Global Warming: Another Look

[NYer]

Academy to referee Climate-Change Fight. (http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113953482702870250-xmUhF6botP4CjKAVMBO61Bv59_c_20070210.html?mod=blog s)

Seeking to resolve a scientific dispute that has taken on a rancorous political edge, the National Academy of Sciences said it had agreed to a request from Congress to assess how well researchers understand the history of temperatures on earth.

The study by the academy, an independent advisory body based in Washington, will focus on the "hockey stick," a chart of past temperatures that critics say is inaccurate. The graph gets its name because of the sudden, blade-like rise of recent temperatures compared with past epochs.

Even government has an occasional lucid moment ...

[NYC]

You know this is a 2 way street?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/02/0209_060209_warming.html

Researchers analyzed tree rings, ice cores, fossils, and other "proxy climate records" and found that the present warming phase has lasted longer and affected a broader area than any other such period in the last 1,200 years.

[NYC]

Global heat

February 10, 2006
Three separate but related developments this week will keep the issue of global warming on the front burner, so to speak, and they are of particular interest to all Americans who, unlike their president, believe the issue is of great importance.

First, a group of 85 evangelical Christian leaders announced its support for legislation aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions. This is an almost-stunning rebuke of President Bush. Until now, Christian evangelicals have been almost unanimous and absolute in their support of the Bush administration.

The group that has broken with the president on global warming includes pastors of the so-called mega-churches, presidents of Christian colleges and religious broadcasters and writers. The group took out a full-page advertisement in yesterday's New York Times and has bought television time to spread its message.

"With God's help, we can stop global warming for our kids, our world and our Lord," the television commercial states.

The Christian leaders, including best-selling author Rick Warren, said their faith and a "growing realization that the threat of global warming was real" drove them to launch their new campaign. One prominent evangelical theologian said: "However we treat the world, that's how we are treating Jesus because He is the cosmic glue."

A poll of 1,000 evangelical Protestants commissioned by the group showed that two thirds believed global warming was taking place and 63 percent said the United States must begin to address the issue immediately. Half said this must happen even if there was a high economic cost.

The two other related developments were on a much smaller scale, and yet they are not without significance. First, The American Association of Petroleum Geologists (a group that likes the Bush administration's positions on energy issues) gave its annual journalism award to science fiction author Michael Crichton, whose 2004 novel "State of Fear" treats global warming as an imaginary threat concocted by evil scientists for their own purposes.

"It is fiction," Larry Nation, a spokesman for the association, admitted, "but it has the absolute ring of truth." Public relations spin aside, there's no "ring of truth" when such an award is given to a novelist rather than to a journalist.

Climate experts have described Crichton's novel as "dangerously divorced from reality." Most scientists believe that human behavior is altering the atmosphere's chemistry in ways that pose dangerous threats.

If petroleum geologists like the novel, Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist told a reporter Wednesday, it is only because "they are ideologically connected to their product, which fills up the gas tanks of Hummers."

Daniel P. Schrag, director of Harvard's Center for the Environment, dismissed the award as "a total embarrassment" that "reflects the politics of the oil industry." He lamented Crichton's "profound ignorance."

Finally, the wet-behind-the-ears White House appointee who censured James Hansen, NASA's top climate specialist, for making speeches about global warming that did not reflect the administration's point of view, resigned after it was discovered he had falsified his credentials.

The appointee, 24-year-old George Deutsch, lied when he said that in 2003 he had earned a degree in journalism from Texas A&M. The university could find no record of him earning his degree. Curiously, it wasn't the White House that asked the university to check him out, it was a blogger.

This administration gets into more and more trouble on more and more issues, yet the president seems serenely satisfied with his performance even if the American public isn't.

http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060210/NEWS/602100331/1021

[NYer]

You know this is a 2 way street?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/02/0209_060209_warming.html

Researchers analyzed tree rings, ice cores, fossils, and other "proxy climate records" and found that the present warming phase has lasted longer and affected a broader area than any other such period in the last 1,200 years.

That's the reason the National Academy of Science will finally look into this ... it is precisely this "Hockey Stick" effect that has triggered all the speculation.

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/NA-AH731_climat_20060209220412.gif