David Burge at Iowahawk responds to Al Gore’s call to action with ten helpful suggestions.

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Hat tip to PJM.

News is slow this week, so some clever journalist is breaking some old information as news, and the same story is bouncing all over the MSM echo chamber. In reality, the Paleoene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was detected by James Kennett and Lowell Stott as early as 1990.

AP‘s story:

Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient vacation hotspot with a 74-degree Fahrenheit average temperature, alligator ancestors and palm trees. It’s smack in the middle of the Arctic.

First-of-its-kind core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that 55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise, three new studies show.

The scientists say their findings are a glimpse backward into a much warmer-than-thought polar region heated by run-amok greenhouse gases that came about naturally.

Mesonyx probably drove too many SUVs.

Today’s Washington Post has a surprisingly sympathetic article on some Global Warming skeptics.

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Hat tip to Reid Detchon.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced three amusing 60 second television ads responding to Al Gore’s about-to-be-released Global Warming agitprop motion picture. link

Al Gore’s agitprop documentary opens in theatres next week, and all our liberals friends will soon be running around in circles, crying: “The sky is falling!” Editorials will proclaim that Gore has definitively proven environmental disaster stemming from anthropogenic climate change is well underway, and dangerously accelerating. My college classmates will be buzzing like a hive of bees on the class email list.

Time to read the National Center for Policy Analysis’ debunking study No 285: Climate Science: Climate Change and Its Impacts. Swimming polar bears and color-changing coral reefs are rapidly headed your way.

Scientific debate continues regarding the extent to which human activities contribute to global warming and what the potential impact on the environment might be. Importantly, much of the scientific evidence contradicts assertions that substantial global warming is likely to occur soon and that the predicted warming will harm the Earth’s biosphere.

The Earth’s climate began a warming trend after the “Little Ice Age” ended in the mid-1800s, long before global industrial development led to substantial increases in greenhouse gases beginning in the middle of the 20th century. About half of the warming during the 20th century occurred prior to the 1940s, and natural variability accounts for all or nearly all of the warming.

To assess future climate trends, climatologists rely upon General Circulation Models (GCMs) that attempt to describe Earth’s climate. The many climate models in use vary widely with respect to the variables they include and in the assumptions they make about how those variables interact. Yet some official reports, including the U.S. National Assessment published in 2000, report only the most extreme predictions, ignoring others that project only moderate warming in the 21st century.

Manga Author James D. Hudnall examines the problem, and concludes what’s going wrong is located not in the Earth’s atmosphere, but between the ears of a sizeable segment of the contemporary human community.

America became the pre-eminent super power after WWII with the invention of the atomic bomb. We used the bomb on two cities in Japan. Having killed so many people, so easily, had a double edged impact. It made people confident in American supremacy. It also made people afraid that it could happen to them. Then scare stories about the effects or radiation came out. Suddenly, the public came to worry that science had gone to far and we had opened a pandora’s box.

Popular culture began to churn out stories about mankind creating monsters by fooling around with science and the power of the atom. In addition to this, the holocaust forced the culture to look honesty at discrimination, which resulted in social upheavals in the form of various civil rights movements. The Vietnam war, the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Watergate made a generation question the government. People started looking for reasons to doubt everything because the reality they had previously accepted was thrown into turmoil.

Previous to all these events, most Americans had a positive view of their society. The Europeans looked at us favorably. But things began to change.

Around this time, the environmental movement began to form. Among the many causes they championed was the reduction in air pollution. The concern was what it was doing to people’s lungs. How it was effecting the environment. At some point the theory of the greenhouse effect was born, and it was considered mostly a good thing. Because CO2, a greenhouse gas, is beneficial to plant life. But then the environmental movement became a big money making machine. The EPA was formed by President Nixon and began to grow exponentially in size. To justify this, it found more and more excuses to engage in every aspect of society. Government grants to study environmental issues soon became a great way for scientists to make a living. A whole industry blossomed around it. To justify their grants, some scientists looked for things to scare politicians, so they could keep that grant money flowing.

The Green movement is ironically named.

And to keep the green rolling in, they had to concoct crises to frighten the public with. In the 1960s it was pesticides. In the 1970s it was Nuclear Power plants. In the 1980s it was the Ozone Hole. In 1990s it was global warming.

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ibid.

I think there are several very obvious ways.

MIT Climate Scientist Richard Lindzen, in the Wall Street Journal, discusses one of the ways you can tell: by the ongoing pattern of intimidation of dissenters and stifling of debate associated with Global Warming in the scientific community.

If it wasn’t bunk, they wouldn’t have to punish dissent and censor debate, would they? If they weren’t liars and opportunists, they wouldn’t act with the ruthlessness and dishonesty which have become characteristic features of Global Warming orthodoxy enforcement.

A “for instance” seems obligatory, so I’ll just point to Scientific American‘s threatening to sue Björn Lomborg for daring to quote the special hatchet job they published on his book The Skeptical Environmentalist in a web-published reply to their attack.

The Telegraph reports that the official temperature records compiled by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia establish the fact that the global average temperature did not, in fact, increase from 1998-2005.

So now, will Al Gore kindly shut up and go away?

Penn State Professor Michael Mann’s famous hockey-stick graph allegedly demonstrating dramatic Northern Hemisphere temperature increases in recent times is one of the best known evidentiary exhibits cited when the case for the reality of Global Warming is being made. Mann’s tree-ring-based temperature chart first appeared in a 1999 paper and was rapidly adopted as the prevailing orthodoxy in climate science, despite its revolutionary revaluation of the significance of known climatic events over the past millenium.

The hockey stick has drawn serious criticism in scientific circles, and as the Wall Street Journal reports, Republican Congressional inquiries have finally produced an upcoming review by the National Academy of Sciences.

An 11-member academy panel will now study the accuracy and importance of such research, in particular the work of Dr. Mann, whose hockey-stick graph was included in a report issued by the United Nations in 2001. An academy spokesman said the report would be completed in about four months.

Dr. Mann’s critics, including two amateur Canadian climate researchers, say his work contains serious inaccuracies. Dr. Mann has denied that, but the debate has prompted several climate researchers to take a fresh look at temperature reconstructions.

Ideological instrusions into academic research leading to flawed methodologies and fudged results, first celebrated and acclaimed, but ultimately provoking major scrutiny and being debunked, have occurred before. Dr. Mann’s hockey-stick is likely soon to be joining Dr. Bellisles’ study of American probate records in the Academic world’s rogues gallery of exploded fabrications.

Holman Jenkins, Jr. in a Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday pointed out the differences between models and reality, facts and theory, and the sorts of things its possible to do something about and those which it is not.

As used by the media, “global warming” refers to the theory not only that the earth is warming, but doing so because of human industrial activity.

How can a reasonably diligent citizen assess this claim? Measuring average global temperature is not an easy matter. It’s a big planet, with lots of ways and places to take its temperature. Scientists, naturally, have to rely on record keepers in decades past, using different instruments, to produce what has become the conventionally accepted estimate of a one-degree rise over the past century.

But even if a change is measured, how do we know it’s manmade? Giant, mile-thick sheaths of ice have come and gone from North America in recent millennia. In our unstable and evolving planet, temperature is often either rising or falling. Who knows whether a trend is the product of human activity or natural?

The answer is nobody. All we have is hypothesis. Let’s be honest: A diligent and engaged citizen judges these matters based on the perceived credibility of public figures who affiliate themselves with one view or another. Less engaged citizens, whose views are reflected in polls showing a growing public concern about global warming, are simply registering the prevalence of media mentions of global warming.

In both cases, it may be rational to assume there wouldn’t be so much noise about global warming unless responsible individuals had validated the scientific claims. This is a rational assumption, but not necessarily a reliable one. Politicians adopt views that are popular in order to be popular. Scientists subscribe to theories that later are proved to be wrong. There are “belief” processes at work even in the community of climate researchers.

So how else might an intelligent layperson judge the matter?

Well, he could begin by evaluating the claim that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 0.028% to 0.036% without necessarily taking the measurements himself. This finding is so straightforward, it’s reasonable to assume it would have been widely debunked if unreliable.

Next, the claim that this should lead to higher temperatures because of the heat-absorbing qualities of the CO2 molecule. A reasonable person might be tempted to take this finding on faith too, for a different reason: because even ardent believers in global warming accept that this fact alone wouldn’t justify belief in manmade global warming.

That’s because all things are not equal: The climate is a vast, complex and poorly understood system. Scientists must resort to elaborate computer models to address a multiplicity of variables and feedbacks before they can plausibly suggest (choice of verb is deliberate here) that the net effect of increased carbon dioxide is the observed increase in temperature.

By now, a diligent layperson is equipped to doubt any confident assertion that manmade warming is taking place. Models are not the climate, and may not accurately reflect the workings of the climate, especially when claiming to detect changes that are small and hard to differentiate from natural changes.

Note this doesn’t make our conscientious citizen a global warming “denier.” It makes him a person who recognizes that the case isn’t proved and probably can’t be proved with current knowledge.

He’s also entitled to turn his attention now to the nonscientific factors affecting public professions of certainty about manmade global warming.

Nobody doubts, for instance, that when Bill Clinton asserts global warming is the greatest threat to mankind, he’s consulting not the science but a purported “consensus” of scientists. A layman asks himself: What can “consensus” mean if it asserts a judgment nobody is equipped to confidently make?

Likewise, a study that made news worldwide last month purported to show the death of frogs from warming. It did not show the death of frogs from manmade warming — the study contributed zero evidence one way or another on a human role in climate change. You would have thought otherwise from the media reports. Ditto Al Gore, who offers a traveling slide show (now a movie) in which he catalogs possible dire consequences of global warming in non sequitur fashion to persuade audiences that climate change is caused by human activity and would yield to human action.

Myanna Lahsen, an anthropologist who spent several years observing and interviewing staff at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, shows in a new paper that even climate modelers themselves, who appreciate better than anyone the limits of their work, nonetheless slip into unwarranted certainty in public. She quotes one: “It is easy to get caught up in it; you start to believe that what happens in your model must be what happens in the real world. And often that is not true.”

All this explains why, inevitably and unfortunately, today’s debate over global warming revolves almost exclusively around the status and motives of spokesmen for opposing viewpoints, rather than the science and its limits. Yet this is a story of progress.

Tony Blair, whose government has been a steady sounder of climate warnings, now says he recognizes the improbability of nations sacrificing their economic growth based on uncertain climate science.

He and many others also recognize that the problems associated with climate change (whether manmade or natural) are the same old problems of poverty, disease, and natural hazards like floods, storms and droughts. Money spent directly on these problems is a much surer bet than money spent trying to control a climate change process that we don’t understand.

The BBC informs us of the latest enviromental threat:

Scientists in Germany have discovered that ordinary plants produce significant amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which helps trap the sun’s energy in the atmosphere.

The findings, reported in the journal Nature, have been described as “startling”, and may force a rethink of the role played by forests in holding back the pace of global warming.

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Ronald Reagan actually joked about trees as a source of pollution twenty-five years ago, and the clueless left took his quip as a mark of ignorance. They still use that quotation in attacks today.

Anybody with two brain cells to rub together ought to be able to tell that the sophister, calculator, and economist community is talking rot when you get this kind of story:

Writing in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, the scientists say that more than 60 closely related frog and toad species have vanished from the tropical forests of Latin America during the last few decades, partly because of warming temperatures. The team says this is the first time such a connection has been made.

The research team found a “near lock-step (link) between the timing of losses and changes in climate,” said lead scientist Alan Pounds of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve and Tropical Science Center in Costa Rica. “It’s a very striking pattern, and it’s hard to find another explanation for it.”

In the first place, we know they’re lying through their teeth, because the vanishing batrachian meme has been a standard Global Warming talking point for a couple of years.

Secondly, do you really believe that scientists are God, sitting on a cloud at MIT, Harvard, and CalTech, keeping an effective eye on every living species in every remote and inhospitable wilderness on earth? Who exactly has been counting, for decades, no less, 60 species of swamp and jungle dwelling frogs and toads? The reality is, no doubt, that some grad student went out twice and counted the frogs and toads to be found in a convenient Latin American one quarter acre somewhere, and then they sat down and started figuring.

Statistical analyses can be designed to prove any thesis you want, since you are always in a position to pick your own assumptions. Unfortunately, reality tends to operate on unknown bases and principles. Simpleton environmentalists believe in a pre-human, pre-lapsarian perfect order of an ideal balance of Nature, but Nature is not like that at all. Nature is always a feast or famine situation. Species are so numerous they darken the sky one day, and then they crash and become rarities. Back in grandfather’s day, a Canada goose was an uncommon trophy, and black ducks and canvasbacks were the staple Eastern wildfowling fare. Today, Canada geese are a non-migratory nuisance species, who’ve developed a penchant for office parks and golf courses, and you get more shots at wood ducks than you do at black ducks or cans.

If frogs and toads are in decline somewhere, you can bet that something else is on the rise. Our amphibian friends have been around a long time, longer than we have, and you can count on them staging a comeback sooner or later.