facing the fire

The WSJ op-ed page again

2012-01-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed by 16 "scientists" claiming that global warming isn't a big deal, and probably stopped many years ago. They do call for funding satellite and ground-based observations of the climate system, which is generous of them. I read the piece, which is full of half-truths and less. It can be found under the title "No Need to Panic about Global Warming" in (or around) 27 January 2012.

Notably, the WSJ rejected a similar letter my 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences. The main difference between the two submissions was, oh, everything. The NAS members call out the poor coverage of global warming and its impacts in the media. Peter Gleick covered this in an article published on Forbes [LINK].

I noticed at least two things about the list of 16 "scientists" on the WSJ piece. First, most of them have little if any professional experience studying the climate system. Second, there is a preponderance of old, white men on the list. I'm not the only one who noticed, Ben Nolan also did, and he's working through the list to see who these people are, including how old and how white they might be [LINK]. It comes as no surprise that many on the list are connected financially to the fossil fuel industry and/or to conservative think tanks (that are likely funded by the fossil fuel industry). I hope Mr. Nolan follows through and completes the list, as I think the rest are just as oily as those he's tracked down so far.

Ralph Hall, chair of the House of Representatives science committee

2011-12-16T12:33:00.000-08:00

I have not read such incoherent drivel from such a highly placed official since George W. Bush was in the whitehouse. Please read this story and accompanying interview with Ralph Hall; it is a shocking view into the world of American politics. It is a world where people say things like "I don't have any proof of that. But I don't believe 'em. I still want to listen to 'em and believe what I believe I ought to believe." [LINK]

Sherwood's dredging up history

2011-10-06T13:14:00.000-07:00

Steve Sherwood has an outstanding piece in Physics Today that compares climate "denialism" to historical precedent. In particular, he compares today's climate deniers to those who denied general relativity and heliocentrism in the past. The three stories are interwoven beautifully, definitely worth the read. Here's the link: LINK

The American ‘allergy’ to global warming: Why?

2011-10-04T10:31:00.000-07:00

"Climate change has already provoked debate in a U.S. presidential campaign barely begun. An Associated Press journalist draws on decades of climate reporting to offer a retrospective and analysis on global warming and the undying urge to deny." -- Editor's Note regarding this piece by Charles Haney, The American ‘allergy’ to global warming: Why? [link].

Nice, concise overview of the state of climate science and "denialism" in the United States.

Start pre-gaming, only two years to the next IPCC report

2011-09-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

The last IPCC report on the physical science of climate change, called the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), was published in 2007. Since that time, plans for the next assessment (AR5) have been underway.

I think I posted before about the announcement of the chapter outlines and the lead authors [link]. The groundwork has been laid for some time, with the lineup of authors finalized earlier this year [pdf]. A lot of the effort falls upon Thomas Stocker [link], the Co-Chair of "Working Group 1," the job previously held by Susan Solomon [link] for AR4. Not only that, but there have already been two meetings of the lead authors, the most recent being in July in Brest, France.

If they are able to keep on schedule, then the AR5 will be published in two years: in September 2013.

The first order draft will be done and reviewed in the next few months. As you know, the assessment is basically a gigantic review paper of climate science. As such, it relies on published results for the basis of the review. The last day to have papers submitted to journals and be considered for inclusion in the AR5 is 31 July 2012, so if you want to get something into the next IPCC report, you have about 10 months to get it done and submitted. It also needs to be accepted by 15 March 2013, giving you plenty of time to deal with those pesky reviewers.

Remote Sensing shakeup

2011-09-06T12:07:00.000-07:00

The editor-in-chief of the open-access journal Remote Sensing has resigned. An editorial in the journal explains the situation. The short version is that this journal is the one that let that Spencer & Braswell paper slip through peer review; that publication has fatal flaws throughout its assumptions and analysis. The paper was quickly and brutally criticized in the climate-blogosphere, but exaggerated and praised in the right-wing, and much of the mainstream, media. The journal was criticized for letting such a poor paper get published. The editor-in-chief, Wolfgang Wagner, has now had a chance to review the criticisms and the paper and the review process. He has come to the conclusion that the paper should not have been published. The reason seems to come down to poor selection of reviewers by the editor that was in charge of that paper. The reviews came back with little criticism, to which the authors responded, and that basically tied the editor's hands and the paper had to be accepted.

From my point of view, the failing was the editorial board's misunderstanding of the subject matter and clear mishandling of the review process. From the tone and content of the paper, it was clearly a contrarian point of view and had the flavor of ideological bias. I suspect that the reviewers were selected from the list of suggested reviewers supplied by the authors. In cases of controversial content, there needs to be at least one critical reviewer selected from the community involved, and I'm pretty sure none of the reviewers in this case were in the mainstream of the climate change community.

I'm glad that Wolfgang Wagner has stepped down. I don't know that he did anything wrong except let the other editors make some bad decisions, but this move does help to show that the journal doesn't want to build a reputation for publishing garbage, contrarian papers. Hopefully this will be a small blemish on the journal's reputation which won't mar the whole thing. It will be interesting to see if the next editor-in-chief conducts a review of the evidence and officially retracts the paper (it is unclear whether this journal has provisions for that, but they should consider it).

The original paper can be found from the journal's web page. The editorial is worth a read, and can be found in the current issue [LINK]. On a related note, a new GRL paper by Andy Dessler destroys the Spencer & Braswell argument in under 4 pages [LINK].

UPDATE: Lots of coverage of this story on the climate blogs. One worth seeing is Mooney's post on DeSmogBlog, which rehashes some similar scandals involving climate, intelligent design, and autism. [LINK]

The big balloon and the garden hose

2011-09-01T08:53:00.001-07:00

I'm uncomfortable with this real-life test of geoengineering: http://www.grist.org/climate-change/2011-08-31-is-planet-cooling-balloon-full-of-hot-air

Maybe they could have started with some modeling?

CLOUD experiments

2011-08-31T09:56:00.000-07:00

The first results from the CLOUD experiments have been getting a lot of media attention. The focus of the attention is the Nature paper that was published this week: [news][paper].

The goal of this project is to determine whether cosmic rays have a significant impact on clouds.

Let's boil this down a little. This project is a laboratory experiment at CERN. It is a cloud chamber, basically an isolated volume of air that is precisely controlled for temperature and pressure. They put very pure air into the chamber, add a little background water, and some gases like ozone, sulfuric acid, and ammonia. The chamber is heavily instrumented to look for nucleation, which just means that they try to keep track of particle formation that occurs as the vapors interact and possibly start condensing. They can do this in neutral conditions (like a classical cloud chamber), or they can shine a pion beam into the chamber. That beam is adjusted to mimic cosmic ray bombardment. The goal is to see if cosmic rays produce ions that enhance the formation of particles, which could then go on to become the seeds for cloud droplets.

The answer seems to be that shining that beam into the chamber does produce more particles. This actually isn't a surprise, as far as I can tell. One important point is that nucleation rates, that is the rate of particle formation, are smaller than observed rates unless the temperature is quite low. This means that it is unlikely that cosmic rays ionizing gases near the Earth's surface is a major source of particle formation. Certainly there is particle formation, but it is likely to be a small source of the total number of particles. This result may change when they start adding in organic molecules, but that is future work.

There is better coverage on RealClimate: link.

There is hubbub about this result because there is a crack-pot theory that galactic cosmic rays are a major control of climate because of their impact on cloud formation. There are major flaws with this theory. My own take is that cosmic rays probably do produce some of the particles in the atmosphere that go on to become cloud condensation nuclei, but there are many paths to becoming cloud condensation nuclei, and there are lots and lots of these particles around. In fact, I seriously doubt that cloud formation is frequently affected by the limitation of these aerosol particles. I've been thinking about this in terms of observed cloud properties. The number of cloud droplets is connected to the number of aerosol particles available: over land where there are lots more aerosol particles, there tends to be more, smaller droplets in clouds, while over the remote ocean the clouds are made of fewer, larger droplets. In very polluted conditions, we can observe changes in the cloud properties that follow that same trend. I think the downfall of the cosmic ray theory of cloud formation comes from the fact that out in the middle of the ocean there are still tons of aerosol particles. While many of those particles may come from cosmic ray influenced nucleated vapors, there is no evidence that there is a shortage of other sources of aerosol, so if the intensity of cosmic ray bombardment were to change, it seems unlikely that other sources of aerosol wouldn't fill whatever tiny void that change would make.

Besides this basic criticism (which amounts to the originators of the theory simply having a bit of a myopic view of cloud formation), there is also a clear lack of evidence for cosmic ray intensity modulating cloud/climate. The RealClimate piece covers that. Finally, there is the link to climate change, for which there is absolutely no evidence.

So my summary would be something like: This research presents experimental results that suggest that ionization by cosmic ray-like effects can impact nucleation rates in conditions similar to the Earth's atmosphere. The role of such nucleation enhancement in the Earth's atmosphere remains unclear, especially given that the impact seems most pronounced in conditions that are outside the atmospheric boundary layer. This is a nice contribution to basic aerosol research, which should help to constrain models of aerosol formation. The impacts on cloud formation and the Earth's climate can not be assessed with the data collected so far.

The authors are only slightly overselling their results, which is typical for authors of Nature papers. The lead author's comments can be heard in the embedded YouTube clip. The media coverage, and especially the climate change denier blogosphere, is lighting up like this experiment proves something controversial. It does not.

Reactions to the Spencer paper

2011-08-08T22:00:00.000-07:00

It's a very bad paper. That is the short story. I haven't thought through all my criticisms of it yet (maybe I'll write something here eventually). In the meantime, I like this overview piece at Climate Central by Michael D. Lemonick [LINK]. I especially enjoyed the comment that, "... it's not that NASA data are blowing a hole in anything. It's that Spencer's interpretation of NASA data are blowing... something, somewhere."

For those of you looking to actually read the paper, it is in a journal called Remote Sensing, and it is open access. You can find it by looking up doi:10.3390/rs3081603. Let me reiterate that this is a bad paper, with many incorrect statements, assumptions, and reasoning. It isn't worth you time reading this paper when you could better spend it reading an informative one about climate sensitivity... oh, I don't know, maybe doi:10.1175/2008JCLI1995.1

A peer-review recipe

2011-07-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

Eos is on a hot streak, at least compared to the usual Eos status quo. There's another useful article in the 12 July issue. It is an overview, or maybe a primer, about peer reviewing [LINK]. It is written by K.A. Nicholas and W. Gordon. I'm not sure what they do, Nicholas is at Lund U. in Sweden, and Gordon is at UT Austin. The article is a bit prescriptive for my taste, but I think it will be helpful reading for graduate students and others who are doing their first reviews. It's a good reminder for the rest of us about how we should think about some aspects of doing reviews.

One difference between my reviews and the ones outlined by the article is in how to treat fatally flawed manuscripts and majorly flawed ones. The article suggests identifying these errors and being done with the review. In my experience, there is a good chance that the manuscript will still get "accepted subject to major revisions," so this may be the only chance to really convey to the authors what they need to improve. (Otherwise, there's the risk of multiple rounds of reviews, which no one wants.) To that end, I always provide a full review, even if I am recommending rejection of the paper. I always hope that the editor will appreciate the effort, and also that the authors will get more constructive criticism to help improve a new version of the manuscript, or at least have a comprehensive set of comments to address in a revised version that will come back for another review.

On a side note, this is also helpful, at least in principle, in the "dialog" between the climate science community and the climate change denying community. There is a lot of mistrust of the peer-review process among "skeptics" (note they are not skeptical, really). The article in Eos is a simple explanation of how peer-reviews are written, and I think almost everyone will agree that the description is roughly what reviews look like. While sometimes reviews are more or less helpful, the thought behind them is basically the one described by the article. They are meant as constructive criticism, pointing out strengths and weaknesses of work, judging the contribution to the field, and recommending whether publication is reasonable or not. This is how I write reviews, and it is similar to reviews I receive. In climate science, reviews are usually anonymous, though there's always the option of signing a review so that the authors know who you are. The decision about how the submitted manuscript proceeds comes from the editor, not directly from the reviewers, so even if a paper receives an unfair review, the editor can take corrective action. When that doesn't happen, the authors can appeal to the editor, pointing out where the review has gone off track. The usual course of action would be for the editor to find another reviewer, who can then corroborate the criticism or back up the author. There really isn't anything secretive or mysterious about the process. There are obvious measures to avoid conflicts of interest, and procedures for interaction among the participants. So while there are interesting arguments about how to improve peer review (blinded reviews, e.g.), I think the current system is quite transparent and attempts to be fair to all involved. I hope that critics of climate science will read this article (and David Schultz's book, LINK) before they attack the peer review process in general.

News Corp behind Climategate?

2011-07-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

Was Rupert Murdoch's right-wing-leaning News Corp behind the illegal hacking of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit? There's no direct evidence at this time, but Joe Romm has put it out there in today's Climate Progress [LINK]. While Romm's connections seem tenuous, there is no doubt that News Corp's news outlets made great use of the stolen emails, and no one would be surprised if the suspicion were to be found true. Either way, I think Romm's real point is that there have been so many investigations of the scientists tangled up in "climategate," but the actual crime remains unsolved. Who broke into UEA's computer system, selectively stole and then distributed emails from CRU? The motive is almost certainly political/idealogical, and whoever did it had some competence with "hacking," and some savvy about how to distribute the stolen information to the media... It would certainly bring closure to the whole affair if the perpetrators were brought to justice.

Comparing volcanic CO2 emissions to human-made emissions

2011-06-24T10:01:00.000-07:00

There's a terrific article by T. Gerlach in last week's issue of AGU's EOS newspaper [PDF]. Gerlach is apparently a volcanologist, not a climate scientist. The article compares estimates of CO2 emission by volcanic sources to human-made emissions. There is a common misconception (I'm not sure how common) about the relative contributions of volcanos and humans to the emission of CO2.

So, which do you think is the larger source of CO2, global volcanos or human-made sources (includes land-use change, cement production, transport, energy, etc)?

The answer is that humans produce (as of 2010) about 135 times more CO2 than all the volcanoes in the world. The numbers are something like humans emitting about 35 billion tons versus volcanoes emitting 260 million tons. There doesn't appear to be any tricky business going on, and all kinds of volcanoes (including underwater volcanoes) are included. In fact, Gerlach goes on to make lots of interesting comparisons: one good one is that human activities produce the same amount of CO2 emissions as the global volcanic annual source every 12.5 hours.

Gerlach also accounts for the explosive volcanic eruptions like Mount St. Helens and Pinatubo, which are called paroxysms. These can suddenly emit a lot of CO2, but they are rare. While these paroxysms are happening, their emission rate might be as large as all of humanity's. The catch is that they only last a few hours, and wind up contributing very little to the global CO2 emissions.

Really nailing the coffin shut, Gerlach also considers what it would mean for volcanism if the emission rate did match the human-made CO2 emissions of about 135 Gigatons per year. It sounds like it would mean that we would need one (or more) supereruptions per year. Supereruptions are huge volcanic eruptions, like when Yellowstone blew up 2 million years ago, and they are rare even for geologists, happening only every 100,000-200,000 years or so.

The only weakness of the article is that Gerlach forgets to address the obvious climate change denial argument that humans are not emitting as much CO2 as claimed. There are hints of how to deal with this, however, as Gerlach mentions that the total volcanic emission is equal to that of about two dozen large coal-fired power plants. The volcanic number is so small that we can easily eliminate huge amounts of human-made emissions and still have more human-made emissions than volcanic emissions by more than an order of magnitude. So I think this presentation is a great place to point to really come to terms with this comparison, and the vast difference in the volcanic versus human-made emissions means that there can be no dispute.

Also see another Gerlach article at EARTH Magazine [LINK].

It pays to go to college

2011-05-28T08:08:00.000-07:00

So this guy Peter Thiel is starting a fellowship program that will give students $100,000 to start a new business. He thinks it will encourage more rapid innovation. The catch is that they can only do this fellowship instead of going to college for two years [NPR story]. Apparently Thiel has some contrarian tendencies, and perhaps a grudge against higher education. He's done pretty well for himself as a co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook; he's worth around $1,5000,000,000 [wikipedia]. Oh, and by the way, he graduated from Stanford in philosophy in 1989, and then got his JD from Stanford in 1992. All that time at Stanford would probably make anyone hate higher education (Go Bears!). So education worked for him, but this fellowship is about stimulating and accelerating innovation, and from my reading of his Wikipedia page, it sounds like Thiel is an investor, not an innovator. He struck gold with PayPal, which has given him a chance to take risks on lots of start-ups, some of which might do well and others completely fail. He's a hedge fund manager and a venture capitalist, so his job is focused on taking risks and hoping that some of them pay off big (and implicitly this assumes that those few successes will more than make up for the many failures).

All this is fine and good, but now that Thiel is talking about education, I think he may have confused his own risk-taking lifestyle as an appropriate one for society at large. He's presenting the undergraduate degree as being overvalued, and thinks of this like a bubble (as in the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble). There is maybe a point in there somewhere, and maybe in the USA we need to think about whether everyone needs to go to college. I'll throw in the thought that "trade schools" are extremely undervalued, and that promoting real trade schools would be much more valuable to a vast number of people than getting an associates degree from a community college. That's a digression, though, and to get back on track, let me say that Andrew Kelly wrote a nice critique of the fellowship program on (unfortunately) the HuffPo [LINK]. He points out that the fellowship program is taking some of the best students from the best universities in the country, and putting them into a 2-year intensive mentoring program. This is a far cry from devaluing higher education.

For the overwhelming number of American students, going to college is a good idea. Whether it is because of an overvaluation of degrees or not, the numbers simply show that the more education one gets, the higher the salary [SEE FIGURE, SOURCE]. In the present social-economic conditions, trying to argue that fewer people need to graduate from college is damning most of those people to a lower salary tier. While Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out of college to become extraordinarily wealthy, the graphic and the data show that they are extreme outliers, and that most people who quit college are giving up almost a third of their potential salary.

Okay, my final comment for this rant... I hope the Thiel Fellowship program is wildly successful. No, really! You should go look at the list of young "innovators" [LINK]; they are extremely impressive, and if this 2-year program can get them and their ideas to the next level, that could have a tremendous impact in several emerging fields (I was especially interested in the Energy category). These are clearly very smart, highly motivated people, and allowing them to focus intensely on these ideas for two years is actually a good plan. It isn't for the average American 20-year-old, but for a few it could be really advantageous. My guess is that most of these Thiel Fellows will go back to school, and then on to graduate school, because they won't be satisfied picking things up along the way. When it comes to extremely technical fields, it actually is more efficient to work through all that fundamental material before just jumping in and cobbling together the pieces as you go along. But we will see.

African biomass burning (part 1?)

2011-03-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

The amount of area and material that is burned each year in tropical Africa is staggering. The series of maps shown here is from NASA, showing burning across Africa during 2005 (note they aren't monthly, just 10 day composites ranging from January to August). Globally, biomass burning is estimated to consume somewhere around 8700 Tg of dry matter and release nearly 4 Tg of carbon to the atmosphere. Much of that carbon is returned to the biosphere, though, because the majority of the burning isn't to clear forest, but to clear cropland in savannah regions. People seasonally set the fires to keep harmful plants and pests out of their farmland. The chemical consequences of this huge efflux of gas and aerosol each season across the tropical belt is still only crudely understood. The global impact is poorly understood, as there are processes that are indirectly related to the burning, such as the planetary albedo, cloud and precipitation effects, and chemical effects in both the troposphere and stratosphere. See here for a little more description, especially on the chemical side.

While not exactly analogous to other forms of anthropogenic changes to the climate system, this is an obvious and large perturbation that is mostly human induced. Understanding the consequences, both locally and remotely, may help us understand impacts of climate change globally.

Another interesting aspect of the African seasonal biomass burning is that it could represent an interaction between the climate system and human culture. The burning is seasonal, as I mentioned, but the extent and severity of the burning and resulting smoke depends on when and where the fires are started. That in turn depends on the previous rainy season. Where the smoke goes depends on the atmospheric circulation, and where the material ends up may determine the remote impact. For example, in some circulation patterns, the central African smoke is transported toward the Indian Ocean and is mixed into the westerlies, which will disperse the plume rather quickly. In other situations, the plume is transported over the southeast Atlantic, which is an are of large-scale sinking motion, so the smoke is contained within a layer and slowly moved over the ocean. This can affect radiation budget and the clouds in the area, which then have potential effects on other aspects of climate variability (through changes in the ocean surface temperature, for example, which may feed back on Atlantic Nino activity). These links are only tenuously understood, and are worth a good think if you have the time.

MODIS burning product, see LINK

Glory of the sea?

2011-03-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

I recently wrote about the Glory satellite mission [LINK]. Early this morning, the rocket carrying Glory to orbit was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Unfortunately Glory will only be studying the particles in the south Pacific, because the rocket was unable to attain orbit and crashed into the ocean. [LINK]. This is very similar, at least superficially, to the failure of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which I also blogged about [LINK]. This is supposed to be the "golden age" of satellite observations of the climate system, but it is hard to believe when we struggle to get the satellites into orbit. Glory has been over a decade in the making, and I imagine there are a lot of people around the country right now who are wondering what they are going to do in the next couple of years.

There may be hope, though. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 is a go, scheduled to be put into orbit in February 2013. Except that they are planning to use yet another Taurus rocket [LINK]. So, yeah.

RealClimate also picked up this story [LINK].

George Will want(ed) high speed rail

2011-03-04T08:54:00.000-08:00

I've said it before, and I say it again: George Will is an ass. [LINK]

Taking the conserve out of conservative

2011-03-01T12:16:00.000-08:00

Today I heard a story on NPR that I think makes plain the GOP position on all matters environmental:

LISTEN ON NPR

They won't even concede that biodegradable plasticware is better than petrochemical-based forks. I mean, if anyone had any doubts about where these people are coming from, this should clear it up.

Horse dies, Inhofe continues beating it anyway

2011-02-25T10:07:00.000-08:00

I can't believe that the scandal that was known as "climategate" continues to give climate change deniers some kind of special tingle. NOAA's Inspector General issued a report about the scandal at the request of Sen. Inhofe [LINK]. Guess what the report said? Yeah, that's right. And how much money and resources were devoted to putting together this report? Why does Jim Inhofe insist on wasting taxpayer dollars on these flights of fancy?

Read details at Climate Progress.

Response to House continuing resolution cuts

2011-02-18T12:28:00.000-08:00

The House Appropriations Committee today introduced a Continuing Resolution (H.R. 1) to fund the federal government for the last seven months of the fiscal year while cutting spending by over $100 billion from the President’s fiscal year 2011 request. This CR legislation represents the largest single discretionary spending reduction in the history of Congress. [source]

I've just been browsing through the summary of the program cuts from this CR proposal, which can be viewed here. My interpretation is that the middle column is the FY2010 budget item minus the CR budget item, and the right column is the FY2011 request (by the Administration) minus the CR budget item. I'll just consider the right column, and assume that these are generally cuts on top of cuts. Just browsing through the list looking for science research related items:

NIST:
- Technology Innovation Program: $40 million cut.
- Construction: $66.8 million cut
- Scientific & Technical Research Services: $115 million cut.

NOAA:
-Operations, Research, and Facilities: $450.3 million cut -- THAT's almost half a billion dollars!!

NASA: $578.7 million cut -- over half a billion dollars.

Office of Science and Technology Policy $500,000 cut (wonder what their budget is?)

NSF:
-Research & Related Activities: $550.9 million cut.
-Major Research Equipment & Facilities Construction: $110.4 million cut.
-Education & Human Resources: $166.2 million cut.

Energy & Water Development (I assume this is DOE mostly):
Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy: $899.3 million cut. What? Seriously?
Fossil Energy Research & Development (for comparison): $30.6 million cut. I see a pattern.
Clean Coal Technology (for comparison): $18 million cut. Hmm.
Science: $1,110,900,000 cut... yes, OVER A BILLION DOLLARS CUT FROM DOE'S OFFICE OF SCIENCE!
ARPA-E (energy innovation grants): $250 million cut. Do you see what is happening here?
Weapons Activities: $312.4 million cut... maybe it isn't all bad?
Nuclear Nonproliferation: $647.5 million cut... oh, I see.

Science is not the only target. Scanning down though, you'll find a category called "Interior and Environment," which must be mostly Department of Interior and the EPA: it starts midway through page 8 and goes until the top of page 11. These are mostly smaller cuts, focused on USGS, EPA, BLM, NPS, and a handful of other programs. There are some nice highlights though.

EPA State and local air quality management: GHG permitting: $25 million cut. It isn't listed as termination, but I'd have to guess this is about all the money they could get for this new program.
Fish & Wildlife Service Grants $160.7 million cut.
State & Tribal Wildlife Grants: $90 million cut.
EPA Great Lakes Initiative: $75 million cut.
EPA Clean Water SRF: $1,310,000,000 cut. Yep, 1.3 Billion cut.
EPA Drinking Water SRF: $457 million cut.
EPA Rescission: $290 million cut.
EPA Categorical Grants: $220.2 million cut.

There are big cuts also for FEMA, NIH, CDC, Department of Labor, OSHA, Head Start (2 BILLION DOLLARS CUT FROM HEAD START!), a billion dollars cut from Social Security Administration, and even cuts in the defense budget.

What I'd like to see is another column stating the proposed budget by the CR for each item, to put in perspective how big these cuts are compared to the programs. I'm guessing that the are huge for these science programs, but I'd like to see the numbers.

And in the end, these cuts could be devastating for science research in the USA, but they only reduce the deficit from $1.5 Trillion to $1.4 Trillion. I think that we need to reevaluate how the government is spending money, not just in these relatively small discretionary items, but for the whole enchilada.

Fickle conspiracy theorists

2011-02-17T12:05:00.000-08:00

Richard Linklater's 1991 film "Slacker" touches on a number of persistent conspiracy theories. Many of them, such as moon landing hoaxes and JFK assassination plots, are still bandied about today, especially on late-night talk shows like Coast to Coast AM. If you watch this clip, you'll see an example, but there's a part about global warming, too. Today the conspiracy nuts think that global warming is the hoax, that somehow scientists are pulling the wool over the eyes of the public. This clip shows that around 1990, the conspiracy needle was really pointing the other way, with the government covering up global warming. "Greenhouse effect... by the way, they discovered that in the '40s."

Dansgaard Dies

2011-02-09T11:17:00.000-08:00

Just saw the LA Times obituary for the Danish paleoclimatologist Willi Dansgaard [LINK]. Dansgaard was a physicist by training, with a specialty in spectroscopy. He figured out the connection between temperature and oxygen isotope ratio in precipitation which became one of the foundations of paleoclimatatology. He also discovered abrupt climate change when he analyzed early ice cores.

Dansgaard's death comes just after Tamino wrote about glacial cycles in a couple of posts that are worth reading: PART0 PART1 PART1b PART2

un-story

2011-02-03T10:11:00.000-08:00

WalesOnline.co.uk has the most unremarkable story on climate change that I have every seen [LINK]. The byline says it is by Chris Kelsey, but the end of the article makes it seem to be connected to Kevin Anderson, a professor at University of Manchester. Either way, I wasn't sure what the point of the article was, since it could well have been written in the 1970s, until I read the lame reader comments that follow it. In case you see them, I can assure you that climate models do include the effects of water vapor, and they have since the 1970s. Where do these people come up with this stuff?

The Hindu: "Expert wants cosmic rays' impact on global warming assessed"

2011-01-24T13:38:00.000-08:00

The Hindu : Sci-Tech / Energy & Environment : Expert wants cosmic rays' impact on global warming assessed

Sigh.

More on this at some point soon. Why don't any of these old tropes die?

Rolling back the job-destroying (greenhouse gas) regulations

2011-01-21T23:59:00.000-08:00

A McClatchy Newspapers article [LINK] suggests that the House republicans are going to move on to the Clean Air Act now that they've "repealed" the health care act. It's actually a really nice article, so I recommend taking a look. The idea is that the republicans don't like that the EPA is going to try to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, so they want to re-write the Clean Air Act to make sure that is not in the EPA's purview.

The argument seems to be that (a) the Congress should pass regulatory legislation, (b) carbon dioxide shouldn't be considered a "pollutant," (c) regulating carbon dioxide will "kill" jobs. Who is making this argument? Well, it seems like Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) is fully on board, but Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is the one who introduced the so-called Free Industry Act and she has 96 co-sponsors who are all Republicans except Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK).

In terms of the points above, I think there are some obvious problems. (a) There is no legislation that is going to regulate emissions that is going to get through congress. That ship sailed last year, even before that commercial in which Joe Manchin literally shot the bill [YOUTUBE]. So the republican position seems to be, "let's do nothing." (b) The EPA went to court to determine whether CO2 is a pollutant, and it is. Case closed, literally. [WIKIPEDIA] (c) Just asserting that reducing carbon pollution will "kill" jobs does not make it true. One of the reasons that Barack Obama was so overwhelmingly elected was because he championed the idea of reducing our dependence on foreign oil by moving toward a renewable energy infrastructure, creating thousands of "green jobs." There are a number of arguments for moving in this direction to create jobs and move the USA into a leadership position in green technology that can be used (read: sold) to other countries [LINK]. I think this point is one where there could be actual debate, but there are so many reasons to move away from fossil fuels that they overshadow possible short-term economic implications. In the long-term, I think everyone agrees that fossil fuels are bad for everyone.

One last point. Just like in the case of health care, there is not enough support to move any of this legislation through the Senate, much less through the White House. It is an exercise in futility, a symbol of the frustration that the Republicans feel and the animosity they have toward environmental regulation. It is also a waste of time in Congress and a waste of taxpayer money. It will make headlines, though, and confuse the American public, who I'm pretty sure now believe that the healthcare bill has really been repealed.

Glory Be.

2011-01-20T10:36:00.000-08:00

Well, it might be, depends how the launch goes. Glory is the new NASA "A-Train" satellite that is supposed to be launched on 23 February [LINK]. The launch vehicle is a Taurus XL 3110; I know what you're thinking, but no this is not a Ford model. It is, however, a similar rocket to the one that delivered the Orbiting Carbon Observatory to the bottom of the ocean [LINK]. So let's hope for a little better luck with this one.

The satellite is really going to be doing two things once it is functional. First, it is going to measure the solar output. Put another way, it is going to measure how much sunshine reaches the top of the atmosphere. Second, it is going to use the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor (APS) to measure properties of suspended particles in the atmosphere (aerosol). According the the overview, "this instrument will measure the size, quantity, refractive index, and shape of aerosols."[NASA]. This isn't the first time aerosol will be observed from space, but it is the first time that detailed properties will be retrieved (as opposed to bulk or geometric properties, as from CALIPSO).

If you are thinking, but isn't the A-Train lifetime actually nearly over? Well, yes, it sure is getting there. Because of the lack of funded missions on the horizon, I have heard our present period referred to as the golden age of satellite observations. The A-Train has been up for a while, except that everything has been delayed. Glory was scheduled to launch in 2008, and here we are years later. The OCO did launch, but crashed; there is an OCO2 planned, but it will be some time before they can build, test, and launch the replacement. The French companion to the A-Train, PARASOL, is heading toward end of life (probably this year), and has had to leave the train because it doesn't have enough fuel to maintain synchronous observations. I think it is safe to say that the original picture of the A-Train never came to fruition, but there has been a lot of overlap which is providing a better view from space than ever could have been achieved with a single satellite.

An interesting aspect of this mission is that the APS is measuring parameters that I don't think have ever been measured from space. It is a passive instrument, which just means that it looks at the light coming up from Earth, and then analyzes that light. Often satellites just measure the brightness (intensity) of the light, and might do that for several frequencies. Glory will measure the other "Stokes parameters" to get information about the polarization of the light, and will do it in 9 different spectral bands. It is quite an impressive piece of optical equipment, even more so when you think it is in a box 705 km above the earth traveling at 24,000 kph or so. Basically a small section of the Earth is seen by the satellite, and the light goes through a refractive telescope and then something called a Wollaston prism before reaching the detectors. The prism separates two orthogonal linearly polarized beams, each beam then impacts a detector. The instrument also contains a motor that rotates the mirrors and allows views of the scene at multiple angles. My knowledge of optics to too rusty to be able to say anything useful about this, but it amazes me that such a complex, delicate instrument can be put into orbit.

But don't forget that Glory is also measuring the Total Solar Irradiance. This is a critical parameter as it represents the energy source for the climate system. There have been continuous space-based measurements of the sunshine for about 30 years. The good news is that the measurements show the variability in solar output and are consistent with theory about what the solar constant should be. The bad news is that different instruments have shown slightly different values (ranging from 360-370 W/m2). That doesn't sound too bad, but 10W/m2 of incoming sunlight makes a substantial difference in the global energy budget. Glory will hopefully provide the accuracy and stability needed to better constrain the average solar output.

Details of Glory can be found in an overview paper from BAMS [LINK], but keep in mind that this was written by the scientists. Despite being for the general atmospheric science community, they don't do a great job of explaining things in simple non-jargony language.

Keeping perspective

2011-01-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

MySpace is firing about half its employees, about 500 people, as it struggles to stay relevant [LINK]. Contrast with Wikipedia, which has about 50 employees total and has existed successfully for 10 years and is now one of the "most relevant" sites on the internet [LINK].

UN not putting mirrors in space

2010-11-30T09:26:00.000-08:00

An article in the Telegraph by Louise Gray carries the headline, "Cancun climate change summit: UN considers putting mirrors in space" [LINK]. That is a misleading headline, to put it mildly. What is really happening is that there's another "climate summit" happening now in Cancun, just like last year at Copenhagen. The difference with Cancun is that there aren't any expectations; for some reason people had high hopes for a deal at Copenhagen despite all the indications that it would not happen. This article, however, isn't really about the summit, it seems to be about the talk that Rajendra Pachauri (head of IPCC) gave at the summit. I haven't double checked, but it sounds like he gave an overview of the current IPCC endeavor, gearing up for the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), which will be released in 2014-ish. What's with the mirrors, though? Well, the AR5 is going to change structure a little bit, just like all the other reports have done. New chapters are going to be added, for example dealing with clouds and aerosols (coverage of clouds and aerosols has been spread across several chapters in the past). The mirrors are a geoengineering idea, and for the first time geoengineering is going to be dealt with explicitly in the IPCC assessment. There won't be a separate report about it, nor even a separate chapter. Like other topics that have emerged in previous reports, geoengineering will be sprinkled throughout the AR5. Specifically, there are sections in the carbon/biogeochemistry chapter (Ch. 6), cloud/aerosol chapter (Ch. 7), the near-term climate change chapter (Ch. 11) in Working Group 1 (physical science basis), plus part of Ch. 5 in WG3's report. This was all laid out already by the IPCC and is available on their web site [LINK].

This was all just to criticize the coverage by the Telegraph. The "UN" isn't considering geoengineering implementation, as the story might lead you to believe. The fact is that research, serious research, is now being done to understand the consequences of geoengineering ideas. Since the AR5 is assessment of climate change science, it is natural to include these geoengineering results. The IPCC is not going to recommend putting mirrors in space.

Yet.

Invitations to contribute chapters

2010-11-24T14:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I opened my email and found an invitation to contribute a chapter to a book on climate change. Huh? Yeah, reading through, it wasn't obviously random, they knew my name and my work, and they were asking my to write something related. Here's the email, with some info removed:

My name is MSc Iva Lipovic and I am contacting you regarding a new InTech book project under the working title "Climate Change", ISBN: 978-953-307-419-1.

This book will be published by InTech - an Open Access publisher covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine.

You are invited to participate in this book project based on your paper "XXXXX", your publishing history and the quality of your research. However, we are not asking you to republish your work, but we would like you to prepare a new paper on one of the topics this book project covers.

Publication of the book is scheduled for 26 July, 2011. It will be abstracted and indexed in major online repositories and search engines. The book will also be available online and you will receive a hard copy via express delivery service.

Why should you participate?
- "Climate Change" covers your area of research
- Free online availability increases your paper's impact
- Each InTech book chapter is downloaded approximately 1000 times per month
- More citations of your work (research findings indicate that papers published under the Open Access model are likely to enjoy increased citation rates)
- You keep the copyright to your work

NEXT STEP: For further details about this book project please visit

http://www.intechweb.org/XXXXXXXX

On this page you can find a detailed description of the book project, its scope and topics, details of the publishing process and a registration form.

For further details about InTech and Open Access please visit:
- About InTech: http://www.intechweb.org/XXXXXXXX
- About Open Access: http://www.intechweb.org/XXXXXXXX

If you need more information about this book project, InTech or Open Access, please don't hesitate to contact me.

On behalf of InTech President, Dr. Aleksandar Lazinica,

MSc Iva Lipovic
Publishing Process Manager
---
InTech
Open Access Publisher
e-mail: lipovic@intechweb.org
Web: http://www.intechweb.org/
Phone: +385 (51) 686 165
Fax: +385 (51) 686 166

Vienna Office
Corporate Address
Zieglergasse 14
1070 Vienna
Austria, European Union

Rijeka Office
Publishing, Marketing and Finance
Janeza Trdine 9
51000 Rijeka
Croatia
Visit us in our Operations Centre in Rijeka!

I've never heard of InTech or InTechWeb before, and I don't know Iva Lipovic, and I've never seen someone use MSc as a title before, so many red flags were waving. So to the interwebs! First stop is the website they sent me to, to check out this book, which seems to exist, and the web site is nice. I start to look at the InTech website, which is also nice. What doesn't look very good are the books themselves. I looked through the books on topics that I might know something about, in particular Climate Change and Variability [LINK]. I think I know one author in the entire book. The topics seems disjointed. The publisher does not appear to be InTech or InTechWeb, but Sciyo. Each chapter does seem to be like a real paper, but from some browsing, some of them seem to be low quality. There's a lack of editorial cohesion, in the sense that there are differences in formatting and style across the chapters. Something doesn't seem right. So now I start the Google search process.

The most useful information I've seen so far comes from an interview with Sciyo CEO
Aleksandar Lazinica by Richard Poynder [LINK]. From all appearances, this is a business model that takes advantage of the Open Access process, wherein research results are "open" to the public online, and authors pay a modest fee to the journal/publisher to cover costs. Open access is a legitimate publishing model, as evidenced by relatively high profile journals like PLoS One and ACP, but the future of this model is certainly far from settled. InTech, now called Sciyo, seems to be a mutation of the general Open Access publishing model. Instead of trying to attract high quality and high impact papers to specialized journals, they publish books for free online using "InTech" as the online publisher (there's no clear distinction between what is InTech and what is Sciyo, so I will use them interchangeably for the remainder of the post.) The catch is that they company appears to be centered on the idea of soliciting chapters from authors and charging them for publishing the chapters. The fee is not outrageous compared to standard journal fees, but this all starts to feel like a vanity press. This feeling seems confirmed by the description of the publication process on the InTech website, for example:

In comparison with scientific journals, the book format is different in scope as well as in length. Furthermore, the book publishing process has to follow strict publishing deadlines. In order to accommodate these differences, we have developed a strict review process without compromising the quality of our publications.
The Subject Editor’s screening and the Editor’s review are the conditions of acceptance for publication. Subject Editors are permanent members of our Editorial Board and, given their scientific expertise in a specific field of research, they are responsible for sorting abstracts by scope and topics. Book Editors review the abstracts ans select resourceful research papers with a bearing on developments in the field. They have overall responsibility for the content of the publication, therefore they pay particular attention to originality, research methods, key results, and language.
Only abstracts that meet all scientific requirements are accepted. However, definitive acceptance is based on the final chapter review. Following the submission of full chapters, the Book Editor is in charge of the final quality check and every effort is made to ensure that manuscripts are reviewed efficiently and to a high quality.

This is all just saying that the book editor is the only "review" of the content of the book, there is no external review of the science, and it is apparent that there is little or no copy editing. I can only conclude that Sciyo/InTech, in this current form, is a scam designed to publish as much as possible and collect publication fees along with whatever advertising revenue they can generate. Maybe this is recourse for those struggling to get a mediocre paper published without going through the hard work of making it acceptable to a mainstream journal? Isn't that what ArXiv.org is for?

I've been trying to follow up my initial searches, but with limited success. There's a little entry on an Economist blog [LINK], and some of those comments are interesting. I think there's a fair comparison between the Sciyo publishing model and both Who's Who and those poetry "contests" that have been around forever. As far as the scientific enterprise goes, the Sciyo models is problematic. Since it does not provide reasonable peer review, the reader is left to determine the quality of the research (with no baseline, as opposed to traditionally reviewed papers where there is at least some credibility to start with). Another blog has a similar story to tell [LINK], and again several interesting comments from people invited to contribute chapters and even people who have done it. Still, the only thing left to conclude is that this is a pay-to-publish model with no peer-review and no evidence of any actual benefit from having these non-reviewed publications on one's CV.

On the plus side though, this could be an interesting model for people who want to publish a book, but want to dispense with some of the overhead. An industrious editor or two could conceivably use the Sciyo system as a platform to get a collection of papers into book-form for a modest price. The downside of being non-reviewed would remain, but could be overcome by having some big names in a given field attached (and by the editor weeding out the sub-par contributions from the "invited" contributions). The result could be a useful resource for some small field, since the books really are free to download. I imagine a group of specialists getting together to basically write a free online textbook for grad students, for example, giving an overview of recent results. This is just daydreaming though, until Sciyo or some other OA publisher decides to get serious about such projects; the current model would probably demand many more papers in any given volume in order to collect more publication fees.

Mass Extinction #6

2010-11-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

One of these days I should go back and take a look at the details of the first 5 mass extinctions. The last one was 65 million years ago, and the evidence for it being caused by a large impactor is pretty solid. The other ones are less clear, as far as I know. The sixth one is currently underway, and the cause is pretty clear. Joe Romm has a nice post about it [LINK]. Whenever reading Romm, one must remember that he's always presenting the worst case scenario (and as if it is inevitable), but even when one scales his arguments by 50% or so, it's not a pleasant picture. If anyone wants to skip the commentary and read the source material, it is a special issue of Phil. Trans. [LINK].

Coherence

2010-11-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

Just saw a post from a month ago on Skeptical Science [LINK] that makes an important point about so-called climate skeptics (aka climate change deniers). That post makes the point that the "skeptical" arguments, when taken together, are incoherent. There are arguments that the globe is not warming, that there is warming but it is natural, that there is warming that is anthropogenic but isn't harmful, that there is anthropogenic and it could be harmful but it's too expensive to deal with it, etc etc. Worse yet, is that for every one of those arguments, there are numerous versions of it, especially in terms of whether there is warming or not and whether it is natural (if there is warming). If one were to sit down and write a book about the skeptical arguments, it would be very difficult because to be coherent, most of the arguments would have to be thrown out in favor of others. Many of them are mutually exclusive.

On the other hand, the science behind climate change is quite coherent. The basic science has hardly changed in decades, but over that time the observational and computational evidence has bolstered the basic ideas of climate science. Nuances have been found and explored, but the primary narrative thread of "global warming" is and has been consistent and coherent. This is the basis of the "consensus" counter-argument that thousands of peer-reviewed papers can't be wrong. Maybe using this coherence version is a more refined response to the various skeptical arguments. Making this point conveys the consensus idea without sounding like an argument from authority, and it weakens the skeptical side by pointing out their lack of agreement even among themselves.

The Whale Pump

2010-10-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

It's this kind of shit that makes oceanography so hard... whale shit, literally. A new study suggests (and does not prove) [LINK][PLoS], that whale poop might pump nitrogen up to the surface in some areas of the oceans, acting as a boost to biological productivity (and consequently fish population). If this "whale pump" were eventually shown to be important in the global nitrogen cycle, how would climate models cope with that information? Who's going to code the whale_poop.F90 module? Geez.

Coffee forests threatened by climate change impacts

2010-10-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

This is serious. At least superficially similar to the pine beetles infecting forests in the Rockies, there's a pest called the coffee berry borer beetle that is infecting coffee plants around the world [LINK]. As the climate is changing, these beetles have started to become common pests in regions where they have historically been virtually unknown, such as Ethiopia. This insect problem just makes the impacts on coffee production worse, as there are already some issues with temperature sensitivity in growing coffee. Frankly, this story completely freaks me out, as I rely on coffee for survival.

Blame Cheney

2010-10-19T09:49:00.000-07:00

Well, at least a recent NYTimes editorial does: LINK, worth a read. It says that Cheney-style denialism of anthropogenic climate change is being adopted by the current crop of GOP candidates. I'm not sure that I agree, but it depends on how one breaks down the denier strategies. From my current understanding of the candidates though, it seems like the so-called tea party candidates generally have a more naive/paranoid take on climate change than the "merchants of doubt" or "wedge strategy" that I'd ascribe to the Cheney folks. This goes for other issues as well, with these tea-party types really falling into the same category as the insane Alex Jones and similar paranoid conspiracists.

fancy words

2010-10-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, no peeking, is this a real or fake title for a paper (answer below):

Enhanced ocean temperature forecast skills through 3-D super-ensemble multi-model fusion

Yep, totally real, I just saw it in my GRL RSS feed. Here's the rest:

F. Lenartz, B. Mourre, A. Barth, J.-M. Beckers, L. Vandenbulcke and M. Rixen

An innovative multi-model fusion technique is proposed to improve short-term ocean temperature forecasts: the three-dimensional super-ensemble. In this method, a Kalman Filter is used to adjust three-dimensional model weights over a past learning period, allowing to give more importance to recent observations, and take into account spatially varying model skills. The predictive performance is evaluated against SST analyses, CTD casts and gliders tracks collected during the Ligurian Sea Cal/Val 2008 experiment. Statistical results not only show a very significant bias reduction of this multi-model forecast in comparison with the individual models, their ensemble mean and a single-weight-per-model version of the super-ensemble, but also the improvement of other pattern-related skills. In a 48-h forecast experiment, and with respect to the ensemble mean, surface and subsurface root-mean-square differences with observations are reduced by 57% and 35% respectively, making this new technique a suitable non-intrusive post-processing method for multi-model operational forecasting systems.

Republicans, 2010 edition

2010-10-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

Wow... another article/study that I missed somehow:

Republican hopefuls deny global warming

This is from the Guardian, reporting results from a Center for American Progress report. The punch line is that of the 48 Republican candidates for Senate, 47 of them deny climate change and/or oppose action on global warming. I don't even have any commentary on this, it simply speaks for itself.

Mann's op-ed in WaPo

2010-10-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

Somehow I missed Michael Mann's op-ed in the Washington Post last Friday [LINK]. It's short and to the point. He's worried about the upcoming elections, specifically about the possibility of the Republicans taking control of key congressional committees. Those committees could be headed by people who continue to cast doubt on the science behind climate change, and some have stated a desire to launch further investigations into climate science and climate scientists. Such investigations would further damage the public perception of climate change and the scientists who study it, and they would also cost the taxpayers many thousands of dollars and detract from meaningful congressional activities. Mann is also saying that climate scientists need to resist these attacks. He doesn't say how, but I think that publishing such an op-ed gives some insight to his personal strategy, and probably what he recommends to a wider group of scientists: engage the public and the press. This seems to me to have greater potential for good than, for example, directly engaging the persistent climate deniers (a la Judith Curry's approach over the past couple of years).

Can someone explain why West Virginia is still a state?

2010-10-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

See John Rudolf's NYTimes Blog post for a little additional backstory on this, though it is hardly even necessary.

The Simpson's & Banksy collaborate

2010-10-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

In the absence of actual content, I submit entertainment:

Banksy storyboarded the sequence. Via Laughing Squid via Daring Fireball.

What if we just stopped doing things for the next couple decades?

2010-09-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

That's essentially the though experiment discussed by Davis et al. in last week's Science [LINK]. They tried to estimate what climate change would occur if CO2-emitting devices that currently exist were used until their expected lifetime, at which point they are taken offline and non-emitting devices are installed. Basically, they say, okay, we've got a lot of coal-fired power plants (and gas or oil plants and also cars and trucks), so what if we just use them until they're not good (say ~35 years for power plants)? In the interim, no additional CO2-emitting devices are introduced. The conclusion is that, based on a vast set of rough approximations and an intermediate complexity climate model, the atmospheric CO2 could be kept below 430 ppm, keeping global warming at a "comfortable" 1.3 degrees or so.

From my reading of the paper, the important insight is that the most dangerous CO2 emissions -- those that will take us past 450ppm and then past 550ppm -- have not yet been built. This is a scary realization because if their estimates are close, then we know we aren't committed to "dangerous anthropogenic warming" yet, but we're about to be. We see what's coming, but won't do anything about it. We're like the proverbial lemmings heading over the cliff.

Now, realistically we might be in worse shape than the scenarios addressed in the paper, and the authors acknowledge that. In particular, since there are such strong economic/societal incentives to use the cheap (but dirty) fuel sources, it is impossible to achieve a scenario that is even remotely like the one simulated by Davis et al. At the end, they also touch on the China and India issues. These countries are in the midst of rapid industrialization, and they aren't going to turn back. And they are going to account for a large amount of the accumulated emissions over the next 50 years or more. The developing world, under the Davis et al. scenario, would be left behind, too, unless they employ an incredible leap-frog to using clean energy sources. In the end, this study the idealistic scenario, one small step past the most idealized scenario of 'what if we stop emitting CO2 completely today?' The lessons we learn directly are mostly about what we are committed to already. That makes these kinds of studies very policy relevant, but of course few policy makers seem to care. Indirectly, science also progresses, as these are the kinds of studies that help us understand the interactions between the societal decisions and the climate system, and can lead to more fundamental understanding of timescales in the perturbed climate system.

--------
Reference:
Steven J. Davis, Ken Caldeira, H. Damon Matthews
Emissions and Climate Change from Existing Energy Infrastructure
Science, Vol. 329 no. 5997 pp. 1330-1333
10 September 2010
DOI: 10.1126/science.1188566

Climategate hurt the reputation of climate science among TV meteorologists

2010-09-07T09:25:00.000-07:00

There's a forthcoming paper to appear in BAMS that reviews the results of a survey of credentialed TV meteorologists. The survey asks about their political beliefs, belief in anthropogenic global warming, and their response to the "climategate" scandal. The result seems to be that the coverage of the scandal was injurious to climate science in the eyes of conservative and moderate TV meteorologists. The main caveat to the paper is that the survey was conducted only about 2 months after the initial story broke, so well before all the involved climate scientists were exonerated. You can reach at least the abstract of the study at the AMS journals web site [LINK].

The opinion of TV meteorologists is important because they are one of the main links between science and the general American population. People tend to trust their TV personalities, who they see on a regular basis, especially compared to nebulous government (or non-government) entities. It has also been shown that a surprising number of broadcast meteorologists are "climate skeptics." This has been somewhat disconcerting for a lot of the climate science community, because these broadcasters have at least a limited ability to sway public opinion about climate change. Whether they decide to make the most of that ability or not is another issue, but the potential harm they could do (and are doing, at least in some cases, e.g., Chad Meyers of CNN) is a serious issue. I think we'll continue to hear about these kinds of studies over the next few years; I'm not sure there's a strategy for reaching out to the broadcasters in a meaningful way, but I'm sure that there are a few people spending time thinking about it. (Too bad they probably aren't science communication experts.)

What is the Higgs boson of climate research?

2010-08-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

That is essentially the question we ended the lunchtime meeting with today.

What is a big question that needs to be answered definitively by climate science? The idea is to provoke a community wide effort, funneling creativity, effort, and resources toward one big problem. The example in particle physics was the Higgs boson and the construction of the large hadron collider. Is there something equivalent in climate research?

Muir Russell report is in, findings no surprise

2010-07-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

The independent report on "climategate" lead by Sir Muir Russell is in, and they find no major problems. The UEA official response is posted [LINK], and the report is available [LINK]. There are a few news stories I've seen floating around [e.g.], but obviously not as many as when the email were stolen. The climate blogs are covering the issue, as expected [e.g.].

The questions now are:

(1) Is the "climategate" controversy over now?
(2) Will the deniers and/or skeptics accept the findings of the numerous investigations that resulted from emails being stolen from UEA's CRU?

The Stanford Study

2010-06-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

DeSmogBlog covers a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: [LINK]. The study finds that "climate skeptics" are not experts in climate science, while climate scientists are. No surprise, I guess, but a useful rhetorical tool.

Why make a point when you can just sound like you are?

2010-06-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

Just read an article on Reuters with the headline: Whale poo helps offset carbon footprint. Sometimes articles get stupid headlines because the person writing the article isn't in charge of making the headline, but this article actually says this in the text. It's real short, go read it. I doubt you'll be as angered by it as I am, but maybe you'll see how incredibly stupid it is.

The story reports on science, which says that sperm whales in the Southern Ocean defecate in the upper ocean where phytoplankton use the iron from the feces to grow. This in turn, allows the phytoplankton to "absorb" more carbon. The idea is just like iron fertilization.

The point that they article makes is that the cycle actually reduces atmospheric CO2 because the amount of carbon used by the phytoplankton is twice as much as is breathed out by the whales. Thus, Michael Perry (the reporter) concludes, the whales offset their carbon and reduce their carbon footprint.

First off, whales don't have feet, so they have no footprint.

Second, though, whales also don't use fossil fuels, so whales have no carbon footprint.

The science sounds interesting enough, and it seems like they are showing that this aspect of the carbon cycle is a net sink of atmospheric carbon. One caveat that isn't dealt with is that the phytoplankton don't necessarily use the carbon immediately die and sink, there is also a lot of recycling in the upper ocean. So this "carbon sequestration" (which just means that the phytoplankton die and sink to the deep ocean) might not be as strong as this news article would lead us to believe.

A larger point is that in the absence of humans, this would just be one of many small carbon sinks that would balance a lot of carbon sources, closing the carbon cycle. Unperturbed ecosystems, much less individual species, are (over long time scales) in steady-state. Imagine that humans disappear, so all the anthropogenic CO2 stays around, but no more is added. These whales(+phytoplankton) might continue to act as a net carbon sink, but over the long run, they aren't going to suck all the carbon out of the atmosphere. Okay, I'll stop belaboring this point.

What makes this an even better example of lazy science reporting is that the really interesting point about the whales'(+phytoplankton's) role in the carbon cycle is buried in the last sentence:

Lavery said that without whaling there may have been 120,000 sperm whales in the Southern Ocean and, according to her calculations, some 2 million tonnes of carbon may have been removed from the atmosphere each year through this process.

So what this says is that if the whale population was what it should be, the carbon source would be ten times larger (there are currently ~12,000 sperm whales in the Southern Ocean). So the interesting twist, in my opinion, isn't that the whales are "carbon negative," but really that whaling represents an increase in atmospheric CO2 by reducing a natural sink. This is just like (though much smaller than) land-use change, which removes carbon-absorbing ecosystems with cropland, removing a terrestrial sink. Does this raise the question of whether over-fishing represents such a decrease in a natural sink? So instead of going off half-cocked to do geoengineering through iron fertilization [e.g.], we should make a legitimate attempt to allow the natural ocean ecosystems to recover from the past couple of centuries of abuse.

UPDATE:
An AP story also has most of this, but better covers the whaling angle: [LINK]

Mike Wallace Symposium

2010-06-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

For those of you with interests in climate dynamics:
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/wallacesymposium/

Someday BibTeX's stranglehold will be broken

2010-06-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

But probably not by CrossTeX. I'd like to believe. Maybe if Donald Knuth starts using it...

UPDATE:
Also see biblatex and biber, if you're shopping for replacements.

A word about titles

2010-06-11T12:59:00.000-07:00

Most scientific papers have terrible titles. Sometimes they are descriptive, often too descriptive. It's nice to see short titles, especially when they don't sound pretentious. It's even better when the title is short and clever, and that hardly ever happens. It happens so rarely, that I hardly look at titles. Today I realized that a paper I've read probably 5 times over the years, has one of the best titles ever:

THE EPIC 2001 STRATOCUMULUS STUDY

I put it in all caps because that's how they did it in the print version [LINK].

I've heard so much about EPIC, which stands for Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate, that I never realized that the title of the paper is a play on words! I'm now pretty convinced that the field project was named EPIC just to have that title.

2010-06-11T09:20:00.001-07:00

Today's XKCD is funny, but I can't decide if it is extra funny because it has meteorology punchline, or if it actually kind of fails for meteorologists. If I actually went storm chasing, I'm sure I'd know immediately.

Latest GRACE data on Greenland ice mass

2010-05-28T12:59:00.001-07:00

As a companion to my concerns about polar amplification, see this blog post about Greenland's increasing mass deficit. I don't want to be an "alarmist," but I'm feeling somewhat alarmed by the OBSERVED changes around the Arctic.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=210

News from the Arctic, and it's bad

2010-05-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

I was just directed to a recent paper in Nature called "The central role of diminishing sea ice in recent Arctic temperature amplification" by Screen & Simmonds [LINK]. The title doesn't quite do justice to the paper. Maybe a better title would be something like, "Staring into the face of polar amplification and knowing fear." To summarize, they use a new "renalysis" dataset called ERA-Interim to show that there is detectable polar amplification over the past twenty years. Renalysis just means a model that is guided by observations, and this one is a more sophisticated one than the more popular ERA-40 or NCEP/NCAR ones. They look at the northern high latitudes and find substantial warming, mostly confined near the surface. The rate of warming is faster than the global mean, and that is the definition of polar amplification. The fact that it is mostly near the surface implicates near-surface processes, and that is actually the key point for arctic researchers because this has recently been a bone of contention. Some previous work suggested that the extra warming was distributed through the atmosphere, leading to the conclusion that changes in atmospheric circulation were most important for the warming. This new paper reaches the conclusion that the mechanism most responsible for the polar amplification is temperature-ice interactions, which many of us like to lump into "ice-albedo feedback." They consider other mechanisms, but the evidence points toward decreasing sea ice being strongly tied to the warming. An implication of the work is that positive feedbacks are already evident in observations, and positive feedbacks destabilizing to the system and can lead to abrupt changes. Insert the phrase "tipping point" somewhere into this discussion, since that is really what we're talking about. The question now is just how far the Arctic can be pushed before things get scary. It is an open question, but clearly needs to be answered soon!

Bacterial origin of clouds and rain

2010-05-24T21:49:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

Bacterial origin of clouds and rain

Ok, there is a lot to say and I don't have the time now to think about it in detail, but consider this a place holder. Basically there is a conjecture floating around that bacteria act as condensation nuclei for cloud formation [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25snow.html?partner=rss&emc=rss]. First I guess that we have to state that there is a plausible idea, and probably more than that. There have been some recent studies that found bacteria in cloud drops, and while I have been a little skeptical of these results, I guess it is time to look at them more seriously. Second, though, I think it is important to keep in mind that a lot of this work is being driven by the biological side of the story, without a lot of input from the cloud physics side. Whether the bacterial origin can explain much of global cloudiness is up for debate. For now, the argument for bacteria being very important for global climate is on the much weaker side. Deails to come soon.

Al Gore: The Crisis Comes Ashore

2010-05-10T10:11:00.001-07:00

Message from sender:

A cogent discussion linking the Gulf of Mexico oil spill with global warming by Al Gore. He makes a lot of critically important points, emphasizes the risk involved with burning fossil fuel, and calls for reforms that might help point our society in the right direction. Well written and scary. Definitely take the time to read through the whole essay, it'll probably be the best few minutes you spend all day.

Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com)

The Crisis Comes Ashore

Why the oil spill could change everything.

Al Gore
May 8, 2010 | 12:00 am

The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day—and there are over 1,400 of them.

Source URL: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-crisis-comes-ashore

Climate debate gets ugly as world moves to curb CO2

2010-05-10T08:11:00.001-07:00

A general overview of the current environment for climate scientists trying to communicate the science to the general public.

http://r.reuters.com/caw39j

Sent from my iPad

On prospects for energy/climate legislation

2010-05-07T13:25:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

On prospects for energy/climate legislation

I just read that Sen. Lindsey Graham is no longer going to support the climate+energy bill that he had been working on with Kerry and Lieberman. Apparently he now thinks that the political climate is not right [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/us/politics/08climate.html]. The article goes on to say that Kerry is willing to focus on the energy issues without explicitly dealing with climate, if that is what he can get passed. Graham says no, though, and insists that legislation has to put a price on carbon emissions.

Wha?

I can not understand this line of thinking. Graham has been one of the only conservative politicians willing to consider meaningful policy to mitigate climate change, but now he's pulling support because of politics? That strikes me as disingenuous, and cynical. To just roll over and ignore such an important issue because it doesn't fit the current political trends is equivalent to admitting that the addressing the problem is also just a politically motivated move too. Every year that goes by without better policy is a year lost, and damns our future to a fate of dealing with the egregious impacts of climate change.

It is notable also that both the recent coal mine explosion and the gulf coast oil spill are cited as shifting the political winds. Again, to me, these are both prime examples why the cost of fossil fuels is not really as cheap as is generally thought, and should boost motivation to move away from these polluting fuels to clean and safe ones.

Maybe attaching lasers to baby birds will make it rain

2010-05-03T17:42:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

Maybe attaching lasers to baby birds will make it rain

There appears to be a laser technology that can be fired into the atmosphere to induce cloud formation processes. [http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100502/full/news.2010.213.html?s=news_rss] A "few" challenges remain to take the step from producing some droplets in the path of the beam to producing measurable rainfall. Whether there are any unexpected consequences is an open question. One potential issue is what happens high up in the atmosphere? The way this works is that the laser ionizes oxygen and nitrogen, which then somehow act as condensation nuclei. What happens in the stratosphere when you create ions? I don't know the answer, but I do know that there is a lot of chemistry happening in the stratosphere. We might not to perturb that chemistry if we don't understand the consequences. See also ozone depletion.

A few issues regarding the oil accident in the Gulf

2010-05-03T12:12:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

A few issues regarding the oil accident in the Gulf

I have not been following the coverage of this gulf oil spill very carefully, so maybe I've missed something, but it seems like there are a few things that aren't being talked about very much. First, what is being publicized well is the potential magnitude of the situation, and it seems like people are pretty concerned about the ecological damage that the spill could wreak in the coming weeks. A totally separate issue is the energy resources aspect of the story. No, this one platform isn't going to adversely affect the price of oil, and maybe that is why not many outlets have picked up this thread yet. This accident is a great example of the fragility of our energy infrastructure. It may also serve as a learning experience about the real cost of fossil fuels. We go to great lengths to extract oil from the Earth's crust, subsidizing the industry that does the extracting to the tune of billions of dollars. The purpose is to supply "cheap" energy to our society. This accident shows that it is hard to get at this cheap oil these days, I mean, who else gets to build floating cities in the middle of the ocean besides oil companies (and maybe some middle eastern princes using money from oil)? It is enormously expensive to construct these platforms, run them, and transport to oil to the mainland for refining. Now we also see that an accident can send thousands of gallons of oil spewing into the ocean, and into the fragile coastal ecosystems nearby. How much is it going to cost to stop the leak? How much to contain the spill? How much to clean up the coast? Who is going to pay? If the USA federal government pays, is that just another of these bail outs that the "tea party" is so upset about? And how many smaller (or less public) spills happen every year?

What is the alternative? Well, I would just like to posit that leveling the playing field might lead to a more secure, reliable, and cleaner energy infrastructure. Take away the deep subsidies that the oil companies get. Make them responsible for their actions, including paying for spills and clean up. Remove the archaic restrictions facing those seeking to build new nuclear power plants. Reward companies that supply local, renewable energy. I think taking these steps would lead to a revolution in the American energy landscape.

These thoughts can be extended by also considering national security. Wouldn't it be nice to stop supporting foreign governments that are, well, not exactly pro-America? I'm looking at you saudi Arabia.

Anyway those are just some considerations that are rolling around my head.
______________________
blogged from my iPad

UPDATE: Just saw this amusing post by D. Roberts: LINK.

Iceland Eruption and risk to airplanes

2010-04-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

If you are looking for the best pictures of the ash plume flowing away from Iceland, then check out the NASA page [LINK].

Air traffic has been pretty badly impacted by the safety precautions, with a blanket ban on flights over much of northern Europe over the past five days. Things look to be getting back on track now, with the UK, France, and Germany opening their airspace starting today [LINK].

A troubling aspect of the ban on air traffic is a backlash against it [LINK]. Apparently there are a number of voices saying that grounding the flights is too cautions, including some airlines. These dissenters say that the precautions aren't based on this volcanic eruption, but on "theoretical" approach.

This line of thinking strikes a familiar chord, I think. It seems that there is a general pattern for science-based decisions, which tend toward being conservative, to be questioned by interested parties. Of course, in this case "interested parties" is a euphemism for people/corporations/industries/governments who have a financial or personal stake in the situation. The usual argument goes something like, these scientists are overly cautious (or alarmist) and the problem isn't that bad, and we should be making decisions based on what is really happening and not what some fancy computer model says.

Let us be quite honest in saying that the science-based findings will be conservative. Decision making based on science follows that. This is best summed up by the old phrase, "better safe than sorry." I think this is the right way to go. There are times when calculated risk is the right approach, but when the choice is between people perchance dying in plane crashes (and airlines making tons of money) or people NOT DYING but being stuck somewhere for a couple of days (and airlines losing some money), what is the right approach? Well, I am betting that there would certainly be some questions if planes started falling out of the sky. Better safe than sorry.

Another aspect of this story is that the decision-making process would certainly be better served with better real-time data. There's no doubt that if we had better in situ observations of the volcanic ash plume, then we would have a better idea of whether it would be safe for airplanes to fly. But guess what? There's really no money for these kinds of observations. Not in Europe and not in the USA. Sure, you can turn to the NASA satellites and get a lot of information. But the real-time information that can be gleaned from the satellites is limited, both because of the satellite coverage and technology, and also because of limited personnel who have the ability to analyze the data. I'm guessing a good amount of real science will come from this eruption, but it will take months (and years) to be done. Better observations could be collected by using balloons, mobile observing platforms, and aircraft. These all require the proverbial boots on the ground. There have to be scientists/technicians on the ready, with the equipment ready to go, a way to get to the site, and personnel to ingest the data and provide analysis to decision-makers. There's no doubt the capabilities exist, and there are scientists who would be willing to do the work (and excited to do it), but there aren't usually resources for that kind of science.

So for those who say that we shouldn't rely on models and statistics for decision-making, I think this is a false dichotomy. It is either that or nothing at this point, but the better way to go is to choose both models and statistics along with real-time observations. I'd also be willing to wager that many of those on that side of the debate would not want to put the money on the table for the kinds of observational networks and responses that they are calling for. In the end, isn't the existence of the risk enough to warrant a response? Isn't it better to be safe than sorry? Given the available resources and the collected knowledge about the risk, I can not see any other recourse.

US Federal Budget & Science

2010-04-18T10:27:00.000-07:00

A great graphical breakdown thanks to Jorge at PHD Comics: LINK

Joanne Simpson

2010-03-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

This news is now several weeks old, but somehow I forgot to mention it here. Joanne Simpson, a pioneer of tropical meteorology, and specifically a giant in the business of clouds, died 4 March 2010. There's a decent obituary via USA Today [LINK]. That obit also points out one of the stories that I've heard several times, which was that Simpson wanted to study meteorology, Rossby told her to study issues related to tropical clouds saying it would be "an excellent problem for a little girl to work on because it is not very important, and few people are interested in." There's a better piece, with a fantastic photo, on the NASA site [LINK]. In the day or so following her death, the tropical meteorology community was aflutter; the obituaries and news stories aren't exaggerating Simpson's importance to meteorology (and climate science more generally), she truly changed the way people think about the atmosphere and about clouds.

Streamlining your workflow

2010-03-19T13:20:00.000-07:00

Just watched this video showing how one guy keeps his references organized. It's included below, and worth watching. My own citation organization isn't as clean, but uses basically these same tools. (Read that as: this is how I should do it!)

I'll also note that I'm a bit conflicted about whether to use BibDesk to organize my files. The definite pros are that I'm already using it to organize my references and that it is free. I've been using Yep! to organize my documents, which don't always need to be in my bibtex library, and it is a pretty nice application. The downside is that it isn't free (I got it in one of those bundles). I think Yep! is very similar to another application called Papers that I know some people like a lot.

Impact in North America?

2010-03-15T13:32:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of talk about an extraterrestrial impact in North America about 11,000 years ago. The idea is that such an event could have contributed to the extinction of North America's megafauna, like giant ground sloths and wooly mammoths. A new paper in PNAS by Haynes et al [LINK] examine the evidence from several "Clovis" sites. These are sites where remains of the Clovis people [wikipedia] have been found. Their analysis finds no strong evidence of an extraterrestrial impactor, and especially damning to me is that they find no enhancement of Iridium, which is a fingerprint for impacts.

While they are careful to say that they haven't ruled out an impact, I think this is strong evidence that the other hypotheses (e.g., human hunting) are more likely to have led to the megafaunal extinction.

News from the paper of record

2010-03-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

Al Gore wrote an Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes on 27 February, and I think it is worth reading [LINK]. He covers a little science and a lot of the politics of global warming.

Meanwhile, there is going to be some kind of review of the IPCC reports [LINK]. Let's consider that this is a ~3000 page assessment of the totality of climate change. Over the past month, about three years since the release of the report, two errors have been discovered. One is mentioned in one paragraph of the second report, and misreports the time it will take for Himalayan glaciers to melt [cf. LINK]. Note that this isn't the official IPCC projection for melting, which is in the first report [cf. LINK]. The second error is that in another part of the second report, there's a statement that 55% of the Netherlands is below sea-level. This number was given to the IPCC by the Dutch government [LINK], who now decry it as an error [LINK]. Here, it should be stressed, this statement was not a scientific finding of the IPCC, the report was just using the Netherlands as an example of a country that is susceptible to sea-level rise; it is. I'm not sure why these two errors -- essentially typos -- have caused this firestorm of controversy, nor why that would warrant an independent committee to review the IPCC (which is itself a review). It is theatre of the absurd.

Also in the meantime, the Vermont legislature is working to close down a nuclear plant [LINK].

Vermont might regret this decision, as the EPA is beginning to go forward with a plan to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases [LINK]. As early as 2013 the largest emitters will be subject to regulation. This is later than regulation should happen, but it is good to see that even if the elected politicians won't act to do something, the EPA is going to be able to. Of course, as the article details, democrat congress members from coal-friendly states are trying to stop or slow this regulation. This is a surprisingly obvious example of politicians being beholden to big industry.

The deniers grasp at straws

2010-02-23T09:31:00.000-08:00

I just saw this great post on ClimateSafety [LINK], and had to direct others to it. Some conclusions about sea-level rise have been retracted, and it is being reported as another instance of 'those-wacky-climate-scientists' getting something wrong. Cries of alarmism. Seeds of doubt about global warming. Et cetera. Well, the retraction is because they upper limit the original conclusion stated (for sea level rise this century) is not actually the upper limit; the actual upper limit (until better constrained) is much higher.

A terrific example of terrible science reporting, and the desperation of climate change deniers.

"This is not your father's quark-gluon plasma."

2010-02-22T13:20:00.000-08:00

It's awesome when you actually do get to break the laws of physics: [NYTimes][via Kottke]

Arguments about how to smooth a timeseries

2010-02-21T13:55:00.000-08:00

When considering the arguments of climate change deniers, my preferred approach is give the benefit of the doubt first, try to understand what they are saying, and evaluate the science. This approach, of course, usually fails immediately because most of the denier arguments are not based on science at all. There are a few of them, though, that claim that science is on their side. One of these guys is Willie Soon, an astrophysicist who has been claiming that the sun causes climate change for the last two decades [LINK].

Background on Willie Soon

The deniers love Soon because he's a real scientist. He's been able to actually publish climate-related papers pretty consistently, too, which gives him a lot of credibility (compared to other prominent deniers). I've been looking into Soon's publications, just for fun, and have noticed a few important aspects of his publication record. I haven't actually found a CV for Soon, but he does have a URL that has a directory called myownPapers-d, which I assume is his archive. This assumption might be wrong, since (1) there are quite a few non-reviewed papers in there (magazine articles and denier-think-tank "reports") and (2) there is at least one paper not credited to Soon by to Richard Mackey. So one thing that is a red flag is that most of the climate papers that Soon has published are in a journal called "Climate Research [LINK]." Why is this of note? Well, because this journal has pretty much been blackballed by the actual climate research community because of the number of dodgy papers that have gotten through "peer review" and published in CR. Now, a lot of the controversy about that journal is related to Soon himself [cf.], so maybe we should give him a pass there. (side note: the typography of CR is pretty nice, even if the content isn't) Well, except that he's also publishing in the notorious Energy & Environment. And the unknown Physical Geography. And New Astronomy. These are not what one would call mainstream science journals. But, in browsing that directory, I also found two papers in GRL, which is a mainstream journal. The second trend in these papers that I noticed was a proclivity to use 'wavelet' analysis; I'm not sure what to make of this, as it is a reasonable approach to time series analysis, but it is more complicated than other methods which are just as valid.

Soon et al 2004 versus Mann 2004

One of the GRL papers that Soon has is from 2004 and has the title: "Estimation and representation of long-term (>40 year) trends of Northern-Hemisphere-gridded surface temperature: A note of caution." [DOI] I am not going to try to simplify their analysis, since it is dead simple to understand. They take a global average temperature record (HadCRUT) and apply three kinds of smoothing using 40-year windows/intervals (running average, Hanning-window, and wavelet). They get different answers for the different methods, and then consider the difference of their estimates compared to other published estimates. They can't match the temperature anomaly at the end of the IPCC TAR at the end of the record (nor the Mann papers), so they try a few ad hoc adjustments to their filtering. They conclude -- and I am not misinterpreting or misrepresenting them -- that since they can't get the same answer then the IPCC must have misreported their methods and that the magnitude of global warming is very sensitive to the method of smoothing.

These results seemed preposterous to me. First, there is nothing novel or interesting about the results, which is a prerequisite to publish in GRL. They show nothing other than that they can't duplicate other people's graphs, which could be interesting if they had done a robust analysis and shown that the previous work had errors. Their point that different smoothing methods gives different answers is very well known, and trivial.

Later that year, Michael Mann published a paper in GRL that is basically a repudiation of the Soon et al work. The paper is titled: "On smoothing potentially non-stationary climate time series." It is more technical than the Soon et al paper, but also easier to understand. The point is to show that there are objective measures for smoothing techniques. He shows one such measure, which was used in his previous work, and shows that it captures the non-smoothed times eries better than the other methods (including the one used in Soon et al 2004). The conclusion is bolstered by comparing to a frequency-domain approach; the two methods agree well. Another example is given, applying the same smoothing methods to a different time series (a measure of the cold season North Atlantic Oscillation). In this case, the method that is best for the northern hemisphere temperature anomaly is the worst match. The point is that this time series does not appear to be as non-stationary (i.e. not such a strong trend at the end of the time series) as the other series, and that an objective measure of the smoothing gives a simple way to evaluate whether the smoothing is appropriate.

The Mann paper makes some interesting points about how to smooth time series that could be non-stationary. More important than that, it explicitly shows that an objective criteria needs to be applied to make any judgements about these kinds of analyses, which essentially blows the Soon paper out of the water because their argument was essentially, 'different methods give different answers, so there's no way to know what is right.' Finally, from reading these two papers (which I encourage you to do), we see the basic difference between doing science and trying blindly to poke holes into science. While the Soon et al paper tries to evoke scientific doubt, it ultimately fails because the methods are sloppy, no hypothesis is actually tested, the conclusions are not robust, and the points they try to make are clearly exaggerated. The Mann paper takes a more objective look at the data and methods, and teaches us something interesting about time series analysis and the nature of two important climatic time series.

If this is the quality of the Soon et al literature when they can get it into mainstream journals, I have to wonder how bad the papers that are hidden away in obscure journals really are.

Further craziness about Jonathan Leake

2010-02-16T09:23:00.001-08:00

Stunningly bad journalism seems to be this guy's modus operandi: [LINK]

The Donald

2010-02-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

Essentially a validation of many of the things I posted yesterday:

Donald Trump: 'With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore.'
[LINK]

The source: The Daily Mail

an overuse of the '-gate' suffix

2010-02-15T16:33:00.000-08:00

There have been a lot of 'gates' flying around, on both sides of the climate "debate." By "debate," of course, I mean the public relations war being waged by a few people who've decided that the climate either (1) isn't changing, (2) is changing but not because of people, or (3) maybe is changing and maybe because of people, but it doesn't matter because (a) it won't affect anything, (b) will actually be beneficial, or (c) is too expensive to stop. These few people appear to me to be waging this war against everyone else, except the people who believe in any of the previous anti-climate-change ideologies, even when they are mutually exclusive beliefs. This inconsistency among the climate change deniers is obvious, but has not been a useful point in convincing people of their delirium. These few people are the leading edge of a wedge, and right behind that leading edge are opportunistic types who are willing to jump on a bandwagon and blindly follow, either for personal gain or to support their own ideological inclinations.

So let's start with what some are still calling "climategate," despite the fact that it should be more accurately be called "stolen-email-gate" or something (some of the climate-related blogosphere has taken to calling it "swifthack" in analogy to the swift-boat smear of the 2004 USA presidential campaign). The most significant update is that Michael Mann of Penn State has been exonerated by a University investigation. One aspect of the investigation will continue, but it seems pretty likely that will be cleared up soon too [LINK1, LINK2]. Another bit of news related to this is that Phil Jones talked a bit with Nature, defending his own science, but really there isn't much new information in the piece [LINK]. Finally, at UEA, the investigation is starting to get going, but without Phil Campbell, who left the panel because of possible impartiality [LINK].

There have suddenly been a bunch of other "scandals" in climate science. But not really. They seem to revolve around some errors in the IPCC reports. There's a paragraph in the "impacts" report that incorrectly reports the rate of shrinkage of Himalayan glaciers. There's also some confusion about a statement about how much of the Netherlands is below sea-level. The important thing to realize here is that these are tiny details in a sea of information in the IPCC reports, and none of the conclusions about climate change rely on these statements.

These errors in the IPCC have been reported extensively in mainstream media. This has lead some to look at the sources of the reports, which seem to be coming disproportionately from two reporters: Jonathan Leake and David Rose. These reporters are reported to have essentially fabricated and/or distorted information for their stories. There is extensive coverage of the details on Deltoid and RealClimate [see also LINK]. Depending on which side you're reading, these are called "journalismgate," "leakegate," "rosegate," "Africagate," "seagate," etc. And it is all utterly asinine. The reporting in the Times (Leake) and Daily Mail (Rose) is undeniably bad and irresponsible. If these news outlets were interested in the credibility and integrity of their reporting, they would sack both of these writers, apologize, and have real science journalists set the record straight. That won't happen because both are in the business of publishing salacious stories of dubious quality.

There's a trickle down effect. Just sitting here watching CNN, I saw weatherman Chad Myers [LINK] citing the Times Online story in reference to whether there is anthropogenic global warming! As if this one, already discredited, report could show that thousands of scientists and tens of thousands of research papers have all been wrong. Oops, you got us, we didn't know any journalists would be interested. And you'll notice from the link that Myers has a history of being a climate change denier. In the span of two minutes, I heard him make at least three statements doubting the science of global warming. This hurts because most Americans' closest source of science news is their TV meteorologist [LINK], and a surprising number of TV weatherpeople have doubts about the science of global warming [LINK].

When I sat down to write this post, I was infuriated; irate that climate science is continually skewed and contorted to twist people's ideas of what is happening in the world. I thought about writing angry emails, or pleading with prominent science communicators to help expose the irresponsible reporting and illuminate the science and evidence behind global warming. By the time I pasted in that last link, I had convinced myself that science and reason have lost another battle. The scientists are losing the PR war, outgunned, outmanned, and outspent by agents of denial. News abounds showing the increasingly obvious role of climate change in the world's ecosystems and geopolitics, yet more and more Americans (and Europeans) doubt even that the world is warming, and all the while plans to mitigate global warming are being stalled by India and China (and others). Not to be a downer, but I now just wonder how long it will take before the evidence is so overwhelming that it can't be denied? Do we have to see the collapse of major ice sheets, or only a truly ice-free Arctic in summer, or maybe the inevitable 2-degree Celsius global warming? What is the evidence that people really need to see? As a personal matter, I'm having that feeling that many scientists have in these situations, which could be summed up: "I'll just stay out of all this and keep doing my work."

UEA CRU update

2010-01-28T13:06:00.000-08:00

Well, in really the first blow against the University of East Anglia in the "climate-gate" scandal, something called the Information Commissioner's Office (www.ico.gov.uk) has apparently found that the university did not handle Freedom Of Information Act requests properly [LINK1 LINK2]. I should mention that LINK1 is pretty slanted in their coverage, and not very clear about what is going on, while LINK2 is mostly concerned with the FOI stuff and not so much in this particular case. I can not find anything on the ICO website, nor on the UEA site to corroborate the news reports. In any case, there will be no prosecutions because of the time between the violation and the complaint. The previous CRU statements say they did handle the requests appropriately, so this finding should elicit some response, I'd think.

As a reminder, the requests for information started flooding the CRU scientists when climate change denier websites started provoking their readers to use the FOI to get the CRU temperature data. The product that the CRU produces is a melding of temperature observations from many stations around the world, using (somewhat) sophisticated mathematical tools to blend the records and make a reasonable estimate of global temperature. As far as I can tell, the FOI requests seek the raw data that CRU uses as input for their processing. As has been covered by numerous blogs and news sites, most of this data is publicly available from the sources institutions. The CRU does not "make" this data, and does not "own" this data, so it would really be the wrong place to request that data; it isn't their job to provide someone else's raw data to the general public. (That requires resources that the CRU doesn't have.) Some of the data is obtained by special agreements with the source institutions, such as national weather services, and the CRU is not allowed to reproduce or disseminate that data. This has been made pretty clear, both to the denier/skeptic community as well as the scientific community. I do not understand why some people continue to declare that the CRU has been hiding data.

There are some of those stolen emails that seem pretty damning, though. Based on what I have seen (and I have intentionally avoided reading the stolen emails), I am not surprised that the ICO would find some faults with the handling of some FOI requests. That said, however, I think there is a reasonable counter-argument, and that is that the CRU was flooded with inappropriate FOI requests and did not have resources to handle all of them. I don't know what the law is in the UK, but I would think that it would be easy to show that most of these requests were unreasonable and would have been denied anyway. This doesn't excuse the CRU, they should have done better, but I'm convinced that these requests were not in good faith, and they were motivated by a desire to bury the CRU scientists in bureaucratic paperwork and distract them from their jobs.

One final side note. Are these stolen emails even admissible evidence? They are stolen property. Would their authenticity have to be verified independently? My hunch is that if the CRU/UEA denied that these emails were authentic, they could avoid some of this difficulty. However, I also guess that the CRU has implicitly stated that the emails are real, and maybe that makes them legitimate evidence. This seems like a thorny issue, and it'd be interesting to hear someone who knows about these issues discuss the case.

Will Obama talk about climate legislation in the SotU?

2010-01-27T05:00:00.000-08:00

The NYTimes suggests he should [LINK].

I'd like to see the Prez get up there and shame the Congress for acting like a bunch of whiny babies. With a "filibuster-proof" 60 votes, what did the Senate get passed? Not health-care reform. Not energy reform. The Judicial Branch seems to have taken matters into their own (conservative) hands with campaign finance. Now, with the filibuster on the table, what will get done? Is the Congress paralyzed from the neck up without at least 60 votes on every bill? Ridiculous. When the Dems were threatening the majority Republicans with filibustering, Trent Lott schooled them by essentially threatening to change the way the Senate works through a risky parliamentary procedure [LINK]. Should the Dems turn to this "nuclear option" now, even though they cried foul when the shoe was on the other foot? There's certainly a lot more murmuring about the filibuster being unconstitutional now than I remember then. I do think, though, that having the legislative process completely derailed by the minority party is counter to the values upon which the republic is founded. The filibuster is a bad thing when used for bad reasons. The other side of the coin is that requiring more than a simple majority enforces a conservative (in the real sense of the word) evolution of law, since the most radical ideas will not be passed.

The unfortunate reality is that mitigating climate change (or reforming health-care) requires radical action, which we see is unlikely to come from the Legislative Branch. Problems like this have been dealt with in the past by circumventing the Congress. A perfect, but horrible, example is the development and subsequent deployment of nuclear weapons, which was not approved by the Congress [LINK]. Perhaps in a more transparent regulatory way, the EPA can be used to impose emissions limits [LINK]. This would be a less ideal choice, since the EPA probably wouldn't be allowed to impose a cap-and-trade system (which has been successful in reducing acid rain, LINK). Instead the EPA will impose rules, with some kind of punishment system for polluters. This "all-stick-no-carrot" approach might work, but it'd be better economically to encourage better use of resources and promote innovation and competition [VIDEO].

A stupid article in LATimes

2010-01-26T09:43:00.000-08:00

I don't have anything else to really say than the title would suggest. Here's an article in the LATimes that basically says nothing at all about global warming, but does almost report on the results of a recent gallup survey [LINK]. It's an opinion piece, so I suppose that lowers expectations, but the journalism involved is piss poor to use a colloquialism. The author is Meghan Daum, who I've never heard of, but is apparently on staff at LAT. I hope I never have to read a word written by her again, it wasted several minutes of my life.

No they di'n't!

2010-01-21T15:47:00.000-08:00

Turncoats? Yes, I guess so. And doing so on a hopeless measure shows they mean it.

3 Democrat Senators support global warming [via Yahoo! via AP]

*Groan* Here's more about this ridiculous assault on science and reason: Murkowski

You can take the monkey out of the jungle, ...

2010-01-20T10:42:00.001-08:00

brilliant:

Disappearing physicist?

2010-01-19T09:03:00.001-08:00

I have never until today heard about Ettore Majorana, an Italian physicist who was a contemporary of Fermi. A new book about Majorana's life and mysterious disappearance is outright panned in Nature (last week, LINK) by Frank Close. While I certainly won't read the book under review, I can't help but be fascinated by this bizarre story, and may have to follow up with some additional reading.

The Dolphin Situation

2010-01-13T10:20:00.000-08:00

It seems that dolphins may be "non-human persons," and deserves special rights above other animals [LINK]. Maybe we can just have the dolphins figure out a way to suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere and avoid making their own underwater world an acid bath. Go Dolphins!

Those Damned Tree Huggers

2010-01-12T16:08:00.000-08:00

A thought just crossed my mind that I thought I'd share. I think that anytime you read/hear the term "tree hugger," you can immediately parse the statements of the source as biased and probably wrong. This is probably true even in those rare instances when the term is used endearingly or positively. Has this always been true? Maybe this is totally obvious. I'm going to keep my eye out for exceptions.

Coolest thing I've seen all day

2010-01-11T14:25:00.000-08:00

If you can, watch in full screen with HD for full effect:

A related comic version: http://xkcd.com/482/

Greenland probably seeing record highs

2010-01-07T20:43:00.000-08:00

Stop crying about being cold. Have you seed the temperature anomalies over northern Canada and Greenland? Crazy, 30 degrees above normal. Warmer in Greenland than Florida. See Jeff Masters' blog here.

Democracy? In California?

2010-01-04T21:05:00.001-08:00

For those in or interested in California, there's an interesting bit of news happening. Linguist George Lakoff is trying to amend the California state constitution. There's a NYTimes story about the effort [LINK]. The beauty of the potential proposition is that it is 14 words, a single sentence. It will insert into the constitution:

All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be

determined by a majority vote.

That's it. The goal is to allow the majority party to actually make decisions to govern the state, which if you've been following hasn't happened in quite some time.

I'm not sure this would be enough, but at least it would be a start, so I wish Lakoff good luck. A signature gathering campaign is ongoing, as is fundraising. For more information, please visit http://ca.restoremajorityrule.com/ and/or http://www.californiansfordemocracy.com/

Welcome to 2010

2010-01-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

Happy new year to everyone. Here's hoping 2010 sees more progress toward mitigating climate change.

Here's a quick, 2-cent review of our current standing:

1. The University of New South Wales has released a summary of climate research, basically as a interim assessment report between AR4 and AR5. The findings say that emissions are growing rapidly, temperature is increasing faster than many estimates, sea-level is rising twice as fast as the AR4 predictions, and both land and sea ice are in rapid decline. [news, orig]

2. The COP-15 didn't go so well. Some might say it was a disaster [LINK], while others are cautiously optimistic about the last-minute actions of Barrack Obama [LINK], but I think the truth is that no one knows how to interpret the outcomes yet [LINK, LINK]. That said, the meeting did not lead to a binding agreement, which means that it failed to achieve the real goal of the process. We're really left with the thought, "well, next year in Mexico City."

3. The Arctic sea ice formation season is here, and it looks like this winter is very close to the the record low sea ice extent. [LINK]

4. The year 2009 was one of the warmest ever (5th according to the Met Office), and 2010 is likely to break the record (and the arguments) for number 1. [LINK]

5. Many people still don't understand the difference between weather and climate, and climate change deniers continue to get their voices heard despite rational discussions of evidence [EXAMPLE, also see this counterpoint].

Climate Scoreboard

2009-12-17T09:10:00.000-08:00

A neat way to follow COP15 from ClimateInteractive.org.

Go read Eric Steig's & Kevin Wood's analysis at RC

2009-12-15T10:09:00.000-08:00

A great comparison of raw weather station data with the CRU temperature reconstruction. Pretty much puts to bed any allegations that the CRU data is fraudulent.

LINK

Friday means a comic (2)

2009-12-11T09:24:00.000-08:00

Well, I've been working on a follow-up to the CRU email fiasco, including a cameo by Sarah Palin, but it isn't done. Instead, please enjoy a terrific PhD comic:

Climate Index

2009-12-09T18:00:00.000-08:00

I just saw this article about a new climate-change index [LINK]. I'm not sure whether I agree with how they are defining the index, but I do totally support the existence of these kinds of indices. If one (or a few) can gain popularity, I think they will be a great way to communicate the degree of climate change the Earth is experiencing. One pitfall of these indices is that you want to measure the climate change, and not things that are not part of the changing climate. For example, this index includes atmospheric CO2 concentration, but this is the forcing on the system, not the response of the system. So imagine we stop CO2 emissions, then the CO2 levels in the atmosphere will stay about the same or decrease, but that doesn't mean the climate won't be changing still (cf. Soloman et al. 2009). On the other hand, arctic sea-ice extent, which is also included in this new index, has potentially large natural variability. I think this comes out when we consider the rapid sea-ice melt season of 2007, which was largely due to a high pressure system sitting in one place for a while (e.g., Zhang et al. 2008). Depending on how they implement the index then, the arctic sea-ice term might be diminishing the overall climate change "factor" because the short-term trend is for sea-ice recovery, but the long-term trend remains and shows decreasing summer sea-ice extent. I'm sure they thought about these issues when designing the index, but I have a feeling we're going to see a bunch of these indices come and go over the next few years. Eventually a few will get picked up and become standard.

Updates on the climategate fallout

2009-12-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

Over the course of the last week, I've been begrudgingly following the CRU stolen email story. It seems that the story is finally starting to dwindle, though it is still more prominent than I would have expected. Also, the consequences for those involved are still to be seen.

There have been quite a few notable responses to the story. Ben Santer has sent around an open letter, mostly defending Phil Jones and the work at CRU [link]. The IPCC has issued an official statement defending the science supporting the Assessment reports [link]. The American Geophysical Union also defended the science and condemned the theft of private email [LINK]. The American Meteorological Society has also reaffirmed its official position on climate change, though without coming to the defense of the scientists that have been "scandalized" [LINK]. The UK "science community" has also stepped up to defend climate science [LINK].

There has been some fun coverage from the blogosphere too, and I couldn't resist including the following video, which sums things up pretty neatly.
.

Of course, this doesn't seem to pacify Sarah Palin, who has a ridiculous Op-Ed in the Washington Post [LINK], where George Will has also been spouting the now standard nonsense [LINK]. Thankfully, Alan Leshner was able to get a response to Palin's crazy into the WaPo [LINK]. Peter Sinclair has produced one of the best Climate Crock of the Week videos to date covering some of this stuff:

Besides the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia's CRU, there are scattered reports of other suspicious activity. The most blatant and most credible of these is that some people tried to gain access (in person) to computers at the Canadian Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis at the University of Victoria [LINK]. Apparently these people identified themselves as technicians initially, but left the premises when confronted by an employee. How weird is that? This may or may not be related to some reported break-ins to a U. Victoria professor's office [LINK]. What in the world is going on here?

All this is now going on at the same time as the big Copenhagen meeting. Again, no coincidence, I'm convinced. In a positive sign, 56 newspapers last week ran an editorial in support of the meeting, and urged the participants to come to some agreement, essentially to save the world [copy of editorial at RealClimate.org]. But the impact of this manufactured controversy has been felt in Copenhagen, not only by demanding attention of legitimate policymakers [e.g.], but has been prominently featured in the denialist activities taking place [e.g.]. It should also be noted that Saudi Arabia has latched on to the misinterpretation of these stolen emails in order to go backward in their stance on climate change [LINK].

Ok, fine, the emails

2009-12-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

I wanted to avoid it, I wanted to ignore it, I wanted it to blow over and be forgotten. Unfortunately, these leaked emails continue to cause headaches for the whole climate science community.

The background, which I'm sure you know, is that the Climatic Research Unit (usually abbreviated CRU) at the University of East Anglia had a cyber-security issue in which a server was compromised and data stolen. This happened on 17 November. The stolen data was published to a Russian server and made accessible to the internet; at the same time, someone tried to post the emails to RealClimate.org [see posts: 1, 2, 3]. I first became aware of the attack and theft on 23 November through an email warning that colleagues at my institution were involved in email exchanges that had been illegally published (and assuring us that our web servers were not compromised). If I hadn't been busy with other things, though, I'd have seen it sooner, as people like Frank Bi were already blogging important details by 20 November (read his follow ups as well). The news was also hitting the mainstream media (e.g., NYTimes.com, Wired.com) by 2o November.

The hoopla is not, however, that a prominent university was hacked and personal data stolen, but rather that the contents of these personal emails was combed through by climate change deniers who then announced that these were proof of some sort of conspiracy. The links above, and those contained therein along with web searches for terms like "climategate" will provide plenty of examples of the emails that are so "provocative," analysis from media, skeptics, and climate scientists.

The media has failed in many cases to properly parse this story. Setting much of the story straight, though, is Elizabeth May [deSmogBlog]. She read all the emails, and summarizes over a decade of exchanges in a well-written post. She's not really a journalist though, and isn't completely impartial, for whatever impartialiality is worth. This week's editorial in Nature also comes to the defense of the science and the scientists, and is worth a look [link, plus additional Nature coverage: 1, 2]. It is worth noting that there seems to be a lot of almost-finger-pointing at Steve McIntyre, who runs ClimateAudit and has been needling people for data for a while; case in point, a Nature news piece about a deluge of requests for CRU's raw data in August [link]. This doesn't directly implicate McIntyre in the break-in, but it should start sounding alarm bells, and, frankly, I would be surprised if the investigators don't eventually talk to him.

The consequences are serious. As of 3 December, the director of CRU, Dr. Phil Jones, has stepped down (at least temporarily) [Wunderground]. An investigation at UEA is pending, headed by Sir Muir Russell [UEA]. That is the investigation that will see if the CRU has been handling itself properly. There is also an ongoing police investigation into the break-in and theft, though there doesn't seem to be a lot of information about that. In the USA, Senator James Inhofe (a notorious climate change denier) has called for a senate investigation [link]. Of course, this whole ordeal is also fodder for the fringe of climate change deniers and the media who court them [e.g.]. All of this also is happening in the lead-up to next week's UN meeting in Copenhagen, and I can not believe that the timing is coincidental.

The irony, as far as I can tell so far, is that the denialists are yelling that these emails are evidence for some kind of vast conspiracy [e.g.], meanwhile all the evidence that I can see suggests that the situation is exactly reversed. There is a history of these deniers using PR tactics to manufacture doubt about human-caused global warming [cf.], there is a recent account of information requests to the CRU which seem to be connected to McIntyre and ClimateAudit, and suddenly there is the break-in and theft, with the published file name FOIA.zip (freedom of information act), and the first people to find these emails on the internet seem to be the denialist bloggers. It's not an airtight case, but this is much more connection than I've seen an any right-wing conspiracy theory lately.

Trends in the central tropical Pacific

2009-11-17T08:59:00.000-08:00

Well, since we've been thinking about the tropical Pacific, here's a bit more to ponder. There is an ongoing discussion in the literature about whether global warming, particularly across the tropical Pacific, will look more like El Nino or La Nina. One way this has tended to shake out is that the atmospheric scientists seem to favor El Nino conditions as the world warms, but oceanographers tend to lean toward La Nina [Eos]. The truth of the matter is that in the past couple of years, this has been shown to be a false analogy; it seems like there is evidence that the atmospheric circulation is changing to look somewhat more like El Nino, but changes in the ocean act against some of these atmospheric effects, looking more like La Nina. In fact, as these arguments mature, it seems like the dynamics involved are not really related to the dynamics that control El Nino and La Nina cycles [Vecchi].

The apparent controversy, though, is too good not to glom onto, and many authors have used it as a construct to present results. This is fine except that it clouds the emerging picture of climate change in the tropical Pacific.

A new paper by Nurhati et al (2009) includes this El Nino/La Nina kind of argument to highlight new isotopic measurements of coral reefs in the central Pacific. The geochemical techniques are applied to coral at three central Pacific islands, and show monthly-resolved temperature and salinity records over the 20th Century. The bottom line seems to be that there are statistically significant linear trends toward fresher, warmer water around these islands. The authors say that these trends are more consistent with more El Nino-like conditions in the central Pacific, are similar to other estimates of temperature changes, and is in line with modeling studies showing decreased upwelling of deep water in a warming world. Only in the final paragraph do the authors finally reveal that this El Nino stuff shouldn't be taken too seriously,

... this analogy likely over-simplifies the complexity of tropical Pacific anthropogenic climate change. Indeed, any of a number of large-scale climate changes that are likely to occur in a greenhouse world might overwhelm or at the very least fundamentally reshape the expected impacts of an “El Niño-like” trend. ... In this regard, the prominent warming and freshening trends uncovered in the coral reconstructions undoubtedly represent a combination of dynamics that are fundamentally different than those associated with the ENSO phenomenon.

The delay tactics worked: no Copenhagen agreement in December

2009-11-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise, but it is now official: Copenhagen will not be the venue for a binding international agreement to address climate change [NYTimes.com]. As we've seen over the past months, the negotiations that should have set up the terms of such an agreement have systematically unravelled. To make matters worse, the USA has squandered its opportunity to be a leader in this arena by failing to pass climate and energy legislation. This despite the Democratic Party being in control of both houses of Congress and the presidency.

As expected, a few people -- notably the administration -- are trying to put a more positive spin on this story [LATimes.com]. Some say the Copenhagen meeting could still lay the groundwork for a real agreement next year, others suggest that getting some "commitment" from India and China might help the Senate pass climate legislation in the next few months.

My commentary is unnecessary, but just to be blunt: this is an inexcusable state of affairs. While the other parties have similarly failed to step up and and become meaningful leaders, my own feeling is that the USA has lost its chance to make a significant move to curtail global warming in the coming decade. These delays are damning humanity and uncountable species to suffer through the effects of dangerous anthropogenic climate change.

The tropical ocean: more than just hurricanes

2009-11-14T21:12:00.001-08:00

The Climate Prediction Center recently released a new El Nino Advisor [link]. The advisory says essentially that all indicators suggest that the current El Nino is still strengthening, and is expected to last through the winter and maybe into spring. It's likely, based on past El Nino events, that the largest anomalies of the tropical sea-surface temperature will happen some time in the next couple of months.

Recall that we knew this El Nino was forming last spring and summer, and that's why the Atlantic hurricane season was forecast to be relatively inactive. As we've seen, that forecast was pretty successful; we've only gotten up to "Ida" in the tropical storm names. The presence of El Nino conditions in the tropical Pacific ocean has effects that reach beyond hurricanes though, as this paragraph from the advisory lists:

Expected El Niño impacts during November 2009-January 2010 include enhanced precipitation over the central tropical Pacific Ocean and a continuation of drier-than-average conditions over Indonesia. For the contiguous United States, potential impacts include above-average precipitation for Florida, central and eastern Texas, and California, with below-average precipitation for parts of the Pacific Northwest. Above-average temperatures and below-average snowfall is most likely for the Northern Rockies, Northern Plains, and Upper Midwest, while below-average temperatures are expected for the southeastern states.

So those of you up north and in Seattle can probably expect relatively mild winters, which might not be bad news! Meanwhile, California is expected to have a wetter than normal year, which so far looks to be true. Some of these correlations aren't very robust, so you can't really count on them, but so far they seem to be holding.

It is also worth noting that the effects of the tropical oceans are not limited to this kind of El Nino action. There's a flip-side to the story, too, which has come to be called La Nina. This is the cold phase of the oscillation, when the eastern tropical pacific is a bit cooler than normal. An interesting side effect of La Nina conditions in the tropical Pacific ocean is that precipitation tends to decrease over the central part of the USA, especially Texas, but extending north into the upper midwest and also west through the southwest and California. The Pacific Northwest and much of the southeast experience extra precipitation. The crazy thing is that it isn't just a seasonal effect, but can be clearly seen at longer time scales. A new paper by McCrary and Randall (2009, link) examines this relationship in observations and climate models, confirming what I've just said on timescales of 6 years and longer. Much of the paper deals with comparing three leading climate models with the observed 20th Century droughts in the USA. While they find that the models do capture some aspects/statistics of long-term drought in the central USA, none of the models seems to convincingly capture the relationships between tropical ocean variability and precipitation seen in the observations.

Of course, the fact that the models struggle to establish these connections between the tropics and the extratropics does not come as a great surprise. A key challenge for these comprehensive climate models is to produce realistic patterns and cycles of El Nino and La Nina. One of the models in McCrary & Randall (2009) is the Community Climate System Model (v3.0), which is known to have an overly regular cycle of El Ninos, with a period of about 2 years. Along with this regular cycle, the observed connections with remote regions is underrepresented. (link) So when looking for longer-term variations, it's unlikely for CCSM to have realistic patterns. In this case, the CCSM's long-term droughts don't seem to be very connected to the tropical oceans at all. The other models have different problems, but do notably better at establishing at least some relationship between cool tropical Pacific surface temperatures and increased likelihood of drought conditions in the central USA.

A key point to emerge from this analysis is that the climate models only marginally represent long-term droughts, and without very convincing physical processes compared to the observations. This means that these models are not necessarily proper tools for studying the frequency of droughts in the future. This hasn't stopped people from doing just that, as the authors note. So if you come across stories about changes in drought, pay close attention to the methods used, and keep a skeptical view of the findings. In the meantime, climate models are now being developed that have much improved representations of El Nino and La Nina (see link above, e.g.), so the next generation of climate models may have more credible (and interesting) droughts. And if you're an optimist, they might even teach us something about how the future of the USA's grain belt will look, and if you are very optimistic, maybe they won't point toward perpetual Dust Bowl conditions in the future.

NCAR YouTube Channel

2009-11-12T07:42:00.000-08:00

Well, I just learned that NCAR has a whole bunch of videos posted on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ncarucar. These are videos about the research done at NCAR (and UCAR), basically aimed at the general public. Non-experts will probably gain some insight into climate science, while those of us in the field can look for people we know. Enjoy.

A terrible video you have to watch

2009-11-06T11:05:00.001-08:00

Everything that this woman says is completely wrong. I'm amazed that someone can be so wrong in such a short span of time.

Did you watch it?

In case you were thinking, well, maybe some of that makes some sense, let me point out a potential "flaw" in her "argument."

She is making a claim that homeopathy is all about energy. As a refresher, remember that homeopathic treatments use some kind of natural agent to cure symptoms, but the application is a very dilute solution. So if onion is the agent, and I think it sometimes is in homeopathy, the homeopath will take an onion, grind it up and add it to water. But then they take that water, divide it into two, and add it to more water, and so on and so on. Eventually the solution is so dilute that there is no meaningful amount of onion in the water, so the homeopathic treatment is just water. I'm not exaggerating, either, go look it up. Anyway, the woman in the video tries to make sense of this because mass is energy, so in some sense she is saying that they are putting the energy of the onion into the water, so it doesn't matter if there is mass in there. She justifies this because the mass term in E = m*c^2 is very small. In fact, she says you can ignore the m because it is infinitesimal. Wah? Yes, she says this several times, including in her introduction, saying that all the matter in the universe could fit into a bowling ball. I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, but I do know how to multiply.

Let's take the speed of light, c. Roughly, c is 300-million meters per second, c = 3*10^8 m/s. That's a big number. Now square it, c*c = 9*10^16 m^s/s2, and that is a really big number. No wonder that homeopath thinks we can just neglect the tiny little amount of matter in an onion, since this number is so big. Let's say we have a really large onion of 1 kg. Now how much energy does that mass turn into, well, 1kg*9*10^16 m^2/s^2 = 9*10^16 kgm^2/s^2, which is just 9*10^16 Joules, the SI unit of energy. Now, that sounds like a lot of energy, so it is fine to divide it into a lot of water, right, and spread that energetic wealth. So the homepath puts the pulverized onion into the water, then splits the water into two and adds water, and so on and so on. Eventually you find that the mass of onion in each drop of water is negligible, or infinitesimal, just like the homeopath said. So let's take a very tiny number for the mass, say 1 millionth of the original mass of the onion, so that much energy is actually E = 1kg/10000009*10^16 m^2/s^2 = 90 billion Joules. Still looks like a big number, but remember 1kg divided into a million pieces is still far more than infinitesimal, what about 1 billionth of a kilogram, well that'd be 90 million Joules, and 1 thousandth of a billionth of a kilogram would be 90,000 Joules, and a kilogram divided by the number of atoms in a mole (= 6.02*10^23) produces about 1.5*10^-7 Joules. Ah, there seems to be a trend. If you keep reducing the mass, the energy drops. Even way before you have a single atom per drop of water, you have a negligible amount of energy, despite the constancy of the speed of light.

Just to belabor the point, the homeopath is missing a fact of basic arithmetic. Multiplying a large number by a small number doesn't mean you get the large number. Spreading the onion's energy over a very large amount of water doesn't imbue the water with magical curative properties. You end up with water, plain and simple.

And I haven't even mentioned an essential physical error in her interpretation, namely that squishing an onion does not release the energy of the onion. You apply energy to the onion to break the bonds that hold it together. This does not convert mass to energy; for all practical purposes mass is conserved. Only when we deal with relativity does the Einstein's mass-energy equivalence come into play.

Homeopathy is bunk. At best it is a placebo, and at worst it convinces people to forego actual treatment, fork over their money to some snake-oil salesperson and not get better.

Updates on Kerry-Boxer in committee

2009-11-04T08:32:00.000-08:00

Well, as expected, the republicans left the committee meeting yesterday, so no quorum could be established. There have been a lot of analogies thrown around, but I actually like Arlen Specter's statement the best: "We have a practice in the world's greatest deliberative body of disagreeing without being disagreeable. But you can't disagree with an empty chair." [link] Democrats appealed to the republicans to come to the meeting, but eventually the room emptied, and a stark scene emerged. Senator Barbara Boxer, alone in the room, waiting for republicans. From that WaPo story:

"I guess at this point I'm going to just sit here and wait till they show up," she said, consulting her watch. The hearing had begun three hours earlier.
"I will just sit here for a bit," she said later. "Talk among yourselves." Boxer checked her BlackBerry and rearranged her papers. C-SPAN filmed the empty seats. "Chairman Boxer (D-CA) is waiting for Republican members to come to this meeting," the network flashed on screen. After 15 minutes of silence, the lone senator in the room tapped the gavel. "We're going to stand in recess," she said.

On the plus side, the executive branch is strongly supporting legislation [link], which could buoy the process in some important ways. Mostly, I think that if Obama et al. can keep pushing on the Congress to get a bill passed, it will prevent the bill from dying in committee; something will get pushed through. We can only hope it happens soon, before Copenhagen if possible, since that would give the USA some bargaining power and a least a modicum of credibility.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, the Europeans are going through negotiations in the lead up to next month's meeting in Copenhagen [link]. It sounds like the Environment ministers are ready to take serious action,

Last week Europe toughened much of its stance further. Environment minsters agreed to slash the EU’s long-term emission reduction targets from 80 percent to 95 percent by 2050, if a deal is reached at Copenhagen, while retaining its relatively ambitious mid-term goal of a 20 percent cut by 2020, rising to 30 percent if other countries promise similar measures (both cuts use 1990 emissions levels as a baseline).

And they also resolved that aviation should cut its emissions by 10 percent, and shipping by 20 percent, by 2020, using 2005 levels as the baseline (both sectors have been exempted from the Kyoto Protocol). And the European ministers said they had decided on vigorous measures to tackle deforestation.

Unfortunately, they Environment ministers don't have power to negotiate the financial side of the deal, and that is where things are stalling out. If the EU can't get their own agreements settled, it is likely that the EU won't come into the Copenhagen meeting with any real power, which is likely to derail the whole proceeding.

Delay tactics

2009-11-02T20:42:00.000-08:00

Well, while I've been neglecting the blog, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has been arguing over the Kerry-Boxer Climate legislation. From what I can tell [example link], the Republican committee members are trying to derail the legislative process. Essentially, they are threatening to just not go to their meeting, which would nominally mean that no rewriting or votes on the bill would be allowed since there wouldn't be a quorum present. Senator Boxer is saying that she hopes the R's will show up, but if they don't she might go ahead with a "different interpretation" of the rules. It is worth noting that the ranking R in this committee is James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a notorious climate denier of the worst ilk.

Another day, another survey

2009-10-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

And today we have less positive numbers. This is a newer poll of 1500 Americans, conducted by Abt/SRBI Inc. for the Pew Research Center [LINK]. This poll is a repeat of earlier ones focused on global warming (the science and the policy). The interesting part is that the Pew Center is reporting on the trends over the past few years, showing that there has been a strong decrease in the belief that global warming is supported by solid evidence and a decrease in the belief that global warming is a very serious problem. The numbers seem to suggest that this signal is mostly carried by the 365 Republicans and the 543 Independents in the survey, but even the 473 Democrats show a decline.

The news is not all bad, and not all contradictory to the older survey I reported on yesterday [LINK]. Despite the decline, the survey shows that 57% of respondent think there is solid evidence the earth is warming, and 65% think it is somewhat or very serious. That's a strong majority. Things get a bit dicier when you consider that only 36% believe there is solid evidence the earth is warming because of human activity; this is a ridiculously low number, and Jim Hoggan thinks this has a lot to do with the well-funded anti-environment, pro-coal lobby [LINK]. The other positive result is that of the participants 50% favor limits on carbon emissions, even if it means higher energy prices. Even more people, 56% of the participants, say that the USA should join other countries in global initiatives to address global warming.

Okay.... but wait a minute. Let me just state that I'm skeptical of the robustness of these results. To be fair, there is a plus or minus 3% on all of these, according to the methodology [LINK]. But even with that in mind, I have to wonder how 50% of the responses favor limiting emissions to address global warming and 56% want global action while only 35% of people think global warming is a "very serious" problem and only 36% think there is "solid evidence" of human-caused global warming. Maybe people are just really pragmatic about environmental policy, so they favor erring on the side of action because of the large risk. I'd support this, as it seems the most rational response (in the absence of "solid" evidence (of which there actually is a mountain)), as discussed in this video. I'm pretty sure people are not nearly that pragmatic nor rational, so I have to wonder whether there is something else happening. I don't really have an alternate hypothesis. One would be a biased sample, but the methodology does seem pretty good (but I'm no expert). A second alternative is that Jim Hoggan is right, but this just seems a little to conspiratorial. Another possibility is that in the past year or so Americans have gotten a little bit edgy because the economy went nuts, and now they are a bit shaken up, not knowing what to think about things like global warming. If this were the case, we'd see a shift in the numbers toward the more moderate or the "don't know" position. However, looking at the responses from April 2008 and October of 2009, the percent of people who think the earth is warming (at all) went from 71% to 57%, and the number of people who think there is not warming went from 21% to 33%. That'd pretty much mean people have changed their minds. However, the question is stated as:

From what you've read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, or not?

So we are restricted to "solid" evidence, so we can not reject my moderation hypothesis.

In this case, I think that we have to take these results with the figurative grain of salt. What would be more informative is to see the results showing whether people have shifted to what they might perceive as the more moderate position. Is there "solid", "compelling", "preliminary", "unconvincing", or no evidence at all that the earth is warming? My guess is that what has really happened is that people, in a haze of fear of the economy collapsing, have shifted to the more conservative position, adopting a more "wait and see" attitude. However, some of their previous thinking remains, and they are taking the more pragmatic position on action because of this. In fact, as a bit of evidence that this is the case, we can look at the follow up question:

Do you believe that the earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity, such as burning fossil fuels, or mostly because of natural patterns in the earth's environment?

The "human activity" answer changed from 47% to 36%, but the "natural patterns" stayed about steady, going from 18% to 16%. If Hoggan's conspiracy were the correct mechanism for the change in opinion, then more people would be jumping on the "natural patterns" bandwagon, since that is a very prevalent denial argument. Instead, I would suggest people are just feeling more skeptical about issues that they don't know much about (e.g., the economy, global warming, etc). Either way, it will be interesting to watch how public opinion changes in the coming months. And the fact that still half of Americans are in favor of action supports my repeated call for the current government to actually do something.

How many Americans don't believe in climate change, or don't care?

2009-10-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

There was a survey conducted in the Fall of 2008 that asked detailed questions about climate-related issues. The study was conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. The report is available for download [LINK], or you can read a summary at the Center for American Progress [LINK]. You should definitely start with the summary, and take a look at those graphs. The bottom line is that report breaks the American population into 6 groups based on their beliefs about climate change. Notable about this analysis is that it finds 51% of Americans are quite concerned about global warming, and are prepared to take actions (by voting and spending). That is terrific, as it shows that the message has finally penetrated to mainstream America. Even better, only 7% are "dismissive" of global warming, meaning they don't believe it is even happening. This makes all the deniers on the internet seem even more out of touch and fanatical. There are another 11% that are "doubtful," which is a mix of people who don't know what to believe or think it might be a "natural cycle." So, even if we take all 18% on this side, they only balance the "alarmed" on the other side. Of course, taken a different way, it means almost 1 in 5 Americans still don't think global warming is important.

I guess there are a couple of important things to take away from these results. First, that we can now confidently say that "most Americans" believe global warming is real, caused by humans, and should be addressed. Next, there are at least 18% of Americans that are willing to take strong action to be part of addressing global warming, and in fact, 34% think large-scale action should be taken by the USA government even if it costs a lot. These are the people who will engage in "consumer activism," meaning they will reward or punish companies based on their environmental stands. This means that companies that are eco-friendly should (and already are in many cases) say so, while companies that are not will try to obfuscate their views. In terms of activism, environmental groups should point out companies that are both ends of the spectrum to promote this consumer activism, as knowing which companies are where is a big impediment to actually acting.

I guess the last big point that strikes me is that these results are not in line with the USA government's actions in climate change and energy policy. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the government has done little of substance to address global warming. The current administration talks pretty good talk, but the congress has decided to sit on their hands and worry about getting re-elected. The big Copenhagen meeting is coming up, and it isn't likely that a binding resolution will come out of that. So the American people now have to make their voices heard on these issues. Since most Americans now believe that action should be taken, and since the basic science supports this majority opinion, and emerging science suggests impacts are already being felt in sensitive ecosystems and climate regimes, it seems no good can come from putting off actual action. When I say actual action, I mean (1) consumer activism as mentioned above, (2) political activism via voting for candidates who pledge to take action on climate policy, (3) political activism via pressuring congress to pass climate and energy policy, and (3) domestic legislation and international agreements with binding targets to reduce carbon emissions and punish those countries that do not participate or do not comply with the agreements.

Maybe a way to start is by visiting the up-and-comer in climate activism, 350.org. Sign a petition or send your congressperson a message. Go support climate change policy by participating in the International Day of Action on 24 October. As much as it doesn't sound like it, one of the most useful ways to help galvanize meaningful action is to donate money to organizations that interface more directly with lawmakers.... sigh, yes, these are "lobbyists." But there are good organizations out there that are really fighting for rational policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Examples are the Union of Concerned Scientists, 350.org, the Environmental Defense Fund, or the Save Our Environment Action Center (which is a confederation of other groups).

Water vapor movie from NOAA

2009-10-20T21:31:00.000-07:00

Just was directed to a mesmerizing animation of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season via Jeff Masters. You definitely should go and watch. They have stitched together all the GOES water vapor imagery over a nice topographic background. You get to just watch the large-scale flow swirling and pulsing over the course of several months. Amazing. This is the kind of thing that has inspirational power... for casual passers-by, school kids, and even those of us actively in the field. I can watch this all day.

Watching Wave

2009-10-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

I've been passively listening to some of the reaction to Google Wave lately. Yesterday (via Daring Fireball), I found a blog post by Daniel Tenner that explains how Google Wave will "replace" email for corporate environments [LINK]. I think Tenner is presenting a good case that the people currently testing Wave aren't really the audience that will most benefit from such a product. Where I think he's going slightly wrong is by using the "corporate" environment (which is what DF says too) as the model. Wave is collaboration software, and the way it is presented by Tenner, it really does sound like it could replace email to a large extent for projects and collaboration. It doesn't replace email for correspondence, and it doesn't replace Facebook or Twitter for "status updates" or "microblogging," and it doesn't replace your favorite IM software. But for people who use any of these tools to actually do work, and especially for people who switch between them (or want to be able to switch between them) for a project, Wave sounds like it will be amazing. The essential idea seems to be that you can start a "wave" as a virtual conversation, including having documents and files and thing, and you can add or drop people from the wave at any time (and they get to see everything, not just what is "happening" now), and Wave makes sense for seamless transitions from email to IM type communication. That is, you upload a document, and everyone has it and can read it and edit it, and everyone can see all versions of it. No more attachments. You can walk away from your computer and come back and get caught up with what is going on, or you can be sitting at your computer going back and forth with others in the wave.

Maybe my vision of Wave makes it better than it can possibly be. But I got excited by Tenner's post. I think this would be an amazing way to do collaborative science. Tenner presents things as problems with email and why Wave fixes it, and for every one I though, yes, that is a problem with email! In science there are many collaborations that could benefit by replacing the normal email with a more efficient communication stream. Examples are reports of all kinds, like when people have to report on the status of a project to the funding agency, or when a dispersed team is writing a paper about a project and different people are writing different sections. Another example might just be a grad student working on her/his thesis, their advisor could observe progress and give feedback using Wave, and postdocs, researchers, or committee members could be brought into the wave as needed for further advice and feedback. It could also work for planning projects, working on code, or even doing homework. Wave seems to be a way to clean up your communication stream, bringing different pieces all into one "wave" seems like a better way to get things done. But we'll see.

Woo-hoo for me

2009-10-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well, I took the Pew Research Center's science knowledge quiz, and as you can see, I did quite well. Go take the quiz yourself: LINK.

Paul Hudson's climate change denier pornography

2009-10-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

On BBC.co.uk a story by Paul Hudson appeared with the title "What happened to global warming?" [LINK]. My opinion of this article is that it is intentionally provocative and misleading, ignoring science for titillation. Hudson takes a mock impartial tone, giving much more credence to climate change deniers than is warranted, and inflating arguments that have been addressed by actual scientists over many years. Additionally he conflates completely different points about the variability of the climate system for the sole purpose of nudging readers toward the unsubstantiated view that global warming has stopped. Let's go through a few of these points in more detail.

Slower warming does not equal cooling

Point number one is essentially the lead of the story: that global average temperature has cooled since 1998. This is now more than misinformation, it has entered the realm of the canard. The source of Hudson's statement is a table at the Met Office website [Hudson's blog, the table]. Amazingly, if you go to the page with that table and actually read the text on the page, it states clearly that global warming has not stopped:

The record-breaking temperatures in 1998 occurred after three decades of warming, starting in the 1970s. These decades saw an increase in global average temperature of about 0.45 °C. After 1998, however, warming slowed significantly — trends over the past 10 years show only a 0.07 °C increase in global average temperature. Although this is only a small increase, it indicates that there has been no global cooling over this period. In fact, over the past decade, most years have remained much closer to the record global average temperature reached in 1998 than to temperatures before the 1970s. All the years from 2000 to 2008 have been in the top 14 warmest years on record.

So the Met Office make sure to inform their visitors that global warming is ongoing. Not only that, but there are other datasets of global average temperature that are slightly different than the Met Office numbers. For example, the National Climatic Data Center's global temperature anomaly data set [LINK], which shows 2003 as slightly warmer than 1998 (though in a statistical tie). This issue has also been thoroughly reviewed at RealClimate [LINK, see links from there].

It is not the sun

The second point Hudson makes is to suggest that something must be going on to explain the "cooling" (that doesn't exist), and his primary argument is that it must be the sun. He appeals to authority in Piers Corbyn (Weatheraction) who "claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.
He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month." Um, so Hudson is suggesting that somebody is about to announce that everything we know about climate change is mistaken, but provides no details? And there's no paper to reference? And Corbyn is going to a "conference in London" to announce the findings? Amazingly, Hudson has omitted that this conference is being organized by WeatherAction.com, which is Corbyn's company. Curious, don't you think. Reminds me of the Orbo in a lot of ways. By the looks of it, Corbyn is suggesting some kind of solar wind hypothesis, which makes no sense whatsoever. These ideas, I'm guessing, are rooted in the galactic cosmic ray hypothesis, which hasn't shown much promise [cf, RC].

PDO: refuge of the deniers

Then Hudson's article goes for the oceans. Wait, what do the oceans have to do with solar charged particles? Nothing. Yes, Hudson simply changes course in the middle of his article, which must be some kind of logical fallacy. Anyway, Hudson starts writing about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, stating that is the most important cyclical warming-cooling mode in the oceans. This is an oversell: the PDO is a big signal, but it is not cyclical, and it is not necessarily the most important mode of variability for the climate. In fact, there is an ongoing debate about what the PDO even is; a current paper supports the view that the PDO is really just a ghost of the ENSO signal, and not a mode of variability unto itself [LINK]. Hudson falls right into the trap, quoting Don Easterbrook:

Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."

It should be noted that Don Easterbrook is a retired professor of geology, and has become a climate change denier as a hobby over the past decade or more. It seems quite unlikely that Easterbrook's prediction of cooling for the next 30 years will be right, no matter what phase the PDO is in.

Hudson does then state that people at the Met Office stand by the science and their modeling effort.

A climate crock continues

Then Hudson says, I assume without appreciating the irony,

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Of course, Hudson has to say in the next paragraphs that this is not actually what Latif thinks, and that he isn't changing his long held belief that humans are causing the observed climate change. Amazingly, this is also a topic of recent debunking, this time at the hands of Peter Sinclair [LINK].

To end the piece, Hudson says it with the elegance it deserves:

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

Yes, I guess it really is hotting up.

Military green

2009-10-14T10:45:00.000-07:00

I just read an excerpt from Amanda Little's book Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—Our Ride to the Renewable Future on Grist [LINK]. The excerpt is about the Department of Defense's efforts to be more "green," meaning energy efficient in this case. I had wondered a little about the fuel usage of the military, and specifically about how the military uses fuel and meets its energy needs in Iraq, but I hadn't really read much about it until now. Not to spoil the read, which I definitely recommend, but the most shocking numbers are probably that the cost of fuel (diesel or gas) increases by an order of magnitude when the cost of transport and security for field delivery is included, and another order of magnitude when it is delivered aerially. Also, just the sheer amount of fuel used by the DoD is amazing... billions of dollars annually? Crazy! So this excerpt is really about the efforts to improve energy efficiency, increase security, and decrease costs by the DoD. While I'm not a big proponent of many of the DoD's efforts, it is exciting to hear that it is looking pretty seriously at alternative energy technology. Many of our favorite things have come from such R&D efforts (e.g., the internet), so maybe these efforts will accelerate some technologies and get them into commercial use faster than could otherwise be expected.