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Volume 4 Number 42:  17 October 2001

Temperature Record of the Week
This issue's Temperature Record of the week is from Greenwood, Delaware. Visit our U.S. Climate Data section to plot and view these data for yourself.

Current Editorial
There Are Bigger Environmental Fish to Fry Than Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions: We review a short article in a specialized scientific journal normally not associated with matters related to global environmental change, wherein UK scientist Geoff Kite offers some important food for thought in his personal assessment of the significance of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content.

Subject Index Summaries
Fungi (In Association with Grasses): A review of the recently published literature suggests that increases in the air's CO2 content will enhance symbiotic relationships between the roots of various grasses and their fungal symbionts in such a way that CO2-induced growth responses may be even further enhanced and persist over time.

Potential Inaccuracies in Temperature Trends: They exist; and they are many.  And their nature is such that they may be giving us a false sense of insecurity about the planet's climate.

Current Journal Reviews
Assessing Northern Hemispheric Temperature Trends Via Reconstructed Precipitation Trends in Spain: A set of relationships between precipitation in southern Spain, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and Northern Hemispheric temperature raises serious questions about the global warming claims of climate alarmists.

A Century of Temperature Data from the Kola Section of the Barents Sea: Just another real-world temperature history that stands in stark contrast to the model-inspired claim of the climate alarmists that the last decades of the 20th century were host to a warming that was greater than any other of the past millennium and propelled the planet to an equally unprecedented level of warmth.

Environmentally-Stressed Plants Respond to Elevated CO2: A meta-analysis of the peer-reviewed scientific literature demonstrates that the elevated-CO2-induced percentage growth enhancement of plants exposed to stressful environmental conditions is generally greater than, or equal to, the enhancement that occurs under optimal growing conditions.

Elevated CO2 Enhances Water Use Efficiency in Field-Grown Sorghum: In spite of experiencing soil moisture levels that were only about one-third of those of well-watered plants, water-stressed sorghum exposed to an additional 200 ppm CO2 exhibited a 19% increase in water use efficiency, while well-watered plants exhibited a 9% increase in this parameter.

Long-Term Effects of Elevated CO2 on Oak Trees: Lifelong natural exposure of two species of now-mature Mediterranean oak trees to elevated CO2 has resulted in significant enhancements of leaf net photosynthesis, as well as large increases in water use efficiency.