This weekly newsletter, focused on environmental issues, highlights relevant analysis done by the John Locke Foundation and other think tanks, as well as items in the news.

1. New research calls global-warming hypothesis into question (again)

Is there a correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures? It seems there definitely is. But new research from Australia provides evidence for the hypothesis that it is higher temperatures that give rise to greater concentrations of CO2, not the other way around.

New research by Professor Murry Salby, Chair of Climate Science at Macquarie University and author of Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics, is scheduled to have his recently peer reviewed research published later this year both in journal form and in his new book Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate. As reported in this news story about the article, looking at CO2 concentrations Salby concludes:

the largest increases [in CO2] year-to-year occurred when the world warmed fastest due to El Nino conditions. The smallest increases correlated with volcanoes which pump dust up into the atmosphere and keep the world cooler for a while. In other words, temperature controls CO2 levels on a yearly time-scale, and according to Salby, man-made emissions have little effect…The climate models assume that most of the rise in CO2 (from 280 ppmv in1780 to 392 ppmv today) was due to industrialization and fossil fuel use. But the globe has been warming during that period (in fact since the depths of the Little Ice Age around 1680), so warmer conditions could be the reason that CO2 has been rising.

2. And there’s more–climate models and predictions of extreme weather events

In the journal Climate Research, new research has been published looking at the predictions of extreme weather activity made by state-of-the-art climate models. In the body of the paper–as opposed to the abstract in the journal–the authors conclude that:

… all models contain large errors in precipitation simulations, both in terms of mean fields and their annual cycle (such as the spurious migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone into the other hemisphere), as well as their characteristics: the intensity, frequency, and duration of precipitation, plus the amount (e.g. IPCC, 2007; Bosilovich et al., 2008; Liepert and Previdi, 2009) … it appears that many, perhaps all, global climate and numerical weather prediction models and even many high-resolution regional models have a premature onset of convection and overly frequent precipitation with insufficient intensity."

3. Weekly Ozone Report

Each week during the summer ozone season this newsletter will report how many, if any, high-ozone days had been experienced throughout the state during the previous week, where they were experienced, and how many have been recorded during the entire season to date. While many environmental groups express concern about air quality, the John Locke Foundation is the only organization that keeps up-to-date track of the actual ozone data and reports it in an unfiltered manner on a regular basis.

The ozone season began on April 1 and ends October 31. All reported data are from the North Carolina Division of Air Quality, which is part of the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

During the period from August 1 through August 7 there were two reported high ozone readings, which occurred over two days, one in Union County and one in Rowan County. So far this season there have been 83 readings on various North Carolina monitors over 22 days that have exceeded federal standards of 0.75 parts per billion.

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