The Whale Pump

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

Coffee forests threatened by climate change impacts

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

Blame Cheney

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

fancy words

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

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












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

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

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

Republicans, 2010 edition

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

Republican hopefuls deny global warming

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

Mann's op-ed in WaPo

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

Can someone explain why West Virginia is still a state?

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

The Simpson's & Banksy collaborate

In the absence of actual content, I submit entertainment:



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

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

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

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

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

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

Climategate hurt the reputation of climate science among TV meteorologists

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

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

What is the Higgs boson of climate research?

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

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

Muir Russell report is in, findings no surprise

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

The questions now are:

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

The Stanford Study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Wallace Symposium

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

Someday BibTeX's stranglehold will be broken

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

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

A word about titles

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

THE EPIC 2001 STRATOCUMULUS STUDY

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

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

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

Latest GRACE data on Greenland ice mass

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

News from the Arctic, and it's bad

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