Don't shoot the messenger
Monday, December 7, marks the opening of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. At that meeting, the leaders of the world will gather to negotiate an agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The new agreement will be the world's road map for dealing with climate change, and the stakes are huge. It is fitting that the conference begins on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, for the Copenhagen conference is sure to be an epic political battle. Indeed, the battle has already been underway for several weeks, with most of the action centering on a PR assault launched by the anti-CO2 regulation forces that sensationalized the contents of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia. The Wall Street Journal has long been at the forefront of the battle to discredit the science of climate change and the scientists involved, and last week they launched a major offensive, publishing multiple opinion pieces. I'll critique one of these, a December 1 editorial by Bret Stephens which accuses climate scientists of having a vested interest in promoting alarmist views of the climate in order to get research funding. "All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God", Stephens wrote.
Money
It's always wise to follow the money when analyzing the motivations of people. However, Ph.D. atmospheric scientists are less motivated by money than, say, the typical reader of the Wall Street Journal. I am an example of that. Nobody owns more shares of Wunderground.com than I do, yet here I am criticizing the Wall Street Journal and some of the richest and most powerful corporations on the planet--hardly the sort of action that will generate more revenue for my company. Our top climate scientists are some of the most brilliant people on the planet. They could have easily made fortunes on Wall Street devising intricate schemes to hawk sub-prime mortgages or leverage obscure derivatives. Yet these people chose climate science as a career, out of a genuine curiosity about how the world works and desire to help find the truth of whether human-caused climate change poses a significant threat to humanity. The charges that these scientists are exaggerating the danger of human-caused global warming to get more funding is a personal attack on their integrity--a typical politician's ploy to avoid talking about the issues, when one has no valid arguments to bolster one's position. In my 29 years in the weather business, I've had the honor of working with many of the world's top weather and climate scientists. I can personally vouch for their integrity and commitment to pursue the scientific truth, no matter what that truth turns out to be. These are honest, incredibly hard-working public servants who are enduring a punishing assault on their integrity because they are the bearers of bad news. The Earth has plenty of pressing problems requiring the services of brilliant scientists; these public servants will always have a job, and have no need to exaggerate dangers or invent new threats in order to get more research funding. If one reads through the entire set of 3,000 emails hacked from the University of East Anglia--not just the choice few lines excerpted from chosen emails, and then spun by the anti-CO2 regulation lobby to make the scientists look bad--you will see that these scientists are the good guys. Never once is there a mention of fabricating data or fudging results to try to get more research funding. There is no conspiring to perpetate the massive "hoax" of human-caused global warming they have been accused of. Rather, we see a picture of some very smart, hardworking, and very human and imperfect scientists that are doing their best to learn the truth, and pass that information on to the rest of us. You don't get ahead in scince by fudging the data. It's publish or perish. While the peer-review system of publication is not perfect, it generally does an excellent job of rewarding those scientists who seek to publish the truth, and rejects those who do not. Published papers that turn out to be false will, in time, crumble under the weight of subsequent studies that do uncover the truth. Smart scientists tend to have big egos and hate being wrong, so there is additional motivation to publish truthful studies that will withstand the test of time and be validated by subsequent research.
Alarmism
Mr. Stephens uses the words "alarm" or "alarmist" four times in the editorial, and he is clearly trying to provoke an emotional reaction against those Chicken Littles guilty of raising the alarm. Speaking as an atmospheric scientist, I can tell you from long experience that we are not the wild-eyed, alarmist lot that the Wall Street Journal makes us out to be. This makes for some very dull parties (if you're not excited about discussing quasi-geostrophic theory), when we get together for a big bash. Very little alarming behavior takes place. (In fact, after I dragged my wife to three straight devastatingly dull departmental Christmas parties while I was in graduate school, she forbade me from ever requiring her to go to another.) Atmospheric scientists are not an alarmist lot--put us in quiet room with a window and give us a computer and pile of data to analyze, and we'll be as happy as a clam at high tide. The portrayal of climate scientists as alarmist, money-grubbing, dishonest hucksters out to destroy the economy to further their own selfish desires for money or fame is a common theme in climate change denial attacks, and is a very narrow-minded and ignorant one. It's more convenient to shoot the messenger than to acknowledge the truth of the bad news they're bringing.
Toleration of false alarms
It is possible that the alarms climate scientists are raising over climate change will turn out to be false. Environmental scientists have in the past issued false alarms over environmental problems that did not materialize as expected. However, we should expect and tolerate some degree of false alarms, given the uncertainty in forecasting these events. If our scientists never issue a false alarm, then the tolerance for issuing alarms is not correct. Would you criticize the National Weather Service for issuing a tornado warning when a possible tornado signature is spotted on Doppler radar, since less than half of these signatures result in in an actual tornado touchdown? Or the National Hurricane Center for issuing a hurricane warning, since only 25% of the warned coast receives hurricane-force winds, on average? No, some degree of false alarms must be tolerated. Our weather forecasters are dedicated public servants, doing their job of warning the public when their best scientific judgment indicates that there might be a significant threat. It is no different with our climate scientists. They are predicting that there is a greater than 90% chance that most of the observed global warming is due to human causes. Climate scientists are extremely concerned about what their scientific results are saying, and are doing their utmost to warn a public resistant to acknowledging the danger. This resistance runs very deep among conservatives. A 2008 Pew Center poll found that 75% of Democrats with a college education believed that humans were responsible for global warming, while only 19% of college educated Republicans believed that. Conservatives' core belief that a capitalist, free market economy with limited regulation is the best economic system in the world is challenged by acknowledging that human-caused global warming is real and a threat. I greatly respect conservatives who can objectively evaluate the validity of global warming science while holding that core belief, for it is difficult to accept that the best economic system in the world could spawn such a self-destructive force. But as I detailed in a post last week, corporations, by law, exist to make a profit. If scientific research shows that a corporation's products may be harmful to the public health, it the obligation of the company to its shareholders to employ whatever legal means possible to cast doubt on this science, in order to protect profits. The profits of the richest and most powerful industry the planet has ever seen--the fossil fuel industry--are currently so threatened. Thus, we are being subject to history's greatest campaign to deny science, and it is keeping us from much-needed action to curb the danger. These voices are telling us what we want to hear--the danger is not real, the scientists are corrupt and are falsifying their data, the uncertainties are great, and that we cannot afford to change. But the laws of physics don't care about ideology or free market economies or election cycles. The overwhelming majority of our top climate scientists are saying that the laws of physics dictate that massive amounts of greenhouse gases, when added to the atmosphere, will cause warming that will be very damaging to civilization. If we are to limit that damage, we must act soon, for the approaching storm will grow ever stronger the longer we wait. Don't shoot the messengers-- they are on your side.
Other posts in this series
Embattled UK climate scientist steps down
The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy
Is more CO2 beneficial for Earth's ecosystems?
Next post
My timing of my next post will depend upon the weather.
Our Climate Change expert, Dr. Ricky Rood, is in Copenhagen for this week's crucial COP15 climate change treaty negotiations. Be sure to tune into his blog for updates on the talks. Wunderground has provided financial support for several University of Michigan students to attend the talks, and I may be featuring portions of their blogs over the coming weeks.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.
"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," Mr. Horner said. "These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this."
I see the glacier data, etc, by a previous poster. But the lynch pin is global temperatures. And right now, I am wondering if there is any openly accessible data and open code analysis that is available. I even wonder if the glacier and tree ring data are accessible and transparent. If money and ideology has corrupted two areas (NASA and CRU) of warmist endeavor, I wonder how far the corruption has spread?
Warmists need to stop circling the wagons and behave like the scientists they claim themselves to be.
Snow is Sactown!
Wunderground is the best current weather data place around. (As far as an evenhanded treatment of global warming goes, not so much, apparently.)
Good night, all!
shreveporttimes.com
December 6, 2009
NEW ORLEANS — High-ranking Obama administration officials are coming to Louisiana and Mississippi to explore the needs and possibilities of restoring and protecting the states' coasts.
The members of the Louisiana Mississippi Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Working Group will meet with stakeholders and tour the Gulf Coast on Monday and Tuesday.
The officials include Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Terrence "Rock" Salt, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for civil works.
I'm gonna call you on this one.
And, I'll give you all the benefits.
Average home in the US uses 1kW per month. I'll give you that (probably bigger, though, if you're on this site... guessing 2kW minimum).
Don't know where you live and you have zero profile, so I'll give you AZ with its avg 7hrs of sun per day.
That requires a 6kW system. That costs minimum $35K.
And that's if you live in ideal conditions. Forget if you live in Seattle...
1kW averages about $100, depending on where you live.
Hmmm.. 100 x 12 = 1200/yr. $35K/1200 = 29 years for payback at 100% covering utilization and excluding any repairs. The panels last about 25 years. Other parts 5-10.
It's hardly "free" electricity. Actually costs more.
Not buying that you run all your electricity through solar, but I guess it's possible.
Now here we go! We can all get behind wetlands, I think. Imagine if we put all the AGW money that has been spent on things like that. Localized stuff because, no question about it, us humans can destroy localized ecosystems.
:)
What's that expression...is it:
Think globally; act locally -- or is it vice-versa?
I hope this restoration group will have the authorization and appropriation dollars to do something fairly soon...budgets are so tight.
P.S. I find it interesting the short article was in "Buss on Business."
Someone mentioned earlier that the equipment for solar should go down in price soon. With this in my mind I would go with the solar energy. We do get a lot of sun in Florida. And the electric companies down here must make a few bucks, especially for what they charge down here to turn the power on.
I live in central Texas. Electric bills for a house the size of ours average $400 per month, for houses that are all-electric like ours, rather than a combination of electric and natural gas. We actually use less than most, because we made some energy efficiency improvements before going solar.
Our solar panels took a month or so over 10 years to pay for themselves. They currently generate more electricity than we use each month, so we're actually not only enjoying free energy, we're contributing some back into the grid as well. They should have 1-2 decades of usable life left in them.
We did have some hail damage this year. It was covered by our insurance, and surprisingly (to me)cost less than the hail damaged roof areas not covered by solar panels. We've had smaller hail in the past that didn't cause any damage, but this was tennis ball sized and made pretty big divots.
ric, now we could get our same system for a lot less, and the payback would be more like 7 years instead of a little over 10. Not only are there federal tax credits, our city has a great incentive, and there is a state/municipal program to finance solar by spreading the cost out over 20 years and adding the monthly payment to our property tax bill. Then, if you sell the house, you are not stuck with paying for a solar array you no longer own, and you pay less per month than your electricity would have cost right from the day your system fires up.
What appears to indicate a sham is if one removes the tree rings from the reconstruction.
That looks like this:
(Mean global temperature reconstruction based on 18 non-tree-ring proxies, to 1935. Only 11 proxies cover the period after 1935.)
From here: http://www.ncasi.org/Publications/Detail.aspx?id=3025
Hey, look, trees that grew much faster than expected when exposed to more CO2:
The scientist found that over the last 50 years, the rise in carbon dioxide increased aspen trees' growth rates by 53%. The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, was published today in the journal Global Change Biology.
"We were quite surprised to see this large of a response," says Rick Lindroth, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an author of the study. "We wouldn’t have been surprised to see some effect, but a 53% increase is a whopping increase."
Those tree rings in the proxy studies were larger because of what, exactly?!? I think Michael Mann should to find alternative employment as the tree rings aren't really capable of telling us which good/bad conditions led to their size.
Show me. Seriously. I've obviously checked it out.
We don't store any power. The way residential solar works is that you are connected to the power grid. During the day, when the local utility has a hard time generating enough power and needs all the help it can get, you are generating more than you need and feeding it into the grid. At night, you usually will draw some power back from the grid. If your net energy use is less that what you generate, your bill at the end of the month is zero.
The Yamal implosion
And thanks Jpritch, I thought you were standalone :)
I have been told that Louisiana has one of the most friendly tax incentive programs for home solar equipment...not much of an option for me, though. My roof gets unabated sunlight for only a few months of the year, and no, I am not cutting down trees. (Not even if I owned all of the property upon which they lie.)
I had seen that before (I still have no confidence that tree rings are useful indicators of any single parameter)...
I want Briffa's hair...
How are ya, Oss? You guys have been busy today, I see.
I have been on the move a lot. Went and took that kids to a Christmas tree farm and cut down one of our choosing (you should have heard it screaming as it fell).
And, then went to see a performance of the Nutcracker. My 5 yr old has loved Tchaikovsky for quite a while (should have heard him say that name when he was 3) and today I had to take his shoes off so his uncontrollable foot tapping to the music wouldn't get bothersome to anyone. A local (SE LA, anyway) product with the Delta Ballet Troupe and the LA Philharmonic...he loved every minute of it.
It does not include instrumentation, at least that is my understanding.
The series used were: GRIP borehole 18O temperature (Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998); Conroy Lake pollen (Gajewski, 1988); Chesapeake Bay Mg/Ca (Cronin et al., 2003); Sargasso Sea 18O (Keigwin, 1996); Caribbean Sea 18O (Nyberg et al., 2002); Lake Tsuolbmajavri diatoms (Korhola et al., 2000); Shihua Cave layer thickness )Tan et al., 2003); China composite (Yang et al., 2002) which does use tree ring width for two out of the eight series that are averaged to get the composite, or 1.4% of the total data input to the mean computed below; speleothem data from a South African cave (Holmgren et al., 1999); SST variations (warm season) off West Africa (deMenocal et al., 2000); SST from the southeast Atlantic (Farmer et al., 2005); SST reconstruction in the Norwegian Sea (Calvo et al., 2002); SST from two cores in the western tropical Pacific (Stott et al., 2004); mean temperature for North America based on pollen profiles (Viau et al., 2006); a phenology-based reconstruction from China (Ge et al., 2003); annual mean SST for northern Pacific site SSDP-102 (Latitude 34.9530, Longitude 128.8810) from Kim et al. (2004); and Spannagel Cave (Central Alps) stalagmite oxygen isotope data (Mangini et al., 2005).
Make it a great week all. L8R
I would love for everyone to stop referencing tree ring proxies and any other data and/or conclusions dependent on them. Sounds good to me.
So, today's temp and recent trends, after removing UHI-contaminated obs, is special when compared to what?
... Earthquake information statement...
The United States geologic survey has confirmed that a 3.2
earthquake occurred at 723 PM EDT over east central Georgia. The
the earthquake was centered near 30.016 degrees north... 83.048
degrees west... or about 5 miles west of Deepstep Georgia. This is
about 12 miles east of Milledgeville and 66 miles west southwest
of Augusta.
Reports of shaking have been received as far east as Vidalia... but
so far no reports of damage have been received in any portion of
the Charleston National weather services area of responsibility.
Those are references to Author and year of publication, not the year the proxy is valid for.
These are the 18 proxies from 2000 years ago to 1935 included and only 11 after 1935...
Not sure what you mean about the instrument readings...
I didn't realize 1 in 4 of the world depend on water from the Himalayas.
You mean the same ones that seek for the rest of us to pay their way?
For the cost of the summit, we could have installed scrubbers on the Chinese smokestacks, the Arctic ice would have recovered further in the next couple of years without the black carbon aerosol deposition, and we would have nothing to talk about...
Yeah, that was a little tongue-in-cheek...
L8R.
The video has a pretty good beat.
Atmo~ I think the last line pretty much summed that up.. "For poor people, climate change is not something in the future. Climate change is hitting them now,"
Your right, they could be approaching this with a more get it done attitude.
Very nicely done, looks accurate, and a little funny: http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/fraudulent-hockey-sticks-and-hidden-data/
Yeah, I read it.
If they believe that CO2 is responsible for any and all changes they are seeing as of late, I would think they would be rather excited about getting some movement underway.
Seastep, sorry, I was away for a few hours, or I would have commented earlier. There is a federal tax subsidy. Basically, it is a 30% tax credit on installing a solar system, with no limit on the total amount. You wipe off a third of the cost of your system from your tax debt, and you can carry it over to the next year if you don't owe that much tax.
Many cities have rebates as well. It is very expensive to build new power plants, so subsidizing residents to invest in solar power is cheaper, in most cases. If your city has a rebate, it will apply in addition to the federal rebate.
Now a lot of states have passed laws that allow for residential solar to be financed through property tax payments. Most programs that are adopted are no-interest or very low interest and spread the cost over 20 years or so. You pay more each month in property taxes, and if you sell your house, the remaining cost of the solar panels transfers to the new owner. Because panels normally outlive their payback point, you pay less per month than you would have paid in electric bills right from the start.
Another innovation is to contract with a company that buys the panels for your house, and you just pay them a set amount per month. Again, it's normally less than the typical utility bill, because the panels generate more than you use over the course of their life.
One good source of info on all this is One Block Off the Grid, 1bog.org. They help people get buying groups together to get additional volume discounts on equipment and installation, and they have a lot of good tech and financial info on their website.
UN says climate finale may have happy ending
AP
By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press Writer Arthur Max, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 29 mins ago
COPENHAGEN – Delegates converged Sunday for the grand finale of two years of tough, sometimes bitter negotiations on a climate change treaty, as U.N. officials calculated that pledges offered in the last few weeks to reduce greenhouse gases put the world within reach of keeping global warming under control.
Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate official, said on the eve of the 192-nation conference that despite unprecedented unity and concessions, industrial countries and emerging nations need to dig deeper.
"Time is up," de Boer said. "Over the next two weeks governments have to deliver."
Link
Earth system sensitivity inferred from Pliocene modelling and data
Daniel J. Lunt, Alan M. Haywood, Gavin A. Schmidt, Ulrich Salzmann, Paul J. Valdes and Harry J. Dowsett
Abstract
Quantifying the equilibrium response of global temperatures to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations is one of the cornerstones of climate research. Components of the Earth|[rsquo]|s climate system that vary over long timescales, such as ice sheets and vegetation, could have an important effect on this temperature sensitivity, but have often been neglected. Here we use a coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model to simulate the climate of the mid-Pliocene warm period (about three million years ago), and analyse the forcings and feedbacks that contributed to the relatively warm temperatures. Furthermore, we compare our simulation with proxy records of mid-Pliocene sea surface temperature. Taking these lines of evidence together, we estimate that the response of the Earth system to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations is 30–50% greater than the response based on those fast-adjusting components of the climate system that are used traditionally to estimate climate sensitivity. We conclude that targets for the long-term stabilization of atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations aimed at preventing a dangerous human interference with the climate system should take into account this higher sensitivity of the Earth system.
Link to abstract: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo706.html
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