In The News
EPW HEARING FOCUSES ON PASSING WRDA, ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS BUDGET
Thursday March 15, 2007
Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure Hearing on Water Resources Needs and the President’s Budget Proposal for the Army Corps of Engineers for Fiscal Year 2008
Wednesday March 14, 2007
A top priority for Senator Inhofe and the entire EPW Committee to be addressed at the hearing is the long overdue Water Resources Development Act (WRDA). This bill contains numerous project authorizations and policy improvements that are important to the country’s economy, public safety and environment. While Congress made significant progress last year, the bill stalled in conference as time ran out at the end of the year. Senator Inhofe intends to continue working closely with Senators Boxer, Baucus and Isakson to build on the progress made last year in order to enact WRDA as soon as possible this year.
The hearing should be available on the EPW Committee Web site at www.epw.senateg.gov
INHOFE IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype (William J. Broad, New York Times, March 13, 2007)
Wednesday March 14, 2007
From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype
March 13, 2007
Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.
But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.
“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”
Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points” about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions” scientists might want. “The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,” he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.”
Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science in “An Inconvenient Truth,” which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and claims.
Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.
Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,” Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were “overselling our certainty about knowing the future.”
Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe’s recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone beyond the scientific evidence.
“He’s a very polarizing figure in the science community,” said Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a colleague of Dr. Vranes at the University of Colorado center. “Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore.”
“An Inconvenient Truth,” directed by Davis Guggenheim, was released last May and took in more than $46 million, making it one of the top-grossing documentaries ever. The companion book by Mr. Gore quickly became a best seller, reaching No. 1 on the New York Times list.
Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. “Unless we act boldly,” he wrote, “our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.”
He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who commend his popularizations and call his science basically sound. In December, he spoke in San Francisco to the American Geophysical Union and got a reception fit for a rock star from thousands of attendees.
“He has credibility in this community,” said Tim Killeen, the group’s president and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. “There’s no question he’s read a lot and is able to respond in a very effective way.”
Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, an environmental scientist, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, “Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees,” adding that Mr. Gore often did so “better than scientists.”
Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president’s work may hold “imperfections” and “technical flaws.” He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.
“We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is,” Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore. “On the other hand,” Dr. Hansen said, “he has the bottom line right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat of vaporization, will tend to be stronger, or have the potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate.”
In his e-mail message, Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate. “Of course,” he said, “there will always be questions around the edges of the science, and we have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask and to challenge and to answer those questions.”
He said “not every single adviser” agreed with him on every point, “but we do agree on the fundamentals” — that warming is real and caused by humans.
Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among scientists against his work. “I have received a great deal of positive feedback,” he said. “I have also received comments about items that should be changed, and I have updated the book and slideshow to reflect these comments.” He gave no specifics on which points he had revised.
He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the dangers of global warming, “I think that I’m finally getting a little better at it.”
While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal skeptics of global warming protested almost immediately. Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about dire climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street Journal of “shrill alarmism.”
Some of Mr. Gore’s centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe’s warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore’s message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.
It estimated that the world’s seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches — down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.
Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in Denmark long skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said in a syndicated article that the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had refrained from scaremongering. “Climate change is a real and serious problem” that calls for careful analysis and sound policy, Dr. Lomborg said. “The cacophony of screaming,” he added, “does not help.”
So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.
Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did “indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.” But the June report, he added, shows “that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years.”
Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore’s claim that the energy industry ran a “disinformation campaign” that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.
“Hardly a week goes by,” Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,” including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.
Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.
“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”
In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.
Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”
Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.”
Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming’s effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.
“For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,” Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts.”
Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton who advised Mr. Gore on the book and movie, said that reasonable scientists disagreed on the malaria issue and other points that the critics had raised. In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished himself for integrity.
“On balance, he did quite well — a credible and entertaining job on a difficult subject,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “For that, he deserves a lot of credit. If you rake him over the coals, you’re going to find people who disagree. But in terms of the big picture, he got it right.”
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EPW FACT OF THE DAY: Bloomberg Article Highlights Inhofe’s Concerns with New EPA Proposal
Wednesday March 14, 2007
Bloomberg Article Highlights Inhofe’s Concerns with New EPA Proposal
Wednesday March 14, 2007
Bloomberg reporter Cindy Skrzycki writes in her article yesterday, March 13, 2007 Cash-Poor EPA Passes Buck in Water Fee Fight, about the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) new proposal to make permit holders pay for more of the cost of managing pollutants discharged into the nation's waterways. Skryzycki includes the concerns of interested parties, including those of several US Senators. She cites two letters in her article sent by Senator Inhofe and other Senators:
March 5, 2007 letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson (Link to attached letter below)
FACT: EPA’s new proposal would fundamentally alter the way that Section 106 grants flow to the states and penalize those that fail to fund at least 75% of their National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit programs through user fees.
It's hard to find anyone who likes the Environmental Protection Agency' s new proposal to make permit holders pay for more of the cost of managing pollutants discharged into the nation's waterways.
The EPA's goal was to find a stable new funding source for the poetically named National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, which governs how states grant permits for about 600,000 facilities across the country.
The idea was to set aside a $5 million pot of federal money to share among states that increase the portion of their funding that comes from user fees to at least 75 percent. Only a few states meet that standard.
Farmers, utilities and other business interests, many state water-quality officials and some members of Congress -- including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) -- have expressed opposition. In a March 2 comment, Michael Baise, representing the Indiana Farm Bureau's 78,000 members, called an increase in permit fees a tax.
The dispute is one example of the infighting that can take place when a federal agency, strapped by budget constraints, tries to pass the buck, literally, to someone else.
"This rulemaking has been an end-run without meaningful consultation, and it would jack up permit fees without improving program performance," said Paul Noe, a former top aide at the Office of Management and Budget's regulatory review office who now heads a coalition of opponents.
Noe's group, the Coalition Against Permitting Unfunded Mandates, includes state and municipal utilities, water-treatment authorities, state regulators, and agriculture and other trade groups.
The discharge permit program was created under the Clean Water Act as a federal-state partnership. The EPA sent states $169 million for it in fiscal 2006. The states pick up the other two-thirds of the cost through a mix of their revenue and user fees.
The EPA explained in its Jan. 4 proposal that the rulemaking was designed to "shift part of the financial burden to those who benefit" from the permits.
Benjamin H. Grumbles, the EPA's assistant administrator for water, said the rule is meant to encourage the states, "not take anything away" from them. He called user fees "an attractive market-based approach."
State officials complained about the idea in discussions last year, according to a summary of meetings on the agency Web site. Last July, a Hawaii official described how utilities and municipalities, the state's "largest dischargers," lobbied against higher fees, and expressed concern that state legislators would cut the program budget by any amount generated by fees.
The agency is also getting flak over whether it has the authority to make the change and over the process it used. By calling the proposal an amendment to an existing grant program, the EPA said it didn't need to ask Congress to change the law. And it said the change wasn't significant enough to require the usual reviews and analyses that can add layers of scrutiny to rulemaking.
The comment period on the proposal closed March 5. Of the 50 comments received by the agency, none were positive, and some asked the EPA to withdraw the proposal.
"Is there anyone other than EPA supporting this?" said Michael Formica, environmental policy counsel for the National Pork Producers Council, a trade group in the District. Some members of his group apply for permits to cover manure lagoons even though the industry maintains it is "discharge-free."
Some state officials and permit holders said they interpret the proposal as the Bush administration's first step toward withdrawing federal financial support for the program and substituting user fees.
They cite the latest OMB budget documents, which say the EPA will complete the rule this year to provide "financial incentives to States to implement fee programs" for the discharge program. To Linda Eichmiller, executive director of the Association of State and Interstate Water Pollution Control Administrators, a Washington-based group of regulators, "This isn't about incentives but forcing states to adopt fee programs."
Clinton and Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) warned the administration in a Dec. 20 letter that the "decision to create a mandatory funding source is one to be made by Congress, not the EPA." Both are members of the Senate committee overseeing the EPA.
Seven other senators joined them last week in a letter to EPA chastising the agency for overstepping its authority.
"EPA would not only be working to micromanage this successfully state-run program, it would also in effect be forcing states to raise costs for millions of consumers by limiting the amount of funding going to a majority of states," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a statement.
Business doesn't always oppose user fees -- as long as it gets something back, such as faster processing of permits or expedited drug reviews.
"It's hard for industry to favor user-fee increases if they don't receive any service improvement in return," said Rosario Palmieri, director of energy and resources policy for the National Association of Manufacturers, a trade group in the District.
The effect of new user fees may depend on the size of the business. KeySpan, a natural gas distributor and electricity generator based in Brooklyn, N.Y., already pays $300,000 in permitting fees for six of its plants, according to Steven Dalton, manager of environmental compliance.
For a company with $7.2 billion in revenue, an increase wouldn't be a substantive issue, he said, though the company thinks the fee already is "fairly robust."
On the other hand, Stewart Stone, a quarrying operation in Cushing, Okla., that employs 20 people, pays $1,653 annually for a stormwater permit and has had to apply for an increasing number of state and federal permits over the years.
"The regulations are getting so absurd and costly," said Lee Barrows, Stewart's chief financial officer. "They are going to put the small guy out of business."
Barrows said she doesn't favor any kind of fee increase, especially since the company just had to curtail its operations.
The EPA's Grumbles said the agency would not withdraw the rule, despite the clamor of opposition. It will open another comment period instead.
"We got some very good comments," he said. "We truly welcome more discussion."
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Warming On Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, Neptune's Moon & Earth Linked to Increased Solar Activity, Scientists Say
Monday March 12, 2007
Bright sun, warm Earth. Coincidence?
By Lorne Gunter
National Post
Link to Article
Monday, March 12, 2007
Mars's ice caps are melting, and Jupiter is developing a second giant red spot, an enormous hurricane-like storm.
The existing Great Red Spot is 300 years old and twice the size of Earth. The new storm -- Red Spot Jr. -- is thought to be the result of a sudden warming on our solar system's largest planet. Dr. Imke de Pater of Berkeley University says some parts of Jupiter are now as much as six degrees Celsius warmer than just a few years ago.
Neptune's moon, Triton, studied in 1989 after the unmanned Voyageur probe flew past, seems to have heated up significantly since then. Parts of its frozen nitrogen surface have begun melting and turning to gas, making Triton's atmosphere denser.
Even Pluto has warmed slightly in recent years, if you can call -230C instead of -233C "warmer."
And I swear, I haven't left my SUV idling on any of those planets or moons. Honest, I haven't.
Is there something all these heavenly bodies have in common? Some one thing they all share that could be causing them to warm in unison?
Warming On Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, Neptune's Moon & Earth Linked to Increased Solar Activity, Scientists Say
Monday March 12, 2007
Warming On Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, Neptune's Moon & Earth Linked to Increased Solar Activity, Scientists Say
Mars's ice caps are melting, and Jupiter is developing a second giant red spot, an enormous hurricane-like storm.
The existing Great Red Spot is 300 years old and twice the size of Earth. The new storm -- Red Spot Jr. -- is thought to be the result of a sudden warming on our solar system's largest planet. Dr. Imke de Pater of Berkeley University says some parts of Jupiter are now as much as six degrees Celsius warmer than just a few years ago.
Neptune's moon, Triton, studied in 1989 after the unmanned Voyageur probe flew past, seems to have heated up significantly since then. Parts of its frozen nitrogen surface have begun melting and turning to gas, making Triton's atmosphere denser.
Even Pluto has warmed slightly in recent years, if you can call -230C instead of -233C "warmer."
And I swear, I haven't left my SUV idling on any of those planets or moons. Honest, I haven't.
Is there something all these heavenly bodies have in common? Some one thing they all share that could be causing them to warm in unison?
Hmmm, is there some giant, self-luminous ball of burning gas with a mass more than 300,000 times that of Earth and a core temperature of more than 20-million degrees Celsius, that for the past century or more has been unusually active and powerful? Is there something like that around which they all revolve that could be causing this multi-globe warming? Naw!
They must all have congested commuter highways, coal-fired power plants and oilsands developments that are releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide into their atmospheres, too.
A decade ago, when global warming and Kyoto was just beginning to capture public attention, I published a quiz elsewhere that bears repeating in our current hyper-charged environmental debate: Quick, which is usually warmer, day or night?
And what is typically the warmest part of the day? The warmest time of year?
Finally, which are generally warmer: cloudy or cloudless days?
If you answered day, afternoon, summer and cloudless you may be well on your way to understanding what is causing global warming.
For the past century and a half, Earth has been warming. Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally), during that same period, our sun has been brightening, becoming more active, sending out more radiation.
Habibullah Abdussamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg, Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a host of the rest of the world's leading solar scientists are all convinced that the warming of recent years is not unusual and that nearly all the warming in the past 150 years can be attributed to the sun.
Solar scientists from Iowa to Siberia have overlaid the last several warm periods on our planet with known variations in our sun's activity and found, according to Mr. Solanki, "a near-perfect match."
Mr. Abdussamatov concedes manmade gasses may have made "a small contribution to the warming in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance."
Mr. Soon showed as long ago as the mid-1990s that the depth of the Little Ice Age -- the coldest period in the northern hemisphere in the past 1,500 years -- corresponded perfectly with a solar event known as the Maunder Minimum. For nearly seven decades there was virtually no sunspot activity.
Our sun was particular quiet. And for those 60 to 70 years, the northern half of our globe, at least, was in a deep freeze.
Is it so hard to believe then that the sun could be causing our current warming, too?
At the very least, the fact that so many prominent scientists have legitimate, logical objections to the current global warming orthodoxy means there is no "consensus" among scientists about the cause.
Here's a prediction: The sun's current active phase is expected to wane in 20 to 40 years, at which time the planet will begin cooling. Since that is when most of the greenhouse emission reductions proposed by the UN and others are slated to come into full effect, the "greens" will see that cooling and claim, "See, we warned you and made you take action, and look, we saved the planet."
Of course, they will have had nothing to do with it.
© National Post 2007
Solar Physicist Rejects Belief Humans Are Driving Global Warming - Says 'The Heat's in the Sun'
Friday March 9, 2007
The Heat's in the Sun
The Financial Post
March 9, 2007
By LAWRENCE SOLOMON, Financial Post
Link to Article
We live in extraordinarily hot times, says Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. In 2004, he led a team of scientists that, for the first time, quantitatively reconstructed the sun's activity since the last Ice Age, some 11,400 years ago. Earth hasn't been this hot in 8,000 years and, he predicts, the hot spell will carry on for a few more decades before the sun turns down the heat.
The 19th and 20th centuries are especially noteworthy. "The sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently -- in the last 100 to 150 years," he says. "The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures."
Dr. Solanki gives cold comfort to those who claim that global warming took off with the Industrial Revolution, and that the warming we've seen over the last century is mostly man-made. To demonstrate how unlikely this is, Dr. Solanki shows an almost perfect correlation between solar cycles and air temperatures over the land masses in the Northern hemisphere, going back to the mid 19th century.
For example, when the length of solar cycle increased dramatically, as it did in from 1910 to 1940, so did the temperature on Earth; when it decreased, as it did from the 1940s to the 1960s, so too did Earth temperatures. Dr. Solanki's startling correlation marked a pivotal point in the climate change debate: Its publication, more than any other single event, caused researchers around the world to examine the role that the sun plays in heating and cooling our planet.
Canadian Survey Reveals Polar Bears Populations Increasing - Nearly Tripled Since 1980's
Friday March 9, 2007
Polar bear numbers up, but rescue continues
National Post
By Don Martin
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Link To Article
Their status ranges from a "vulnerable" to "endangered" and could be declared "threatened" if the U.S. decides the polar bear is collateral damage of climate change.
Nobody talks about "overpopulated" when discussing the bears' outlook.
Yet despite the Canadian government 's $150-million commitment last week to fund 44 International Polar Year research projects, a key question is not up for detailed scientific assessment: If the polar bear is the 650-kilogram canary in the climate change coal mine, why are its numbers INCREASING?
The latest government survey of polar bears roaming the vast Arctic expanses of northern Quebec, Labrador and southern Baffin Island show the population of polar bears has jumped to 2,100 animals from around 800 in the mid-1980s.
As recently as three years ago, a less official count placed the number at 1,400.
The Inuit have always insisted the bears' demise was greatly exaggerated by scientists doing projections based on fly-over counts, but their input was usually dismissed as the ramblings of self-interested hunters
Prominent French Scientist Reverses Belief in Global Warming - Now a Skeptic
Friday March 9, 2007
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...
Allegre's second thoughts
Financial Post
By LAWRENCE SOLOMON,
Friday, March 02, 2007
Link to Article
Claude Allegre, one of France's leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming.
"By burning fossil fuels, man increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, for example, has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Dr. Allegre, a renowned geochemist, wrote 20 years ago in Cles pour la geologie.." Fifteen years ago, Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming's "potential risks are very great" and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe's fragility in order to stave off "spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse."
In the 1980s and early 1990s, when concern about global warming was in its infancy, little was known about the mechanics of how it could occur, or the consequences that could befall us. Since then, governments throughout the western world and bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have commissioned billions of dollars worth of research by thousands of scientists. With a wealth of data now in, Dr. Allegre has recanted his views. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena. Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.
His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in l' Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro's retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. "The cause of this climate change is unknown," he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the "science is settled."
