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In the last two years, a remarkable amount of disturbing news has been published concerningglobal warming, largely concentrating on melt-ing of polar ice, tropical storms and hurricanes,and mass extinctions. The sheer volume of thesestories appears to be moving the American polit-ical process toward some type of policy restrict-ing emissions of carbon dioxide.It is highly improbable, in a statistical sense,that new information added to any existing fore-cast is almost always “bad” or “good”; rather,each new finding has an equal probability of making a forecast worse or better. Consequently,the preponderance of bad news almost certainly means that something is missing, both in theprocess of science itself and in the reporting of science. This paper examines in detail bothrecent scientific reports on climate change andthe communication of those reports.Needless to say, the unreported informationis usually counter to the bad news. Reports of rapid disintegration of Greenland’s ice ignorethe fact that the region was warmer than it isnow for several decades in the early 20th century,before humans could have had much influenceon climate. Similar stories concerning Antarctica neglect the fact that the net temperature trend inrecent decades is negative, or that warming thesurrounding ocean can serve only to enhancesnowfall, resulting in a gain in ice. Global warm-ing affects hurricanes in both positive and nega-tive fashions, and there is no relationshipbetween the severity of storms and ocean-surfacetemperature, once a commonly exceeded thresh-old temperature is reached. Reports of massivespecies extinction also turn out to be impressive-ly flawed.This constellation of half-truths and mis-statements is a predictable consequence of theway that science is now conducted, where issuescompete with each other for public support.Unfortunately, this creates a culture of negativity that is reflected in the recent spate of globalwarming reports.
 Is the Sky
Really 
 Falling? 
 A Review of Recent Global Warming Scare Stories
by Patrick J. Michaels
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
 Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and professor of natural resourcesat Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is a past president of the American Association of StateClimatologists and an author of the 2003 climate science “Paper of the Year” selected by the Association of AmericanGeographers. His research has been published in major scientific journals, including 
Climate Research
 ,
ClimaticChange
 ,
Geophysical Research Letters
 ,
 Journal of Climate, Nature
 , and
Science
. He received his Ph.D. inecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1979. His most recent book is
Meltdown:The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media 
.
Executive Summary 
No. 576August 23, 2006
 
Introduction
For much of the last two years, the publichas been barraged with global warming horrorstories. Greenland is melting faster than everthought. Antarctica is disappearing along withthe Pacific island of Tuvalu. Frogs and toads arecroaking in record numbers. Hurricanes aregetting worse. Hurricanes will get worse.Here I examine three climate-related issuesthat have received extensive coverage, decon-structing both the peer-reviewed literature andthe reporting on that literature. Each of thesetopics is centrally important to global warm-ing policy:1.
 Polar ice.
Melting of large areas of land icewill substantially raise sea level. Meltinglarge areas of sea ice does not affect sea level but can have other important eco-logical impacts. Is Greenland gaining orlosing ice? What about Antarctica?2.
 Hurricanes.
Since the fall of 2004, a num-ber of papers have appeared in the scien-tific literature relating increasing hurri-cane severity to global warming. What arethe strong points and what are the limita-tions of these studies? Are there otherrecent findings in the refereed literaturethat indicate otherwise? Have they beenreported with the same prominence?3.
 Extinctions.
Some very disturbing researchhas recently been published linking glob-al warming to massive extinctions of tropical amphibians and to large-scalemigrations of entire classes of organisms.Do these studies stand up to furtheranalyses? If not, why not?
Polar Ice
In a review of recent global warming sci-ence, it seems appropriate to start at the cold-est place on earth.
Antarctica
 Antarctica’s ice sheets and glaciers are thelargest mass of ice on the planet, comprisingsome 25.71
×
10
6
cubic kilometers, or 89.5percent of total global ice.Global warming theory predicts, in gener-al, that warming is enhanced in cold, dry regions. That’s because the response of tem-perature to a given “greenhouse” gas, such ascarbon dioxide, is logarithmic. The responseis similar if there are two greenhouse gasesthat absorb much of the same wavelengths of heat radiation emanating from the earth.Both water vapor and carbon dioxide havethis property.Suppose we had an atmosphere that ini-tially contained a relatively constant concen-tration of carbon dioxide—at least since therecession of ice, some 11,000 years ago, frommuch of the North American land mass.(Technically, because the definition of an “iceage” is one with large areas of nonpolar landice, we are still in one because of the massiveGreenland ice cap.) And also suppose we could find placeswhere there were only tiny amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere. Those would be very cold land areas. The vapor pressure of water—a measure of how much is given off by a wet surface to the air—is about 1,000 timesless at -40°C (-40°F) than it is at +40°C(105°F), which is the earth’s nominal surfacetemperature range, depending on location.The atmosphere over cold land areas isexceedingly dry.Beginning around 1850, the carbon diox-ide concentration of the atmosphere beganto rise, from a background of about 280 partsper million (ppm) to roughly 380 ppm today.Direct measurements, taken at Mauna Loa by Keeling et al.,
1
date back to 1957.In fact, dry, cold land areas, such as Siberia or northwestern North America in winterindeed show more warming than do otherplaces (Figure 1). As dispositive proof of thathypothesis, Michaels et al.
2
demonstratedthat the more cold, dry air there is in theseregions (as measured by barometric pressure,which is the weight of the air above a point),the greater the warming rate. As a control,regions that are moist show no such relation-ship.
2
Antarctica isdisappearingalong with thePacific island of Tuvalu. Frogsand toads arecroaking inrecord numbers.Hurricanes aregetting worse.Hurricanes willget worse.
 
 Antarctica is an exception. Over 15 yearsago, Sansom
3
published a paper in the
 Journal of Climate
that showed no net warm-ing of Antarctica since the InternationalGeophysical Year of 1957, which began thefirst systematic study of Antarctic tempera-ture. Before then, records from transientexpeditions are extremely sporadic. However,Sansom’s study relied on only a handful of stations and did not form an areally weight-ed average, which is necessary because somany Antarctic weather stations are on thecoast and very few inland.Doran et al.
4
demonstrated a net coolingover Antarctica (Figure 1). Yet, on Earth Day,2005, an AP Newswire headline said, “Study Shows Antarctic Glaciers Shrinking.”
5
How does one square this seemingly contradictory result?Table 1 gives the seasonal breakdown of  Antarctic temperature change, from Doran etal. It is divided into Antarctica as a whole and Antarctica minus the Antarctic Peninsula—thenarrow strip of land that points toward South America. It is clear from this table that warm-ing of the peninsula, which makes up 2 per-cent of the continent, is quite anomalouscompared to what is happening over the restof the land area.The AP story referred to work of Cook etal.,
6
which only examined glaciers in thenorthern portion of the peninsula, or about 1percent of the Antarctic land area, and specifi-cally the portion that has warmed the most.The title of a scientific article is supposedto economically convey as much pertinentinformation as possible. But even our mostrespected journals occasionally publish mis-leading ones, which can help to generate mis-leading press stories.In 2002
Science
carried an article by Quayle etal. called “Extreme Responses to Climate Changein Antarctic Lakes.”
7
Quayle et al. restricted theirstudy to an area even smaller than the AntarcticPeninsula—nine lakes located on tiny Signey Island at the tip of the peninsula, which make upabout 1/10,000,000 of Antarctica. The finding of note was that water in the lakes warmed at a rateabout two to three times faster than the air tem-peratures and three to four times faster thanglobal average temperature. (While the lakes arefrozen for most of the year, liquid water remainsbelow the ice.)It is scientifically inappropriate to con-flate global temperatures with what’s hap-pening on an isolated island, especially whenthe climate of that very small place is chang-ing in a different direction than is that of theassociated continent. Although there was obviously no globalsignificance, the Associated Press said thisfinding “could have very important implica-tions for global climate change.”
8
In reality,Signey Island is a pretty special case. It is on
3
Quayle et al.restricted theirstudy to nine lakeslocated on tiny Signey Island atthe tip of thepeninsula, whichmake up about1/10,000,000 of Antarctica.
Table 1Areal Extent of Warming and Cooling in Antarctica, Showing the Biasing Effect of the VerySmall Antarctic Peninsula, 1966–2000
Antarctica without thePeriodAntarcticaAntarctic PeninsulaAnnual+41.4%, –58.3%+33.8%, –65.9%Winter (June–Aug.)+62.5%, –37.3%+56.3%, –43.4%Spring (Sept.–Nov.)+54.1%, –45.7%+49.4%, –50.4%Summer (Dec.–Feb.)+31.7%, –67.4%+22.8%, –76.3%Autumn (Mar.–May)+12.6%, –87.4+0.3%, –99.7%
Plus signs indicate the proportion warming; minus signs indicate the proportion cooling. The Antarctic Peninsula isdefined as the area north of 80°S and east of 80°W. From Doran et al., p. 518.
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