Ignoring Salby: An apology

A certain Professor Murry Salby has become the toast of the denialosphere after a talk in which he gives academic CPR to the long-flatlined myth that natural sources account for the recent rise in CO2 concentrations.

Along the way he revisits other "skeptical" golden oldies, arguing that CO2 has a short residence time, and slipping in the old non sequitur that human CO2 emissions are a small fraction of the "emissions" from natural sources.

Despite the fact that these points have been more or less done to death, despite the fact that there is no publication to refer to (one is promised soon) and no slides from the talk (an inexplicable and frankly dodgy omission) Salby has been everywhere. The Mothership. Jo Novo's virtual antiscience coffee klatsch (come to think, she's entertaining. Added to the denier blogroll.) Judith Curry, most bizarrely, gave it a quickly infamous "Wow."

Aside from the System Lords of Psuedoskepticism, the minor Goa'uld of denial are in full on dittohead mode: Bishop Hill, Andrew Bolt, and plenty of obscure bloggers you've probably never heard of (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Takedowns have quickly followed, including a bracing post from Open Mind, a takedown from Deltoid, and a typically devastating off-the-cuff analysis from Gavin Schmidt.

And so of course you must ask, why not me? Where is my enthusiastic, amateurish analysis upon which the true climate change news junkie has come to depend after they have read literally everything else on offer? Well, I'll confess: I haven't listened to the lecture, and I'm not going to. I'm not willing to waste an hour of my life on a lecture in which the lecturer spends much of their time explaining slides I can't see. It's one thing to spend precious hours of your life on repetitive, nonsensical, anti-intellectual, oft-refuted crap. That's what we do here; it's right on the masthead. But to waste time on an argument without being able to see any of the evidence or data -- no. That's a bridge to nowhere too far. Call me when he posts his slides.

Let's talk about the reaction for a minute, though. The reaction we can see. The reaction tells us a lot. The first thing it tells us is that good or bad, original or hackneyed retread, we're in for many, many repetitions of this argument. Once a piece of nonsense has circulated through Watts Curry Jo Novo et al, deniers will be repeating it endlessly, as fact, for years to come. Congressmen will endorse it. The bellignorant will throw it in the faces of their opponents and demand to know why the sublime Truth of Selby which overturns the entire Global Warming Conspiracy is being suppressed.

So Selby is going to be around. For a long -- long -- time. So once he produces his slides, there will be time to review his argument. In the meantime, note the way Selby has effortlessly breathed life into two or three hoary denier myths, despite being up against mountains of empirical evidence wielding nothing more than slides which he will not show us.

This is happening because for all their noise about the nobility of dissent from the consensus and the folly of appeals to authority, deniers recognize the tremendous importance of scientific credentials in determining credibility on scientific matters. And so when a professor who has published climate science arrives on the scene and says something "skeptical," it doesn't matter if his evidence is alien telepathic communications or Egyptian hieroglyphs he has discovered in his mash potatoes. He is instantly a star.

Which is fine -- we should be more interested in what climate scientists have to say about climate science than the ill-informed amateurs that form most of a "skeptic's" daily caloric requirement of misinformation. But the hypocrisy is thick. If they are so easily seduced by an argument with literally nothing to support it but the speaker's identity as a climate scientist, how can they justify ignoring the vast majority of climate scientists who are telling them AGW is real and dangerous?

Ozone recovery will accelerate global warming

The Montreal Protocol is one of the great success stories in global environmental protection. In 1987, the world's government recognized the threat of ozone-depleting chemicals and agreed to phase them out. The treaty to that effect came into force in 1989 and now has 196 signatories. It can be done.

Unfortunately, the necessary and desired recovery of the ozone is going to slightly accelerate global warming, as ozone is itself a greenhouse gas. A recent study (h/t AGWObserver) quantifies this warming:

Tropospheric temperature response to stratospheric ozone recovery in the 21st century – Hu et al. (2011) “Recent simulations predicted that the stratospheric ozone layer will likely return to pre-1980 levels in the middle of the 21st century, as a result of the decline of ozone depleting substances under the Montreal Protocol. Since the ozone layer is an important component in determining stratospheric and tropospheric-surface energy balance, the recovery of stratospheric ozone may have significant impact on tropospheric-surface climate. Here, using multi-model results from both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC-AR4) models and coupled chemistry-climate models, we show that as ozone recovery is considered, the troposphere is warmed more than that without considering ozone recovery, suggesting an enhancement of tropospheric warming due to ozone recovery. It is found that the enhanced tropospheric warming is mostly significant in the upper troposphere, with a global and annual mean magnitude of ~0.41 K for 2001–2050. We also find that relatively large enhanced warming occurs in the extratropics and polar regions in summer and autumn in both hemispheres, while the enhanced warming is stronger in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere. Enhanced warming is also found at the surface. The global and annual mean enhancement of surface warming is about 0.16 K for 2001–2050, with maximum enhancement in the winter Arctic.” Hu, Y., Xia, Y., and Fu, Q., Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 7687-7699, doi:10.5194/acp-11-7687-2011, 2011.

Full text here. At the time of the IPCC's 2007 report, the effects of ozone on warming were held to be doubtful:

Hence, the net heating or cooling is subject to large uncertainty, and available model simulations do not give a consistent picture of future development of ozone, particularly in the Arctic.

While the IPCC models do include the recovery of the ozone layer (and are among the resources used by the authors), it seems fair to say that if this result holds up, we are looking at more warming "in the pipeline" than projected in the Fourth Assessment Report; a not-insignificant 0.03C/decade, or 15% of the overall expected trend of 0.2C/decade.

Inside the strange world of the climate dismissives, Ctd

Ever notice climate deniers seem a bit mistrustful?

You're not imagining it:











Percent of "dismissives" (vs all groups) who "strongly trust" a given source:

NOAA: 3% (vs 22%)
Scientists: 5% (vs 21%)
The EPA: 1% (vs 14%)
The CDC: 0% (vs 15%)
The National Park Service: 0% (vs 13%)
The Department of Energy: 1% (11%)
President Obama: 0% (11%)
Television weather reporters: 2% (5%)
The mainstream news media: 0% (4%)
Their congressional representative 3% (2%)

Now, don't get distracted by the points of trivia herein, such as the fact that deniers trust television weatherpersons more than the EPA or the fact that even among deniers, the scientists are the most trusted source of information about the climate, suggesting the denier smear campaign against scientists is not the great success they like to pretend it is.

No, what's truly interesting here is how globally mistrustful they are -- they don't trust anybody. No one is strongly trusted by more than one in twenty deniers (of course, the pollster couldn't very ask them the critical follow-up question: "And what if the source was telling you something you wanted to hear?") It would be one thing if they trusted their own sources of information and distrusted "alarmist" sources, and vice versa. That is what we would expect, in line with the whole narrative of isolating, self-reinforcing ideological positions in the internet age.

What we find is more disturbing than that. Deniers are globally mistrustful. Every single group is less trusted by deniers than by the general public, with the single bizarre exception of Congress. Even adding "somewhat trust" to "strongly trust" does not change the picture much:




NOAA: 25% (vs 76%)
Scientists: 27% (vs 76%)
The EPA: 19% (vs 68%)
The CDC: 12% (vs 62%)
The National Park Service: 24% (vs 75%)
The Department of Energy: 11% (59%)
President Obama: 3% (46%)
Television weather reporters: 10% (52%)
The mainstream news media: 3% (38%)
Their congressional representative 14% (36%)

Wow: the number of deniers who have any trust at all in our president is three percent. Not that there's any ideological component of . . . no, trivia, staying away from trivia.

No more than a quarter of dismissives have any trust in any group polled . . . the exception, against, is climate scientists, who are trusted, again, more than any other group as a source of information, "Climategate," and sundry psuedoscandals notwithstanding. Once again, the public as a whole trusts these sources variably, but always twice as strongly as deniers do. On average they trust or somewhat trust 14.8% of the time, compared to 58% among all polled. A normal person is more than four times as likely to have at least some trust of one of these sources as is a climate denier.

Deniers are existing in a world that does not just close off opposing views and sources perceived as unfriendly, like a political ideology. There world closes itself off from all outsiders that might challenge their beliefs -- like Christian fundamentalists with the Bible, they believe they have all they need:

Question: On some issues people feel that they have all the information they need in order to form a firm opinion, while on other issues they would like more information before making up their mind. For global warming, where would you place yourself?

Percent answering "I do not need any more information":

National average: 23%
Alarmed: 28% (+5% vs average)
Concerned: 9% (-14% vs average)
Cautious: 11% (-17% vs average)
Disengaged: 14% (-9% vs average)
Doubtful: 39% (+16% vs average)
Dismissive: 70% (+57% vs average)

Deniers aren't looking to get questions answered -- this is the fallacy of those, like Judith Curry, who blame climate scientists for incurring the wrath of "skeptics." They believe they have all the answers already. Which is perhaps why they don't trust any of the many, many different groups of people telling them they're wrong.

Forest-killing fungi

This is why it is a bad idea to make the planet hotter than it has been in the last fifteen million years. We don't know what might happen.

The demise of the world's forests some 250 million years ago likely was accelerated by aggressive tree-killing fungi triggered by global climate change, according to a new study by a University of California, Berkeley, scientist and her Dutch and British colleagues.

The researchers do not rule out the possibility that today's changing climate could cause a similar increase in pathogenic soil bacteria that could devastate forests already stressed by a warming climate and pollution.

Are these scientists right about the role of these fungi in the Permian mass extinction? Maybe. Will warming now produce a similar outbreak? Hard to say. Would a massive die-off in the world's forests hurt us? Let me count the ways. Habitat loss. Watershed damage. Loss of agricultural productivity, including lumber. Loss of a major carbon sink, with accelerated CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere. Worsening fires (dead things burn.) And so on.

This is the sort of story that makes deniers see red -- no one can tell them, with certainty, what will happen (which they think is what "real science" does) and so this in contrast is hyperventilating alarmist nonsense, apocalyptic thinking, doomsday paranoia.

I don't think that it is. No one is in a panic; no one is promising that the seas will evaporate and the moon will be as blood. It's just a matter of simple, practical reality that if you keep rolling dice, eventually they will come up snake eyes. We have a limited understanding of our climate, we have never in the history of mankind seen warming like this, and the farther we progress down this unknown path, the greater our likelihood of something like this -- a previously unexpected interaction of biology and climate that will violently shift our ecology into a less friendly set of operating parameters.

Threats against climate scientists -- a glossary

I looked around on the interwebs and didn't find a good glossary of the relevant articles. So here are a few of the sources, starting with one of the few articles to directly quote the threats.

Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial

"If we see you continue, we will get extremely organised and precise against you."

When Pitman politely replied to the last, the response was more aggressive:

"F**k off mate, stop the personal attacks. Just do your science or you will end up collateral damage in the war, GET IT."

All threats have to be taken seriously, and at times warrant calling in the police. The police are able to trace anonymous emails to their sources and take action against those who send them. The police are now advising those who received abusive and threatening emails to resist the immediate urge to delete them and keep them in a separate folder for future reference.

Climate campaigners have also noticed a surge in the frequency and virulence of this new form of cyber-bullying. The following was received by a young woman (who asked that her name not be used):

"Did you want to offer your children to be brutally gang-raped and then horribly tortured before being reminded of their parents socialist beliefs and actions?
"Burn in hell. Or in the main street, when the Australian public finally lynchs you."

Another campaigner opened her inbox to read this:

"F**k off!!!

"Or you will be chased down the street with burning stakes and hung from your f**king neck, until you are dead, dead, dead!

"F**k you little pieces of sh*t, show youselves in public!!!"

Especially widely publicized have been the death threats against scientists at Australian National University in Canberra, which promoted police to move several scientists to more secure housing:

Australian climate scientists receive death threats

After Death Threats to Climate Researchers, Australian Universities Take Tough Protection Measures

A spokeswoman at the University of New South Wales didn't respond to questions about the threats but noted in a press release that scientists there had "reported receiving abusive e-mails and phone calls, including threats of violence, sexual assault, or attacks on family members." A recent article in the university's magazine, Uniken, described the ridicule and vitriolic personal attacks heaped on one professor, Andrew J. Pitman, director of the Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, as a result of his media appearances.

A public-affairs officer at Australian National said the death threats there had occurred over the course of three years and had escalated in recent months. As a result, nine scientists were "moved to a more secure location that requires card access."

US climate scientists receive hate mail barrage in wake of UEA scandal

The scientists revealed they have been told to "go gargle razor blades" and have been described as "Nazi climate murderers".

Mann, of course, is a favorite target:

"6 feet under, with the roots, is were you should be," one e-mail reads. "How know 1 one has been the livin p*ss out of you yet, i was hopin i would see the news that you commited suicide, Do it."

Mother Jones documented further threats against Mann:

         "Your work is finished. YOU ARE GOING TO HANG SOON!"

Scientists are pushing back against these tactics:


Scientists’ Group Raises Alarm Over Threats to Climate Researchers

The world’s largest general scientific body, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says it’s getting alarmed by a growing pattern of threats against climate researchers.

But the threats continue.

Climatologists targeted by climate deniers with hate mail, death threats

Climate denier brandishes noose to scientist at climate conference

Besides the well-publicized threats like the public noose-waving, there are hundreds if not thousands of violent threats by climate deniers posted to climate denier blogs on a daily basis, like this one from the Mothership:

Tucci78 says:
May 4, 2011 at 9:07 pm

Hm. I thnk the “painted themselves into a corner” imagery is entirely inadequate.

How about “stuck their necks in a noose” instead?

Dunno about other readers, but I’m ready to haul up on the line and make it fast.

The fact that threats like that are still tolerated at places like WUWT tells me the climate "skeptic" movement has really not adjusted to the fact that one of their own stepped beyond rhetoric and murdered dozens of members of what he called the "eco-marxist conspiracy."

Brevik is in police custody, but his ideology lives on:

shame on you physicist for throwing your lot in with the collectivist vermin plotting to destroy the one example in human history which gives the proverbial “little guy” a fighters’ chance to better himself on his own terms; not to mention, where will you be, physicist, when the defenders of freedom and personal liberty are dead and gone and the totalitarians wish to purge the dead weight of the useful idiot?

with each hysterical yellow smiley you are revealing the true ecomarxist face under the warm and fuzzy gaia worshiping veneer

It's important to realize, in this context, that despite the wish of many right-wingers to disassociate themselves from acts of violence and specific threats, the gap between calling someone "vermin" who are "plotting to destroy" you, and advocating violence against those conspiring "vermin," is very small.

Those engaging in the rhetoric of dehumanization and paranoia share responsibility for people who translate their words into actions -- if you really believe that certain people are "vermin" who are plotting to destroy your society, violence against them would certainly seem justified.

There is evidence of a direct link between the violent vilification of climate scientists by "mainstream" deniers and the threats:

[The late climate scientist Stephen] Schneider described his attackers as "cowards" and said he had observed an "immediate, noticeable rise" in emails whenever climate scientists were attacked by prominent right-wing US commentators, such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

What causes the rise? Publication of his email addresses on the sceptic website Climate Depot presumably helped. The comment Schneider made in July make sobering reading in the light of the Giffords attack:

Schneider said the FBI had taken an interest earlier this year when his name appeared on a "death list" on a neo-Nazi website alongside other climate scientists with apparent Jewish ancestry.

UPDATE: We're seeing an emerging meme from Jo Nova, Anthony Watts and their many useful idiots trying to downplay these threats or deny them outright. One of their completely absurd talking points is that police are not investigating these threats. On the contrary:

Two of the scientists involved in "Climategate" – the e-mail hacking incident at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK – have been emailed death threats since the contents of their private e-mails were leaked to the world. No further information can be revealed about these particular threats at present because they are currently under investigation with the FBI in the United States.

And further:

The scientist at the heart of the climate change email scandal was today interviewed by police about the scandal. . . . Sources said the interview concerned the theft of emails from the university and alleged death threats since the contents of the emails were released, adding he was being treated as a 'victim of crime' rather than a suspect in any criminal investigation.

Yet another independent line of evidence for global warming

Scientists looked at changes in the length of hundreds of glaciers measured over the course of the twentieth century. Money quote:

The temperature record obtained from glacier fluctuations confirms the pronounced warming of the twentieth century, giving a global cumulative warming of 0.94 ± 0.31 K over the period 1830–2000 and a cumulative warming of 0.84 ± 0.35 K over the period 1600–2000.

The pronounced warming of the last hundred years is old news to most of us, but sixty percent of climate deniers still think the world is not warming at all. Among many others, there circulates the myth that climate science is merely a collection of computer models:

"More Trouble For Global Warming Alarmists":

Because global warming alarmism is based almost entirely on computer climate models rather than, you know, actual scientific observation. The models have already been shown to be unable to accurately predict historical climate changes on a backward looking basis for periods in which we have observational data. Now, they are once again proven wrong. Garbage in; garbage out.

"Joe Dallas" repeats the meme:

The alarmists’ claims are based entirely on hypothetic­al indirect consequenc­es of additional CO2. But these alleged indirect effects are not based on empirical observatio­n, they are merely hypothesiz­ed by the alarmists and incorporat­ed into their computer models. For a long time, we have known that the models’ prediction­s are contradict­ed by empirical observatio­n. In the world of science, this is called refutation of a theory, but global warming exists in the realms of politics and religion, not science.

"Abovetopsecret," a favorite hangout of mass murderer/climate denier Anders Behring Breivik, ties this myth to Roy Spenser's latest modelling misadventure:

In order for human emissions to cause any real change in climate, alarmist scientists have to incorporate “feedback” mechanisms in their models that greatly amplify the known effects of human CO2 warming.

These “feedback” mechanisms are entirely hypothetical constructs which are incorporated into alarmist computer models.

The fact that this commenter, like so many others, uses a paper that is no more than curve fitting a crude and poorly executed model, to criticize the use of computer models, is an indication of how ill-thought-out (or deceptive) these criticisms are. And the hypocrisy is widespread. Not just Roy Spencer's recent paper but any sort of computer model that produces results deniers like garners almost delirious praise, with all their former skepticism of "computer models" temporarily forgotten.

The truth of the matter is that scientists are still very much in the business of observing the physical world. Take just one variable, global temperatures over time, and you will find scientists measuring it in every conceivable way you can think of and more than a few that never occurred to you. A partial and incomplete list:

!. Direct temperature measurements at fixed sites.
2. Changes in the ranges of plant and animal life.
3. Changes in sea level.
4. Changes in glacier size, mass, and distribution.
5. Direct measurements of outgoing radiation and incoming radiation at the top of the atmosphere.
6. Changes in the shape of the earth (really!)
7. Changes in plant growth (like tree ring data).
8. The isotopic composition of snow, corals, and stalactites.
9. Sediment core records of Arctic lakes.
10. Ice core data.
11. Flood markings.
12. Records of crop and grape harvests.
13. Weather diaries and historical maps.
14. Records documenting the timing and extent of Christian agricultural celebrations.
15. Instrumental records of humidity (which varies directly with temperature).
16. Satellite measurements.

The list goes on and on. All these data sources, like all data, has strengths and weakness and limited resolution. That is not my point. What the data proves and what it doesn't is a discussion for another day. My point is that scientists measure things, and climate scientists measure things a lot -- many different kinds of things, collecting information over large spans of time. Once those data sets exist, computer models become an essential adjunct in understanding the data and what is says about our climate and our future. But let's not lose sight of who is spending long hours at low pay collecting real observations from nature, and who is obsessively mathturbating.

Idiot post of the week: Blackboard edition

It's been interesting in a morbid way to watch the transformation of Lucia Liljegren's "The Blackboard" from a technical science blog with a skeptic slant to a pale imitation of Anthony Watt's wildly popular hate machine.

In the riveting "Adapting to global warming: Winnetka park district" Liljegren gives us her best effort at aping Watt's patented sneering chuckle:

The Chicago Tribune alerts us to this horrifying possible consequence of global warming:

Global warming presents a potentially dire future for Winnetka, warns a Park District report.

“This would obviously mean the end of outdoor (ice) skating in Winnetka,” the report says.

Evidently, ice skating “is a part of the fabric of this community”. To avoid tearing it, the park district report suggests “a refrigerated outdoor skating rink to provide consistent ice for close to three months”.

Going on, of course, to ridicule Winnetka for worrying about their ice skating rink, especially when there are so many, many other things for kids to be doing, such as "surf[ing] the web"(!)

This is a favorite denier defense mechanism in two parts. One of the many hundreds of impacts of global warming comes up in discussion, including local examination of the specific impact one one of the millions of communities affected (as in this case). The response goes like this:

Is the specific impact catastrophically destructive for the entire society or humanity as a whole?

If not:
Mock it as a minor inconvenience. If this is not possible (say, because at entire community is at risk of destruction) contrast the cost of adjusting to this particular impact (solving that one problem) with the cost of mitigating global warming over the entire earth (as if this one problem was to total impact of global warming, and you could do a cost-benefit analysis on that basis.)

If so:
Mock those investigating the impact for catastrophic thinking, mock the end that global warming could ever result in such apocalyptic scenarios, compare scientists to end of the world cultists, etc.



This is obviously a closed system, non-falsible. A small cost is derided as insignificant; a large cost is dismissed as an overdramatization. There is yet to be discovered any "goldilocks" impact, neither too small nor too large, that would make a climate "skeptic" concerned about the consequences of global warming. Their past efforts to prove global warming wasn't happening have collapsed in humiliating fashion; that there will be impacts on people all over the world is now obvious. So finding ways to defend their belief system from the steady drumbeat of these problems is job one for climate deniers.

Lucia is obviously prepped and ready to repeat this sort of dreck ad nausem, as evidenced by her closing appeal:

If you know similar stories about global warming representing a threat to the social fabric of a community — by virtue of something as horrifying as putting and end to outdoor ice skating — I’d like to read those too.

Of course, if she were really interested, she could read about the many communities in Alaska threatened by melting permafrost, the Inuit villages on the Arctic coast being slowly destroyed by storm surges, the island communities that are threatened with extinction via rising seas in the next century. But don't waste your virtual ink on stuff like that -- she's telling us outright that she wants funny little stories about impacts "as horrifying as putting and end to outdoor ice skating" -- i.e., this is an exercise in making her feel better, harsh realities need not apply.