Discuss: How to Be a Climate Hero

@dfalgout: i notice you’re not telling people that the study to which you refer is 16 years old and has been shown false, by virtue of “errors in the way satellite data had been collected and interpreted.”

@audrey schulman: political models in the last several elections show that climate skepticism rises significantly among american conservatives every four years. a mysterious coincidence.

Audrey Schulman

The skepticism about the claim that carbon dioxide is warming our climate and might lead to catastrophic changes in the near future has not died.  To the contrary, science that conflicts with those claims is accumulating at an ever-increasing rate. 

I went to your site, Pub Med.  I searched on the term “climate change” and as I expected found only one article in the first 50 (of 4,543) that contained an assessment of the carbon dioxide-induced climate-warming hypothesis.  That article, “Human-induced Arctic Moistening.” Science. 2008 Apr 25;320(5875):518-20 Min SK, Zhang X, Zwiers F. appeared to be a comparison of measured moisture in the Arctic environment to the moisture levels predicted by some 22 of the (of 40 or so) General Circulation Models (GCMs).  I have not yet read this article only the abstract so I cannot comment on it.

All the rest were article by health experts, zoologists, biologists etc that discussed the possible effects of future climate change.  It seems that all biological scientists who write about the possible effects of future warming take the IPCC projections to be gospel and proceed from there to extrapolate future events from laboratory studies and IPCC temperature projections.  I cannot consider any of those to be endorsements of the IPCC position; they are mere uncritical acceptances of the IPCC position, which the various authors have not analyzed.

If you want to find the best source of information about the IPCC procedures for making projections you should go to the source, the IPCC assessment reports.  You can find links to the IPCC Working Group 1 technical assessment here http://www.junkscience.com/draft_AR4/.  I realize that the source may be distasteful to you, but they have provided links to Adobe format copies of the technical assessment report of Working Group, which are unavailable from the IPCC.  IPCC released its Summary for Policy Makers a couple of months ago but will not release the technical assessment documents for another 4- to 6- months.  In the interim, the non-scientists at the IPCC, those who prepare the Summary for Policy Makers will review and edit the draft Working Group draft reports.  In IPCC’s own words, they will make only “Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter.”

Anyway, you will find all of the technical assessments that the IPCC working group scientists made in conjunction with preparation of the most recent assessment report.  You will find that there is little to no observational data that demonstrate that carbon dioxide is causing the climate to warm.  What you will find is copious references to the outputs of various GCMs that project (note IPCC does not call them predictions) future temperature changes.  You will find that for the most part the projections are for temperature increases in the range or 2 to 2.5 Celsius degrees during the next 100 years.  If you really look hard at the projections and their own admitted imprecision in their estimates of the effects of clouds on climate warming you can discover that their projection is for 2.5 +/- 75.0 (one standard deviation from the mean) Celsius degrees.  Yes, the standard deviation is 30 times higher than the projected change.  I have some difficulty believing the IPCC. 

What I fear is not changing my ways or providing help.  In fact, I am doing just that.  If this baseless claim goes unchallenged, we will self-induce a genuine disaster.  What I fear is the needless suffering of millions (perhaps billions) of disadvantaged humans all over the planet if we rush headlong into economy-curtailing activities because or our fear of an unfounded claim that carbon dioxide is causing climate change. 

I do not feel fear and anxiety.  Psychologically, I am fine, thank you very much.  Mostly I feel frustration that journalists who do not understand the science behind the issue claim to be instant experts after having skimmed the IPCC’s Summary for Policy Makers and then proceed to deluge the print and electronic media with wholehearted support for what appears to be a dishonest process.

hapa

The study to which I referred is not 16 years old.  The study appeared in November (I think (I do not have a pornographic memory and cannot recall all of the details)) of 2007.  I have not yet seen any critical responses from IPCC or its acolytes.  I have not noticed my personal skepticism rising and falling in concert with the election cycles; it has remained relatively constant.  Question.  Are the cited political models more or less accurate than the GCMs? 

I looked at the article that you cited.  You are correct in that between 2004 and 2007 researchers at the University of Washington (I believe the man’s name was Woo) questioned the analytical techniques that Dr. Christy was using to analyze the satellite temperature data.  There ensued a back and forth among the interested parties and a settlement of the issue.  The result was that Christy modified his technique and a second organization, which disagreed on some minor detail, began providing an independent report of the satellite data.  The two versions now agree within a few hundredths of a degree and everyone seems happy. 

Dr Christy and some co-workers published the article to which I referred.  They compared the output from several of the GCMs to both versions of the satellite temperature data.

the political model was one polling agency’s chart of responses to questions about the environment and global warming over more than a decade. it showed precipitous drops in concern about global warming among self-reported republicans in 2000 and 2004.

you don’t need a memory. you just need to be able to do a web search. we can do this for weeks, if you want. you put up an argument and i’ll kill it with a couple quick web searches.

ok, here. john christy has an entry in wikipedia. it’s very flattering toward him. here’s what that entry says about the nature of the work he does:

Unlike some other major climate data sets, the satellite data are constantly being refined and adjusted as new discoveries are made in the relatively new science of remote sensing. Notable adjustments were made to compensate for the effects of orbital drift and orbital decay, and most recently to correct an arithmetic error.

that’s the solid ground of half your argument—“constantly being refined and adjusted.” the other half, about uncertainty relating to clouds and predicting the future, is absolutely true.

If their area coverage increases as greenhouse gas concentrations increase, the surface temperature response will be muted; if their area coverage decreases, the surface temperature response will be amplified. It is currently unclear how these clouds respond to climate change, and climate models simulate widely varying responses.

but notice. the problem with clouds is not whether they, and not human pollution and deforestation, are responsible for warming, it is that we don’t know how warming will change the cloud cover. what that error spread says, it seems to me, is that the possibility of losing cloud cover—an unbelievably bad situation—is more likely than gaining enough cloud cover to protect us from the worst effects of extra heat in the system.

it’s a pendulum, not a one-way ticket in the direction you want it to go. it swings both ways and the center is bad news.

i didn’t find a paper. he talked to the senate, though, and wrote an op-ed for the WSJ. those don’t count as science.

the speech and attached op-ed. (pdf)

quite a mixed bag, at once quoting lomborg and calling a 10% reduction of fossil fuel use by 2020 “very serious” (when most serious proposals now talk about 20-40% cuts in that timeframe and the one i favor, to beat the clock on peak oil, does an 80% switch), while also saying this:

Please note, there is no guarantee at all that specific energy policies designed to deal with climate change will actually have the intended effect either in magnitude or sign.  Will they produce more or less rain? ... no one knows.  However, energy policies which address other important issues mentioned above and which include the emphatically desirable goal of affordable energy, and also reduce emissions, are worth pursuing.

hapa

OK, you got me.  The article appeared online at the International Journal of Climatology (a publication of the Royal Meteorological Society in December 2007 not in November as I said.  You can see a synopsis of the article on the Science Daily website at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071211101623.htm.

Of course, the techniques of the satellite measurement of temperature change as technology and knowledge changes.  It is an incredibly difficult task, measuring the temperature of the entire atmosphere, except the poles, nearly continuously.  The adjustments and refinements have been subtle and small, not enough to change any conclusions that one might make from them.  Nearly all researchers agree that the satellite temperature data are more accurate and precise than the surface station data.  You can make pettifogging criticisms about the satellite data but none of that changes the fact that the satellites provide the best temperature data available. 

If you’ll look into it, you’ll see that the model projections of cloud cover and the nature of the clouds sometimes causes overestimation of climate temperatures and sometimes causes underestimation of climate temperatures.  The error band is approximately +/- 20%.  IPCC has no way to know whether the model is giving high results or low results.  Standard science technique is to provide an error band around your measurements that is equal to plus or minus one standard deviation.  In this case, the estimate for the first projected year would be plus or minus 20%.  That would result in a temperature estimate error of something like 3.4%.  Because the second year estimate begins with the first year estimate the temperature error for the second year becomes 1.034^2 = 7%.  By the time you get to 100 years, the possible error is plus or minus 3000%.  I think that is poor information upon which to base a decision to curtail our economy.

I was not arguing that we can select either higher or lower results from the variation in cloud data.  I was arguing that we cannot know which to choose because our understanding of this small part of the science of climate change is so poor that we do not know what to do.  I also know that there are many other parts that we do not understand.  I also am arguing that these models are poor and are not reliable enough to provide reliable information about future temperature trends. 

I agree, the variation is not a one-way ticket.  However, I do not agree that it is a pendulum.  It is not even an estimate of the accuracy of the projections.  It is an estimate of their precision.  The models tell us that the temperature in 100 years will either go up 102.5 degrees or decrease by 97.5 degrees and that the central value of the estimated range is 2.5 degrees.  That does not provide information about the future climate; it tells us that the models are useless. 

I wonder if the Republicans felt less concern about global warming after the 2000 and 2004 elections because President Bush, who said that he would not play the game won both elections.  I know that I would have been far more concerned had Al Gore won in 2000.

so, you’re a bad gambler. you’re willing to bet everything on one of two possible technological paths—the one that will cost most, by virtue of price of new supply and other pollution externalities—because the full extent of its drastic consequences can’t be predicted 100 years in the future.

on the basis that the predicting models can’t account for temperature relationships in the least volatile climate region and you hate al gore’s guts.

and the fact that right now the place is going through incredible shifts, at faster pace than predicted, is ok, because later some other change might moderate it, we can’t say; nor can we say that increasing releases of greenhouse gas from the transformed earth won’t be naturally prevented or balanced; nor can we say that paleoclimatological evidence should be taken into account, i’m guessing?

not in saying What Will Happen. in assessing risk.

this is what i hear you arguing. i hear you arguing that we don’t know what will happen to the weather in the future and, so, the right response is to ignore that uncertainty and pour on more uncertainty by adding more of a known catalyst to the process.

and then you say you’re worried about the economic consequences, as you sit in a country that’s leveraged in every possible direction, with something like 10 million of our 100 million households nearing bankruptcy by a combination of food, fuel, and foreclosure, as i see it.

foreign lenders and foreign energy suppliers have us by the nuts and you’re afraid of the consequences of changing what we do. i don’t get it.