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Chemist Dr. Martin Hertzberg’s response to NYT’s Paul Krugman: 'Hysteria is based on half-baked computer models’ By EPW Blog Tuesday, August 5, 2008 Dr. Martin Hertzberg’s response to NYT’s Paul Krugman: ‘Hysteria is based on half-baked computer models’ (Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry, is one of the more than 500 scientists featured in the U.S. Senate’s report of scientists dissenting from man-made global warming fears. See this U.S. Senate report.) Hertzberg Excerpt: I am a lifelong liberal Democrat, but I am also a scientist. […] In this morning’s article “Can This Planet...

The alignment of the planets, and especially that of Jupiter and Saturn, control the climate on Earth.So explained Rhodes Fairbridge of Columbia University, a giant in science over much of the last century whose accomplishments are perhaps unsurpassed for their breadth, depth, and volume. This one man authored or co-authored 100 scientific books and more than 1,000 scientific papers, he edited the Benchmarks in Geology series (more than 90 volumes in print) and was general editor of the Encyclopaedias of the Earth Sciences. He edited eight major encyclopedias of specialized scientific papers in the atmospheric sciences and astrogeology; geomorphology;...

Thirty days after Steve McIntyre caught NASA cooking climate history again - this time in a feeble attempt to somehow conceal the alarmist-embarrassing  downward trend since 1998 -- Al Gore shamelessly portrayed Saturday's Myanmar cyclone catastrophe as a ‘consequence' of global warming.  A mere 16 days after NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation's cool phase shift would likely bring colder temperatures for as many as the next 20-30 years, Gore told NPR that the "trend toward stronger and more destructive storms appears to be linked to global warming and specifically to the impact of global...

'Big Thaw,' a summertime spectacular in National Geographic magazine, provided awesome scenes of climate-change catastrophes.The glaciers are melting. The ice sheets are melting. They're sliding rapidly out to sea. More rapidly than anyone imagined. Look for the ice sheets to collapse. Look for sea levels to rise. Etc. Etc.National Geographic's breathless account, brilliantly illustrated with the stunning photography for which it is famous, won headlines around the world. It has been dramatized and magnified on nightly newscasts and blogs alike, and has become a staple in the popular imagination.But it won't happen, says Prof. Cliff Ollier of the University...

Vincent Gray has begun a second career as a climate-change activist. His motivation springs from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body that combats global warming by advocating the reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Dr. Gray has worked relentlessly for the IPCC as an expert reviewer since the early 1990s.But Dr. Gray isn't an activist in the cause of enforcing the Kyoto Protocol and realizing the other goals of the worldwide IPCC process. To the contrary, Dr. Gray's mission, in his new role as cofounder of The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, is to...

Antarctica -- a vast territory whose sea-ice growth in winter effectively doubles its size to envelop an area three times that of Canada -- is the world's coldest continent by far, its permanent ice sheet regulating the Antarctic atmosphere. It is also the world's windiest and driest continent by far, and its highest by far, with a mean elevation of 2,300 metres.It is also the world's most remote continent, its least explored and least understood.Not until 1998, with the advent of new technologies and improved scientific understanding, did human knowledge "allow the question of the global relevance of Antarctica...

To save the planet from global warming -- a looming catastrophe many believe we can no longer prevent -- could require that China stop building the equivalent of a new 1000 megawatt coal plant every five days, and India the same equivalent every two weeks. It could also require that the rest of the developing world slows its economic growth, for the good of humanity. And it could require us, in the rich countries, to dramatically curtail our air and auto travel, and other greenhouse gas producing activities, even if it means plunging ourselves into recession if not depression.Or,...

Ideologies: Once in a while the truth accidentally tumbles out on global warming activists' real agenda. That's exactly what happened at the U.N., when Bolivia's leader called for ending capitalism to save the planet. Delivering the keynote address at the United Nations forum on Indigenous People on Monday, Bolivia's President Evo Morales told the adoring crowd that "if we want to save our planet earth, to save life, to save mankind, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system."Morales elaborated on that by calling for an end to "unbridled industrial development, extraction of natural resources, excessive...

The last few years have witnessed an Internet-stock bubble and a real-estate bubble. Could we be approaching the bursting point of the climate-change bubble? The intensity of the current climate crusade, Al Gore’s $300 million ad campaign, and Time’s fifth panicky global-warming cover in three years (“Be Worried, Be Very Worried” read the 2006 cover) are all good contrary indicators suggesting that the hysteria is reaching its terminal stage. Like mortgage-backed securities dealers, the climate campaigners are in a panic because the public isn’t buying what they’re selling. The latest annual Gallup survey on the environment shows that only 37...

Want to talk about really inconvenient truths? Well, despite Nobel Laureate Al Gore's massive campaign to scare the world into thinking the planet is facing imminent doom at the hands of global warming, Americans don't seem to be buying it.In fact, a new Gallup poll released moments ago revealed, "a little more than a third say they worry about [global warming] a great deal, a percentage that is roughly the same as the one Gallup measured 19 years ago."Hehehehehe.Here are the exquisitely delicious details (emphasis added): Despite the enormous attention paid to global warming over the past several years, the...

Stephen Schwartz knows as much about the effects of aerosols on climate change as anyone in the world, and he's worried. He believes climate change is so massive an economic issue that we face costs "in the trillions if not quadrillions of dollars." He thinks a Herculean effort and great sacrifice is required to get the world down to zero net increase in carbon dioxide concentrations, an effort he compares to that which the Allies undertook in their all-out war against Nazi Germany and Japan."Recall World War II, where everyone was making a sacrifice: gas rationing, tire rationing, no...

Iceland is shrouded in a permanent low-pressure system. Far to the south, the Azores are shrouded in permanent highs. Both pressure systems rock, from east to west and with ever-changing intensity, in the process controlling the North Atlantic's westerly winds. When the westerlies are strong, Europe's summers are cool, its winters are mild and rain is frequent. When westerlies are weak, rainfall decreases and temperatures become extreme, leading to summer heat waves and winter deep freezes.These year-to-year variations in the North Atlantic are known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. Though in many ways mysterious, their effects are quite predictable...

He's called the world's most famous hurricane expert, not because he likes to fly into hurricanes to experience them up close -- which he does -- but because of what he's learned from them, up there, buffeted by the fury of nature. William Gray has developed an intuitive sense when it comes to understanding the atmosphere in its infinite complexity. This intuition rooted in experience allowed him to pioneer the science of hurricane forecasting more than two decades ago, and subsequently to practice his craft with an unprecedented precision that he keeps refining year after year. He and his...

Bob Carter, a professor at James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide (South Australia), is a paleontologist, a stratigrapher, and a marine geologist.He has been chair of the National Marine Science and Technologies Committee, director of the Australian Office of the Ocean Drilling Program, and chair of the Earth Sciences Discipline Panel of the Australian Research Council.He is Cambridge educated.And he is an outspoken global-warming skeptic.Most global-warming skeptics criticize the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on limited grounds -- they might view the science put forth by the IPCC to be at odds with science...

We are doomed, say climate change scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that is organizing most of the climate change research occurring in the world today. Carbon dioxide from man-made sources rises to the atmosphere and then stays there for 50, 100, or even 200 years. This unprecedented buildup of CO2 then traps heat that would otherwise escape our atmosphere, threatening us all."This is nonsense," says Tom V. Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the same IPCC. He laments...

He's the world's most cited climatologist, according to an analysis in the journal of the British Institute of Geographers. He's also the fifth-most-cited physical geographer in the world, and the 11th most cited among all geographers.He has written some 230 articles and five books, including in such fields as geology, limnology, meteorology and archeology.He has twice seen his papers in Environmental Conservation awarded prizes for being "best paper of the year," and he's a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honour, created to recognize "outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment."He's Dr. Reid Bryson,...

Lawrence Solomon's series becomes a book, providing heft to the claim that climate science is not settledGlobal warming has become a question for citizens, and not only scientists. Citizens must decide how serious the threat is and what to do about it, which cures make sense, and which might be worse than the disease. Alas, the answers to these questions depend on scientific issues of fierce complexity that few laymen are capable of confronting directly. So what are we to do? Al Gore has an answer, and in some ways it is a very sound answer. Mr. Gore says, essentially,...

In the 1970s, leading scientists claimed that the world was threatened by an era of global cooling.Based on what we've learned this decade, says George Kukla, those scientists - and he was among them -- had it right. The world is about to enter another Ice Age.Dr. Kukla, in 1972 a member of the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences and a pioneer in the field of astronomical forcing, became a central figure in convincing the United States government to take the dangers of climate change seriously. In January of that year, he and another geologist, Robert Matthews of Brown University,...

Michael Griffin aired his doubts about climate-change politics on National Public Radio. Under a barrage of criticism, he recantedThe head of NASA -- the National Aeronautical and Space Association--is "an idiot" and "in denial." He is also "surprisingly naive" and "a fool." With his judgment and competence so lacking, demands abound for his resignation as head of the largest and most accomplished science agency in the world. Those comments and others in the past week have come from scientists shocked to learn that NASA chief Michael Griffin thinks differently than they about global warming. Among the most shocked is one...

"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled." S o said Al Gore ... in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren't sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn't think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere...

Germany's Hans von Storch, one of the world's leading climate scientists, believes that climate change is for real and that humans are responsible. He also believes that we shouldn't fear climate change, that predictions of doom are "hysterical" when they aren't "completely idiotic and dubious," and that many of the science establishment's pronouncements on climate change are bereft of scientific merit."Theories of global warming have left laboratories far behind. Now, they are the stuff of Hollywood," he wrote in Der Spiegel, in an article that castigated global warming alarmists for debasing scientific inquiry and intimidating those who would challenge...

If you're the type of person who sets aside money today for the university education of your great-great-great grandchildren, even if it means that you may not be able to afford university tuition for your own children, you may think it sensible for society to invest now in major measures to stop global warming.If you're not this type -- and who in his right mind is -- you should forget about Kyoto-like greenhouse-gas reduction targets and the crash programs that would be required to meet them. Doing so would not only be economically prudent, it would be -- by...

President George Bush meets Pope Benedict in June. Some Vatican authorities are lobbying the Pope to press the U.S. administration to act on global warming."It's not for me to say what the Pope and President Bush should discuss, but certainly they will discuss current issues and therefore I imagine and I hope they will [discuss climate change]," said Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Vatican organization charged with developing policy for the environment and social issues.Cardinal Martino spoke at the start of "Climate Change and Development," a Vatican study seminar two weeks...

Once upon a time, and for millennia before then, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were low and stable. Then came the industrial revolution and CO2 levels began to rise. The more man industrialized, the more that CO2 -- and the temperature -- rose. In the last half century, with industrialization at unprecedented levels, CO2 reached levels unprecedented in the human history. This is the story of global warming.This story is a fable, says Zbigniew Jaworowski, past chairman of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, a participant or chairman of some 20 Advisory Groups...

In the history of the global-warming movement, no scientist is more revered than Roger Revelle of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Harvard University and University of California San Diego. He was the co-author of the seminal 1957 paper that demonstrated that fossil fuels had increased carbon-dioxide levels in the air. Under his leadership, the President's Science Advisory Committee Panel on Environmental Pollution in 1965 published the first authoritative U.S. government report in which carbon dioxide from fossil fuels was officially recognized as a potential global problem. He was the author of the influential 1982 Scientific American article that elevated global...

Of all the scientists who are labelled "deniers" because they don't support the orthodoxy of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, none comes in for more vilification than Eigil Friis-Christensen. For understandable reasons.Dr. Friis-Christensen questions the very premise that man-made activities explain most of the global warming that we see, and through his work he has convinced much of an entire scientific discipline to explore his line of inquiry. With his 1991 paper in Science, showing a startling correlation between global warming and the activities of the sun, Dr. Friis-Christensen unleashed a wave of related research by solar...

Physicist Freeman Dyson knows from long experience that models containing numerous fudge factors are worthlessAs a mathematician and physicist, Freeman Dyson is known for the unification of three versions of quantum electrodynamics, for his work on the Orion Project, which proposed space flight using nuclear pulse propulsion, and for developing the TRIGA, a small, inherently safe nuclear reactor used by hospitals and universities worldwide for the production of isotopes. As a theoretician, he is known for the Dyson sphere (an inspiration for science fiction such as Star Trek, as well as scientific works), the Dyson transform (which led to the...

The Earth slowly but surely warmed over the course of the 20th century, global temperatures increasing by about half a degree Celsius. The evidence for this global warming comes from ice core data from the Arctic island of Severnaya Zemlya, published just last year.The Earth slowly but surely warmed over the course of the 19th century, too, global temperatures again increasing by about half a degree Celsius. The evidence for this global warming comes from the same ice core data.The Earth slowly but surely warmed over the course of the 18th century, too, global temperatures increasing by about a...

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is very particular about the scientists it selects to investigate the health consequences of global warming. Those the likes of Paul Reiter needn't apply.Prof. Reiter heads the Insects and Infectious Disease Unit at the Pasteur Institute, famed for its founding by Louis Pasteur in 1887 and the eight Nobel Prizes that its later scientists received. Prior to joining the Pasteur Institute, Prof. Reiter directed the entomology section at the Dengue Branch of the Centers for Disease Control, the path-breaking U.S. government agency. Prof. Reiter is also known for his work as an...

Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been wronged. In The Great Global Warming Swindle, a no-holds-barred documentary that aired last week in the United Kingdom and will soon be coming to TV sets in North America, he was cast as a partisan in the climate-change debate. That he is not.He was also cast as impugning the motives of scientists who employ complex computer models to predict the climate 50 or 100 years into the future. That he also did not do. Neither does he subscribe to the theory, championed in the documentary, that...

Astrophysicist Nir Shariv, one of Israel's top young scientists, describes the logic that led him -- and most everyone else -- to conclude that SUVs, coal plants and other things man-made cause global warming. Step One Scientists for decades have postulated that increases in carbon dioxide and other gases could lead to a greenhouse effect. Step Two As if on cue, the temperature rose over the course of the 20th century while greenhouse gases proliferated due to human activities. Step Three No other mechanism explains the warming. Without another candidate, greenhouses gases necessarily became the cause. The series Statistics...

We live in extraordinarily hot times, says Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. In 2004, he led a team of scientists that, for the first time, quantitatively reconstructed the sun's activity since the last Ice Age, some 11,400 years ago. Earth hasn't been this hot in 8,000 years and, he predicts, the hot spell will carry on for a few more decades before the sun turns down the heat. More Deniers Statistics needed -- The Deniers Part IWarming is real -- and has benefits -- The Deniers Part IIThe hurricane expert who...

Claude Allegre, one of France's leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming."By burning fossil fuels, man increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, for example, has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Dr. Allegre, a renowned geochemist, wrote 20 years ago in Cles pour la geologie.." Fifteen years ago, Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming's "potential risks...

Jasper Kirkby is a superb scientist, but he has been a lousy politician. In 1998, anticipating he'd be leading a path-breaking experiment into the sun's role in global warming, he made the mistake of stating that the sun and cosmic rays "will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth's temperature that we have seen in the last century." Global warming, he theorized, may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth's temperature.Dr. Kirkby was immediately condemned by climate scientists for minimizing the role of human beings...

Who are the global warming deniers, those scientists who downplay the human cause of climate change, who claim that manmade climate change, if it's occurring at all, may have modest costs or even bring benefits, who claim that the science is not settled on climate change? To discover whether these deniers are crackpots from the fringes of academia, as their detractors so often claim, I decided to investigate scientists at odds with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the official body organizing the great bulk of the climate research that dominates the public airwaves.After writing 10 columns on the...

Astrophysicist Nir Shariv, one of Israel's top young scientists, describes the logic that led him -- and most everyone else -- to conclude that SUVs, coal plants and other things man-made cause global warming. Step One Scientists for decades have postulated that increases in carbon dioxide and other gases could lead to a greenhouse effect. Step Two As if on cue, the temperature rose over the course of the 20th century while greenhouse gases proliferated due to human activities. Step Three No other mechanism explains the warming. Without another candidate, greenhouses gases necessarily became the cause. The series Statistics...

Climate change is a much, much bigger issue than the public, politicians, and even the most alarmed environmentalists realize. Global warming extends to Mars, where the polar ice cap is shrinking, where deep gullies in the landscape are now laid bare, and where the climate is the warmest it has been in decades or centuries."One explanation could be that Mars is just coming out of an ice age," NASA scientist William Feldman speculated after the agency's Mars Odyssey completed its first Martian year of data collection. "In some low-latitude areas, the ice has already dissipated." With each passing year more...

When Frans Nieuwstadt, a distinguished Dutch meteorologist, engineer, editor and professor, died in 2005, his obituary recounted seminal events in his accomplished life. Among the experiences worthy of mention: Nieuwstadt had studied under the celebrated professor, Henk Tennekes, and along with other colleagues had been instrumental in convincing Tennekes to return to Europe in 1978 to become director of research at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and later chairman of the august Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.Henk Tennekes, in ways both personal and professional, has touched an extraordinary number of lives in his own...

Apology To Dr. Nigel WeissNigel Weiss, professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, believes that the warming trend in Earth's climate is caused by greenhouse gases produced by human activity, and that the effect of a potential future reduction in solar activity would not reverse or cancel out that trend, but might have a small effect in mitigating it. He has held these views for several years. Incorrect information appeared in a column in the Financial Post on Feb. 2. The National Post withdraws any allegation that Dr. Weiss is a global warming "denier" and regrets the embarrassment...

Man produces greenhouse gases and greenhouse gases cause global warming, most scientists agree, but how, exactly, do greenhouse gases cause global warming? While theories abound, as do elaborate computer models incorporating a multitude of gases and other climatic factors, none has been conclusive. And if greenhouse gases aren't responsible, what else could be? A clear, verifiable mechanism showing how a greenhouse gas or other physical entity can drive climate change has eluded science. Until now.For more than a decade, Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center has been pursuing an explanation for why Earth cools and warms. His findings...

Most scientists who are labelled as "deniers" for their views on global warming don't embrace this role. They cringe at the thought of disagreeing with colleagues who think that the science is settled, they do their best to avoid making waves, and they fear being marginalized as cranks who disagree with the scientific consensus. Dr. Richard Lindzen is an exception.Dr. Lindzen is one of the original deniers -- among the first to criticize the scientific bureaucracy, and scientists themselves, for claims about global warming that he views as unfounded and alarmist. While he does not welcome the role he's acquired,...

A great melt is on in Antarctica. Its northern peninsula -- a jut of land extending to about 1,200 kilometres from Chile -- has seen a drastic increase in temperature, a thinning of ice sheets and, most alarmingly, a collapse of ice shelves. The Larsen A ice shelf, 1,600 square kilometres in size, fell off in 1995. The Wilkins ice shelf, 1,100 square kilometres, fell off in 1998 and the Larsen B, 13,500 square kilometres, dropped off in 2002. Meanwhile, the northern Antarctic Peninsula's temperatures have soared by six degrees celsius in the last 50 years.Antarctica represents the greatest threat...

You're a respected scientist, one of the best in your field. So respected, in fact, that when the United Nations decided to study the relationship between hurricanes and global warming for the largest scientific endeavour in its history -- its International Panel on Climate Change -- it called upon you and your expertise.You are Christopher Landsea of the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. You were a contributing author for the UN's second International Panel on Climate Change in 1995, writing the sections on observed changes in tropical cyclones around the world. Then the IPCC called on you as a contributing...

One month ago, the world heard that global warming could lead to a global catastrophe "on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century." This assessment, from Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, made banner headlines and led prominent leaders such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair to urge immediate action to stem global warming.It also led some prominent environmentalists to denounce Sir Nicholas for what they deemed an outrageous study bereft of credibility. None of the environmentalists issued a stronger...

In the global warming debate, there are essentially two broad camps. One believes that the science is settled, that global warming is serious and man-made, and that urgent action must be taken to mitigate or prevent a future calamity. The other believes that the science is far from settled, that precious little is known about global warming or its likely effects, and that prudence dictates more research and caution before intervening massively in the economy.The "science is settled" camp, much the larger of the two, includes many eminent scientists with impressive credentials. But just who are the global warming skeptics...

New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals "runaway warming" impossible Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was. That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Langley Research Center. After studying it,...

Global warming skeptics CNN's Miles O'Brien reports on a meeting of skeptical minds in New York. THIS IS A VIDEO.

** EXCERPT **The world has seen some extraordinary winter conditions in both hemispheres over the past year: snow in Johannesburg last June and in Baghdad in January, Arctic sea ice returning with a vengeance after a record retreat last summer, paralyzing blizzards in China, and a sharp drop in the globe’s average temperature. It is no wonder that some scientists, opinion writers, political operatives and other people who challenge warnings about dangerous human-caused global warming have jumped on this as a teachable moment. “Earth’s ‘Fever’ Breaks: Global COOLING Currently Under Way,” read a blog post and news release on Wednesday...

Many friends and colleagues of mine who share my libertarian views are aghast at my organization's policy proposal of the carbon tax to combat global warming. Most of these perturbed individuals are self-styled global warming "skeptics" who are much more persuaded by the scientific evidence doubting the seriousness (or even existence) of anthropogenic climate change than the evidence confirming it. This article is an attempt to reach out to my free-market friends with five reasons why the carbon tax still is the best option for American policy - even if they're right about global warming.

November 15-17 San Diego, California Speakers Include: Lee Strobel William Lane Craig Gary Habermas J.P. Moreland Craig Hazen Cutting-Edge Topics Include: Overturning Evolution Radical Islam The New Atheism Jesus as the Only Way Evidence for the Resurrection Defending the Bible The Case for the Trinity