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.
Showing posts with label skeptics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skeptics. Show all posts
2010-11-01
2010-09-07
Climategate hurt the reputation of climate science among TV meteorologists
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.)
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.)
2010-06-22
The Stanford Study
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.
2010-02-21
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].
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.
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.
2009-12-07
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.
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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.
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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?
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].
2009-12-03
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 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.
2009-10-15
Paul Hudson's climate change denier pornography
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.
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:
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].
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].
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:
Hudson does then state that people at the Met Office stand by the science and their modeling effort.
Then Hudson says, I assume without appreciating the irony,
To end the piece, Hudson says it with the elegance it deserves:
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.
2009-05-23
Saturday means a video
Okay... not every saturday means a video, but this one does.
I just wanted to share this week's installment of Climate Denial Crock of the Week with Peter Sinclair, which I have to admit that I've really taken to in the past couple weeks. It is a series of well-produced (by internet standards) short videos that dissect global warming deniers arguments.
This video is actually directly related to a pair of recent posts, in which I showed you Rep. Boehner being a jack-hole and also explained that breathing does not produce a net source of carbon dioxide. It's like blogosphere synergy!
2009-05-20
Stubbornness is a function of age?
I like this quote from Carl Sagan quite a lot:
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
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:
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:
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.
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.
2009-04-24
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.
2009-04-23
Brook takes down Plimer, as usual
I just read Barry Brook's response to Ian Plimer's new book, Heaven+Earth. Plimer is a notorious climate change denier in Australia, and apparently has enough "cred" to get a book deal. According to Barry, the book is 500 pages of rubbish, rehashing the same old arguments that all the climate change deniers always march out. It sounds like Plimer also takes ALL climate scientists to task for being bad scientists, by committing intellectual fraud and misleading the public about climate change. Brook gives a broad overview, and a list of specific errors and misrepresentations from the book. What will be interesting to see, over the next year or two, is whether this book becomes the standard go-to reference for climate change denial. I hope it does, as I'm sure that there will soon be compilations of fact-checking focused on the book, and having a pre-existing refutation of everything in the book would be disarming for (at least some) people sympathetic to the denier worldview.
2009-04-15
Notes on Freeman Dyson's irrelevance
The New York Times Magazine recently ran a long profile of Freeman Dyson, a brilliant mathematical physicist known for contributions to the unification of quantum theory with electrodynamics. Unfortunately, that seminal work was mostly done by 1949, and ever after Dyson bounced eclectically from topic to topic. His contributions have been significant, if notably unfocused, and he is generally regarded highly in the physics community. I've actually met Dyson, when he visited my undergraduate physics department to give a talk, and met with a group of undergraduates, and then attended a meeting of the research group I was part of. Dyson was very nice, and seemed incredibly bright, but even then he was very old.
In the past few years, Freeman Dyson has come out as something of a climate change denier. This isn't really news anymore, as it really has been a while, but for some reason Dyson seems to be getting more press recently. The NYT Magazine piece spends most of its effort on the climate change issue, I think in an attempt to bring across Dyson's independent spirit, or maverickness. It does not totally work because it degenerates into a fictional publicity struggle between Dyson and James Hansen. The author, Nicholas Dawidoff, exaggerates the situation and paints Hansen as a caricature.
Here I just want to pull some of the relevant things that Dyson is saying, hopefully in context, and evaluate them. The main point I want to make is that Dyson is not dealing with climate change as a science issue. Here's an excerpt from that article that starts to make my case:
We all are aware that there are chunks of environmentalism that are not exactly science-based, but to lump the entirety of the global warming issue into one of environmentalism is offensive to say the least. Note that there's no science in his declaration, though.
Not all his issues are so explicitly non-scientific,
This does bring up an important point in the first half. Though he misrepresents the evolution of the science, which started from a physical science point of view because the models started as weather prediction models. The role of biology and chemistry have long been recognized, and inclusion of chemical and biological processes in climate models is still being incorporated. As a practical matter this has been slow because there are trade-offs between complexity and resolution in climate modeling, which is a consequence of the limited computer power that has been available. More focus has been on physical processes because they are thought to be of lower-order importance overall; there are examples including new processes and getting wildly different solutions, though usually less realistic ones. The trend is for more and more complexity, though, and over the next few years we will have much more comprehensive representations of the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle. The bottom line, though, is that the main results are unlikely to change much, even if some regional effects are substantial. The second half of the quote is just specious, and has nothing to do with science.
In the next paragraph of the NYT Mag article, a list of common climate denier talk is rehashed. In order, the article suggests Dyson believes that (1) rising carbon dioxide just doesn't matter much to the Earth, (2) the globe isn't warming everywhere so it isn't really global warming, (3) more carbon dioxide could be good for the climate, (4) ocean acidification is probably exaggerated, (5) sea-levels are rising but we don't really know why, and ending by essentially saying we have to do more work and figure stuff out. After a paragraph about coal, this last issue is more explicitly stated; apparently Dyson wants to see more evidence. And then this:
Where to start? Well, I think a lot of the real answer starts to come in the following paragraph, which states, "Embedded in all of Dyson’s strong opinions about public policy is a dual spirit of social activism and uneasiness about class dating all the way back to Winchester, where he was raised in the 1920s and ’30s by his father..." In fact, I think this captures an essential aspect of Dyson's denial, as well as quite a lot of other climate change deniers, particularly the issues of class in the first half of the 20th century. As energy became cheaper and cheaper, manufacturing became easier, and wealth began to get distributed to a larger chunk of the population, at least in the countries we now think of as developed. This was all a result of the "second industrial revolution" and the advances made in the immediate aftermath, and going into World War I. Dyson seems to be concerned about distribution of wealth and opportunity, and is a proponent of equal rights, which are all worthy things, and have nothing to do with climate change. In Dyson's worldview, as far as I can tell, an important part of breaking down class barriers and spreading peace and freedom is the use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels did completely change the world, and particularly in the early 20th century in western Europe and North America. I think this is a foundation for denying climate change: some people see the attribution of climate change to burning fossil fuel as a threat to humanity's progress. For the oldest generation or two, this can be a visceral threat, which evokes suspicion or anger. Denying climate change might be a psychological response to this feeling of threat. I also have a hunch that this fits well with Naomi Oreskes' findings linking conservative, anti-communist groups to first opposition of smoking-cancer links and later to fossil fuel-climate change links. (Even if Dyson himself isn't all that conservative in many ways, his connections with the Orion program and JASON do connect him strongly with groups that are strongly associated with that ideology.)
As for Dyson's particular claims, I don't need to devote any time to them because they come straight out of the standard climate change denier language. Take a look at how to talk to a climate change skeptic, or RealClimate's wiki. All of these claims are debunked in detail. Also note that whenever an impending ice age is invoked, it should trigger red flags, as this is a last bastion of the desperate denier.
In the past few years, Freeman Dyson has come out as something of a climate change denier. This isn't really news anymore, as it really has been a while, but for some reason Dyson seems to be getting more press recently. The NYT Magazine piece spends most of its effort on the climate change issue, I think in an attempt to bring across Dyson's independent spirit, or maverickness. It does not totally work because it degenerates into a fictional publicity struggle between Dyson and James Hansen. The author, Nicholas Dawidoff, exaggerates the situation and paints Hansen as a caricature.
Here I just want to pull some of the relevant things that Dyson is saying, hopefully in context, and evaluate them. The main point I want to make is that Dyson is not dealing with climate change as a science issue. Here's an excerpt from that article that starts to make my case:
... in a 2007 interview with Salon.com [Dyson said] that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books ... that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism.
We all are aware that there are chunks of environmentalism that are not exactly science-based, but to lump the entirety of the global warming issue into one of environmentalism is offensive to say the least. Note that there's no science in his declaration, though.
Not all his issues are so explicitly non-scientific,
Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees. “The biologists have essentially been pushed aside,” he continues. “Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”
This does bring up an important point in the first half. Though he misrepresents the evolution of the science, which started from a physical science point of view because the models started as weather prediction models. The role of biology and chemistry have long been recognized, and inclusion of chemical and biological processes in climate models is still being incorporated. As a practical matter this has been slow because there are trade-offs between complexity and resolution in climate modeling, which is a consequence of the limited computer power that has been available. More focus has been on physical processes because they are thought to be of lower-order importance overall; there are examples including new processes and getting wildly different solutions, though usually less realistic ones. The trend is for more and more complexity, though, and over the next few years we will have much more comprehensive representations of the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle. The bottom line, though, is that the main results are unlikely to change much, even if some regional effects are substantial. The second half of the quote is just specious, and has nothing to do with science.
In the next paragraph of the NYT Mag article, a list of common climate denier talk is rehashed. In order, the article suggests Dyson believes that (1) rising carbon dioxide just doesn't matter much to the Earth, (2) the globe isn't warming everywhere so it isn't really global warming, (3) more carbon dioxide could be good for the climate, (4) ocean acidification is probably exaggerated, (5) sea-levels are rising but we don't really know why, and ending by essentially saying we have to do more work and figure stuff out. After a paragraph about coal, this last issue is more explicitly stated; apparently Dyson wants to see more evidence. And then this:
One of Dyson’s more significant surmises is that a warming climate could be forestalling a new ice age. Is he wrong? No one can say for sure.Beyond the specific points of factual dispute, Dyson has said that it all boils down to “a deeper disagreement about values” between those who think “nature knows best” and that “any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil,” and “humanists,” like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment.
Where to start? Well, I think a lot of the real answer starts to come in the following paragraph, which states, "Embedded in all of Dyson’s strong opinions about public policy is a dual spirit of social activism and uneasiness about class dating all the way back to Winchester, where he was raised in the 1920s and ’30s by his father..." In fact, I think this captures an essential aspect of Dyson's denial, as well as quite a lot of other climate change deniers, particularly the issues of class in the first half of the 20th century. As energy became cheaper and cheaper, manufacturing became easier, and wealth began to get distributed to a larger chunk of the population, at least in the countries we now think of as developed. This was all a result of the "second industrial revolution" and the advances made in the immediate aftermath, and going into World War I. Dyson seems to be concerned about distribution of wealth and opportunity, and is a proponent of equal rights, which are all worthy things, and have nothing to do with climate change. In Dyson's worldview, as far as I can tell, an important part of breaking down class barriers and spreading peace and freedom is the use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels did completely change the world, and particularly in the early 20th century in western Europe and North America. I think this is a foundation for denying climate change: some people see the attribution of climate change to burning fossil fuel as a threat to humanity's progress. For the oldest generation or two, this can be a visceral threat, which evokes suspicion or anger. Denying climate change might be a psychological response to this feeling of threat. I also have a hunch that this fits well with Naomi Oreskes' findings linking conservative, anti-communist groups to first opposition of smoking-cancer links and later to fossil fuel-climate change links. (Even if Dyson himself isn't all that conservative in many ways, his connections with the Orion program and JASON do connect him strongly with groups that are strongly associated with that ideology.)
As for Dyson's particular claims, I don't need to devote any time to them because they come straight out of the standard climate change denier language. Take a look at how to talk to a climate change skeptic, or RealClimate's wiki. All of these claims are debunked in detail. Also note that whenever an impending ice age is invoked, it should trigger red flags, as this is a last bastion of the desperate denier.
2009-04-09
The super chimney that will save us all!
Yesterday I threw up a teaser for a future post about the Super Chimney, and here it is. I can not resist the pull of this posting, it has been rattling in my head since I found the Super Chimney (via SGTU podcast #192). The site that is home to the Super Chimney is simply superchimney.org, and is run by a man named Michael Pesochinsky. I know nothing about Mr. Pesochinsky, his motives, his background, or his mental state. I can only take the site at face value, as there is no indication that it is farce, and it appears that some effort has been put into the site, excepting quite a few grammar and spelling errors.
Here is the skinny on the Super Chimney: Mr. Pesochinsky suggests that building a few (around 10) Super Chimneys of diameter 1 km and height 5 km, anthropogenic global warming will be mitigated, the world's energy problems will be solved, and carbon will be sequestered in the newly arable land that is created by rain around the chimneys. So, what is the idea, well by clicking a link to the "principle," it is quite simply explained: "Hot air rises above cold air because hot air is less dense and therefore, it is lighter than cold air." Quite right, and really the underlying principle for a surprisingly large amount of the atmospheric sciences. The Super Chimney idea simply says that you can throw up a structure with openings at the bottom and top, and hot near-surface air will rush in at the base and rise with striking speed up the chimney because the surface air is so much hotter than the air at 5 km up. Along the way, harness all the kinetic energy of the updraft by installing turbines.
The idea is simple, and at first makes sense to a lot of people, which makes it a bit dangerous. In this post, I want to address two points: (1) be skeptical of things that seem too good to be true, and (2) the Super Chimney is a ridiculous and naive idea that has no hope of working in any way.
So, the first point about being skeptical. Whenever a new idea is presented, whether a product like a "dietary supplement," a medical treatment, intelligent design, or a mitigation strategy for global warming, there are several levels of skepticism that have to be addressed. If the idea/product/etc claims to solve even one "grand challenge" problem, that is a red flag, and if the claim is that multiple important problems are solved, many, many red flags should be waving in your head. These difficult problems, the problems of all humanity, are hard to solve, and lots of people are working to solve them. Rarely does one obscure idea emerge from the din to successfully tackle an important problem. This goes back to the old saying about something being too good to be true... Also, it is good to ask whether this miraculous idea/device/medicine/etc has been vetted by the scientific community, or have the interested parties gone straight to the media or public? And consider the source itself. Is this a single person, from outside the field, or a respected professional? Does the person have any experience relevant to the topic at all, and is there any information even available about the background?
In the case of the Super Chimney, let's see if the idea really merits much consideration just based on these questions. Well, the claim is that building 10 Super Chimneys will produce arable land, sequester carbon, generate the world's energy needs, and mitigate global warming. No small feat!! So, it sounds too good to be true, and claims to solve huge problems. The source seems only to be this website, and there's no scientific publication to back up the claims. On the plus side, there are no testimonials on the site yet. Finally, Mr. Pesochinsky is not a climate scientist, and we don't really know anything about him. None of this suggests that the proposal should be considered seriously. How does it stand up to scrutiny?
To start, let's suppose that it is feasible to build towers of the size suggested (1km wide, 5km tall); there are some issues with this, but I'm totally willing to concede the engineering is possible.
Next, let's not get caught up with the end results for now, and only address the physical principle underlying the proposal.
HOT AIR RISES
Yes, hot air rises, and it is because hot air is less dense than cold air. The Super Chimney relies on hot air at the surface entering the tower and then rising because, as is stated, "As we climb up, the temperature drops 10° C (roughly 20° F) every 1000 meters." So because of this unstable situation, i.e., cold air over warm air, the warm air rises.
Hold on a second.... there's warm air at the surface -- check -- the temperature decreases with height -- check -- warm air rises -- check... BUT ALL THE AIR HIGH UP IS COLDER THAN THE AIR AT THE SURFACE!!! Everyone please don't panic, proceed to the nearest shelter, we expect the Earth's atmosphere to blow upward from the surface at supersonic speeds at any moment. Just as soon as the atmosphere realizes that the surface is warmer than the air aloft.
There is a logical fallacy going on here. The air at the surface is warmer than the air aloft, but it is not necessarily buoyant, and where it is, it does indeed rise. An important aspect of atmospheric dynamics exactly involves instability and convection, with the take-home message that convection acts to eliminate instability. This really means that the atmosphere will convect, i.e., air will rise, as long as it can and then it will stop.
Imagine you take a blob of warm air from the surface up to some height, and you do it such that all the energy in the blob is retained. Physically, this transformation has to change the temperature of the air in the blob. When you are done moving the blob and you measure the temperature inside the blob and outside the blob (at the same height), if the temperature of the blob is greater than the environment, it is buoyant and could continue to rise, but if it has cooled to a temperature less than the environment it would sink. We'd say that in the former case the blob is unstable to this "adiabatic" transformation while the latter situation is stable. The way that meteorologists make this kind of problem simple is by defining alternative temperatures; in this case the quantity that would be of particular value would be the potential temperature, which is simply the temperature air would have if it were brought to a reference height in this kind of transformation. It turns out to be very easy to derive an equation that says that the temperature decreases by 10 degrees C per about 1000 m of height with no vertical motion. That explains why the air above the surface is colder than the air at the surface without being unstable; in a dry atmosphere this would be the situation everywhere, but it turns out that the condensation of water changes this temperature change, and for the tropics and sub-tropics the change is more like 6.5 degrees of cooling for every 1000m of height.
The fact that the surface air is NOT unstable to vertical displacements makes the Super Chimney idea fall flat. Of course, if you warm the air at the surface enough, it will become unstable and rise, but doing so requires pumping energy into the air, and removes any benefits that could be achieved by the chimney. It simply can not work.
Additional Considerations?
There are a host of other potential problems with the physics of the Super Chimney idea. In fact, every claim that is made on that site is suspect, and most of them are demonstrably wrong.
Unfortunately, given the fundamental flaw in the premise of the Super Chimney, it is impossible to address many of the outrageous claims made. For instance, take the idea that the venting air at the top of the chimney would cool down, condense water vapor, and rain in the vicinity of the tower. My first thought is that, no, this won't happen, you will really get the cloud forming inside the tower, and rising up out of it. However, that requires the air within the tower to have a reasonable temperature profile, which immediately invalidates the crazy claims of a constant updraft of more than 100 m/s. If you did have an updraft in the tower, though, the cloud base would form about where liquid water can exist, which in most environments would be around 1-2km above the surface. The result would be, among other things, a downpour within the tower itself which would cool the lower part of the tower as liquid water fell into the warm air and evaporated, and this would stabilize the column by cooling the low levels. You could actually then imagine outflow from the the base of the tower! (And, by similar reasoning to the original Super Chimney idea, maybe you could then pump cold air down to the surface and solve global warming via refrigeration!)
Another ludicrous claim is that just 10 of these towers would dramatically alter the Earth's climate. Just from a scaling perspective, this can be dismissed. A single tropical thunderstorm is an updraft that reaches from near the surface up to 15km or so, and is several km in diameter. There are thousands of such storms at any given time across the tropics. Yes the energy contained within them is enormous, but the idea that just putting 10 small, but intense storms in fixed locations and expecting them to completely change the temperature structure of the atmosphere is beyond the pale.
In retrospect, I probably should have ignored this topic, as the more I look at that site and think about it, the more and more crazy it is. The whole thing is based on completely misunderstanding the basic physics of the atmosphere, and that is even before we start considering the implications for global warming or energy production. The lesson to be learned is that if an idea doesn't pass snuff on the basic skeptical questions, it probably isn't worth digging into it in any depth, at risk of your own mental well-being. However, just as a reminder that craziness can have consequences, I suggest checking out the website WhatsTheHarm.net.
Here is the skinny on the Super Chimney: Mr. Pesochinsky suggests that building a few (around 10) Super Chimneys of diameter 1 km and height 5 km, anthropogenic global warming will be mitigated, the world's energy problems will be solved, and carbon will be sequestered in the newly arable land that is created by rain around the chimneys. So, what is the idea, well by clicking a link to the "principle," it is quite simply explained: "Hot air rises above cold air because hot air is less dense and therefore, it is lighter than cold air." Quite right, and really the underlying principle for a surprisingly large amount of the atmospheric sciences. The Super Chimney idea simply says that you can throw up a structure with openings at the bottom and top, and hot near-surface air will rush in at the base and rise with striking speed up the chimney because the surface air is so much hotter than the air at 5 km up. Along the way, harness all the kinetic energy of the updraft by installing turbines.
The idea is simple, and at first makes sense to a lot of people, which makes it a bit dangerous. In this post, I want to address two points: (1) be skeptical of things that seem too good to be true, and (2) the Super Chimney is a ridiculous and naive idea that has no hope of working in any way.
So, the first point about being skeptical. Whenever a new idea is presented, whether a product like a "dietary supplement," a medical treatment, intelligent design, or a mitigation strategy for global warming, there are several levels of skepticism that have to be addressed. If the idea/product/etc claims to solve even one "grand challenge" problem, that is a red flag, and if the claim is that multiple important problems are solved, many, many red flags should be waving in your head. These difficult problems, the problems of all humanity, are hard to solve, and lots of people are working to solve them. Rarely does one obscure idea emerge from the din to successfully tackle an important problem. This goes back to the old saying about something being too good to be true... Also, it is good to ask whether this miraculous idea/device/medicine/etc has been vetted by the scientific community, or have the interested parties gone straight to the media or public? And consider the source itself. Is this a single person, from outside the field, or a respected professional? Does the person have any experience relevant to the topic at all, and is there any information even available about the background?
In the case of the Super Chimney, let's see if the idea really merits much consideration just based on these questions. Well, the claim is that building 10 Super Chimneys will produce arable land, sequester carbon, generate the world's energy needs, and mitigate global warming. No small feat!! So, it sounds too good to be true, and claims to solve huge problems. The source seems only to be this website, and there's no scientific publication to back up the claims. On the plus side, there are no testimonials on the site yet. Finally, Mr. Pesochinsky is not a climate scientist, and we don't really know anything about him. None of this suggests that the proposal should be considered seriously. How does it stand up to scrutiny?
To start, let's suppose that it is feasible to build towers of the size suggested (1km wide, 5km tall); there are some issues with this, but I'm totally willing to concede the engineering is possible.
Next, let's not get caught up with the end results for now, and only address the physical principle underlying the proposal.
HOT AIR RISES
Yes, hot air rises, and it is because hot air is less dense than cold air. The Super Chimney relies on hot air at the surface entering the tower and then rising because, as is stated, "As we climb up, the temperature drops 10° C (roughly 20° F) every 1000 meters." So because of this unstable situation, i.e., cold air over warm air, the warm air rises.
Hold on a second.... there's warm air at the surface -- check -- the temperature decreases with height -- check -- warm air rises -- check... BUT ALL THE AIR HIGH UP IS COLDER THAN THE AIR AT THE SURFACE!!! Everyone please don't panic, proceed to the nearest shelter, we expect the Earth's atmosphere to blow upward from the surface at supersonic speeds at any moment. Just as soon as the atmosphere realizes that the surface is warmer than the air aloft.
There is a logical fallacy going on here. The air at the surface is warmer than the air aloft, but it is not necessarily buoyant, and where it is, it does indeed rise. An important aspect of atmospheric dynamics exactly involves instability and convection, with the take-home message that convection acts to eliminate instability. This really means that the atmosphere will convect, i.e., air will rise, as long as it can and then it will stop.
Imagine you take a blob of warm air from the surface up to some height, and you do it such that all the energy in the blob is retained. Physically, this transformation has to change the temperature of the air in the blob. When you are done moving the blob and you measure the temperature inside the blob and outside the blob (at the same height), if the temperature of the blob is greater than the environment, it is buoyant and could continue to rise, but if it has cooled to a temperature less than the environment it would sink. We'd say that in the former case the blob is unstable to this "adiabatic" transformation while the latter situation is stable. The way that meteorologists make this kind of problem simple is by defining alternative temperatures; in this case the quantity that would be of particular value would be the potential temperature, which is simply the temperature air would have if it were brought to a reference height in this kind of transformation. It turns out to be very easy to derive an equation that says that the temperature decreases by 10 degrees C per about 1000 m of height with no vertical motion. That explains why the air above the surface is colder than the air at the surface without being unstable; in a dry atmosphere this would be the situation everywhere, but it turns out that the condensation of water changes this temperature change, and for the tropics and sub-tropics the change is more like 6.5 degrees of cooling for every 1000m of height.
The fact that the surface air is NOT unstable to vertical displacements makes the Super Chimney idea fall flat. Of course, if you warm the air at the surface enough, it will become unstable and rise, but doing so requires pumping energy into the air, and removes any benefits that could be achieved by the chimney. It simply can not work.
Additional Considerations?
There are a host of other potential problems with the physics of the Super Chimney idea. In fact, every claim that is made on that site is suspect, and most of them are demonstrably wrong.
Unfortunately, given the fundamental flaw in the premise of the Super Chimney, it is impossible to address many of the outrageous claims made. For instance, take the idea that the venting air at the top of the chimney would cool down, condense water vapor, and rain in the vicinity of the tower. My first thought is that, no, this won't happen, you will really get the cloud forming inside the tower, and rising up out of it. However, that requires the air within the tower to have a reasonable temperature profile, which immediately invalidates the crazy claims of a constant updraft of more than 100 m/s. If you did have an updraft in the tower, though, the cloud base would form about where liquid water can exist, which in most environments would be around 1-2km above the surface. The result would be, among other things, a downpour within the tower itself which would cool the lower part of the tower as liquid water fell into the warm air and evaporated, and this would stabilize the column by cooling the low levels. You could actually then imagine outflow from the the base of the tower! (And, by similar reasoning to the original Super Chimney idea, maybe you could then pump cold air down to the surface and solve global warming via refrigeration!)
Another ludicrous claim is that just 10 of these towers would dramatically alter the Earth's climate. Just from a scaling perspective, this can be dismissed. A single tropical thunderstorm is an updraft that reaches from near the surface up to 15km or so, and is several km in diameter. There are thousands of such storms at any given time across the tropics. Yes the energy contained within them is enormous, but the idea that just putting 10 small, but intense storms in fixed locations and expecting them to completely change the temperature structure of the atmosphere is beyond the pale.
In retrospect, I probably should have ignored this topic, as the more I look at that site and think about it, the more and more crazy it is. The whole thing is based on completely misunderstanding the basic physics of the atmosphere, and that is even before we start considering the implications for global warming or energy production. The lesson to be learned is that if an idea doesn't pass snuff on the basic skeptical questions, it probably isn't worth digging into it in any depth, at risk of your own mental well-being. However, just as a reminder that craziness can have consequences, I suggest checking out the website WhatsTheHarm.net.
2009-04-01
Ads that drive content
Just for fun (well, we'll see if it is JUST for fun), I have added Ads by Google to the blog. There's one up there, between the title and the content, and then another down to the right in the bar. There's also an Amazon tag-cloud, but more on that another time. Google tries to target the adds based on the words on the page, which here will include clouds, climate, carbon dioxide, global warming, you see the pattern. Of course, there are only so many advertisers for climate-related topics, and also Google doesn't deal with the semantic content, just the literal words, all with the result that some interesting ads have already been reported.
One in particular is an add for something called the Douglass Report, which is a climate change denier site operated by Dr. William Campbell Douglass. The add takes you to a page that asks for your email address, in return Douglass sends you his report about how climate change is all a big hoax AND a you get a subscription to his medical newsletter.
The claims on that page are absolutely outrageous. Douglass drags out all the old, debunked claims that deniers always use. I don't often deal with these claims here because they've all been beaten to death elsewhere (cf., RealClimate's wiki). Let's just point out the two that really get my goat. First is,
Second, is the tired argument that "these same scientists were trying to convince us the world was cooling just a few decades ago, when that's where the grant money was." No, actually that is just not true. There was discussion of a new ice age, but there was no serious concern that we'd precipitously enter into one, since that isn't how ice ages work. In fact, there was already quite a bit of serious concern about global warming by the mid-1970s. Read more in the BAMS article that tackles this issue in some depth. (See also (1) and (2).)
This guy is also apparently well-known as a medical crackpot, peddling snake oil and discouraging proper health practices. For example, he doesn't think that exposure to sunlight causes melanoma. He also believes that there is no evidence that cholesterol in any amount is bad for you, and that DDT (yes, the poison) might prevent breast cancer! There's more craziness if you do a quick search (example). And I kid you not, he's not only been a guest on Coast-To-Coast, but went on to talk about the health benefits of tobacco!!! (here). The bottom line is that this guy seems to be wrong about everything, and I have to now assume he is a brilliant satirist, as no one could believe all the garbage that comes out of this guys head. So kudos to Dr William Campbell Douglass.
Getting back to the ads on the blog. Here's the great thing. First, we've already gotten quite a kick out of the ads that have shown up, so that makes it all worthwhile. And second, if you can't believe what you're seeing, click it. Worst case scenario is that you make me a few pennies, and cost some terrible web site a few. Good deal.
One in particular is an add for something called the Douglass Report, which is a climate change denier site operated by Dr. William Campbell Douglass. The add takes you to a page that asks for your email address, in return Douglass sends you his report about how climate change is all a big hoax AND a you get a subscription to his medical newsletter.
The claims on that page are absolutely outrageous. Douglass drags out all the old, debunked claims that deniers always use. I don't often deal with these claims here because they've all been beaten to death elsewhere (cf., RealClimate's wiki). Let's just point out the two that really get my goat. First is,
"Scientists have reaped MILLIONS from their global warming 'research.' They've turned supporting global warming - despite what the science really says - into a cash cow!"Oh, don't even get me started. One definitive answer to this canard is that if scientists are getting so much money from studying global warming, why would the vast majority of climate scientists be calling for intense investment in R&D of climate solutions, rather than additional funding for climate studies? If this is about the avarice of scientists, then they'd all be saying, "let's wait and see," but the truth is that almost no one who seriously studies climate change thinks waiting is a reasonable strategy at this point.
Second, is the tired argument that "these same scientists were trying to convince us the world was cooling just a few decades ago, when that's where the grant money was." No, actually that is just not true. There was discussion of a new ice age, but there was no serious concern that we'd precipitously enter into one, since that isn't how ice ages work. In fact, there was already quite a bit of serious concern about global warming by the mid-1970s. Read more in the BAMS article that tackles this issue in some depth. (See also (1) and (2).)
This guy is also apparently well-known as a medical crackpot, peddling snake oil and discouraging proper health practices. For example, he doesn't think that exposure to sunlight causes melanoma. He also believes that there is no evidence that cholesterol in any amount is bad for you, and that DDT (yes, the poison) might prevent breast cancer! There's more craziness if you do a quick search (example). And I kid you not, he's not only been a guest on Coast-To-Coast, but went on to talk about the health benefits of tobacco!!! (here). The bottom line is that this guy seems to be wrong about everything, and I have to now assume he is a brilliant satirist, as no one could believe all the garbage that comes out of this guys head. So kudos to Dr William Campbell Douglass.
Getting back to the ads on the blog. Here's the great thing. First, we've already gotten quite a kick out of the ads that have shown up, so that makes it all worthwhile. And second, if you can't believe what you're seeing, click it. Worst case scenario is that you make me a few pennies, and cost some terrible web site a few. Good deal.
2009-01-19
Climate blog smackdown
So for those who follow the climate blogs (by which I mean the blogs in which climate change deniers' arguments are routinely dismantled with high school math and physics), Tamino has just posted one of the best smackdowns to a denier analysis I've seen in a while. Tamino writes the "Open Mind" blog, and the entry is from 19 January [LINK]. Basically, a denier says that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is not anthropogenic, but natural, and presents a time series analysis of the Mauna Loa CO2 data using carbon isotopes. It probably sounds good if you aren't being critical about it, but in about three lines of algebra, Tamino proves that the analysis is exactly wrong, and the "result" is dictated by the terrible way the analysis was done. Smack. Fail. Totally worth reading.
2008-08-26
Turbulent times at the science-public interface
I read a fair number of climate-related blogs. One of these days I'll try to get some kind of "blog roll" going on the side of the page. In the meantime, there's a small box over there that has items I'd like to share, not always science related, but things I found interesting. Anyway, I sometimes get frustrated with these blogs because it seems like most of their effort is to address/attack/debunk/explain the climate change skeptics/sceptics/deniers/inactivists. This seems less and less useful to me, for a couple of reasons. First, there just aren't that many of those deniers out there that can make waves in the media with anything close to a reasoned argument. Second, just going point by point through their "arguments" to show why they are wrong appears to me to be a weak form or rhetoric. Actually, this is a major problem with the democratic party, too, as they seem to just respond to the outlandish attacks of the republicans.
I think this topic has been addressed in excruciating detail in the climate-blogosphere recently... I should have links to Mooney and other here, but I'm just riffing today. There were a lot of posts about whether or not to directly address the deniers, or whether it was counterproductive. Today I think it is largely counterproductive.
Not to say that these idiotic arguments shouldn't be ripped apart, they should, but we don't need 50 blogs all ripping apart one obscure denialist's claims, as it really just gives them much more "credibility." For example, this weird person that as far as I've seen is only working in the blogosphere and only goes by the name "lucia." She's making all kinds of noise, and because places as high profile as realclimate and deltoid spend time on her, I think she's attracted quite a following. This despite the fact that she is unable to present a reasoned argument that actually answers a question (a recent post by Grumbine demonstrated this).
This is just a bit of a rant, I guess. My point is that I'm now feeling more strongly that refutations of these arguments should simply be compiled in some climate science wiki, where all the people who feel compelled to add their take on a denialist claim should be allowed to add their part. The blogs themselves would be much more interesting if they would start explaining the science of climate change (or impacts of climate change) without the obligatory strawman provided by denialist claims.
From the point of view of marketing climate science and the general findings of the field (e.g. the IPCC report), there need to be stronger statements of the things we know, worded without our normal scientific, passive, conservative language. I've recently seen more of this, even in the recent report on severe weather and climate change, but communication to the public needs to be better. Yes, it probably has to be dumbed down, meaning less nuance and fewer caveats, which as scientists we don't like. However, the public is bombarded with too much information, and the average American is undereducated in basic science, so we have to develop a language to communicate that we are certain that humans are causing climate change, and there are severe risks involved in doing so. And this has to be done without being condescending. Again, this is exactly what the democrats need to do. We need those lists of talking points that the conservative think tanks cook up and distribute. It's sad, and I don't like it, but is there any other way to do it? The ideal way would be to ground all Americans firmly with rational thought and basic science, but that is long-term and probably unrealistic. *Sigh*
Haven't other fields gone through all this? What about AIDS research? Tobacco causing cancer? Evolution, obviously. Stem-cell research... Why can't we start talking amongst ourselves about dealing with the public and the press, without getting bogged down in the details of our own fields? Climate science needs to look to these examples, get the people who have experience, and ask for advice.
[UPDATE: A related post today from Grumbine, discussion versus debate.]
I think this topic has been addressed in excruciating detail in the climate-blogosphere recently... I should have links to Mooney and other here, but I'm just riffing today. There were a lot of posts about whether or not to directly address the deniers, or whether it was counterproductive. Today I think it is largely counterproductive.
Not to say that these idiotic arguments shouldn't be ripped apart, they should, but we don't need 50 blogs all ripping apart one obscure denialist's claims, as it really just gives them much more "credibility." For example, this weird person that as far as I've seen is only working in the blogosphere and only goes by the name "lucia." She's making all kinds of noise, and because places as high profile as realclimate and deltoid spend time on her, I think she's attracted quite a following. This despite the fact that she is unable to present a reasoned argument that actually answers a question (a recent post by Grumbine demonstrated this).
This is just a bit of a rant, I guess. My point is that I'm now feeling more strongly that refutations of these arguments should simply be compiled in some climate science wiki, where all the people who feel compelled to add their take on a denialist claim should be allowed to add their part. The blogs themselves would be much more interesting if they would start explaining the science of climate change (or impacts of climate change) without the obligatory strawman provided by denialist claims.
From the point of view of marketing climate science and the general findings of the field (e.g. the IPCC report), there need to be stronger statements of the things we know, worded without our normal scientific, passive, conservative language. I've recently seen more of this, even in the recent report on severe weather and climate change, but communication to the public needs to be better. Yes, it probably has to be dumbed down, meaning less nuance and fewer caveats, which as scientists we don't like. However, the public is bombarded with too much information, and the average American is undereducated in basic science, so we have to develop a language to communicate that we are certain that humans are causing climate change, and there are severe risks involved in doing so. And this has to be done without being condescending. Again, this is exactly what the democrats need to do. We need those lists of talking points that the conservative think tanks cook up and distribute. It's sad, and I don't like it, but is there any other way to do it? The ideal way would be to ground all Americans firmly with rational thought and basic science, but that is long-term and probably unrealistic. *Sigh*
Haven't other fields gone through all this? What about AIDS research? Tobacco causing cancer? Evolution, obviously. Stem-cell research... Why can't we start talking amongst ourselves about dealing with the public and the press, without getting bogged down in the details of our own fields? Climate science needs to look to these examples, get the people who have experience, and ask for advice.
[UPDATE: A related post today from Grumbine, discussion versus debate.]
2008-02-18
I found the included video from a lecture by Naomi Oreskes on Deltoid. You'll remember Oreskes from her Science article a while back in which she showed that there is strong scientific consensus in the belief that global warming is human-induced. In this lecture, she presents a very brief history of the science of global warming, doing an excellent job of going back to the very roots, and making the important point that scientists have predicted global warming for at least 50 years. A related point is that as time has marched on, the predictions have gotten more detailed, and they've shown to be true so far. I especially think back to the 1988 Hansen paper, which showed projections of climate change from numerical simulations, which has now shown to be a conservative estimate of the warming. In the second half of her lecture, Oreskes discusses the "denial of global warming." This goes back to that now familiar, but surprisingly recent, poll that most Americans still think there is scientific debate about whether global warming is human-induced (versus a "natural cycle" or such). Oreskes asks why this is, when scientists, as she has just shown, really reached consensus about global warming in the 70s/80s and about the cause of the warming in the mid to late 1980s. She traces the origins to the Marshall Institute, and a tactic she calls the "tobacco strategy." She traces the history of the Marshall Institute to its roots as a PR campaign to defend Reagan's star wars program: ultimately a conservative, anti-communist group. She follows the progression, and discusses Fred Singer and others, who have through the past two decades argued against scientific issues essentially to stop government regulation (and thus "creeping communism"). It's a very interesting presentation, clear and objective, and I think shows very well how the "tobacco strategy" has effectively misguided the American public through deliberate manipulation of mass media outlets.
2007-11-26
Watch a YouTube video
This guy on YouTube has spelled out a very nice approach to how "skeptics" should look at the possibility of a changing climate.
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