climate change

[Dropped Cat]

The first article I read about global warming was in Newsweek July 1969.

Science is fun, but when one discusses his "belief of science"
I see political motive, not scientific investigation.

Having a web browser and an agenda does not an expert make.

 

[sdd420]

As I have said in the past and still believe, we have had ice ages and global warmings before. Check your history books , also any temperature readings are not very old. We have been here thousands of years, the earth is millions of years old? So any trend is recent and means nothing....but keep worrying y'all it gives you something to do

 

[MicroRoy]

I saw one theory.

The basics of the theory. An ice age lasts one million years. With cycles that run one hundred thousand years with a period of ten thousand years of warm. Leaving us due for a cycle of cold.

 

[sdd420]

I saw one theory.

The basics of the theory. An ice age lasts one million years. With cycles that run one hundred thousand years with a period of ten thousand years of warm. Leaving us due for a cycle of cold.

Someone told me they have some areas that are already colder in their recent years records.meaning trending colder not warmer

 

[FoothillFarming]

My thesis is global warming is man made, and 95% of scientists agree. Case closed........then again, science should always be challenged. That is the base of science.

 

[Genghis Kush]

the concern is over the rate of change in the climate not whether the climate is changing or not.

ice core drilling is used to determine the rate of change in the past, its like tree core drilling in that each year leaves a layer that can be looked at to determine the climate of that year.


The level of Carbon being put into the atmosphere is causing the average temp to rise more quickly than has been detected in the ice cores from before man started to pollute.

 

[armedoldhippy]

My thesis is global warming is man made, and 95% of scientists agree. Case closed........then again, science should always be challenged. That is the base of science.

i hope you mean "theory". even if it was 100% of the scientists, they could still be wrong. the case is not yours to close, it may NEVER be closed. like the chicken/egg problem, it can be argued indefinitely with no resolution. i do not believe it can be proven either way. and yes, you are right. all advances in science began with someone saying "bullshit!"

 

[trichrider]

Cloud-seeding surprise could improve climate predictions

A molecule made by trees can seed clouds, suggesting that pre-industrial skies were less sunny than thought.

Davide Castelvecchi

25 May 2016

The role of trees in cloud formation has been under-appreciated.

Molecules released by trees can seed clouds, two experiments have revealed. The findings, published on 25 May in Nature1, 2 and Science3, run contrary to an assumption that the pollutant sulphuric acid is required for a certain type of cloud formation — and suggest that climate predictions may have underestimated the role that clouds had in shaping the pre-industrial climate.

If the results of the experiments hold up, predictions of future climate change should take them into account, says Reto Knutti, a climate modeller at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). For 20 or more years, clouds have been the largest source of uncertainty in understanding how manmade emissions affect the atmosphere, he says.

In addition to releasing carbon dioxide, burning fossil fuels indirectly produces sulphuric acid, which is known to seed clouds. So, climate scientists have assumed that since pre-industrial times, there has been a large increase in cloud cover, which is thought to have an overall cooling effect by reflecting sunlight back into space. And they have assumed that this overall cooling effect has partially masked the climate’s underlying sensitivity to rising carbon dioxide levels.

The latest experiments suggest that it may have been cloudier in pre-industrial times than previously thought. If this is so, then the masking effect, and in turn the warming effects of carbon dioxide, might have been overestimated, says Jasper Kirkby, a physicist at the CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, who led one of the experiments.

But Kirkby adds that it is too early to say whether this is true in practice, or by how much, because there are so many factors that play into such projections. “There are many uncertainties; we are only talking about one,” says Kirkby. Knutti says the results will probably not affect the most likely projections of warming, as laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Our best estimate is probably still the same," he says.

Aerosols needed

Clouds are made of microscopic droplets of liquid water or, in some cases, of small ice crystals. But in the atmosphere, water vapour cannot simply turn into a cloud: it needs solid or liquid particles, known as aerosols, on which to condense.

About half of these aerosols originate, already in solid form, from Earth’s surface: for instance, dust from deserts, salt crystals from the oceans or soot from combustion. The other half forms anew in the atmosphere from gaseous impurities. The individual gas molecules capture more molecules from the air to form solid particles. If they grow to 50–100 nanometres, water vapour can condense on them.

The CLOUD experiment simulates the effects of cosmic rays in the atmosphere.

Until recently, atmospheric scientists thought that only sulphuric acid vapour, which can be produced by volcanic emissions or by burning fossil fuels, could trigger this process. As a result, it was thought that pre-industrial skies were somewhat less cloudy than present ones because they contained less of this pollutant, says Kirkby.

To investigate the process, he turned to the Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets (CLOUD) experiment, which he founded. A three-metre tall stainless steel tank that can reproduce a vast range of atmospheric conditions, CLOUD can be hooked up to the beams of particles that feed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. This simulates the effects of cosmic rays — high-energy subatomic particles that come from outside the Solar System and are thought to have a role in cloud formation — in the atmosphere.
Cosmic-ray starter kit

In the two Nature papers1, 2, Kirkby and his co-authors report that aerosols can form and grow to the size needed to seed a cloud from compounds emitted by trees — without any sulphuric acid and accelerated by simulated cosmic rays. In these experiments, the team used α-pinene, a molecule that helps to give fir forests their characteristic smell, but compounds from other types of vegetation might show a similar effect, the scientists say.

In the third paper, published in Science3, a team that includes some of Kirkby’s co-authors reported a similar finding using a different experiment. Federico Bianchi, a chemist now at the University of Helsinki, and his collaborators measured the composition of air and monitored the weather at the Jungfraujoch Research Station in the Swiss Alps at around 3,500 metres in altitude. They found that molecules similar to α-pinene that could also originate from vegetation can seed clouds without much sulphuric acid.

In addition to feeding into climate predictions, the findings have another potential implication, says atmospheric scientist Bjorn Stevens of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. Some scientists have warned that measures such as scrubbing sulphur dioxide from coal-plant emissions could remove some of the beneficial cooling effect of clouds and boost global warming, but this may now be less of a concern because trees can seed clouds too. “What it means is, we don’t have to fear clean air,” says Stevens.

It is also interesting to speculate whether trees emit these compounds in part because there is a benefit to them in making their own climate, Kirkby says. “This really does touch on the Gaia hypothesis,” he says, referring to the theory that Earth’s life behaves as a single organism that tends to preserve itself. “It’s a beautiful mechanism for trees to control their environment.”

http://www.nature.com/news/cloud-seeding-surprise-could-improve-climate-predictions-1.19971

isn't that molecule a terpene?

 

[Meraxes]

Trump said wind turbines are killing beautiful birds...Thats awful, he'll be getting my vote now(cough/meth hit)

 

[Cannavore]

View Image


Then again...I got more important things to worry about...

View Image

it must be all true it's in a meme, yo.

 

[Genghis Kush]

“I don't think..." then you shouldn't talk, said the Hatter.”

 

[armedoldhippy]

Trump said wind turbines are killing beautiful birds...Thats awful, he'll be getting my vote now(cough/meth hit)

they have issued permits to wind farms that they expect will kill hundreds of bald eagles yearly. gonna need a new national symbol at that rate. maybe the opossum, buzzards, or english sparrows...

 

[Dropped Cat]

In the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill of 1989 an estimated 247
Bald Eagles were killed in Prince William Sound.

Energy production, and human's thirst for it, will always
outweigh the natural order of things.

Remember whale oil?

Silly human race.

 

[trichrider]

Solar Deniers Face Harsh Times …Flurry of New Studies, CERN, Show Sun’s Massive Impact On Global Climate

By P Gosselin on 28. May 2016

Harsh times for the nay-sayers to the sun driving climate, who risk facing academic extinction and joining history’s huge scrap heap of junk science circus performers.

CERN just recently confirmed the sun’s impact, via cosmic radiation, on climate-regulating cloud formation. Scinexx.de here writes here:

Through the influence of ions from cosmic rays, the effect increases even 10 to 100 times.”

Jasper Kirkby calls the link between cloud cover and climate “profound“.


The UV mechanism

Now Germans Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt present papers on another way the sun impacts climate: UV radiation. Clearly the sun has an entire bag of tricks when it comes to dominating climate on Earth, and we are only at the dawn of understanding.
===================================
Heavenly Teamwork: How UV Radiation Above The Stratosphere Impacts Cliamte At The Earth’s Surface

By Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
(German text translated by P. Gosselin

The sun? It doesn’t have any impact on the climate. At least that’
s what climate alarmism circles believe. A new study from 28 April 2016 appearing in the Geophysical Research Letters once and fore all shakes this view. Scientists have been able to show that changes in solar UV radiation on a scale of months have a clear impact on temperatures at the lower weather atmospheric levels at the tropics. What follows is the paper’s abstract. a paper by L. L. Hood of the Univeristy of Arizona in Tucson:

Lagged response of tropical tropospheric temperature to solar ultraviolet variations on intraseasonal time scales
Correlative and regression analyses of daily ERA-Interim reanalysis data for three separate solar maximum periods confirm the existence of a temperature response to short-term (mainly ∼27 day) solar ultraviolet variations at tropical latitudes in both the lower stratosphere and troposphere. The response, which occurs at a phase lag of 6–10 days after the solar forcing peak, consists of a warming in the lower stratosphere, consistent with relative downwelling and a slowing of the mean meridional (Brewer-Dobson) circulation, and a cooling in the troposphere. The midtropospheric cooling response is most significant in the tropical Pacific, especially under positive El Niño–Southern Oscillation conditions and may be related to a reduction in the number of Madden-Julian oscillation events that propagate eastward into the central Pacific following peaks in short-term solar forcing.”

Thomas et al. even found a solar-regulated temperature in the mesosphere, which he described in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics in November 2015:

Solar-induced 27-day variations of mesospheric temperature and water vapor from the AIM SOFIE experiment: Drivers of polar mesospheric cloud variability
Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMCs) are known to be influenced by changes in water vapor and temperature in the cold summertime mesopause. Solar variability of these constituents has been held responsible for 11-year and 27-day variability of PMC activity, although the detailed mechanisms are not yet understood. It is also known that the solar influence on PMC variability is a minor contributor to the overall day-to-day variability, which is dominated by effects of gravity waves, planetary waves, and inter-hemispheric coupling. To address this issue, we have analyzed 15 seasons of data taken from the Solar Occultation for Ice Experiment (SOFIE) on the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) satellite. The SOFIE data contain precise measurements of water vapor, temperature and ice water content (among other quantities). These high-latitude measurements are made during the PMC season at the terminator, and therefore directly relate to the simultaneous measurements of mesospheric ice. Using a composite data set of Lyman-α irradiance, we correlated the time variation of the atmospheric variables with the 27-day variability of solar ultraviolet irradiance. We used a combination of time-lagged linear regression and Superposed Epoch Analysis to extract the solar contribution as sensitivity values (response/forcing) vs. height. We compare these results to previously published results, and show that the temperature sensitivity is somewhat higher, whereas the water sensitivity is nearly the same as published values. The time lags are shorter than that expected from direct solar heating and photodissociation, suggesting that the responses are due to 27-day variations of vertical winds. An analytic solution for temperature changes forced by solar irradiance variations suggests that if the response is due purely to Lyman-α heating and Newtonian cooling, the response should vary throughout the summertime season and depend primarily upon the height-dependent column density of molecular oxygen.”

Also Ball et al. found a detectable climate impact by solar UV fluctuations in a study appearing in the journal Nature Geoscience of 25 January 2016. Interesting result: The models are unable to reproduce the results. Here’s the abstract:

High solar cycle spectral variations inconsistent with stratospheric ozone observations

Solar variability can influence surface climate, for example by affecting the mid-to-high-latitude surface pressure gradient associated with the North Atlantic Oscillation1. One key mechanism behind such an influence is the absorption of solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation by ozone in the tropical stratosphere, a process that modifies temperature and wind patterns and hence wave propagation and atmospheric circulation2, 3, 4, 5. The amplitude of UV variability is uncertain, yet it directly affects the magnitude of the climate response6: observations from the SOlar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite7 show broadband changes up to three times larger than previous measurements8, 9. Here we present estimates of the stratospheric ozone variability during the solar cycle. Specifically, we estimate the photolytic response of stratospheric ozone to changes in spectral solar irradiance by calculating the difference between a reference chemistry–climate model simulation of ozone variability driven only by transport (with no changes in solar irradiance) and observations of ozone concentrations. Subtracting the reference from simulations with time-varying irradiance, we can evaluate different data sets of measured and modelled spectral irradiance. We find that at altitudes above pressure levels of 5 hPa, the ozone response to solar variability simulated using the SORCE spectral solar irradiance data are inconsistent with the observations.”

A long neglected link between the solar fluctuations and climate change at the sea surface, troposphere and stratosphere was described by Yamakawa et al. in March 2016 in the journal Quaternary International:

Relationships between solar activity and variations in SST and atmospheric circulation in the stratosphere and troposphere
Relationships between solar activity and variations in both sea surface temperature (SST) and atmospheric circulation at the time of the solar maximum are presented. The global distribution of correlation coefficients between annual relative sunspot numbers (SSN) and SST from July to December was examined over a 111-year period from 1901 to 2011. Areas with a significant positive correlation accounted for 11.7% of the global sea surface in December, mainly over three regions in the Pacific. The influence of solar activity on global atmospheric pressure variations and circulation in the maximum years was also analyzed from 1979 to 2011. The results indicated that higher geopotential height anomalies tended to appear in the stratosphere and troposphere in the northern hemisphere, centering on around the Hawaiian Islands from November to December, in the second year of the solar maximum. The SST distribution in the Pacific with strong north and south Pacific Highs produced a pattern that resembled teleconnection patterns such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Central-Pacific (CP) El Niño, or El Niño Modoki (ENM). It is suggested that the solar activity had an influence on the troposphere via not only the stratosphere but also the sea surface.”

Another paper by Reichler et al. appearing in Nature Geoscience already back in 2012 follows similar lines:

A stratospheric connection to Atlantic climate variability
The stratosphere is connected to tropospheric weather and climate. In particular, extreme stratospheric circulation events are known to exert a dynamical feedback on the troposphere1. However, it is unclear whether the state of the stratosphere also affects the ocean and its circulation. A co-variability of decadal stratospheric flow variations and conditions in the North Atlantic Ocean has been suggested, but such findings are based on short simulations with only one climate model2. Here we assess ocean reanalysis data and find that, over the previous 30 years, the stratosphere and the Atlantic thermohaline circulation experienced low-frequency variations that were similar to each other. Using climate models, we demonstrate that this similarity is consistent with the hypothesis that variations in the sequence of stratospheric circulation anomalies, combined with the persistence of individual anomalies, significantly affect the North Atlantic Ocean. Our analyses identify a previously unknown source for decadal climate variability and suggest that simulations of deep layers of the atmosphere and the ocean are needed for realistic predictions of climate.”

The University of Utah issued the following press release:

Stratosphere Targets Deep Sea to Shape Climate:
North Atlantic ‘Achilles heel’ lets upper atmosphere affect the abyss

A University of Utah study suggests something amazing: Periodic changes in winds 15 to 30 miles high in the stratosphere influence the seas by striking a vulnerable “Achilles heel” in the North Atlantic and changing mile-deep ocean circulation patterns, which in turn affect Earth’s climate.

‘We found evidence that what happens in the stratosphere matters for the ocean circulation and therefore for climate,’ says Thomas Reichler, senior author of the study published online Sunday, Sept. 23 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Scientists already knew that events in the stratosphere, 6 miles to 30 miles above Earth, affect what happens below in the troposphere, the part of the atmosphere from Earth’s surface up to 6 miles or about 32,800 feet. Weather occurs in the troposphere.

Researchers also knew that global circulation patterns in the oceans – patterns caused mostly by variations in water temperature and saltiness – affect global climate.

‘It is not new that the stratosphere impacts the troposphere,’ says Reichler, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah. ‘It also is not new that the troposphere impacts the ocean. But now we actually demonstrated an entire link between the stratosphere, the troposphere and the ocean.’

Funded by the University of Utah, Reichler conducted the study with University of Utah atmospheric sciences doctoral student Junsu Kim, and with atmospheric scientist Elisa Manzini and oceanographer Jürgen Kröger, both with the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.

Stratospheric Winds and Sea Circulation Show Similar Rhythms

Reichler and colleagues used weather observations and 4,000 years worth of supercomputer simulations of weather to show a surprising association between decade-scale, periodic changes in stratospheric wind patterns known as the polar vortex, and similar rhythmic changes in deep-sea circulation patterns. The changes are:

— ‘Stratospheric sudden warming’ events occur when temperatures rise and 80-mph ‘polar vortex’ winds encircling the Artic suddenly weaken or even change direction. These winds extend from 15 miles elevation in the stratosphere up beyond the top of the stratosphere at 30 miles. The changes last for up to 60 days, allowing time for their effects to propagate down through the atmosphere to the ocean.

— Changes in the speed of the Atlantic circulation pattern – known as Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – that influences the world’s oceans because it acts like a conveyor belt moving water around the planet.

Sometimes, both events happen several years in a row in one decade, and then none occur in the next decade. So incorporating this decade-scale effect of the stratosphere on the sea into supercomputer climate simulations or “models” is important in forecasting decade-to-decade climate changes that are distinct from global warming, Reichler says.

‘If we as humans modify the stratosphere, it may – through the chain of events we demonstrate in this study – also impact the ocean circulation,” he says. “Good examples of how we modify the stratosphere are the ozone hole and also fossil-fuel burning that adds carbon dioxide to the stratosphere. These changes to the stratosphere can alter the ocean, and any change to the ocean is extremely important to global climate.’

A Vulnerable Soft Spot in the North Atlantic

‘The North Atlantic is particularly important for global ocean circulation, and therefore for climate worldwide,’ Reichler says. ‘In a region south of Greenland, which is called the downwelling region, water can get cold and salty enough – and thus dense enough – so the water starts sinking.’

It is Earth’s most important region of seawater downwelling, he adds. That sinking of cold, salty water ‘drives the three-dimensional oceanic conveyor belt circulation. What happens in the Atlantic also affects the other oceans.’

Reichler continues: ‘This area where downwelling occurs is quite susceptible to cooling or warming from the troposphere. If the water is close to becoming heavy enough to sink, then even small additional amounts of heating or cooling from the atmosphere may be imported to the ocean and either trigger downwelling events or delay them.’

Because of that sensitivity, Reichler calls the sea south of Greenland “the Achilles heel of the North Atlantic.”

From Stratosphere to the Sea

In winter, the stratospheric Arctic polar vortex whirls counterclockwise around the North Pole, with the strongest, 80-mph winds at about 60 degrees north latitude. They are stronger than jet stream winds, which are less than 70 mph in the troposphere below. But every two years on average, the stratospheric air suddenly is disrupted and the vortex gets warmer and weaker, and sometimes even shifts direction to clockwise.

‘These are catastrophic rearrangements of circulation in the stratosphere,” and the weaker or reversed polar vortex persists up to two months, Reichler says. “Breakdown of the polar vortex can affect circulation in the troposphere all the way down to the surface.’

Reichler’s study ventured into new territory by asking if changes in stratospheric polar vortex winds impart heat or cold to the sea, and how that affects the sea.

It already was known that that these stratospheric wind changes affect the North Atlantic Oscillation – a pattern of low atmospheric pressure centered over Greenland and high pressure over the Azores to the south. The pattern can reverse or oscillate.

Because the oscillating pressure patterns are located above the ocean downwelling area near Greenland, the question is whether that pattern affects the downwelling and, in turn, the global oceanic circulation conveyor belt.

The study’s computer simulations show a decadal on-off pattern of correlated changes in the polar vortex, atmospheric pressure oscillations over the North Atlantic and changes in sea circulation more than one mile beneath the waves. Observations are consistent with the pattern revealed in computer simulations.

Observations and Simulations of the Stratosphere-to-Sea Link

In the 1980s and 2000s, a series of stratospheric sudden warming events weakened polar vortex winds. During the 1990s, the polar vortex remained strong.

Reichler and colleagues used published worldwide ocean observations from a dozen research groups to reconstruct behavior of the conveyor belt ocean circulation during the same 30-year period.

‘The weakening and strengthening of the stratospheric circulation seems to correspond with changes in ocean circulation in the North Atlantic,’ Reichler says.

To reduce uncertainties about the observations, the researchers used computers to simulate 4,000 years worth of atmosphere and ocean circulation.

‘The computer model showed that when we have a series of these polar vortex changes, the ocean circulation is susceptible to those stratospheric events,’ Reichler says.

To further verify the findings, the researchers combined 18 atmosphere and ocean models into one big simulation, and “we see very similar outcomes.”

The study suggests there is “a significant stratospheric impact on the ocean,” the researchers write. ‘Recurring stratospheric vortex events create long-lived perturbations at the ocean surface, which penetrate into the deeper ocean and trigger multidecadal variability in its circulation. This leads to the remarkable fact that signals that emanate from the stratosphere cross the entire atmosphere-ocean system.'”

- See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2016/05/28/...global-climate/#sthash.0Wz15jFH.netzPQZM.dpuf

 

[trichrider]

http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2016/05/Campbell.pdf

Paris Climate Agreement Objectives Impossible....
Third World Skates....

Conclusion

The UNFCCC is based on an agreement that the emissions of the developing coun-
tries can grow unboundedly in pursuit of economic growth and poverty eradication.
The major industrialising countries such as China and India are classed as developing
countries. The growth of their emissions cannot be and never have been capped and
those emissions have grown enormously since 1990, being the principal cause of a
concomitant growth in global emissions. Under the UNFCCC, the mitigation policy
has always been impossible, has proven to be impossible, and will continue to be im-
possible. The Paris Agreement confirms, and indeed strengthens, this position. For
the UK to pursue its decarbonisation policy in these international circumstances is
irrational. A fifth carbon budget should not be set.
Refusal to set a carbon budget will, of course, lead to criticism of the Committee
on Climate Change and many other agencies of UK and EU climate change policy.
This criticism should be based on recognition of the following: UNFCCC Article 4(7),
Kyoto provisions to similar effect, reiterations of Article 4(7) in subsequent climate
change negotiations, and now the Paris Agreement, have made the mitigation policy
impossible since the UNFCCC was agreed. The UK government has been a party to all
these negotiations and agreements. In its own capacity and through its influence on
EU diplomacy, the UK government entered into the agreement, reinforced at Paris,
that makes global reductions impossible. For the government to continue to set car-
bon budgets having internationally agreed that any such effort will be completely
fruitless is irrational.

 

[Genghis Kush]

“Either it brings tears to their eyes, or else -"
"Or else what?" said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
"Or else it doesn't, you know.”

 

[vta]

it must be all true it's in a meme, yo.

Yeah that's right Moonbat...Everything I believe is based on memes.

 

[vta]

Some common sense...Mark Steyn....I know the believers don't want to listen to alternative reasoning, so this is for the freethinkers...

[YOUTUBEIF]6bARjABDqok[/YOUTUBEIF]

 

[Genghis Kush]

“Oh, there’s no use in talking to him,’ said Alice desperately: ‘he’s perfectly idiotic!’

 

[trichrider]

GOP senators complain to DOJ over push to 'stifle' climate debate


By Doug McKelway Published May 28, 2016 FoxNews.com

Five Republican senators are fighting back against what they see as heavy-handed tactics by the Department of Justice to silence climate change skeptics.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., may have shed light on the DOJ tactics at a Senate hearing in March when he pointedly told Attorney General Loretta Lynch, "Under President Obama, the Department of Justice has done nothing so far about the climate denial scheme."

Lynch replied, "We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI."

Within days of that exchange, Democratic attorneys general from more than a dozen states fired off subpoenas seeking decades of records from climate change skeptics. Among them: university professors, scientists, corporations and think tanks including the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

"It's already had a chilling effect since we got the subpoena 45 days ago," said CEI's Sam Kazman. "This was a subpeona issued by the attorney general of the Virgin Islands for some reason."

"It's way more than a chilling effect, it's an absolute freezer effect," he added, citing outside legal fees CEI has paid to fight the subpoena.

ExxonMobil was subpoenaed last year by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who is seeking the oil company's 40-year-old in-house research about fossil fuels and climate. He told PBS's "News Hour" on Nov. 10 that he believes ExxonMobil may have withheld information that could have hurt the company's shareholder value. "We have to see what documents are in there, but certainly all of the claims would lie in some form of fraud," Schneiderman said.

When asked during the same program whether it defrauded the public, Kenneth Cohen, ExxonMobil's vice president of public and government affairs, said, "The answer is a simple no." Cohen added, "The discussions that have taken place inside our company, among our scientists mirror the discussions that have been taking place ... by the broader scientific community."

While the recent actions involve state attorneys general, five Republican senators wrote Lynch on May 25 demanding DOJ cease its "ongoing use of law enforcement resources to stifle private debate on one of the most controversial public issues of our time - climate change."

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, author of the letter, told Fox News: "I sent the letter because the attorney general of the United States should not be threatening criminal investigation with respect to someone who chooses to simply exercise their First Amendment rights."

First Amendment rights aside, accusations of distorting climate science for political advantage run both ways. That was demonstrated Oct. 6, when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, grilled Aaron Mair, president of the Sierra Club, over satellite data that is at sharp odds with predictions of a rapidly heating planet.

"The computer models say there should be dramatic warming," said Cruz, "and yet the satellite measurements don't show any significant warming."

A flustered Mair responded, "But senator, 97 percent of scientists concur and agree there is global warming."

That 97 percent figure, like so much else about the science of global warming, is the subject of vigorous debate.

Meanwhile, the Competitive Enterprise Institute is fighting back, last week asking a D.C. Court to fine the attorney general of the Virgin Islands for allegedly violating its First Amendment rights.

In a small, unexpected victory for CEI, the Virgin Islands AG withdrew his subpoena two weeks ago, but not before CEI had incurred considerable legal costs.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...o-doj-over-push-to-stifle-climate-debate.html