In this report, we review New Mexico’s long-term climate history and find little in the way of evidence that greenhouse gas build-up in the atmosphere has altered New Mexico’s climate. Instead of long-term changes, short-term variability dominates the state’s average temperature, precipitation, and drought frequency. Current temperatures are not all that different than the ones observed at the beginning of the last century—100 years ago.

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SPPI has published a new Book, The Many Benefits of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment.

The full book can be purchased here: http://www.valeslake.com/bookmart.htm

Global warming alarmists tell us the horrors of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration. Skeptics tell us that it's not all that bad. Finally, there is a non-apologetic treatise that tells us of the benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment in an alphabetical format. This extensively referenced 360-page color book by Drs. Idso and Idso tells us of fifty-five benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment, and belongs in the library of all who study CO2 and climate.

That's 55 benefits. Fifty-five!

The benefits are not squeezed out of computer models, but are based on real data. CO2, after all, is plant food, absolutely necessary for all of the biosphere.

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As presently constituted, earth’s atmosphere contains just slightly less than 400 ppm of the colorless and odorless gas we call carbon dioxide or CO2. That’s only four-hundredths of one percent. Consequently, even if the air's CO2 concentration was tripled, carbon dioxide would still comprise only a little over one tenth of one percent of the air we breathe, which is far less than what wafted through earth’s atmosphere eons ago, when the planet was a virtual garden place. Nevertheless, a small increase in this minuscule amount of CO2 is frequently predicted to produce a suite of dire environmental consequences, including dangerous global warming, catastrophic sea level rise, reduced agricultural output, and the destruction of many natural ecosystems, as well as dramatic increases in extreme weather phenomena, such as droughts, floods and hurricanes.

As strange as it may seem, these frightening future scenarios are derived from a single source of information: the ever-evolving computer-driven climate models that presume to reduce the important physical, chemical and biological processes that combine to determine the state of earth’s climate into a set of mathematical equations out of which their forecasts are produced. But do we really know what all of those complex and interacting processes are? And even if we did -- which we don't -- could we correctly reduce them into manageable computer code so as to produce reliable forecasts 50 or 100 years into the future?

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Temperature changes recorded in the GISP2 ice core from the Greenland Ice Sheet show that the global warming experienced during the past century pales into insignificance when compared to the magnitude of profound climate reversals over the past 25,000 years.

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Until a few days ago I knew that the US government spent an excessive amount of taxpayer money on climate change research. It was just a general notion; I had read occasional articles showing the funding of certain agencies like NASA but I didn't know many specifics. Then on New Years Day, I wrote a very quick article where I randomly picked a document from a Google search showing funding for climate change. The numbers astonished me. I decided to take a closer look.

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As Steve McIntyre has often commented, with these folks you really have to keep your eye on the pea under the walnut shell. These folks seem to have sub-specialties in the “three-card monte” sub-species of science.

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Scientists agree that the Brisbane floods are a consequence of the unusually severe la Niña phase of the el Niño Southern Oscillation, a naturally-occurring four-year cycle of warming and cooling of the world’s oceans, starting in the equatorial eastern Pacific and carried around the globe by the thermohaline circulation of ocean currents.

Scientists also agree – for it is a matter of record – that floods of similar severity have struck the east coast of Australia before: twice in the 19th century and most recently in 1974. These earlier floods could not have been caused by manmade “global warming”, because there was not enough of it to make any difference at that time.

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The pressure has been mounting. The public doubt about global warming has been increasing in recent years given Climategate, and how promises of warm snowless winters failed. After cold and snowy winters in 2007/08 and 2008/09, the winter of 2009/10 was the coldest ever in parts of the southeast, and in parts of Siberia and the coldest since 1977/78 or 1962/63 in many parts of the United States, Europe and Asia. This past December was the second coldest in the entire Central England Temperature record extending back to 1659. It was the coldest ever December in diverse locations like Ireland, Sweden, and Florida. Reluctantly, alarmists changed their tune and the promise of warm and snowless winters as recent as 4 years ago morphed into global warming means cold and snowy winters.

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The winter of 2009-2010 was a memorable one in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, with locations like Philadelphia enjoying multiple massive snow storms that led to record totals for the winter. As with all exceptional weather events of late, the usual suspects blamed the occurrence on global warming. In a NOAA press release reported in USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2010-07-15-heat-record_N.htm), Jay Lawrimore stated that…

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Four cold winters in a row ought to have raised questions in legislators’ minds about the competence of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which they have generously but unwisely funded and trusted. The IPCC’s dire predictions of dangerous warming are not happening in observed reality.

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December was indeed a December to Remember (or for many, to forget!) with widespread cold and snows. The Central England Temperature record is one of the longest continuous temperature records in the world extending back to the Little Ice age in 1659. December 2010 was the Second Coldest December Temperature in the entire record (352 years) with an average of -0.7C just short of the record of -0.8C recorded in December 1890.

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Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.

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We are entreated daily that the West must cut its industrial base because the planet is in danger from our CO2 emissions and our politicians happily fall into line to impose draconian energy taxes. There is somewhat of a disconnect when we read that industrialisation is proceeding apace in developing nations, with money from the industrialised nations. The announcement from Fiat, Italy, is another example of global corporations moving their operations to the developing world where they can emit to their heart's content without penalty and get paid by us for doing so, with money we give to the UN for "development".

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THE 16TH CONFERENCE of the Parties, said Ms. Christiana Figueres, its president, “is a litmus test of global-governance capacity”. There it was, right out in the open. Yet the few commentators who pointed out that the Cancun agreement established several hundred new bureaucracies all over the world, all answerable to the shadowy but now immensely wealthy and powerful Secretariat of the States Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, were pilloried by the Fascists of the “green” movement as mere world-government conspiracy theorists.

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THERE IS a general obligation on policymakers to think first and spend later. It is other people’s money we are spending, and the hard-pressed taxpayer, especially in difficult times, expects those who govern him to use his money wisely.

However, as soon as the label “green” is attached to any proposal to spend our money, policymakers simply switch off their minds and cease to think or check. As a result, some profoundly unwise spending decisions have been made.

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A recent re-posting on the SPPI blog from the HockeySchtick site, with the title, “The 97% ‘Consensus’ is only 75 Self-Selected Climatologists” was a second look at the claim first made in January 2009, in a paper called “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” by Peter Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, from the department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois.

This was their stated aim:

“The objective of our study presented here is to assess the scientific consensus on climate change through an unbiased survey of a large and broad group of Earth scientists.”

It was roundly de-bunked at the time by several commentators and it would have been forgotten and consigned to its proper place in the dustbin, if it hadn’t been continually quoted by activists as fact.

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Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West. The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself.

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Former Republican Congressman and former chairman of the House Committee on Science, Sherwood Boehlert, launched an attack last week on the Republican Party and its stance on global warming science. He made great play of the contributions of Climate Scientists and National Academy of Sciences reports on climate matters. It seems he does not have much idea of the make-up of the NAS panels and how they are stacked with activist scientists and NGO’s to deliver the right message, whilst carrying the scientific imprimature of the NAS.

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Deutsche Bank Group published a report purporting to respond to skeptic arguments. I took issue with a number of points in that document, and DB has responded with a revision to its original report (available at http://www.dbcca.com/dbcca/EN/_media/DBCCAColumbiaSkepticPaper090710.pdf) accompanied by 2 weblog entries at http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/tag/climate-matters. I will discuss their response, indicating where some meeting of minds has occurred, as well as places where I think it falls short; also I would like to raise a few points not taken up earlier.

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The scientific literature fails to support the hypothesis that the trace amount of naturally occurring mercury in the fish we eat in any way endangers or threatens health, especially that of expectant mothers and their babies. Exactly the opposite appears true: those alarming people away from fish pose the real danger to public health.

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