Prominent scientist James Hansen criticizes President Bush’s climate change policy, despite the fact that the policy is in part based on Hansen’s own findings.

This is unheard of: A prominent scientist in the pay of the federal government attacks the President in a crucial state (Iowa) one week before the election. Not just any prominent scientist, either, but James Hansen, recipient of $250,000 in pocket change from the Heinz Foundation, run by Mrs. John Kerry. Don’t worry, though, he said he was speaking as a private citizen because he paid his own way. With Mrs. Kerry’s money, we might add, in his family nest egg.
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Research on the long-term drought history of the western United States doesn’t jibe with research on the long-term temperature reconstructions of the same region. When two records disagree, something is amiss.
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Despite a slew of British press reports to the contrary, the data reveal no unnatural “jump” in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

The British press lit up this week with a story about an unprecedented, and surprising “jump” in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But a check of the data reveals nothing of the kind. Instead, recent fluctuations appear to be just part of natural variability.
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Will future hurricanes will be stronger in a greenhouse-gas warmed world? A new climate model says yes, but (as usual) the observations suggest otherwise.

With all the hurricane activity as of late—both in the Atlantic Ocean and in the U.S. media—we’re starting to hear rumblings conflating hurricanes and global warming. Renowned hurricane experts say that notion is unfounded, given actual observations.
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There’s new research in Science demonstrating the “hockey stick” reconstruction of earth’s temperature history over the last 1000 years suffers deficiencies that further undermine its reliability.

Why are so many researchers concerned with reconstructing a thousand years of Earth’s climate history? Some will argue it’s actually a political debate; to the winner goes the spoils — passage of or withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol by governments worldwide.
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Increased rainfall? Lower temperatures? So suggests a regional climate model. Yet, the regional climate model projecting a “warming hole” in the U.S. Midwest for the coming century suffers from the same difficulties all climate models do—the inability to accurately capture reality. So despite the fact that the net effects of the projected climate change would be overwhelmingly beneficial for the regions agriculture, it looks like this is just another in a long string of modeling studies that are more useful as an academic exercise than as a reliable indicator of our climatic future.
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National Geographic joins the climate change fray with an issue dedicated to misinformation on global warming, past, present and future.

This isn’t your father’s National Geographic anymore. Once a coffee-table staple with gorgeous photos of people, places, and things, it now more resembles the host of other Washington-slick lobbying mags, pushing today’s popular issues.
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Though the new U.S. Climate Change Science Program report concedes numerous climate modeling unknowns, a New York Times editorial misrepresents it as a “striking shift” by the Bush Administration.

Well, you can’t fault the New York Times for trying—that is, trying to move its global warming agenda forward by any means necessary. On August 26, a routine federal report on climate change research was hailed as “a striking shift” of the Bush Administration, and then used as the basis for a masthead editorial August 27 calling for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

In reality, the report, Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Years 2004 and 2005 (OCP ) resembles a jillion other climate reports with interminable titles emanating from our Washington agencies. University faculty mailboxes groan with this overload. (Whatever became of the paperless office, we ask?)
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It’s increasingly difficult to keep a straight face while reading any global warming paper in a major scientific journal. Even by this standard, a recent article on deaths in California and destruction of its wine industry (of course, because of dreaded global warming) is a true belly-slapper.

The fact that it appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is a lot less funny. What on earth is happening to the peer-review process in science, and how are papers this bad getting through that process?
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A recent news story—itself a disturbing distortion of climate change science—should prompt any critical citizen to ask this: Why do scientists inevitably emphasize scare stories that aren’t warranted by even the most cursory respect for the facts?

Consider coverage of a recent Science article by Princeton’s Steve Pacala. Along with colleague R. Socolow, they argued, plausibly, that emissions of carbon dioxide—the main human greenhouse gas—can be reduced by increased adoption of existing technologies. They fail to mention that people have to want them, and they have to actually work.
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