I have ordered a copy of “Not Evil Just Wrong” for review. I am excited to see it, but am not going to immediately lend my support until I see the film. There are lots of folks out there who nominally share some of my conclusions but whom I wouldn’t want arguing the case for me. So we’ll see. I will post a review as soon as I have seen it.
Reminder: November 10 Phoenix Climate Presentation
I am making this reminder in honor of Blog Action Day for Climate.
I would like to invite all of you in the Phoenix area to my climate presentation on November 10, 2009. The presentation is timed to coincide with the Copenhagen climate negotiations as Ill as debate on the Boxer cap-and-trade bill in the US Senate.
Despite the explosion of media stories on climate, it is difficult for the average person to really get a handle on the science of greenhouse gasses and climate change in the simplistic and often incomplete or even incorrect popular accounts. This presentation, which is free to the public, will focus on the science of climate change, including:
- Why greenhouse gasses like CO2 warm the Earth.
- How most forecasts of warming from manmade causes are grossly exaggerated, which helps to explain why actual temperatures are undershooting warming forecasts
- How natural processes lead to climate variations that are being falsely interpreted as man-made.
- A discussion of public policy initiatives, and the presentation of a much lower-cost alternative to current cap-and-trade bills
- A review of the role of amateurs in weather and climate measurement, and how the average person can get involved
I have a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University and a masters degree from Harvard. Most of his training is in control theory and the forecasting of complex dynamic systems, which turn out to be the key failure points in most catastrophic climate forecasts. My mission over the last few years both at this web site and my lectures and debates has been to teach the science of global warming in ways that are accessible to the general public.
Over the years I have preferred a debate format, as for example in my debate with Joe Nation, the author of California’s cap-and-trade law. Unfortunately, the most alarmist proponents of catastrophic manmade global warming have taken Al Gore’s lead and refuse to participate in public debates on the topic. As a result, I will do my best to be fair in presenting the global warming case, and then show which portions are really “settled science” and which portions are exaggerated. You are encouraged to check out Climate-Skeptic.com to see the type of issues I take on – there are links to past presentations, blog posts, books, and even a series of popular and highly-rated YouTube videos.
Below you will also find an example of the types of issues I will discuss. There are many, many folks out there on both sides of this issue whose writing and presentations amount to little more than fevered finger-pointing – I work hard to avoid this type rhetoric and focus on the science.
The presentation will be at 7PM November 10 in the auditorium of the Phoenix Country Day School, just north of Camelback on 40th Street, and is free to the public (this event is paid for me personally and is not sponsored or paid for by any group). The presentation will be about an hour long with another hour for questions and discussion. Folks on all sides of these issues are encouraged to attend and participate in civil discussion of the issues.
If you are interested, please join the mailing list for this presentation to receive reminders and updates:
Example Climate Issue: Positive Feedback
By Warren Meyer
I often make a wager with my audiences. I will bet them that unless they are regular readers of the science-based climate sites, I can tell them something absolutely fundamental about global warming theory they have never heard. What I tell them is this:
Man-made global warming theory is not one theory but in fact two totally separate theories chained together. These two theories are:
- Man-made greenhouse gasses, such as CO2, acting alone will warm the planet betIen 1.0 and 1.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100.
- The Earth’s climate system is dominated by positive feedbacks, such that the warming from Greenhouse gasses alone is amplified 3-5 or more times. Most of the warming in catastrophic forecasts comes from this second effect, not directly from greenhouse gas warming.
This is not some Iird skeptic’s fantasy. This two-part description of catastrophic global warming theory is right out of the latest IPCC report. Most of the warming in the report’s forecasts actually results from the theory of positive feedback in #2, not from greenhouse gasses directly.
One of the most confusing issues for average people watching the climate debate is how one side can argue so adamantly that the science is “settled” and the other can argue just the opposite. The explanation lies in large part with this two-part theory. There is a high degree of consensus around proposition1, even among skeptics. I may disagree that the warming is 0.8C or 1.2C, but few on the science end of the debate would argue that CO2 has no effect on warming. When people say “the science is settled” they generally want to talk about proposition 1 and avoid discussion of proposition 2.
That is because proposition 2 is far from settled. The notion that a long-term stable system can be dominated by very high positive feedbacks offends the intuition of many natural scientists, who know that most natural processes (short of nuclear fission) are dominated by negative feedbacks. Sure, there are positive feedbacks in climate, just as there are negative feedbacks. The key is how these net out. The direct evidence that the Earth’s climate is dominated by strong net positive feedbacks is at best equivocal, and in fact evidence is growing that negative feedbacks may dominate, thus greatly reducing expected future warming from greenhouse gasses.
In my public presentations, I typically will
- Explain this split of catastrophic man-made global warming theory into two propositions, and how most of the predicted catastrophe comes from the second proposition rather than the first
- Show how skeptics have hurt their credibility by trying to challenge proposition #1
- Explain the mechanics in simple terms of positive and negative feedback
- Show the data and evidence related to feedback
- Show from historic temperature numbers that assumptions of high positive feedback are extremely unlikely to be correct.
I have a video related to these issues of feedback and forecasts on YouTube in a 9 minute video titled “Don’t Panic – Flaws in Catastrophic Global Warming Forecasts.” See all my videos at my YouTube channel.
My Climate Plan
Apparently this is Blog Action Day for Climate. The site encourages posts today on climate that will be aggregated, uh, somehow. Its pretty clear they want alarmist posts and that the site is leftish in orientation (you just have to look at the issues you can check off that interest you — lots of things like “societal entrepreneurship” but nothing on individual liberty or checks on government power). However, they did not explicitly say “no skeptics” — they just want climate posts. So I will take the opportunity today to post a number of blasts from the past, including some old-old ones on Coyote Blog.
From the comments of this post, which wondered why Americans are so opposed to the climate bill when Europeans seem to want even more regulation. Leaving out the difference in subservience to authority between Europeans and Americans, I wrote this in the comments:
I will just say: Because it’s a bad bill. And not because it is unnecessary, though I would tend to argue that way, but for the same reason that people don’t like the health care bill – its a big freaking expensive mess that doesn’t even clearly solve the problem it sets out to attack. Somehow, on climate change, the House has crafted a bill that both is expensive, cumbersome, and does little to really reduce CO2 emissions. All it does successfully is subsidize a bunch of questionable schemes whose investors have good lobbyists.
If you really want to pass a bill, toss the mess in the House out. Do this:
- Implement a carbon tax on fuels. It would need to be high, probably in the range of dollars and not cents per gallon of gas to achieve kinds of reductions that global warming alarmists think are necessary. This is made palatable by the next step….
- Cut payroll taxes by an amount to offset the revenue from #1. Make the whole plan revenue neutral.
- Reevaluate tax levels every 4 years, and increase if necessary to hit scientifically determined targets for CO2 production.
Done. Advantages:
- no loopholes, no exceptions, no lobbyists, no pork. Keep the legislation under a hundred pages.
- Congress lets individuals decide how best to reduce Co2 by steadily increasing the price of carbon. Price signals rather than command and control or bureaucrats do the work. Most liberty-conserving solution
- Progressives are happy – one regressive tax increase is offset by reduction of another regressive tax
- Unemployed are happy – the cost of employing people goes down
- Conservatives are happy – no net tax increase
- Climate skeptics are mostly happy — the cost of the insurance policy against climate change that we suspect is unnecessary is never-the-less made very cheap. I would be willing to accept it on that basis.
- You lose the good feelings of having hard CO2 targets, but if there is anything European cap-and-trade experiments have taught, good feelings is all you get. Hard limits are an illusion. Raise the price of carbon based fuels, people will conserve more and seek substitutes.
- People will freak at higher gas prices, but if cap and trade is going to work, gas prices must rise by an equal amount. Legislators need to develop a spine and stop trying to hide the tax.
- Much, much easier to administer. Already is infrastructure in place to collect fuel excise taxes. The cap and trade bureaucracy would be huge, not to mention the cost to individuals and businesses of a lot of stupid new reporting requirements.
- Gore used to back this, before he took on the job of managing billions of investments in carbon trading firms whose net worth depends on a complex and politically manipulable cap and trade and offset schemes rather than a simple carbon tax.
Payroll taxes are basically a sales tax on labor. I am fairly indifferent in substituting one sales tax for another, and would support this shift, particularly if it heads of much more expensive and dangerous legislation.
Update: Left out plan plank #4: Streamline regulatory approval process for nuclear reactors.
The Single Best Reason Not To Fear a Climate Catastrophe
Apparently this is Blog Action Day for Climate. The site encourages posts today on climate that will be aggregated, uh, somehow. Its pretty clear they want alarmist posts and that the site is leftish in orientation (you just have to look at the issues you can check off that interest you — lots of things like “societal entrepreneurship” but nothing on individual liberty or checks on government power). However, they did not explicitly say “no skeptics” — they just want climate posts. So I will take the opportunity today to post a number of blasts from the past, including some old-old ones on Coyote Blog.
While the science of how CO2 and other greenhouse gases cause warming is fairly well understood, this core process only results in limited, nuisance levels of global warming. Catastrophic warming forecasts depend on added elements, particularly the assumption that the climate is dominated by strong positive feedbacks, where the science is MUCH weaker. This video explores these issues and explains why most catastrophic warming forecasts are probably greatly exaggerated.
You can also access the YouTube video here, or you can access a higher quality version on Google video here.
If you have the bandwidth, you can download a much higher quality version by right-clicking either of the links below:
- 640 x 480 Windows media version, 86MB
- 320 x 240 Windows media version, 31MB
- Quicktime 640 x 480 version, 245MB
I am not sure why the quicktime version is so porky. In addition, the sound is not great in the quicktime version, so use the windows media wmv files if you can. I will try to reprocess it tonight. All of these files for download are much more readable than the YouTube version (memo to self: use larger font next time!)
By Popular Demand…
I have gotten something like 6 zillion emails asking that I link the Paul Hudson’s BBC News article “What happened to Global Warming.” Frequent readers of this and other science-based skeptic sites won’t find much new here, except the fact that is appeared on the BBC. Apparently it is now the most read article on the BBC site.
Followup on Antarctic Melt Rates
I got an email today in response to this post that allows me to cover some ground I wanted to cover. A number of commenters are citing this paragraph from Tedesco and Monaghan as evidence that I and others are somehow mischaracterizing the results of the study:
“Negative melting anomalies observed in recent years do not contradict recently published results on surface temperature trends over Antarctica [e.g., Steig et al., 2009]. The time period used for those studies extends back to the 1950’s, well beyond 1980, and the largest temperature increases are found during winter and spring rather than summer, and are generally limited to West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula. Summer SAM trends have increased since the 1970s [Marshall, 2003], suppressing warming over much of Antarctica during the satellite melt record [Turner et al., 2005]. Moreover, melting and surface temperature are not necessarily linearly related because the entire surface energy balance must be considered [Liston and Winther, 2005; Torinesi et al., 2003].”
First, the point of the original post was not about somehow falsifying global warming, but about the asymmetry in press coverage to emerging data. It is in fact staggeringly unlikely that I would use claims of increasing ice buildup in Antarctica as “proof” that anthropogenic global warming theory as outlined, say, by the fourth IPCC report, is falsified. This is because the models in the fourth IPCC report actually predict increasing snowmass in Antarctica under global warming.
Of course, the study was not exactly increasing ice mass, but decreasing ice melting rates, which should be more correlated with temperatures. Which brings us to the quote above.
I see a lot of studies in climate that seem to have results that falsify some portion of AGW theory but which throw in acknowledgments of the truth and beauty of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory in the final paragraphs that almost contradict their study results, much like natural philosophers in past centuries would put in boiler plate in their writing to protect them from the ire of the Catholic Church. One way to interpret this statement is “I know you are not going to like these findings but I am still loyal to the Cause so please don’t revoke by AGW decoder ring.”
This particular statement by the authors is hilarious in one way. Their stated defense is that Steig’s period was longer and thus not comparable. The don’t outright say it, but they kind of beat around the bush at it, that the real issue is not the study length, but that most of the warming in Steig’s 50-year period was actually in the first 20 years. This is in fact something we skeptics have been saying since Steig was released, but was not forthrightly acknowledged in Steig. Here is some work that has been done to deconstruct the numbers in Steig. Don’t worry about the cases with different numbers of “PCs”, these are just sensitivities with different geographic regionalizations. Basically, under any set of replication approaches to Steig, all the warming is in the first 2 decades.
| Reconstruction |
1957 to 2006 trend |
1957 to 1979 trend (pre-AWS) |
1980 to 2006 trend (AWS era) |
| Steig 3 PC |
+0.14 deg C./decade |
+0.17 deg C./decade |
-0.06 deg C./decade |
| New 7 PC |
+0.11 deg C./decade |
+0.25 deg C./decade |
-0.20 deg C./decade |
| New 7 PC weighted |
+0.09 deg C./decade |
+0.22 deg C./decade |
-0.20 deg C./decade |
| New 7 PC wgtd imputed cells |
+0.08 deg C./decade |
+0.22 deg C./decade |
-0.21 deg C./decade |
Now, knowing this, here is Steig’s synopsis:
Assessments of Antarctic temperature change have emphasized the contrast between strong warming of the Antarctic Peninsula and slight cooling of the Antarctic continental interior in recent decades1. This pattern of temperature change has been attributed to the increased strength of the circumpolar westerlies, largely in response to changes in stratospheric ozone2. This picture, however, is substantially incomplete owing to the sparseness and short duration of the observations. Here we show that significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1 °C per decade over the past 50 years, and is strongest in winter and spring. Although this is partly offset by autumn cooling in East Antarctica, the continent-wide average near-surface temperature trend is positive. Simulations using a general circulation model reproduce the essential features of the spatial pattern and the long-term trend, and we suggest that neither can be attributed directly to increases in the strength of the westerlies. Instead, regional changes in atmospheric circulation and associated changes in sea surface temperature and sea ice are required to explain the enhanced warming in West Antarctica.
Wow – don’t see much acknowledgment that all the warming trend was before 1980. They find the space to recognize seasonal differences but not the fact that all the warming they found was in the first 40% of their study period? (And all of the above is not even to get into the huge flaws in the Steig methodology, which purports to deemphasize the Antarctic Peninsula but still does not)
This is where the semantic games of trying to keep the science consistent with a political position get to be a problem. If Steig et al had just said “Antarctica warmed from 1957 to 1979 and then has cooled since,” which is what their data showed, then the authors of this new study would not have been in a quandary. In that alternate universe, of course decreased ice melt since 1980 makes sense, because Steig said it was cooler. But because the illusion must be maintained that Steig showed a warming trend that continues to this date, these guys must deal with the fact that their study agrees with the data in Steig, but not the public conclusions drawn from Steig. And thus they have to jump through some semantic hoops.
Telling Half the Story 100% of the Time
By now, I think most readers of this site have seen the asymmetry in reporting of changes in sea ice extent between the Arctic and the Antarctic. On the exact same day in 2007 that seemingly every paper on the planet was reporting that Arctic sea ice extent was at an “all-time” low, it turns out that Antarctic sea ice extent was at an “all-time” high. I put “all-time” in quotes because both were based on satellite measurements that began in 1979, so buy “all-time” newspapers meant not the 5 billion year history of earth or the 250,000 year history of man or the 5000 year history of civilization but instead the 28 year history of space measurement. Oh, that “all time”.
It turns out there is a parallel story with land-based ice and snow. First some background
As most folks know, melting sea ice has no effect on world ocean heights — only melting of ice on land affects sea levels. This land-based ice is distributed approximately as follows:
Antarctica: 89%
Greenland: 10%
Glaciers around the world: 1%
I won’t go into glaciers, in part because their effect is small, but suffice it to say they are melting, but they have been observed melting and retreating for 200 years, which makes this phenomenon hard to square with Co2 buildups over the last 50 years.
I am also not going to talk much about Greenland. The implication of late has been that Greenland ice is melting fast and such melting is somehow unprecedented, so that it must be due to modern man. This is of course slightly hard to square with the historical fact of how Greenland got its name, and the fact that it was warmer a thousand years ago than it is today.
But I am sure you have heard panic and doom in innumerable articles about 11% of the world’s land ice. But what about the other 89%. Crickets?
This may be why you never hear anything:
From World Climate Report: Antarctic Ice Melt at Lowest Levels in Satellite Era
Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?
The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.
Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:
A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season.
Figure 1. Standardized values of the Antarctic snow melt index (October-January) from 1980-2009 (adapted from Tedesco and Monaghan, 2009).
The silence surrounding this publication was deafening.
By the way, in case you think there may be some dueling methodologies here – ie that the scientists measuring melting in Greenland are professional real scientists while the guys doing the Antarctic work are somehow skeptic quacks, the lead author of this Antarctic study is the same guy who authored many of the Greenland melting studies that have made the press. Same author. Same methodology. Same focus (on ice melting rates). Same treatment in the press? No way. Publish the results only if they support the catastrophic view of global warming.
So — 11% of world’s land ice shrinking – Front page headlines. 89% of world’s land ice growing. Silence.
UPDATE: Followup here
Phoenix Climate Presentation, November 10 at 7PM
I have given a number of presentations on climate change around the country and have taken the skeptic side in a number of debates, but I have never done anything in my home city of Phoenix.
Therefore, I will be making a presentation in Phoenix on November 10 at 7PM in the auditorium of the Phoenix Country Day School, on 40th Street just north of Camelback. Admission is free. My presentation is about an hour and I will have an additional hour for questions, criticism, and rebuttals from the audience.
I will be posting more detail later, but the presentation will include background on global warming theory, a discussion of why climate models are likely exaggerating future warming, and an evaluation of various policy alternatives. The presentation will be heavy on science and data, but is meant to be accessible without a science background. I will post more details of the agenda as we get closer to the event.
I am taking something of a risk with this presentation. I am paying for the auditorium and promotion myself — I am not doing this under the auspices of any group. However, I would like to get good attendance, in part because I would like the media representatives attending to see the local community demonstrating interest in at least giving the skeptic side of the debate a hearing. If you are a member of a group that might like to attend, please email me directly at the email link at the top of this page and I can help get more information and updates to your group.
Finally, I have created a mailing list for folks who would like more information about this presentation – just click on the link below. All I need is your name and email address.
Some Common Sense on Treemometers
I have written a lot about historic temperature proxies based on tree rings, but it all boils down to “trees make poor thermometers.” There are just too many things, other than temperature, that can affect annual tree growth. Anthony Watts has a brief article from one of his commenter that discusses some of these issues in a real-life way. This in particular struck me as a strong dose of common sense:
The bristlecone records seemed a lousy proxy, because at the altitude where they grow it is below freezing nearly every night, and daytime temperatures are only above freezing for something like 10% of the year. They live on the borderline of existence, for trees, because trees go dormant when water freezes. (As soon as it drops below freezing the sap stops dripping into the sugar maple buckets.) Therefore the bristlecone pines were dormant 90% of all days and 99% of all nights, in a sense failing to collect temperature data all that time, yet they were supposedly a very important proxy for the entire planet. To that I just muttered “bunkum.”
He has more on Briffa’s increasingly famous single hockey stick tree.
Draft Boxer Climate Bill
I have not had time to plow through it, but here is the Boxer-Kerry climate bill. How many critical 1000-page bills am I going to have to read this summer? (Answer: more than anyone in Congress has read).
More Hockey Stick Hyjinx
Update: Keith Briffa responds to the issues discussed below here.
Sorry I am a bit late with the latest hockey stick controversy, but I actually had some work at my real job.
At this point, spending much time on the effort to discredit variations of the hockey stick analysis is a bit like spending time debunking phlogiston as the key element of combustion. But the media still seems to treat these analyses with respect, so I guess the effort is necessary.
Quick background: For decades the consensus view was that earth was very warm during the middle ages, got cold around the 17th century, and has been steadily warming since, to a level today probably a bit short of where we were in the Middle Ages. This was all flipped on its head by Michael Mann, who used tree ring studies to “prove” that the Medieval warm period, despite anecdotal evidence in the historic record (e.g. the name of Greenland) never existed, and that temperatures over the last 1000 years have been remarkably stable, shooting up only in the last 50 years to 1998 which he said was likely the hottest year of the last 1000 years. This is called the hockey stick analysis, for the shape of the curve.
Since he published the study, a number of folks, most prominently Steve McIntyre, have found flaws in the analysis. He claimed Mann used statistical techniques that would create a hockey stick from even white noise. Further, Mann’s methodology took numerous individual “proxies” for temperatures, only a few of which had a hockey stick shape, and averaged them in a way to emphasize the data with the hockey stick. Further, Mann has been accused of cherry-picking — leaving out proxy studies that don’t support his conclusion. Another problem emerged as it became clear that recent updates to his proxies were showing declining temperatures, what is called “divergence.” This did not mean that the world was not warming, but did mean that trees may not be very good thermometers. Climate scientists like Mann and Keith Briffa scrambled for ways to hide the divergence problem, and even truncated data when necessary. More here. Mann has even flipped the physical relationship between a proxy and temperature upside down to get the result he wanted.
Since then, the climate community has tried to make itself feel better about this analysis by doing it multiple times, including some new proxies and new types of proxies (e.g. sediments vs. tree rings). But if one looks at the studies, one is struck by the fact that its the same 10 guys over and over, either doing new versions of these studies or reviewing their buddies studies. Scrutiny from outside of this tiny hockey stick society is not welcome. Any posts critical of their work are scrubbed from the comment sections of RealClimate.com (in contrast to the rich discussions that occur at McIntyre’s site or even this one) — a site has even been set up independently to archive comments deleted from Real Climate. This is a constant theme in climate. Check this policy out — when one side of the scientific debate allows open discussion by all comers, and the other side censors all dissent, which do you trust?
Anyway, all these studies have shared a couple of traits in common:
- They have statistical methodologies to emphasize the hockey stick
- They cherry pick data that will support their hypothesis
- They refuse to archive data or make it available for replication
The some extent, the recent to-do about Briffa and the Yamal data set have all the same elements. But this one appears to have a new one — not only are the data sets cherry-picked, but there is growing evidence that the data within a data set has been cherry picked.
Yamal is important for the following reason – remember what I said above about just a few data sets driving the whole hockey stick. These couple of data sets are the crack cocaine to which all these scientists are addicted. They are the active ingredient. The various hockey stick studies may vary in their choice of proxy sets, but they all include a core of the same two or three that they know with confidence will drive the result they want, as long as they are careful not to water them down with too many other proxies.
Here is McIntyre’s original post. For some reason, the data set Briffa uses falls off to ridiculously few samples in recent years (exactly when you would expect more). Not coincidentally, the hockey stick appears exactly as the number of data points falls towards 10 and then 5 (from 30-40). If you want a longer, but more layman’s view, Bishop Hill blog has summarized the whole story. Update: More here, with lots of the links I didn’t have time this morning to find.
Postscript: When backed against the wall with no response, the Real Climate community’s ultimate response to issues like this is “Well, it doesn’t matter.” Expect this soon.
Update: Here are the two key charts, as annotated by JoNova:
And it “matters”
Peer Review for Thee But Not for Me
This is pretty funny, The Climate Change “Science” Compendium from the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) pulls a key chart off of Wikipedia. More also from Anthony Watt.
What A Daring Guy
Joe Romm has gone on the record at Climate Progress on April 13, 2009 that the “median” forecast was for warming in the US by 2100 of 10-15F, or 5.5-8.3C, and he made it very clear that if he had to pick a single number, it would be the high end of that range.
On average, the 8.3C implies about 0.9C per decade of warming. This might vary slightly by what starting point he intended (he is not very clear in the post) and I understand there is a curve so it will be below average in the early years and above in the later.
Anyway, Joe Romm is ready to put his money where his mouth is, and wants to make a 50/50 bet with any comers that warming in the next decade will be… 0.15C. Boy, it sure is daring for a guy who is constantly in the press at a number around 0.9C per decade to commit to a number 6 times lower when he puts his money where his mouth is. Especially when Romm has argued that warming in the last decade has been suppressed (somehow) and will pop back up soon. Lucia has more reasons why this is a chickensh*t bet.
Have You Checked the Couch Cushions?
Patrick Michaels describes some of the long history of the Hadley Center and specifically Phil Jones’ resistance to third party verification of their global temperature data. First he simply refused to share the data
We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?
(that’s some scientist, huh) and then he said he couldn’t share the data and now he says he’s lost the data.
Michaels gives pretty good context to the issues of station siting, but there are many other issues that are perfectly valid reasons for third parties to review the Hadley Center’s methodology. A lot of choices have to be made in patching data holes and in giving weights to different stations and attempting to correct for station biases. Transparency is needed for all of these methodologies and decisions. What Jones is worried about is whenever the broader community (and particularly McIntyre and his community on his web site) have a go at such methodologies, they have always found gaping holes and biases. Since the Hadley data is the bedrock on which rests almost everything done by the IPCC, the costs of it being found wrong are very high.
Here is an example post from the past on station siting and measurement quality. Here is a post for this same station on correction and aggregation of station data, and problems therein.
Great Moments in Skepticism and “Settled Science”
The phrase shaken baby syndrome entered the pop culture lexicon in 1997, when British au pair Louise Woodward was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Massachusetts infant Matthew Eappen. At the time, the medical community almost universally agreed on the symptoms of SBS. But starting around 1999, a fringe group of SBS skeptics began growing into a powerful reform movement. The Woodward case brought additional attention to the issue, inviting new research into the legitimacy of SBS. Today, as reflected in the Edmunds case, there are significant doubts about both the diagnosis of SBS and how it’s being used in court.
In a compelling article published this month in the Washington University Law Review, DePaul University law professor Deborah Teurkheimer argues that the medical research has now shifted to the point where U.S. courts must conduct a major review of most SBS cases from the last 20 years. The problem, Teurkheimer explains, is that the presence of three symptoms in an infant victim—bleeding at the back of the eye, bleeding in the protective area of the brain, and brain swelling—have led doctors and child protective workers to immediately reach a conclusion of SBS. These symptoms have long been considered pathognomic, or exclusive, to SBS. As this line of thinking goes, if those three symptoms are present in the autopsy, then the child could only have been shaken to death.
Moreover, an SBS medical diagnosis has typically served as a legal diagnosis as well. Medical consensus previously held that these symptoms present immediately in the victim. Therefore, a diagnosis of SBS established cause of death (shaking), the identity of the killer (the person who was with the child when it died), and even the intent of the accused (the vigorous nature of the shaking established mens rea). Medical opinion was so uniform that the accused, like Edmunds, often didn’t bother questioning the science. Instead, they’d often try to establish the possibility that someone else shook the child.
But now the consensus has shifted. Where the near-unanimous opinion once held that the SBS triad of symptoms could only result from a shaking with the force equivalent of a fall from a three-story to four-story window, or a car moving at 25 mph to 40 mph (depending on the source), research completed in 2003 using lifelike infant dolls suggested that vigorous human shaking produces bleeding similar to that of only a 2-foot to 3-foot fall. Furthermore, the shaking experiments failed to produce symptoms with the severity of those typically seen in SBS deaths….
“When I put all of this together, I said, my God, this is a sham,” Uscinski told Discover. “Somebody made a mistake right at the very beginning, and look at what’s come out of it.”
Before I am purposefully misunderstood, I am not committing the logical fallacy that an incorrect consensus in issue A means the consensus on issue B is incorrect. The message instead is simple: beware scientific “consensus,” particularly when that consensus is only a decade or two old.
Good News / Bad News for Media Science
The good news: The AZ Republic actually published a front page story (link now fixed) on the urban heat island effect in Phoenix, and has a discussion of how changes in ground cover, vegetation, and landscaping can have substantial effects on temperatures, even over short distances. Roger Pielke would be thrilled, as he has trouble getting even the UN IPCC to acknowledge this fact.
The bad news: The bad news comes in three parts
- The whole focus of the story is staged in the context of rich-poor class warfare, as if the urban heat island effect is something the rich impose on the poor. It is clear that without this class warfare angle, it probably would never have made the editorial cut for the paper.
- In putting all the blame on “the rich,” they miss the true culprit, which are leftish urban planners whose entire life goal is to increase urban densities and eliminate suburban “sprawl” and 2-acre lots. But it is the very densities that cause the poor to live in the hottest temperatures, and it is the 2-acre lots that shelter “the rich” from the heat island effects.
- Not once do the authors take the opportunity to point out that such urban heat island effects are likely exaggerating our perceptions of Co2-based warming — that in fact some or much of the warming we ascribe to Co2 is actually due to this heat island effect in areas where we have measurement stations.
My son and I quantified the Phoenix urban heat island years ago in this project.
I am still wondering why Phoenix doesn’t investigate lighter street paving options. They use all black asphalt, and just changing this approach (can you have lighter asphalt?) would be a big help. By the way, our house is all white with a white foam roof, so we are doing our part to fight the heat island!
Ocean Acidification
In the past, I have responded to questions at talks I have given on ocean acidification with an “I don’t know.” I hadn’t studied the theory and didn’t want to knee-jerk respond with skepticism just because the theory came from people who propounded a number of other theories I knew to be BS.
The theory is that increased atmospheric CO2 will result in increasing amounts of CO2 being dissolved . That CO2 when in solution with water forms carbonic acid. And that acidic water can dissolve the shells of shellfish. They have tested this by dumping acid in sea water and doing so has had a negative effect on shellfish.
This is one of those logic chains that seems logical on its face, and is certainly scientific enough sounding to fool the typical journalist or concerned Hollywood star. But the chemistry just doesn’t work this way. This is the simplest explanation I have found, but I will take a shot at summarizing the key problem.
It is helpful to work backwards through this proposition. First, what is it about acidic water — actually not acidic, but “more neutral” water, since sea water is alkaline — that causes harm to the shells of sea critters? H+ ions in solution from the acid combine with calcium carbonate in the shells, removing mass from the shell and “dissolving” the shall. When we say an acid “eats” or “etches” something, a similar reaction is occurring between H+ ion and the item being “dissolved”.
So pouring a beaker of acid into a bucket of sea water increases the free H+ ions and hurts the shells. And if you do exactly that – put acid in seawater in an experiment – I am sure you would get exactly that result.
Now, you may be expecting me to argue that there is a lot of sea water and the net effect of trace CO2 in the atmosphere would not affect the pH much, especially since seawater starts pretty alkaline. And I probably could argue this, but there is a better argument and I am embarrassed that I never saw it before.
Here is the key: When CO2 dissolves in water, we are NOT adding acid to the water. The analog of pouring acid into the water is a false one. What we are doing is adding CO2 to the water, which combines with water molecules to form carbonic acid. This is not the same as adding acid to the water, because the H+ ions we are worried about are already there in the water. We are not adding any more. In fact, one can argue that increasing the CO2 in the water “soaks up” H+ ions into carbonic acid and by doing so shifts the balance so that in fact less calcium carbonate will be removed from shells. As a result, as the link above cites,
As a matter of fact, calcium carbonate dissolves in alkaline seawater (pH 8.2) 15 times faster than in pure water (pH 7.0), so it is silly, meaningless nonsense to focus on pH.
Unsurprisingly, for those familiar with climate, the chemistry of sea water is really complex and it is not entirely accurate to isolate these chemistries absent other effects, but the net finding is that CO2 induced thinning of sea shells seems to be based on a silly view of chemistry.
Am I missing something? I am new to this area of the CO2 question, and would welcome feedback.
Potential Phoenix Climate Presentation
I am considering making a climate presentation in Phoenix based on my book, videos, and blogging on how catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory tends to grossly overestimate man’s negative impact on climate.
I need an honest answer – is there any interest out there in the Phoenix area in that you might attend such a presentation in North Phoenix followed by a Q&A? Email me or leave notes in the comments. If you are associated with a group that might like to attend such a presentation, please email me.
More Proxy Hijinx
Steve McIntyre digs into more proxy hijinx from the usual suspects. This is a pretty good summary of what he tends to find, time and again in these studies:
The problem with these sorts of studies is that no class of proxy (tree ring, ice core isotopes) is unambiguously correlated to temperature and, over and over again, authors pick proxies that confirm their bias and discard proxies that do not. This problem is exacerbated by author pre-knowledge of what individual proxies look like, leading to biased selection of certain proxies over and over again into these sorts of studies.
The temperature proxy world seems to have developed into a mono-culture, with the same 10 guys creating new studies, doing peer review, and leading IPCC sub-groups. The most interesting issue McIntyre raises is that this new study again uses proxy’s “upside down.” I explained this issue more here and here, but a summary is:
Scientists are trying to reconstruct past climate variables like temperature and precipitation from proxies such as tree rings. They begin with a relationship they believe exists based on a physical understanding of a particular system – ie, for tree rings, trees grow faster when its warm so tree rings are wider in warm years. But as they manipulate the data over and over in their computers, they start to lose touch with this physical reality.
…. in one temperature reconstruction, scientists have changed the relationship opportunistically between the proxy and temperature, reversing their physical understanding of the process and how similar proxies are handled in the same study, all in order to get the result they want to get.
Data Splices
Splicing data sets is a virtual necessity in climate research. Let’s think about how I might get a 500,000 year temperature record. For the first 499,000 years I probably would use a proxy such as ice core data to infer a temperature record. From 150-1000 years ago I might switch to tree ring data as a proxy. From 30-150 years ago I probably would use the surface temperature record. And over the last 30 years I might switch to the satellite temperature measurement record. That’s four data sets, with three splices.
But there is, obviously, a danger in splices. It is sometimes hard to ensure that the zero values are calibrated between two records (typically we look at some overlap time period to do this). One record may have a bias the other does not have. One record may suppress or cap extreme measurements in some way (example – there is some biological limit to tree ring growth, no matter how warm or cold or wet or dry it is). We may think one proxy record is linear when in fact it may not be linear, or may be linear over only a narrow range.
We have to be particularly careful at what conclusions we draw around the splices. In particular, one would expect scientists to be very, very skeptical of inflections or radical changes in the slope or other characteristic of the data that occur right at a splice. Occam’s Razor might suggest the more logical solution is that such changes are related to incompatibilities with the two data sets being spliced, rather than any particular change in the physical phenomena being measured.
Ah, but not so in climate. A number of the more famous recent findings in climate have coincided with splices in data sets. The most famous is in Michael Mann’s hockey stick, where the upward slope at the end of the hockey stick occurs exactly at the point where tree ring proxy data is spliced to instrument temperature measurements. In fact, if looking only at the tree ring data brought to the present, no hockey stick occurs (in fact the opposite occurs in many data sets he uses). The obvious conclusion would have been that the tree ring proxy data might be flawed, and that it was not directly comparable with instrumental temperature records. Instead, Al Gore built a movie around it. If you are interested, the splice issue with the Mann hockey stick is discussed in detail here.
Another example that I have not spent as much time with is the ocean heat content data, discussed at the end of this post. Heat content data from the ARGO buoy network is spliced onto older data. The ARGO network has shown flat to declining heat content every year of its operation, except for a jump in year one from the old data to the new data. One might come to the conclusion that the two data sets did not have their zero’s matched well, such that the one year jump is a calibration issue in joining the data sets, and not the result of an actual huge increase in ocean heat content of a magnitude that has not been observed before or since. Instead, headline read that the ARGO network has detected huge increases in ocean heat content!
So this brings us to today’s example, probably the most stark and obvious of the bunch, and we have our friend Michael Mann to thank for that. Mr. Mann wanted to look at 1000 years of hurricanes, the way he did for temperatures. He found some proxy for hurricanes in years 100-1000, basically looking at sediment layers. He uses actual observations for the last 100 years or so as reported by a researcher named Landsea (one has to adjust hurricane numbers for observation technology bias — we don’t miss any hurricanes nowadays, but hurricanes in 1900 may have gone completely unrecorded depending on their duration and track). Lots of people argue about these adjustments, but we are not going to get into that today.
Here are his results, with the proxy data in blue and the Landsea adjusted observations in red. Again you can see the splice of two very different measurement technologies.
Now, you be the scientist. To help you analyze the data, Roger Pielke via Anthony Watt has calculated to basic statistics for the blue and red lines:
The Mann et al. historical predictions [blue] range from a minimum of 9 to a maximum of 14 storms in any given year (rounding to nearest integer), with an average of 11.6 storms and a standard deviation of 1.0 storms. The Landsea observational record [red] has a minimum of 4 storms and a maximum of 28 with and average of 11. 7 and a standard deviation of 3.75.
The two series have almost dead-on the same mean but wildly different standard deviations. So, junior climate scientists, what did you conclude? Perhaps:
- The hurricane frequency over the last 1000 years does not appear to have increased appreciably over the last 100, as shown by comparing the two means. or…
- We couldn’t conclude much from the data because there is something about our proxy that is suppressing the underlying volatility, making it difficult to draw conclusions
Well, if you came up with either of these, you lose your climate merit badge. In fact, here is one sample headline:
Atlantic hurricanes have developed more frequently during the last decade than at any point in at least 1,000 years, a new analysis of historical storm activity suggests.
Who would have thought it? A data set with a standard deviation of 3.75 produces higher maximum values than a data set with the same mean but with the standard deviation suppressed down to 1.0. Unless, of course, you actually believe that the data volatility in the underlying natural process suddenly increase several times coincidental in the exact same year as the data splice.
Mann et al.’s bottom-line results say nothing about climate or hurricanes, but what happens when you connect two time series with dramatically different statistical properties. If Michael Mann did not exist, the skeptics would have to invent him.
Postscript #1: By the way, hurricane counts are a horrible way to measure hurricane activity (hurricane landfalls are even worse). The size and strength and duration of hurricanes are also important. Researchers attempt to factor these all together into a measure of accumulated cyclone energy. This metric of world hurricanes and cyclones has actually be falling the last several years.
Postscript #2: Just as another note on Michael Mann, he is the guy who made the ridiculously overconfident statement that “there is a 95 to 99% certainty that 1998 was the hottest year in the last one thousand years.” By the way, Mann now denies he ever made this claim, despite the fact that he was recorded on video doing so. The movie Global Warming: Doomsday Called Off has the clip. It is about 20 seconds into the 2nd of the 5 YouTube videos at the link.