra Club) in a
useful perspective.
Astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas came to Washington last Friday to speak at a
Congressional staff briefing organized by the National Consumer Coalition's
Climate Change Working Group--the "Cooler Heads." Baliunas, a Fellow at the
George C. Marshall Institute and currently at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics, is well-known for her work on the effects of the sun's
variability on climate change. She gave a terrific presentation, which was
filmed and later broadcast on nationwide television by C-SPAN.
While we're handing out laudatory comments, kudos to ABC News' "Good Morning
America," which had an outstanding segment last Friday on the urban "heat
island" effect and how it distorts surface temperature readings. And here we
thought GMA was just a kaffeeklatch show. Go figure.
On a more sobering note, we were dismayed last week by reports that 13
scientists had accepted $156,000 in payments from the Tobacco Institute to
write articles panning the EPA's genuinely junk science on secondhand smoke.
Then we found out that in 1994 the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety
Administration paid its own set of 13 scientists just over $150,000 to testify
IN FAVOR of OSHAs proposed smoking ban. One of those, Dr. Stanton Glantz,
professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, not
only got $25,000 to testify but also received a three-year, $606,000 grant
from the National Cancer Institute for research on tobacco-industry lobbying
(something the Washington Times questioned at the time as a misuse of NCI
research funds). Glantz was quoted extensively last week saying how
scandalous it was that scientists would take payoffs from the Tobacco Institute. Ahem.
We also learned that the Packard Foundation has just awarded a $1.5 million
grant to Oregon State University and the Ecological Society of America to
establish the Aldo Leopold Fellows Program. Aldo Leopold, for those out of
the
loop, was an old line environmentalist and author of the semi-spiritual "A
Sand
County Almanac." Each year, in his honor, OSU is going to train 20 scientists
to promote global warming and other eco-scares to the press.
The program will be directed by Judith Vergun, who also directs OSU's "Native
Americans in Marine Sciences" program. The press release announcing the grant
trumpets the active involvement of representatives from, among others, the
Environmental Defense Fund, Time magazine and National Public Radio, not to
mention the Smithsonian Institution and the Nation Science Foundation.
Elsewhere, the BBC reported August 7 that the House of Commons Environmental
Audit Committee is urging the British government and the European Union to use
"all available means to encourage the U.S. to ratify" the Kyoto Protocol. And
to think we bailed them out of two World Wars.
Finally, climatologists at Florida State University have tossed a monkey
wrench
into Green claims that the Sahara Desert is marching southward and that people
are to blame. Look at this remarkable statement, again from the July 31 issue
of Science: "For the past decade...scientists armed with ecological studies
have been fighting the idea that...desertification is widespread or largely
human-induced. Now, they have satellite images to bolster their argument that
much of what has been called desertification was instead the reflection of
natural ups and downs of rainfall."
Where have we EVER seen it reported that for the past decade scientists have
been fighting this idea? What we've seen instead is scare story after scare
story about the expanding Sahara, prompting, as the article notes, "an
outpouring of aid and an international treaty." Do we detect a pattern here?
TW2 is compiled by SEPP Research Associate Candace Crandall. See The
Science & Environmental Policy Project web site for
additional reports and updates.
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