Russ Steele
Yesterday UPS dropped Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science they Don't Want your to Know on our front steps at Noon, and by 8:15 last night I could not wait to start reading his latest book by Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling Jr. I had seen the CATO Institute ad sent to me by my friend George Rebane, and it looked very interesting.
In the Preface Michaels tell us why he is writing this book and leaving the University of Virginia. He is leaving after being told by the Virginia Governor Tim Kaine he could no longer refer to himself as the Virginia State Climatologist if he kept talking about global warming and explaining the science to reporters. He goes on to enumerate the other State Climatologist that have been fired, or muzzled in Washington, Oregon and Delaware for failing to follow the political dictates that "the science is know, and humans are responsible."
One of those State Climatologist was David Legates who was muzzled by Delaware Governor Minner for speaking about global warming. I worked with David when doing Surface Station Surveys in Delaware. He helps me find a missing station and photograph it, when the NCDC Database Latitude and Longitude put the station in the middle of an empty filed. I wrote about it here. Both David and I are given credit for the Dover Station find here. David took the pictures for me.
In Washington an Assistant State Climatologist Mark Albright was fired because he refused to stop e-mailing the entire snow fall record for the Cascade Mountains, rather than the cherry-picked one preferred by the Governor that showed a declining snow pack from 1950 to 2004. The total record showed nothing unusual. Given the hugh snowfalls in Oregon and Washington last year and this year, I checked the latest results. They had some dry years from 2003 through 2005, but the 2006/2007 winter was above, or at the average. This year through January, the snow water content is still a little below average in some areas, a little above in other areas all based on the 1971 to 2000 normal. The final numbers are not in. Remember that we had a warm PDO from 1977 to 2001, so was the normal during a warm PDO. I wonder what the normal would be from 1900 to the present.
Climate of Extremes has lots of graphs and charts, most with annotated data sources. More as I get farther into the book.
