RELEASED The censored EPA CO2 endangerment document – final report

27 06 2009

EPA-Carlin-FinalOn June 25th the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released a draft copy of the suppressed EPA report by EPA employee Alan Carlin critical of the EPA’s position on Carbon Dioxide saying:

The released report is a draft version, prepared under EPA’s unusually short internal review schedule, and thus may contain inaccuracies which were corrected in the final report.

While we hoped that EPA would release the final report, we’re tired of waiting for this agency to become transparent, even though its Administrator has been talking transparency since she took office. So we are releasing a draft version of the report ourselves, today,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman.

CEI notes that: Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.

I’m pleased to say that we have the final report exclusively available here, courtesy of our verified contact at the EPA, who shall remain anonymous. For some background on this contact, developed with the help of Tom Fuller at the San Francisco Environmental Policy Examiner, please read the WUWT story below. The download link is also below. Read the rest of this entry »





New paper – Global dimming and brightening: A review

27 06 2009

Stockholm_solar

Global dimming and brightening: A review

Martin Wild
Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

There is increasing evidence that the amount of solar radiation incident at the Earth’s surface is not stable over the years but undergoes significant decadal variations. Here I review the evidence for these changes, their magnitude, their possible causes, their representation in climate models, and their potential implications for climate change. The various studies analyzing long-term records of surface radiation measurements suggest a widespread decrease in surface solar radiation between the 1950s and 1980s (“global dimming”), with a partial recovery more recently at many locations (“brightening”). There are also some indications for an “early brightening” in the first part of the 20th century. These variations are in line with independent long-term observations of sunshine duration, diurnal temperature range, pan evaporation, and, more recently, satellite-derived estimates, which add credibility to the existence of these changes and their larger-scale significance. Read the rest of this entry »





Warmists deny Copenhagen access to polar bear scientist

27 06 2009

From the UK Telegraph 26 June 2009

Christopher Booker

POLAR BEAR EXPERT BARRED BY WARMISTS

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission, will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with the views of the rest of the group.

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching into the status and management of  polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by  insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

polar_bears480

WUWT readers may recall seeing this photo flashed around the world of polar bears “stranded” on ice at sea. Photo by: Amanda Byrd

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming in the past 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists’ agenda as their most iconic single cause.

The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the ‘wind-sculpted ice’ they were standing on made such a striking image. Read the rest of this entry »