Idiot Tracker

Liberal Science Denial

2012-01-27T02:21:00.000-08:00

MarkH makes the case we are letting liberals off the hook too easily:

. . . liberals are just as likely to to disbelieve science that challenges their ideology, only the issues where liberals tend to deny aren't quite as earth-shattering (although anti-vax is a serious public health problem) and not as much in the media spotlight. And recent cognitive studies on why people believe what they believe support the likelihood that all of us, liberal, conservative, or moderate, are poor rational actors in the evaluation of science. . . .
For instance, I've found liberals are far more likely to be interested in "greening our vaccines" (note the liberal pull of the label "green"). There are conservative anti-vaxxers but they come to it ideologically as well from the "the guv'mint can't tell me to vaccinate" standpoint. Liberals are far more likely to buy into altie-med, to believe "toxins" cause all illness, to engage in "big pharma" conspiracy-mongering, to express paranoid delusions about GMO foods or irradiation, to espouse insane theories about food in general, or to believe Bush was behind 9/11.

But commenter Rev. Enki sets him straight:

Here's a question: How many (relatively) liberal, serious presidential primary contenders (say, getting >10% of the primary votes in multiple states) for the past decades have been anti-vaccine? How many have been anti-GMO? How many have been HIV denialists? The primaries are generally considered to be significantly biased toward the liberal activists. The liberals among liberals. On the other side, how many serious conservative primary contenders have been anti-evolution? How many have been deniers of, or at least minimizers of global warming? How many have been anti-vaccine, for chrissakes? How many have outright declared, or at least intimated that the UN is considering taking over the world?

Exactly so. While in principle, liberals are just as capable of science denial as any conservative, in practice, denialism among US conservatives at this particular moment in history is mainstream, whilst liberal denialism is relegated to the fringes where it belongs.

If you keep looking and you look hard enough and long enough, you can find ample evidence for the irrationality of all humankind. The fear of nuclear power. Resistance to education reform (lately better) and so on. But denialism is a little more complex than that. It also incorporates a hostility towards the educated, an embrace of conspiracy theory and crackpots, and rage and hostility when confronted with the facts. It takes root and flourishes among those that see themselves as persecuted and threatened by powerful, sinister forces responsible for the lacuna between what they feel to be true and the actual evidence.

This is typically a minority outlook, for obvious reasons. But sometimes a larger political movement will either pander to that outlook or be captured by it outright, and that is what the American conservative movement is flirting with today.

A new way to assess permafrost

2012-01-23T01:23:00.000-08:00

Airborne electromagnetic imaging of discontinuous permafrost – Minsley et al. (2012)

H/t you know who. This airborne survey does not tell us -- yet -- about permafrost melting, since it only reflects a single point in time. But repeated annually, it could become an indispensable record of the evolving (read: melting) carbon storage lockers of the North.

I wonder if similar methods have been/could be used in the shallow waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf? They say they got data down to 100m -- parts of the ESAS are considerably shallower than that.

Preparations in the meantime

2012-01-21T02:31:00.000-08:00

Population: 158 million

Reported without comment:

According to the Bangladeshi government’s climate change action plan, as many as 20 million Bangladeshis may need to be resettled as soon as 2050. “Preparations in the meantime will be made to convert this population into trained and useful citizens for any country,” the plan (pdf) says.

Methane: a worse worst-case scenario

2012-01-19T02:31:00.000-08:00

Real Climate has weighed in on the Arctic methane question, and, as always, their contribution is cogent, well-considered, and reasonable:

But the methane worst case does not suddenly spell the extinction of human life on Earth. It does not lead to a runaway greenhouse. The worst-case methane scenario stands comparable to what CO₂ can do. What CO₂ will do, under business-as-usual, not in a wild blow-the-doors-off unpleasant surprise, but just in the absence of any pleasant surprises (like emission controls). At worst comparable to CO₂ except that CO₂ lasts essentially forever.

It's comical (which I suppose is the point) the degree to which Randall Munroe captured this perspective in this 2010 cartoon:

"The worst-case scenario is what's happening now." Indeed it is. And we shouldn't allow ourselves to be distracted from the certain disaster of BAU CO2 emissions by the possible disaster of the rapid release of methyl hydrates.

That said -- and at the risk of sounding like stick-figure Michael Bay -- their worst-case scenario is pretty tame -- they increased Arctic emissions by a factor of a hundred compared to today. While that sounds like a lot, a mere 10% annual increase starting in 2010 would push us past that mark in 2060. That's a fair "nasty surprise" scenario, but I don't see how you can really call it "worst-case."

Helpfully, Real Climate rapidly followed the original post with a second one providing an online methane release model. So we can easily look at a Mississippi-rerouting, flaming alligator scenario. Here goes:

While we have estimated the Arctic methyl hydrates at about 2,000Gt, those estimates have varied by a factor of eight from one study to another. In the worst case, we have underestimated the amount of methane, and there is about 8,000Gt under the Arctic, and 40,000Gt worldwide.

In 2023, the Arctic unexpected flips over to a new high-convection state that is ice-free year-round. The Arctic rapidly warms by 15-20C (as it did the last time CO2 hit 390ppm). In this new regime, Arctic methyl hydrates prove far less stable than we thought, and 80% of them are released over the next 170 years. The warming driven by that plus human CO2 even destabilizes a small portion of the global methyl hydrate deposits, previously thought to be safe: 20% of them degas in the same time period.

So 80% of Arctic methyl hydrates (6,400Gt) plus 20% of the rest (6,400Gt) = 12,800Gt over a hundred and seventy years (2023 -- 2193). Plug that into the model and we get:

We rapidly build to a total change in forcing of +25 W/m^2. Because the atmospheric processes that oxidize methane to CO2 cannot keep up, the methane becomes a long-lived greenhouse gas, the average molecule hanging around for decades instead of years:

With the radiative forcing of seven doublings of CO2, total warming quickly exceeds +15C (on its way to +20C), rendering most of the earth's surface uninhabitable:

Sherwood (2010). +12C.

The blue and red (and black) on the graph indicate areas likely habitable by humans (absent 24-hour climate-controlled environments) in a +15C world. At +20C, it's Greenland, Iceland, Antarctica or fry.

The Amazon and the boreal forest burns; massive anoxic events spread across the oceans; billions fight over the last scraps of habitable land even as plummeting agricultural yields kill billions by starvation. The living envy the dead.

And that, my friends, is a real worst-case scenario.

SOPA: [censored]

2012-01-18T08:24:00.000-08:00

SOPA and PIPA enable the government and private individuals and (of course!) corporations to target and block content and websites they don't like, without ever showing in a court of law or proving to anyone but themselves that the content or the website infringes copyright.

This is not about how you feel about people stealing copyrighted works; it's not about whether we believe "data should be free." It's not about that, any more than the power to detain and imprison an American citizen and supposed "terror suspect" without probable cause or recourse to habeas corpus is about how you feel about a plane smacking into the World Trade Center.

Once you excuse the government from having to prove wrongdoing in a court of law, you can forget about who the law is supposed to target or what it is supposed to do, because there is no longer any mechanism for the target or anyone to use the courts to confine the law to its original targets. The Founders understood this. Do we?

Curry's monopolar uncertainty

2012-01-16T05:02:00.000-08:00

Recently Judith Curry has been emphasizing the need to consider the possibility that natural variability may be causing a substantial part of the recent warming trend. The following comment is typical:

In the latest issue of Nature Climate Change, there is an interview with Richard Muller (behind paywall). Its a good interview, with this notable Q&A:

Q: Do you believe the global warming you see is a result of human actions?
RM: I have not a done a scientific study, but my own impression–based on reading the literature-is that some of the warming we have seen is caused by humans. To my mind, you can’t rule out half of the warming being caused by humans, but I think to conclude that most of it is–as the IPCC says–could be an overestimate. This is my personal impression; the other members of the team might feel differently.
Well said, RM.

Neither Curry nor Muller has identified any natural forcings -- solar, volcanoes, cosmic rays -- that they believe have been miscounted. Nor have they identified a shifting of energy within the system -- like the El Nino effect, but over decades of warming -- that might account for the current conditions. They seem to be arguing, purely and simply, that our estimates of natural forcings and natural climate oscillations is limited, so we must, as a matter of acknowledging uncertainty, consider that we may have underestimated these natural effects, which are thought to be small:

Gillett et al. (2012)

So about a week age I posed this question to Dr Curry, which seems destined to go unanswered:

Without reopening the discussion of what Hansen said/meant, I have a question specifically for you, Dr. Curry, if you don’t mind.You have argued that it is premature to attribute most warming to AGW with high confidence, because of uncertainty related to natural variability.Let’s take that as fact. Still, in order to do things like attribution analyses, we need to estimate the contribution of AGW to recent warming.My question: isn’t the central estimate for that contribution still about 100%?Proving greater uncertainty broadens the range of possible values, but unless I am really missing something (possible), it broadens them in both directions. Natural forcings could be positive or negative over the recent past; establishing greater uncertainty does not tell us which.We still do not have a candidate for a “natural” warming influence, with solar forcing flat, and volcanic activity flat.So isn’t the most reasonable way to proceed to continue to calculate the effects of AGW as similar to all of the recent warming, given that it could be more (net negative natural forcing) as well as less (net positive natural forcing)? Until we have a strong natural forcing or forcings in mind, we don’t know which.Is this your thinking, or do you think there is a convincing case to be made that the uncertainty is mostly monopolar in the direction of positive natural forcings?

And this follow-up:

Robert | January 9, 2012 at 9:55 am |@Dr. CurryJust to place some numbers around my thought from above (http://judithcurry.com/2012/01/06/the-new-climate-dice/#comment-157346) let’s suppose we consider the current warming, if 100% human-caused, compatible with a climate sensitivity of 1.5C — 4.5C/doubling.Now we suppose that there is a powerful natural variability that is responsible for 50% of the warming trend. We do not know what this might be; we have not been able to detect it, but since we don’t know everything about natural variability, we accept it as possible. Now the observed response of the climate system to human activity is compatible with a climate sensitivity of 0.75C — 2.25C/doubling.But if principled uncertainty, rather than observed natural warming, is the reason for supposing this to be so, then it would seem the opposite proposition is just as reasonable — that absent human influence, a cooling of 50% of the observed warming trend might be unmasked. Such that the actual net forcing producing the current warming is 50% of what we observe humans to be contributing, compatible with a climate sensitivity of 3C — 9C per doubling.If indeed both are possible, then instead of being constrained in a band from 1.5C — 4.5C, the modern climate response would be compatible with a climate sensitivity of 0.75C — 9C.Unless the uncertainty operates in only one direction, for some reason, it would seem that the assumption that current warming is 100% human-caused remains a reasonable working hypothesis, except insofar that if you are right about the greater uncertainty, it implies a much larger “fat tail” of climate sensitivity.

Think she'll respond? I have my doubts.

Romney's Bain

2012-01-14T02:08:00.000-08:00

Rich Lowry tries valiantly to find a line of defense:

After Bain’s $8 million takeover, the mill announced plans for a $98 million modernization. It merged with another operation “to form one of the largest mini-mill steel producers in the U.S.” Bain re-invested another $16.5 million. When an industry competitor tried to buy the new steel company, Bain declined. These weren’t the acts of a scavenger picking at a carcass. [IT: Starts off well. Hey, maybe this the "creative destruction" we keep hearing about]

Still, it didn’t end well, as Reuters relates. Management performed poorly. Cheap imports from Asia drove down prices. Energy costs rose. The financial crisis in Asia diminished demand. A unionized work force hampered its productivity. Are we to believe that if Mitt Romney had simply been a nicer guy, it would have worked out differently? [IT: Still making progress. Hey, Lowry says, it was on fire when Romney lay down upon it.]

Bain made money on the deal anyway, since the doomed steel company took on debt to pay dividends. [BOOM! Self-inflicted headshot.] But Bain clearly didn’t want to bankrupt its own enterprise. It did want to get a return as soon as possible. Otherwise, why bother taking on such a tenuous proposition? This thinking certainly doesn’t shock the conscience of all the institutional investors in private equity — the public pension plans, the charities, the university endowments — who get on board expecting precisely such returns.

Oh, it's a good line of patter, right up to the point where it all falls apart.Yes, businesses sometimes need restructuring, jobs are sometimes lost, but value is sometimes created, too. I'll even follow Lowry up to the point that the dismal reek of failed businesses and crushed lives that Bain Capital exudes may be in part the result of a "Buy low, sell high" philosophy that associated Bain disproportionately with companies already in trouble.

But here's the problem: Bain Capital was not prepared to wait and take their chance that they could sell high: they wanted their money whatever happened, so they used the companies to borrow heavily to pay dividends to themselves. They forced these multiple companies to go deep in debt, feeding the borrowed money to themselves, the investors. Then the companies eventually went bankrupt, and the money Bain had borrowed and turned into their personal wealth did not have to be paid back. Pace Lowry, that IS the act of a scavenger picking at a carcass, except that in these cases the victim was still alive when Bain Capital started ripping out chunks of flesh.

To buy control of a company, use its good name to borrow heavily, and funnel that money to you as profit, ensuring bankruptcy, is loathsome. That is not "creative destruction"; it's Bernie Madoff with better legal advice.

The "capitalist at work" story only scans if Bain Capital rises or falls with the fortunes of the companies it invests in. That is supposed to be how the invisible hand turns greed to society's good; the things we own, we are supposed to care for, because if they are hurt, we lose too. This is not what Bain Capital did; instead, they ran a con in which the acquired businesses became effectively shell companies through which Bain could steal from lenders. If a skin-picking meth addict did this with credit cards, he or she would net a few thousand or tens of thousands of dollars, and "identity theft" would send them to prision for decades. Romney & friends went to Harvard and wore expensive suits; Romney made a quarter of a billion dollars. So they're not going to jail.

In the coming days, lots of defenders of Bain are going to point out that not every business they bought took on huge debts to funnel profits to Bain, before going bankrupt (Sports Authority! Staples!). But that, of course, is the beauty of the scam. Bain buys a cheap company. They look at making it more cost efficient and profitable. If they have a company on their hands that will quickly become successful (or is already rising like a rocket), they enjoy its success. On the other hand, if a business like KB Toys or AmPad looks to have a long, difficult road to profitability, they bleed it with the borrow-and-dividend strategy, hire themselves and pay themselves millions of dollars a year in "management fees," and/or pump and dump the stock. It's a heads-we-win, tails-we-win strategy, and that is what is wrong with it.

Carl Sagan vs the 21st century

2012-01-13T09:27:00.000-08:00

Five denier memes for 2012

2012-01-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

In 2012, deniers will still not be Galileo

What denialist tropes will the cool kids be pushing in 2012?

All the golden oldies will remain in heavy rotation, including slandering scientists, "there's been cooling/no warming for X years," and "there's no consensus." But be on the lookout for the following memes, which are focus testing in the small markets of the comment threads now:

1. It's way too small to make a difference.

Notes: Deploying this strategy is as simple as minimizing something by comparing it to something vast. The fallacy is that instead of comparing cost to benefit, the denier compares a tiny instance to a world-spanning, expensive view of the whole, which is relevant only if someone is claiming that instance will address a whole issue by itself (no one ever is).

It's use is as simple as dividing X by Y. For example, if Jo Nova sadistically murdered eight children, that would be merely an insignificant 0.000000115% of the world's people.

Usable on almost anything the denier wants to dismiss; the emissions caused by the Keystone XL's dirty oil, the Greenland ice lost in a single melting season; the contribution to the grid of a single wind farm.

2. It's too late to do anything.

This is the next logical fail back position after "It's not warming" and "We're not causing it" and "It won't be bad." Expect it to surge among the more refined "skeptics," who are still subject to embarrassment when their original line of bull has been shredded.

3. Misrepresenting the world.

Note: Watch out for the sentence beginning "India and China will never . . . ." What follows is almost always an exercise in wishful thinking.

4. God save the white race!

I'm getting a really loathsome, racist vibe off of a lot of deniers these days. I'm not sure why this is making a comeback on the right. More marginalized, less inhibited?

5. Equating inaction with the success of their arguments.

Deniers are less important than people concerned about inaction think, and much less important than they think they are. They cast themselves (and sometimes we, their opponents, collude in this) as the primary reason the world has not taken action to fight climate change, but here's what we know:

* Denialists have, through two years of relentlessly promoting the fake scandal "Climategate," left 75% of the public blissfully unaware of their anger and striving. 75% of Americans have never heard of "Climategate."

* Those that vehemently deny global warming consistently poll between 10-15% of the public. Of those, less than 5% admit to ever posting a comment about the subject online. So the highly visible fringe of the denialist movement represents a small minority of a small minority, talking mostly back and forth to each other. When they tell you more and more people are flocking to their banner, laugh.

* It's no mystery why Americans and the rest of the world haven't taken the right steps to fight global warming, the steps everyone is going to wish had been taken sixty years from now. It's a long-term problem. Is our political system good at those? It requires a certain degree of scientific literacy just to wrap your mind around it. Is that one of our strong points?

Special bonus prediction: Combining memes 1-4, 2012 will see a surge in the "Our emissions don't matter; the global South's emissions will soon dwarf ours." (Not true, poorer countries emission are important and will become the majority of emissions, but rich countries will maintain a large minority share but when has that ever stopped them?)

Jo Nova: nonsense headline of the day

2012-01-09T02:42:00.000-08:00

From Jo Nova's spiteful-stupid slanderous slurry come this gem:

. . .

Whatever happened to that "Atlas Shrugged" movie?

2012-01-08T17:34:00.000-08:00

It flopped:

Those that think money is the measure of all things will be interested to note that Rand lost her backers $15 million.

How could it all have gone so wrong? The hard right had already popped its champane corks, based on a fair but unspectacular opening:

CHICAGO, April 29, 2011 — By current Hollywood standards, it is a movie that should never have been made. Imagine this story pitch to progressive movie execs: "we have a female heroine, genius entrepreneurs disappearing, and a government conspiring to control its people and their creations. In short, a powerfully persuasive anti-government message."
Not exactly “Iron Man 3” is it?
Yet, despite (or because of) Hollywood’s best efforts to keep the movie down, “Atlas” is racking up dollar signs at the box office. With a hearty $5640 per theater in its opening weekend, “Atlas Shrugged,” based on the influential Ayn Rand best-seller, has left Hollywood insiders dumbstruck to explain its success.
The Hollywood Reporter has reported that the film will expand its release from 299 theaters to 425 this weekend and to 1,000 by the end of the month.
What is the explanation? Rand Power.

How do you turn a $20 million investment into almost $5 million? Rand Power. The sequel is now in peril.

I was inspired to check out the stats after reading another self-congratulatory notice of this critically-panned film on the "free-market energy" (and climate denying) blog "MasterResource":

The movie captures what happens in a society when a philosophy of achievement and individualism is replaced by one of mediocrity and collectivism. Government policy hurts the productive and rewards the incompetent. The Ken Lays win and the Charles Kochs lose. The welfare state runs amok with the top burdened by the bottom until the top sinks toward the bottom.

Doubtless the welfare state is to blame for this miserable abortion of a movie. And while I speak in jest, this is really one of the major ironies in Rand's work; it worships an ideal of a naturally superior, overwhelmingly valuable and important person, the Great Man, who is so great that the rest of society is basically surviving on the detritus of his genius. As yet her writing is screamingly mediocre: the characters flat, the dialogue stilted, the conceits implausible and weird. In hating the average she is essentially hating herself, but her work has enduring appeal, not to the accomplished, whom it praises, but to other narcissistic mediocrities, who find in its obsession with an evil world conspiring against the pure genius an explanation for their own failures to succeed.

The lonely life of the pan-energist

2012-01-08T02:03:00.000-08:00

Florida has good, not great solar potential

I like nuclear energy (the more so since reading Burton Richter's Beyond Smoke and Mirrors), and I like Brave New Climate and their relentless championing of nuclear energy.

When I read articles like "Solar Power in Florida," though, it makes me feel lonely. Because I do not have a power source to champion. I am not a wind-and-solar guy, nor am I with the nuclear-or-bust folks. As long as it doesn't spew carbon into the atmosphere, I really don't care what it is. This not-caring rests on several bedrock principles:

1. There really are no silver bullets to cut emissions and stop climate change. Everybody admits that, but not everybody really believes it. Whether or not you agree with the details of the wedge analysis, it's deeper truth is this: there is no single technology, strategy, or breakthrough that can cut carbon emissions by 80-90% from current levels while sustaining economic growth. But many hands make light work.

2. Nothing is more obvious in the world of energy than that different technologies thrive in different circumstances. Some places are really sunny; some enjoy a nice steady wind; some have plentiful water to cool a great big pile of fissionables. Some places are ideal for large, more efficient plants; some places are way off the grid and only need a smidge of power anyway. There are great geothermal sites in Iceland; there are mighty rivers coursing through the Northwest.

Wind energy potentials

Places like Japan have already picked the low-hanging fruit of efficiency; places like the Eastern United States have a giant source of "free energy" that they can tap any time they want to by choosing sensible measures (higher mileage standards, green building codes, etc.) to implement greater efficiency.

Japan gets two-and-a-half times the economic output from a ton of CO2

Our energy present is messy; our energy future will be messy too. Often arguments about existing sources or promising future directions get caught up in what technology has the most promise, the greatest scalability, the cheapest implementation. But the reality of energy generation is that the answer to that question will not only depend on technological advances no one can accurately predict, but on who you are, where you are, and what kind of power you need at what times.

3. There is nothing in the political universe that is as important to me as action on climate change. Some people I respect want to yoke climate change to a more general shift in our politics towards greater equality, less consumerism, more respect for the environment and a smaller human footprint. I might agree with George Monibot that the general anti-progressive trend in politics is to be deplored. But that is not the argument. I am for a wedge solutions to climate change, not climate change as a wedge issue. This is about the survival of our civilization. Everything else is secondary. So I have no problem (well, I do have a problem, but I will accept) our remaining a selfish, consumer-driven, greedy and unequal society, to the extent that we can find a way to do that without shooting ourselves in the head. Give me plentiful no-carbon energy and I will happily waste it like a good American and defer the rest of the green agenda for another day. While we don't have that, we need to think about conserving energy and becoming more efficient, and I'm fine with that too. If the no-carbon energy kills birds or generates waste or floods valleys, then I'm for facing those consequences directly and incorporating them into the cost-benefit analysis, without trying to prove that one source is clearly superior and all the others are useless or repugnant. Which you would think would be the default position for everyone but, surprisingly, not so.

COMING SOON: How the hit piece on the potential of solar in Florida misled.

Hot Air denizens: Bigoted, racist, and in denial

2012-01-07T14:58:00.000-08:00

From the geniuses at Hot Air, whilst busily denying that the sea is rising:

Racist, religiously bigoted, and a climate denier to boot! Ladies, form one line.

Really, "burrata" is just reflecting the general tenor of the conversation over there. The original post, by "Jazz Shaw," informs us that sea levels are not really rising, according to "sea level expert" and master dowser Nils-Axel Mörner. Yep, who are you going to believe, an occultist divination expert or your own lyin' eyes:

But what do I know. I can't even find underground water sources through divination. I don't even own a magic stick.

A Judith Curry Nonsense Sampler

2012-01-07T07:58:00.000-08:00

I enjoy Climate Etc., which in my imagination always carries the subtitle "The decline and fall of a once-respected climate scientist."

For those interested in an introduction, Curry has helpfully provided a brief summary of her major intellectual faceplants, in a post titled, in a notable example of unconscious self-referential irony, "The real holes in climate science." She starts out with one of her very favorite delusions:

People cry ‘fraud’ and ‘misconduct’ when they perceive that scientists are trying to hide uncertainties.

Dr. Curry loves to attribute the science denial emanating from the hard right wing to what in her opinion are the shortcomings in climate scientists' characterization of uncertainty. In Dr. Curry's worldview, Rush Limbaugh was innocently and trustingly perusing his copy of the Journal of Climate when he determined that Michael Mann's use of an invalid principal component method resulted in an understatement of the noisiness of his temperature proxies. This resulted in his denouncing climate science as a hoax to his 15 million listeners on a daily basis.

The ostensible purpose of the post is to highlight the eponymous article, which has just won a journalism prize. The author writes, sensibly, of the problems with our modelling of precipitation:

A 2007 study, published too late to be included into the last IPCC report, found that precipitation changes in the twentieth century bore the clear imprint of human influence, including drying in the Northern Hemisphere tropics and subtropics. But the actual changes were larger than estimated from models — a finding that concerns researchers.
“If the models do systematically underestimate precipitation changes that would be bad news”

This gives Professor Curry the opportunity to elucidate the single most bizarre lacuna in her understanding, which is that, despite writing voluminously on uncertainty and risk, she completely fails to grasp that more uncertainty does not imply less risk:

The poor performance of the climate models somehow gives rise to greater alarm about the future. Go figure.

Her position on this is as clear as it is indefensible: the less we understand the radical changes we have set in motion in the earth's climate, the less we need to worry about them. If the science cannot reduce the uncertainty to an unspecified, but very low level (as determined by Curry herself, based on subjective criteria she has never specified), we are asked to ignore the science completely.

The ultimate defense

The truth, which even a bright ten-year-old could grasp, is that there are different kinds of uncertainties, and different degrees of uncertainty, and the effects on risk vary, sometimes implying more risk, sometimes less (but in no case do the reduce the risk to zero.) For someone who claims to be interested in uncertainty and how it impacts our decisions, the character of the uncertainty does not seem to interest Curry at all.

Above we have a particularly egregious example of this. Scientists have accurately projected changes in precipitation, but they are happening faster than the models predict. In the world according to Judith Curry, this is supposed to be reassuring, because:

1. The climate models didn't get it exactly right.
2. Climate models are unreliable.
3. Therefore, the risks climate science is telling us about (based on a heap of evidence, including the models) aren't anything to worry about.

You can see how a first year undergrad who had just learned about the problem might fall into this fallacy, but for a PhD who claims uncertainty as a research interest, it's insane. Curry would have us believe that if somebody comes to your house and tells you your kid was hit by a truck going 60mph, and you rush to the scene only to be told by the highway patrol that your kid was struck by a truck going 80mph, that you ought to relax and go home, since clearly the first person didn't know what they were talking about.

A particular target for Curry's ill-informed pronouncements on uncertainty is the assessment by the IPCC that most of the observed warming is caused by human activities (with high -- >90% -- confidence):

The uncertainties in the paleoclimate record and the aerosol forcing discussed in Schiermeier’s article are alone sufficient to question the high confidence in the IPCC’s attribution statement.

She can, of course, question whatever she wants to, but neither she now anyone else has seriously challenged the reasoning or the evidence of the IPCC's finding. A higher or lower aerosol forcing implies a higher or lower transient climate sensitivity, but doesn't at all affect the reality that the world is warming or the observation that an enhanced greenhouse effect is the primary cause. As for the "uncertainties in the paleoclimate record," they are likely a large part of the reason the assessment says "most" of the warming is human caused, rather than reflecting the central estimate -- that all of it and perhaps and little more than all of it is cause by human activities, with a slightly negative natural forcing.

Even if we presuppose huge uncertainty in the paleoclimate record, between that and a serious challenge to the attribution statement is a whole chain of mutually dependent unsupported premises, a veritable daisy chain of wishful thinking:

1. That the uncertain record involves radical upward and downward spikes in temperature.
2. That these are not only not clearly demonstrated in the record, but were not noted at the time -- despite the fact that a similar warming in the past might be expected to produce dramatic changes in the ice sheets, the glaciers, growing seasons and animal habitats, as we see screaming at us throughout the world today.
3. That besides it being merely possible (based on the imaginary spikes of warming in the radically uncertain record) for natural variation to produce the present warming, that it is producing the current warming, despite the fact that:
3a. No one can detect this mystery forcing or forcings, and;
3b. We observe at that time an increase in the greenhouse gas forcing that would be expected, based on two centuries of settled science, to produce a dramatic warming, as we observe is happening.

I expect scientific illiterates like Christopher Monckton or Willis to pull stunts like this, taking two cents of uncertainty in an active area of research and proceeding via a long string of biased reasoning to terminate in a nonsensical assertion. But it is a source of continuing bafflement to mean that a working scientists should think this way.

Professor Curry is not only emulating the pseudoscientists' reasoning, but even their excuses for their irrelevance:

The article raises the important issue of the holes in climate science, but only seeks perspectives from establishment scientists.

"Establishment scientists," saints preserve us. By all means, let's weigh scientific expertise according to the ideas of balance and equity popularized by the Washington press corps (it's worked so well for Washington.) Don't accept the dominance of "establishment scientists," and while you're at it, tell the airline you want to take your next flight without any stuffy establishment pilots on board. Don't leave your health in the hands of establishment doctors and nurses -- next time you're sick, consult a Galileo-like dissenter from the germ theory of disease. Let me know how your surgery goes.

If you are writing about science, talk to scientists. If they disagree, reflect that disagreement. If they broadly agree, that is not a problem requiring you to expand your search to less and less credible voices until a dissenter is found.

The Anna Karenina scenario

2012-01-05T16:37:00.000-08:00

Every happy family is alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Apropos of the Anna Karenina Principle, how many things would have to go right for climate change to be merely an expensive annoyance (or one human problem among many), rather than a planetary disaster?

First, we need continued rapid economic growth. Even in the best case, dealing with the impacts of global warming -- drought, sea level rise, heat waves, extreme weather events -- between now and 2100 or 2200 will require resources we don't have today. Without continual economic growth, even most optimistic global scenarios offer certain disaster.

Stern Review

Five percent of 2100's projected GDP is over 40% of our GDP today -- an impossible burden that would lead to global impoverishment.

The assumption of continued economic growth is a reasonable one, as the world's economy has been on an upward trend for many years:

Nevertheless, continued rapid economic growth is not inevitable, and should be ranked as one of the requirements in realizing the Anna Karenina scenario. Wars, a global depression, unrelated natural disasters, and climate change itself could all compromise this pillar of futurists everywhere.

It is necessary but not sufficient that climate sensitivity prove to be on the low end of estimates. With a climate sensitivity of 3C, and a BAU pathway of 1000ppm CO2 equivalent (1), we can expect +4-6C of warming, which would wipe out most forms of life on earth.

Extract from p. 42 of Technical Summary of IPCC WGIII Fourth assessment Report (2007)

Reasonable people trying to strike a middle course between "alarmism" and "skepticism" will often say that climate change may not be a big deal, but we should protect ourselves from the possibility that climate sensitivity is high. This is well-intended, but a wrongheaded oversimplification. The reality is that while five degrees and onward is a planetary catastrophe under almost any set of assumptions you chose does not mean that 2-3 degrees is an expensive but manageable problem. A high total temperature rise is game over; a low total temperature rise still requires many other things to go right (2).

Sea level rise is presently estimated at between 0.5m to 2.0m between now and 2100. It needs to be closer to 0.5m to avoid the loss of huge numbers of human settlements to the sea. We must hope that the Greenland ice sheet and the WAIS respond very slowly to warming and are largely incapable of responding on a decadal scale. Of course other ice sheets, such as the less-popular sibling of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the East Antarctic ice sheet, must not have any nasty surprises in store.

Agriculture will have to prove highly resistant to climate shocks. Varying the type of crops and making efficient irrigation broadly available while avoiding massive losses to pests, diseases, and extreme precipitation.

We cannot afford to lose the Amazon (as is expected) or the boreal forests: the Anna Karenina scenario requires they resist warming and there is no massive die-off that would turn the terrestrial biosphere into a net source of carbon. That would insure catastrophic long-term warming.

No Arctic warming tipping points.

Healthcare technology and delivery systems will have to advance faster than the spread of tropical diseases north and south. Efficient building designs and/or air conditioning will need to be available to rich and poor alike to avoid millions of deaths from the direct thermal effects alone.

Permafrost melting will need to release its stored carbon slowly, and overwhelmingly as carbon dioxide and only a small amount as methane. Methyl hydrates need to stay put, or leak out only very slowly.

Political systems will have to prove highly resilient and adaptive. They will have to respond to the escalating climate harms with aggressive long-term adaptation, and not make things worse with panic responses like hoarding, protectionism, or conflicts over migration, borders, or resources. As the Economist cogently put it:

I feel fairly comfortable arguing that a modern economy can handle the stresses of climate change reasonably well; economies are built to handle big change. I feel very nervous about the ability of various political systems to survive temperatures unprecedented in human history. Many political systems rely explicitly on stability to survive, and even those capable of handling climate impacts may struggle to handle the knock-on effects of climate impacts on their more vulnerable neighbours. And as political systems are disrupted, it will become more difficult to sustain growth.

This is a partial list. There are impacts I haven't covered; there are certain to be impacts no one has yet guessed at.

The nasty aftertaste of a clear-eyed look at the possibilities is this: even if everything goes right -- if humanity holds the winning climate lottery ticket and none of the terrible things come to pass, or happen only in a blunted and delayed form, and only (in large part) after we are all healthier and wealthier and wiser than we are today: even so, in the best of all possible worlds, global warming will be an expensive destructive mess than will drag on for thousands of years, making the impoverishment of the natural world and disruption of the benign Holocene climate our civilization's permanent legacy.

Most economic analyses assume all these good things happen and neglect, not out of malice but due to the limitations of their science, most of the horrible disasters climate scientists think are possible -- in some cases likely. Even so, the benefits of slowing climate change outstrip the costs in virtually every economic analysis out there.

One of my least favorite lukewarmer fallacies is the concept of "no regrets" policies -- that we should push ahead with policies that can be sold to the right wing as energy independence or job creation or whatever appeals to those in denial of the science. This is an asinine idea. Climate change is real. You don't get to smart policy by agreeing to disagree on critical scientific facts pertaining to the future of human civilization. Here's the truth; aggressive emissions cuts are the true no-regrets strategy. Uncertainty in climate change lies between bad and worse. The benefits range from saving trillions of dollars and millions of lives, on the low side, to averting planetary catastrophe.

_______________________________________________

1) Meaning a forcing caused by human activities similar to change the level of CO2 to 1000ppm, comprised mostly of CO2 but also with contributions from methane, NO, CFCs, and land use changes.

2) The best analysis of the economic implications of a "fat tail" probability of climate catastrophe is "On modeling and interpreting the economics of catastrophic climate change" (2009) by Martin L. Weitzman, the undisputed expert in this area (400+ citations for that paper alone in less than three years). He wisely make the limitations of climate sensitivity highly explicit:

There are so many sources of uncertainty in climate change that a person almost does not know where or how to begin cataloging them. For specificity, I focus on the uncertainty of so-called "equilibrium climate sensitivity." This is a relatively well-defined and relatively well-studied example of known unknowns, even if the uncertainties themselves are uncertain. However, it should be clearly understood that under the rubric of "equilibrium climate sensitivity" am trying to aggregate together an entire suite of uncertainties, including some non-negligible unknown unknowns. So climate sensitivity is to be understood here as a prototype example or a metaphor, which is being used to illustrate much more generic issues in the economics of highly uncertain climate change.

Place your bets -- Epsilon redux

2012-01-04T12:43:00.000-08:00

Tamino asks:

What’s the chance that if we continue with business-as-usual, man-made global warming will lead to disastrous climate change? It isn’t zero. It isn’t one. What is epsilon?

My estimate (with links added):

Even if benefits were somehow remotely comparable to costs (2% chance of that, maybe?), benefits will be concentrated among the rich, while harms will be concentrated among the poorest and most vulnerable. So disaster is highly likely.

Enough disruption and direct harm to reverse the overall trend to greater wealth and prosperity — 10% — 70% (highly uncertain) — say 40% over the next few centuries.

Collapse of civilization, barbarism, going a long way backwards in terms of knowledge and human adaptive capacity even as impacts continue for centuries — 5%.

About the first estimate I (and most economists who have studied the issue) are very confident, and it’s easy to make the case for mitigation based on that alone. The other estimates are highly uncertain, and many analyses ignore them, foolishly in my view.

Add your own estimates at Tamino's and/or over here. He forbids much supporting argumentation, to avoid distractions, but not being cursed with his degree of popularity, I think we can differentiate ourselves by welcoming rationales and arguments for the numbers.

ENSO and public concern over climate change

2012-01-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

Hypothesis: Americans are not very bright.

Hence we predict their level of concern about global warming will vary quite a bit with the short-term flucuations in warming, despite the strong, persistent long-term trend.

The most important driver of temperature variability, in the short term, in ENSO (El Ninos and La Ninas):

A similar but less powerful short-term influence is the phase of the solar cycle:

So giving people a year or two to process news stories about temperature records, extreme weather, ice cover losses and the like, we might expect to see the levels of concern rising in 1999-2000 after the big El Nino, with a rise starting in 2004-2005 related to the second large recent El Nino, with concern falling in 2009-2010, related to a La Nina event.

The phase of the solar cycle would make the peak in concern from 1998-2002 slightly higher, while the lower solar activity after that, as well as the lack of a similarly intense El Nino event, could be expected to make the peaks of concern lower, and the troughs deeper. In late 2011 we saw the next solar cycle finally start to wake up, but this will not have had a big impact yet.

So how did we do? Here's the gallup polling on concern for global warming:

Not bad. We don't see the brief 2009 El Nino in the data, but it may be too early (the polling stops in May 2011), or it may be the rapid return to La Nina conditions blunted the effect.

Of course, this is all fun and games with graphs, and if we were attaching any seriousness to it it would come dangerously close to mathdurbation. It's just as easy to come up with a different correlation, for example:

Hypothesis: Americans care about global warming only when they are not much more worried about the economy:

When people felt relatively better, in 2008, concern about global warming was high. When economic worry spiked in 2009, concern about global warming fell. The slight increase in economic confidence recently may show up in 2012's climate polling, especially if the economy continues its still painful slow but accelerating recovery.

Should we expect these short-term reactions to subside as the long-term warming continues to push the earth's climate further out of the Holocene range? Unfortunately, we cannot assume that. Gradual changes and shifts over time are difficult to perceive. This is often described via the (apocryphal) anecdote of the frog placed in lukewarm water that is slowly boiled alive. People rapidly normalize their present experiences, unless there is a readily identifiable shift. The gradual erosion of my paycheck by inflation is not as striking as being swindled out of some portion of my savings, even if they cost me the same amount of money. That is one reason we as a society are prepared to invest huge amounts in speculative measures to reduce tiny risks (dying in a terrorist attack, for example) but not, as yet, to invest significant amounts of money, time, or even attention to the overwhelming likelihood of the less vividly imagined but far more globally destructive process of climate change.

Could there be a tipping point for the Arctic after all?

2012-01-03T14:14:00.000-08:00

The rapid disappearance of the Arctic sea ice raised for many the prospect of a "tipping point" at which ice loss becomes irreversible and an ice-free North becomes a permanent condition.

Especially after the dramatic fall in 2007, efforts have been made to model the probable behavior of the rapidly waning sea ice. That led to an important paper with a simple method and an elegant result. Several scientists at the university of Washington did model runs in which CO2 forcing was gradually increased, looking for a tipping point ("threshold behavior"). They didn't find any. The sea ice disappeared gradually as conditions warmed. When they allowed conditions to cool, the sea ice came back. No tipping points in the model.

Well, brace yourselves for the shock, but "skeptics" missed the point of the paper, and shouted the results from every rooftop. Stupid scientists! "The Next Ice Age Now" crowed "More global warming propaganda debunked."

The actual result, rather than the result deniers fantasized had come about, was this: the dramatic fall in sea ice cover to date represents a steady response to the long-term climate warming. It is progressing fast because the climate is changing fast. The ice cover is still falling apart, not (so far) because of a tipping point, but because of rapid global warming. It could recover if we successfully halted or reversed global warming. Short of that, it will continue its death spiral.

Not really a pro-"skeptic" message, if you read past the headline. Fortunately for their peace of mind, they rarely do.

Work to understand the rapid changes to the Arctic continues. Chris R points us to this 2008 paper:

It is argued that deep atmospheric convection mightoccur during winter in ice-free high-latitude oceans, and thatthe surface radiative warming effects of the clouds andwater vapor associated with this winter convection couldkeep high-latitude oceans ice-free through polar night. Insuch an ice-free high-latitude ocean the annual-mean SSTwould be much higher and the seasonal cycle would bedramatically reduced - making potential implications forequable climates manifest. The constraints that atmosphericheat transport, ocean heat transport, and CO2 concentrationplace on this mechanism are established. These ideas areinvestigated using the NCAR column model, which hasstate-of-the-art atmospheric physics parameterizations, highvertical resolution, a full seasonal cycle, a thermodynamicsea ice model, and a mixed layer ocean. Citation: Abbot,D. S., and E. Tziperman (2008), Sea ice, high-latitude convection,and equable climates, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L03702, doi:10.1029/2007GL032286.

It's not bathtub reading, but basically what Abbot and Tziperman set out to do was to explain evidence from the paleoclimate record of a warmer Arctic (1) and a less pronounced seasonal cycle at the poles. Both the late Cretaceous and the early Paleogene climate had these features, but existing climate models do not reproduce them well. When they created a more sophisticated model of the Arctic, they found it could settle into a stable ice-free state secondary to changes in cloud cover and atmospheric circulation (they discuss the same issues in a slightly earlier paper published by the Royal Meteorological Society.) The former has been cited 23 times; the latter 16, according to Google Scholar. So while this is serious science, the theory has not exactly caught fire. That they continue to explore the idea in Feb 2009 and again in July 2009, without a lot of other climate scientists taking up the charge,deepens the suspicion that Abbot/Tziperman have not convinced their colleagues that this is a thing, despite a 2011 paper (h/t Artful Dodger) which Abbot wrote with the great Raymond Pierrehumbert, which cites one of the 2009 papers as part of a broader discussion of possible sea ice tipping points.

On the other hand, it's not as if we have a lot of great explanations for the paleoclimate record laying around:

The consensus among these proxies suggests that Arctic temperatures were ∼19 °C warmer during the Pliocene than at present, while atmospheric CO₂ concentrations were ∼390 ppmv. These elevated Arctic Pliocene temperatures result in a greatly reduced and asymmetrical latitudinal temperature gradient that is probably the result of increased poleward heat transport and decreased albedo. These results indicate that Arctic temperatures may be exceedingly sensitive to anthropogenic CO₂ emissions.

The specter of an Arctic tipping point has not been laid to rest. If a similar amount of forcing to today's somehow got the Pilocene's Arctic 19C warming than today's, than some kind of hole in the floor seems a logical area of concern. (I wonder idly if the phlegmatic Dmitrenko ever modeled 19 degrees of warming over the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.)

UPDATE: Check out Dosbat, Chris R's insanely good blog, for even more Arctic/Climate change goodness. Added to the blogroll, as well.

Five things I learned in 2011

2012-01-02T05:05:00.000-08:00

1. Trees matter. A lot. They sequester more carbon than we thought; they generate cooling aerosols in their own right. We could do a lot to slow the advance of global warming if we decide to stop reducing forests in extent and start intensive reforestation.

2. The howls of outrage from deniers in the blogosphere in response to an argument vary in direct proportion to how effective that argument is with the broader public. There is a scientific consensus, and in many respects, the science is settled. The global is warming, and humans are the cause. Many deniers or "skeptics" get their funding from fossil fuel companies, exaggerate their qualifications, and misrepresent their results. This is simple stuff to those of us that live and breath this stuff, and deniers try to discourage us from making this arguments with howls of rage and jeering contempt. But they are not the people we need to convince, and the people we do need to convince -- the broader disengaged public -- these are powerful messages that should be underscored. Deniers know they are powerful, which is why they try and silence them.

3. Methane and CO2 release from the North (permafrost and methyl hydrates) could be apocalyptic in its effects. But the significance of this is undercut by the fact that the BAU pathway will almost certainly be apocalyptic in its effects. A lot of carbon is going to come out of those frozen deposits, but having studied it a fair bit this year, this quote from Raymond T. Pierrehumbert most closely reflects my own layperson's view:

But the clathrate release problem is in a rather different category from the runaway greenhouse issue. It has to be seen as just one of the many fast or slow carbon catastrophes possibly awaiting us, in a system we are just groping to understand. The models of destabilization are largely based on variants of diffusive heat transport, but the state of understanding of slope avalanches and other more exotic release mechanisms is rather poor — and even if it turns out that rapid methane degassing isn’t in the cards, you still do have to worry about those several trillion metric tons of near-surface carbon and how secure they are. It’s like worrying about the state of security of Soviet nuclear warheads, but where you have no idea what kind of terrorists there might be out there and what their capabilities are — and on what time scales they operate.

Or to put it another way: what would be the state of the climate today if this carbon didn't exist? Call that scenario one:

On a BAU pathway, we face mass extinctions, tremendous human suffering, and unpredictable feedbacks that could greatly accelerate climate change, including ice loss, glacier melt, forest fires, changes in ocean currents, and other known and unknown shifts in the climate and the biosphere.

With intensive mitigation, many of the same problems await us, but will hopefully develop more slowly, over several centuries, blunting the impact somewhat and giving us an opportunity to reverse some of the effects. We still have to worry about unpredictable feedbacks that could greatly accelerate climate change, including ice loss, glacier melt, forest fires, changes in ocean currents, and other known and unknown shifts in the climate and the biosphere, but forcing the system less intensely will, logically, reduce the risk.

Now add the carbon back in:

On a BAU pathway, we face mass extinctions, tremendous human suffering, and unpredictable feedbacks that could greatly accelerate climate change, including ice loss, glacier melt, forest fires, changes in ocean currents, release of methane and CO2 from permafrost and methyl hydrates, and other known and unknown shifts in the climate and the biosphere.

With intensive mitigation, many of the same problems await us, but will hopefully develop more slowly, over several centuries, blunting the impact somewhat and giving us an opportunity to reverse some of the effects. We still have to worry about unpredictable feedbacks that could greatly accelerate climate change, including ice loss, glacier melt, forest fires, changes in ocean currents, release of methane and CO2 from permafrost and methyl hydrates, and other known and unknown shifts in the climate and the biosphere, but forcing the system less intensely will, logically, reduce the risk.

In isolation, the potential for destabilization of this buried carbon would be a looming global catastrophe. But as it is, it becomes one aspect of a global catastrophe already in progress. That's how I see it, anyway.

4. Climate deniers represent a hard fringe of the American right; climate deniers in the blogosphere are an even smaller and more radicalized sub-group. Their views are not only more extreme than the large minority of the public that doubts the science of climate change, or the majority that is not ready to pay a significant price to combat climate change: they are fundamentally different in their outlook. You can see this in the opinion polls; you can see it in the comments and posts they make, in which a extreme anarcho-libertarianism features prominently. This ideology is totally unknown and would be bizarre to most American conservatives; to climate deniers it is practically conventional wisdom. Note also the amazing prevalence of what can only be described as the mentally ill, suffering from delusions that demonstrate grandiosity, paranoia, loose associations, and flight of ideas.

We can win the undecided middle to our side; there is evidence that this is already happening. We do it not by trying to win over or placate deniers, nor by trying to bait them. We win by telling the truth in a clear, simple, understandable way, by being less crazy and more normal, with the caveat that part of being normal is reacting strongly to people who attack hysterically and dishonestly.

5. Even as the overall picture continues to be grim, I found some of the research I came across this year comforting. This is turn reassures me that my filters, such as they are, are not the industrial-strength blast shields one often notes in one's opponents, but can easily overlook in oneself.

Although I remain very concerned about agriculture, I was happy to see that models that incorporated varying the type of crops and where they are sowed found a less severe impact from warming. Some crops will benefit from a CO2 fertilization effect.

Since warming over the last couple of decades has run at about 0.14-0.17C/decade, versus slightly more, 0.18-0.21C, as we would expect from the bulk of the models, the cheerful possibility exists that short-term climate sensitivity is a little lower than we thought, 2-3C instead of 3C-4C (possibly because the aerosol forcing is on the high side). So while the consequences of climate change, like glacier melt, continue to mostly run ahead of the models, it is hopeful that temperatures are running slightly behind. Of course, even a warming of 0.05C/decade or 0.10C/decade would be incredibly fast in geological terms and very dangerous. To see the danger we need only look at the response of the climate and the natural world. Still, better to be warming a little slower than we expected than a little faster.

-----------------------------

What did you learn in 2011?

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T05:03:00.000-08:00

The Year of the Dragon

My head is full of lists and year-end summaries and such, but my schedule is full of real work, so it will have to wait, but welcome to 2012.

It's going to be hot. It's an election year in the USA (and in France, Russia, Finland and elsewhere) so expect to hear a lot of nonsense talked about the climate, and not a lot of sense. Don't despair. The world will take action to combat climate change, for a simple reason -- unlike the plight of the homeless or conflict in the Middle East or hunger in Africa, climate change, despite being one of those problems people just want to ignore, affects everybody, and is going to get worse and worse until even the most short-sighted (well, most of them) see the need for action.

By then, you say, it will be too late? Maybe, but, then, by most objective definitions, it has been too late for some time. Too late to avoid radically transforming the climate. Too late to avoid melting the permafrost. Too late to avoid drought in the Amazon and the crumbling of the WAIS into the sea.

But it will never be too late to pick ourselves up and stop making things worse. It seems like 2012 will not be the year we stop nibbling around the edges of the problem with tiny subsides and minimal regulation, but who knows the future, especially in politics -- I certainly don't.

In 2012 at IT we will continue to watch the science, watch the deniers, and on the basis of that reporting, advocate strongly for real action to combat global warming. We won't exaggerate, we won't demonize, we won't give way to hysteria; those are unhelpful responses. But we will be heard and we will be here, with no retiring or taking a blogging break or moving on to some other hobbyhorse. We'll be here in 2012, and onward, until the world has well and truly changed course.

Curry, Burgess-Jackson & Pangloss (2011)

2011-12-30T03:31:00.000-08:00

Judith Curry has a post up that -- well, let's let Dr. Keith Burgess-Jackson, her ostensible inspiration, speak for himself:

What we should do about global warming (again, assuming it exists) depends on the consequences of global warming. Few if any changes have only good consequences or only bad consequences. Almost always, there are both good and bad consequences. Whether we should do something to stop the change, therefore, depends on which type of consequence—good or bad—predominates.How often have you heard a dispassionate discussion of the good consequences of climate change? All you hear, day after day, is a depressing litany of bad consequences. This alone shows that global warmists are biased. They want intervention to stop climate change, so they mention only the bad consequences of climate change. A rational person with no ideological axe to grind would attend to good consequences as well as to bad consequences.

I cannot believe I am about to have this conversation with a scientist who studies hurricanes, but this is totally ridiculous. "Almost always, there are both good and bad consequences"? A professional philosopher said this? It sounds like a fortune cookie. But fine, OK, let's dance. A recent study reported that one out of five American women has been molested or raped. Dr. Burgess-Jackson will now enumerate for us all the positive consequences of that.

[Waiting]

[Still waiting . . . millions of rape victims are eager to hear the optimistic corrective . . .]

Well, maybe he'll get back to us. In the meantime he doubles down:

I wish scientists would inform the public [of all] the consequences of global warming, so that the public can decide for itself whether to expend its scarce resources in preventing it. That scientists have not done this is the best evidence yet that they are advocates rather than, as they purport to be, disinterested observers. Is it any wonder that they are not trusted? Do you trust people who are hell-bent on selling you something to the point where they omit relevant information? In law, this is called fraud.

For the love of God, who is this idiot? And why is Judith Curry giving him a platform (no disclaimer this time -- I checked)?

Second question: According the the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 700,000 children were abused or neglected in the United States last year. Positive consequences of that: Go.

I'm sure Dr. Keith Burgess-Jackson will consult his colleagues, possibly including Dr Pangloss, and formulate a response.Forget for a moment that scientists (and economists) talk about positive elements of global warming all the time. They make effort to quantify the CO2 fertilization effect, which should (in contrast to worsening heat waves, droughts, or floods) help certain crops. They estimate reduced deaths from hypothermia. They predicted and have since observed the opening of the Northwest Passage, a very convenient shipping lane.I am sure a professor of philosophy knows what a straw man argument is, and would mark down a student's paper if it made so blatant a use of that fallacy.

But, again, leaving that aside, the argument is still senseless. Why might there be little discussion in the popular press, or in informal conversations, of benefits from climate change? Is bias the parsimonious explanation? Of course not.Let's go back to the hurricanes; in particular, Katrina. It had positive and negative consequences, according to Dr. Curry's new friend. Reporting only on the negative consequences should make you suspect bias. So, when the ninth district was under water, did you see a lot of reporters camped out three hundred miles away, looking for a farmer that might say "Well, it's a terrible human tragedy and a catastrophic failure of civil society, but we really needed the rain."

We all remember the scenes from along the coast, where dozens of homes -- entire settlements, in some cases -- were wiped from the face of the earth. When watching that, did you ever see them cut to a yachting race in New England, where they praised the stiff winds moving upwards from the South?In other words, there are lots of social, pragmatic, and commonsensical reasons why in the face of overwhelming disaster, one might not seek out and highlight tiny areas of positive benefit. Reasons like: it's insensitive, it's orders of magnitude less significant, it's just basically kind of stupid. None of which have anything to do with bias; none of which should make you think that maybe hurricanes are really a wonderful blessing to humanity slandered by scientists and the news media.

Another reason, and this is certainly relevant to climate change, is that those minor benefits may prove, in time, to be illusory. Because we do not live in our own hermetically sealed universes of benefit and harm. Maybe Garrison got some rain it needed from Katrina; it also got tens of thousands of refugees. Maybe my hypothetical yachts got a nice stiff breeze; but their owners also got a nice fat tax bill (or a nice fat slice of federal debt). We are more isolated from the harms in other countries, but not completely. It is folly to think that a hundred million people could starve in a nuke-armed India and that Canada would be above it all, grooving on a longer growing season. Good luck with that.

Revkin vs Revkin: the final battle

2011-12-29T03:43:00.000-08:00

Andrew Revkin has completed his methane trilogy. The final installment, "More Views on Climate Risk and Arctic Methane," like part two "Leaders of Arctic Methane Project Clarify Climate Concerns" could be taken as a debunking of his original post on the subject ("Methane Time Bomb in Arctic Seas – Apocalypse Not"). But I prefer to think of it as journalism (very good journalism, when all is said and done) in real time.

Revkin begins his journey with the piece in the Independent, which he (correctly) recognizes as overhyped. He thinks he already knows this is rubbish, based upon his reporting in 2010:

This all builds on what I was told in 2010, when I last visited the question of methane releases from Arctic seas. . . . I urge you to read, and pass around, the 2010 post — “The Heat Over Bubbling Arctic Methane.”

He talks to a couple of scientists, and gets a couple of quotes bolstering his view that nothing can have changed:

To review, the authors confirm “drastic bottom layer heating over the coastal zone” that they attribute to warming of the Arctic atmosphere, but conclude that “recent climate change cannot produce an immediate response in sub-sea permafrost.” That’s the understatement of the year considering their conclusion that even under sustained heating, the brunt of the sub-sea methane won’t be affected in this millennium.

We of course do not need the brunt of it, but only, say 2% of it, to radically transform the world(1). No matter. Onward to the "publish" button!

Yet, he cannot have been without the nagging feeling that he forgot something. Something kind of important. Something like talking to the scientists being debunked. But they were on vacation! (2)

So, to his credit, he does a follow-up to that post when Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov check in. And Revkin is no Michael Bay; his sequels are all better than the original. In part two, we find that these researchers were not panicky about methane plumes, as the Independent made them sound, be had real and legitimate concerns about the accuracy of the models Revkin spent his first post praising:

Yes, modeling is important. However, we know that modeling results cannot prove or disprove real observations because modeling always assumes significant simplification and should be validated with observational data, not vice versa. Much of our work includes this field validation. Last spring, we extracted a 53-meter long core sample from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, to validate our conclusions about the current state of subsea permafrost. We found that the temperatures of the sediments were from 1.2 to 0.6 degrees below zero, Celsius, yet they were completely thawed. The model in the Dmitrenko paper [link] assumed a thaw point of zero degrees. Our observations show that the cornerstone assumption taken in their modeling was wrong.

The obvious thing to do after this bombshell was to talk to even more scientists, which Revkin has now done. While none of them look like retreating to a compound in the Rockies just yet, no one appears quite as sanguine as the December 14 Revkin of "Apocalypse Not":

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert: But the clathrate release problem is in a rather different category from the runaway greenhouse issue. It has to be seen as just one of the many fast or slow carbon catastrophes possibly awaiting us, in a system we are just groping to understand. The models of destabilization are largely based on variants of diffusive heat transport, but the state of understanding of slope avalanches and other more exotic release mechanisms is rather poor — and even if it turns out that rapid methane degassing isn’t in the cards, you still do have to worry about those several trillion metric tons of near-surface carbon and how secure they are. It’s like worrying about the state of security of Soviet nuclear warheads, but where you have no idea what kind of terrorists there might be out there and what their capabilities are — and on what time scales they operate.

Edward Brook: One problem with this discussion is that there is no definition of “time bomb” so people get confused. It seems quite likely that continued global warming will increase the emissions of methane from permafrost deposits and marine hydrates. Some of that will get in to the atmosphere, though … some will also be consumed in the water column and in soils. This “chronic” source may increase over time, and affect climate, but for the reasons you discussed it is likely to be slow, and not a catastrophic risk. [So we can't say there's nothing to worry about for a millennium?] Of course it is still important.

He goes on to quote a few other scientists to the effect that yes, methyl hydrates may contribute to climate change as a feedback, but no, massive near-instantaneous releases don't seem very likely. Which is comforting, of course, but only up to a point. Besides the fact that they could be wrong (and we know that climate science is not at its best when predicting when stuff is gonna melt) even if they are spot on, how gradual are we talking? Suppose a linear release over a thousands years -- 0.1% per year. That's 1.7 Gt of methane -- roughly half the amount of methane in the atmosphere today. Even if half of it were oxidized in the water column, you would still double the amount of methane in the atmosphere in four years and increase it by a factor of ten in fairly short order. Sweet dreams.

I can't judge Andrew Revkin harshly in this. It's impossible for me to dislike the man (how could I -- he left a comment on my blog!) The worst thing you can say about him is, he's a blogger. He's quick off the draw. Sometimes he'll print first and collect more facts afterwards. He has hobbyhorses and is the more likely to launch into debate to defend positions he's staked out before. But he will keep eleborating, keep talking to people, and correct his original views where they were excessive or misinformed (though you still need to change the date of publication (Oct 19, not Dec 6) in your original post, Andy!) What can I say to that, without being a hypocrite? Let he who has never done a quick edit after reading comments, cast the first stone.

_________________________

1) 2% of 1700Gt = 34Gt, increasing the existing methane burden in the atmosphere by a factor of tem, with a change in forcing of about +4W/m^2. Given that such a release over a short time period would overwhelm the supply of reactive species to break it down, despite methane's normally short life in the atmosphere, you'd probably be looking at a good 30 years of that before it even began to wane.

2) If I had ever made that excuse to an editor of mine, they would have fried me in extra virgin olive oil and served me with a light white sauce. Especially if I included nothing in the piece to the effect that "I tried to contact these people, but I couldn't reach them."

Minor myths: Do some economists think global warming will be beneficial?

2011-12-28T13:18:00.000-08:00

The cost of climate change. Interactive version here.

Several times recently, I've read or had it put to me that we don't know if global warming is going to be harmful or costly, and, specifically, that some economists think it may produce a net benefit.

To investigate this claim, I went to Google Scholar with the search terms "cost climate change." I ignored any article that wasn't about the cost of climate change, and also ignored any article not either written by a trained economist or published in their literature. I took only articles from 2009 onwards, picking up where this interesting study left off (Tol looks at 211 estimates of the cost of climate change, finding eight negative estimates (out of 211) from the work of just three authors, including Tol himself. He concludes -- and, as background, he is unquestionably the most respected and accomplished of the "skeptical" economists -- "Firstly, greenhouse gas emission reduction today isjustified. Even the most conservative assumption lead to positive estimates of the socialcost of carbon (cf. Table 1) and the Pigou tax is thus greater than zero.")

So onwards towards the present:
1. I quickly found out Martin L. Weitzman is not sanguine:

It is difficult to imagine what +10C–20°C mightmean for life on Earth, but such high temperatures have notbeen seen for hundreds of millions of years and such a rateof change over a few centuries would be unprecedentedeven on a timescale of billions of years. Global averagewarming of 10°C–20°C masks tremendous local and seasonal variation, which can be expected to produce temperature increases greater than this at particular times in particular places. Because these hypothetical temperaturechanges would be geologically instantaneous, they would effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it. At a mini-mum such temperatures would trigger mass species extinctions and biosphere ecosystem disintegration matching orexceeding the immense planetary die-offs associated in Earth’s history with a handful of previous geoenvironmentalmega-catastrophes. There exist some truly terrifying consequences of mean temperature increases +10°C–20°C, suchas disintegration of Greenland’s and at least the western part of the Antarctic’s ice sheets with dramatic raising of sealevel by perhaps thirty meters or so, critically important changes in ocean heat transport systems associated withthermohaline circulations, complete disruption of weather, moisture and precipitation patterns at every planetary scale,highly consequential geographic changes in freshwater availability, and regional desertification.

All of the above-mentioned horrifying examples of climate-change mega-disasters are incontrovertibly possible on atimescale of centuries.

Geez, Martin, thanks for the pep talk.

2. Burniaux et al, writing for the OCED, are less terrified but equally convinced:

The benefits of mitigation policies are difficult to quantify and fully monetise. Nevertheless,OECD analysis finds that when non-market impacts and risks of inaction are factored in,ambitious mitigation action is found to be economically rational – i.e. to result in net benefits –at the global level. This is the case even though the analysis does not factor in the co-benefitsfrom mitigation action (e.g. in terms of human health, energy security or biodiversity), whichprevious OECD analysis estimated to be large (Burniaux et al. 2008).

3. I found Richard Tol had done another meta-analysis:

I review the literature on the economic impacts of climate change, an externality that is unprecedentedly large, complex, and uncertain. Only 14 estimates of the total damage cost of climate change have been published, a research effort that is in sharp contrast to the urgency of the public debate and the proposed expenditure on greenhouse gas emission reduction. These estimates show that climate change initially improves economic welfare. However, these benefits are sunk. Impacts would be predominantly negative later in the century. Global average impacts would be comparable to the welfare loss of a few percent of income, but substantially higher in poor countries. Still, the impact of climate change over a century is comparable to economic growth over a few years. There are over 200 estimates of the marginal damage cost of carbon dioxide emissions. The uncertainty about the social cost of carbon is large and right-skewed. For a standard discount rate, the expected value is $50/tC, which is much lower than the price of carbon in the European Union but much higher than the price of carbon elsewhere. Current estimates of the damage costs of climate change are incomplete, with positive and negative biases. Most important among the missing impacts are the indirect effects of climate change on economic development; large-scale biodiversity loss; low-probability, high-impact scenarios; the impact of climate change on violent conflict; and the impacts of climate change beyond 2100. From a welfare perspective, the impact of climate change is problematic because population is endogenous, and because policy analyses should separate impatience, risk aversion, and inequity aversion between and within countries.

4. Bollen et al revisit a longtime hobbyhorse of IT, the additional benefits to human health and welfare of cutting fossil fuel burning, a major cause of asthma, lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. They think the air pollution benefits may be the larger benefit! But, again, there's no suggestion than global warming isn't a significantly costly event:

We attempt to cover at least part of the existing gap in the literature by assessing how costs and benefits of technologies and strategies that jointly tackle these two environmental problems can best be balanced. By using specific technological options that cut down local air pollution, e.g. related to particulate emissions, one may concurrently reduce CO₂ emissions and thus contribute to diminishing global climate change. Inversely, some of the long-term climate change strategies simultaneously improve the quality of air in the short run. We have extended the well-established MERGE model by including emissions of particulate matter, and show that integrated environmental policies generate net global welfare benefits. We also demonstrate that the discounted benefits of local air pollution reduction significantly outweigh those of global climate change mitigation, at least by a factor of 2, but in most cases of our sensitivity analysis much more. Still, we do not argue to only restrict energy policy today to what should be our first priority, local air pollution control, and wait with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, we propose to design policies that simultaneously address these issues, as their combination creates an additional climate change bonus. As such, climate change mitigation proves an ancillary benefit of air pollution reduction, rather than the other way around.

5. Hill et al, who are primarily concerned with analyzing the utility of biofuels, cleverly use estimates of the cost of CCS (carbon capture and storage) to set an upper limit on carbon costs:

We generate a monetary cost for GHG emissions based on independent estimates of carbon mitigation costs, carbon market prices, and the social cost of carbon. Carbon mitigation (capture and storage) costs for an integrated gasification combined-cycle electricity generating plant are $92–$147 Mg⁻¹ C (18); we use the midpoint of this range, $120 Mg⁻¹ C. This estimate is in the range of recent prices on the European carbon market [€23–28 Mg⁻¹ CO₂, or U.S. $133–$162 Mg⁻¹ C at an exchange rate of $1.58 €⁻¹ in July 2008, and €18–23 Mg⁻¹ CO₂, or U.S. $88–$112 Mg⁻¹ C at an exchange rate of $1.33 €⁻¹ in October 2008] (molecular weight ratio of CO₂:C = 44:12). It is also within the range of estimates for the “social cost of carbon,” which represents the expected future damages from enhanced climate change (e.g., damages from sea level rise, increased storm intensity, and crop losses from more intensive drought). The mean estimate of the social cost of carbon from peer-reviewed studies was $43 Mg⁻¹ C (19), although there was large variation in the estimates from below $0 to >$300 Mg⁻¹ C. The large variation in estimates occurs largely because of disagreement on how to weigh future costs and benefits relative to the present (“discounting”) and how to weigh costs and benefits accruing to poor and rich countries (“equity weights”). In addition, there are large uncertainties about climate forcing impacts and future human adaptability.

6. Anthoff, Hepburn, and Tol (him again!) find that equity-weighting increases the estimated damages of climate change. What is equity weighting? I have no idea (the downside of wading through the economists' literature). My usual approach is useless -- there's no Wikipedia page. At any rate, they use a damages estimate that is positive, based on Tol's earlier work.

Climate change will give rise to different impacts in different countries, and different countries have different levels of development. Equity-weighted estimates of the (marginal) impact of greenhouse gas emissions reflect these differences. This paper analyses the impact of equity weighting on the marginal damage cost of carbon dioxide emissions, and reaches four main conclusions. First, equity-weighted estimates are substantially higher than estimates without equity-weights; equity-weights may even change the sign of the social cost estimates. Second, estimates differ by two orders of magnitude depending on the region to which the equity weights are normalised. Third, equity-weighted estimates are sensitive to the resolution of the impact estimates. Depending on the assumed intra-regional income distribution, estimates may be more than twice as high if national rather than regional impacts are aggregated. Fourth, variations in the assumed inequality aversion have different impacts in different scenarios, not only because different scenarios have different emissions and hence warming, but also because different scenarios have different income differences, different growth rates, and different vulnerabilities.

7. Ackerman et al feel existing estimates of the economic damages of climate change systematically underestimate the problem:

The integrated assessment models (IAMs) that economists use to analyze the expected costs and benefits of climate policies frequently suggest that the “optimal” policy is to go slowly and to do relatively little in the near term to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We trace this finding to the contestable assumptions and limitations of IAMs. . . . A better approach to climate policy, drawing on recent research on the economics of uncertainty, would reframe the problem as buying insurance against catastrophic, low-probability events. Policy decisions should be based on a judgment concerning the maximum tolerable increase in temperature and/or carbon dioxide levels given the state of scientific understanding. The appropriate role for economists would then be to determine the least-cost global strategy to achieve that target. While this remains a demanding and complex problem, it is far more tractable and epistemically defensible than the cost-benefit comparisons attempted by most IAMs.

8. Anthoff and Tol are back, "Discounting for Climate Change":

. . . However, if we probabilistically constrain the parameters to values that are implied by observed behaviour, we find that the expected social cost of carbon, corrected for uncertainty and inequity, is approximate 60 US dollar per metric tonne of carbon (or roughly $17 per tonne of CO2) under the assumption that catastrophic risk is zero.

. . . the problem with that being that catastrophic risk isn't zero. In any case, again the cost is positive.

9.Heltberg et al don't give us a number, but they don't give any hint they think climate change will be of net benefit in "Addressing human vulnerability to climate change: Toward a ‘no-regrets’ approach":

Recent evidence and predictions indicate that climate changes are accelerating and willlead to wide-ranging shifts in climate variables. There will be changes in the mean and varianceof rainfall and temperature, extreme weather events, food and agriculture production and prices,water availability and access, nutrition and health status. The most adverse impacts are predictedin the developing world because of geographic exposure, reliance on climate sensitive sectors,low incomes, and weak adaptive capacity. Socio-economic impacts, though generally not well-understood, are likely to be profound and will impact humans through a variety of direct andindirect pathways (IPCC, 2007; Cline, 2007; Stern, 2007). The indirect risks are often hard topredict (they are the consequences of consequences) but could have the worst impacts.

10. Jamet and Corfee-Morlot (love those French names) round out our top ten with a nice review: "Assessing the Impacts of Climate Change":

On the whole, estimates of the global impact of climate change have not changed much over thelast 10 years according to the IPCC (Figure 3). However, the Stern review estimates are much larger thanin other studies. As already mentioned, this is mainly due to a low discount rate, and to a lesser extent tonew information regarding the impacts (Nordhaus, 2007a; Dasgupta, 2007). Nevertheless, use of a lowdiscount rate may involuntarily yield more plausible estimates than those in the rest of the literature(Weitzman, 2007). This is in part because there are large uncertainties on the impacts of climate change,which are explained in more detail in the following section.

So what have we learned from this exercise? For my part I am reminded again that it is much easier to be a liar than to defend the truth. It's easy for a denier to causally toss off the assertion that some economists think climate change will be of net benefit. Maybe they are thinking of Lomborg (who supports a carbon tax, and anyhow is not actually an economist) or Tol (who is also on record supporting a carbon tax.) Maybe they are just repeating something they've heard; maybe they think it sounds plausible and no one is likely to check. But in any case the misinformation is the work of a moment; fact-checking it takes weary hours.

At any rate: economists more or less universally believe that the impact of global warming will be a net negative. They differ as to the magnitude of the damages expected, but for the most part they are in broad agreement with the climate scientists that global warming on a business as usual pathway will be expensive and destructive in the best case and utterly catastrophic at the worst.

Let me count the ways

2011-12-28T05:07:00.000-08:00

How can we as a society slow climate change?

Right now the discourse about solutions is limited by the problem that many of the stakeholders have refused to come to the table, instead denying the problem exists, or prioritizing other concerns.

Someone like me, designing a program more or less in a vacuum, is free to come up with what they view as a simple and an optimal approach. But when the action really starts, the program will likely not be optimal, and not be simple. That's OK: slowing climate change is a matter of survival, and like fighting a war, we do not need to find the optimal solution, just a solution that works.

It's easy to lose sight of that, I think. Creating a low-emissions society is likely to be an expensive and difficult undertaking, and when arguing for our own favorite approach, it is easy to slip into the mentality that says if this is not done in the best way (my way) that failure is assured.


+80m sea level -- not soon, but soon to be inevitable

If we embark on a messy, complicated, in some measures unrealistic approach; an approach that pampers some stakeholders and imposes an unfair burden on others, that will be inefficient, and in some measure unjust, but nowhere near as bad as doing nothing.

Progressives, environmentalists, conservatives, and libertarians are likely to have different opinions as to the best approach. We should celebrate the day when everyone is arguing about how to fight climate change, rather than arguing about whether it is happening. The wider the array of options, the more likely any given faction can find an approach they like. So what are some of the options?

From Nordhaus et al (2010)

Carbon taxes (higher or lower), cap and trade (fixed allowances versus falling quotas vs buy-back), regulation (industries must cut emissions by 5% per year, figuring out how themselves; energy efficient technologies mandated; high mileage standards for cars), direct intervention (by, for example, mass producing the new AP1000 reactor like Liberty ships, by the thousands. Or, for the more ambitious, we could quickly finalize and mass produce something such as a thorium-based molten salt reactor.) There is carbon sequestration, via tree planting or no-till agriculture or subterranean injection or transferring the carbon to the deep sea.

There are various methods of geoengineering: aerosol injection, painting roofs white, shooting a saltwater spray upwards to generate more reflective clouds.

We can subsidize research and development into low-carbon energy sources; we can undertake a variety of methods to improve energy efficiency (upgrading to a national HVDC grid, for example, or changing building regulations, or reducing traffic congestion with smart highways, or improving our rail networks.)

In terms of reaching an international accord, we can proceed with multilateral negotiations, like the ones that produced the Kyoto Protocol, or we could pursue a more muscular approach, like the recent EU ruling on commercial airline emissions; identify large countries ready to move forward and pressure others to cooperate with trade carrots and sticks.

I could go on. Some of these methods are better than the others; most would not work singly, meaning we need some combination of approaches. Geoengineering, for example, is not (in my opinion) practical by itself, chiefly because you would have to continue it for hundreds or thousands of years, and any interruption, such as an international conflict, could lead to extremely rapid warming. We might, however, decide to gradually reduce our emissions over the next century, using geoengineering for a couple of centuries to avoid tipping points, and ramping up carbon sequestration to have CO2 back at a reasonable level by then.

We have to do something, and soon. The harmful effects of global warming continue to arrive ahead of schedule (h/t Steve Bloom.)

Semiletov and Shakhova report

2011-12-27T11:11:00.000-08:00

The methane researchers who disturbed our rest and inspired immediate, pre-communication debunking by Andrew Revkin, Semiletov and Shakhova, now explain their concerns to him based on the recent findings:

We would first note that we have never stated that the reason for the currently observed methane emissions were due to recent climate change. In fact, we explained in detail the mechanism of subsea permafrost destabilization as a result of inundation with seawater thousands of years ago. We have been working in this scientific field and this region for a decade. We understand its complexity more than anyone. And like most scientists in our field, we have to deal with slowly improving understanding of ongoing processes that often incorporates different points of views expressed by different groups of researchers.

Yes, modeling is important. However, we know that modeling results cannot prove or disprove real observations because modeling always assumes significant simplification and should be validated with observational data, not vice versa. Much of our work includes this field validation. Last spring, we extracted a 53-meter long core sample from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, to validate our conclusions about the current state of subsea permafrost. We found that the temperatures of the sediments were from 1.2 to 0.6 degrees below zero, Celsius, yet they were completely thawed. The model in the Dmitrenko paper [link] assumed a thaw point of zero degrees. Our observations show that the cornerstone assumption taken in their modeling was wrong. The rate at which the subsea permafrost is currently degrading largely depends on what state it was in when recent climate change appeared. It makes sense that modeling on an incorrect assumption about thaw point could create inaccurate results.

Observations are at the core of our work now. It is no surprise to us that others monitoring global methane have not found a signal from the Siberian Arctic or increase in global emissions. [This refers to the work of Ed Dlugokencky and others; see his comments in my Dot Earth post.] The number of stations monitoring atmospheric methane concentrations worldwide is very few. In the Arctic there are only three such stations — Barrow, Alert, Zeppelin — and all are far away from the Siberian Arctic. We are doing our multi-year observations, including year-round monitoring, in proximity to the source. In addition to measuring the amount of methane emitted from the area, we are trying to find out whether there is anything specific about those emissions that could distinguish them from other sources. It is incorrect to say that anyone is able to trace that signal yet.

All models must be validated by observations. New data obtained in our 2011 cruise and other unpublished data give us a clue to reevaluate if the scale of methane releases from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf seabed is assessed correctly (papers are now in preparation). This is how science works: step by step, from hypothesis based on limited data and logic to expanded observations in order to gain more facts that could equally prove or disprove the hypothesis. We would urge people to consider this process, not jump to conclusions and be open to the idea that new observations may significantly change what we understand about our world.

So what is the news here? The different thaw point result will need to be replicated. How far down the melt goes should be directly measured in as many locations as possible. Meanwhile, it should be trivial to do model runs at different thaw points and see what effect that might have.

Steven Mosher explained

2011-12-26T14:43:00.000-08:00

Why is he the way he is? Now it's a little clearer:

That's right. He's performed deconstructions. You sit with that, four eyes, with your "science" and your "data." You ponder it.

Alaska methane levels spike

2011-12-25T08:14:00.000-08:00

Let's hope the data at the far right (which is preliminary and unconfirmed) represents a measurement artifact and not the postscript to Ed Dlugokencky recent reassurances:

[B]ased on what we see in the atmosphere, there is no evidence of substantial increases in methane emissions from the Arctic in the past 20 years.

This came up at Neven's, whereupon it was pointed out that CO2 is spiking too:

Which could indicate the sensors are off. On the other hand, we would expect a significant fraction of any undersea methane release to be oxidized to CO2, and melting permafrost also releases both gases . . . so I don't know that the presence of a similar anomalous spike in the CO2 measurements really helps us decide if the methane spike is real. Only time will tell, I suppose . . . updates as I find them.

UPDATE:

Cold Bay shows a spike for CO2:

But nothing out of the ordinary for methane:

While NOAA's interactive map is incredibly helpful, what one would not give for a few Siberian sites.

A Christmas Carol guide to denial

2011-12-25T07:55:00.000-08:00

It's global cooling! Or not.

It hasn't changed much:

'I wish to be left alone,' said Scrooge. 'Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned-they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.'

   'Many can't go there; and many would rather die.'
   'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides-excuse me-I don't know that.'
   'But you might know it,' observed the gentleman.

Choosing not to know -- choosing not to see. Deliberate ignorance in the face of unwelcome insight. And if someone pushes that insight upon you, what then?

[1]"Deny it!' cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city.[2] 'Slander those who tell it ye! [3] Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And abide the end!'

Making sense of methane

2011-12-23T04:19:00.000-08:00

I'm traveling today, but here are a few review articles about methane which are free online:

"Atmospheric Methane: Trends and Impacts"

"As discussed earlier, increasing water vapor from methane could be leading to an increased amount of polar stratospheric clouds. Ramanathan (1988) notes that both water and ice clouds, when formed at cold lower stratospheric temperatures, are extremely efficient in enhancing the atmospheric greenhouse effect. He also notes that there is a distinct possibility that large increases in future methane may lead to a surface warming that increases nonlinearly with the methane concentration."

"Archer: Destabilization of Methane Hydrates: A Risk Analysis"

"Methane is less concentrated than CO2,and its absorption bands less saturated, so a single molecule of additional methane has alarger impact on the radiation balance than a molecule of CO2, by about a factor of 24[Wuebbles and Hayhoe, 2002]. The radiative impact of CH4 follows the concentration toroughly the 1/3 power, while the CO2 impact follows the log of the concentration. To getan idea of the scale, we note that a doubling of methane from present-day concentrationwould be equivalent to 60 ppm increase in CO2 from present-day, and 10 times presentmethane would be equivalent to about a doubling of CO2."

"Strong atmospheric chemistry feedback to climate warming from Arctic methane emissions"

"The indirect contribution to RF of additionalmethane emission is particularly important. It is shown that if global methane emissionswere to increase by factors of 2.5 and 5.2 above current emissions, the indirectcontributions to RF would be about 250% and 400%, respectively, of the RF that can beattributed to directly emitted methane alone. Assuming several hypothetical scenarios ofCH4 release associated with permafrost thaw, shallow marine hydrate degassing, andsubmarine landslides, we find a strong positive feedback on RF through atmosphericchemistry. In particular, the impact of CH4 is enhanced through increase of its lifetime,and of atmospheric abundances of ozone, stratospheric water vapor, and CO2 as a result of atmospheric chemical processes."

. . . so make sense of it your own damn self! Kidding. Here are a some things I gleaned:

* The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is uniquely vulnerable, and this vulnerable formation has its own vulnerable sub-sections. So a leak, while serious, would not necessarily imply a planetary disaster.

* Doubling methane would increase forcing by about 0.4 - 0.6 W/m^2 (that is a harder number to find then you might think.) The calculation is complicated, because the effect of methane on water vapor, ozone, and reactive O2 species effects both the warming caused by the methane and the lifespan of the methane in the atmosphere.

* The impact of an event similar to the Storegga landslide I found helpfully described as "similar in magnitude and duration but opposite in sign to a large volcanic eruption." The largest known "mud volcanoes" have similar potential.

Overall, this is a complex but not unapproachable subject. Worriers like me will find plenty to worry about, but there are also good reasons why oceanic methane release is not the thing keeping methane scientists up at night. And the science and research is really cool.

Justin Gillis on methyl hydrates

2011-12-22T02:39:00.000-08:00

Justin Gillis' dead eyes will burn into you until he gets to the truth.

Man, I should buy a lottery ticket.

While we were working our way through the very excited British accounts of the methyl hydrate threat, and the very phlegmatic (but not entirely convincing) response of Andy Revkin, Justin Gillis came out with a fantastic article on permafrost that is already getting rave reviews. And I thought "I wish Justin Gillis would take on this methane thing."

And in less than a day, Justin Gillis took on the methane thing: "Arctic Methane: Is Catastrophe Imminent?" And Gills' sources, like Revkin's are not overly impressed with the threat of massive methane release:

While examples can already be found of warmer ocean currents that are apparently destabilizing such deposits—for example, at this site off Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic—the scientists explained that a pervasive ocean warming sufficient to destabilize a lot of methane hydrates would almost certainly take thousands of years.
And even if that happened, many scientists say that the methane released would largely be consumed in the sea (by bacteria that specialize in eating methane) and would not reach the atmosphere. That is what seems to be happening off Svalbard.
“I think it’s just dead wrong to talk about ‘Arctic Armageddon,’ ” said William S. Reeburgh, an emeritus scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who spent decades studying such matters and says the likely consumption of methane within the ocean should not be underestimated. “Most of this methane is never going to see the atmosphere.”
Nobody regards the case as closed, and more research is necessary, but most of the methane deposits lining the margins of continents would seem to be fairly low on the list of scientific concerns about global warming.

But the Arctic is, perhaps, something of an exception:

The methane hydrate deposits in the Arctic Ocean may represent a somewhat greater hazard because the Arctic is warming so rapidly. Considerable attention was devoted to a paper published last year that found methane bubbling out across large areas of ocean above the East Siberian Shelf, which has some of the Arctic’s largest methane hydrate deposits.
But that paper did not prove that the methane release was new, much less that it was increasing. Subsequent work by others has in fact suggested that these particular deposits have probably been unstable and slowly breaking down since the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago.
Moreover, the zone from which the methane is escaping appears to represent only a fraction of the total methane beneath the Arctic Ocean. Most methane hydrate is far enough below the sea floor that sediments serve as an insulating layer, limiting how fast heat can spread downward. Again, the most careful calculations seem to put any significant methane release at hundreds or even thousands of years in the future.
As I hope to describe in more detail later this week, methane measurements in the atmosphere are consistent with the picture I just outlined. They do not support the idea that any big new releases of methane are occurring in the Arctic yet, at least not on a sufficient scale to have an overall impact on the planet’s methane burden. So if a methane “time bomb” actually exists in the ocean, as some news stories would have you believe, it seems fairly clear that it hasn’t gone off yet.
Still, there’s no question that some scientists are worried about this issue — less by what we know than what we don’t. Carolyn Ruppel, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey, is leading some of the efforts to get better information and especially to map areas off northern Alaska that may contain deposits of methane hydrate. “We need a baseline” against which future changes can be judged, she said.

None of these reassurances are entirely satisfying as regards the recent observations, but until we have some clear numbers on those observations and preferably confirmation from another team at the Shelf, or detect a change in the atmospheric burden of methane, it's hard to judge how, if at all, the new observations are going to change how we see the situation under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

We await developments (I do feel somewhat better). Meanwhile, a couple of good sources:

Neven's post and thread are superb, as usual.
The Columbia Journalism Review went over the major articles in this mini-methane-stampede.

Is the debate about climate science really about values?

2011-12-20T03:40:00.000-08:00

Pielke Jr thinks so:

As I argued in my first essay in this roundtable, the justification of political actions in terms of science is a common feature of our politics, expressly because science is held in such high regard. Everyone (many scientists included) seems to think that by invoking the scientific correctness of his or her positions, he or she can reach a moral high ground that will trump the arguments presented by opponents (who, typically, also appeal to science). Science is thus viewed as a way to circumvent political discourse over values and interests.

For instance, we began this exchange with an invitation to respond to a question motivated by the statements made by Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, who expressed skepticism about the science of climate change. While we've been having this discussion, the Obama administration has decided to overrule the recommendation of an FDA science advisory committee on the safety of an over-the-counter contraceptive for girls under age 17.

While many observers cast both examples as anti-science, neither has anything to do with being anti-science and everything to do with politics and values.

While I think Dr Pielke has half a point here, he is holding it upside down. The story of how politicians and voters end up butting heads over science may sometimes have to do with ill-judged appeals to scientific legitimacy, but more often they have to do with the rigid rationality of science bringing to the fore the irrational contradictions between our stated goals and values and our feelings (including our desires, gut instincts, prejudices). Science is attacked not in defense of our values, but rather to defend ourselves from our values when they conflict with our impulses. Science is collateral damage in an assault on our own values and interests.

Suppose you are a man of a certain age ordering breakfast in a restaurant. You want this:

But you know your doctor wants you to order this:

You enjoy being alive and being able to climb a flight of stairs or two without feeling like the air is being squeezed out of your chest. Therefore you and your doctor are not having a conflict about values, or about interests. The second breakfast is the right thing to do. But you want plate number one. And that is where the anti-science rationalizations suddenly become useful.

Doctors don't know everything. They keep changing their minds about what is healthy [but not about whether you should eat 3,000 calories for breakfast]. My father ate whatever he wanted, and he lived to be 80! [Diabetic, blind, and in a nursing home after three heart attacks.] I reject the tyranny of health nuts! Give me plate one!

The debate about emergency contraception is the same thing. It's not (mostly) about values. As a society, most of us agree that kids should have ready access to contraception. But Plan B does not feel like contraception. Even when we know the facts, a pill you take after sex to prevent pregnancy feels like an abortifactant. People who have no problem with kids having access to condoms don't want them to have easy access to Plan B. Because of how it feels.

Climate denial is the same thing all over again. It's not a debate about values. No one's values are served by endangering human civilization or by bringing about the extinction of 40%-70% of all extant species. Conservative, liberal, religious, atheist; that possibility should be equally offensive to everybody. Nobody will argue openly for hurting the poor so the rich can freely pollute, or impoverishing the world of our children so that we can continue to waste.

The things that climate science in combination with what their own values imply -- that's what deniers are running from, because their feelings bring them in conflict with their values. That is also the problem in engaging the broader waffling public. To act we have to think about the long term (hard). We need to spend some money and energy now for benefits that are mostly in the future (hard). Conservatives need to accept that in this area, governments will need to be active in preventing a tragedy of commons (hard).

Conflicts over values can be hashed out directly. People bring science into it mostly, I think, when the hard clear light of scientific reason shows them something their values and interests tell them they should do -- but they still don't want to. Rather than control their feelings and impulses to bring them into line with their interests, or modify their values, they attack the messenger. When they do they use whatever materials are at hand, drifting around in the zeitgeist.

For an American, that means populism, anti-elitism, anti-secularism. Scientists are attacked as leftist with an agenda, ivory-tower dons who have lost touch with reality, parasites subsisting off of tax dollars, distracted professors without common sense. None of these tropes are new; they have been around for decades, some of them for centuries. They can come tinged with anti-Semitism. But at the deepest level, science is not the true target of these attacks -- their purpose is to help people close the gap between what they know they should do (based on their own values and interests) and what they want to do (based on their feelings and desires).

Semiletov v Dmitrenko: The tale of the tape

2011-12-19T09:47:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Mr. Revkin's intrepid reporting, we now know that there is a bit of a schism afflicting researchers looking at methane release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS). After reporting on the permafrost model presented by Dmitrenko at the recent AGU meeting (a model that suggests methane releases in the Arctic are not going to markedly accelerate with climate change), Revkin relates:

Semiletov is finally in touch with me (he'd gone on vacation right after AGU) and you'll hear more on his work soon. He's very critical of Dmitrenko. This kind of back-and-forthing is the process of science in action.

And indeed it is. And both of these authors have many peer-reviewed climate studies to their name. They are both respectable professionals, and only time will tell who has a better sense of what is happening on the ESAS. I was interested, though, in how they compared to one another in terms of their stature in this field, so I did a little research.

There is no completely reliable and objective way to gauge the impact of a particular researcher in their field, but a commonly used rule of thumb is to look at the number of times their publications have been cited. Once a scientist crosses the great divide of peer-reviewed publication that separates him or her from a Monckton or a Glenn Beck, the next test of relevance is whether or not their work is useful to others in the field; whether it is considered to be work that needs to be addressed or built upon. Science that doesn't stand the test of time gets superseded or just ignored.

Citations, then, are a way to assess, within the scientific community, what Samuel Johnson called the only objective measure of greatness "length and duration of esteem."

One quick example of how this works. Steig (2009) analyzed temperature trends in Antarctica. A "skeptic," Ryan O'Donnell, with assistance from Steig, turned his critique of Steig (2009) into something that successfully navigated peer review -- O'Donnell (2010). Climate Audit then triumphantly proclaimed "O'Donnell et al 2010 Refutes Steig et al 2009." Watts gloated similarly.

With both publications in print for more than a year, let's see how they're doing:

Improved methods for PCA-based reconstructions: case study using the Steig et al. 2009 Antarctic temperature reconstruction (O'Donnell et al, 2010). Cited by 2.

"Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year" (Steig et al, 2009). Cited by 163.

So that's basically how it works. Better science tends to get more citations. So with that in mind, I searched Google Scholar for "Semiletov and methane," and "Dimitrenko and methane," and took the first five articles I could find:

Dimitrenko and methane

Recent changes in shelf hydrography in the Siberian Arctic: Potential for subsea permafrost instability

IA Dmitrenko, SA Kirillov, LB Tremblay… - Journal of Geophysical …, 2011 - agu.org

None yet.

Impact of the Arctic Ocean Atlantic water layer on Siberian shelf hydrography

IA Dmitrenko, SA Kirillov, LB Tremblay… - Journal of Geophysical …, 2010 - agu.org

Cited by 8.

The Laptev Sea system since the last glacial

…, JA Hoelemann, I Dmitrenko… - SPECIAL PAPERS- …, 2007 - books.google.com

Cited by 2.

Siberian shelf methane emissions not tied to modern warming

C Schultz - Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, 2011 - agu.org

This is a summary of the first paper. I did it again! But there's nothing else to plug in here. No citations.

Bottom water temperatures of a Siberian shelf sea in response to ice formation

J Hoelemann, M Makhotin, C Wegner, I Dmitrenko… - 2008 - utsa.edu

None.

Dmitrenko has a total of ten citations for these papers. I felt a little bad about this, so I looked into the matter some more, and found, based on his publications listed at the International Arctic Research Center, that he is more of a water-and-wind guy, and less of a permafrost-and-methane guy (nothing wrong with that). So I tried again with the publications listed here:

Dmitrenko, I, Kirillov S, Eicken H, Markova N. 2005. Wind-driven summer surface hydrography of the eastern Siberian Shelf. Geophysical Research Letters. 32:L14613.

Cited by 13.

Dmitrenko, I, Holemann J, Kirillov S, Berezovskaya S, Ivanova D, Eicken H, Kassens H. 2006. Sea ice impact on the periodical shallow water dynamics in the Laptev Sea (Siberian Arctic). Proceedings of the 16th IAHR International Symposium on Ice at Dunedin, New Zealand. :375-381.

Cited by 2.

Dmitrenko, I, Kirillov S, Ivanov VV, Woodgate R. 2008. Mesoscale Atlantic water eddy off the Laptev Sea continental slope carries the signature of upstream interaction. Journal of Geophysical Research. 113:C07005.

Cited by 5.

Dmitrenko, I, Tyshko K, Kirillov S, Hölemann J, Eicken H, Kassens H. 2005. Impact of flaw polynas on the hydrography of the Laptev Sea. Global and Planetary Change. 48:9-27.

Could not find with Google Scholar.

Dmitrenko, I, Polyakov IV, Kirillov S, Timokhov L, Simmons HL, Ivanov VV, Walsh D. 2006. Seasonal Variability of Atlantic Water on the Continental Slope of the Laptev Sea during 2002-2004. Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 244:735-743.

Cited by 11.

A total of 31 citations, or an average of six per publication (possibly depressed a bit by my inability to find citations for the fourth paper.)

Semiletov and methane

North Siberian lakes: a methane source fueled by Pleistocene carbon

SA Zimov, YV Voropaev, IP Semiletov, SP Davidov… - Science, 1997 - sciencemag.org

Cited by 116.

Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf

[PDF] from instrument.com.cnN Shakhova, I Semiletov, A Salyuk, V Yusupov… - Science, 2010 - sciencemag.org

Cited by 55.

The distribution of methane on the Siberian Arctic shelves: Implications for the marine methane cycle

N Shakhova, I Semiletov… - Geophysical Research Letters, 2005 - agu.org

Cited by 36.

Methane release and coastal environment in the East Siberian Arctic shelf

…, I Semiletov - Journal of Marine Systems, 2007 - Elsevier

Cited by 19.

Anomalies of methane in the atmosphere over the East Siberian shelf: Is there any sign of methane leakage from shallow shelf hydrates?

N Shakhova, I Semiletov, A Salyuk… - Geophysical Research …, 2008 - geobc.gov.bc.ca

Cited by 11.

Total citations: 227.

Semiletov's least cited paper is cited almost as many times (11) as Dmitrenko's most cited (13). He has more than seven times as many citations. Also, interestingly, he's clearly something of a specialist in this area; finding five papers about Arctic methane by Semiletov was no trouble at all. Dmitrenko has expertise in the relevant fields of hydrology and the Arctic, but he seems to be something of a methane newbie; only the first paper, which Revkin references, from October 2011, is about methane emissions.

Dmitrenko is a serious scientist; his work should be and will be judged on its merits. Nothing against him. But taking a quick look at their respective records, Dmitrenko is a strange choice for a debunker of Semiletov's concerns. First, basic weight-class stuff:

1. Dmitrenko's top papers have been cited a few dozen times; Semiletov has hundreds of citations.

On methane:

2. Semiletov has been studying methane emissions from waterlogged permafrost for at least 15 years; Dmitrenko published his first paper on the subject three months ago.

On the type of studies:

3. Dmitrenko's is a permafrost modelling study; Semiletov recently returned with direct observations from the ESAS.

Final verdict: ADVANTAGE SEMILETOV for greater experience, and longer record, more respect from peers, and recent direct observations of the phenomenon in question. I award bonus points because the established methane researcher, with a longer record and more citations, would be the one we would expect would be downplaying recent changes and be disposed to assert continuity in the face of excitable newcomers to the field. If the old man is worried, well, it puts me in mind of the old joke shirt:

Open letter to Andrew Revkin

2011-12-18T06:12:00.000-08:00

Mr. Revkin, thanks for dropping by.

I appreciate your correction on the two sources you cited, the summary by the AGU and the paper itself. I’m sure you can understand how two pieces with different titles, different authors, and different dates of publication would appear to be different papers. I’ll correct the original post.

You may wish to correct this part of your post: “A paper published in Dec. 6. . . .” The summary was posted Dec 6; the paper was published Oct 19.

As to not being a “middleman” and avoiding “whiplash” -- I don’t entirely understand you here. You thought Semiletov et al were important enough to swiftly reply to the Independent piece, but not enough to speak with any of them or get an account of their findings? When you chose to write on Semiletov and the story in the Independent, you decided to get into a back-and-forth discussion. You then omitted Semiletov, leaving us with the -and-forth. I really don’t think that’s how you improve things.

I would be happier if instead of highlighting a paper published two months ago, you had been able to quote Dmitrenko as saying “Yeah, that Semiletov guy is a nut and his data on the ESAS are not to be trusted.” Then you’re telling one side of the story, but at least you’re telling the story. You didn’t do that; you brought out a modeling study from October.

Not that I don’t think you should remind us what the modeling is saying right now, but really. This expedition and the observations that led up to it are news. If they aren’t news, you should ignore them. If they are news, you can’t pull a book off the shelf and say you’ve explained the observations. It’s as if someone reported a mass revolt sweeping Jordan (surprising, unexpected, unlikely) and you replied by quoting a political science professor’s book from 2010 to the effect that popular revolutions were impossible in the Arab world.

Moreover, there is nothing like a consensus among scientists that we don’t need to worry about this issue or that the methane we’re seeing is just a 8,000-year dribbling out. Under the header "'Arctic Armageddon' Needs More Science, Less Hype" Richard Kerr wrote for the Journal Science that:

The threat of global warming amplifying itself by triggering massive methane releases is real and may already be under way, providing plenty of fodder for scary headlines. But what researchers understand about the threat points to a less malevolent, more protracted process.

Both sentences are part of the state of the science; but you appear to have chosen to only relate the latter part of the warning. I like everything you said about the modeling and Dmitrenko's team, but I think you needed to say more.

NYTimes: As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks

2011-12-17T07:31:00.000-08:00

The Times hit it out of the park with this one. They covered the major points of the science, sketched how our understanding has changed, and provided real numbers for the estimated impact:

For now, scientists have many more questions than answers. Preliminary computer analyses, made only recently, suggest that the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions could eventually become an annual source of carbon equal to 15 percent or so of today’s yearly emissions from human activities.

But those calculations were deliberately cautious. A recent survey drew on the expertise of 41 permafrost scientists to offer more informal projections. They estimated that if human fossil-fuel burning remained high and the planet warmed sharply, the gases from permafrost could eventually equal 35 percent of today’s annual human emissions.

The experts also said that if humanity began getting its own emissions under control soon, the greenhouse gases emerging from permafrost could be kept to a much lower level, perhaps equivalent to 10 percent of today’s human emissions.

It sounds like a little thing, but I can't tell you how main mainstream news stories:

1) Avoid using numbers completely.
2) Take the first number they are told and put it in the article, not caring whether the number means anything (here they convert it to a % of human emissions, perfect).
3) Stick to one central number, assuming people will be hopelessly confused by the reality of different estimates.

The author gets to the point of what the numbers mean, too:

Even at the low end, these numbers mean that the long-running international negotiations over greenhouse gases are likely to become more difficult, with less room for countries to continue burning large amounts of fossil fuels.

The whole article does a great job. Good numbers with appropriate caveats:

Scientists need better inventories of the ancient carbon. The best estimate so far was published in 2009 by a Canadian scientist, Charles Tarnocai, and some colleagues. They calculated that there was about 1.7 trillion tons of carbon in soils of the northern regions, about 88 percent of it locked in permafrost. That is about two and a half times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Followed by context:

Philippe Ciais, a leading French scientist, wrote at the time that he was “stunned” by the estimate, a large upward revision from previous calculations.
“If, in a warmer world, bacteria decompose organic soil matter faster, releasing carbon dioxide,” Dr. Ciais wrote, “this will set up a positive feedback loop, speeding up global warming.”

It may be small of me, but I like a little action in my science stories. It reminds us of the absurdity of the denialist portrait of the rent-seeking elitist ivory-tower scientist, running computer simulations from a desk and collecting grant money:

One recent day, in 11-degree weather, Dr. Walter Anthony and an assistant, Amy Strohm, dragged equipment onto two frozen thermokarst lakes near Fairbanks. The fall had been unusually warm and the ice was thin, emitting thunderous cracks — but it held. In spots, methane bubbled so vigorously it had prevented the water from freezing. Dr. Walter Anthony, six months pregnant, bent over one plume to retrieve samples.

“This is thinner ice than we like,” she said. “Don’t tell my mother-in-law! My own mother doesn’t know.”

Well, they know now. And it's for the good of the public; they need to know what scientists really do.

They don't shy away from explaining how unusual these emissions are:

Dr. Walter Anthony had already run chemical tests on the methane from one of the lakes, dating the carbon molecules within the gas to 30,000 years ago. She has found carbon that old emerging at numerous spots around Fairbanks, and carbon as old as 43,000 years emerging from lakes in Siberia.

“These grasses were food for mammoths during the end of the last ice age,” Dr. Walter Anthony said. “It was in the freezer for 30,000 to 40,000 years, and now the freezer door is open.”

And they talk about the danger of fire:

One day in 2007, on the plain in northern Alaska, a lightning strike set the tundra on fire.
Historically, tundra, a landscape of lichens, mosses and delicate plants, was too damp to burn. But the climate in the area is warming and drying, and fires in both the tundra and forest regions of Alaska are increasing.

The Anaktuvuk River fire burned about 400 square miles of tundra, and work on lake sediments showed that no fire of that scale had occurred in the region in at least 5,000 years.

Are they going to leave it there? No, they are going to give you context for the effect of this fire:

Scientists have calculated that the fire and its aftermath sent a huge pulse of carbon into the air — as much as would be emitted in two years by a city the size of Miami.

As well as what the fire means in the broader context of the permafrost:

Scientists say the fire thawed the upper layer of permafrost and set off what they fear will be permanent shifts in the landscape.

Up to now, the Arctic has been absorbing carbon, on balance, and was once expected to keep doing so throughout this century. But recent analyses suggest that the permafrost thaw could turn the Arctic into a net source of carbon, possibly within a decade or two, and those studies did not account for fire.

“I maintain that the fastest way you’re going to lose permafrost and release permafrost carbon to the atmosphere is increasing fire frequency,” said Michelle C. Mack, a University of Florida scientist who is studying the Anaktuvuk fire. “It’s a rapid and catastrophic way you could completely change everything.”

Almost everyone agrees that the legacy media in general and science journalism in particular are on the rocks these days, but Justin Gillis seems not to have gotten the memo. This article is going to win some awards.

Andrew Revkin on methane, ctd

2011-12-17T06:52:00.000-08:00

Revkin responded to my criticism in a comment exchange at Quark Soup:

Andy Revkinsaid...: I sent several emails to Semiletov and others in his group since the AGU presentation. Happy to post when and if there's input from them on the points made by other scientists gauging the long-term risk question. Witnessing a lot of emissions now is important information, and monitoring is essential in such regions. But drawing conclusions about overall risk from this is not possible unless setting those observations against both basic understanding of sub-sea permafrost response to ocean warming and what can be learned by looking back 8,000 years ago etc.; 10:52 AM

This is a reasonable explanation of why Semiletov et al are not quoted in the article. It is common and uncontroversial to run without an important source when you have made a good faith effort to contact them and haven't been able to.

What confuses me, still, is why he didn't just say that. "I tried to contact Semiletov and others from his group, but no one replied." In addition to being basic good journalism, such a sentence to frame what Revkin is doing in the piece a lot more clearly. If I were his editor, I might suggest a revision, something (preserving Revkin's editorial intent) along the lines of:

There was a story in the Independent last week that tried to get us riled up about the possibility of rapid methane release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS). This story was ostensibly based on a recent expedition to the Shelf by Russian scientists, who were quoted in the article as finding "We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before. Some plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal."

While the Independent made this sound terrifying, they ran a very similar story in 2008, right down to the "intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels." Semiletov and his team have not returned emails, and Semiletov's AGU talk is not available online. So the actual results of the trip are not yet available. But there is some important context to the story that the Independent didn't provide:

* Permafrost scientists think that the methane emissions seen from the ESAS over the last few years can be explained by their permafrost models and are part of an 8,000 year process that is not directly linked to global warming.

* They think the bulk of the permafrost is safe for the next thousand years.

Both of these studies are based on modelling and the emissions of prior years, so it's possible Semiletov's team has found something that will challenge those models. Until he publishes his results, or at the very least, starts returning my emails, the state of the science today is still that a rapid, massive release of methane sufficient to accelerate global warming is thought to be unlikely.

That's how I would have written it, not that the highly accomplished Andrew Revkin (no sarc, he's done a lot of great climate writing) needs my imput.

Meanwhile, we need to hear from Semiletov and colleagues. Did anyone hear their talk?

Andrew Revkin on methane -- Reassuring, but inaccurate

2011-12-16T07:19:00.000-08:00

After the disturbing piece in the Independent, I was looking for somebody to talk me down, and Andrew Revkin seems to have set himself precisely that task in "Methane Time Bomb in Arctic Seas – Apocalypse Not." He is all reassurance:

If you read the Independent of Britain, you’d certainly be thinking the worst. The newspaper has led the charge in fomenting worry over the gas emissions, with portentous, and remarkably similar, stories in 2008 and this week.
If you read geophysical journals and survey scientists tracking past and future methane emissions, you get an entirely different picture:
A paper published in Dec. 6 in the Journal of Geophysical Research appears to confirm pretty convincingly that the gas emissions seen in recent years are from a thawing process that has been under way for 8,000 years — since seas rose sufficiently to cover the near-shore seabed.

I have to say, however, that the more Andy Revkin tries to play the part of the sane middle ground in the climate debate -- not too denialist, not too excited -- the less I am inclined to trust what he says at face value. "I occupy the sane middle ground" is an ideological self-description like any other, and Revkin regularly illustrates the distorting effects that rigidly pursuing that can have. Let's look at the abstract of the paper:

Summer hydrographic data (1920–2009) show a dramatic warming of the bottom water layer over the eastern Siberian shelf coastal zone (<10 m depth), since the mid-1980s, by 2.1°C. We attribute this warming to changes in the Arctic atmosphere. The enhanced summer cyclonicity results in warmer air temperatures and a reduction in ice extent, mainly through thermodynamic melting. This leads to a lengthening of the summer open-water season and to more solar heating of the water column. The permafrost modeling indicates, however, that a significant change in the permafrost depth lags behind the imposed changes in surface temperature, and after 25 years of summer seafloor warming (as observed from 1985 to 2009), the upper boundary of permafrost deepens only by ∼1 m. Thus, the observed increase in temperature does not lead to a destabilization of methane-bearing subsea permafrost or to an increase in methane emission. The CH₄ supersaturation, recently reported from the eastern Siberian shelf, is believed to be the result of the degradation of subsea permafrost that is due to the long-lasting warming initiated by permafrost submergence about 8000 years ago rather than from those triggered by recent Arctic climate changes. A significant degradation of subsea permafrost is expected to be detectable at the beginning of the next millennium. Until that time, the simulated permafrost table shows a deepening down to ∼70 m below the seafloor that is considered to be important for the stability of the subsea permafrost and the permafrost-related gas hydrate stability zone.

Just as important, look at the dates on the paper:

Received 18 April 2011; accepted 28 July 2011; published 19 October 2011.

Sharp readers will note that the dates don't match; the date of publication is Oct 2011, not Dec 2011. We'll get to that in a minute. For the moment let's focus on the paper itself.

Now, I'm not sure this is quite as reassuring vis-a-vis the boiling seas of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf as Revkin seems to think. For although he says "A paper published in Dec. 6 in the Journal of Geophysical Research appears to confirm pretty convincingly that the gas emissions seen in recent years are from a thawing process that has been under way for 8,000 years" this paper was submitted in April, months before scientists were dispatched to the shelf to investigate the expanding methane plumes. So while the study may reassure us about emissions "in recent years" it has nothing to say, specifically, about what the Independent was reporting about -- the very recent trip to examine the area after reports of huge plumes of gas.

Let me be very clear: here at IT, we listen to scientists; we don't dismiss them. Revkin talked to permafrost experts, who feel the recent plumes can be accounted for by their permafrost model. That model also says we don't need to worry about a large amount of methane escaping the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. However, it does not appear that that model was developed with, tested by, or compared to the data from the expedition dispatched in September (remember, the paper was submitted in April!) So unless there is more to the story, the scientists Revkin spoke with may think they can explain the observations, but they haven't explained the observations as yet. Indeed, the observations haven't even been reported yet.

I initially assumed -- I'm sure this wasn't deliberate on Revkin's part -- that when he referred to a paper published Dec 6, which reassures us about the findings of the expedition dispatched in September, that the paper was about the expedition dispatched in September. It is not. It's about a model of permafrost melting. And to be absolutely clear, we do not scorn modelling studies at IT. They are very important. The paper says that the model can adequately explain the small methane plumes observed in prior years as part of a long-term process, not a short-term, rapidly worsening degradation of permafrost. But there is no indication that the model has been tested against the new observations. The timeline doesn't seem to work.

I also thought -- and this time based on what Revkin explicitly stated -- that he had linked to the study published on Dec 6. Here's the quote:

But read this summary of the paper from the American Geophysical Union, which publishes the journal, and see if you feel reassured that the “methane time bomb” there is safe for a long time to come:
[T]he authors found that roughly 1 meter of the subsurface permafrost thawed in the past 25 years, adding to the 25 meters of already thawed soil. Forecasting the expected future permafrost thaw, the authors found that even under the most extreme climatic scenario tested this thawed soil growth will not exceed 10 meters by 2100 or 50 meters by the turn of the next millennium. The authors note that the bulk of the methane stores in the east Siberian shelf are trapped roughly 200 meters below the seafloor… [Read the rest.]
Here’s the link to the paper itself: “Recent changes in shelf hydrography in the Siberian Arctic: Potential for subsea permafrost instability.”

But if you click on the link to the AGU summary, you ~~quickly~~ slowly realize that these are two different papers, one called "Siberian shelf methane emissions not tied to modern warming" by Colin Schultz, and “Recent changes in shelf hydrography in the Siberian Arctic: Potential for subsea permafrost instability,” by Dmitrenko et al. the AGU summary was published Dec 6; the actual paper was published October 19.

So Revkin has ~~conflated two different papers by different authors into one~~ confused the summary's date of publication with the paper itself; he started off talking about the Independent's account of Dr. Semiletov's recent trip to the Arctic and his recent AGU presentation, but he didn't talk to Semiletov or reference that presentation.

So the Independent did publish a sensational story, a story that does look remarkably similar to one they published in 2008 (a good catch by Revkin.) But if you are comparing the two stories, the Independent's has this claim: they actually wrote about the findings of the expedition. They referred to Semiletov's talk at the AGU, which presumably relates to his paper in press "Trace gas emissions from sub-sea permafrost" (no abstract I could find) and not to either of the papers published by different authors about permafrost models developed prior to the recent observations.

So while it is as a general rule wise not to panic, and, especially on the subject of science, to wait for the dust to settle before reaching any conclusions, all the facts cited by Revkin in support of his languor are reported inaccurately and/or oversold.

Andy Revkin now wears the hat of a blogger, but he sometimes seems to have brought with him into his new career the very attributes that brought about the decline of traditional journalism: he is sloppy, he cares more about appearing moderate and fair than reporting the facts accurately, and while tsk-tsking at the sensationalism of the Independent, he neglects to do the basic stuff like talking to the principal people involved and actually getting the facts about the subject of his article.

Update: Revkin's response is below. I reply here.

Christopher Hitchens on Climate Change

2011-12-16T05:39:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens, noted iconoclast, skeptic, scourge of Mother Theresa and harsh critic of the left, passed away yesterday, of a pneumonia that was a complication of esophageal cancer. He was 62.

Christopher Hitchens was a highly intelligent guy, although his anti-religious writing, which is probably the thing he was most known for, for me had a harsh, intolerant lilt to it. On foreign policy, he was far to the right, with a predictably anti-Islamic slant. I was curious if he had anything to say on the subject of climate change.

He does not appear to have written on the subject, but he did address it in a video in 2007 (h/t Daily Kos), when he got it, somewhat to my surprise, pretty much exactly right:

The argument about global warming is not whether there is any warming but whether or not and to what extent human activity is responsible for it. My line on that is that we should act as if it is, for this reason, which I borrowed from Jonathan Schell's book on the nuclear question, The Fate of the Earth: We don't have another planet on which to run the experiment. Just as we don't have a right to run an experiment to run an experiment in nuclear exchange on this planet, we have no right to run an experiment in warming it either. So if it turned out to be that there was no severe global warming threat or that it wasn't man-made, then all we would have done would be make a mistake in analysis - which we could correct from. But if it turned out that there was and we didn't do anything about it, then it would be too late to do anything at all. And that would lead to disaster.

Coward deniers continue threats

2011-12-15T09:59:00.000-08:00

Threats of violence against climate scientists continue to be endemic in the denialosphere, like this idiot comment from Climate Etc:

Rich Matarese | December 15, 2011 at 2:36 am |
. . .

Mr. Young, you’re a nice person. I’m not. When I got a look into the e-mail communications which Dr. Mann mistakenly assumed would never get into the hands of the people he’d been so successfully defrauding and suppressing, I confess that it got my Sicilian up, and I began recalling remote locations in the Pine Barrens – well within driving distance of Centre County, Pennsylvania – where a little work with some shovels and a sack of quicklime could serve a genuine public benefit.
Hammering Dr. Mann is necessary not only as a punishment for his particular offenses but also as a pour encourager les autres public enforcement of those standards of conduct which academicians overtly profess but covertly violate as a matter of routine.
Not to get too Spider-Man here, but with great power comes great responsibility, and in order to prevent the abuse of such power, those accorded same have to be held to their responsibilities.
That may not be “business as usual” in the forms to which our present professoriate members are accustomed, but what the hell makes anybody think that their “business as usual” is acceptable when it produces multi-trillion-dollar damages like the AGW fraud?

You'd think a self-described Sicilian thug would know enough not to go on record threatening to murder a scientist they didn't like. Perhaps Rich assumes that we know, based on his general inability to back up anything he says, that he's a harmless blowhard, and we shouldn't take him seriously when he threatens to murder somebody.

Rich is probably too much of a coward to act on his violent fantasies, but he contributes to a culture among climate deniers that gets more extreme and violent each day. We've already seen our first climate denier mass murderer, who signed off praising Monckton (who is fond of comparing his opponents to Nazis) and the CRU hack before he systematically murdered seventy defenseless people. Are cowards and bullies like Rich contributing to a culture that makes horrors like that more likely? No question.

Solar forcing headed up, La Nina hanging in

2011-12-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

Just as we would expect at this point in the cycle:

The last month to put up numbers like November was eight years ago.

We continue to languish in what will apparently end up being a double-dip La Nina:

But the odds continue to favor at least one good El Nino coinciding with the upper half of the solar cycle, in the next four years or so. That will be a hot year.

Remember that clathrate gun? Huge methane plumes found in the Arctic

2011-12-13T20:45:00.000-08:00

In September Steve Bloom gave us a pointer to this:

Something strange
Posted on September 14, 2011 by rusfedmin

Commercial shipping through the Northeast Passage over the last couple weeks has reported the seas bubbling as if they were boiling. Their observations have been reported to the science ministry who have sent scientists to investigate.

The story hasn't gone away and hasn't gotten any more reassuring:

Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said. "I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them."

For further context, see here.

See also here:

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova's research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean.

This is one of those things; one of those things that was not supposed to happen. Or not happen for a long time. Or happen very slowly. To have methane boiling out of the Arctic sea, unoxidized, in plumes a kilometer across, in volumes sufficient to raise the local atmospheric levels of methane by a factor of a hundred . . . these are hard and heavy tidings. Hard to know what they mean, exactly, but nothing good.

Pew poll shows climate denial in retreat

2011-12-13T15:41:00.000-08:00

A new Pew Research poll finds more Americans accepting the reality of global warming:

The bump is modest -- 63% from a nadir of 57%. But the cross tables tell a different and more encouraging story:

The change in Democrats' view is a blip -- a statistically insignificant 2%. But Republicans and independents moved towards the science by 8% and 10%, respectively.

In the detailed cross tables, you can see that the shift in Republicans is not coming from the far right:

Q.65 From what you’ve read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature onearth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, or not?

Conservative Republican 31%
Mod/Lib Republican         63%
Mod/Cons Democrat        73%
Liberal Democrat             84%

Just to be sure, we can compare the same question from October 2009:

PARTY AND IDEOLOGY

Conservative Republican     32%
Mod/Lib Republican          41%
Mod/ConsDemocrat             72%
Liberal Democrat                 83%

Absolutely no motion in any group -- except moderate Republican. They advanced towards acceptance by leaps and bounds -- going from 41% saying the world is warming to 63%. The moderates are slowly abandoning the hardliners on this issue.

It's unfortunate the ideology remains such a strong predictor of who can accept incontrovertible scientific fact, but here's the silver lining: the conservatives are isolated, and their views are diverging more and more from those of the general public. Moderate democrats differ from liberal democrats on this question by a mere 9%; but conservative Republicans disagree with their moderates by a stunning 32%, compared to their own gap of just 9% from a mere two years ago.

This is another in a long line of polls to demonstrate the fallacy of the spin put out by climate "skeptics" to the effect that "We never questioned that the world is getting warmer." Not only did they question it; their voters still deny it by a two-to-one margin.

"Climategate 2.0" a giant flop

2011-12-12T10:21:00.000-08:00

That tiny bump at the end is for the stunning disclosure of yet more email that the hacker had hidden for two years.

The potty peer actually jumped out of a plane to try and gin up interest in this big bag of nothinginess:

Fortunately for AIDS sufferers and puzzlers everywhere, his chute opened without problems. Reeks of desperation a bit, though, doesn't it? I don't think this is going down quite as planned. Besides not giving us anything new, this rehash repeats the experience of revealing emails that say nothing about fraud or any misconduct of any kind. The first batch of emails landed in a more innocent world in which a few scientists using rude language to describe deniers who clearly deserved the epithets could by relentlessly flogged by the right-wing noise machine and this surprised people. It could appear organic, not scripted, and sell itself as the revelation of secrets, which thrills people, and not as a political dirty trick, which it actually was.

The second batch of emails undermines all of the elements of the original story that helped it sell. It is obviously calculated, not organic. The thief held on to the e-mails for two years. Moreover, the new release proves the thief selected which e-mails to release in 2009. That destroys the myth of the "whistleblower" pulling back the curtain on bad behavior -- selective disclosure to maximize embarrassment, concealment of the full context -- these are the hallmarks of political manipulation and deceit.

All in all, a pretty devastating own goal for Team Denial.

Not good

2011-12-10T16:23:00.001-08:00

Observed decreases in oxygen content of the global ocean – Helm et al. (2011) “Comparing the high-quality oxygen climatology from the World Ocean Circulation Experiment to earlier data we reveal near-global decreases in oxygen levels in the upper ocean between the 1970s and the 1990s. This globally averaged oxygen decrease is -0.93{plus minus}0.23 μmol l-1, which is equivalent to annual oxygen losses of -0.55{plus minus}0.13×1014 mol yr-1 (100-1000 m). The strongest decreases in oxygen occur in the mid-latitudes of both hemispheres, near regions where there is strong water renewal and exchange between the ocean interior and surface waters. Approximately 15% of global oxygen decrease can be explained by a warmer mixed-layer reducing the capacity of water to store oxygen, while the remainder is consistent with an overall decrease in the exchange between surface waters and the ocean interior. Here we suggest that this reduction in water mass renewal rates on a global scale is a consequence of increased stratification caused by warmer surface waters. These observations support climate model simulations of oxygen change under global warming scenarios.” Helm, K. P., N. L. Bindoff, and J. A. Church (2011), Geophys. Res. Lett., doi:10.1029/2011GL049513, in press.

H/t AGWObserver.

In recent years we have seen less accumulation of thermal energy than we expect to see in the upper ocean. This is the "missing heat." Some of the "missing" heat can be found by taking measurements of the deeper ocean.

Climate models grimly predict that increased warming of the surface ocean will strength the stratification of the ocean's layers, slowing the exchange of heat between the surface and the deep.

But "losing" heat to the deep ocean raised for me the hopeful speculation that heat might be settling into the deep faster than climate models predict, potentially buying humanity a itsy-bitsy piece of time to get serious about global warming.

But if we are already detecting the hypoxia caused by "an overall decrease in the exchange between surface waters and the ocean interior" then the real-world observations are supporting the models. The huge heat sink of the icy abyssal waters of the deep ocean will help us less and less as we heat the surface, meaning we end up with more surface warming for the same amount of retained heat.

Sea Level

2011-12-10T08:23:00.001-08:00

New site, h/t WHT: http://www.sealevelreport.com/

As with many climate impacts, the problem of sea level rise is a little more complicated than it appears at first blush. There is, of course, the problem of putting valuable real estate under water. Five million square kilometers of land lies within 10m of sea level; but it is not just any land. For thousands of years, boats have been the most efficient way to move goods; before the advent of railroads, automobiles, and airplanes, they were also by far the fastest. Hence huge numbers of people live at the water's edge. Today, about 37% of the world's people live within a 100km of the coast; by 2030, half the world's people will. About 500 million people currently live within 5m of sea level; those are the people whose homes are likely to be under water sometime between 40 and 400 years from now. There are 800 million people within 10m of sea level; they will probably have to move eventually as well.

But in addition to human settlements from small towns to great metropolises that must either by lost to the sea or protected via a huge and expensive system of dikes, there are additional consequences to sea level rise. One is erosion; higher seas mean the ocean takes bigger and bigger chunks of land away with the waves. This has been estimated at about 10% of rate of inundation -- so if we lose 5 million square km to rising seas, we might expect to lose 500,000 km^2 to erosion.

A more subtle problem is the infiltration of salt water deep inland.

As the sea level rises, salt water filters into the aquifers, a problem exacerbated by over-pumping. In California, some regions have already been forced to inject fresh water into the aquifer on a regular basis to create a barrier to slow the infiltration of salt water into the aquifer.

An excellent report on sea level rise, its dangers, and the costs of adaptation, is here. The cost of the realistically expected sea level rise in this century alone is in the trillions. These estimates do not take into the loss of historic cities, the destruction of wetlands, corals, and wildlife, or the cost of conflicts over limited water or the resettlement of refugees.

Why the decision to ignore Judith Curry isn't simple

2011-12-07T03:08:00.001-08:00

Climate Etc. lead for much of yesterday with a post entitled "Why the decision to tackle global warming isn’t simple." It's mostly excerpts from a piece by Jim Manzi in the New Republic, which reiterates the Curry Fallacy: I don't know how much global warming there will be, or how destructive it will be, because of the huge uncertainties, but I do nevertheless know that the risk of it being highly destructive is small, and I know the costs of cutting emissions will be huge."

The common sense problem with the Curry Fallacy is, of course, that if you don't know what the risk is, then you don't know what the risk is.

Am I exaggerating dizzying illogic of all this? See for yourselves:

The starting point for such a consideration is to recognize that we are not certain how much CO2 humanity will emit, how much warming a given amount of CO2 will cause, or how much damage a given amount of warming will cause. That is, we are concerned here with the inherently unquantifiable possibility that our probability distribution itself is wrong.

But:

The expected economic benefits of emissions mitigation do not cover its realistically expected costs.

How can you know the benefit to be realized in preventing a certain amount of warming if you don't know how much damage the warming itself would cause? It makes no sense.

Unfortunate Mr. Manzi, who also writes for the National Review, has caught the habit of not only ignoring facts he doesn't like, but actively misrepresenting them and distorting the truth. His evidence for the above claim (that the expected economic benefits do not justify the costs of mitigation) is only this:

William Nordhaus, who heads the widely respected environmental-economics-modeling group at Yale, estimates (page 84) the total expected net benefit of an optimally designed, implemented, and enforced global program to be equal to the present value of about 0.2 percent of future global economic consumption.

Although he just called Nordhaus "widely respected," and although Manzi is not an economist and has not done any of the calculations himself, he arbitrarily decides to multiple the costs of mitigation several times, to reflect unspecified "side deals" he's sure would push the cost skyward. Shame they didn't do that with their estimates on the cost of the Iraq war, eh? Anyhow, that is how he concludes, based on Nordhaus, the exact opposite of what Nordhaus wrote: Nordhaus said action will save three and a half trillion dollars, and Manzi concludes from that that mitigation is an economic loser whose costs will far exceed its benefits.

We can count our blessings: neither Curry nor Manzi deny that the earth is warming, or that humans are the cause, or that the resulting changes will be, at least to some degree, destructive. But they do misrepresent serious research, and deploy the concept of uncertainty selectively, using it to justify ignoring projections they don't like, and ignoring it when they don't.

5.9%

2011-12-04T22:56:00.001-08:00

What happened after 2004? The black line is now at 10,000.

Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.

The growth in CO2 emissions was expected to spike after the recession-induced dip last year. But 5.9%? That's a disaster. We can't afford many more years like 2010, doubly since scientists are warning that melting permafrost will add a hefty chunk of carbon to our own slug of emissions (380 billion tons -- roughly thirty-eight year of emissions at the 2010 rate. Meaning that as we talk about getting serious about reducing emissions, as we argue about the Keystone XL, we have already locked ourselves in for another forty years' worth of rapid climate change.)

Air conditioners all the way down

2011-12-03T09:16:00.001-08:00

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the
sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at
the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish.
The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant
tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying,"What is
the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever,"
said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."

I came across this interesting inaction rationale in the latest Economist analysis of Durban:

Recent work by, among others, Michael Greenstone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology backs that approach. It shows that hot spells kill few people in air-conditioned America; but in India, where 300m have no access to electricity, the death toll is huge. India’s priority is to provide its people with electricity, and one day air-conditioners. That this will increase its emissions is less a problem for India than for the world. It therefore views any suggestion that it should be bound to curb its emissions as a threat.

Assuming that is indeed a line of argument in India (and the Economist is usually quite reliable) I was interested in how practical this approach might be, so I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Readers should feel free to point out obvious errors. Here we go:

There are about 1.2 billion people in India. That number is expected to rise to 1.6 billion by 2050. Let's say we want to protect them from global warming by providing them with central air in their homes and businesses (we could preserve their lives by, say, cooling a single room in their homes and making them all rest and sleep there, but let's assume they don't want to lead that sort of miserable existence.) Let's estimate about 200 million households needed residential air; there will probably be more than that by 2050, but let's be conservative. Some of them may live in cool regions; some already have air conditioning, factoring in to India's current power costs and greenhouse gas emissions, which for the record are:

India (thousands of tons of CO2): 1,742,698

We will also give them 50m commercial systems; they can't spend all day in their houses. We don't need people dropping from heat stroke in the factories, offices, the call centers and the banks.

Using this helpful wikipedia article, I estimated the residential systems would need about 3 tons of refrigeration, while I estimated the commercial systems very conservatively at 10 tons. One ton of refrigeration consumes 3,517 Watts whilst in operation (assuming an seasonal energy efficiency ratio (SEER) of 10). So residential systems consume roughly 10,000W, and commercial systems 35,000W (there is no point in false precision when we are throwing around estimates like this.)

A standard estimate for the use of air conditioning is a thousand hours per year (eight hours a day times a hot season of 125 days). That seems reasonable. That puts us at (10Kw * 1000 hours * 200,000,000 systems) = 2.0 * 10^12 Kw-h for the residential, plus (35Kw * 1000 hours * 50,000,000 systems) = 1.75 * 10^12 Kw-h for the commercial, totaling 3.75 * 10^12 Kwh of electricity required.

So how much is that? Well, at eight cents a Kwh, that power will run you $300 billion dollars a year (20% of India's present-day GDP; even if the economy grew by 300% in short order, they would still be spending 5% of their GDP on air conditioners). But more importantly, at an average emissions density for fossil fuel electricity of 750g (I love wikipedia) that air conditioning generates greenhouse gas emissions of:

India air conditioning alone (thousands of tons of CO2): 2,812,500

That's two and a half times India's current emissions. It's roughly 10% of the total global emissions in 2010. In other words, relative to the 80% emissions cut needed by 2050 to (hopefully) stabilize the climate in the short term, the CO2 emissions of Indian air conditioning would consume half of humanity's global CO2 budget.

The alternative is to keep emitting and keep warming -- and keep building air conditioners, and burning fossil fuels to power them, accelerating the warming further. Eventually we will need to run the air conditions harder, and longer, to deal with warming of +4C, +5C, or even more -- driving the cost and the emissions even higher (while we are also paying to resettle climate refugees, relocate coastal towns, and fight the spread of tropical diseases). Of course, we can't air condition our crops, we can't air condition every home in Africa or South America or the rest of Asia. But other than that, smooth sailing. It's air conditioners all the way down.

Data socialists

2011-12-02T11:27:00.001-08:00

Over at Climate Etc Dr. Curry has penned a guest post selling a romantic vision of what she calls "data libertarianism" quoting an opinion piece by Fred Pierce:

The battle between the two men for the crown jewels was the backdrop — and very possibly the motive — for the still-mysterious hacking of CRU’s emails and their publication online at the end of 2009. Much of the world’s science community sided with Jones in the resulting “climategate” saga, condemning what they regarded as politically and commercially motivated attacks on their research.
But others took McIntyre’s side, seeing him as a data libertarian. And last June, following a new request for the data from Jonathan Jones, an Oxford physicist and “climate agnostic”, the FOI’s commissioner, Christopher Graham, finally ruled that the crown jewels should be handed over. And they were, a month later. The world did not fall in.
If CRU had been more open with its data from the start, a great deal of time and angst on the part of its scientists — and a great deal of public uttering of paranoid nonsense from climate deniers — would have been avoided.

Ignoring the foolish assertion that any amount of cooperation can stem the relentless neap tide of paranoid nonsense from deniers, this account of McIntyre's stance in the FOI wars is exactly wrong.

There has long been a huge amount of climate data freely available to the public. Some of it is not, for reasons that should be evident to any "libertarian": those that own the data (mostly national weather agencies) chose not to make it available to all. The data sets in question cost money to create. Their creators make money by selling licenses (limited licenses) to use the data -- licenses that have no market value if their property is forcible redistributed by the government as soon as a FOI request is made.

Steve McIntyre is what libertarians call a rent-seeker. He uses the coercive power of the state to force other people to give him, gratis, the fruits of their labor. He does not produce himself -- he uses the data of others, repackaged and sensationalized, to fuel the hit count of his blog.

A "data libertarian," if there is such a thing, would be horrified by this. The warp and woof of libertarianism is respect -- a respect that borders on fetishism -- for property rights. Forcing the people who spent time and money creating these data sets and profit by selling access to them -- for the supposed good of science and humankind -- is the opposite of the libertarian model. Making other people's property free to all comers is a philosophy which already has a name -- forced collectivization. In other words, what McIntyre is arguing for is data socialism, not data libertarianism.

The rise of the psuedo-expert

2011-11-30T06:42:00.001-08:00

Andrew Sullivan highlighted this graphic a few days ago: it is a translation of a note by Leonardo da Vinci. He also points to this analysis, which I find telling in our particular historical moment today:

I think it's pretty interesting that of the nine tasks shown, six involve consulting and learning from other people. Leonardo da Vinci needs to find a book. Leonardo da Vinci needs to get in touch with local merchants, monks, and accountants who he hopes can help him better understand concepts within their areas of expertise.
Leonardo da Vinci knows he doesn't know everything.

The climate debate is of course saturated with people who believe they know everything. Monckton is a particularly egregious example, but this behavior extends on the way down to the lowly comment-leaving "skeptic." An important aspect of their rhetoric is its implicit populism; how dare so-called "experts" with their "training" and their "lifetime of peer-reviewed scientific work" fail to respect the blog-taught skeptic auteur.

This behavior extends beyond the climate wars; it has become a key element of dishonest rhetoric in the internet age. Bill Keller's recent essay "The Politics of Economics in the Age of Shouting" tells the story from another angle:

Back in the very pre-digital days, the writer A. J. Liebling famously remarked that freedom of the press was guaranteed only to the man who owned one. Nowadays, of course, freedom of the press belongs to anyone with Internet access, from the information guerrillas of WikiLeaks to the blogger next door. The democratization of media has diminished the authority once held — and sometimes abused — by a few big newspapers and broadcasters. In many ways this has enriched society, creating a great global buffet of information and opinion, pooling the knowledge of the masses and providing an almost instantaneous reality check on the conventional wisdom.
The consequences have not all been happy, though. The easiest way to stand out in such a vast crowd of microbroadcasters is to be the loudest, the angriest, the most outrageous. If you want that precious traffic, you stake out a position somewhere in oh-my-God territory and proclaim it with a vengeance. Global warming is a hoax! Vaccines make you sick! Obama is a Muslim! In vanquishing the conventional wisdom, sometimes it seems we have vanquished wisdom itself. . . . In the Internet age, anyone can be an expert, and anyone who says otherwise is an elitist.

When people take the time to actually become experts, or at least competent, the internet free-for-all is valuable. But pseudoskeptics, whose ultimate goal is to forestall action, rarely take that path, and it's not hard to see why:

1. Loudly asserting expertise may not convey authority upon you, but it does serve to create confusion. Creating an environment in which real scientists are not trusted is just as effective -- and far easier -- than building a solid argument that convinces people who know the science.

2. Expertise is narrow. Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps the most famous polymath in human history, yet, the areas in which he trusts his own knowledge exclusively are rather narrow; his dependence on other scholars is quite extensive. That's the reality of knowing something well; it takes time and effort. Fake expertise, based upon expensive claims, arrogant assertions, and vicious, slanderous attacks on real scientists, is a Swiss Army knife of rhetoric.

Fake skeptics need fake expertise because they change their accounts of the science and critique of emissions restrictions on a daily basis, according to the needs of the situation. One minute they are attacking the temperature record. The next they scorn the idea that anyone ever questioned the world was warming. The next day they are economists, knowing that warming will be beneficial to human welfare. On Tuesdays they are experts in international politics, certain that there will never be an agreement to cut greenhouse gases, and by Wednesday, if the winds are favorable, they will once again be experts in radiative physics, proving that carbon dioxide cannot warm the planet.

Real expertise will speak to one of those arguments. In part. Fake expertise is easily invoked to support them all.

My favorite recent example of fake experts in their natural habitat is this thread, in which the subject of how Easter Island with deforested attracted the attention of Judith's pseudoscientists, who instantly, instantly -- use their "common sense" to become experts in archeology. Just one example:

randomengineer | September 22, 2011 at 1:26 am | Reply

Overall I find Diamond’s work absurd and consider him to be equivalent to other obvious cranks and charlatans like Von Daniken. He’s popular only because modern day eco-silliness and cultural revisionism is popular, and it is popular for the same reason the Victorians had such asinine views of societies that preceded theirs — projection in the form of disbelief that previous societies could be quite clever. (e.g. until very recently the prevailing view of Tudor England was informed by a number of victorian works, all of which were breathtakingly wrong, and only recently has been overturned by real scholars like David Starkey.) Diamond isn’t even qualified to serve lunch to real scholars, much less waste their time with his ridiculously slanted and partisan opinions.

----------

randomengineer | September 23, 2011 at 12:15 pm | Reply

This thread is no different. An anti-western (typical postmodern revisionism purporting to reject colonialism therefore “cool” and oh so intellectual) eco-warrior like Diamond highlights a suspect eco-warrior opinion paper so as to wield this as a club to make a blunt and wrong point, and the usual suspects chime in with the “hey it was published therefore must be TRVTH” meme.
I’ve seen the easter island eco-rubbish before and have considered it a real hoot. I had no idea anyone took Diamond et al seriously. The notion that islanders who know they’re living on a remote rock would blow the only resources necessary to leave said rock so as to roll giant heads about is absurdity on stilts.

----------

randomengineer | September 22, 2011 at 12:37 pm | Reply

. . . People were clever even back then. Imagine that. Dragging was invented by those who have a romantic notion of the cleverness of the modern era and a presumption that the ancients were stupid. Diamond et al conjure up the image of imbecile natives deforesting the island to drag statuary assuming they were too dumb to figure out how to move statues any other way. “Scholarship” depending on the notion of stupidity of the people of the past is worthless.

And so on and on. Ultimately, the strategy of the fake expert is a bluff; by bald assertion, frequent repetition, and rapid escalation to hysterical carpet-chewing, they seek to train others to let their ridiculous claims pass unchallenged. If others do engage with them, they seek to assert a false equivalence with informed commentators; they have their opinion, and (scientists, archaeologists, economists, etc) have theirs.

This rhetoric is highly effective in rallying those already predisposed to disregard politically troublesome facts. It is strengthened by the hyperpartisan atmosphere in which everything is contested, and nothing one's own "side" says can ever be a simple mistake -- as the online legions who rushed to defend Sarah Palin's Paul Revere blunder can attest:

nomedawson 5 months ago

The sad, snide, sappy, snarky, superlious attacks on Sarah Palin by lachrymous, lugubrious, liberal latte-sippers is soooo sanctimonious & shallow. All revolutionary/foundational events soon become encrusted in myth & legend. The truth is too mundane. So, simple minded jingles from Longfellow become rigid doctrine. Who would dare to look deeper? Complexity, nuance? Oooooh, sooo mean! So, if Sarah Palin ever goes to Italy, she must parrot the rubbish that two abandoned babies named Romulus & Remus were sustained into puberty on wolf’s milk; then they founded Rome. Because “it’s one of the key stories” in Roman history.

How does real expertise -- in all its necessary humility, walking its narrow path of specialization, with its retinue of caveats and qualifications -- assert itself in an internet age in which, as Yeats prophetically predicted, the worst are full of passionate intensity?

That is the key question for those on the side of science in the global warming online free-for-all.

Idiot comment of the day

2011-11-12T18:33:00.001-08:00

Joe Lalonde | November 11, 2011 at 7:08 am | Reply

Judith,
Ignorance is not fraud when you follow practiced procedures or come up with a new calculation or concept. When those procedures are incorrect, what others is out there that are correct?
Years of traditional teachings and theories that never change even though they are incorrect to the technology available is still being installed in our education. Not allowed to question the teacher as he is only as good as what is in a book.
So, where do you go when the teacher does not have the answer, yet you must follow protocol or fail?
I tried twice with the peer-review system and will not subject myself again to a system that is prejudice.
Now begs the question of who is the expert to review velocity?

What can you say? The ignorance and lack of self-awareness is horrifying but in a strange way majestic, like an elephant carcass rotting in the sun.

Keystone XL on hold

2011-11-10T10:16:00.000-08:00

From the Times:

The Obama administration is preparing to delay a decision on the contested Keystone XL pipeline while it studies an alternate route, effectively pushing any action past the 2012 election, officials and lobbyists who have been briefed on the matter said on Thursday. An announcement is expected as early as Thursday afternoon.

This is a victory for those that stood against this spectacularly awful plan to help Canada distribute massive amounts of dirty oil. James Hansen, a world-renowned scientist and septuagenarian who went to jail over this, deserves special mention.

It's also really clever politics. Environmentalists are appeased. The plan isn't dead, which should blunt the inevitable "job-killing government socialist machine!" meme. And because the plan isn't dead, and the final decision will fall into the next president's lap, angry progressives have another reason to fight for Obama's re-election.

Solar activity hits seven-year high

2011-11-10T02:41:00.000-08:00

Solar cycle 24 continues to ramp up, as expected. When La Nina falters -- it's now expected to persist through the middle of 2012 -- temperature records will fall. Until then, enjoy another data set following the trajectory predicted by scientists based on a model.

Graph of the day

2011-11-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

Via Skeptical Science:

The BEST reanalysis in a nutshell. You think global warming has stopped? There you go.

A hundred million batteries for our power grid

2011-11-07T02:06:00.000-08:00

The loony right's frequent lament:

So-called green energy often is not very green and cannot possibly serve as a substitute for most fossil fuels. Windmills and solar panels are far more expensive than coal and gas; their production is intermittent, unreliable and largely unstorable [sic]. Because of the physics of theelectrical grid, wind and solar can never produce more than about 18 percent of electrical production — at least not until low-cost storage devices are developed.

Technology doesn't stand still; whilst fossil fuel apologists are bemoaning an "intermittency problem" that could really ramp up if we had ten times as much renewable power on the grid as actually exists(*), bright engineers are already installing work-arounds.

From the NYTimes:

As a result, the Bonneville Power Administration, the wholesale supplier to a broad swath of the region, turned this year to a strategy common to regions with hot summers: adjusting volunteers’ home appliances by remote control to balance supply and demand.

When excess supply threatens Bonneville’s grid, an operator in a control room hundreds of miles away will now dial up a volunteer’s water heater, raising the thermostat by 60 more degrees. Ceramic bricks in a nearby electric space heater can be warmed to hundreds of degrees.

The devices then function as thermal batteries, capable of giving back the energy when it is needed. Microchips run both systems, ensuring that tap-water and room temperatures in the home hardly vary.

I'm guessing the efficiency of the system is not great, especially since they are using "found" materials and not purpose-built components. But even a small amount of energy storage, multiplied by the number of water heaters and home heating systems in the US, could add up to a large reserve of stored power.

On the other end of the spectrum, power companies are experimenting with power storage attached to the site, allowing them to manage surges and lulls in demand.

Of course, a extensive North American backbone of HVDC lines could render such adaptations unnecessary by combining the output of thousands of sources and the averaged demand of tens of millions of customers.

Fearmongering, denial of the possibility of technological progress, disbelief in our capacity to adapt and overcome obstacles -- isn't that kinda the mentality the right likes to accuse "greens" of falling into? I thought they were supposed to be the troubadours of technological optimism and faith in human progress? I'm so confused.

* Current power from wind and solar is about 3.3%

Overpopulation as "international socialist" conspiracy

2011-11-06T06:15:00.000-08:00

We hit seven billion last week, as per the UN Population Division. Until recently, the world's population was expected to top out at about nine billion and slowly decline. More recent estimates, however, have the population continuing to rise to ten billion and potentially to keep rising (albeit much more slowly) from there.

This is a problem at our present level of development. While we have enough food and water for seven billion people if it were equally distributed, it isn't equally distributed, and it isn't likely to become so in the future. To produce that food and make use of that fresh water, farmers all our the world are using unsustainable practices, from deforestation to overuse of fertilizers and pesticides.

Because of that, even though technology will improve in the future, we don't know if those improvements will keep pace with the degradation of soil, the pollution and depletion of groundwater, the erosion and salinization of coastal lands, the droughts and heat waves of the 21st century. We can reliably expect that, all other things being equal, we will get better at producing food, but meanwhile the physical environment upon which we depend to make food will be becoming significantly more hostile because of our actions. And our food production needs not only to keep pace with these developments, but grow significantly in spite of them.

Of course the savants of WUWT have a simple explanation for all this:

The international socialists see all of this. They figure out: if we can develop an agenda through academia to be followed by the seemingly benevolent, above-the-fray NGOs, then we develop the scholarly agenda of “rights” and “global warming,” then we can feed the govt the science, and tell the govt who to fund to act on the science.

So, the intl socialists have to make up some crises. “Overpopulation,” “reproductive rights,” “global warming,” “pandemic,” etc.

Yes, just like global warming and disease, overpopulation is a fake problem invented by international socialists to advance their secret agenda via their sinister organs, the NGOs(*).

Concerns about overpopulation are sometimes ad-hom'd to a desire for eugenics or a generally murderous, life-hating outlook:

I maintain that Bonnie Erbe's dopey tribute to Attenborough, "Meanwhile, population explosion ignored" (Courier Times, March 18) reveals "disguised form" eugenics. As Erbe herself notes, "Attenborough points out what I agree with him has become an 'absurd taboo' on speaking out publicly on human population growth and trying to do something about it."
. . .
Erbe parrots Attenborough's hateful bile, which is not even disguised! It would behoove Bonnie Erbe and Sir David to step out of their limos and visit a library.
They would benefit by opening a book once in a while, as there have been many notable ones - AFTER Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

The logic here (and I use the term loosely) seems to be that if you like people, you want more people, and if you don't want more people, you hate people and you want them to die. The concept that people are nifty but that too many of them could get in each other's way is too subtle, it would seem.

A global population of ten billion people is concerning. Much like what we are doing to the planet's climate at the same time, ten billion humans represent a condition which our civilization has never seen (see the graph above). If they generated greenhouse gases at the same rate per capita as people today, you're talking about a 42% increase in greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time you have a 42% increase in the calories we need to sustain that population. At before you start tilling new fields to feed them, you may want to consider where three Chinas worth of people are going to live.

Since we need more housing and more food, you may want to cut down some forests. Before you do, however, you'd be well advised to read some of the recent literature on terrestrial carbon sinks: "An analysis of inventory data from across the globe suggests that temperate and boreal forests accounted for the majority of the terrestrial carbon sink over the past two decades."

The more people we have, the more difficult it will be to reverse course on greenhouse gas emissions. This is doubly so because many of those new people are going to be born in Sub-Saharan Africa, already the poorest region of the world, and the region expected to experience the most dramatic warming outside the polar regions:

Still, one can make a case that we will be able to cope with overpopulation:

For more than 40 years, climaxing around the first Earth Day, the public has been bombarded with apocalyptic tales of disaster regarding population growth. Paul Ehrlich, for example, a Stanford professor, prominent prophet of population doom and contributor to this op-ed article, predicted in his 1968 bestseller "The Population Bomb" that millions of people would die of starvation during the 1970s because the Earth's inhabitants would multiply at a faster rate than the world's ability to supply food. Six years later, in "The End of Affluence," a book he co-authored with his wife, Anne Ehrlich, the death toll estimates increased to a billion dying from starvation by the mid-1980s. By 1985, Ehrlich predicted, the world would enter a genuine era of scarcity.

Paul Ehrlich's predicted famines never materialized. While too many people remain hungry, agricultural advances have fought off massive famines. Even as the world's population doubled, per-capita food consumption in poor countries increased from 1,932 calories a day in 1961 to 2,650 in 1998, and malnutrition in those countries fell from 45% of the population in 1949 to about 18%. Furthermore, fertility rates dropped from about five children per woman in the 1960s to about 2.5 today.

I like how the author drops in that bit about falling fertility -- hey, overpopulation isn't a problem, and anyway, birth rates are falling.

Of course part of the reason birth rates are falling is that some governments, like China's, have actively sought to slow population growth, while other have benefited from rapidly falling birthrates as their people became wealthier and more educated. The collapse of the Soviet Union also led to plummeting birth rates in that part of the world.

It's always going to be possible, in retrospect, to identify wildly overstated or otherwise inaccurate predictions, but we shouldn't conclude, without evidence, that those predictions were universal or even typical. The same author who fillets Ehrlich toss in this old canard:

[C]oncerns about climate change have shifted from cooling to warming since the 1970s.

Hopefully everyone knows that myth has been repeatedly debunked. Which reminds us to be cautious when someone pulls out an old, inaccurate prediction and asks us to make a number of leaps:

1. That the prediction is being fairly represented.
2. That reality is not different because the warning was heeded (many anti-science folks try to gin up outrage about the "acid rain scare" ignoring the fact that the threat didn't materialize because effective action was taken to mitigate and then reverse the damage.)
3. That the prediction is typical of predictions made at the time.
4. That "those people" making predictions then are similar/the same to "those people" making predictions now (and hence their failures "then" speak to their credibility "now").

That said, I think the author has a point. The green movement does have a history of saying intemperate things. The modern green movement has been largely supported and championed by the left (something of which the left can be proud), and the left has a long history of underestimating the adaptive power of capitalism. Hence leftists of many stripes, from Karl Marx on down, have imagined capitalism collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions in a terrible and glorious smash-up.

That is not going to happen, and those of us who acknowledge the problem of global warming, and the related problem of overpopulation, should make it as clear as possible that that is not our goal. The goal is to use the tremendous productive, inventive and adaptive power of capitalism, not hobble it. This requires a system in which democracy guides money a little bit, rather than money leading democracy by the nose. Markets are a powerful creation, but they are a creation, and they are an expression of human law, not natural law. So to work effectively they need a certain amount of regulation. The pursuit of the individual good will often contribute to the social good, but there are important exceptions. The right-wing climate denial movement would like to equate regulation with central planning and central planning with totalitarianism. Those working to move society towards coping with global warming should not help them by making global warming a proxy fight over the virtues or the sins of a market economy.

* The hostility right-wingers feel towards non-governmental organizations is quite interesting from a philosophical perspective. You'd think that something with "non-governmental" right in the name would appeal to them. The whole "small government" thing assumes that once we "starve the beast" all sorts of voluntary non-governmental organizations will spring up to vaccinate children, clean sewage, sponsor libraries and and provide free education. Private charity is thought to be ready to replace collective action in public good decided upon by our elected representatives.

Yet people actually self-organizing to do good outside the government model are reviled. Corporations are the only nongovernmental organizations of which they approve. Could it be that what they really want is a tyranny of money over people?

Skeptical Science on permafrost melting

2011-10-26T02:43:00.000-07:00

SkS has a post up on the decay of permafrost. Catnip to me, of course. It's a good summary, and highlights a number of issues. Here's one I hadn't thought about much:

Commercial activities in the Arctic are large, important to national economies and for the viability of local population centres. Monitoring of permafrost melting and associated greenhouse gas emissions is undertaken by ground instruments and satellites. However, unless technology able to replace melting permafrost with an affordable, durable load bearing foundation can be applied, it should be accepted that virtually all existing buildings and structures located on permafrost with foundations less than 5 metres deep are likely to be damaged or destroyed before 2100.

That's the homes and businesses of millions of people; oil, gas, and mining infrastructure, utilities and transport infrastructure, etc. The rapid erosion of the Arctic's 100,000km coastline (which is made of little rocks glued together with the aforementioned permafrost) also gets a good treatment.

They don't precisely estimate the amount of feedback from carbon (methane and carbon dioxide) released by melting permafrost. I don't know the answer either, although I discuss some estimates here and here. If you said 25-100ppm of CO2 in additional carbon by 2200, I don't think anyone could tell you you were wrong. If I find a better estimate, I'll post on it.

Permafrost FAQ

1. Why do we never hear about Antarctic permafrost?

Because for complicated reasons it doesn't store very much carbon (touch wood!) Since there are few people there, no one really cares.

2. I'm sick of reading wildly different estimates of the potency of methane as a greenhouse gas compared to CO2. What's the real number?

A molecule of methane traps heat hundreds of times better than a molecule of CO2. But it decays much faster. The really high estimates you see are molecule-to-molecule comparisons; the lower ones are long-term comparisons. The long-term comparisons turn out to be tricky. Methane is worse than CO2; and when it decays it turn into CO2, so it's really a lose-lose proposition.

3. Does melting permafrost release CO2 or methane?

Either CO2 or both. The methane makes headlines but the research I highlighted here suggests the CO2 is actually the bigger problem. More on methane here.

4. Can we stop the melting of the permafrost?

Probably not, given the feedbacks that have already kicked in, and Arctic amplification which we see rapid warming of the North even with radical emissions reductions. Short of large-scale geoengineering, the permafrost is going to go. The additional warming will further accelerate global warming.

Preach it, Roger

2011-10-25T04:43:00.000-07:00

Smart, and a pretty handsome guy too.

This is important:

Another lesson is that debates over forecasts and uncertainty often overshadow knowledge that is far more certain. Paul Somerville and Katharine Haynes of Macquarie University note wryly that "no action has yet been taken against the engineers who designed the buildings that collapsed and caused fatalities, or the government officials who were responsible for enforcing building code compliance."6 The real tragedy of L’Aquila may not be that scientists led the public astray with their bumbled discussion of predictive science but, rather, that our broader obsession with predictions blinds us to the truths right before our eyes.

As the entertaining yet depressing spectacle ("skeptacle"?) of deniers relentlessly revising history in the face of the disappointing results from BEST, this is a key point to keep in mind. It's easy to get distracted by the horse race, and think our focus should be there, especially as real science wins that race over and over again. It shouldn't. That argument has been won. It should be on the very basic first step of instituting a carbon price and greatly improving our infrastructure for the challenges ahead.

Wait, what?

2011-10-24T02:43:00.000-07:00

Anthony is having a hard week, and the strain is starting to show:

Brian H says:October 21, 2011 at 12:51 amCould you paraphrase the 2 questions in the Q&A? Couldn’t pick them up.I’d have loved to follow-up on the human sourcing of CO2, in the form: “Why does the Mona Loa record not show any fluctuations in trend corresponding to significant variations in human CO2 output that occurred since record-keeping there began?”If it doesn’t fluctuate, it’s not measuring anthro-GHG contributions. Period.REPLY: Turn up your volume, and sheesh I’ve spent my whole day servicing people and the cause of skepticism on my blog, I’ve taken abuse of all sorts, got no work done for myself, and now you want me to spend time to transcribe and paraphrase questions for you? And you still haven’t figured out from the several blog posts I’ve written and my about page that I’m hearing impaired and couldn’t hear the questions, much less Dr. Santer talking to me directly and I had to ask him to speak up? 24 hours timeout for you – Anthony

Yep. Threw a fellow denier right off the bus while he was in mid-antiscience-rant. H/t tip to cRR Kampen in the comments to Ben's awesome post on Watt's post-BEST meltdown.

Idiot comment of the day: the circle of denial

2011-10-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

BEST has failed the skeptics. HenryP has a brilliant idea:

The illusion of validity

2011-10-23T06:04:00.000-07:00

Surprise! There's a book coming out on this.

A fascinating article by a Nobel-prize-winning psychologist in the New York Times magazine:

I thought that what was happening to us was remarkable. The statistical evidence of our failure should have shaken our confidence in our judgments of particular candidates, but it did not. It should also have caused us to moderate our predictions, but it did not. We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses, but we continued to feel and act as if each particular prediction was valid. I was reminded of visual illusions, which remain compelling even when you know that what you see is false. I was so struck by the analogy that I coined a term for our experience: the illusion of validity.

There is a lot here for everyone. Of course, it is going to be easier to spot those among our opponents who are subject to the illusion of validity, rather than ourselves. There are those who will find in this concept a general critique of climate science, but to do so you must ignore the fact that climate science has made predictions which are quite a bit better than chance:

Kellogg thought he had his Minecraft addiction under control

Yet it should concern all of us that through the act of telling a story, we become more confident that that story is true.

As I learn more about the climate, I trust the experts more, and my own intuition less. I have come to realize that my ability to formulate a reasonable and plausible story about what is likely to happen far exceeds my ability to actually predict the future.

The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.

Dr Kahneman is blowing through some pretty advanced material on cognitive biases here, especially the availability heuristic, which is the observation that we are heavily influenced by examples that are easy to call to mind. This make people more responsive to events that are dramatic and memorable -- terror attacks, for example -- out of proportion to their actual frequency. Physicians, for example, will often change their entire practice pattern on the basis of one disaster -- eschewing a useful therapy, for example, because one patient had a horrible complication.

In blog science this probably comes up most often because it is easier to remember being right as opposed to being wrong. We are constantly in the process of reshaping our memories, usually with the result that they become more flattering to us over time. Another reason to favor scientists over non-scientists in the discussion of science is that through publication, we have a record of that person's actual predictions at a given time. They are accountable for what they said.

There are other concepts in the article highly relevant to the blogosphere:

Decades later, I can see many of the central themes of my thinking about judgment in that old experience. One of these themes is that people who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it.

Over the time I've been following politics, I've seen this become expected behavior in press conferences and debates: answering the question you wish you had been asked rather than the one you were. It's endemic among deniers, who will frequently answer a question about the climate with a political lecture on the evils of leftism.

You can try and use this, and I suppose some will, as one more argument that the "uncertainty monster" should hold us paralyzed in fear. But that seems to be just about the opposite of what Kahneman is arguing -- he is talking about the limits of snap judgements, and the biases that distort the (oftentimes exceptionally successful) application of rapid cognition to problems. How does he know they are flawed? Well, he systematically gathered data and applied statistical tests to it, based on his hypothesis. In other words, Kahneman's "gold standard" for accuracy is science. The lesson here is to interrogate our intuitions using hard data, not to make a fetish of doubt.

Another successful prediction for Hansen

2011-10-23T04:55:00.000-07:00

From “Global warming study finds no grounds for climate sceptics' concerns,” The Guardian (UK), Oct 20, 2011 , H/t John Hartz:

Jim Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said he had not read the research papers but was glad Muller was looking at the issue, describing him as "a top-notch physicist". "It should help inform those who have honest scepticism about global warming.

"Of course, presuming that he basically confirms what we have been reporting, the deniers will then decide that he is a crook or has some ulterior motive.

"As I have discussed in the past, the deniers, or contrarians, if you will, do not act as scientists, but rather as lawyers."

“As soon as they see evidence against their client (the fossil fuel industry and those people making money off business-as-usual), they trash that evidence and bring forth whatever tidbits they can find to confuse the judge and jury."

Idiot comment of the day: Stewie Griffin on blog science

2011-10-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/10/see-no-evil.html

Why BEST matters.

2011-10-22T09:47:00.000-07:00

Confirming earlier results that had already been repeatedly confirmed is nice, but that's not why BEST matters. BEST matters because, as great as it would be in a perfect world to confirm all facts through direct personal observation and replace all expert opinion with each individual's perfect mastery of every field of science and human endeavor, until that blessed day we will have to rely on the expertise of others in fields in which we are not experts ourselves. And while this does not ask us to surrender our own reasoning and common sense, the loudest demand of common sense when confronted with a complex and technical issue is to find people with good credentials and a good track record and let them explain things. So who has a good track record on climate change?

BEST is another reminder that it is the mainstream scientists of the "consensus" that have the track record. They said they had controlled for UHI and that station dropout was not notably altering the trend. They were right. "Skeptics" that pushed these issues as discrediting the temperature record were wrong. They said that siting issues might affect individual sites, but would not distort the global trend. They were right. "Skeptics" were wrong.

As with the temperature record, so with predictions of warming. The real scientists got it mostly right:

Kellogg, no cookie for you

The "skeptics," when they have made predictions, have been consistently wrong:

And so it goes with CO2 levels, ice loss, sea level rise and pretty much any other parameter you can name. Where you can compare the projections of real scientists to "skeptics," science wins, every time.

So who are you going to trust?

BEST reports: News roundup & LOL

2011-10-21T02:10:00.000-07:00

Should it be spiking upwards like that?

The BEST group's draft papers: here.From the press release:

COOLING THE WARMING DEBATEBerkeley Earth Releases Global Land Warming Analysis20 October, 2011 Global warming is real according to a major study released today. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in average world land temperature of approximately 1˚C since the mid-1950s…On the basis of its analysis… the group concluded that earlier studies based on more limited data by teams in the United States and Britain had accurately estimated the extent of land surface warming.

News roundup:

WashPo -- A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data

The Economist -- The heat is on

The New York Times -- Climate Skeptics Stay Unswayed

Peter Gleick at Forbes -- Breaking News: The Earth Still Goes Around the Sun, and It's Still Warming Up

Richard Mueller describes the BEST findings in the WSJ -- The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism

Science Daily -- Cooling the Warming Debate: Major New Analysis Confirms That Global Warming Is Real

The Independent is impressed by Dr. Mueller's about face -- Ex-climate sceptic now backs global warming

The Christian Science Monitor has my favorite headline so far -- Koch brothers accidentally fund study that proves global warming

Blogger reaction is going to be inescapable for the next few days, so for that, just galance at the blogroll.

The bottom line:

Qaddafi caught

2011-10-20T06:37:00.000-07:00

One less idiot on the loose. Watts is still at large.

Mathturbation -- Richard Saumarez joins the circle

2011-10-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

Amazingly, Judith Curry's appetite for group mathturbation remains unslaked. First Frank Lemke, and now yet another electrical engineer comes forward with a mathematical trick to blow open this whole "global warming" scam (which he claims to have no opinion about -- but unfortunately is lying.)Observe the smoothness with which he slides past the whole "not a scientist" thing:

As Professor Curry asked me to give some biographical detail, I should explain that after medical school, I did a PhD in biomedical engineering, which before BME became an academic heavy industry, was in an electrical engineering department.

What was that last part, Richard? I think you mumbled a bit at the end.When pressed about the whole not-a-climate-scientist thing, Richard gets testy:

Should we have a point of view? You apparantly think not. Interesting. I wonder how satellites work, how measuring instruments work, how computers work, how the internet works? I wonder how the lights turn on when you throw a switch? I wonder how much of the mathematical techniques used in climate modelling stems from engineering analysis of physical problems. Clearly engineers have had no input in this and are unqualified in every respect.

Shades of Socrates, no?

At last I went to the artisans, for I was conscious that I knew nothing at all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things; and in this I was not mistaken, for they did know many things of which I was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom . . .

Frank Lemke mathturbates in public -- Judith Curry watches

2011-10-18T11:13:00.000-07:00

Words fail me.

Briefly said, knowledge mining is data mining that goes steps further. It is a data-driven modeling approach, but in addition to data mining, self-organizing knowledge mining also builds the model itself, autonomously, including self-selection of relevant inputs by extracting the necessary “knowledge” to develop it from observational noisy data, only, most objectively in an inductive, self-organizing way. It generates optimal complex models according to the noise dispersion in the data, which systematically avoids overfitting the data. This is a very important condition for prediction. These models are available then explicitly in form of nonlinear difference equations, for example.

So this approach is different from the vast majority of climate models, which are based on theories.

Frank Lemke -- a face you can trust.

Translating Mr. Lemke into English, he is curve-fitting, ignoring any physical reality, and trying to make predictions for the future and assertions about what elements of the physical system matter according to the mathematical games he is playing with himself. As was foretold:

There seems to be a rash of trying to explain global warming by theories that either ignore, or flatly contradict, the science called “physics.”

Lemke brings this unphysical approach forward as an exciting a new take on scientific inquiry. It's not. Real scientists are quite familiar with how incredibly easy it is to tune and tweak a made-up mathematical construct to say anything you want it to say. As the poet said:

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

Judith Curry, who has given this clown her increasingly promiscuously bestowed "fascinating"[!], slips in a backhanded acknowledgement that Lemke is selling snake oil:

Conclusions regarding AGW and the role of CO2 cannot be drawn from 23 years of data, but this methodology in principle could be extended to longer time periods.

Of course Lemke has already drawn such conclusions. That's the point of the whole pointless exercise:

Looking at observational data by high-performance self-organizing predictive knowledge mining, it is not confirmed that atmospheric CO2 is the major force of global warming. In fact, no direct influence of CO2 on global temperature has been identified for the best models.

So Lemke's main argument gets no traction even with Dr. Curry -- so why push this huckster into the limelight?

A while back -- in fact, I'm the only one who even seems to remember this -- Dr. Curry came out with a post called "Meta-expertise" that provided an excellent list of questions with which to evaluate a self-described expert:

Finally, here are a few tests that can be used to evaluate the “experts” in your life:
Credentials: Does the expert possess credentials that have involved testable criteria for demonstrating proficiency?
Walking the walk: Is the expert an active practitioner in their domain (versus being a critic or a commentator)?
Overconfidence: Ask your expert to make yes-no predictions in their domain of expertise, and before any of these predictions can be tested ask them to estimate the percentage of time they’re going to be correct. Compare that estimate with the resulting percentage correct. If their estimate was too high then your expert may suffer from over-confidence.
Confirmation bias: We’re all prone to this, but some more so than others. Is your expert reasonably open to evidence or viewpoints contrary to their own views?
Hedgehog-Fox test: Tetlock found that Foxes were better-calibrated and more able to entertain self-disconfirming counterfactuals than hedgehogs, but allowed that hedgehogs can occasionally be “stunningly right” in a way that foxes cannot. Is your expert a fox or a hedgehog?
Willingness to own up to error: Bad luck is a far more popular explanation for being wrong than good luck is for being right. Is your expert balanced, i.e., equally critical, when assessing their own successes and failures?

I think these are excellent questions. Put them to your favorite "skeptic" expert today, see how they get on. Based on the howls of outrage that followed when I brought, I think maybe they are only intended for use "outside the family," as it were. But no matter. Let's explore Frank Lemke's claims to climate modelling expertise.

Credentials: Does the expert possess credentials that have involved testable criteria for demonstrating proficiency?

From Lemke's Linkedin profile:

Education: Master, Electricial Engineering and Technical Informatics

Exciting day, huh? An electrical engineer come to teach us about climate science. Never seen that before. Question two:

Is the expert an active practitioner in their domain (versus being a critic or a commentator)?

The Linkedin profile gives no publications. I did a Google Scholar search for publications authored by "Frank Lemke" in the past five years.

"A Unified DAQ Interconnection Network with Precise Time Synchronization"
"Modeling tool wear in end-milling using enhanced GMDH learning networks"
"A unified interconnection network with precise time synchronization for the CBM DAQ-system""Knowledge Extraction From High Dimensional Data Using Multileveled Self-organization" (self published on his own website)
"High-density active optical cable: from a new concept to a prototype""Parallel Self-organizing Modeling" (self published on his own website)
"Algorithms for (Q) SAR model building"

Lemke is not a climate scientist and has not published anything on climate science. He publishes in his field -- electrical engineering. He has tried to apply his mathurbation model to climate systems, but nobody published that stuff -- he posted it on his own website.

Overconfidence: Ask your expert to make yes-no predictions in
their domain of expertise, and before any of these predictions can be
tested ask them to estimate the percentage of time they’re going to be
correct. Compare that estimate with the resulting percentage correct. If
their estimate was too high then your expert may suffer from
over-confidence.

I doubt Lemke's going to help us with this one, but it's hardly necessary. Curry herself has already called Lemke out for sweeping conclusions not justified by his data. #3 and #6 are pretty similar to one another:

Confirmation bias: We’re all prone to this, but some more so
than others. Is your expert reasonably open to evidence or viewpoints
contrary to their own views?

Willingness to own up to error: Bad luck is a far more popular explanation for being wrong than good luck is for being right. Is your expert balanced, i.e., equally critical, when assessing their own successes and failures?

Fortunately Lemke is participating in the discussion at Climate Etc, so we can see his response to criticism:

knowledgeminer | October 18, 2011 at 5:57 am |
@anander
“After reading a bit more on the subject, I get a hunch that this is not that mainstream – this is just a hunch mainly based on lowish citation counts. What I was able to find (quickly) were written almost solely by Frank Lemke himself. This doesn’t mean it is somehow false or anything, just wondering!”

Well, this is really an ill-posed task. Try solving it with the info you have and observe yourself how assuming different aspects impacts your answers.

Kind of brittle, sarcastic and not to the point, huh? Let's try another:

knowledgeminer | October 17, 2011 at 3:32 pm | Reply

“There is also some danger in the application of theoretically derived paradigms by individuals without reasonably detailed knowledge of climate physics, because this can easily lead to small misinterpretations that generate inaccurate conclusions.”
Fred, to make it clear: There is no application of theoretically derived paradigms in this modeling approach at all! EVERYTHING, including the model and the composition of inputs is derived from observations, only. Observations, measurements of system variables, hide essential information about the behavior of the system. This knowledge can be extracted by self-organizing modeling and transformed into predictive models.

Not a lot of humility there either -- the questioner is totally wrong, everything (EVERYTHING) Lemke did is right and correct, so there you go. Further down MattStat has a nice critique:

MattStat | October 17, 2011 at 6:39 pm | Reply

The objective function of the algorithm is not well described. To continue a thought posted by Vaughan Pratt, within a range of 90% of the optimal objective function achieved, and the optimal itself, you can usually find a large set of models that have different entities included, different parameter estimates, and different interpretations. The difference in the objective function between the best and all these second and third raters can’t be known to be other than chance variation. With many variables and few observations, it is next to impossible to avoid overfitting and over-interpreting. So tell us more about how you are not excessively fitting noise.
FWIW, this post reads like an advertisement.

Which leave Lemke sputtering with indignation, but not admitting any shortcomings:

knowledgeminer | October 17, 2011 at 7:10 pm | Reply1. There is a proven history of this approach of more than 40 years. References are also given in this discussion.2. Follow the “advertisement”. Sometimes people also call it transparency.

Is Lemke a hedgehog or a fox (#5)? Hard to care particularly when his performance on #1-#4, & #6 is a series of epic fails.

Lemke's not an expert, not a scientist, not even a phD. What does he actually do? Well, funnily enough, he sells software. What kind of software? Modelling software -- the same kind he's using to argue that CO2 doesn't warm the planet. Public mathturbation may be "fascinating" to Dr. Curry, but I doubt very much it will either transform climate science or even sell his software.

Curt Stager's Eemian -- cold comfort for a +4C future

2011-10-16T16:21:00.000-07:00

Curt Stager has some reassurance for us regarding Greenland's ice sheet:

Another way to estimate the durability of Greenland's ice is to look to the distant past. Ice cores and marine sediments show that dozens of cyclic natural warmings have punctuated the last 2 to 3 million years without totally deglaciating the poles. The one before the last ice age, the Eemian Interglacial, kept Arctic summers several degrees warmer than now between 130,000 and 117,000 years ago, but at least half of Greenland remained glaciated even after 13,000 years of Eemian heating.

Oh, good. As long as it doesn't get any warmer than it was in the Eemian, we shouldn't lose more than half of the Greenland ice sheet. But of course, if you lose ice from Greenland you will probably lose ice from elsewhere, too, so we should probably look at what sea levels did in the Eemian, rather than just one source of what. They were about 13 to 20 feet higher than today.

Now one might object that Stager says this took place over 13,000 years. But that's not exactly what he said. He said that after 13,000 years, about half the ice was gone. That's not quite the same thing. Glaciers persist because of a balance of accumulation of new ice and melt. A given amount of warming pushes the equilibrium of the glacier towards a reduced size, but unless the reduced size starts to compromise the accumulation zone, the new equilibrium can be stable. Meaning that Greenland could have lost all that ice in a couple of centuries following the warming, and then remained in a stable half-melted state for the next 12,800 years. We don't know. Our proxies are not detailed enough to tell us. We know half the ice was there after twelve thousand years, but we don't know if that represents a rapid melt and a new equilibrium, or a gradual 13,000-years melting.

But, still. Twenty feet. We can do twenty feet, surely? I see the Bangladeshi delegation have their hands up. Please hold your questions until the end. Thank you.

The trouble with the reassuring anecdote of the Eemian is that it was not really all that much warmer than the present. Some parts of Europe were 1-2C cooler than today. The Arctic may have been "several degrees" warmer -- due to Arctic amplification, which we already observe with regards to the present warming.

SRES A1B, warming per century, from Real Climate

As the map illustrates, we can expect warming in the Arctic to run about double the overall trend. That puts us in line for +8C, +10C or even more over the next century or two. Eight degrees -- eight degrees is beginning to leave the realm of "several" and put a toe over the line into "many." In other words, the end of the next century will be warmer than the Eemian was.

So what were the sea levels like the last time the world was +4C warmer (+8C at the poles) (the warming expected over the next century or so)?

If you look at the +2C line (which is probably the best case scenario for 2100, with aggressive mitigation; we are +0.8C now) you'll see the world has not seen temperatures that warm in the last ten million years, including the Eemian. The last time we were at +4C was in the Eocene, some 40 million years ago. What were the sea levels then? That turns out to be a tricky question to answer precisely, because over tens of millions of years, the land as well as the seas are moving up and down. But there was little ice in Antarctica, or in Greenland. Which, if it happened today, would equate to a 80 meter sea level rise -- 260 feet.

This is what the United States looks like after an 80 meter rise:

The Eastern seaboard is gone.

The Gulf is gone.

The principle cities of the West Coast are gone.

Essentially the United States as we know it would be destroyed and the nation, if it survived as such, would have to resettle more than a hundred million people and abandon its most valuable, most heavily developed, and most historic lands -- Washington DC and New York, Philadelphia, Miami (and indeed all of Florida), Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle.

I don't know how long we would have to remain at +4C for this to happen. A very long time, I fervently hope. But if you are looking for analogies to the coming warming, mine seems closer to the coming centuries than his. Yet he's a note paleoclimatologist with a book out on this very subject:

So why what seems to be a falsely reassuring analogy? Perhaps I'm missing something basic. He's the climate scientist, not me. To my layman's understanding, he seems to be avoiding the uneasy truth of just how far out of the realm of anything we know we are pushing the world's climate. He's striving to sound reasonable, but the threat is objectively so much bigger than the discourse is prepared to accept, that to sound reasonable you have to downplay the logical implications of the paleoclimate record.

Real green jobs: 4 more key projects

2011-10-15T12:15:00.000-07:00

I've written here about why conventional "green jobs" are a problematic concept. When the government tries to cultivate a given industry to create jobs, there are many potential stumbling blocks. The industries may not be labor-intensive. The government may back the wrong industries or the wrong technologies. The parts that are labor intensive may move overseas. They may require extensive training, and when the work is completed, that training may be useless.

Over here, I suggested a few nontraditional paths to green jobs:

1. We could upgrade the nation's rail infrastructure with electrified rail replacing diesel engines and with the addition of double-track lines to minimize traffic congestion that can slow trains to an average of 2mph on some routes.
2. We could weatherize every home in America.
3. We could fully fund fuels management on all federal lands:
4. We could construct a backbone of HVDC lines.

These measures address the problems with traditional "green jobs" plans by striving for the following:

1. They focus on national infrastructure, a traditional "public good," rather than seeking to identify and promote particular companies or industries.
2. In themselves (without assuming a cascading effect of private-sector adoption) they significantly mitigate our national contribution to global warming.
3. They involve significant amounts of unskilled or semi-skilled labor (cutting brush, laying rail, weatherizing homes).
4. Much of the work generated necessarily comes from workers in the United States.
5. They are large, nationwide projects (large enough to stimulate employment, large enough to make a real difference to the climate.)

With those principles in mind, here are four other key projects with the potential to create real green jobs:

1. Rapid transit for the hundred largest cities in America. Subways and elevated rails work. Annual ridership of the New York subway is 1.6 billion. Most of the ten largest cities in America have them. Radically expanding electrified mass transit not only gets people out of their cars, it gets people too poor to afford cars mobility to get out to work (or their doctor's appointments, or to care care, or to do their shopping).

2. Paint all roofs white. Part of the problem with traditional approaches to creating "green jobs" is that jobs like working in a solar factory or erecting offshore windmills are highly skilled. Not very many people are qualified to perform them, and those that are are likely already employed. Meanwhile, while every sector of our economy has an unemployment problem, the worst problem is among those with a high school education or less:

So a green jobs plan with teeth should provide jobs to people at the bottom of the educational ladder -- which will also provide a greater dollar-for-dollar stimulus. So how about painting roofs white?

AGWObserver highlighted exciting recent research on "negative radiative forcing":

The radiative forcing benefits of “cool roof” construction in California: quantifying the climate impacts of building albedo modification – VanCuren (2011) “Exploiting surface albedo change has been proposed as a form of geoengineering to reduce the heating effect of anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases (GHGs). Recent modeling experiments have projected significant negative radiative forcing from large-scale implementation of albedo reduction technologies (“cool” roofs and pavements). This paper complements such model studies with measurement-based calculations of the direct radiation balance impacts of replacement of conventional roofing with “cool” roof materials in California. This analysis uses, as a case study, the required changes to commercial buildings embodied in California’s building energy efficiency regulations, representing a total of 4300 ha of roof area distributed over 16 climate zones. The estimated statewide mean radiative forcing per 0.01 increase in albedo (here labeled RF01) is −1.38 W/m². The resulting unit-roof-area mean annual radiative forcing impact of this regulation is −44.2 W/m². This forcing is computed to counteract the positive radiative forcing of ambient atmospheric CO₂ at a rate of about 41 kg for each square meter of roof. Aggregated over the 4300 ha of cool roof estimated built in the first decade after adoption of the State regulation, this is comparable to removing about 1.76 million metric tons (MMT) of CO₂ from the atmosphere. The point radiation data used in this study also provide perspective on the spatial variability of cool roof radiative forcing in California, with individual climate zone effectiveness ranging from −37 to −59 W/m² of roof. These “bottom-up” calculations validate the estimates reported for published “top down” modeling, highlight the large spatial diversity of the effects of albedo change within even a limited geographical area, and offer a potential methodology for regulatory agencies to account for the climate effects of “cool” roofing in addition to its well-known energy efficiency benefits.” Richard VanCuren, Climatic Change, DOI: 10.1007/s10584-011-0250-2.

If a single square meter of roof counteracts 41kg of CO2, then painting 50 square meters of roof is the equivalent (in warming terms) of removing one ton of CO2 from the atmosphere. Depending on what kind of a carbon price you favor, this could be worth $50-$300. And you don't need a lot of education to slap on white paint.

3. Upgrade interstate highways with an automated highway system. There are roughly 50,000 miles of interstate highway (accounting for a third of all road travel) -- upgrading them would be a massive project that would be undertaken in stages. It would be expensive, but the payoff would be huge (not unlikely building the roads in the first place). Intelligent highways would move people faster, with greater fuel efficiency and fewer accidents.

The systems that have been road-tested (so to speak) rely on sensors planted meter-by-meter in the highway. This would be labor-intensive, but doubly rewarding; trips on intelligent highways would burn far less gas, and would be far less likely to get bogged down in traffic, where 4.8 billion hours a year are wasted. For knowledge workers, self-driving cars would also make driving time more productive -- makeup will be applied more evenly; kids can be yelled at more effectively! -- without the risk that the distractions will lead to lethal accidents.

4. Implement no-till agriculture in American fields. No-till agriculture in appropriate soils and with appropriate crops has been found to sequester carbon, reduce NO2 emissions, reduce soil erosion, and conserve water, all at a reasonable cost. To encourage this, we can provide carbon sequestration credits, free training in no-till methods.

This promotes employment in custom weeding, herbicide application, as well as sequestering carbon. Less fuel is burned when tilling is omitted.

Substituting employment costs (jobs) for diesel fuel costs -- and sequester carbon in the process. Sounds like a green job to me.