We are pleased to announce the latest addition to our blogroll category of “Books”—that being Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives—a fine publication edited by our own Dr. Patrick J. Michaels.

Climate Coup is published by the Cato Institute and is available through Cato or through Amazon.

Here is how the Cato Institute describes Climate Coup:

Global warming alarmism is invading nearly every aspect of our society. Despite convincing evidence that climate change does not portend an apocalyptic future, children are inundated with that idea in schools. Poor countries shake down rich ones in the name of climate “justice.” Lawmakers try to impose tariffs and sanctions on nations that don’t agree with their environmental views. The military uses climate change as a reason to enlarge its budget. And courts are compelling the government to restrict the amount of energy we use and the way we use it.

Climate Coup provides an antidote to this, gathering together myth-breaking insights and data from a team of experts on the pervasive influence global warming alarmism is having on health, education, law, national defense, international development, trade, and academic publishing.

”Global warming’s reach has become ubiquitous,” writes the editor, Patrick Michaels. “This book documents how far unelected bureaucracies have pushed this issue into our lives.”

Each author details the width and depth of the impact global warming alarmism is having on his or her area of expertise. The coverage includes:

-How the Constitution’s limited government restraints have been torn away, allowing global warming policy to be dictated by the president.

-The deliberate abdication of legislative authority by Congress to further concentrate regulatory power in the executive and judicial branches.

-How outrageous exaggerations of global warming fuel budget expansion within the Defense Department.

-How students are subjected to forms of climate change education that are akin to social engineering.

-How trade policies do nothing about climate change but erode market freedoms.

-Ending the myth that global warming reduces the quality of life in developing countries.

-An examination of the unrealistic and unsupported public health claims made about global warming.

Climate Coup confronts the exaggerations, opportunism, and myths about global warming that are all too pervasively altering the shape of our lives and provides the tools and insights necessary to push back against the takeover.

Climate Coup is edited by Dr. Patrick Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute. According to Cato, “Dr. Michaels is widely acknowledged by climate alarmists as today’s most effective synthesizer of the nonapocalyptic view of climate change. He is a distinguished senior fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists. He has also authored multiple books on global warming, including Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know.”

Climate Coup includes individual chapters contributed by:

Roger Pilon
Evan Turgeon
Ross McKitrick
Ivan Eland
Sallie James
Indur M. Goklany
Robert E. Davis
Neal McCluskey

For those interested in hearing more about what Climate Coup is all about, the Cato Institute is hosting a Book Forum on Wednesday May 4, 2011. The Book Forum will be streamed on-line, and will feature speakers Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, MIT and Bob Ryan, Fellow and past president of the American Meteorological Society and meteorologist for WJLA / ABC 7 News. The discussion will be moderated by Patrick J. Michaels.

Be sure to tune in to see all the fun!

Back in the summer of 2009, we ran a piece titled “Sea Level Rise: An Update Shows a Slowdown” in which we showed that the much ballyhooed “faster rate of sea level rise during the satellite era” was actually slowing down.

We suggested that this observation would help the IPCC to adjudicate an issue that it raised in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report:

“Whether the faster rate [of sea level rise] for 1993 to 2003 reflects decadal variability or an increase in the longer term trend is unclear.”

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You know the story. Humans are burning fossil fuels and because of their actions, the world is now warming at an unprecedented pace. This warming is stressing ecosystems throughout the world with devastating consequences to vegetation from one end of the earth to the other. If we do not act fast, we will destroy the planet and have a tough time facing our grandchildren. We can all hear it now—why didn’t you do something when there was still time to save the Earth?

Two articles have appeared recently in the scientific literature with results that may make us reconsider this entire affair. The first appears in the Journal of Geographical Sciences dealing with worldwide trends in the vigor of vegetation since the early 1980s—the results may surprise you, but they did not surprise us given all that has been written on this subject and certainly covered at World Climate Report.

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We all know that if you are impacted by a flood, drought, tornado, hurricane, heat wave, wildfire, tsunami, earthquake, landslide, or anything else you can dream of, you might as well just go ahead and blame global warming—after all, if you don’t someone else most assuredly will. Whether or not you’d be correct, though, is another story entirely.

Over the past year, a number of volcanic events have been in the news from Europe to Hawaii and now the big earthquake in Japan and resultant tsunami has a lot of folks asking “can we blame all of this global warming.” Literally one day after the earthquake in Japan, The Daily Caller ran a story entitled “Some respond to Japan earthquake by pointing to global warming” starting with the sentence “Hours after a massive earthquake rattled Japan, environmental advocates connected the natural disaster to global warming. The president of the European Economic and Social Committee, Staffan Nilsson, issued a statement calling for solidarity in tackling the global warming problem.”

Another a story at Grist was titled “Today’s Tsunami: This is What Climate Change Looks Like” (but this Grist story was softened after severe critcism from the Center for Environmental Journalism). Even in far away places like Nunavut Canada, people are pushing a global warming/earthquake link.

And back when volcanoes were closing down air traffic in Europe, Reuters (April 16, 2010) carried a story worldwide entitled “Ice cap thaw may awaken Icelandic volcanoes”. Here is an excerpt from that story:

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We hear over and over that any warming at the global scale will be amplified in the Arctic region of the Northern Hemisphere, and the warming will cause ice to melt and sea level to rise and all the rest. Let some ice-free area appear during summer near the North Pole and the global media will take the bait every time and announce we are witnessing geophysical changes of Biblical proportions. Several articles have appeared recently in leading journals with interesting results regarding the temperature history of the Arctic over the past 1,000 to 1,500 years, and they show that temperatures there have risen and fallen to a significant degree many times in the past (that is, without the benefit of large changes in atmospheric CO2 levels), and they call into question whether any unusual warming (or cooling) has occurred there in recent decades.

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As the curtain falls on the climatological winter (December-February) of 2010-11 in the U.S., we are left shivering.

For the second year in a row, the winter temperature when averaged across the contiguous United States came in below the average temperature for the 20th century. This marks the first time since the winters of 1992-93 and 1993-94 that two winters in a row have been below the long-term normal, and it makes for the coldest back-to-back winter combination for at least the past 25 years.

Figure 1 shows the history of winter temperatures averaged across the Lower 48 as compiled by the U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) for the winters from 1895-96 through 2009-2010. Although all the data have yet to be completely processed by NCDC for the winter of 2010-11, when the final numbers are in the average winter temperature will probably fall within the oval we added at the end of the record. If it does so, it will mean that the combined average temperature for the past two winters will be colder than any two-winter combination since 1983-84 and 1984-85, and perhaps even as far back as the all-time back-to-back coldest winters of 1977-78 and 1978-79.

Figure 1. Average winter (Dec.-Feb.) temperature for the contiguous United States (data source: NCDC). The oval of the right hand side of the data series contains our guess as to the value for the winter of 2010-2011.

[Update: March 8, 2011. NCDC’s final numbers are in for winter 2011, and the U.S. winter temperature history looks like this.]

What’s global warming got to do with any of this? It is hard to say. But what we can say for sure, is that whatever influence it may have, the end product during recent winters is nothing out of the ordinary—at least as far as can be ascertained by looking at the seasonal average temperature history of the U.S.

Over the longer term (i.e. since 1895-86) there has been a statistically significant increase in the NCDC-compiled U.S. winter temperature history. And recent decades have been dominated by warmer than average winters (including many that have been much warmer than average). But as the last two winter seasons have aptly demonstrated, cold snowy winters have not been relegated to a thing of the distant past.

Whether or not all the winter warming exhibited by the NCDC-compiled record is actual warming of the broader-scale climate (there are indications/suggestions/contentions that some of the warming may result from artificial warming from microclimate or instrument changes), what is undoubtedly true is that whatever your tastes in winter may be, we are sure that you will continue to get your fill from winters to come.

One word that comes up over and over in the global warming issue is “uncertainty”. The alarmists tend to minimize the discussion of uncertainties while the so-called skeptics seem to harp on how uncertain we are on so many fronts. Two articles have appeared in the literature during the past year highlighting amazing uncertainties dealing with ice loss from glaciers and water mass in the world’s oceans.

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If you haven’t heard the news, global warming is causing sea level to rise and causing storms to become more severe, and the net result is shoreline erosion throughout the world. This pillar of the apocalypse is particularly easy to sell—gather up some pictures of shoreline erosion, throw in some images of turtle nest destruction, and you are on your way to winning a Nobel Prize for putting all the pieces together.

A recent issue of Global and Planetary Change contains an article on this subject written by two scientists with the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland; funding was provided by the Environmental Protection Agency-Queensland. Dawson and Smithers focused on Raine Island located on the northern portion of the Great Barrier Reef, and if you don’t know, Raine Island is “a globally significant turtle rookery.” So it’s all here—an island on the Great Barrier Reef, turtles, sea level rise, relatively frequent tropical cyclones, sand beaches easily eroded—we are sure the global warming alarmists cannot wait to see how bad things have become at this sacred location.

But, alas, the results from Raine Island are about to rain on their parade of pity.

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A common rhetorical device to make potential future climate sounds even scarier, is to invoke the concept of “tipping points”—events that no one is sure when or even if they will happen, but suggest that when and if they do come to pass, they will lead to some sort of catastrophe that can’t be recovered from. Of course, global warming will push us closer to reaching these “tipping points.”

President Obama’s advisor on Science and Technology and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren, is a fond user of such scare tactics.

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We suspect everyone who reads World Climate Report has experienced a mid-latitude cyclone. These are the low pressure features that routinely cross the United States with warm, cold, and occluded fronts that bring us rain and snow. Some of these lows, like the occasional Nor-easters, can produce high winds, large amounts of precipitation (either rain or snow), and can be associated with considerable damage. Many of our readers have also experienced tropical cyclones – low pressure features that can grow into hurricanes. With lows in the tropics, and lows in the mid-latitudes, some alert school child might ask about lows in the polar regions.

So here we’ll take at how “polar lows” and how they may change character in a warmer climate.

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