Crops vs. Weeds at the Northern Edges of Their Current Ranges

By Craig Idso

Published August 6, 2014

Climate alarmists project weeds will increase. Experimental results indicate otherwise, deflating yet another one of the global warming scare stories… Read More

Simulations of Mediterranean and Northern Africa Precipitation (5 Aug 2014)
According to the authors of this study, “the failure [of present-day state-of-the-art climate models] to simulate observed mid-Holocene changes in the north African monsoon and the potentially linked failure to simulate the observed shift in rainfall seasonality in the Mediterranean raises concerns about the reliability of model projections of future climates in these regions.” We could not agree more and policy makers would be wise to take note… Read More

Carbon-Nitrogen Cycle Models of Forest Responses to Elevated CO2 (5 Aug 2014)
How well do they represent reality? Not very, as “most models failed to simulate the sustained net primary production enhancement at the Duke FACE site,” leaving the 23 researchers from 7 different countries who conducted this study to conclude “this tendency to underestimate the net transfer of N from soils to vegetation under elevated CO2 at Duke calls for a better representation of below-ground processes, in particular root allocation and microbial responses to enhanced rhizodeposition.” How true that is… Read More

Can Earth’s Two Hemispheres Get Their Climatic Act Together? (5 Aug 2014)
A new study reveals important differences between them that lead the authors of this study to conclude that “climate system predictability on decadal to century timescales may be lower than expected based on assessments of external climate forcing and Northern Hemisphere temperature variations alone.” And in the final paragraph of the body of their paper, they state that the strong inter-hemispheric coupling in the climate model simulations they conducted “suggests that models overestimate the strength of externally-forced relative to internal climate system variability, therefore implying more limited predictability not only on regional but also hemispheric scales”… Read More

Millennial-Scale Climate Variability During the Holocene (6 Aug 2014)
In the case of the most recent phase of Holocene millennial-scale climate variability – i.e., the Little Ice Age-to-Current Warm Period warming – we must also consider the likelihood that it, too, may have been driven by the very same force or forces that were responsible for all of the many other episodes of millennial-scale climate change of the Holocene, which were clearly not driven by changes in the air’s CO2 content… Read More

A Real-Life Non-Calcifying Anthozoan-Symbiodinium Symbiosis (6 Aug 2014)
Several marine species inhabit highly heterogeneous environments, such as intertidal habitats, and “have evolved the ability to exhibit high levels of physiological plasticity,” which is “the mechanism whereby organisms alter their physiology enabling them to persist in new environmental conditions (i.e. phenotypic plasticity), including decreased pH” as illustrated in this study of sea anemones… Read More

The Modeling of Low-Frequency Rainfall Variability (6 Aug 2014)
How close do general circulation models come to matching what is observed in nature? As has been found to be the case in so many other studies of the integrity of state-of-the-art climate models, the findings of this new study clearly indicate that current GCMs are not yet up to the task of reliably representing low-frequency rainfall variability… Read More