Ten years ago today the U.S. Senate did something that at the time seemed significant and now seems remarkably foresightful. By a vote of 95 to 0, the Senate voted in favor of the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which expressed the Sense of the Senate on the upcoming global warming negotiations in Kyoto, Japan.

Ilulissat, Greenland – The July 27-29 2007 U.S. Senate trip to Greenland to investigate fears of a glacier meltdown revealed an Arctic land where current climatic conditions are neither alarming nor linked to a rise in man-made carbon dioxide emissions, according to many of the latest peer-reviewed scientific findings.

TOKYO - Japan's plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions under the Kyoto Protocol could be affected if an earthquake-hit nuclear power plant is closed for a long time, the country's trade minister said on Tuesday.

Litigation: We wondered what trial lawyers would gun for next after smoking the tobacco industry. Fast-food chains? Soft-drink bottlers? Gun makers? How about companies that contribute to . . . global warming?

Though the 2007 hurricane season is off to a slow start, my colleague Phil Klotzbach and I will be updating our seasonal Atlantic Basin Hurricane Activity Forecast on Aug 3. We still anticipate another active season -- an above-average number of major hurricanes with maximum sustained winds in excess of 110mph.

Manmade global warming alarmism took a disgraceful turn for the worse this weekend when Newsweek published a lengthy cover-story repeatedly calling skeptics "deniers" that are funded by oil companies and other industries with a vested interest in obfuscating the truth.

At least 70 children have died during a spell of freezing weather in the Andean regions of Peru, officials have said.

File photo of a young child in the AndesThe children, all under five years old, died of pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses over the past three months.

Droughts are becoming longer and more intense ... at least according to Al Gore, who made this unequivocal declaration in his 21 March 2007 testimony before the United States Senate's Environment & Public Works Committee.

Hurricanes are getting stronger ... at least that's the word from Al Gore, who made this factual-sounding declaration in his 21 March 2007 testimony before the United States Senate's Environment & Public Works Committee. But is this contention true? And if so - or if not - why?

Background
Dimethylsulfide or DMS, to quote the authors, "is produced by marine phytoplankton activity, and its content in the surface mixed layer is supersaturated with respect to the atmosphere," so that "the net flux of DMS is driven from sea to air." This fact is very important because, as they continue, "in the atmosphere, DMS is rapidly oxidized to form sulfur aerosols, and the cloud condensation nuclei derived from DMS act to counter global greenhouse warming."

Landsea reports that Mann and Emanuel (2006) used quantitative records stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century to develop "a positive correlation between sea surface temperatures and Atlantic basin tropical cyclone frequency for the period 1871-2005..."

[SPPI Note: Here we have the classic pattern. Government employees churning out computer modelled reasons – not real world data or experiences - to expand government size and power. While all the while, exactly the opposite is really taking place.]

The New York Times sets the stage for a new movie, scheduled to open in the coming weeks, called “Arctic Tale” – a fictitious account of the struggle of polar bears and walruses against a changing climate.

Background
There is growing concern that it will be difficult to feed the expanding human population of the planet just a few decades from now without the taking of great quantities of land (Waggoner, 1995; Tilman et al., 2001, 2002; Huang et al., 2002) and nearly all available freshwater resources (Wallace, 2000) from what might be called "wild nature," which habitat usurpation could lead to the extinction of far greater numbers of plant and animal species (Raven, 2002) than what climate alarmists are predicting will be caused by global warming. Idso and Idso (2000) have described how the aerial fertilization effect of the ongoing rise in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration can boost the yields of current crop varieties and help avert this disaster, as we discuss in more detail in our Editorial of 4 Sep 2002. The most recent work of De Costa et al. suggests an additional way of profiting from the expected increase in the air's CO2 content and its ability to stimulate agricultural productivity and water use efficiency.

Nukes best option..

What was done
Employing open-top chambers, the authors determined net ecosystem CO2 exchange (NEE) before, during, and after the severe Central Florida drought of 1998 in a scrub-oak ecosystem in ambient-CO2 (AC) air and in elevated-CO2 (EC) air that had been enriched with an extra 350 ppm of CO2 since May 1996, focusing on the ecosystem's dominant species (Quercus myrtifolia Willd.) for which they measured net photosynthetic rate (PN) throughout the daylight hours of several days.

What was done
The authors analyzed the vertical distributions of diatoms, silicoflagellates and biogenic silica found in two sediment cores recovered from the inner and outer basins (49°04'N, 125°09'W and 49°02'N, 125°09'W, respectively) of Effingham Inlet, British Columbia, Canada, describing the climatic implications of what they found.

What was done
The authors made spatially and temporally intensive measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentration across an urban-to-rural CO2 gradient comprised of Salt Lake City's downtown business district, a residential neighborhood, and a non-urbanized rural location within the Salt Lake Valley (Utah, USA) from 2004 to 2006, as well as measurements of CO2 and water isotopic composition at the same locations over a one-year period.

Global Warming: A private firm's downgrade of its hurricane forecast raises an obvious question: If scientists can't get near-future projections in a limited area right, how can they predict the climate decades from now?

What was done
The authors used mass balance measurements made on the two largest glaciers of the Polar Urals (the IGAN and Obruchev glaciers, ~67.5°N, 67.5°E) between 1957 and 1981 to develop a model of glacier mass balance based upon temperature and precipitation data they obtained from two meteorological stations situated about 100 km from the glaciers, after which they developed models of temperature and precipitation based upon local tree-ring data; and since the tree-ring data spanned the period AD 778-1990, they were able to develop temperature and precipitation histories for that extended period of time, which finally enabled them to reconstruct glacier mass balance back to AD 778.

To bolster our claim that "There Has Been Little Net Global Warming Over the Past 70 Years," each week we highlight the temperature record of one of the 1221 U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations from 1930-2005.

What was done
Extending the work of Mangini et al. (2005), who developed a 2000-year temperature history of the central European Alps based on an analysis of δ18O data obtained from stalagmite SPA 12 of Austria's Spannagel Cave, Vollweiler et al. (2006) used similarly-measured δ18O data obtained from two adjacent stalagmites (SPA 128 and SPA 70) within the same cave to create a master δ18O history covering the last 9000 years, which Mangini et al. (2007) compared with the Hematite-Stained-Grain (HSG) history of ice-rafted debris in North Atlantic Ocean sediments developed by Bond et al. (2001), who had reported that "over the last 12,000 years virtually every centennial time-scale increase in drift ice documented in our North Atlantic records was tied to a solar minimum."

To bolster our claim that "There Has Been Little Net Global Warming Over the Past 70 Years," each week we highlight the temperature record of one of the 1221 U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations from 1930-2005.