Shortly thereafter, PSU started being accused of risking its reputation by “whitewashing” the inquiry with a cover up designed to protect Dr. Mann. The accusations came in form of press releases from think tanks, blog posts from media pundits, as well as some traditional media outlets. A typical example was the Fox News report that Republican Represntative Darrell Issa had called for freezing all federal grants to PSU and Mann until PSU “settled all the charges” against Mann, suggesting that perhaps money was the reason that PSU was allegedly covering up Mann’s supposed research misconduct.

S&R decided to investigate the “whitewash” claims to determine if they had any substance. Here’s what we discovered.

The first question we asked a number of experts was about the overall reputation that PSU has, and whether or not its reputation was good enough to warrant protection. The PSU College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (CEMS) (of which the Meteorology program is part) was ranked #5 for graduate schools by US News and World Reports in 2009, the Geosciences programs were ranked between #2 and #11 when US News ranked geosciences in 2006, and was ranked #8 and #10 by US News for Materials Science and Engineering graduate and undergraduate programs respectively in 2009. Furthermore, the National Science Foundation has twice ranked the CEMS as #1 in the country for research in the last 15 years, and CEMS faculty were ranked #7 in the country for the impact of their published papers from 1997-2001 by Science Watch.

In addition, PSU as a whole was ranked #1 in 2009 for research performed on industry-paid research grantst. Clearly, both the CEMS in particular and Penn State as a whole have an excellent reputation.

According to Dr. Gary K. Ostrander, Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, “[t]he most valuable component of a research university is its reputation.” Because reputation is so critical to attracting grants, donors, faculty, students, and more over the course of years, he said “it has been my experience that universities take allegations of research misconduct very seriously.”

Dr. James W.C. White, Director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, agreed with Ostrander . “We live and die by our good name. We must be quick to identify problems, and thorough in correcting them.” This is why, when the CRU emails were released and accusations of misconduct by Mann began flowing into PSU’s administration, PSU formed an inquiry committee and immediately looked into it. During his S&R interview, Ostrander also pointed out that it was unlikely that any university would be willing to engage in a cover-up: “It is far better to deal with the fallout of the mistakes of one faculty/staff member (if that occurs) than to deal with the fallout of having been involved in a cover-up.”

Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a co-blogger with Mann at the climate blog RealClimate, felt that it was “extremely unlikely” that any university would be involved in a cover up, asking “[w]hy would a university ruin their reputation by attempting to cover up misconduct?” And Dr. Philip W. Mote, professor at Oregon State University and Director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, said “I’m sure universities try first and foremost to protect their reputations above those of individual scientists and wouldn’t be inclined to whitewash.”

When this wide a variety of academics and administrators all feel that a university’s reputation is sacrosanct, one has to wonder how likely it is that any inquiry into research misconduct would be covered up. In Ostrander’s experience, “universities take allegations of research misconduct very seriously and are very responsive to such allegations.” White feels that there’s “no chance at all” that any university would cover up research misconduct, adding that “[l]ying in science is a death penalty, certainly for the scientist, and to the extent that the institution is also culpable, the institution itself.” Clearly, neither man believes that the charges of a whitewash are credible.

Rahmstorf made the point even more strongly during his interview, calling into question the motives of those accusing PSU of a whitewash:

These people would have cried “whitewash” regardless how thorough and objective the inquiry was – they just dislike the outcome. Their response is entirely predictable and has nothing to do with the quality of the inquiry.

So what about the claim made by Fox News and others that PSU’s administration has a financial motive to “whitewash” the Mann inquiry? Ostrander thinks very little of it, saying that “it does not make sense that a top research university would “whitewash” an inquiry when their reputation and millions of dollars in future funding are at stake.” White agreed and pointed out that

we live and die by our good name with reviewers and funding agencies. Why risk the whole institution for one investigator?

White also claimed that Mann’s contribution to PSU’s overall research budget was tiny. S&R decided to verify that claim and investigated the total value of all the research grants that Mann brought into the PSU coffers as compared to the total research money that PSU has earned while Mann’s been a member of the faculty.

According to a list of grants at The Free Republic, Mann has brought in a total of $4.2 million since he joined PSU in 2006, with a significant portion of that money to be spent over the next several years. From 2006 to 2009, Mann’s grants totaled about $1.8 million. In that same period, PSU’s total research income was $2.8 billion ($2,804 million). As a percentage, Mann’s grants represented 0.06% of the total research money that PSU was granted between 2006 and 2009. Clearly, as White pointed out, “[i]t makes no sense that [Mann's] grants could corrupt the whole system.”

As for the allegations of misconduct made against Mann himself, Rahmstorf had this to say:

I don’t think there ever was any serious basis for an official inquiry. Rather, the allegations are part of politically motivated character assassination attacks aimed at individual climate scientists, by people who don’t really care about science at all, but who dislike climate policy and the idea of reducing emissions. However, a university has little choice but to properly investigate if such allegations are raised.

None of these points fully address the accusations that the entire PSU inquiry process was a “whitewash,” however. S&R asked Ostrander, the Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education, to describe what a typical university inquiry process is like:

The typical process when an allegation of misconduct is brought to the administration is for a responsible official to conduct a preliminary assessment to determine if this allegation has any credibility. If there is reason to believe any inappropriate behavior may have occurred the matter is referred to a committee (usually made up of faculty and sometimes administrators) to conduct an investigation. The first step is designed to weed out frivolous claims. The second step is typically a detailed analysis of the allegation. In my experience they take a lot of time and reflect a vast amount of work on the part of the faculty to get to the truth and make sure that everyone involved/related to the allegation is heard.

Depending on the outcome of the investigation the faculty member may face discipline to include, in the case of the most serious offenses, termination from the university and having the matter referred to the criminal justice system.

According to the PSU inquiry committee report, the completed inquiry roughly equates to the first phase of the process described above by Osteander, the phase designed to “weed out frivolous claims.” There have been complaints by a number of Mann’s accusers (such as Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit) that the inquiry committee ruled without consulting anyone outside of PSU. If it was the inquiry committee’s opinion that the first three allegations against Mann were obviously incredible, then the lack of contact during this phase is not necessarily unreasonable or unexpected, and claims of a whitewash would therefore be premature. However, during the investigation phase of the process, it would be entirely reasonable to assume that Mann’s accusers would be contacted during the course of the investigation and given an opportunity to have their say.

S&R contacted a number of other representatives of research universities and asked their opinion of the accusations of “whitewash.” Many of them claimed that they hadn’t been following the issue closely enough to be willing to comment. When asked why that might be the case when so many bloggers and media have been accusing PSU of a “whitewash,” Ostrander replied that he had “grown to appreciate that [he] will not know what really happened” unless it was an investigation of someone on his faculty. Instead, Ostrander chose to leave the details of such allegations to the individuals involved in the investigations.

Penn State University is a tier-1 research university with an excellent national reputation. There is no reason to believe that the PSU administration would risk the university’s excellent reputation for any single faculty researcher, and especially not for such a small monetary gain as a few million dollars over the last four years. Ostrander said that “[i]f universities and justice systems have fair and transparent processes it should be possible to arrive at something approaching the truth in most cases.” To this point, the PSU inquiry appears to have been fair and transparent. If the investigation of the one remaining allegation remains as fair and transparent as the inquiry itself was, then there is every reason to believe that the results of the investigation will be accepted by scientists and academics around the world, whatever the results may be. However, if Rahmstorf’s opinion on the political nature of the allegations against Mann is correct, then there will be a group of so-called climate change skeptics who will only accept the results if they convict Mann of misconduct. If that happens, then the skeptics will have proven that they are not actually skeptics according to any accepted definition thereof.

Image Credit
Pennsylvania State University

Thanks to Dr. Ostrander, Dr. White, Dr. Rahmstorf, and Dr. Mote for taking the time to be interviewed by S&R.

After the CRU emails were released in November, 2009, there was widespread accusations of misconduct against most of the scientists mentioned in the emails. Today, the Penn State University (PSU) inquiry committee investigating accusations made against Dr. Michael Mann publicly released its findings. The committee found that, with respect to the most serious three accusations out of four, “there exists no credible evidence” that Mann had committed research misconduct. The inquiry committee empaneled an investigation committee to look into the last accusation – that Mann had “seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community” – because they could make a determination about this and because

Only with such a review will the academic community and other interested parties likely feel that Penn State has discharged its responsibility on this matter.

According to the report, neither the inquiry committee nor the University received any formal allegations of research misconduct before or during the inquiry, so the committee generated four allegations after “[reducing] to allegation form the many different accusations that were received from parties outside of the University.” The accusations were reduced down to the following four:

• Did [Mann] engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to suppress or falsify data?
• Did [Mann] engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data, related to AR4, as suggested by Phil Jones?
• Did [Mann] engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any misuse of privileged or confidential information available to [him] in [his] capacity as an academic scholar?
• Did [Mann] engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities?

After reviewing all the CRU emails that Mann sent, received, or even discussed Mann’s work, and after the inquiry committee researched other relevant information from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), science journal articles, OP-ED columns, and even internet blogs, the committee interviewed Mann. Several days after that interview, the committee also interviewed Dr. Gerald North, the lead author of the NAS paper that exonerated Mann’s research and the so-called hockey stick temperature graph in 2006, as well as the former editor of Mann’s Science Magazine associated science article. And the outcome of all the research and interviews was that there was no substance to the first three allegations above.

The inquiry committee specifically pointed out that the “trick” email that has drawn a lot of attention used the word “trick”

to describe a mathematical insight that solves the problem. For example, see in a classic text on quantum mechanics by David Parks: “The foregoing explanation of the velocity paradox involves no new assumptions; the basic trick, the representation of a modulated wave as the superposition of two (or more) unmodulated ones, has already been used to explain interference phenomena…”

This is a point that has been made repeatedly ever since the CRU emails were released last November.

The fourth and final allegation will be reviewed by an investigation committee because the inquiry committee wanted a group of professors (the inquiry committee was composed of administrators) to determine if Mann’s private emails cast doubt on his professionalism and because of the risks to PSU’s public reputation. In addition, the administrators didn’t feel that they could judge what qualified as “accepted practice” for Mann and his field of climatology when accepted practice can vary from one scientific discipline to another.

Overall, however, the PSU inquiry committee found that the three allegations of research misconduct were all without merit and that they were unqualified to determine whether the final allegation had merit or not.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the news of Mann’s exoneration on three of the four accusations has been met with spin from partisan media, accusations of bias, and even claims of conspiracy.

While there’s been a number of media sites that spun this story in a fashion that focused exclusively on the investigation while downplaying the fact that the three most serious allegations were all found to be without merit, this Washington Examiner piece went a bit too far with their spin. They wrote that PSU officials were investigating “at least one charge of professional misconduct.” Given that the inquiry report found exactly one potential problem, the “at least one” is unjustified and represents blatant spin.

Update: World Net Daily commits as great a sin of spin as the Washington Examiner does, claiming that “[e]ven colleagues want ‘warming’ scientist investigated” and “[a] panel of fellow faculty members at Penn State University has recommended further investigation….” Make that University administrators, not fellow faculty. There’s also no mention of the fact that Mann was exonerated on three of four allegations, an attempt to show that Mann is out of step with mainstream scientists by comparing him to the thoroughly debunked OISM Petition Project, and pointing to the biased and flawed work of Icecap’s Joe D’Aleo.

Paul Chesser at the American Spectator blog has forgone the spin and flat-out accused the University of bias. Chesser says that the PSU committee’s reference to the CRU emails as “stolen” casts doubt on the committee’s objectivity, that the administrators can’t be objective given the fact that Mann’s reputation reflects on theirs, and he accuses PSU of committing a “whitewash.” Tobacco and Big Oil shill Steve Milloy also accused PSU of bias in a press release that accuses the committee of not being thorough and essentially calls them liars with respect to whether or not Mann deleted emails under an FOI request from the UK. And here’s another example, from Pajamas Media, where the common “whitewash” and “greywash” memes of Milloy and American Spectator are again repeated.

Update: More accusations of supposed “whitewash” by Green Hell, and Andrew Bolt (with grand conspiracy claims in the comments).

But the posts get really interesting at blogs like Michelle Malkin’s and Big Government, where the commentators claim outright that this is an example of a leftist/socialist/statist plot, or that PSU is beholden to the money that Mann has brought into the university, or that Mann is guilty of fraud and deserves to be imprisoned. James Delingpole at the Telegraph is perhaps the most extreme, claiming that “Michael Mann is as innocent as OJ” and repeating false claims about Mann’s work on the pre-industrial temperature record.

And, given the history between Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit and Mann, as well as the climate disruption denial stoked by both McIntyre and Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat, it’s not surprising that both blogs illustrate spin, bias, and paranoid conspiracies.

Thankfully, Mann has his defenders as well, among them Kevin Grandia of DeSmogBlog and the Huffington Post, Pete Altman at the NRDC Switchboard blog, climatologist and science blogger Eli Rabett, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, to name just a few.

And there are a number of other observers of this investigation who view it as a partial exoneration because they take the PSU inquiry committee at their word barring proof of misconduct by the committee itself. In fact, most of the traditional media falls into this category, such as James Broder of the NYTimes, The Canadian Press, The Seattle Times, even Ars Technica.

Update: Some more examples of good reporting on the PSU finding include The LA Times, the Catallaxy Files blog, and The Great Beyond blog at Nature.

This story isn’t over. Mann said as much in his statement:

Three of the four allegations have been dismissed completely. Even though no evidence to substantiate the fourth allegation was found, the University administrators thought it best to convene a separate committee of distinguished scientists to resolve any remaining questions about academic procedures.

This particular chapter in the Climategate saga won’t be closed until after the five faculty investigation committee completes their investigation into the last allegation sometime in the next 120 days. And if the response of the denialosphere to this partial exoneration is any indication, the Mann saga won’t be over even then. What will probably happen with respect to Mann is what has happened repeatedly with respect to climate disruption science over the last decade or more – self-described skeptics and climate disruption deniers will claim that this time it’s the end of climate disruption.

No, this time.

No, this time….

Disclosure: I attended PSU for my BSEE back in the 1990s.

Thanks to Kevin Grandia of DeSmogBlog for posting this over at HuffPo, where I initially came across it.

Unlike gardens and crops, wild plants lack human caretakers providing fertilizer. Wild plants have to scrounge for their soil nutrients wherever and however they can get them, and it is often the case that soil nutrients, especially nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, limit how fast forests, grasslands, etc. can grow. A paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters shows that the availability of soil nutrients will probably limit how much human-emitted carbon dioxide (CO₂) plants can absorb. This limit will prevent plants from absorbing as much CO₂ as climate scientists have modeled, and so global warming will likely be worse than current projections.

Even though the bulk of the atmosphere is nitrogen, plants are not able to make use of that nitrogen directly. Instead, most plants rely on bacteria known as “nitrogen fixing” bacteria to convert nitrogen in the air into the nitrite and nitrate that plants then use to grow. Nitrogen-fixing plants such as peanuts, soybeans, and alfalfa form symbiotic relationships with nitrogen fixing bacteria, and it’s this relationship that is the reason farmers rotate crops like corn with soybeans – the corn uses the nitrogen in the soil while the soybeans put at least some if the nitrogen back.

According to the paper, most nitrogen fixing occurs in the tropics (defined by the GRL paper as between 30°N and 30°S latitude, roughly between New Orleans in and the country of Uruguay in South America), where temperatures are nearly optimal for nitrogen fixing bacteria. Areas outside of the tropics produce about 1/10^th of the fixed nitrogen that is produced in the tropics, largely because of cooler temperatures. As anthropogenic CO₂ emissions drive up global mean temperature, the paper projects that nitrogen fixing outside the tropics will rise, but the increase will be more than offset by a reduction of nitrogen fixing in the tropics. As a result, the total amount of available soil nitrogen will drop as a result of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions.

Without increasing the amount of fixed nitrogen in the soil, plants will not be able to convert the anthropogenic CO₂ into growth. As a result, recent estimates of CO₂ absorption are too high. The paper estimates that insufficient soil nitrogen will lead to between 16 and 149 Gigatons of unabsorbed carbon (GtC) by 2050 under best case model parameters. The worst-case parameters produce between 158 and 253 GtC unabsorbed carbon by 2050.

A couple of different climate research groups have tried to determine how much CO₂ human activity can emit into the atmosphere without exceeding 2° C temperature rise by 2100. Their “carbon budget” is no more than 750 or 1000 GtC by 2050. However, these budgets do not appear to include the likely reduced absorption by plants globally.

If CO₂ absorption by plants is too high by as much as the GRL paper suggests, then it will be even more difficult to stay below the projected danger threshold of 2° C warming. In fact, if emissions grow at an annual rate of approximately 2.4% (2.4% is the average global growth from 2004 to 2008 as calculated from the Energy Information Administration), then human activity will emit 750 GtC by 2029 and 1000 GtC by 2035. Removing about 250 GtC from the carbon budget means that human activity exceeds its budget approximately five years earler, 2024 and 2030 respectively.

The paper’s authors also estimate the warming potential of the unabsorbed anthropogenic CO₂. The authors estimate that global warming will increase between 0.38 and 0.72 C by 2050 over the approximately 1.0-1.5° C warming estimated by the IPCC AR4 WG1, Chapter 10. Put another way, the warming could be between 40% and 50% greater than currently estimated by climate models, depending on what model scenario is used for comparison. Right now, CO₂ are greater than the high emissions case (A2) model from the IPCC AR4.

This paper shows that plants are not just going to grow because of an abundance of CO₂ like some people claim. In fact, the claim that CO₂ is “plant food” is based on greenhouse farmers who increase CO₂ concentrations in their greenhouses in order to grow larger crops. But greenhouse farmers don’t just add CO₂ – they also fertilize their crops with abundant soil nutrients like nitrogen. And as this paper shows, nitrogen-limited natural ecosystems will not respond to elevated CO₂ in the same way that nitrogen-rich greenhouses do.

Thanks to Dr. Ying-Ping Wang of CSIRO for the providing me a copy of his paper for this post.

Image credits:
vivergreen.com

If Watts were correct, this would be a major problem. If the entire US temperature record was unreliable, then conclusions drawn from the temperature record could also be similarly flawed. At a minimum, the scientific papers using the temperature record would have to be revisited. So a thorough investigation of Watts’ conclusion by scientists was warranted. And now a new peer-reviewed paper by scientists at the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) have analyzed the temperature record and found that Watts’ conclusion of a flawed temperature record runs contrary to the actual data.

Let’s start by looking a little closer at how Watts’ reached his conclusion that the US temperature data was unreliable.

According to Watt’s white paper, 89% of the surveyed temperature stations in the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) do not meet new NOAA standards for proximity to heat sources, location away from shade and the crest of hills, and so on. Watts chose a station in Bainbridge, Georgia, as his main example (pictured at right). It shows that the thermometer is located about 9 feet from an air conditioning unit and in the shade rather than the desired 100 meters from any heat sources. Furthermore, the original thermometer enclosure can be seen just above “14.3′” distance indicator in a much better, but still not ideal location. Given the photographic evidence, it’s impossible to claim that the new thermometer location is ideal. As Watts points out, “the new station may report higher temperatures than the old station even if ambient temperatures remain unchanged.”

But this statement presents a problem. Watts says that the new station “may” report higher temperatures. But do we know for certain that it will? Determining what effect the AC unit and shade tree have on the temperature measurement requires an actual analysis of the temperature data from the new thermometer and location. Watts’ white paper has no such analysis. In fact, in the entire paper, Watts presents a brief analysis of only a single station’s temperature record, and it’s not this station. One station out of a total 865 stations that had been surveyed at the time of the white paper’s publication, and out of a total of 1221 USHCN stations in the continental United States, is not enough to cast doubt on the entire network no matter how bad the analysis turned out.

Watts uses words like “may” and “likely” and “could have” throughout his white paper. In fact, just about the only firm conclusion that Watts reaches is that the temperature record is unreliable. But he’s based that conclusion entirely on qualitative information known as “metadata” (information that may or may not affect the accuracy of a measurement) rather than on quantitative (mathematical) data analysis. With respect to thermometer measurements, the proximity of the thermometer to a heat source like an AC unit or an electrical transformer is metadata. So is the type of thermometer used. And the time of day that the temperature measurement was taken. And the color and composition of the thermometer enclosure. And whether or not the thermometer moved from one place to another. And so on.

The problem is that metadata is a tool to determine if there might be a problem in the real data, but it takes actual data analysis to establish if there’s a problem. And analyzing a single station (Watts used Lampasas, Texas) isn’t enough to draw any statistically valid conclusions, such as reliability or unreliablility, about any other station or about the temperature monitoring network as a whole.

Watts makes a number of other mistakes in his white paper as well. One of the larger errors is that he claims, based exclusively on qualitative metadata, that “89% of the stations surveyed produce unreliable data by NOAA’s own definition (emphasis original).” It’s not possible to make that claim without a detailed mathematical analysis of the temperature record for the supposedly unreliable stations, and Watts shows no such analysis. Watts also claims that “the reported increase in temperature during the twentieth century falls well within the margin of error of the instrument record,” but doesn’t take into account the simple techniques that can be utilized to reduce error in a measurement – techniques like averaging multiple samples, correcting for known biases in equipment, filtering, homogenization of station errors, and so on.

Watts does, however, make a couple of good recommendations in his white paper. One of them is that “a pristine dataset should be produced from the best stations and then compared to the remainder of the USHCN network to quantify the total magnitude of bias.” While this is something that Watts himself probably should have done before making a blanket declaration that the US temperature record was bad, it’s still necessary to quantitatively assess the impacts of all the metadata on real temperature measurements. And that analysis is what the NCDC team undertook in their new paper titled “On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperate Record”.

What the NCDC scientists found was that, contrary to Watts’ claim of unreliability, the difference between good and poor sited thermometers was small and thus the US temperature record is reliable.

The NCDC scientists reached this conclusion by looking at thermometer stations scattered around the continental US that were in the surfacestations.org database and broke them up into two groups, one each for good and poor thermometer siting. Then the scientists calculated the monthly temperatures at each station and compared the results of the good stations to the poor sited stations, both before and after adjusting for discontinuities (aka “homogenization”) in the records. When they did this, they discovered that, contrary to what Watts expected, the unadjusted data showed that poor sites showed cooler maximum temperatures and only slightly warmer minimum temperatures, while the adjusted data showed almost no difference whatsoever. This is shown in the image below.

Furthermore, when the scientists continued their analysis, they found that the vast majority of the difference in the unadjusted temperature came not as a result of the location of the thermometer as Watts had claimed, but rather from changes in the technology used to measure temperature (liquid-in-glass thermometers vs. electronic) and from a widespread change from taking measurements in the afternoon to taking them in the morning. In fact, these two changes represented 90% of the adjustment required for good sited temperature stations and 72% of the adjustment needed for poorly sited stations.

The fact that the two transitions mentioned above represents so much of the overall adjustment disproves another claim of Watts’, namely that the homogenization process itself transferred hot temperatures from poorly sited stations to good stations. Had Watts’ claim been correct, then the time of day adjustment would account for a much smaller percentage of the total adjustment. In fact, the data shows that time of day adjustments account for less of the adjustments made to poorly sited stations (72% vs. 90% for good sited stations), suggesting that the good stations are actually correcting the poor ones.

Watts also claimed that the transition from LiG thermometers to electronic thermometers took too long to correct and wouldn’t show up in the data. The analysis in the NCDC paper shows that this claim is also incorrect. In fact, the transition occurred mostly in the mid 1980s, and the transition is clearly visible in the maximum temperature graphs of the figure below where the “adjusted maximum” crosses the red line (0.0 degrees C).

In addition, Watts’ surfacestation.org project classified USHCN temperature stations by using criteria developed for a new generation of climate monitoring stations, known as the United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN). The USCRN stations and the criteria by which they’re gauged as “good” or “poor” are newer and significantly more restrictive than the quality criteria for the USHCN. So Watts’ use of the CRN standards for USHCN stations is something of an apples/oranges comparison. However, the USCRN has 60 months of good data that can be compared to the most recent 60 months of USHCN data. The result is a statistical correlation (r²) of 0.998 and 0.996 for the maximum and minimum monthly temperatures respectively. While this is a short period of correlation, it shows that, at least recently, the USHCN data is clearly reliable. As the NCDC scientists point out,

the value of the USCRN as a benchmark for reducing the uncertainty of history observations from the USHCN and other networks will only increase with time.

The image below visually illustrates the close correlation of the USCRN (black dashes) data to the USHCN data.

Finally, Watts claimed that if the US surface temperature record was unreliable, then by extension, the entire global surface temperature record must be similarly unreliable, since “the U.S. temperature record is widely regarded as being the most reliable of the international databases.” While Watts offered no documentary support for this statement, if we accept his logic, then the results of the NCDC paper clearly show that the international records must be reliable because as the US records have been shown to be. However, it’s certainly possible that the international databases are less reliable than the US database, and so the accuracy of Watts’ original statement is questionable at best.

Ultimately, the paper’s conclusion represents a clear rejection of Watts’ conclusions:

[O]ur analysis and the earlier study by Peterson 2006 illustrate the need for data analysis in establishing the role of station exposure characteristics on temperature trends no matter how compelling the circumstantial evidence of bias may be. In other words, photo and site surveys do not preclude the need for data analysis, and concerns over exposure must be evaluated in light of other changes in observation practice such as new instrumentation.

The NCDC scientists directly acknowledge Watts’ effort at documenting and categorizing the USHCN sites via the surfacestations.org project. And even though Watts’ conclusions in the Heartland Institute white paper cannot be supported, the work he organized and accomplished via a legion of volunteers at surfacestations.org represents a significant contribution to climate science and the surface temperature record in the United States. Unfortunately for Watts, he rushed his white paper to print before he had verified that his conclusions were justified by the measured data.

Ever since Watts and the Heartland Institute published Watts’ white paper, a large number of self-described climate disruption skeptics have been using the white paper as “proof” that that temperature records are riddled with errors. These so-called skeptics claim that the qualitative metadata about the surface stations make strong conclusions about the state of the global climate impossible. The new paper authored the NCDC scientists shows those claims to be wishful thinking. The temperature record clearly shows that the U.S. climate has warmed significantly over the last 130 years, and this paper serves as yet another proof of the robustness of that observation.

Other voices discussing this paper:

• Eli Rabett
• Skeptical Science
• DeSmogBlog
• Joe Romm
• Deltoid
• Wunderblog
• Robert A. Pielke Sr

Image credits:
Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres
surfacestations.org

Back in 2007, Working Group 2 (WG2) of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) put together a large list of what climate disruption was likely to impact around the world. One of the impacts was reduced availability of fresh water due to rapidly melting glaciers around the world, and especially in the Himalayas. One of the specific claims was that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, an amazingly and likely unrealistically fast rate of melting. After an Indian government minister questioned this claim, scientists looked into it and found that the date was incorrect and that internal procedures for vetting references weren’t followed in this particular case. As as result, the IPCC has issued a formal statement of apology for the error.

And if this were about any other topic except climate disruption, that would be the end of it.

But given the denial echo chamber, that’s not the end of it. Instead, we have Patrick J. Michaels. We have conservative columnist Lorne Gunter of the National Post essentially claiming that the IPCC has failed utterly due to this single error. We have Peter Foster, also of the National Post, claiming that this “is further evidence that the entire IPCC process has been corrupt from the start,” even as he acknowledges that the error represents a mere 300 words in a 3000 page document. Rick Moran of the libertarian blog American Thinker says this is “simply one more indication that the proponents of AGW don’t care about the science and are promoting a political agenda.” And that from a blog that starts with a complaint that climate activists want “to use this information to steal trillions from the world’s most productive nations.” Pot, meet kettle.

I’d like to see anyone write 3000 pages of scientific data and technical detail without messing up a few times. That this relatively minor point is being proclaimed loudly around the land as the a death blow to the IPCC’s AR4 conclusions means that all the other supposed death blows since 2007 have failed to take. Ben Webster of the Times Online makes a very good point when he says

Climate sceptics around the world have spent two years scrutinizing every claim made by the panel. So far they have identified one serious error; it seems unlikely that they will find many more.

So yes, the IPCC made an error here. But the general conclusion that glaciers are melting hasn’t moved a micrometer as a result. Tibet’s glaciers have still melted so much that scientists can’t detect the radiation from US and Soviet nuclear tests in the 1950s. Glaciers around Juneau, Alaska have still melted so much that the land is rebounding amazingly quickly. Glaciers in Switzerland are still melting fast enough that previously stored organic pollutants like DDT are being re-released into the environment at dangerously high concentrations.

This contrived scandal is fated to go the way of all the other climate scandals that have been created out of the ether – it’ll become just another “fatal blow” to anthropogenic climate disruption that is steamrollered by actual climate science and data. Soon, this too will become a “scandal” only in the minds of the truly reality-challenged climate disruption deniers.

The worst distortion is that Heartland says that the survey is more widely applicable than it actually is. In different parts of the article, Heartland claims that the survey applies a) to all American Meteorological Society (AMS) broadcast meteorologists, b) to all AMS members, and c) to all scientists. Here are the three applicable quotes:

Only one in four American Meteorological Society broadcast meteorologists agrees with United Nations’ claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent global warming….

The survey of AMS meteorologists shows only a small minority of AMS members agree with the AMS bureaucracy’s position statement….

The survey results contradict the oft-repeated assertion that a consensus of scientists believes humans are causing a global warming crisis. (emphasis added)

These three claims are not only incompatible with each other, but they’re also in opposition to what the paper reporting the 2008 survey results actually says.

According to the BAMS paper, “Opportunities and Obstacles for Television Weathercasters to Report on Climate Change”, the 2008 survey actually applies only to the 121 meteorologists who responded to the online survey. As such, the survey is self-selected and isn’t statistically valid for all AMS broadcast meteorologists as Heartland claims. In addition, the survey was only sent to AMS weather forecasters who have a college degree in meteorology, and the AMS membership is over “14,000 professionals, professors, students, and weather enthusiasts”. For that reason, the survey can’t say anything about the larger AMS membership’s views on climate even though Heartland makes that claim too. Finally, 60 self-selected respondents rejecting the science behind anthropogenic climate disruption says precisely nothing about scientists – physicists, chemists, geologists, climatologists, et al – in general. The claims in the Heartland article are clearly incorrect.

In another distortion of the BAMS paper, the Heartland article fails to provide critical context for a claim it makes. Heartland points out that “a prior survey of all television weather forecasters – including ones without meteorological training – produced a heavy percentage of skeptics,” but neglects to mention that the 2002 survey in question found

widespread ignorance of and misinformation about basic climate change science is evident, and as the data describe, much of that can be connected to the values and beliefs that weathercasters hold about the topic….

The results of this survey indicate that many television weathercasters have created dissent in areas in which scientific consensus exists. Their misunderstandings of the basic principles of meteorology, which also apply to climate change, are baffling and ultimately can be explained in this sample by their own politicizing of the science.

In other words, the weather forecasters are guilty of making climate change a political issue because they ignore the actual climate science. Yet Heartland neglects to mention this context.

Heartland also interviewed one of the weather forecasters responsible for politicizing the science of climate disruption, ICECAP’s Joe D’Aleo. D’Aleo guessed incorrectly about the purpose of the recent survey and BAMS paper, saying

This survey likely was conducted in an attempt to isolate a “more scientifically trained” subset of broadcast meteorologists that could be touted as more scientifically knowledgeable than television weathercasters as a whole. The survey shows, however, that such an attempt has backfired.

If D’Aleo had actually read the BAMS paper, he’d know that his guess was not the purpose of the survey. Instead, the BAMS paper points out that these individuals were surveyed specifically because

they are the primary targets of the new online instructional course that will count toward AMS professional development credits.

And the purpose of that course is to educate weather forecasters about how climatologists have attributed climate disruption to human influences and how climate models work and differ from weather models, as well as to provide a reference list of recent information for forecasters to use on a day-to-day basis.

The BAMS paper’s conclusions are that meteorologists need more education into the differences between climatology and meteorology, between climate and weather. From the paper;

In his blog, John Coleman makes many reasonable assertions, but one in particular relates to the distinction between climate and weather (or climatology and meteorology). “Global warming is not a religion, it’s not something you believe in, it is science, the science of meteorology,” he says. While he’s absolutely correct that it’s not something to “believe” in, he’s incorrect that climate change is just the science of meteorology. It is the science of climatology, and while the two share many common foundations, the scale and scope of the two are quite different and reflect the need for further education to build on the commonalities while elucidating the distinctions.

And Heartland? They ignore this critical distinction entirely, instead quoting the meteorologist D’Aleo as saying “from my observation, the opinion of broadcast meteorologists on this is issue (sic) is similar to the opinions of all fields of practicing meteorologists.” As far as Heartland is concerned, there is no difference between climatology and meteorology, just as they maintain that there is no difference in expertise between 32,000 people with bachelor of science degrees and thousands of actual, practicing scientists.

The Heartland Institute has a long history of distorting facts to serve the economic interest of their donors, and they continue their campaign of misinformation with their ongoing denial of human-caused climate disruption.

However, today it appeared that Judicial Watch and number of large climate denier blogs didn’t get the memo. Judicial watch issued a press release that claimed

“This email traffic ought to be embarrassing for NASA. Given the recent Climategate scandal, NASA has an obligation to be completely transparent with its handling of temperature data. Instead of insulting those who point out their mistakes, NASA scientists should engage the public in an open, professional and honest manner,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Apparently, neither Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat.com nor the aforementioned Steve McIntyre were aware that the emails had been released, since both deniers put up fresh posts repeating the Judicial Watch press release in the last couple of days. Furthermore, Telegraph blogger (and one of the more vocal Climategate pundits) James Delingpole also got caught by the press release, even going so far as to ask

Has Climategate moved to the US? Looks like it from this story at Watts Up With That.

After reading the emails myself, it’s clear to me that Delingpole must have come unmoored if he seriously thinks that these emails show anything even remotely like another climate non-scandal. And while neither Watts nor McIntyre have made the same claim that Delingpole made, both men did link to the Judicial Watch press release and both have been content to permit the comment threads to claim “scandal!” on their behalf.

Put simply, the emails show the GISS scientists acting professionally and in and open and transparent manner with reporters and McIntyre himself. To illustrate, let’s read some of the emails ourselves.

Gavin Schmidt wrote, in reference to responding to McIntyre:

I would suggest being more specific about what was assumed and what you will do now. The stats you had for the number of stations which had positive and negative offsets would be appropriate. You might also want to thank him for bringing this to our attention. The first because he’ll ask you anyway or work it out himself, the second since it doesn’t hurt to be gracious.

Reto Ruedy, in his email response to McIntyre:

..and I’d like to thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Ruedy also contacted the National Geographic Society to make sure that they updated their maps:

I checked what this correction does to your map and it does change the colors somewhat over parts of the US; the rest of the world is unaffected. Even the change over the US is way within the maring of error (0.5 C). So there is little need to make any changes.

Ruedy wrote several emails to Leticia Sorg of Redacao Epoca which show him patiently explaining how McIntyre’s overblown claims about the US have no impact on global climate (a point I made myself back in 2007). Sorg asked “Considering [the 1934/1998 ranking change], would it be possible to say that the planet is becoming hotter and hotter?” to which Ruedy replied

To answer your question, given the existing sampling error (.1-.2C): No – we cannot draw any conclusion about our planet from the US data (much less from the rankings you show below)

In other words, the emails show the scientists discussing their work, politely explaining things to journalists and to McIntyre, and generally being normal people.

McIntyre, however, doesn’t exactly come off nearly as well as the GISS scientists in these emails. McIntyre asked on August 4, 2007,

In addition, could you provide me with any documentaiton (additional to already published material) providing information on the calculation of GISS raw and adjusted series from USHCN versions, including relevant source code.

Ruedy points out that, as of McIntyre’s request, all the source code is already publicly available:

The software we spend close to 100% of our time in developing and which is the real basis or [sic] our work (in addition to general physics and chemistry), is openly available (giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE) to anybody.

And yet McIntyre, in a later email on August 8, 2007 (four days after his initial request and a day after Ruedy pointed out that the source code was publicly available), asks again for source code:

I would like to assess the impact of these modifications on the US and global averages for myself. I would appreciate a copy of the source code used for these calculations.

Reto Ruedy, responding to a request from a NASA press officer about McIntyre:

The blog [Climate Audit] you attached is a prime example of what gives bloggers a really bad name….

[McIntyre] omits that the global mean time series (which is generally considered the standard measure for global warming) is unaffected [by the small errors in the US record that McIntyre discovered].

He concentrates on US time series which (US covering less than 2% of the world) is so noisy and has such a large margin of error that no conclusions can be drawn from it at this point; showing the plot of annual means before and after the correction would have made the whole article a joke since the differences are barely visible.

He had to use the device of ranking the years rather than showing the plots to make any point at all. The problem with rankings is that there are large clumps of years which are equal within the margin of error and rankings within these clumps are purely accidental.

He finds it astounding that years 1934 and 1998 reversed ranks, not remembering that the corrections only affected years 2000-2006, hence that there is no possible connection there.

And McIntyre had been using a ‘bot to download every bit of data from GISS and complained when his IP was blocked (a point that McIntyre made today in the comments at climateaudit.org). Schmidt wrote on August 16, 2007

Reto and Rob Schmunk have the details. [McIntyre] was using a robot to automatically download pages that robots weren’t allowed to (because of the server demands of interactive scripts) and Rob blocked the IP. After a couple of emails back and forth, he was allowed to continue on weekends/evenings.

The webmaster’s account of McIntyre’s actions goes like this:

On about May 16, around 10:30 or 11:00 p.m., as I was getting ready to leave GISS for the night, I belatedly checked the error logs on the two web servers and discovered that there were several thousand errors in the log on Web2. On a normal day there would be about 500…..

Further investigation revealed that someone had been firing off requests to Web2 since about 2:00 that afternoon for the station data and by the time I looked into the situation, there had been at least 16,000 requests. Perhaps half of these had gone to addresses in the CGI directory, which means that activating CGI scripts to extract data, etc….

Plainly this activity was from an “automated” agent, which in rough parlance is usually called a “robot”….

As the robot on may 16 came from a generic ISP address rather than, say, an academic address and further because it’s “user-agent” tag provided no further information about who was running it, and _also_ because the GISS websites have “robots.txt” files which instruct all well-behaved web robots to stay out of the CGI directories, I cut off access to the ISP in question to the websites on Web2.

The next day I received e-mail from McIntyre asking what was up. He did not identify himself or on whose behalf he was acting….

All I know is that my first contact with him came because he was blasting umpteen thousand requests at the webservers.

I have no idea how much traffic McIntyre’s website gets, and I don’t know that I havve ever even looked at it. His tone in his e-mail was on the arrogant side, so I had no desire to prolong communication with him any longer than was necessary.

In other words, McIntyre created a ‘bot to scrape all the GISS data up and download it and did so in a way that a) interfered with the operation of GISS’ server, b) ignored instructions that the GISS webmaster had put in place to prevent overloading the servers, and c) he got annoyed when he was shut down. If that had been me (and I’ve managed websites from time to time), I’d have suspected an attack and done exactly what the webmaster did.

Columnist Mark Steyn doesn’t come off very well either, given the actual email responses McIntyre got. A Steyn column is quoted at length in a GISS email dated August 13, 2007, from Stephen Volz. The quote says in part:

So why is 1998 no longer America’s record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow called Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove that there was a bug in NASA’s handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible, and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an “oversight” that would be corrected in the next “data refresh.” The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings. (emphasis mine)

All in all, the emails show McIntyre being a jerk, the GISS scientists responding politely even to repeated, unreasonable requests from McIntyre, and the GISS scientists managing quite well under the stress of a media circus based on statistically insignificant differences that had no bearing on the actual error that McIntyre corrected.

So this isn’t Climategate 2.0 (Climategate 1.0 wasn’t Climategate either, for that matter), even though Judicial Watch and James Delingpole both seem to think so. And while Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre aren’t personally claiming that this a new Climategate, they’ve done nothing as of the writing of this post to correct the record at their websites, making any misperceptions of a scandal by readers Watts’ and McIntyre’s responsibility.

Furthermore, the content of the actual emails shows that the GISS scientists did engage McIntyre and reporters in an open and professional manner. GISS also openly and transparently permitted McIntyre to continue scraping all the data off the site after getting him to agree to do it on off-hours so as not to overload the GISS servers. Amazingly enough, GISS acted in 2007 just as Judicial Watch’s president, Tom Fitton, demanded last week.

Thanks to Eli Rabett for pointing this out, albeit indirectly.

According to the 2009WEO [World Energy Outlook], global emissions in 2020 are projected to be about 5 Gt for the reference scenario. According to the 450 ppm scenario, global emissions peak around 2015 at the level of 43.7 Gt and remain broadly stable at that level before starting to decline in 2020.

The UN Secretariat’s “reference scenario” puts the global emissions peak at or above 550 ppm, occurring after 2020, and at least 3 °C.

Most scientists studying climate believe that 2 °C is relatively safe for avoiding abrupt climate transitions, but that the higher you go above that, the more likely things are to get really bad really fast.

According to The Guardian:

The analysis seriously undermines the statements by governments that they are aiming to limit emissions to a level ensuring no more than a 2C temperature rise over the next century, and indicates that the last 24 hours of negotiations will be extremely challenging.

Other voice on this news:

• The official COP15 news site quotes Greenpeace:
  

  “The UN is admitting in private that the pledges made by world leaders would lead to a three degree rise in temperatures. The science shows that it could lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, crippling water shortages across South America and Australia and the near-extinction of tropical coral reefs, and that’s just the start of it,” Greenpeace campaigner Joss Garman tells the newspaper.

• 350.org, a group advocating for emissions cuts to 350 ppm, not 450 ppm, says
  

  So if someone–Barack Obama, for instance–tells you that this agreement will hold temperature increases below 2 degrees (itself an unsafe level), just show him this document.

• A. Siegel at Get Energy Smart Now! claims that the “leaked UN documents show that current proposals would lead to a CO2 concentration of 770 ppm by 2100.” This analysis is from Climate Interactive’s Climate Scorecard.
• Democracy Now! has an interview with the journalist who received the leaked document.
• Andy Revkin at the NYTimes blog DotEarth said that “United Nations officials confirmed the document’s authenticity but declined to discuss it.” In addition, he points out that
  

  [3 °C] is far above the thresholds for dangerous warming being debated at the meeting and accepted in recent statements by the major economies of the world.

I’ll update this story as more information is available.

Monckton is wrong. Temporarily taking over a meeting, chanting, and disturbing the organizers and invited speaker (Monckton) is not what the Nazis would have done. As someone who studied the history of Nazism and fascism in college, allow me to describe what would have happened during the meeting had it been invaded by the Nazis. Just a warning – I’m not going to go into gory detail, but I’m not going to sugar coat this either, so some of what I describe below is unpleasant.

After talking to one of the activist organizers of the protest, only a few of the approximately 50 activists would have been in the Hitler Youth – most were adults (over 18), so they would have been in the Sturmabteilung (SA, aka brownshirts), the Nazi party militia, or the Schutzstaffel (SS) state security organization instead of the Hitler Youth. Furthermore, about a third were non-white, about half were non-Christian, and about half were women. The SA was composed entirely of men, all white (the few non-whites living in Germany at the time were outcasts and wouldn’t have been granted membership in the SA), and Christian. The SS would have been even more restrictive.

But perhaps for the purposes of this example, we can assume that all 50 activists would have been SA or SS members.

The SA wouldn’t have come in wearing their day clothes – they would have been wearing brown shirts as part of a standard militia uniform that made them more terrifying. They also would have had someone watching the event and not entered until after Monckton had started speaking, assuming that he was their target. And when they entered, they would have been carrying weapons.

After they entered the meeting, the SA would probably have waited for someone to panic and try to run. When that happened, the SA would have attacked everyone and everything in the room, using knives, truncheons, pipes, and fists.

Let’s start with Monckton. He probably would have been attacked with knives and/or truncheons and either stabbed and beaten to death outright or injured so severely that it would have taken a miracle for him to survive long enough to reach a hospital.

The AFP organizer probably would have been hauled out, thrown to the ground, and kicked and stomped literally senseless. He might have died from his injuries, but not intentionally killed unless he’d been a serious thorn to the SA in the past. If he had been a bother to the SA in the past, then he’d probably have had his skull crushed.

The other AFP members would have been beaten and driven out of the hotel bloodied and broken. All would have needed medical attention, some might have died from their beatings or having been stabbed. Those that recovered would have been injured badly enough that they might not have been able to walk again, or have lost the use of an arm, or have sustained brain damage, or have lost an eye, or been permanently deafened.

The attendees might have had a chance to escape, but even the ones that escaped would have been bloodied and might have broken limbs and serious cuts that would need medical attention. Given that there appears to have been only five actual attendees, they all probably would have been as injured as the other AFP members mentioned above.

The SA wouldn’t have stopped there, however. If they had today’s technology available to them, the probably would have grabbed one of the cameras and filmed the entire thing themselves. They also would have destroyed as much of the equipment they could get their hands on, throwing down lights, smashing cameras, and so on. In the process, the would have turned the lights and cameras and microphone cords into impromptu weapons, bludgeoning AFP members, hotel staff, and attendees with the cameras, possibly choking others with cords, and smashing lights down on their targets’ heads.

The SA wouldn’t have stopped there either. They would have dragged the hotel manager and assistant managers out into the street and beat them senseless as well. The probably would have been left alive, however, as a lesson to everyone who watched the beating.

In later years, when the SS was strong, this might have gone one step farther. The SS might have shown up at the hotel owner’s home after bed time, broken in, and efficiently killed everyone inside, leaving the bodies on the front lawn to be discovered by a family member, neighbor, or the regular police.

Now, you tell me – does what I just described sound at all like what happened at the AFP event? Monckton was allowed to continue talking. The AFP organizer was permitted to continue talking. The activists brought a sign (that was torn away by an AFP member), not truncheons or knives. The activists were of many ethnicities, religions, and wore regular clothing, not white Christians in uniforms. There was no violence at all, in fact – no one was beaten, stabbed, choked, or bludgeoned.

Calling what the activists did “fascist” or “Hitlerite” or Nazis shows a marked ignorance of just how terrible the Nazis and fascists really were, both on the part of Lord Monckton and his defenders.

Two recent studies measuring different changes on the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves have added more evidence that sea levels are going to rise higher and faster than the IPCC estimates. One used highly accurate measurements of the changes in ice sheet thickness to estimate how much ice was exiting the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica via glaciers dumping ice into the ocean. The other used the GRACE gravity measurement satellites to estimate the total amount of mass being lost from Antarctica. Both found significant losses in ice, but GRACE found something more significant – a loss of ice mass from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, a mass of ice that was previously believed to be stable or even adding ice mass.

Laser altimetry bounces a laser off the surface of the earth to measure how far the surface is from the satellite, and as the satellite passes over the surface, changes in surface’s height can be tracked over months and years. The first study, published in the journal Nature, use laser altimetry to determine whether the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica were getting thicker or thinner, and the results revealed significant thinning of the ice sheets along their edges.

The Greenland data revealed that the majority of the ice cap’s edges showing significant thinning, with those areas feeding fast-flowing glaciers thinning the most. Only a few areas showed thickening, and most of those were in the interior and/or above 2000 m altitude. As the ice thins, the total mass of ice going into the ocean increases and sea level rises. However, the authors couldn’t estimate how much ice was being lost due to thinning because most of Greenland is thinning at a slow enough rate that it didn’t exceed the detection limit and so wasn’t considered significant. Even so, the fast moving glaciers thinned dramatically, and in three areas the thinning has penetrated deep into the ice sheet – at the outlet glaciers Jakobshavn Isbrae, Helheim, and Kangerdlugssuaq, where thinning is detectable 120, 95, and 100 km inland. Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier is one of the largest outlet glaciers, draining 6.5% of the Greenland ice cap. Helheim and Kangerdlugssuaq are known for having accellerated unexpectedly and retreated from the coast rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s.

The Nature study’s conclusions on Antarctica provide another independent confirmation of what scientists have known for a long time – the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is thinning dramatically. In addition, there are areas of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) that are thinning as well, although the bulk of the EAIS appeared to be relatively stable between 2003 and 2007. And the authors found that some parts of the WAIS were actually thickening, even as the outlet glaciers were thinning.

These results led the authors to conclude that air temperatures are less a factor in the loss of ice mass than changes in ocean temperature and currents. The areas that thinned the fastest were those where the outlet glaciers ground out into the ocean in areas where warm water can melt the bottoms of the glacier, speeding it up by reducing friction on the sea bottom. The authors say

This is an apparently widespread phenomenon that does not require climate warming sufficient to initiate ice-shelf surface melt. (emphasis mine)

Furthermore, the authors conclude that the thinning of the ice sheets at their edges is “more sensitive, pervasive, enduring, and important than previously realized.”

While the laser altimetry study had difficulties determining the mass lost to thinning and melt, the GRACE satellite measures mass directly, albeit over a much larger spatial area than a reflected laser beam. And according to the study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, not only has there been significant mass loss from the WAIS, the previously stable EAIS is apparently losing mass as well. If the EAIS were to melt significantly, it would add a massive amount of water to the oceans and dramatically increase sea level rise, especially since melting of the EAIS has not been included in the climate models.

Something to notice is that the two studies agree with each other qualitatively – the areas that are the reddest in the image above are the areas with the most thinning. They match the bluest areas in the figure at right, which have the greatest mass loss.

According to the GRACE study, the WAIS lost 132 ± 26 Gt of ice per year while the EAIS lost 57 ± 52 Gt per year over the period from 2002 to 2009. According to the paper, the large error in both regions is largely a result of limitations in the model of post-glacial rebound in Antarctica, but the larger EAIS error is a result of barometric pressure problems that occur over the EAIS but not over the WAIS. Regardless, the error is still smaller than the estimated loss of ice mass, and the combined total (190 ± 77 Gt per year) shows that the Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass.

Furthermore, the EAIS data from two areas where there’s been the most change show a potential breakpoint at around 2006, as seen below

If a breakpoint really did occur, then the ice loss from 2006-2009 would be greater than the average over the period of 2002-2009. Instead of 190 ± 77 Gt per year, the actual loss could be as high as 220 ± 89 Gt per year.

Taken in combination, these two papers support the conclusion that sea level rise is very likely to be greater than the IPCC estimated in 2007, and may in fact exceed recent estimates. Combined with another paper that suggests ice sheets and sea level are more tightly coupled to climate changes and carbon dioxide than previously believed, these papers should probably be read as a serious warning about the future of the world’s coastal areas.

Thanks to Dr. Pritchard and Dr. Chen, primary authors on the two papers discussed above, for providing review copies of their work.

Image Credits
Nature
Nature Geoscience

According to Kevin Grandia at DeSmogBlog, climate disruption denier Lord Monckton was talking with a number of youths when he was approached by a couple of other youths he recognized from the Americans for Prosperity event that was temporarily taken over by youth climate activists yesterday. When he was asked to shake one of the activists’ hand, he responded

No, no. I’m not going to shake the hand of Hitler Youth. I’m sorry.

The activist in question, Ben Wessel, is Jewish, and his grandparents escaped the Nazis. Furthermore, Monckton’s remarks yesterday could have been considered intemperate as they were made in the heat of the moment. That Monckton would repeat the charge today when he’s not being shouted over suggests that he truly believes the youth activists to be equal to the Hitler Youth.

Here’s the video:

Some key quotes from Monckton:

World food prices have doubled. That is because of the global warming scare. You won’t look at the science. As a result of that, millions are dying in third world countries because of the biofuel scam, because of the global warming scare.

And you people don’t care. And until you start caring I will call you Hitler youth if you ever again interrupt any meeting I am present, where we are trying to have a private conversation.

So now you know what it looks like when you do robotic chants of the sort which the Hitler youth used to do in Copenhagen when they occupied this city.

So I think you should all just chill out and accept that if you ever behave like that again I will call you that again in public. You’re already now known and your faces around the world are known as members of the Hitler youth.

You people do as much damage to the poor as the Hitler youth did.

Monckton’s charge is false. The youth climate activists were certainly rude, but their actions didn’t rise anywhere near the level of being “Hitler Youth.” Some of the more glaring examples of discrepancies between Monckton’s characterization of the activists and the actual Hitler Youth include:

• The climate activists didn’t engage in violence. The Hitler Youth did.
• The climate activists didn’t behave in militaristic manner. The Hitler Youth did.
• The climate activists showed no sign of anti-Semitism. The Hitler Youth did.
• It’s not mandatory for all youths to be climate activists. It was mandatory for all German children to be members of the Hitler Youth.

Clearly, as I said yesterday, Monckton is as ignorant of the history of Nazism as he is of climate science. Furthermore, Monckton has no expertise in climate or any other hard science whatsoever – his diploma is in journalism and he’s educated in classics, not science, engineering, or mathematics. He is a member of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) delegation to Copenhagen, and he’s on record as believing in a New World Order/global government conspiracy that climate disruption is a tool for the UN to create a global government:

“I read the Copenhagen treaty,” says Lord Monckton. “And what it says is this; that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity.”

CFACT is an oil company and mining interest-funded fake-grassroots (aka “astroturf”) organization that is one of the more powerful forces in climate disruption denial.

Two other members of the CFACT delegation include S. Fred Singer and Steve Milloy. Singer is a scientist who was paid by the Tobacco Institute to write a paper that cast doubt on the connection between second hand smoke and cancer and who has a connection with the widely discredited Petition Project of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine that falsely claimed an overwhelming number of scientists as disbelieving in climate disruption. S&R examined the OISM petition’s claims and found that the OISM petition signatories, at most, 0.3% of all US scientists even when using the OISM’s own expansive definition of “scientist.”

Milloy is a non-scientist who presents himself as an expert on climate and other controversial scientific topics and who formed and ran an organization that was created using Philip Morris money for the express purpose of denying the dangers of smoking. S&R ran an investigative series on Milloy in December, 2007 that focused on his anti-climate disruption propaganda “survey” from DemandDebate.com, his background with various libertarian think tanks and working for Philip Morris, and his current financial backers and associates including at least one man who offered bribes to scientists who would write op-eds against the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

Given the background of Monckton’s current associates, it’s perhaps not surprising that he would resort to falsely accusing climate activists of being “Hitler Youth.” After all, Singer and Milloy have no problem distorting science and outright lying to enrich themselves and protect the profits of their backers.

Until he drifted off message and said:

You are listening now to the shouts in the background of the Hitler youth.

The following YouTube video has Monckton saying “Hitler youth” twice, but you can skip to the last 20 seconds or so if you aren’t interested in sitting through the entire thing.

As someone who’s studied the Nazis, I think we can safely add the history of Nazism right under climatology on the list of things Monckton is ignorant of.

However, the more interesting point is that Monckton publicly cracked. It’s one thing to say intemperate things about your ideological opponents in private email correspondence that you never intend to make public, but it’s something else entirely to do the same in a public forum. Clearly, when being badgered, even a practiced speaker like Monckton can get frustrated and publicly say things that are intemperate at best.

The way I see it, climate disruption deniers have only two courses of action they can take. Either they can condemn Monckton’s intemperate public remarks just as they have condemned the private intemperate remarks of climate scientists in the illegally-obtained CRU email archives. Or they can forgive Monckton his public remarks and similarly forgive the climate scientists their private remarks as well.

Forgiving Monckton but condemning the CRU climatologists would be hypocritical.

According to the National Post, criminals impersonated network technicians and tried to break into the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and gain access to the network servers. This follows many break ins and burglaries at the University of Victoria where papers were rifled through and where a dead computer was stolen.

Brad Johnson at The Wonk Room is following this story, as is Kevin Grandia at DeSmogBlog.

It’s too early to say whether these attacks on CCCM and the UofVictoria are related to the illegal release personal emails from the Climate Research Unit, but the timing is certainly curious. In my experience, two incidents can be coincidence, but if another one or two pop up, it’s likely that we have a coordinated campaign against climate science.

I’m greatly troubled by the content of Chapter 5, but only partly because of the many factual errors that L&D made. What troubles me the most about Chapter 5 is its arrogant tone, fed partly by a group of smart Seattle-based entrepreneurs, and the major inconsistencies that arrogance engendered. It is one thing to believe that you know more about climate disruption than everyone else when you’ve studied the field for years. It’s something else entirely to believe you know more than everyone else without verifying it first. And not only did L&D fail to verify their own knowledge about climate, they also failed to determine whether the entrepreneurs they interviewed knew more about climate than the real experts. The result was a fatally flawed Chapter 5.

L&D set the tone of Chapter 5 in the first 11 pages. They give a six-page explanation of the economic concept of an “externality” (the effect of an action that benefits the actor, but the costs affects someone else) that could have been explained as well in a couple of paragraphs. They claim that driving isn’t as bad for the global climate as eating locally-ranched beef, allegedly disproving both the “drive less” and “eat locally” green memes at the same time. And L&D label climate disruption as a “religion,” complete with a high priest (James Lovelock), a patron saint (Al Gore), “true believers” and “heretics,” and a quote from the mayor of London saying

the fear of of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery; and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful.

And L&D naturally set themselves apart from those suffering from what they label as religious zeal.

L&D go on to toot their own horns when they claim that economists like Levitt

are trained to be cold-blooded enough to sit around and calmly discuss the trade-offs involved in global catastrophe….

They might as well have said “we’re better than you are because you’re ‘excitable’ and prone to ‘believing’ in global warming. We’re better than that.”

But it’s when we’re introduced to the entrepreneurs of Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures (IV) that the arrogant tone of Chapter 5 gets turned up to 11.

L&D extensively interview IV co-founder Nathan Myhrvold and former astrophysicist (and IV employee) Lowell Wood, building both men up to be larger than life. Myhrvold is described as “so polymathic as to make an everyday polymath tremble with shame” and L&D quote Bill Gates as once saying that he didn’t “know anyone [he] would say is smarter than Nathan.” With such a glowing recommendation, L&D’s statement that “Myhrvold thinks Wood is one of the smartest men in the universe” lends Wood intellectual gravitas. So does the listing off of Wood’s achievements during the development of the Star Wars missile defense system and how Wood trained under renowned physicist Edward Teller. But just because both men are smart doesn’t mean that either has any credible expertise in the field of climate disruption – Myhrvold is the former chief technology officer for Microsoft, not a climate modeling expert. Wood is a former astrophysicist who worked on lasers, not a climatologist. Yet L&D elevate both men to being the equal of an actual climate expert like Stanford climatologist Ken Caldeira.

I mention Caldeira because he’s also an IV consultant, and he is presented by L&D as the climate expert that he actually is. But L&D’s purpose in interviewing Caldiera appears to have been to burnish of Myhrvold’s and Wood’s climate credentials. Caldeira’s work is only briefly mentioned , and in a way that either fails to provide the necessary context or, in some cases, even is applied to the wrong context. For example, Caldeira is quoted as saying that trees planted in the wrong place can increase climate disruption because tree leaves may be darker than the ground was. The context of this quote in Chapter 5 is that “many climate disruption memes are wrong,” but L&D didn’t bother to point out that planting trees in other places would reduce climate disruption. Doing so would have reduced the impact of L&D’s preferred, and opposing, frame.

The other way Caldeira’s reputation is used to burnish the qualifications of Myhrvold and Wood is by lending credibility to their climate engineering ideas. L&D point out that several years ago, Wood proposed pumping sulfur dioxide (SO₂)into the stratosphere as a way to cool the Earth, and after running simulations, Caldeira admitted that it might work and that additional research was warranted. L&D use this apparently unimpeachable recommendation as the jumping-off point for proclaiming throughout most of the rest of Chapter 5 that climate engineering is the wave of the future. What L&D neglect to mention is that Caldeira has actually come out against geoengineering using SO₂ at this time for reasons entirely unrelated to global temperatures – it only treats one of the symptoms (rising global temperatures), does nothing for ocean acidification and other carbon dioxide (CO₂) related problems, and is therefore too risky. And it doesn’t help that L&D baldly misrepresented Caldeira’s actual statements and beliefs regarding climate engineering, as the prior links illustrates.

But based on Caldeira’s presence at IV, L&D remake Myhrvold and Wood into experts on geoengineering and climate. And so Wood’s statements on climate modeling are given the same weight as Caldeira’s using guilt by association. Or rather in this case, expertise by association.

Wood is quoted by L&D as saying that climate models are

crude in space and they’re crude in time. So there’s an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can’t model. They can’t do even giant storms like hurricanes.

Wood also claims that the models are all tuned in a similar fashion in order to keep the research money flowing and that current models don’t know how to handle water vapor. Wood’s claims have several problems. They’re presented in a way that’s misleading, they’re not given any actual scientific context, or they’re outright wrong. And because Wood, the former astrophysicist, is a “climate expert by association,” we’re led to believe that these claims are reasonable.

First, while L&D point out that computing power limitations drive climate modelers to make simplifications including lower spatial and temporal resolution than the modelers would prefer, those limitations don’t make the models “crude.” Neither does the fact that the scientists doing the modeling admit that they don’t yet agree on the best ways to model clouds and aerosols (two areas that scientists have made significant advances in since the publication of the IPCC AR4 in 2007). But neither of these issues mean that the latest models are crude. In fact, a quick analysis of the models illustrates that, contrary to Wood’s claims, the existing state-of-the-art general circulation models (GCMs) are quite sophisticated given the computational limitations.

The spatial resolution of an average IPCC AR4 climate model is about 55,350 square kilometers, or a square 235 km on a side (the highest resolution models resolve areas as small as 100 km on a side). For comparison, this is about one fifth of the state of Colorado, which has at least two different climatic zones. Sampling theory (Shannon’s sampling theorem) says that, in order to perfectly reproduce a signal, you need to sample it at twice its frequency. Applied to an average GCM from the AR4, the smallest spatial pattern that could be accurately resolved without help would be 470 km or larger. While there are regions around the globe where you can move through multiple climatic zones over the course of 470 km, they’re not exactly common. And while the average GCM wouldn’t accurately model these areas, climatologists have developed what are called “parameterizations” to represent small scale effects like cloud formation, aerosol effects, and convection that vary locally within the model spatial cells. And generally speaking, it’s not the spatial resolution that presently limits the models’ accuracy (or increases the models’ uncertainty), but rather how the GCMs handle these intra-cell parameters.

The GCMs don’t yet have enough spatial resolution to handle multiple major climatic transitions in small areas, but the models are presently accurate enough to draw conclusions for large climatic regions like “the desert Southwest,” or “the Great Plains,” “the Indian subcontinent,” or “the African savanna.” And while it’s unlikely that any model will ever be able to predict microclimate variations that can change from one kilometer to the next, there is no reason to believe that such high spatial resolution would ever be required for a climate model. So from my perspective, the word “crude” applied to the models used in earlier IPCC Third assessment reports rather than to the latest generation of GCMs. The figure below illustrates how the latest models compare to earlier generations.

Furthermore, sampling theory suggests that Wood is also wrong with respect to the temporal resolution of climate models. Climate models attempt to project the climate, which is itself a long-term average taken over years or even decades. Sampling theory says that we only need to model at twice the frequency of the fastest changing event we care about. One of the fastest changing climate events is El Niño/La Niña, but even at its fastest, it takes weeks to change significantly. This suggests that that sampling once a week or so would be enough, but due to noise and other limitations on sampling, it is usually best to sample more often than the minimum rate. Most climate models sample every 12 hours. If El Niño/La Niña is one of the fastest major climate changes that climate models need to model, then sampling twice a day represents 28x oversampling (assuming that El Niño/La Niña doesn’t pop up any faster than over the course of two weeks). It’s unlikely that the temporal resolution of climate models will need to improve much beyond where it is today. As a result, it’s clear that GCMs are pretty refined with respect to their temporal resolution.

Second, climate models don’t need to model any single storm, not even a hurricane, in order to be broadly accurate. Any individual storm has such a short term effect, and the effects are so localized, that they’re essentially weather, not climate. Four years after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the city is recovering and the parts of Louisiana and Mississippi that were damaged are physically different, but not so much that it qualifies as a local change of climate. The aggregate energy transfer from all hurricanes is important to climate disruption, but no single storm is going to transfer so much energy from the tropics to the subtropics to be critical. Remember – climate is an average over decades, not years or months or weeks. So the fact that no climate model presently models even the largest hurricanes is a distraction, not a real criticism.

Finally, Wood’s claim that models are tuned alike for research funding reasons runs counter to a social dynamic in the scientific community that values original research and intellectual competitiveness over the “same old, same old.” Most scientists live for discovering something new and having the opportunity to research it. Most scientists also enjoy finding errors in another scientist’s work and correcting the error. This is especially true of scientists at the top of their fields. As a result of these dynamics, most scientists would be more likely to tune their models to be different in order to garner attention from their scientific peers – if there was a physically legitimate way to do it. Furthermore, given that climate disruption will very likely become a nightmare for billions of people, discovering that climatologists had got it all wrong would greatly boost the scientist’s, the host organization’s, and the host nation’s prestige. So climate modelers have an incentive to tweak their models as much as scientifically justified in order to generate something new, publishable, and in opposition to the prevailing scientific understanding of climate disruption. The fact that all the models function similarly and reach similar conclusions suggests that, even with this social dynamic at work, scientists and labs haven’t been able to find anything major wrong with the science embedded in each other’s models.

There’s an irony here, though. Myhrvold and Wood, “experts by association” with Ken Caldeira, don’t think that climate modeling is accurate enough. Yet Caldeira’s climate expertise is based significantly on his experience modeling the effects of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases on plants, the ocean, and global climate in general. L&D only implicitly acknowledge this fact:

Caldeira ran a climate model to test Wood’s claims [about geoengineering].
…
Caldeira’s study showed that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide while holding steady all other inputs – water, nutrients, and so forth – yields a 70 percent increase in plant growth, and obvious boon to agriculture.

It is, after all, Caldeira’s models of the effects of pumping tons of SO₂ into the stratosphere to cool the globe that forms the basis of L&D’s main focus in Chapter 5 – geoengineering as a cheaper alternative to slashing CO₂ emissions.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, geoengineering is essentially using a technological, engineering-based solution to solve climate problems that were created by human civilization. L&D believe that geoengineering is the cheapest and most effective method to addressing climate disruption, and it’s this belief that drove them to talk to Myhrvold and Wood at IV. The two IV men believe that, for less than a billion dollars, they can built a big straw that would deliver tons of SO₂ directly into the stratosphere. Once there, the SO₂ would chemically react to form aerosols that scatter and reflect solar energy back into space before it could be absorbed by the Earth. The basic science underlying this idea is pretty solid – large volcanic eruptions blast SO₂ into the stratosphere where the sulfur aerosols naturally cool the globe for a few years. So it’s reasonable to believe that it would work.

Except as Myhrvold and Wood point out, there are a few problems. Minor problems, if you believe L&D. For one, it’s not possible to know at this time what effect all that extra sulfur in the stratosphere would do. Myhrvold and Wood also worry that it would make people complacent about continuing to emit GHGs instead of using the sulfur straw as a short-term solution. And they are worried that the technological solution is so cheap that it would be a political problem – could a country with a straw hold the world hostage by threatening to turn it off, or could it get turned up higher in order to cool and dry the climate of another, rival nation? These are potentially serious issues, but L&D largely ignore the broader political implications, giving the problems only three paragraphs after spending ten pages building the case for geoengineering. And L&D don’t even mention a problem that a sulfur straw would do nothing to fix, and what Caldeira is perhaps best known for – ocean acidification and the associated damage to marine ecosystems.

The bulk of Chapter 5 is spent talking up geoengineering – how it’ll work, how it’s “harmless” because the climate would just revert to its prior state if the straw were turned off, how it’s cheap. But there’s another irony that L&D don’t appear to recognize, and this one cuts to the bone of the geoengineering argument. Myhrvold and Wood, and by extension L&D, are proposing that we pumps megatons of SO₂ into the stratosphere in order to cool the Earth, but the only way to make this plan politically viable would be to rely on projections from climate models – the very same climate models that have been dismissed by the authors and the IV crowd.

At this point, scientists don’t know what pumping hundreds of kilotons of SO₂ into the stratosphere continually for decades or even centuries would do to the atmosphere. With less energy falling on the Earth in general, the water cycle would change and as a result, rain and snowfall patterns would change and would create water winners and losers. Projecting how and who would fall to climate models.

Stratospheric chemistry isn’t a straightforward science – it relies on atmospheric concentrations of ozone, oxygen, hydroxyl radicals (which are also necessary to convert methane to CO₂, among other things), CO₂, nitrogen, the availability of solar radiation in various wavelengths, humidity, prevailing winds, and so on. Projecting how the atmosphere will react to all that SO₂ being dumped continuously into the stratosphere will fall to climate models.

A separate chemical effect that needs to be considered is the effect of SO₂ on ozone depletion around the world. Lower ozone levels in the stratosphere may result in more skin cancers, cataracts, and may result in higher incidence of certain diseases. In addition, more ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface will have an effect on ecosystems and species as well as agriculture around the world. Climate models would be necessary to determine how these effects will vary seasonally as well as regionally.

Even the claim that the sulfur straw would be “harmless” because it could be turned off requires verification – and the only way to verify this claim before turning the straw on is with climate models.

If the models truly are as bad as Myhrvold and Wood claim, then we can not rely on them to project the effects of geoengineering. And if the models are good enough to accurately model the effects of geoengineering, then perhaps we should trust what they tell us about addressing global climate disruption, namely that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is the best way to curtail overall climate disruption.

Finally, Myhrvold claims to be advocating for a go-slow approach to creating his sulfur straw, opting for more research and development. He claims that

it’s like having fire sprinklers in a building. On the one hand, you should make every effort not to have a fire. But you also need something to fall back on in case the fire occurs anyway.

The problem is that Myhrvold dismisses the GHG-emission cutting goals of climate disruption activists so vehemently that it’s hard to take seriously his claim that he just wants more research and development. He says that

[global warming activists] are seriously proposing a set of things that could have enormous impact – and we think probably negative impact – on human life. They want to divert a huge amount of economic value toward immediate and precipitous anti-carbon initiatives, without thinking things through. This will have a huge drag on the world economy. There are billions of poor people who will be greatly delayed, if not entirely precluded, from attaining a First World standard of living.

Myhrvold apparently hasn’t heard how seriously climate activists are pushing for technology transfers and direct financial assistance to poor countries so that they don’t have to use high-carbon energy sources to improve their standards of living. Nor has he apparently read about the many studies that say the costs of addressing climate disruption will not affect the global economy as much as he seems to believe. Myhrvold instead seems to be more motivated by money than by research. The fact that IV has been accused of being “patent trolls” doesn’t help his case – IV is Myhrvold’s company, after all, and L&D mention the “patent troll” issue themselves.

It’s clear that Levitt and Dubner are both smart men and that they found other smart men in Myhrvold and Wood. The problem is that all of them are so convinced that they’re the smartest people around that they can’t seem to realize that they’re mired in myopia. Levitt and Dubner are certain that Myhrvold and Wood have come up with “The Solution^TM” in the SO₂ geoengineering project that they don’t notice, or don’t care, that the arguments in favor aren’t logically consistent and don’t stand up to basic scrutiny. Myhrvold and Wood are so sure that they’re right about climate models and geoengineering that they seem to blow off the serious problems and ignore the experts who actually know what the hell they’re talking about – experts like Ken Caldeira and his fellow practicing climatologists. And none of the men – not Levitt, not Dubner, not Myhrvold, and not Wood – seem to realize that they’re making statements that are counter to the best available science and, in many cases, could have been detected as wrong with some simple and basic fact checking.

Climate disruption is a huge issue, and geoengineering can’t be ignored as a potential insurance policy. But it’s presented as the first line of defense against climate disruption instead of a fall-back plan. And as much as Levitt and Dubner try, their arrogance wrote checks that their intellects couldn’t cash.

“Trust us – we’re smarter than you” doesn’t work when you make it so abundantly clear that you’re not actually smarter after all.

———-

There are legions of critiques of the climate disruption chapter of Superfreakonomics on the Web. Here’s a short list of some of the better ones:

• Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate.org
• Paul Krugman at his NY Times blog has both a critique and an explanatory note, plus some additional links and commentary.
• All of economist Brad DeLong’s many posts on the subject
• Union of Concerned Scientists
• Raymond T. Pierrehumbert of RealClimate and the University of Chicago (Prof. Levitt is a professor at Chicago as well)
• The Union of Concerned Scientists lists a large number of general errors
• Tim Lambert’s 10 major errors
• Brad at Think Progress’ The Wonk Room has a bunch of posts about this, chronicling errors big and small
• A Siegel at GetEnergySmartNow has a number of good links.
• And the best compilation of all the sites criticizing the book I could find

Image Credits:
SSEC
Stanford
UCAR
Accuweather

[T]he Administration is allegedly curbing Federal scientists from presenting scientific findings that are at odds with its policies. Before we start screaming “McCarthyism,” we should examine how little merit these accusations actually have. (Source)

and

These e-mails betray the true thoughts and motives of many leading climate scientists. It shows a pattern that’s closer to scientific fascism than the scientific method.(Source)

The first was Sensenbrenner defending the Bush Administration from accusations (later proven) that scientists were being pressured and their work interfered with for political reasons. The second refers to the Swiftboating of CRU scientists (aka Swifthack – see here for the best roundup of links on this subject I’ve found on the Web).

Care to explain your apparent hypocrisy, Rep Sensenbrenner?

Also, two different journal publishers have publicly said that the contents of the emails are not sufficient justification to open an investigation into scientific misconduct.

The journal Nature:

The stolen e-mails have prompted queries about whether Nature will investigate some of the researchers’ own papers. One e-mail talked of displaying the data using a ‘trick’ — slang for a clever (and legitimate) technique, but a word that denialists have used to accuse the researchers of fabricating their results. It is Nature’s policy to investigate such matters if there are substantive reasons for concern, but nothing we have seen so far in the e-mails qualifies.

The American Meteorological Society (and publishers of eleven different journals):

AMS Headquarters has received several inquiries asking if the material made public following the hacking of e-mails and other files from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia has any impact on the AMS Statement on Climate Change, which was approved by the AMS Council in 2007 and represents the official position of the Society.

The AMS Statement on Climate Change continues to represent the position of the AMS….

For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true — which is not yet clearly the case — the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.

“If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW,” says the Telegraph’s James Delingpole.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss “repetitive, false data of higher temperatures.”

The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, “The blue-dress moment may have arrived.”

“The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century,” blares Michelle Malkin.

The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are “proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in moderrn [sic] science.”

So, do these emails and documents represent proof of a “conspiracy” and “scandal”? At this point it seems highly unlikely, and the more that people look at the illegally-obtained emails and documents, the less likely it will become. Here’s why.

First, there has been much ado made about some emails that supposedly talk about “tricks” and procedures to “hide the decline”, as well as other words used that indicate that the CRU scientists (and their various correspondents) were lying about their data (something that RealClimate discusses). And it’s much ado about nothing (with apologies to Shakespeare). I work in electrical engineering where I use words and phrases that, taken out of context, could be misinterpreted as nefarious by people who are ignorant of the context or who have an axe to grind. For example, I regularly talk about “fiddling with” or “twiddling” the data, “faking out” something, “messing around with” testing, and so on. In the first case, I’m analyzing the data to see if I can make it make sense or if I can extract the signal from the noise. In the second case, I’m often forced to force a piece of electronics into a specific mode manually so I can test it and verify some other function, or I use the phrase to provide artificial test data for calibration and/or verification that my electronics are working correctly. And in the third case, it usually involves trying to deduce whether a problem is caused by the electronic board I;m testing or by the equipment that is doing the testing.

Second, it might be unpolitical to say that you’ll be happy when someone died, or that Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts are pricks and assholes, but that doesn’t make the statements a scandal. I personally was happy when former Senator Jesse Helms died, and I will probably enjoy a drink of expensive scotch when Marc Morano, James Inhofe, and Steve Milloy kick the bucket. And I’ve got no problem calling someone like Joe D’Aleo a liar or Steve Milloy an oxygen thief. If that makes me a bad person, well, I’m OK with that. I expect that most people hold enough contempt for some of their enemies to relish it when they die. So it’s not political and it’s not nice or decent, but it’s also not scandalous. It’s still human, and scientists are just as human as anyone else.

Third and probably most importantly, no matter how much the deniers scream, these emails aren’t likely to reveal any evidence of scientific malfeasance. And even if they do, there’s an entire globe of researchers whose independent research has bolstered the case that climate disruption is real and that it’s predominantly caused by human civilization. It will take more than even a couple of thousand emails to knock the massive, reinforced scientific foundation that underlies anthropogenic climate disruption.

And let’s not forget – the emails and documents were obtained illegally. If there is truly damning information (such as a critical scientist or three overtly saying stuff along the lines of “I fudged my data and nobody caught me. You lost the bet – pay up.”), then the illegality of the release will fade somewhat in the face of other data. But if not, this hack will be a major problem for not only the hackers who released it but also for all the people who are republishing the emails. Hacking is illegal, but in some states and countries, releasing private email correspondence is considered breach of privacy and is thus also a crime.

Finally, let’s point out that some of the people here screaming the loudest from their soapboxes are hypocrites (such as Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey). If the hackers had got into military computers and released private communications, they’d be screaming for the hackers’ blood and demanding that any site republishing the emails be brought up on federal charges. But here they’re screaming for the victim’s blood. If hacking and leaking emails is wrong, then it’s wrong. Claiming that it’s wrong when a leak targets your friends but OK when it targets your enemy makes you a hypocrite and a political hack worthy of nothing but disdain.

There’s a chance that the hack will end the career of a scientists or two, probably for political reasons. But the supposedly damning emails the conservatives and deniers are touting are nothing of the sort. And given how strong the science is, it can survive this latest round of denier dirty tricks.

For anyone interested, here’s a link to a Memeorandum page where there’s lots of links about this topic.

• Independent statisticians reject recent global cooling claims in blind analysis
• Melting glaciers releasing pollutants from decades ago
• IEA: climate treaty necessary to keep energy prices low
• Floating cities as a response to sea level rise
• American Physical Society rejects changes to climate change statement

Climate disruption deniers have been claiming for years now that the global temperature has been cooling down, even though the temperature data clearly shows that it isn’t. Scientists and statisticians have pointed out that, mathematically speaking, the recent reduced warming trend is well within the noise, or put another way, it’s weather, not climate.

A new report by the Associated Press reveals what many of us knew already – the denier’s claims don’t hold water, statistically speaking. The report is intriguing because the AP provided their data to four independent statisticians without telling them what it was, and all four found that the slower warming of the past decade was statistically insignificant with respect to the actual data.

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

“If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect,” said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

Furthermore, the data that the AP sent to the statistician came from two different sources – the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), run by NOAA, and the satellite data preferred by climate disruption deniers that is generated by scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In both cases, the statisticians found no statistically significant trends over the last ten years.

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Saying there’s a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers.

Identifying a downward trend is a case of “people coming at the data with preconceived notions,” said Peterson, author of the book “Why Did They Do That? An Introduction to Forensic Decision Analysis.” (emphasis mine)

The AP interviewed Don Easterbrook, who claimed that “We started the cooling trend after 1998. You’re going to get a different line depending on which year you choose.” According to one of the statisticians, the fact that you have to choose 1998 as your starting point in order to observe a (statistically insignificant) cooling trend is part of the problem.

Grego produced three charts to show how choosing a starting date can alter perceptions. Using the skeptics’ satellite data beginning in 1998, there is a “mild downward trend,” he said. But doing that is “deceptive.”

The trend disappears if the analysis starts in 1997. And it trends upward if you begin in 1999, he said.

This is what’s referred to in statistics as “endpoint sensitivity,” and it’s the main reason that climate disruption deniers like Easterbrook can appear and sound so reasonable when they’re actually misusing or misunderstanding the data.

———-

Melting glaciers releasing pollutants from decades ago

A study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology has revealed a new and troubling aspect to climate disruption – as glaciers melt, they are releasing persistent organic pollutants like DDT, PCBs, other pesticides, and synthetic musks (chemicals that mask body odor).

The scientists studied the annual sediment layers in a high alpine lake in Switzerland and found that there the annual flux of pollutants varied consistently across all the studied pollutants – the fluxes started low in the 1950s, peaked in the 1960s and 70s, dropped off again in the 1980s, and then rose to a new peak in the late 1990s. But in the case of all the pollutants except for musks, the production of the pollutants ceased by 1986 at the latest, and the musks have been in constant production globally since the late 1980s. The image at right illustrates these peaks for the various pollutants the scientists studied.

According to the study, the first peak corresponds closely to when the production of the various pollutants peaked, either in Switzerland or in continental Europe. That peak likely is a result of airborne delivery of the pollutant, either by way of dust or precipitation depositing the pollution in the lake and surrounding land directly. But since there has been no production (or constant production) of the pollutants in decades, it’s extremely unlikely that dust or rain/snow is responsible for the second peak.

In addition, the authors compare the results from the high alpine, glacial melt-fed lake to several other lower altitude lakes. The comparison shows that the low altitude lakes do not show the same spike in pollutants in the late 1990s that the alpine lake does, but they do show similar dust/precipitation driven spikes in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

As a result, the authors’ hypothesized that glacial ice had been accumulating pollutants since the 1960s and 70s and then started releasing those pollutants into the lake as the pollution-laden ice melted. And given the strength of their data, they’re almost certainly correct.

The ramifications of this are significant. Other studies have found recent increases in pollutants around the world even though the production of those pollutants stopped decades ago. Pesticides have been discovered in alpine lakes in the Italian Alps and the Canadian Rockies, and Antarctic penguins have been found to have old DDT in their bodies. If this result holds for other glacially-fed lakes around the world (and there’s no reason to believe that the results won’t hold), then the dangerous pollutants that environmentalists thought had largely been phased out will return and could cause similar ecological damage as they caused decades ago (DDT-thinned eggshells, fishing limitations due to PCBs, etc.). And all as a result of glacier melt that has been caused or enhanced by climate disruption-driven warming. And the results of the study point out that the pollutants present in the studied lake are not likely to be everything that the glacier holds:

The burden of pollutants in Lake Oberaar sediment due to glacier melting is already in the same range as the earlier accumulation from direct atmospheric input. The undiminished increase of the fluxes of many organohalogens into the sediment of Lake Oberaar does not yet prefigure an exhaust of the glacial inventory of these contaminants.

In other words, the environmental toll of these pollutants isn’t over yet by a long shot.

———-

IEA: climate treaty necessary to keep energy prices low

There are many reasons to address climate disruption, ranging from saving species to reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil to reducing the chance of catastrophic drought. The economy is usually not considered to be one of the reasons, especially by those who have a vested interest in maintaining their own profits at the expense of the environment and global climate. However, there are those who say that addressing climate change is critical to maintaining a healthy future economy. According to a new Reuters article, we can now add to that small but growing list the International Energy Administration (IEA).

Reuters interviewed Fatih Birol, author of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, and he said that the world needed to work towards a carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration of no higher than 450 ppm in order to keep energy costs from skyrocketing by 2030. According to Birol’s estimates, Europe alone would see energy prices increase by 300% over the average of what Europe paid over the last 30 years, from $160 billion per year to $500 billion.

Birol’s also estimates that oil prices will reach $100 per barrel by 2015 and $190 per barrel by 2030. Given that there is evidence that the high oil prices of 2008 were part of what caused the global recession, this should make the U.S. and other oil dependent countries nervous. And the global oversupply of natural gas that is keeping prices low in the U.S. this year won’t last – Birol estimates that the demand for natural gas by 2030 will far outstrip supply.

The Guardian is reporting that an anonymous IEA whistleblower is claiming that US pressure has been applied to redefine the point at which peak oil occurs. If this is true and can be verified, then peak oil is probably much closer than previously expected and Birol’s estimates are very likely optimistic. Similarly, Reuters doesn’t discuss whether Birol has any coal estimates or not, but the USGS has pointed out that the U.S. could be approaching “peak coal” as well, after which the price of energy would skyrocket.

Diversifying energy out of carbon-based fossil fuels makes sense from an environmental perspsective, from a climate disruption perspective, from a green jobs perspective, and from an economic perspective. All that remains is for the world’s governments to accept that it makes sense from a political perspective as well.

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Floating cities as a response to sea level rise

Some ideas are just too cool and deserve mention just because they’re cool. According to the NYTimes blog Green Inc., the Dutch are designing floating cities to replace or augment land-based cities as the global sea level rises over the next few centuries. The floating cities would be connected to each other and to the mainland via floating highways and rail lines. According to the article, the designers plan to use the ocean to help moderate the cities’ temperatures in much the same way as ground source heat pump does – pump cold water up from the depths beneath the city in order to cool it efficiently.

In case you’re not convinced that concrete can be made to float, there are floating bridges across Lake Washington in Seattle – the glacially-carved lake is far too deep to drive pilings into the lake bed to support the bridge, so it floats instead.

The first floating proof-of-concept residences in a Rotterdam residential neighborhood are expected to be available in 2010.

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American Physical Society rejects changes to climate change statement

Earlier this year, a small group of American Physical Society (APS) members requested that the APS change it’s official statement on climate change. This statement reads:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

A committee was appointed by the Council earlier this year to determine if the latest science justified any changes to the statement. According to the official APS press release, the committee recommended that no changes be made, and on November 8, the Council of the American Physical Society “overwhelmingly” rejected the proposed changes to the 2007 statement on climate change.

Appointed by APS President Cherry Murray and chaired by MIT Physicist Daniel Kleppner, the committee examined the statement during the past four months. Dr. Kleppner’s committee reached its conclusion based upon a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research. APS members were also given an opportunity to advise the Council on the matter. On Nov. 8, the Council voted, accepting the committee’s recommendation to reject the proposed statement and refer the original statement to POPA for review.

The APS has over 47,000 members, of which only 206 appear to have signed the petition to the APS Council. That’s about 0.4% of the APS membership. According to the 2009 “Six Americas” study by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communications, fully 18% of Americans are either doubtful or dismissive of climate disruption. If those numbers applied to the 47,000 members of the APS, we could expect almost 8500 signatories to the APS petition.

There are three possible interpretations of this difference:

1. Physicists may be less willing to sign online petitions for whatever reason(s).
2. Physicists may actually be more knowledgeable of the science and mathematics than the average American (or less easily swayed by denial industry-manufactured FUD) and thus they accept the overwhelming scientific data to date.
3. Both 1 & 2

My best guess is that it’s probably option #3. But even so, I doubt that reticence to sign petitions accounts for a 45x difference from physicists to the general population.

Image credits:
Geophysical Research Letters
Environmental Science & Technology
Delft University, via Green Inc

In the introduction to Last Chance – Preserving Life on Earth, author Larry J. Schweiger, the CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, comes right out and says that he’s not trying to change minds with this book. Instead, it’s his hope that the book will motivate millions of people to transform their concerns over global warming into activism.

There are three sections to the book that can be summarized as follows. First, the latest science says that disruptions due to climate change will be worse and happen faster than the best estimates of even a couple of years ago. Second, there are a few global ecosystems that are more sensitive than even average, and there are people who don’t want you to know that and who actively work to keep you ignorant of the facts. And third, there are a few things we can do to help ourselves and the Earth.

People who are familiar with the state of climate science will not read much new in the first section of Last Chance. It briefly recounts key moments in the history of climate science – the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and it’s four Assessment Reports, the discovery of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) by Scripps Scientist Charles Keeling, the concern over climate “tipping points.” As a result of global warming, Schweiger points out that we are likely facing an irrecoverable loss in Arctic sea ice, the potential for massive methane hydrate releases, and the loss of millions of acres of forests to insects like the pine beetle and to massive drought-induced forest fires. Furthermore, Schweiger points out that the increasing global temperatures are causing massive losses in Greenland ice and, as a result, raising the global sea level.

And Schweiger supports all his claims with references to peer-reviewed papers, sections of the NASA, NOAA, and EPA websites, and media reports.

In recounting the devastation that has already happened, and thus is representative of what will likely happen in the future, Schweiger focuses on invasive species in Lake Erie and the political machinations that polar bear supporters have endured in the process of trying to get the bears listed as an Endangered Species. And he calls out to the outdoorsmen in all of us with his descriptions of changes in the life cycles of horseshoe crab, sea turtles, and pronghorn antelope, all of which are seriously threatened by global warming.

But he doesn’t stop there. Schweiger fingers journalists and the mainstream news media as being complicit in the world’s unwillingness to address global warming. He believes that advertising dollars and short-term-profit hungry media companies are making editorial decisions about what stories to run based on perceptions of whether the ensuing controversy is worth the loss of advertising revenue. In addition, Schweiger suggests that newsroom cuts to experienced journalists and expensive investigative reporters are coupling with a loss of “public interest” reporting to essentially dumb down media just as global warming is heating up to a level that calls out for experienced communicators.

Schweiger wraps up his book with a detailed call to action. Support electric cars powered over a smart grid from renewable sources of electricity. Make your homes and workplaces as energy efficient as possible. And support those politicians who act on these issues with money and your vote. Schweiger also condemns industrial farming as being destructive to the topsoil and recommends that people support local, small and mid-size farms that farm using sustainable agricultural practices that keep soil nutritious and alive. And finally, he calls for the reader to educate themselves and those around them – family, friends, coworkers, media sources, even political representatives – about the real dangers of global warming.

Last Chance isn’t a catastrophe tale, even though Schweiger makes it clear that catastrophe will very likely be in our future if we don’t address global warming. Instead, it’s a call to action for those readers who recognize how much global warming will change their lives and the lives of their descendants for many generations to come. And Schweiger provides recommended action plans to ease implementing the various recommendations that he makes throughout Last Chance.

All in all, Last Chance is a good book for those readers who are already convinced of the seriousness of global warming, want to have their understanding reinforced, and who want to take more action but don’t know how. But it’s not a book to convince anyone to do something they weren’t already inclined to do.

One of the challenges that the authors had was the fact that few available previous studies didn’t show correlation between the amount of CO₂ in the air and the global climate prior to the start of ice core data. The authors hypothesized that this was a problem with the other datasets and developed a set of tests to check their hypothesis.

First they found two sites in the Pacific where they concluded – based on prior published studies – that the effects on marine sediments would be relatively unchanged over the last 20 million years due to specific geologic and oceanographic factors (limited upwelling, geologic stability, low biological productivity, et al). And they measured three different proxies from marine fossils that enabled them to estimate pH, sea surface temperature, and the amount of CO₂ in the water.

Then they compared their results to the ice core data in order to estimate the accuracy of their measurements. What they found was that their reconstruction of the amount of CO₂ in the air independently reproduced the ice core measurements to within the known error in the ice core measurements themselves. The importance of this fact was mentioned specifically in the paper:

[F]ew pCO₂ proxies have replicated the ice core data of the past 0.8 Ma. (NOTE: “pCO₂” is defined as the partial pressure of CO₂ and is thus a measurement of the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. “Ma” is a shorthand unit for “millions of years ago.”)

As a result of this new reconstruction, the authors claim that “[r]esults for the Miocene and Late Pliocene support a close coupling between pCO₂ and climate.”

In addition, the paper finds that a climatic optimum from 14-16 million years ago have the highest estimated CO₂ concentrations in the paper’s data, and that during the optimum is the only period in the entire 20 million year dataset that has higher CO₂ concentrations than the present.

The authors don’t claim to have answered everything, and like all good scientists, they point out that they haven’t proven causation, only shown very high correlation. Attribution studies to determine whether CO₂ was a cause, an effect, or both will require more research.

Even so, the paper has a number of important conclusions. First, the data supports “the hypothesis that greenhouse gas forcing was an important modulator of climate over [the past 20 million years] via direct and indirect effects.” Second, the new reconstruction has sufficient resolution to define rough thresholds of CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere for different degrees of ice sheet size and stability, and thus sea level. Specifically, the last time that there was this much CO₂ in the air, there was little to no sea ice in the Arctic, Greenland had little to no ice, there was essentially no ice on West Antarctica, and even East Antarctica was mostly ice-free. And finally, the reconstruction may indicate that the global climate is highly sensitive to the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

At the climate optimum described in the study, “global surface temperatures were on average 3 to 6°C warmer than present.” If this study’s results are corroborated, then this paleoclimate reconstruction will be yet another study supporting the widespread understanding that climate is very sensitive to CO₂ concentrations. In addition, the study will stand out as another example of “climate disruption is worse than we figured” as it points to the near complete melting of both Greenland and both sides of Antarctica. That would raise sea level by nearly 70 meters (~230 feet).

Other studies have shown that it takes hundreds to thousands of years for that much ice to melt, but if it starts this century, there may not be much humanity can do about it but move inland.

Thanks to lead author Dr. Tripati for a review copy of her paper. For the supplemental online information, click here.

Image Credits:
Powerline
W Berner/University of Bern, via NewScientist.com

Here are two very different, but simultaneously very effective, examples of climate messaging. First, the negative.

And now the positive.

Which works (better) for you, and why?