*sigh* what a waste of time. Good thing I’m on vacation. I spent the day in sunny Fort Lauderdale by a swimming pool. I think I’m going out in the kayak if the water is high enough. I *could* claim the rainfall is low becasue of global warming. lol

Except it turned out to be a lie.

I’ve got to tel you that Susan Soloman, the co-chair of WG1 says the incidence of hurricanes has only a peripheral relationship to global warming. But that’s only a person I have talked to who is a climatologist and not a real conservative PR flack. Landsea withdrew from the IPCC committee he was on in 2005 because a guy at Harvard made some stupid remarks about hurricanes being more fierce because of global warming. Landsea thought it was over the top and stepped back in protest in order to get the publicity hogs to back down. As far as I know, they did.

There is no documentation on this story. Nobody seems to know anything about it except the people who get the mysterious talking points emails and equally meyteriously post them on their blogs within a half hour of one another.

Hey I found out something really interesting today. I talked to a lady whose sister was a Bush appointee. Her sister told her about getting a talking points memo every morning that instructed her to say things that were often incorrect and against what her judgement would indicate. But she was an appointee and she did her job but it got to be too much and she left like many others.

Look scoop, just because scientists disagree with one another, it doesn’t mean you understand why. Reading the papers about it doesn’t help. You have to talk to an actual scientist who does climate for his living. Not goddamn geologists, not goddamn vegetation modelers and not a guy who works as a PR flack for the stupidest senator in the solar system.

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post

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 author once more, for its “Third Assessment Report” in 2001. And you were invited to participate yet again, when the IPCC called on you to be an author in the “Fourth Assessment Report.” This report would specifically focus on Atlantic hurricanes, your specialty, and be published by the IPCC in 2007.

Then something went horribly wrong. Within days of this last invitation, in October, 2004, you discovered that the IPCC’s Kevin Trenberth — the very person who had invited you — was participating in a press conference. The title of the press conference perplexed you: “Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity.” This was some kind of mistake, you were certain. You had not done any work that substantiated this claim. Nobody had.

As perplexing, none of the participants in that press conference were known for their hurricane expertise. In fact, to your knowledge, none had performed any research at all on hurricane variability, the subject of the press conference. Neither were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability, you knew, showed no reliable upward trend in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes. Not in the Atlantic basin. Not in any other basin.

To add to the utter incomprehensibility of the press conference, the IPCC itself, in both 1995 and 2001, had found no global warming signal in the hurricane record. And until your new work would come out, in 2007, the IPCC would not have a new analysis on which to base a change of findings.

To stop the press conference, or at least stop any misunderstandings that might come out of it, you contacted Dr. Trenberth prior to the media event. You prepared a synopsis for him that brought him up to date on the state of knowledge about hurricane formation. To your amazement, he simply dismissed your concerns. The press conference proceeded.

And what a press conference it was! Hurricanes had been all over the news that summer. Global warming was the obvious culprit — only a fool or an oil-industry lobbyist, the press made clear, could ignore the link between what seemed to be ever increasing hurricane activity and ever increasing global warming. The press conference didn’t disappoint them. The climate change experts at hand all confirmed the news that the public had been primed to hear: Global warming was causing hurricanes. This judgement from the scientists made headlines around the world, just as it was intended to do. What better way to cast global warming as catastrophic than to make hurricanes its poster child?

You wanted to right this outrageous wrong, this mockery that was made of your scientific field. You wrote top IPCC officials, imploring: “Where is the science, the refereed publications, that substantiate these pronouncements? What studies are being alluded to that have shown a connection between observed warming trends on the earth and long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity? As far as I know, there are none.” But no one in the IPCC leadership showed the slightest concern for the science. The IPCC’s overriding preoccupation, it soon sunk in, lay in capitalizing on the publicity opportunity that the hurricane season presented.

You then asked the IPCC leadership for assurances that your work for the IPCC’s 2007 report would be true to science: “[Dr. Trenberth] seems to have already come to the conclusion that global warming has altered hurricane activity and has publicly stated so. This does not reflect the consensus within the hurricane research community. … Thus I would like assurance that what will be included in the IPCC report will reflect the best available information and the consensus within the scientific community most expert on the specific topic.”

The assurance didn’t come. What did come was the realization that the IPCC was corrupting science. This you could not be a party to. You then resigned, in an open letter to the scientific community laying out your reasons.

Next year, the IPCC will come out with its “Fourth Assessment Report,” and for the first time in a decade, you will not be writing its section on hurricanes. That task will be left to the successor that Dr. Trenberth chose. As part of his responsibility, he will need to explain why — despite all expectations — the 2006 hurricane year was so unexpectedly light, and at the historical average for the past 150 years.

He decoupled the argument for conservation of carbon and attached it to something quite different and you accept it. You shouldn’t have accepted it.

There is noting in the global warming debate that addresses the need for humans to adjust their garments or housing to either increased or decreased temperatures for the purpose of comfort. The adjustments have to do with extreme weather.

You are correct that you will be able to live comfortably whatever the temperature. Humans are very adaptable. Unfortunately some things we enjoy are not.

You may not enjoy coral but I do. For the first thirty years of my life I enjoyed the ocean nearby. Today due to increased temperature and nutrients, our coral is mostly dead and has been replaced by a nasty algal blanket. You see, while you can put on a jacket or take off your shirt, my coral can live only in a VERY narrow band of temperature and salinity. It only took a couple of degrees.

Here is a link to a website you may not like since the members are academics who like to yell at the president and call him names but they are really good at what they do:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/early-warning-signs-of-global-warming-coral-reef-bleaching.html

If you like first hand experience, come to Florida and stick your head under water. It’s gross.