Quote of the Week “Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract…a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding.” Jane Lubchenco, NOAA Administrator, 1997 AAAS presidential address [Boldface added, H/t Joe D’Aleo, ICECAP] This Week By Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) Possibly the big news of the week is that the American Chemical Society is conducting a survey of its membership on its public policy position regarding climate change: should it keep its public policy position, drop it, or revise it? This is the opportunity for those who do not agree with the present position to voice their views. ****************************** Last weekend a major ice berg broke off the Petermann Glacier on Greenland about 620 miles south of the North Pole. This is the largest ice berg to break off from Greenland in 48 years. Initial reports did not attribute this event to “global warming” and Professor Andreas Muenchow of the University of Delaware, who has been studying this glacier noted it had been growing for the past 7 to 8 years. However, almost immediately some climate scientists were informing Congress that this was only the beginning. According to Professor Richard Alley of Penn State, we may pass a ‘tipping point’ in ten years and a rise in temperatures of 2 to 7 degrees C would wipe out Greenland’s ice sheet and sea levels will rise by some 23 feet (3 meters) submerging coastal cities (http://tiny.cc/f8c12 ). (Please see Greenland Glacier Calving and Sea Level” below by Nils-Axel Momer. Dr. Momer points out that this rate of sea level rise is many times greater than what occurred with the great ice of the Northern Hemisphere melted. The referenced article also points out that according to ice core borings, in the past 10,000 years Greenland has been as much as 2.5 °C warmer than today. Also perplexing is that the ice cores show the current temperature is almost minus 31°C. A warming of 7°C would bring it to minus 24°C, hardly the melting point of ice. ****************************** The capping of the BP oil spill well appears to be successful and the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is disappearing. This is causing concern among some environmental groups who cannot accept that the oil would disappear so quickly. They are losing a major sales point in raising the money needed to replenish their treasuries after the failure of capand- trade. Apparently, they cannot accept the fact that light crude of the type from the BP spill evaporates and in the Gulf there are countless organisms that dine on petroleum as brought out in previous TWTW’s. ****************************** Number of the Week: 1826. As of August 13, 115 days into the spill, this is the total number of visibly oiled dead birds collected by US Fish and Wildlife. The statistic does not mean the oil killed the birds. The total number of visibly oiled birds collected, alive or dead, is 3727. The total number of visibly oiled sea turtles collected stands at 461, 17 of which were dead. The total number of visibly oiled mammals collected stands at 5, 4 of which were dead. (http://www.fws.gov/home/dhoilspill/pdfs/colle ction_08132010.pdf) This is not the environmental disaster projected in the press and does not appear to approach the environmental disaster due to the cold in Bolivia which was referenced in last week’s TWTW. ****************************** Russia continues to suffer from heat, drought, and smoke. As described below, the heat and drought appears to be a weather pattern – a high pressure blocking system. (Please see “The Great Russian Heat Wave 2010”). The most persistent fires are those in peat that was drained many years ago. (Please see “Past Errors to Blame for Russian Peat Fires”). ****************************** Book of the Week: Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science by Ian Plimer exemplifies why so few geologists are on the great global warming express. By what some consider a slight of hand, the vaunted Summary for Policymakers by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) covers the carbon cycle for the past 50 years of the earth’s climate history. Plimer covers the carbon cycle for past 4,000 million years. Changes in the sun, earth, ice, water, and air of earth’s climate history are detailed in Heaven and Earth. Fiery volcanoes, slush ball earth, drastic changes in the carbon dioxide/oxygen composition of the atmosphere are all part of the remarkable tapestry of the history of this planet. Yet, life formed, changed it, and survived. Perhaps Australia’s pre-eminent academic geologist, Plimer exposes the weak physical evidence of the IPCC in claiming that man is causing unprecedented and dangerous “global warming.” which, by focusing on the past 50 years, diverts attention from major inconsistencies in this hypothesis. The IPCC cannot explain that ice ages existed when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was many times greater than today and many times greater than man could possibly make it by burning fossil fuels. The IPCC cannot explain why in the past 10,000 years the earth experienced periods warmer than today even though the IPCC asserts that carbon dioxide was roughly stable until the 20th Century. During times of high carbon dioxide concentrations, life flourished. It did not stagnate or was threatened as the IPCC suggests. Plimer demolishes the fear due jour by US EPA and NOAAclaiming “ocean acidification” from human carbon dioxide emissions will destroy much of ocean life. He describes oceans as complex chemical solutions in rough balance and that sea floor rocks and sediments of the earth are an important part of this balance which makes the oceans alkaline. [EPA experiments of dropping hydrochloric acid into sea water do not capture this vital balance.] As Plimer describes, millions of years of undersea volcanic activity emitting massive quantities of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide directly into the oceans have failed to acidify them and man’s carbon dioxide emissions will not. [Side note: The volcanic hot deep sea vents that are rich in sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide feed a form of life that is dependent on chemosynthesis rather than photosynthesis.] Although not for the casual reader, Heaven and Earth reveals much of what is ignored in commonly expressed climate science and is important for serious study of this complex subject. [Heaven and earth: global warming, the missing science by Professor Ian Plimer (School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Adelaide, AU), 2009, Connor Court Publishing Pty Ltd. ISBN 9781921421143 (ppk), 503 pp including extensive footnotes and 10 pp index.] ****************************** The State of Earth’s Climate 2009: How can so many people be so wrong? Guest editorial by Sherwood Idso, Keith Idso, and Craig Idso In a "Highlights" report of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's State of the Climate in 2009 document, which was prepared under the direction of the U.S. National Climatic Data Center, we can read the principal findings of what the document describes as the work of "more than 300 scientists from 48 countries." Their primary conclusion, as stated in the Report's first paragraph, is that "global warming is undeniable," and the Report goes on from there to describe "how we know the world has warmed." But this, and all that follows, tells us next to nothing about what has caused the warming, which is the crux of the whole contentious matter. The Report next states, for example, that "recent studies show the world's oceans are heating up," which is fine; but then -- as if hoping no one will question them -- the Report says the oceans are warming, "as they absorb most of the extra heat being added to the climate system from the buildup of heat-trapping gases," which contention is far from a proven fact, and is -- in fact -- merely an hypothesis .... and a bad one at that, as we shall soon see. Another fault of the Report is its hyping of "melting Arctic sea ice," while it remains silent on the state of Antarctic sea ice, which has been doing just the opposite as it has grown in extent. Likewise, a major inconsistency of the Report is its stating, with respect to temperature, that "a particular year can experience record-breaking highs and lows in any given location," while, "as a whole, global climate continues to warm." This is very true; and it can also do so while, as a whole, global climate cools or remains unchanged. And it implies the same thing for all types of weather phenomena (such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, etc.), which means that the occurrence of any unusually dramatic weather phenomenon in any "particular year" should imply nothing about the long-term trend of that phenomenon or the presumed trajectory of the global climate within which it is embedded. Yet the Report goes on to describe six such extreme events that occurred in the "particular year" of 2009, which would have to have been done for no other reason than to imply that these weather extremes were caused by global warming, which flies in the face of their earlier contention that record-breaking low temperatures in any year say nothing about the long-term thermal tendency of the planet. Last of all, the Report states that "people have spent thousands of years building society for one climate and now a new one is being created -- one that's warmer and more extreme," which leads us to wonder .... How could more than 300 scientists from 48 countries possibly be so wrong? Any student of history and palaeoclimate well knows that earth's climate has changed dramatically over the past "thousands of years." During the central portion of the current interglacial period, for example, many parts of the planet were a few to several degrees Centigrade warmer than they currently are. And only a thousand years ago, the Medieval Warm Period was holding sway. Although many of the scientists of Climategate infamy tried mightily to make that period of warmth "go away," the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change has for quite some time now posted a review of a different research project every single week that testifies to the reality of the Medieval Warm Period. And that ever-growing body of research is demonstrating beyond any doubt that there was a several-hundred-year interval of warmth back then that was at many different times (stretching from decades to centuries), and in numerous places (throughout the entire world), significantly warmer than the Report's highlytouted first decade of the 21st century, and at a time when the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was far less than it is today. What makes this particular failure of the Report so doubly damning is the fact that it claims that each of the "more than 30 different climate indicators" it has analyzed "is placed into historical context." That is obviously not true. And for a parameter so central to the core of the global warming discussion as temperature to not be put into proper long-term context is inexcusable, although quite understandable, especially when one realizes the implications it would hold for the Report's unfounded contentions about the present state of earth's climate.