A geologist from the northern reaches of Alberta changed his mind on global warming after building a "Kyoto house" which he says uses less than 10% of the natural gas used in a regular home. Bruno Wiskel's research resulted in a new book titled The Emperor's New Climate.

Wiskel, who teaches an extension course at the University of Alberta called "Building an Energy Efficient Home for Less" does not seem to be cut from the same cloth as most global warming skeptics. I'd be interested in reading his book, but I can't find it for sale in any of the typical book-selling venues. His other books, Woodlot Management and Pond Raising Rainbow Trout are available. There seems to be irony in that.

ExxonMobil should be getting used to this. In early September, the UK branch of ExxonMobil, Esso UK Limited, received a letter from the Royal Society, then in late October Senators John D. Rockefeller IV and Olympia Snowe sent a letter to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson asking the oil giant to cease funding of climate change "deniers." Heck, there's an entire web site focussed on "outing" ExxonMobil's funding of climate change skeptics. The Wall Street Journal, which has a bit of a skeptical bent on the global warming issue, comments extensively on the senators' letter.

I've got mixed feelings on this. First of all, the $19 million dollars spent by ExxonMobil since the late 1990s (7 or 8 years) seems to be a relative pittance, especially given the monstrous profits the company has generated in recent years. The think tank specifically mentioned in the letter, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has received just over $2 million from ExxonMobil since 1998 (through 2005) - that just doesn't seem like a lot to me.

Of course, it's always best to trust peer-reviewed science over research which hasn't come under the same scrutiny, but is peer review always fair? An April, 2006 editorial in the Wall Street Journal from Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, included this paragraph expressing his own frustration at the peer review process:

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen.

Mr. Lindzen is criticized by some for taking consulting fees from oil and gas interests.

The green blog Gristmill yesterday posted an entry in their series "How to talk to a climate skeptic" titled "Current global warming is just part of a natural cycle." Since that idea gets raised over here frequently, I thought I'd give you all a link and see what you think.

Was the pressure too much, or too late? ExxonMobil has stopped funding groups skeptical of global warming, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Exxon stopped funding CEI in 2006, prior to the letter from Senators Snowe and Rockefeller as well as the UCS report, and the letter from England's Royal Society.

"Mark Boudreaux, a spokesman for Exxon, the world's biggest publicly traded company, said its position on climate change has been 'widely misunderstood and as a result of that, we have been clarifying and talking more about what our position is.'

Exxon's funding action was confirmed this week by its vice president for public affairs. Kenneth Cohen told the Wall Street Journal that Exxon decided in late 2005 that its 2006 nonprofit funding would not include CEI and 'five or six' similar groups.

Cohen declined to identify the other groups, but their names could become public this spring when Exxon releases its annual list of donations to nonprofit groups."

The oil company is also involved, along with representatives of 20 other companies, in talks sponsored by Resources for the Future, a D.C. based nonprofit. The talks, which began in December, should generate a report this fall with recommendations to legislators on how to regulate greenhouse emissions.

If ExxonMobil shows the same commitment to developing alternative fuels that BP and Shell have shown, we may yet shake our oil addiction.

A report out of Russia today from Habibullo Abdusamatov, head of the space research laboratory at the St. Petersburg-based Pulkovo Observatory, who says an increase in solar activity is to blame for global warming. Abdusamatov is one of a small number of scientists who dispute the view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

I have a couple of gripes with Abdusamatov's claims in this article. First with this paragraph:

He said an examination of ice cores from wells over three kilometers (1.5 miles) deep in Greenland and the Antarctic indicates that the Earth experienced periods of global warming even before the industrial age.

My second gripe stems from this paragraph:

However, Abdusamatov insisted: "Ascribing 'greenhouse' effect properties to the Earth's atmosphere is not scientifically substantiated. Heated greenhouse gases, which become lighter as a result of expansion, ascend to the atmosphere only to give the absorbed heat away."

The name, greenhouse effect is unfortunate, for a real greenhouse does not behave as the atmosphere does. The primary mechanism keeping the air warm in a real greenhouse is the suppression of convection (the exchange of air between the inside and outside). Thus, a real greenhouse does act like a blanket to prevent bubbles of warm air from being carried away from the surface. As we have seen, this is not how the atmosphere keeps the Earth's surface warm. Indeed, the atmosphere facilitates rather than suppresses convection.

I enjoyed a piece today from William Tucker in The American Spectator on global warming and nuclear power. Yes, The American Spectator. I can just imagine right now some of the regulars here are falling over in shock because I'm posting an article from that source. And others have their undies in a bunch for the same reason. The author of the piece wants to encourage the use of nuclear power and wants to use global warming as a "motivator" for environmentalists who would otherwise be against it.

The author then documents his research into global warming and the tactics which have come into play on both sides, which he refers to a guerilla warfare with both sides now at the point of trying to outlaw the other's opinion. Finally he decides perhaps both sides are right. Maybe there's a natural cycle which is being amplified by human activity. His final conclusion:

As far as I'm concerned, both sides have a point. Yes, there was a Medieval Warming and yes, the sun is the main agent of temperature change, but something is also happening with carbon emissions that is pushing us into unknown territory. It's worth doing something about it.

I hope this convinces both sides to take another look at nuclear power.

The Toronto Star published an interesting article on Canada's climate-change skeptics Sunday. Interesting for its content, but also for its tone, which is fairly clearly one of some disdain for those who remain skeptical of anthropogenic climate change. The author chooses to use the term "denier" throughout the article, a term which carries a strong negative connotation and which stifles an open discussion on the issue.

The skeptics face an uphill climb against a rising tide of opinion that humans are at least partly responsible for the current warming, but they remain committed to slowing public action. The article asks the fair question of who is funding skeptical organizations. At least some of the skeptics do have ties to fossil fuel industries, either directly or through industry-sponsored think tanks. Many of the skeptics claim they only want to delay action until there is adequate proof of human impact on climate.

The skeptics' critics say we have adequate proof now and any more delays in action are not justified. Sounds like things north of the border aren't so different from things here in the U.S.A.

I wrote an entry late last week about a California lawmaker pushing to ban incandescent light bulbs. I was going to post that today, but I happened upon an editorial by Canadian skeptic Dr. Timothy Ball that I thought would spark even more discussion. Dr. Ball is a consultant to Canadian lobby group Friends of Science, a group which has been criticized because a large portion of its funding comes from the oil and gas industry.

In some off-topic notes, I apologize that I've fallen behind on publishing comments - I will get to them tomorrow. I do want to say that I want the tone here to change. I'm drawing the line on the insults in the comments. Before people scream censorship, I want to state again I don't care what your opinion is. State it in a civil manner and I will publish it. Call someone else an idiot because they disagree with you and I will not. Period.

I'll publish that light bulb piece tomorrow, too....that's interesting stuff.

Roger Pielke, Sr posted a blog entry on the AMS Statement on Climate Change which readers here may find interesting.

While you're over there, read Dr. Pielke's complaint about the misrepresentation of his position in an article in the Rocky Mountain News. Very interesting and telling that - so often journalists have their own story to tell rather than reporting facts.

I've used the "skeptic" category here, but I don't really like it. Dr. Pielke's conclusions summarize his findings about climate science, and particularly the impact humans have had on the climate.

Humans are significantly altering the global climate, but in a variety of diverse ways beyond the radiative effect of carbon dioxide. The IPCC assessments have been too conservative in recognizing the importance of these human climate forcings as they alter regional and global climate. These assessments have also not communicated the inability of the models to accurately forecast the spread of possibilities of future climate. The forecasts, therefore, do not provide any skill in quantifying the impact of different mitigation strategies on the actual climate response
that would occur.

It's getting tough to be a global warming skeptic within the public arena. Just ask Oregon state climatologist George Taylor, who may be fired by Gov. Ted Kulongoski for having views not in line with state policy on greenhouse gas reduction.

The article I linked refers to 3 other state climatologists (there are 47 all together) who hold skeptical views, Patrick Michaels of Virginia, David Legates of Delaware and John Christy (incorrectly spelled as Christie in the article) of Alabama (who was also a lead author on the 2001 IPCC Assessment and a contributing author on earlier IPCC reports).

A quick Google search for more information on Taylor led me to a response he wrote to an August, 2005 newspaper article in the Willamette Week in which Taylor addresses, point by point, the criticisms leveled at him in the article.

As an aside, I would encourage people to read the two page Policy Statement on Climate Variability and Change by the American Association of State Climatologists. It covers the difficulty of climate prediction and, perhaps more importantly, the difficulty of verifying the accuracy of climate prediction and also addresses public policy on climate change in a sensible, practical manner.