Under Dissent in the US, the IBD talks about how so far all the "murderers" of Haditha have gone free, acquitted. So where are Murtha and the media apologizing. Pretty quiet on the liberal front.

Tons of stuff today on the election, particularly Democratic Candidates. Some of the opinion writers are speculating on Obama's VP and that is interesting.

Obama's character is further identified in the IBD story about Tony Rezko. The friends you keep tell a lot about yourself. And in Obama's case, it's a disaster. What is pretty obvious to some of us is that Obama is just a big smooth talker, but he has little or no substance. His policy is change, but most of his change is not for the better. He apparently is a poor judge of friends. When you get all through, all you have is talk. Does snake oil come to mind?

Krauthammer has a great article today about $4 gas under Gas Prices. His point is that we can solve a lot of problems simply by taxing gas up to some minimum level like $4 or $6. I'm not happy about taxing, but it surely true that prices will affect demand. But the taxes don't necessarily encourage more energy exploration. On the positive side, a floor on prices would encourage exploration and research because the risk that low oil prices will ruin the economic prospects of the research, but the taxes going to the government are just wasted.

A technical paper on The Global Warming Hoax tells us that more evidence has been uncovered that the sun is the main cause of Gore's "disaster", not man as he suggests. Consensus as shouted by Gore is a little far–fetched. How is it every week we can have scholarly articles, peer–reviewed, that blow the theory of man's affects on global warming to smithereens and we still have Congress trying to ruin the economy with cap and trade?

Have a great Friday.

Climate Change: Policymakers and other busybodies trying to save the planet will one day learn that, despite all the hype about global warming, most people are focused on issues that for them are more meaningful.

During economic boom times, developed and developing nations have the luxury to indulge in meaningless gestures, such as the trendy campaign to beat global warming.

But when the economy slows and energy costs increase, the people in those nations become a bit more focused and find that environmental issues might not be as important as they thought. This evolution of thought can be tracked by looking at how the public regards global warming now compared with last year.

A recent survey of 12,000 people across 11 countries commissioned by financial institution HSBC and environmental groups clearly confirms the progression.

Climate Change: A British jurist wants to form an international court for the environment with the power to punish states and businesses. Will fossil fuels soon become controlled substances?

The United Nations Climate Change Conference kicked off in Poznan, Poland, on Monday with representatives from around the world working to negotiate the framework for a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol.

Stephen Hockman, the former head of the British Bar Council and a deputy High Court judge, has an idea why Kyoto failed to reach its emission goals and has proposed a remedy: creating a body similar to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Which is scarier –– the economy or global warming? Climate change gets our vote, in part because it will be with us for decades to come.

That's even more our thought in the wake of the findings of scientists studying the Pacific Ocean waters off Washington's Tatoosh Island. They found that global warming is apparently causing the water to become acidic 10 to 20 times faster than the rate predicted by climate–change models.

Here's another reason why people don't trust newspapers. When science reporters write about, say, hormone therapy or drinking red wine, they report on studies that find that hormones or red wine can be good for you, as well as studies that suggest otherwise. Any science involving complex organisms is rarely black and white.

When it comes to global warming, newspapers play up stories that reinforce the prevalent the–sky–is–falling belief that global warming is human–caused and catastrophic. But if a study or scientist does not portend the end of the world as we know it, it rarely rates as news.

In that spirit, many papers (including The Chronicle) have reported on a UC San Diego science historian who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer–reviewed articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003, and concluded, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

Background
The authors introduce the report of their new study by writing that "between the late 1970s and the early part of the 21st century, the extent of Arctic Ocean sea ice cover has declined during all months of the year, with the largest declines reported in the boreal summer months, particularly in September (8.6 ± 2.9% per decade)," citing the work of Serreze et al. (2007).

What was done
To "quantify the change in marine primary productivity in Arctic waters resulting from recent losses of sea ice cover," Arrigo et al. "implemented a primary productivity algorithm that accounts for variability in sea ice extent, sea surface temperature, sea level winds, downwelling spectral irradiance, and surface chlorophyll a concentrations," and that "was parameterized and validated specifically for use in the Arctic (Pabi et al., 2008) and utilizes forcing variables derived either from satellite data or NCEP reanalysis fields."

WASHINGTON –– Prospects for success in the world's struggle to combat global warming have been transformed at a stroke after U.S. President–elect Barack Obama made it clear that America would play its full part in renewing the Kyoto Protocol climate–change treaty.

His words, in effect, brought an end to eight years of willful climate obstructionism by the administration of George W. Bush, who withdrew the U.S. from Kyoto in March 2001, thus doing incalculable damage to the efforts of the international community to construct a unified response to the threat.

The Bush withdrawal set back the international effort by nearly a decade –– years in which it became increasingly clear that the warming of the atmosphere being caused by greenhouse gas emissions was proceeding much faster than United Nations scientists thought it would.

Climate Change: Despite record snows and low temperatures around the world last month, a major Al Gore supporter says October was the hottest on record. The only thing being cooked here is not the Earth, but the books.

James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and global warming alarmist, is Al Gore's favorite scientist, part of that mythical global warming "consensus" that says we are doomed and man is the culprit. On Nov. 10 he announced that last month was the hottest October on record and we were still doomed.

As faith leaders we know our state must take action to reduce global warming pollution and build a clean energy economy. We have a spiritual call to protect creation, a moral responsibility to care for the poorest and most vulnerable and a responsibility to keep the Earth intact for future generations.

Meeting the challenge of global warming is our faithful obligation as stewards of the Earth. We must protect the legacy we hand on to our children and grandchildren. Religious leaders from all major faith traditions –– including Pope Benedict XVI and the heads of most Protestant denominations, the Union for Reform Judaism and the Islamic Society of North America –– have called on world leaders to take action on climate change, for good reason. It is our God–given responsibility to do this.

Background
Many people fear –– or at least claim they do –– that global warming will lead to enhanced precipitation and melting of ice in high northern latitudes, which will lead to augmented freshwater runoff to the North Atlantic Ocean, which will lead to a precipitous decline in North Atlantic Deep Water formation, which will produce a swift reduction in the global ocean's thermohaline circulation, which could shut down the Gulf Stream and bring cold times to Europe.

What was done
In a study that comes to bear upon this climate–alarmist scenario, Lund et al. used the δ18O of foraminifera obtained from sediment cores retrieved near the Dry Tortugas and Great Bahama Bank to reconstruct density profiles of the Florida Current (the portion of the Gulf Stream that flows through the Straits of Florida) over the past millennium.

What was learned
In the words of the three researchers, "the cross–current density gradient and vertical current shear of the Gulf Stream were systematically lower during the Little Ice Age (AD ~1200 to 1850)," and they estimate that the "Little Ice Age volume transport was ten percent weaker than today's," stating additionally that "the intervals 0–100 yr BP [years before present] and 1,000–1,100 yr BP are characterized by higher transport."

What it means
In contrast to climate–alarmist contentions that the Gulf Stream could weaken in response to global warming, real–world data indicate that during portions of both the Medieval and Current Warm Periods the strength of the Gulf Stream was actually enhanced relative to what it was during the cooler Little Ice Age, which finding runs exactly counter to what Al Gore and many of his followers have long suggested should be the case.

What was done
In a study published back in 2001, Rustad et al. employed meta–analysis "to synthesize data on the response of soil respiration, net nitrogen mineralization, and aboveground plant productivity to experimental ecosystem warming at 32 research sites representing four broadly defined biomes, including high (latitude or altitude) tundra, low tundra, grassland, and forest."

What was learned
In the words of the 45 researchers involved in the analyzed studies, "there was a diversity of responses among sites, with experimental warming increasing plant productivity at 13 of the 20 sites for which data were available, decreasing plant productivity at two of the 20 sites, and having no significant effect on plant productivity at five of the 20 sites," the end result of which was that "the weighted mean increase in plant productivity due to warming was 19%." In addition, they report that "the response was greatest in the colder ecosystems characterized by lower mean annual precipitation."

What it means
The international team of scientists concluded that "the warming–induced increase in plant productivity may be a direct effect of either increased rates of photosynthesis at higher temperatures or (in those experiments with year–round warming) longer growing seasons, or an indirect effect of increased nutrient availability, resulting from increased rates of litter decomposition and nitrogen mineralization," the latter of which phenomena was increased by an average of 46% by the experimental warmings they analyzed. In addition, they note that "both direct and indirect effects of warming could be particularly important in higher latitude arctic ecosystems, which tend to be both temperature and nutrient–limited."

These several results, which the authors describe as "the most comprehensive synthesis of ecosystem response to experimental warming to date" –– which date was 2001 –– tend to suggest that warming is much to be preferred over cooling in terms of the temperature change's impact on ecosystem productivity.

Background
The authors of this important new study write that light–absorbing and light–scattering aerosols "contribute to atmospheric solar heating and surface cooling," and that "the sum of the two climate forcing terms – the net aerosol forcing effect – is thought to be negative and may have masked as much as half of the global warming attributed to the recent rapid rise in greenhouse gases," but they caution that there is "at least a fourfold uncertainty in the aerosol forcing effect."

What was done
In an observational program that studied this phenomenon as it has never been studied before, Ramanathan et al. employed "three lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles that were vertically stacked between 0.5 and 3 km over the polluted Indian Ocean," which "deployed miniaturized instruments measuring aerosol concentrations, soot amount and solar fluxes" within the infamous atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs) that have been demonstrated to envelop "most of Asia and the adjacent oceans" during "the six–month–long tropical dry season," when "convective coupling between the surface and the troposphere is weak [and] aerosol solar heating can amplify the effect of greenhouse gases in warming the atmosphere while simultaneously cooling the surface."

What was learned
The seven scientists found that "atmospheric brown clouds enhanced lower atmospheric solar heating by about 50 per cent" during the period of their study; and they say that general circulation model simulations suggest that, over the Indian Ocean and Asia during the long tropical dry season, "atmospheric brown clouds contribute as much as the recent increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases to regional lower atmospheric warming trends."

What it means
For a huge and important part of the world – where the situation could well get worse before it gets better – only half of the observed lower atmospheric warming trend of the past few decades has been either natural or greenhouse–gas–induced (take your pick), while the other half appears to have come courtesy of the region's infamous ABCs. One can only wonder, therefore, what the case may be over other polluted parts of the planet. Perhaps aerosols there may also be adding to global warming instead of subtracting from it, which would appear to be a real possibility considering the enormous fourfold uncertainty Ramanathan et al. associate with the net aerosol forcing effect.

In a review paper authored by 130 researchers that employed data compiled by over 1700 acknowledged experts in the field, Schipper et al. (2008) present, in their words, "the results of the most comprehensive assessment to date of the conservation status and distribution of the world's mammals, covering all 5,487 wild species recognized as extant since 1500."
So what did they find?

First of all, they determined that 25% of all mammals for which adequate data are available are threatened with extinction, with the percentage for marine mammals rising to 36%. These figures include 188 critically endangered species that face what they call "a very high probability of extinction," as well as 29 species for which they say "it may already be too late."

What are the primary causes of the possible near–term mammal extinctions?

Climate Change: It's been a bad year for global warming alarmists. Record cold periods and snowfalls are occurring around the globe. The hell that the radicals have promised is freezing over.

As the British House of Commons debated a climate–change bill that pledged the United Kingdom to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050, London was hit by its first October snow since 1922.

Apparently Mother Nature wasn't paying attention. The British people, however, are paying attention — to reality. A poll found that 60% of them doubt the claims that global warming is both man–made and urgent.

What was done
Meteorological data from Arctic Station (69°15'N, 53°31'W) on Disko Island (West Greenland) were analyzed for the period 1991–2004, after which the data were correlated, in the words of the authors, "to the longest record available from Greenland at Ilulissat/Jakobshavn (since 1873)."

What was learned
Marked changes were noted over the course of the study period, including "increasing mean annual air temperatures on the order of 0.4°C per year and 50% decrease in sea ice cover." In addition, due to "a high correlation between mean monthly air temperatures at the two stations (1991–2004)," Hansen et al. were able to place the air temperature trend observed at Disko "in a 130 years perspective." This exercise led them to conclude that the climate changes of the last decade were "dramatic," but that "similar changes in air temperatures have occurred previous[ly] within the last 130 years." More specifically, they report that the changes they observed over the last decade "are on the same order as changes [that] occurred between 1920 and 1930."

What it means
Climate alarmists generally contend that the global warming of the past several years was unprecedented over the past one to two millennia, and that the warming of the Arctic was greatly magnified above that. However, Hansen et al.'s analysis suggests that the recent warming in West Greenland –– as dramatic as it was –– was not even unprecedented over the past century.

In reporting the findings of their test of Charlson et al.'s (1987) CLAW hypothesis, Gunson et al. (2006) begin by reminding us that the hypothesis suggests that an increase in oceanic dimethylsulfide or DMS emissions –– such as has been shown to occur in warming waters on both a diurnal and seasonal basis (Sciare et al., 2000; Baboukas et al., 2002; Kouvarakis and Mihalopoulos, 2002) –– "gives rise to longer–lived clouds with increased droplet density," and that "the resulting increase in global albedo in turn leads to less solar radiation reaching the sea surface, thereby mitigating the effects of climate change" and leading to a reduction in the degree of global warming.

Reference
Nolan, D.S. and Rappin, E.D. 2008. Increased sensitivity of tropical cyclogenesis to wind shear in higher SST environments. Geophysical Research Letters 35: 10.1029/2008GL034147.
What was done
The authors extended the methodology of Nolan et al. (2007) to include a prescribed wind as a function of height that remains approximately constant during the genesis of tropical cyclones in environments of radiative–convective equilibrium that are partially defined by sea surface temperature (SST), which they then employed to explore what happens when SSTs rise.

What was learned
Nolan and Rappin report that "an unexpected result has been obtained, that increasing sea surface temperature does not allow TC genesis to overcome greater shear." In fact, they say that "the opposite trend is found," and that "the new and surprising result of this study is that the effect of shear in suppressing TC genesis actually increases as the SST of the radiative–convective equilibrium environment is increased."

What it means
This new model–based result is eerily analogous to the recent observation–based result of Vecchi and Knutson (2008), who found that as the SST of the main development region of North Atlantic TCs had increased over the past 125 years, certain aspects of climate changed in ways that may have made the North Atlantic, in their words, "more favorable to cyclogenesis, while at the same time making the overall environment less favorable to TC maintenance." Hence, it is doubly interesting that Nolan and Rappin conclude their paper with an intriguing question: "Do these results explain recent general circulation modeling studies predicting fewer tropical cyclones in a global warming world (e.g., Bengtsson et al. 2007)?" It is perhaps too early to say; but it is clearly time to note that even the climate modeling world is not behaving quite the way climate alarmists such as Al Gore and James Hansen would have us believe it is.

Yet government–mandated restrictions on carbon emissions would do precisely that, adding enormous additional weight to an economy already reeling. This additional weight shouldn't just be thrown from the bus — it should be thrown under it.

Most econometric studies agree that restricting greenhouse gas emissions would slow our already sluggish economy.

A study by the National Association of Manufacturers projected that emissions caps, similar to those rejected earlier this year by the U.S. Senate calling for a 63% cut in emissions by 2050, would reduce U.S. gross domestic product by up to $269 billion and cost 850,000 jobs by 2014.

In the September 2008 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Monaghan and Bromwich (2008) review what has been learned about snowfall and near–surface air temperature over the past five decades in Antarctica. This they do because, in their words, "snowfall is the largest contributor to the growth of the ice sheets, and near–surface temperature controls surface melting, which in turn has important impacts on the stability of Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers," which ultimately, we might add, impact global sea level.
So what did their review reveal?

The two researchers from the Byrd Polar Research Center of Ohio State University (USA) begin by noting that "instrumental records indicate statistically insignificant seasonal and annual near–surface temperature changes over continental Antarctica from the late 1950s through 2000," citing the work of Turner et al. (2005). On the Antarctic Peninsula, on the other hand, temperature measured at the Faraday/Vernadsky station rose at the phenomenal rate of 0.56°C per decade from 1951 to 2000. However, the peninsula comprises a mere 4% of the continent's total surface area; and its warming, although dramatic, is thus but a small–scale anomaly.

Reference
Changnon, D., Merinsky, C. and Lawson, M. 2008. Climatology of surface cyclone tracks associated with large central and eastern U.S. Snowstorms, 1950–2000. Monthly Weather Review 136: 3193–3202.
What was done
Using a newly developed dataset (Changnon et al., 2006), which "defined the dimensions of extra large damaging snowstorms during 1950–2000 in the eastern two–thirds of the nation," the authors assessed the characteristics of "the surface low pressure systems that caused the 241 largest and most costly snowstorms, those producing heavy snow (>15.2 cm of snowfall) over 258,000 km2 (100,000 mile2) or more area" in "the same 1–2–day period," which systems were responsible for "the top 10% of all snowstorms."