Comment...
Global warming is certainly occurring. But it's wrong to blame it primarily on greenhouses gases. Yet, that's exactly what the United Nations did in the summary of its 2007 climate report.

It should be obvious to everyone that the United States should stop out-sourcing our climate science to the UN and convene our own objective, transparent Climate Truth Commission. Why obvious? For starters: 1) UN climate scientists systematically ignore the importance of natural climate cycles, 2) there's been little global warming for ten years and 3) Climategate and other recent revelations. It also defies common sense that we allow the UN to serve as both judge (IPCC) and advocate (Kyoto Protocol, Copenhagen).

Obvious again is that the 'science is settled' argument 1) Lacks the common sense acknowledgment that climate science is a young science with many discoveries ahead; and 2) It's a science based upon reams-and-reams of difficult to collect and decipher data.

I blame the politicization of climate science largely on the United Nation's 'Climate Change 2007' report that concluded CO2 drives global warming. This conclusion, made in the report's summary, went well beyond the scientists' findings in the body of the report. The fact is that no smoking gun supports the UN's claim that CO2 drives global warming. This leap of faith by the few who wrote the summary is hugely important to our energy policy.

Hindsight also makes it clear that the UN had not even proved their most basic point: that climate change is global. Data and recent discoveries suggest climate change often varies by region.

If 'drives' and 'global' are correct, America and the rest of the world must quickly restructure our energy infrastructure to reduce CO2 emissions. But if Mother Nature actually drives climate change, then we should not move precipitously to burden our economy with carbon taxes and alternative-energy subsidies. I, for one, do not want to pay a dollar or two more per gallon, skimp on heating my home or see the blight of wind mills because of faulty science. Moreover, America just can't afford any more system-wide bad choices -- we're already bankrupt.

Sadly, we've out-sourced our scientific opinion to the United Nations. ...an organization more concerned about political influence and funding than conducting good science. The UN also needs to perpetuate the Kyoto Protocol to remain in the game.

It's crystal clear. The United States needs our own objective, transparent climate commission to think-through global warming. The advice of a Climate Truth Commission is needed before we burden our economy with expensive energy. Both sides of the man-made global warming issue should welcome such an approach. ...each is so darn sure of their facts.
                                           . . .

The Report has huge implications for the United States. For instance, the EPA declared CO2 a pollutant substantially based upon the the UN's Report (e.g. more than half the citations in it's Technical Findings report are to Climate Change 2007).

But according to many scientists around the world, including some who participated in Climate Change 2007, the body of the report only strongly suggests that CO2 contributes to global warming.

Here's how the IPCC thinking boils-down:

1. The earth today is warmer than its been in 400 years.
2. CO2 levels are the highest in 650,000 years.
3. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that traps heat.
4. Sophisticated computer models indicate that CO2 caused our global warming.

The message I take away from reading the United Nations' IPCC 2007 Report is that there is no 'smoking gun' that proves global warming is driven by CO2. Instead, the man-made theory of global warming confuses cause-and-effect, and relies upon circumstantial evidence and computer models that purport to predict the future. It's also clear that the greenhouse gas theory is slow to assimulate new research, cherry-picks its evidence, and its proponents 'demonize' those who question the science behind their assertions.

IPCC more or less ignores the following:

• Natural causes have driven hundreds of past warming episodes, why not this one?
• The earth is still bouncing back from the Little Ice Age that was upon us from about 1300 to 1800 AD. It's no surprise that the earth is warmer today than in the past 400 years.
• Global temperatures were probably warmer during the Medieval Warm Period – a span of several hundred years around 1,000 A.D. There was also the Roman Warming Period at time of Christ. Both were during 'normal' CO2 levels.
• The earth cooled from the 1950s to the 1970s when CO2 levels were increasing.
• Scientists voice many misgivings about their climate models.
• Past periods of global warming don't correlate well with past CO2 levels. In fact, CO2 levels appear to trail, not lead global warming.

Without the empirical evidence that proves CO2 drives global warming the IPCC mostly bases its conclusions on computer models that, according to them, predict future climate. Here's what's in my mind: Do we want to bet the farm on computer models? Remember how just a couple years ago educated people and their computers told us our economy was a perpetual motion machine.

Plus, there are many wild cards that may or may not impact climate, but need to be fully investigated such as sun spots, cosmic rays, a wondering magnetic north pole, a weakening magnetic force in the sun and earth, contrails, and the effects and formation of cloud cover.

Please, help me get at the truth. If anyone can provide the CO2 smoking gun, I'd be greatly indebted.

                                             . . .

Measuring the climate is hugely complicated and error prone. We've had accurate satillite measurement for only 30 years and accurate thermometer measurement for 150 years. For climate information earlier than 1850 we rely on 'proxies', such as tree rings and the ratio of oxygen isotobes in ice. A half dozen proxies are sometimes put together to reveal the climate history of a particular area — but often, proxies aren't in full agreement. Here is a link to an interesting discussion of proxies.

Moreover, climate scientists 'correct' data for known problems. Who's to say these corrections aren't actually loading the dice?

There are also calibration issues with instruments. Here is a link where scientists explain how they recently mis-measured Arctic ice by more than the size of California.

Mankind's history and the written word also helps us understand past climates. For instance, we know that London had annual ice festivals in the 1700s. That citrus was once grown farther north in China than today. And that the Vikings named Newfoundland 'Vinland' due to the abundance of grapes.

If measuring past climate is chancy then using computers to predict the future strikes me as a downright craps shoot. Climate models are incredibly complex and potentially fallible. They contain many, many assumptions. Small errors in these assumptions can have a huge affect on the output.

— Robert Moen, Founder        
rmoen@energyplanUSA.com

2,000 Year Global Temperature Reconstruction
Energy & Environment (Loehle 2007)

This graph is based upon 18 previously published temperature proxies smoothed with a 30-year running mean, and so provides the most robust estimate available to date. It is clear that the reconstruction shown here does not match the IPCC's famous hockey stick shape. One persistent question is whether the Medieval Warm Period was “really” warmer than the end of the 20th century. It would indeed seem to show the Medieval Warm Period to be warmer than the late 20th century.

IPCC crushes scientific objectivity
Watts Up With That? 2009
Unquestionably, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to build the scientific case for humanity being the primary cause of global warming. Such a goal is fundamentally unscientific, as it is hostile to alternative hypotheses for the causes of climate change.

The IPCC’s neglect of natural variability in the climate system ends up leading to circular reasoning on their part. They ignore the effect of natural cloud variations when trying to diagnose feedback, which then leads to overestimates of climate sensitivity. This, in turn, causes them to conclude that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations alone are sufficient to explain global warming, and so no natural forcings of climate change need be found.

By ignoring natural variability, they can end up claiming that natural variability does not exist. Admittedly, their position is internally consistent. But then, so is all circular reasoning..

Methane time bomb ticking louder
Grist.2008
At the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, Igor Semiletov, a Russian scientist who has spent the last 15 years tracking the release of methane from Siberia, said, "We have to tell people that something is happening now with the subsea permafrost." He spoke of a little-known area, an undersea shelf, easily visible on photos from space, larger than Spain, France, and Germany combined. He estimated that 50 percent of this shallow shelf is now emitting methane in the summer, with "large clouds of methane bubbles observed in the water column over hundreds of square kilometers." He believes that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age. Keep in mind that methane is a greenhouse gas believed to be 20-times more potent than CO2.

Prominent scientists push to revise Physics Society climate statements
Examiner.com 2009
Eighty prominent scientists, researchers and environmental business leaders – many of them physicists – have called on the American Physical Society (APS), the nation's leading physics organization, to revise its policy statement on climate change. The century-old APS is the premier scholarly group in the U.S. dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of the knowledge of physics. The signers of an open letter to the APS Council, the governing body of APS, are current and past members of APS. They disagree with the current APS policy statement on climate change, which contains such language as, "Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate,” and “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.”

Defects in key climate data are uncovered
National Post 2009
The Hockey Stick graph was a statistical compilation of tree ring data supposedly proving that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Prior to the publication of the Hockey Stick, scientists had held that the medieval-era was warmer than the present, making the scale of 20th century global warming seem relatively unimportant. The dramatic revision to this view occasioned by the Hockey Stick's publication made it the poster child of the global warming movement. It was featured prominently in a 2001 report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as government websites and countless review reports.

The mathematics behind the Mann Hockey Stick were thought by some to be badly flawed, such that its shape was determined by suspect bristlecone tree ring data. Controversies quickly piled up: Two expert panels involving the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were asked to investigate, the U.S. Congress held a hearing, and the media followed the story around the world.

The expert reports upheld all of our criticisms of the Mann Hockey Stick, both of the mathematics and of its reliance on flawed bristlecone pine data. One of the panels, however, argued that while the Mann Hockey Stick itself was flawed, a series of other studies published since 1998 had similar shapes, thus providing support for the view that the late 20th century is unusually warm. The IPCC also made this argument in its 2007 report. But the second expert panel, led by statistician Edward Wegman, pointed out that the other studies are not independent. They are written by the same small circle of authors, only the names are in different orders, and they reuse the same few data climate proxy series over and over.

The climate science isn't settled
Wall Street Journal 2009
Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA) has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction.

The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide.

At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern.

Sea-level expert:
it’s not rising
21st Century Science & Tech. 2007
Follows are excepts from an interview with Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, a leading experts on sea level and its effects on coastal areas and expert reviewer of the IPCC's Climate Change 2007 report.

"The IPCC chose Hong Kong, which has six tide gauges, and they choose the record of one, which gives 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level. Every geologist knows that that is a subsiding area. It's the only record which you shouldn't use."

"If you go around the globe, you find no rise anywhere."

Burt Rutan joins the ranks Of AGW skeptics
Aero-news.net 2009
Aviation pioneer and long-time flight test engineer Burt Rutan has begun making a public case against Anthropological Global Warming, or AGW, saying the data does not support a case for global warming, or climate change of any kind, caused by human activity.

Interview with Dr. Madhav Khandekar: climate scientist & IPCC Expert Reviewer
Frontier Centre for Public Policy 2009
Is there a consensus among the scientific community surrounding the causes of the global warming?

MK: A very intense debate is going on. Most of the skeptics like me feel that the warming that we saw during the 80’s and 90’s was most possibly due to the natural variability of the climate, just as there was a cooling of the earth’s climate from 1945 to about 1977. More importantly many skeptics and solar scientists feel that this warming and cooling is possibly driven by the variability of the total radiation received at the top of earth’s atmosphere. So the problem is much more complex than what the IPCC has projected to us.

Which of the various theories that have been put forward to explain recent changes in temperature do you find the most compelling?

MK: From my perspective I feel that the warming that we saw during the 80’s and 90’s is most likely the natural variability of climate. There may have been a contribution, but a very small one, from human-added CO2. But I do not see human-added CO2 causing a significant warming in the next few years to few decades.

Start of the great freeze?
Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance 2010
Is the bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere the start of a global trend towards much cooler weather that is likely to last in the longer term?

Some of the world's most eminent climate scientists are suggesting that this might be the case. Their predictions are based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. This demonstrates that much of the warming we witnessed in the last few decades was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a 'warm mode' as opposed to the present 'cold mode'. This undermines the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth in the 20th and 21st centuries has been driven solely by anthropogenic, ie, man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue to do so as long as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.

Fewer Americans see solid evidence of global warming
Pew Research 2009
There has been a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. And fewer also see global warming as a very serious problem – 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.

What happened to global warming?
BBC 2009
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

Biggest news you’ve never heard: Earth isn’t warming
Christian Science Monitor 2009
The Earth isn’t warming right now. It may even be cooling down somewhat.

Five major climate centers around the world agree that average global temperatures have not risen in the past 11 years, according to the BBC.

At the very least, a delay in warming even as total CO2 emissions increase, throws some doubt on the cause-and-effect relationship between mankind’s activities and mean global temperatures.

Might 'confirmation bias' color climate change debate?
How to ignore the yes-man in your head
Wall Street Journal 2009
Your own mind acts like a compulsive yes-man who echoes whatever you want to believe. This mental gremlin is called "confirmation bias." A recent analysis of psychological studies with nearly 8,000 participants concluded that people are twice as likely to seek information that confirms what they already believe as they are to consider evidence that would challenge those beliefs.

Momentum on climate pact Is elusive
New York Times 2009
Global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.

The global average temperature is now only 0.13 degree Fahrenheit higher than it was in 1999, according to the British meteorology office.

Mojib Latif, a prize-winning climate and ocean scientist wrote a paper last year positing that cyclical shifts in the oceans were aligning in a way that could keep temperatures over the next decade or so relatively stable, even as the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming continued to increase.

Some businesses see nothing but profits in the green movement
Wall Street Journal 2009
Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties." This is certainly true of climate change.

Wobbling earth triggers climate change
Discovery Channel 2009
Regular wobbles in the Earth's tilt were responsible for the global warming episodes that interspersed prehistoric ice ages, according to new evidence. The finding is the result of research led by Russell Drysdale of the University of Newcastle that has been able to accurately date the end of the penultimate ice age for the first time. The new dates show the end of the second last ice age occurring 141,000 years ago, thousands of years earlier than previously thought. Using information gathered from a trio of Italian stalagmites, the research has punched a hole in the prevailing theory that interglacial periods are related to changes in the intensity of the northern hemisphere summer.

Climate change controversies
Royal Society 2008
The Royal Society, the national academy of science of the UK felt the need to debunk "those who seek to distort and undermine the science of climate change and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of global warming" in their undated, plain-language guide. The question is, is their critique itssef fair and accurate or is the Royal Society close-minded to new evidence and science that contradicts long held beliefs?

Global warming: natural or manmade?
Dr. Roy Spencer Website
The IPCC claims that the only way they can get their computerized climate models to produce the observed warming is with greenhouse gas emissions. But they’re not going to find something if they don’t search for it, says Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama and former Senior Scientist for NASA. His website describes evidence that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution.

Increasing dust speeds melting of mountain snow
ABC News 2009
Throughout memory the warmth of spring has begun the mountain snowmelt, bringing life-giving water to greening plants so they can blossom and renew their species. But now, scientists say, the timing is being thrown off by desert dust stirred as global warming dries larger areas and human activity increases in those regions.

Debate ended over demise of ice ages
Oregon State University 2009
Researchers from Oregon State University and other institutions conclude that slight shifts in solar radiation caused by predictable changes in Earth’s rotation and axis caused global ice levels to reach their peak about 26,000 years ago, stabilize for 7,000 years and then begin melting 19,000 years ago, eventually bringing to an end the last ice age. The melting was first caused by more solar radiation, not changes in carbon dioxide levels or ocean temperatures, as some scientists have suggested in recent years.

Do cities deflect rain storms?
Philadelphia Inquirer 2009
In the 21st century, summer thunderstorms often whack suburbs harder than cities, here and around the country. Scientists say one reason for that phenomenon could be the cities themselves. Recent research suggests that dense, urban building might enhance rain just outside cities. A NASA study based on satellite data showed that summer rainfall in Memphis and Atlanta was half what it was 20 to 40 miles away. Other studies have found that urban heat might alter lightning-flash patterns and the paths of thunderstorms and perhaps even afford downtowns a small measure of protection against severe weather.

German scientists dissent over global warming claims
Climate Depot 2009
More than 60 prominent German scientists have publicly declared their dissent from man-made global warming fears in an Open Letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The more than 60 signers of the letter include several United Nations IPCC scientists. The scientists declared that global warming has become a “pseudo religion” and they noted that rising CO2 has “had no measurable effect” on temperatures. The German scientists, also wrote that the “UN IPCC has lost its scientific credibility.”