Current Editorial
The Distempered Brain Strikes Again!: Periodically, we come across some uniquely outrageous assaults upon logic and just plain common sense.  Normally when this happens, we simply shake our heads in dismay; but this week we do something special about it.  We honor a number of people at Science magazine and several international institutions of higher learning with our very first bestowal of ... drum-roll ... The Distempered Brain Award.

Subject Index Summaries
Natural Variability of Climate: Natural or unnatural?  That is the question that plagues climatologists searching for evidence of CO2-induced global warming.  A little anomaly here, a little aberration there, and – voila! – the culprit is caught, according to the climate alarmists.  But can the anthropogenic signal really be picked out that easily from the unruly cast of characters that comprises the climate’s natural variability lineup?

Temperature x CO2 Interaction – Plant Growth Response (Agricultural Crops): Most of earth’s plants display increases in photosynthesis and biomass production when exposed to elevated levels of atmospheric CO2.  But what happens when air temperature rises concurrently?  In this summary, we survey the recent scientific literature to get a feel for the fate of agricultural crops under this oft-predicted scenario.

Current Journal Reviews
Historic Hurricane Periodicities in Northwest Florida: Do you think last year’s or this year’s hurricane season was or is bad and related to global warming?  If so, or even if not, you need to check the results of this study examining major hurricane landfall periodicities over the past 7000 years.  History is such an important subject!

Alaskan Glaciers Advance and Retreat with Changes in Holocene Climate: A review of Alaskan glacial movements reveals both a Medieval Warm Period recession and a Little Ice Age advance from which the ice fields there are still recovering.

Have Most Greenhouse Studies Underestimated the Positive Effects of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment on Plant Growth?: The answer could very well be Yes.

Updating the World’s Longest Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment Experiment: Trees live a long time, and experiments designed to determine their ultimate equilibrium response to atmospheric CO2 enrichment must last a long time too.  We here report the latest results of the world’s longest and still-ongoing experiment designed to determine the effects of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration on wood and fruit production in sour orange trees.

Effects of Elevated CO2 and Nitrogen on Symbiotic Fungi in Forest Species: Atmospheric CO2 enrichment enhanced fine root and ectomycorrhizal fungal biomass in model ecosystems composed of beech and spruce seedlings after four years of treatment exposure, indicating that greater amounts of carbon will likely be sequestered in these belowground ecosystem components as the CO2 content of the air continues to rise.