American Meteorological Society Statement on Climate Chnage

Posting two days in a row!?!?

I just wanted to draw attention to the updated statement on climate change from the American Meteorological Society. Here's the link: [LINK]. It is just a 7 page statement that goes through the following sections:

• Background 
•  How is climate changing? 
•  Why is climate changing? 
•  How can climate change be projected into the future? 
•  How is the climate expected to change in the future? 
•  Final remarks

There is nothing surprising in the statement. The AMS supports the scientific consensus that the Earth's surface and lower atmosphere are warming due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation. Overall, it is well-written and straight-forward, and I recommend taking a look at it no matter what your background is. My guess is that everyone will get the gist, and if you've got any background in climate science then you'll pick up on some of the details. I'd quibble over some of the word choices here and there, but the substance is fine. Maybe they over emphasize climate models in the future section, because many of the points they make there are not based solely on model projections, but also observations and basic theory. Anyway, go take a look.

What's the difference between the Maunder Minimum and the late twentieth century?

Somehow I became distracted by an online "discussion" in which someone was confused about the connections between solar variability and climate variability. The result of that distraction was that I made a plot, shown here, that compares the Maunder Minimum (1645 - 1715 CE) to the last 60ish years (1945-present). Below is the text I wrote to present this figure, along with data sources and citations. 

Let's compare the Maunder Minimum with the second half of the 20th Century. Since there isn't really that much data, we are limited to a few quantities. I have chosen two, one is the total solar irradiance (TSI), which is the energy received by the Earth from the sun (per time per area, expressed in Watts per square meter). This data comes from a reconstruction by Wang et al. (2005) as modified by Kopp & Lean (2011), and was obtained at the link below. This data is very similar to other reconstructions (Lean et al. 2004, 2000, 1995), but is basically shifted downward by about 5 W/m2 as a recalibration. The updated data covers 1610 to 2011. The second quantity we can investigate is the northern hemisphere temperature anomaly (degrees C). There are not direct observations (of sufficient quality) reaching back to the Maunder Minimum, so we will use the temperature reconstruction of Moberg et al. (2005). That data actually stops at 1979, but we can visually extend the data to near present day by including the observed northern hemisphere temperature anomaly from Smith et al. (2008) which reaches to January 2012. For the Smith et al. data, I chose to use the land plus ocean values. There is an issue with baselines, the Moberg et al. data are anomalies with respect to the 1961-1990 average temperature while the Smith et al. data are with respect to the 1901-2000 average temperature (which is cooler than the shorter, later average). I have not adjusted for this offset, and the result is that the pink dots in the figure should actually all be slightly upward compared to the red line. The agreement between the overlapping interval is quite good, but would be a little worse if the shift were included. There are other reconstructions available, and I have no reason to choose Moberg's over the others except that it is perhaps the most recent. The TSI and temperature reconstruction data are both annual, and I've made sure the data are centered within each year. The Smith et al. data are monthly (which is why I need to center the annual records). 

Finally, just for completeness, I define the Maunder Minimum using the definition on the Wikipedia page, which is 1645 to 1715. This is in line with the TSI data. For the more recent climate, I chose to simply shift 300 years into the future. So the plots cover 1945 to 2015, but the data sets stop at whatever their last times are. The Maunder Minimum times and data are shown in blue, while the 20th/21st Century data are shown in red and pink with the time labeled along the top of each panel. 

To try to head off any misinterpretation of this plot, let me simply state what it shows. During the Maunder Minimum, there was reduced solar activity and the average northern hemisphere temperature was about 0.6 C cooler than the the 1961-1990 average value. During the period covering 1945 to the 1960s/1970s, the northern hemisphere temperatures were relatively flat and near their 20th Century average. Over those years, the sun was active, showing "normal" sunspot and TSI 11-year cycles. From some time in the 1970s until present, shown in the pink circles, the northern hemisphere average temperature shows a clear upward trend. All the monthly average values after 1996 are warmer than the 20th Century average. During this rapid and clear warming, the solar activity was typical, and quite similar to the 1945-1975 period, showing clear quasi-periodic activity. There appears to be little connection between variation in solar activity and variation in northern hemisphere average temperature during the late 20th Century. 

REFERENCES

Kopp & Lean (Geophysical Research Letters, 38, L01706, doi:10.1029/2010GL045777, 2011)

Lean, J.. 2004: Solar Irradiance Reconstruction. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology. Data Contribution Series # 2004-035. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.

Lean, J. 2000: Evolution of the Sun's Spectral Irradiance Since the Maunder Minimum. Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 27, No. 16, pp. 2425-2428, Aug. 15, 2000. 

Lean, J., J. Beer, and R. Bradley. 1995: Reconstruction of Solar Irradiance Since 1610: Implications for Climate Change. Geophysical Research Letters, v.22, No. 23, pp 3195-3198, December 1, 1995.

Moberg, A., D.M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N.M. Datsenko and W. Karlén. 2005: Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low-and high-resolution proxy data. Nature, Vol. 433, No. 7026, pp. 613-617, 10 February 2005. 

Wang, Lean, and Sheeley (The Astrophysical Journal, 625:522-538, 2005 May 20)

DATA SOURCES
TSI: http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/data/tsi_data.htm
TSI: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/lean2000_irradiance.txt
NH T Reconstruction: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/moberg2005/moberg2005.html
NH T Observations: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php

The American ‘allergy’ to global warming: Why?

"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.

Fickle conspiracy theorists

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."

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

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

Arguments about how to smooth a timeseries

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.

an overuse of the '-gate' suffix

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."

Will Obama talk about climate legislation in the SotU?

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].

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

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

Climate Index

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

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

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

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.

NCAR YouTube Channel

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.

the chemistry of the greenhouse effect

Just a quick mention of an interesting study that I saw today. Three researchers from NASA and Purdue have a paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry called Identifying the Molecular Origin of Global Warming [LINK]. It was brought to my attention by a news story on NewScientist.com [LINK]. Now based on that title, what would you expect from this paper? The news article doesn't completely make sense to me, perhaps because the writer tries to get so many barely-related things into such a tiny piece. It had me intrigued though, so I went and read the paper.

Before we get to the conclusions of the paper, let's consider what we know about global warming, specifically the greenhouse effect. We know that the most important greenhouse gas in terms of the human impact on climate is carbon dioxide. The way that the greenhouse effect works is that the molecules of carbon dioxide absorb infrared radiation emitted from the Earth's surface. Those molecules then emit infrared radiation at a slightly colder temperature, and they radiate in all directions. This has the effect of storing energy in the system, first by keeping it in molecules (before they radiate it away), and second by radiating back to the atmosphere and surface. So what does this paper have to offer?

The study uses calculations of molecular properties to investigate the greenhouse warming potential of different gases. The GWP of a gas is essentially a measure of how strongly a gas absorbs in the infrared, and how much warming it could cause over a given time in the atmosphere (typically 100 years). The way I've seen it presented, carbon dioxide is given a value of 1, and other gases are then shown compared to carbon dioxide. This study shows that there are a couple of families of molecules that have very large GWP, and presents an argument for how it comes about. The gist seems to be that molecules that have carbon-fluorine or carbon-chlorine bonds are particularly good greenhouse gases. These happen to include chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFC) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). The warming potential increases strongly with the number of bonds between the F or Cl and the carbon atom. This seems to be because the vibrational modes of the molecules, which are quite pronounced for these bonds, plus the stretch length of these bonds mean that the infrared interaction is within the atmospheric window. If this is all sounding vague and Greek-ish, it's because I don't completely understand all the terminology in the paper. The point is just that F, and to a lesser degree Cl and H, have strong bonds with C in these molecules, and their vibrational modes are in the atmospheric window, meaning they can absorb strongly in the correct band to make a difference to climate.

The major problem with the paper is that these gases are quite rare in the atmosphere, and it is hard to make the case that they are making a significant difference to the climate. The counter to such an argument is that this paper shows the physical mechanism at the molecular level that is responsible for some gases being very good greenhouse gases. It means that you can basically know from the outset whether some gas, perhaps an industrial product of some sort, will be a strong greenhouse gas. It also can serve as an early warning against over-using these gases, since large increases in their production could have consequences for the climate system.

The secondary problem with this paper is the way it seems to be interpreted in that news story (and thus likely others). It's presented almost like it's the first time we've understood what is going on with the greenhouse effect. Of course, that is rubbish, as we've had a good handle on the basics for over a century, and detailed studies of CO2 for decades. The authors don't try play down their results either, which you can tell just from the title. This is not a world-shattering study; it is a nice piece of chemistry that has some application to climate science.

The warming arctic

Over the past week or so, I've noticed a number of articles and posts about the Arctic. There seems to be some kind of ongoing flap about some climate change deniers denying that the extreme north is warming. I have (mostly) avoided reading those original posts because they can't be a good use of time (one example will essentially prove my point). Following each denier rant seems to be a barrage of posts refuting their claims. The good things about these posts are that they more carefully present evidence to support themselves and the reader can actually learn something from them (here's a good example from Tamino). Unfortunately, I don't think these posts help to convince the public of the state of the science, since the public doesn't read them (sorry, but they don't). If a person is willing to dig into the climate change issues enough to read these posts, I think they have already decided what they believe before they get involved (even passively) in these "debates." (They are, of course, not debates at all.)

Another article from the NYTimes.com helps explain why the warming Arctic is an important issue, not just for climate research, but for geopolitical and economic reasons. A commercial ship is about to finish traversing the Northeast Passage from South Korea to the Netherlands. This cuts thousands of miles off the usual trip. If more ships start going this way during the summer, Russia stands to profit because the ships will sail through Russian waters. The path has historically been blocked by ice even in the summer, but as the Arctic has warmed, summer ice has become reduced in area and thickness, and over the past few years the Northeast Passage has been open for a few weeks each year. Similarly the Northwest Passage through Canada's many islands has been open, but so far commercial ships haven't used it yet (they will soon, I would wager). These are impacts of climate change, and unlike most other impacts, these ones could be interpreted as positive for some of the involved parties. Of course, along with these routes opening, the open waters spell doom for the polar bears who have become unwitting symbols of the ecological impacts of a warming world.

On the research side of things, the warming Arctic has long been considered the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Because of strong positive feedbacks associated with snow and ice retreat and atmospheric water vapor, there has emerged a general understanding of the polar regions (especially in the north) as being particularly sensitive. The poles are expected to warm most rapidly, an effect usually called "polar amplification." There is some scientific uncertainty about whether the amplification is observed yet (e.g., this RealClimate post from C. Bitz), but there is strong consensus among researchers that it will emerge from the noise. This view is supported by climate modeling experiments, in which all the reliable models predict an amplified response in the Arctic. From my reading, which is incomplete, this extends to the Antarctic, but only on slightly longer timescales because of the heat transfer into the Souther Ocean.

Stubbornness is a function of age?

I like this quote from Carl Sagan quite a lot:

At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the world, but there is a built-in error-correcting mechanism: The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the field on track.
-- Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, Parade, February 1, 1987

There is a lot of information in that quote, really. The part at the end, that scientists cam make mistakes in their attempt to understand the world, is what I want to point out today. Further, it seems to be common for older scientists to become mistaken, and I think for many of them it is that they become locked into that ruthless skepticism that Sagan refers to, but lose part of their openness. We discussed this in depth with Freeman Dyson, who seems to have an emotional reaction to climate change that fires up his skepticism and closes down his openness.

Another example seems to be George Kukla, a renowned scientists from Columbia University. Kukla is best known for his tremendous work in paleoclimate, where his specialty has been in exposing the role that orbital variation plays in changing climate [see bio]. Kukla is now emeritus at Columbia, but is a "special research scientist" at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and appears to be marginally involved with some ongoing research. Though less visible than Dyson, or less credible people like Pat Michaels or Fred Singer, Kukla has been a skeptic of anthropogenic climate change. He is often quoted (or liberally paraphrased) as believing that variations in sunlight are causing the current global warming, which will turn toward a new ice age in the future.

I just read a 2007 interview with Kukla [link] in Gelf Magazine. I urge you to check it out. Somehow I ended up there after watching a short video clip from Letterman [link] in which Kukla appears. In the interview, Kukla seems to present evidence that the current warming is very similar to warming during previous interglacial periods that then transitioned to glacials. However, there are several points of fact that are misrepresented. For example, Kukla says

The knowledgeable climate students know that the global climate works in cycles. The relatively short cycles happen to be about 60 to 80 years long, out of which one half goes up and the other half down. Right now the Northern Hemisphere appears to be at the turning point of the warming branch. Just wait!

Well, there certainly are cycles in climate, but the "short cycles" of 60-80 years are certainly not well quantified or understood. In fact, I know of no compelling evidence for periodicity in this range. There is a lot of interest in "decadal variability" in the climate system, which could certainly be a source of noise in the spectrum around 60-80 years, but is unlikely to be a cycle by any sort of sensible definition of the word. The second part of the quote above, that the northern hemisphere is now turning from warming to cooling, is likely to be shown false very shortly. This is really just a regurgitation of the common climate change denier tactic of using insignificant short-term trends to say something that is false. We can only hope that Kukla is around in a few more years to see the results.

Here's another quote from the interview:

What happened then was that the shifting sun warmed the tropics and cooled the Arctic and Antarctic. Because the tropics are so much larger than the poles, the area-weighted global mean temperature was increasing. But also increasing was the temperature difference between the oceans and the poles, the basic condition of polar ice growth. Believe it or not, the last glacial started with "global warming"! The shifts of solar orbit today are about two to three times weaker than in the last glacial, or by the way, in the last 400,000 years. So, on that basis, we have little to worry.

In this we see Kukla's motivation: he is so enraptured by the astronomical theory of climate change, that he has closed his mind to other forms of climate change. This is his downfall on this topic, for some reason he can't see the vast difference between past climate change and current global warming. He's still not nearly as severe an offender as other skeptics, though. He recognizes important aspects of anthropogenic activity, but somehow ignores them. He also sees, as he says above, that changes in sunshine are very small right now, and later in the article he even acknowledges that, "No doubt that we have about 10,000 or even possibly 20,000 years still ahead before the major ice advance can start." This implicitly means that there are very different timescales involved, but this just isn't enough for Kukla. Above, he also says that a sign of the oncoming ice age is a warming tropics and cooling poles. However direct observation shows that the polar regions are now warming twice as fast (at least in the Arctic, more mixed in the Antarctic) as the globe as a whole. This should be a red flag, but to the true believer, it is evidence against the common thinking.

Okay, you are getting the idea, and I don't want to beat up on this guy, so just one more quote, showing again that Kukla almost accepts the current thinking:

The CO2 certainly has an influence. For instance, it appears that already now, with still relatively low concentrations, it may have a significant warming impact on the night [temperature] minima. And because the usual way to determine the daily mean is as the average of the daily minimum and maximum, here we go! But it is difficult to be sure: more clouds can do the same.

So he clearly says that people are changing climate, yet then he says they aren't. If you are confused about what Kukla believes, then I think you join a long list that probably also includes Kukla himself.

Again, let me stress that George Kukla has made impressive and important contributions to our understanding of paleoclimates. All I am saying is that his current opinions about global warming seem to be somewhat off the mark. My opinion is that he has become fixated on the astronomical theory of climate change to such a degree that he can no longer tolerate the rational arguments for anthropogenic climate change, which are founded in basic science and backed up by direct observation. Like quite a lot of scientists who are, well, let's just say "getting up there in years," he has developed an emotional response to the current science that can not be defended by scientific arguments. I hope he comes around at some point.

Marathon runners not a source of CO2 to atmosphere -- shocker!

I'm so glad that RSS exists, so that I don't miss stories like "Barton worries that EPA will regulate runners" from Kate Sheppard at Grist. Did you read it yet? Just in case you didn't, let me recap for you. Representative (from Texas) Joe Barton (Republican) is the ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which means he's the most senior Republican on the committee. This committee's role is, from Wikipedia:

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce has developed what is arguably the broadest (non-tax-oriented) jurisdiction of any Congressional committee. Today, it maintains principal responsibility for legislative oversight relating to telecommunications, consumer protection, food and drug safety, public health, air quality and environmental health, the supply and delivery of energy, and interstate and foreign commerce in general. This jurisdiction extends over five Cabinet-level departments and seven independent agencies--from the Energy Department, Health and Human Services, the Transportation Department to the Federal Trade Commission, Food and Drug Administration, and Federal Communications Commission — and sundry quasi-governmental organizations.

Which is to say, this is a pretty powerful committee. They get to advance (or squelch) a lot of potentially important legislation. And Barton, as ranking member, is a powerful guy within this powerful committee. So it matter that he thinks crazy things, like that marathon runners could be considered a source of pollution. Yeah, didn't you read that article? It goes back to the EPA's decision that carbon dioxide can be considered a pollutant, and as such can be regulated. Barton thinks that people are point sources of carbon dioxide, and I guess because marathons are a large group of heavily exhaling people, Joe thinks that means a large source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

The point Barton is trying, and failing, to make is that carbon dioxide is difficult to regulate because it is a naturally occurring substance that is a basic part of all life on Earth. The reason he is trying to make this point is because he doesn't want to believe that the EPA has the right to regulate carbon dioxide. There are two reasons he doesn't want to accept that. First, because he's a Republican, and that party has decided to oppose regulation of nearly any kind. (Examples, regulating financial institutions like AIG or energy brokers like Enron.) Second, as part of Barton's ideology, he can't accept that humans affect the Earth adversely, so he emotionally reacts to climate change by denying it.

The point I want to make is that Barton is wrong about marathon runners. They aren't a source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, even though they do exhale carbon dioxide. The reason is that humans are part of the terrestrial biosphere, which is part of the global carbon cycle, which is basically in balance except for the perturbation from burning fossil fuels. To see this, think about that air you just exhaled, which is relatively enriched in carbon dioxide. Note, you don't breathe in pure oxygen, and you don't exhale pure carbon dioxide. How did that CO2 get into your breath? It is a byproduct of your physiology, mostly it come from breaking down sugars, which provides you with energy. So that means we're a source! No, wait a minute, where did those sugars come from? You ate them! This is exactly why we eat, to ingest the nutrients that will supply us with energy. So think about that for a second: we eat foods that have carbon in various organic molecules, which we break down to get energy, and CO2 is made as a byproduct and respired.

But that means humans (and all animals) make CO2 and put it into the air.

Yeah, but it all comes from somewhere. Let's take me as a simple example, or a cow. The point being, the cow and I are vegetarians, so most of the CO2 we respire comes from breaking down plant matter. Where does the carbon in that plant matter come from? Remember what we all learned as kids, plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen. Yes, plants take the CO2 right out of the air. They take CO2 from the air, water from the soil, and sunlight, and perform photosynthesis, which is to say 6CO₂ + 6H₂O → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂. Like magic, isn't it. On the right side are just 6 molecules of oxygen along with a sugar molecule that is holding onto some carbon and oxygen, which I'll eat and break down for energy, releasing CO2. Magic.

So there's a balance... like a cycle of carbon in the biosphere. This is why, in principle, biofuels should be carbon neutral. Breaking down plant matter moves CO2 around, eventually expelling it into the atmosphere, but eventually it is sucked back into the biosphere by autotrophs like plants and phytoplankton.

So what's the problem with burning fossil fuels? Well, that takes carbon from the lithosphere and suddenly introduces it to the atmosphere-biosphere-ocean system. There is normally exchange between the lithosphere and the rest of the climate system, but that is a very slow process, which combustion accelerates. There's no where for that extra CO2 to go because each part of the cycle only has so much wiggle room. The result is a build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere, where it enhances the greenhouse effect, and chaos ensues. Carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant like CFCs, then, but the carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels is basically the same. Whatever oil, coal, or natural gas is pulled out of the rocks needs to be accounted for, because that is the potentially harmful carbon.

We should get Bachmann and Pence together

Wow. Via DeSmogBlog:

Boehner and the conservative fight against climate change

Another quick post today, basically sending you over to DeSmogBlog, where they have more details in addtion to the video below. The video clip is of House Minority Leader John Boehner basically poo-pooing climate change, specifically carbon dioxide emissions as something that need to be regulated. 

Dealing with climate change deniers is something that gets a lot of play in the blogosphere, and there are blogs/sites that are basically devoted to explaining why the "skeptical" standpoint on climate change is unreasoned and unjustified. Here, we don't deal a lot with debunking these ridiculous claims, both because those other sites do it well and also because it more widely disseminates that illogical viewpoint. When it comes to public figures, especially government officials, I take a slightly different stand. These people represent a direct interface between the science, the public, and the policy, and when congress-people or other government officials ignore the entire science part of the issue, pandering to some fringe subset of the public and undercutting effective policymaking, it hurts our society. Representative Boehner is not an isolated incidence of climate change denialism in Congress, and in fact as the DeSmogBlog post reminds us, the GOP leadership seems to hold fictitious ideas about climate change. This viewpoint is predominantly held by far-right to mid-right conservatives, for no really apparent reason except that climate change has some association with environmentalism, and conservatives have in the past 2-3 decades been (and again apparently without a good reason) anti-environmentalism.

Adopting appropriate measures to combat climate change would be hard enough for a purely centrist congress that accepts scientific findings, but throwing these irrational arguments into to the pot will only make the job more difficult. My fear is that whatever climate policy can escape from congress will be impotent, and the practices that have lead to global warming will continue unabated for another decade before effective measures can be instated, and by then it could be too late to stop a good deal of life-altering climate change.