I decided to do a quick search on the so-called experts cited in the Senate letter, here's what I found:
name from the Senate letter: Professor Bob Carter, of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia
What desmogblog says:
In our continuous quest to debunk the debunkers, the DeSmogBlog has uncovered another questionable connection between an oil company funded front group and the Alberta-based Friends of Science.
Thanks to a helpful tip from one of our fans, and a little of our own digging, we have found that one of the signatories to a recent Friends of Science letter to PM Harper is
Australian climate change “skeptic” Dr. Bob Carter. Dr. Carter is connected to the energy sector funded think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). http://www.desmogblog.com/another-questionable-friend-of-the-friends-of-sciencename from Senate letter: Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT,
what SourceWatch says:
Ross Gelbspan, journalist and author, wrote a 1995 article in Harper's Magazine which was very critical of Lindzen and other global warming skeptics. In the article, Gelbspan reports Lindzen charged "oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; (and) his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels and a speech he wrote, entitled 'Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,' was underwritten by OPEC." (3)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_S._Lindzen By now everyone knows that last June the UAH (University of Alabama Huntsville) team led by Roy Spencer and John Christy released updates to their satellite derived lower troposphere temperature trends. These trends, which come from their “TLT” dataset use data from the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) packages that have been flying aboard NOAA’s Polar Orbiting Environmental (POES) satellites since late 1978. This dataset uses combinations of nadir (straight-down) and off-nadir views of MSU Channel 2 to create a “synthetic” channel that isolates a lower and thinner portion of the atmosphere than the Channel 2 data alone (these measurements are taken by successive cross-track scans that look from left to right as the satellite orbits).
Prior to this UAH’s most up-to-date TLT trend, Version 5.1 (Christy & Norris, 2004) was 0.086 deg. C/decade–well below the predictions of state-of-the-art climate models for the lower troposphere. The corresponding trend from the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) team led by Carl Mears and Frank Wentz is derived from applying the Fu et al. method to their middle troposphere temperature measurements which are taken directly from the MSU Channel 2 nadir view. That trend is 0.19 deg. C/decade and is well within the range of model predictions. So naturally, the Spencer and Christy trends are the only ones that have ever been cited by global warming skeptics as reliable. Spencer and Christy’s Version 5.2 data now yields a trend of 0.12 deg. C/decade for the period 1978-2004 which is now much closer to the comparable RSS trend, also well within the range of the model predictions and essentially resolving the conflict. Since their release the reason for these corrections has been a mystery. There was little if any comment from UAH about the nature of the corrections. For awhile Spencer and Christy were even putting the data up at their web site and taking it down again at frequent but unpredictable intervals making access to it a little hit and miss.
Now, the reason for this UAH update has been made public. One of the more important corrections that needs to be applied to these datasets is one for diurnal drift. The satellites are put in “sun-synchronous” orbits so that they will cross the equator at the same times and locations throughout their service lives. Any imperfection in this sun-synchronous timing will result in an east-west drift that will cause the satellite to measure temperatures at different times of the day. This will in turn cause a spurious warming or cooling in the trend. The NOAA-11 satellite, which operated from 1987 to 1993 had a particularly large diurnal drift correction. Last week a new paper by Mears and Wentz of RSS appeared in Science (Mears & Wentz, 2005) revealing that for some time now, Spencer and Christy have been applying the NOAA-11 diurnal drift correction to their trend calculations with the wrong sign! They’ve been treating that drift as introducing a spurious warming when in fact, it introduces a spurious cooling. Rerunning their analysis with the proper diurnal correction for NOAA-11 alone increased their TLT trend by almost 50 percent.
In other words, the entire controversy over surface vs. troposphere temperature trends, and with it the only potentially credible skeptic argument, boils down to…. a math error!The same day another paper also appeared in Science that speaks to another piece of this issue—radiosonde measured lower troposphere trends. For years skeptics have claimed that radiosonde derived trends independently “confirm” the satellite record. This has always been questionable on a number of grounds, but earlier UAH TLT trends were closer to the radiosonde record than those of RSS. Now it appears that the radiosonde records were also low for a completely different reason, and the previous similarities between the two were purely coincidental. A team led by Steven Sherwood of Yale has discovered that these records suffer almost universally from an overcorrection for incident solar radiative heating. Radiosondes carry “thermistor” type thermometers that measure local air temperature at regular intervals during the balloon’s ascent. Like any thermometer left directly in the sun, these tend to read high unless compared to “shade” thermometers which are more accurate. In the past it has proven to be quite difficult to correct for this. Sherwood’s team examined long-term radiosonde records from globally distributed stations for the impact of this effect. They found that the corrections for this effect that have been used most frequently overcorrect it by a significant amount leaving the sonde record with a spurious cooling. Recent datasets have provided more reliable corrections. When these are used the radiosonde record also agrees with the satellite and surface records to a degree well within the confidence intervals of each.
Thus, the radiosonde “confirmation” of previous math-error driven UAH trends has also vanished.
For what it’s worth, the UAH team has acknowledged the error. Spencer put up something of a concession of sorts at Tech Central Station last week . He’s not quite saying “we were wrong…” yet, but he’s clearly shifting from “it ain’t happening!…” to “maybe it won’t be so bad…” Ron Bailey of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (who edited the book Global Warming and other Eco-Myths, which included a piece by Christy himself) has also acknowledged the error in an editorial in Reason magazine . Until last week, he was one of the more visible and vociferous of global warming skeptic science commentators. Now, he says that “anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up. All data sets-satellite, surface, and balloon-have been pointing to rising global temperatures..” A very honorable and reasoned concession on his part. http://timlambert.org/2005/08/msu-correction/ Warmer is better: Junk Science Week
Access to central Canada through Hudson Bay and longer growing seasons are only two of the advantages if Canadian temperatures should rise
Tim Ball, Financial Post
Published: Thursday, June 15, 2006
Some present global warming as a threat to all life on the planet; others say that at best it's a threat to human well-being. The latest from the doom-is-everywhere camp came last week from David Suzuki, who likes to float scary scenarios. He's been a big promoter of the killer-mosquito threat, allegedly brought on as climate warming brings higher temperatures north and creates hospitable climates for disease-carrying bugs. Now he's found a new threat: killer poison ivy. New research, he says, shows that with higher carbon dioxide levels, "poison ivy did not only grow twice as fast -- it became more poisonous."
***
Just a brief list of the benefits to our coldest province, Manitoba, and the coldest city, Winnipeg, illustrates the positive potential of global warming:
- Reduced heating costs.
- Reduced fuel bills for travel.
- A longer growing season, allowing a greater variety of crops.
- Less frost damage and crop loss.
- A greater variety of plants for gardens and other uses.
- More rapidly growing forests and an increased rate of reforestation.
- Less frost damage to streets and roads.
- The potential for direct access to world markets through northern ports.
- Reduced construction costs in an ameliorated climate.
- A longer summer season for tourism, and for cottagers and campers.
As for mosquitos, Winnipeggers at least have been dealing with the pesky bugs since long before David Suzuki even heard of global warming.
A warmer Canada would improve our lives in these and other ways too numerous to list. Global warming? Let's hope so.
http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=aeb40fd9-f370-4057-8335-bc7345bf2e10 
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