On Jan 31, 8:05 pm, "sailirc" wrote:
I got this feeling with all this yap about global warming , the weather-aka
seas will become
very unstable. I keep watching and hearing about large chunks of ice
falling out of the sky.
we had one fall here in Tampa you may have seen it on the news. It smashed a
car. The piece of ice
was over 100lbs. The local news station confirmed that no planes were
flying over that location
at the time of the ice drop. What was funny the weather man could not
explain the ice drop of that size.

--
NH_/)_www.sailirc.net

The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science
The Deniers -- Part III
Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post
Published: Friday, February 02, 2007
December 8, 2006

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.

- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance
Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe
Research Foundation.


THE CV OF A DENIER:

Christopher Landsea received his doctoral degree in atmospheric
science from Colorado State University. A research meteorologist at
the Atlantic Oceanic and Meteorological Laboratory of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, he was chair of the American
Meteorological Society's committee on tropical meteorology and
tropical cyclones and a recipient of the American Meteorological
Society's Banner I. Miller Award for the "best contribution to the
science of hurricane and tropical weather forecasting." He is a
frequent contributor to leading journals, including Science, Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Society, Journal of Climate, and
Nature.