Wow! Scientists are REAL PEOPLE!

Shocking, isn't it? Rhetorical question, of course. OK, so here's the thing about denial of climate change (despite the ice melting, the air warming, the oceans warming, the Arctic melting, the permafrost melting, thermokarst lakes increasing in size and number, habitats moving and leaving behind the fauna and vice-versa, corals dying, methane increasing, CO2 increasing, the fact that the signatures of CO2 show beyond doubt where the CO2 is coming from...), why is Climate Science the only science these people don't trust? Do they attack their doctors and medical science? No. Do they not drive their cars because they don't understand how they work? No. Do they not fly airplanes because aerodynamics is crap? No. Do they refuse their food because Big Ag used genetic science (breeding and GM) to create the food they eat? No. Do they doubt astrophysics? No. Do they doubt chemistry? No. Do they doubt the physics and engineering that keep their boats afloat? No...

Where have we seen this before...? Hmmm.... real head-scratcher, that one...

We've seen it with smoking, for one. And many of the same people, too. (Right, Fred Singer?) Do yourself a favor and watch Naomi Oreskes work on Climate Denialism. Anywho... 


This is as good an explanation of Climategate E-Mail Foolishness (a.k.a. The time a bunch of denialists lied about and distorted some irrelevant e-mails ) as you are ever to find. Of course, there are many who will read the following text and determine every evil thing hey ever thought about climate scientists is true.

They will fail to understand, most with malice aforethought, what is being said and choose to reinforce the previously-solidified constructs built up by lies and bullshit. There will be nothing new or interesting in this. It is a fact of the world we live in.

On the off chance lightning strikes and a circuit gets switched, here ya go, from comments at RealClimate:

Kate (#20): I’m afraid to say that a lot of the personal emails between academics in any field are probably not very nice. We tend to be very blunt about what appears to us as ignorance, and intolerant of anything that wastes our time, or distracts us from our work. And when we think (rightly or wrongly) that the peer review process has let another crap paper through we certainly don’t hold back in expressing our opinions to one another. Which is of course completely different to how we behave when we meet one another. Most scientists seem able to distinguish clearly between the intellectual cut and thrust (in which we’re very rude about one another’s ideas) and social interactions (in which we all get together over a beer and bitch about the downsides of academic life). Occasionally, there’s someone who is unable to separate the two, and takes the intellectual jabs personally, but such people are rare enough in most scientific fields that the rest of us know exactly who they are, and try to avoid them at conferences!

Part of this is due to the nature of the academic research. We care deeply about intellectual rigor, and preserving the integrity of the published body of knowledge. But we also know that many key career milestones are dependent on being respected (and preferably liked) by others in the field, such as the more senior people who write recommendation letters for tenure and promotion and honors, or the scientists with competing theories who will get asked to peer review our papers, etc.

Most career academics have large egos and very thick skins. I think the tenure process and the peer review process filter out those who don’t. So, expect to see rudeness in private, especially when we’re discussing other scientists behind their backs with likeminded colleagues, coupled with a more measured politeness in public (e.g. at conferences).

Now, in climate science, all our conventions are being broken. Private email exchanges are being made public. People who have no scientific training and/or no prior exposure to the scientific culture are attempting to engage in a discourse with scientists, and these people just don’t understand how science works. The climate scientists whom they attempt to engage are so used to interacting only with other scientists (we live rather sheltered lives- they don’t call it the ivory tower for nothing), that we don’t know how to engage with these outsiders. What in reality is a political streetfight, we mistake for an intellectual discussion over brandy in the senior commonroom. Scientists have no training for this type of interaction, and so our responses look (to the outsiders) as rude, dismissive, and perhaps unprofessional.

Journalists like Monbiot, despite all his brilliant work in keeping up with the science and trying to explain it to the masses, just haven’t ever experienced academic culture from the inside. Hence his call, which he keeps repeating, for Phil Jones to resign, on the basis that Phil reacted unprofessionally to FOI requests. You don’t get data from a scientist by using FOI requests, you do it by stroking their ego a little, or by engaging them with a compelling research idea you want to pursue with it. And in the rare cases where this doesn’t work, you do the extra work to reconstruct it from other sources, or modify your research approach (because it’s the research we care about, not any particular dataset itself). So to a scientist, anyone stupid enough to try to get scientific data through repeated FOI requests quite clearly deserves our utter contempt. Jones was merely expressing (in private) a sentiment that most scientists would share – and extreme frustration with people who clearly don’t get it.

The same misunderstandings occur when outsiders look at how we talk about the peer-review process. We’re used to having our own papers rejected from time to time, and we learn how to deal with it – quite clearly the reviewers were stupid, and we’ll show them by getting it published elsewhere (remember, big ego, thick skin). We’re also used to seeing the occasional crap paper get accepted (even into our most prized journals), and again we understand that the reviewers were stupid, and the journal editors incompetent, and we waste no time in expressing that. And if there’s a particularly egregious example, everyone in the community will know about it, everyone will agree it’s bad, and some will start complaining loudly about the editor who let it through. Yet at the same time, we’re all reviewers, so it’s understood that the people we’re calling stupid and incompetent are our colleagues. And a big part of calling them stupid or incompetent is to get them to be more rigorous next time round, and it works because no honest scientist wants to be seen as lacking rigor. What looks to the outsider like a bunch of scientists trying to subvert some gold standard of scientific truth is really just scientists trying to goad one another into doing a better job in what we all know is a messy, noisy process.

The bottom line is that scientists will always tend to be rude to ignorant and lazy people, because we expect to see in one another a driving desire to master complex ideas and to work damn hard at it. Unfortunately the outside world (and many journalists) interpret that rudeness as unprofessional conduct. And because they don’t see it every day (like we do!) they’re horrified. 

Comment by Steve Easterbrook — 25 March 2010 @ 6:04 AM

The Loss of Multi-year Arctic Sea Ice Animation

The loss of thick, multi-year sea ice is the big non-story of the Arctic that should be THE climate story. While the extent each summer is important, very important, because it allows sunlight to get to the water and leave it warmer than before, if the thick ice stayed each year the extent wouldn't matter so much because there would be no way for the ice extent to fall very far, or, at least it would take a lot longer to melt out completely.

Imagine a punch bowl filled with ice. The temp is very cold in the room, say 35 degrees. Now imagine every 30 minutes you alternate adding a cup of 40 degree water or a 3/4 cup of 35 degree water. Imagine how long it would take for the ice to melt.

Now imagine the same punch bowl filled with ice. The temp is 35 degrees. Now imagine every 30 minutes you alternate adding a cup of 40 degree water or a 3/4 cup of 35 degree water, but this time take out the half of the biggest ice cubes and replace them with the same number of ice cubes, but the same size as the smallest ice cubes in the bowl. Imagine how long it would take for the ice to melt now. How long before the water temperature edges closer to 40 than 35?

That's the effect of losing the multi-year ice.

To understand the loss of multi-year ice and the added energy from the sun, when you add the water, add 1/10 of a degree in temp each round to both cups of water.

As the Arctic goes, so goes the planet. It really is that simple. Hope and pray that the winds blow in every and any direction that doesn't push sea ice out of the Arctic Sea, because that's the only thing that's going to slow this train, and possibly even allow some re-growth of thicker ice. A few anomalously cold summers would help, too.

Whew... anyone got a kerchief? It's getting hot in here...

Chopping Down the Cherry Tree - Answers to Climate Change Denial

Posted here with permission.


Chopping Down the Cherry Tree

The image above shows a cherry tree with 96 red cherries and 4 blue cherries.  If somebody asked me or another scientist what type of tree this is I would state:
“It is very likely to be a red cherry tree and I am investigating why there are a few blue cherries that do not appear to fit in.”
Similar statements have been made by scientific experts regarding climate change:
 “Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”  (IPCC, 2007)
“Continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would very likely be larger than those observed during the 20th century.”  (IPCC, 2007)
The term very likely used by the IPCC means a probability greater than 90%.
A poll performed by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago of 3,146 Earth scientists showed 96.2% of climatologists who are active in climate research believe that mean global temperatures have risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and 97.4% believe that human activity is a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures.
For more information about the scientific consensus regarding climate change please see The Scientific Consensus.
So if this red cherry tree is so obvious why do we still have some people trying to tell us that it is a blue cherry tree?  This technique is called cherry picking data to support a false claim.  A few notable examples of cherry picking appear below.
1)  “Global Warming Stopped in 1998” or “There Is Global Cooling”:
If I were determined to show global cooling, I would choose 1998 as a starting point and then 2008 as my ending point.  Why?  1998 was a strong El Niño year which caused a very warm signal and 2008 had a strong La Niña which caused a very cool signal.   Here is what the four major global temperature plots look like when I “cherry pick” the data:

Global surface and lower troposphere monthly mean anomalies and linear trends between 1998 and 2008

Three of the four global average temperatures indeed are decreasing in their trends (although the actual global mean temperatures are still warmer than the previous decades). So what happens if I start with the year 1999 and end with the year 2009?

Global surface and lower troposphere monthly mean anomalies and linear trends between 1999 and 2009

Simply by shifting our starting point by one year, all four global average temperatures are increasing in their trends! The point made here is that if one cherry-picks a small subset of the data, one can make just about any claim with a nice plot to back it up. The correct way to view global temperature trends is to look at ALL of the data.

Global surface and lower troposphere monthly mean anomalies and linear trends since 1880

For more information please see Global Cooling.

The bottom line is that 20 of the warmest years on record have occurred in the past 25 years. The warmest year globally was 2005 with the years 2009, 2007, 2006, 2003, 2002, and 1998 all tied for 2^nd within statistical certainty. (Hansen et al., 2010) The warmest decade has been the 2000s, and each of the past three decades has been warmer than the decade before and each set records at their end.

Looks like a red cherry tree to me!

2)  “Arctic Sea Ice Has Been Increasing Since 2007!”

Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent since 1953

The image above from the National Snow and Ice Data Center indeed shows that ice extent has increased from a record low in 2007 but, of course, the long-term trend is steeply downward since the 1970s.
Sea ice extent is just part of the picture. Sea ice thickness has also been measured by declassified submarine records and ICESat satellite measurement.

Northern Hemisphere sea ice thickness submarine & ICESAT combined (Kwock & Rothrock, 2009)

The figure above shows the mean thicknesses of six Arctic regions for the three periods (1958–1976, 1993–1997, 2003–2007). Thicknesses have been seasonally adjusted to September 15.  This combined analysis shows a long-term trend of sea ice thinning over submarine and ICESat records that span five decades.

Looks like a red cherry tree to me!

3)  “Greenland and Antarctica Are Gaining Ice at Their Centers”

Yes, ice mass is increasing in the centers of both of these ice sheets.  However, when one considers the mass of these ice sheets in their entirety, a different picture emerges:

Greenland Ice Mass Loss (Velicogna, 2009)

Antarctica Ice Mass Loss (Velicogna, 2009)

It is quite clear that, overall, Antarctica and Greenland show a long-term loss of ice. John Cook at Skeptical Science has several very good summaries of this research. See: An overview of Antarctic ice trends, An overview of Greenland ice trends, and Why is Greenland’s ice loss accelerating?

Looks like a red cherry tree to me!

4)  “The                         Glacier is Advancing!”  (Fill in the blank with your favorite advancer)

There are indeed some glaciers around the world that are advancing.  Yes, there are a few blue cherries on our red cherry tree.  Let us look at ALL of the glaciers around the world that are being monitored by the World Glacier Monitoring Service.

Mean cumulative specific mass balance of all reported glaciers (black line) and the reference glaciers (red line)

It is quite obvious that glacial mass is rapidly decreasing.  So what about the claim that some glaciers are advancing?  According to the WGMS, 90% of worldwide glaciers are retreating.

Looks like a red cherry tree to me!

So what are your favorite examples of cherry-picking?

Written by Scott Mandia
February 20, 2010 at 1:46 pm

http://profmandia.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/chopping-down-the-cherry-tree/

 A nice overview of where things stand. Be sure to look through the stories listed and the comments. There's often better stuff there than even in the main post or stories.

Ilargi: For once, I'm afraid, I have to agree with Paul Krugman, himself a highly dysfunctional man in my eyes: the US government is Dangerously Dysfunctional. Only, Krugman, ever eager to be my anti-thesis, -somewhat comfortingly for me- rolls off the rails right away again by claiming that this is a result of party politics, and the blame lies squarely with the party he happens not to like, the GOP. And while I have little sympathy for that particular party, I do know that Krugman's portrayal is false.

Eliot Spitzer and Wiilam K. Black, seemingly honest and (therefore?) marginalized voices, ask to see emails concerning the AIG bailout(s). Therein, they contend, we’ll be able to see what really went on when the world's -then- largest insurer received $180 billion of your money, much of which was transferred at an amazing speed to the likes of Goldman Sachs. Make the emails public and we’ll know, because then "a thousand journalistic flowers can bloom". They actually wrote that.....

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism reacts, and wants more. She thinks we should know why no research was done into all the parties involved, why they could receive money without being scrutinized before, during and after the bail-out process. Yves provides a well-written overview of Goldman Sachs actions that involved parts of the AIG funds. Still, calling for investigations into the matter, with or without emails, and more than a year after the fact, largely misses the crucial points here. Which takes us back to my buddy Krugman.

The AIG decisions were made in Washington. There was another party on the throne, but what difference did that make? The decision-making problems don’t vanish when another party comes to power. That much, we can all agree by now, has been made exceedingly obvious by the Bush to Obama transfer. The reason behind this is that the real rulers stayed in place while the White House changed occupants. The US simply isn't governed by its elected politicians. Or at least not by their ideas and convictions, if, when and where these differ from those of their donors.

If a politician can be elected only when (s)he has enough money (i.e. millions of dollars, and for a president hundreds of millions) to run a campaign, then the resulting policies will be dictated by those who donate that money. And since one dollar equals one vote, the grandma who ate mac and cheese for a week to donate $10 to Obama has no say, while a financial institution that gave $10 million does.

Both parties partake of the exact same largesse, so claiming that one is to blame and the other is not is nonsense. The system itself is broken. And you can't fix it with a bit more openness here or a few published emails there. You can only fix it by separating politics and business, by taking a big old axe and cruelly cutting clear through the umbilical chords so carefully and profitably attended to on K Street. Anything else is mere make believe. Nobody in Washington seeks the truth behind all this. Everybody seeks a story that makes them look good for their voters.

Arnold Kling describes it like this in The Harvard-Goldman Filter:

As to libertarians, certainly in a world with no deposit insurance or government guarantees I could argue against government interference in the structure of private banks. But banks are not private in this country. They are quasi-public institutions [..].

There is a synergy between big banks and big government. Jefferson and Jackson were right. So breaking up big banks fits in with breaking up big government. Which is why we won't see the Progressive elite breaking up big banks.

The trouble in Denmark on Capitol Hill runs much deeper than a vote or an idea. The country is governed by a few hundred enlightened souls who are all for sale, or they wouldn't be where they are. And if a soul does get lost on the Hill and tries to follow his or her conscience, the rest of them will drown it out.

This is not a new issue, though it has rapidly grown more poignant in the past 3 decades. What is new today is that the dysfunctional system has to deal with a crisis that cannot be dealt with as previous crises were: with more growth.

And without growth, what wealth there is has to be redivided, or society as a whole becomes untenable. And yes, redivided it is, but not in a way that would warrant society's continued viability. On the contrary, those who always had much will have more, while those who had least will now have nothing. And I’ve said it before, it's not a political statement to say that if a society doesn't provide a minimum for its poorest, that society must of necessity fail.

Read all the emails you want, investigate all the crooked deals made in the bail-outs. It won’t matter one iota. Once growth is gone, you need to prevent the rich from lobbying themselves into ever and even more riches. because these will have to come from the mouths of the desolate.

Or you can choose not to, but then your society is over and done with. Now, I don’t really think people will think I’m right. When most read that the noughties were the worst decade for stocks ever, as in since the 1820's, almost 200 years, they’ll think: well, it should go up then, shouldn't it?

Who among them concludes that growth may be gone, even if they know it can’t last forever? It was inevitable that they'd still be expecting -nay, even seeing- growth when the world around them is shrinking.


PS: The Financial Times headline "Bank of Japan says it will not tolerate deflation" inspired a good friend to come up with this quote about King Canute, about a millenium or so old. It would be a valuable lesson for many, not in the least the economists and assorted financial types who overestimate governmental powers and good will of many sorts and stripes.

"Henry of Huntingdon, the 12th-century chronicler, tells how Cnut set his throne by the sea shore and commanded the tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes; but the tide failed to stop.

According to Henry, Cnut leapt backwards and said "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws." He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix, and never wore it again."

This is from RealClimate. The editorial is available from many sources, but I like the comments here showing some of the process behind the editorial. Unlike RC, I do take a very definite position in support of the editorial.

The Guardian’s Editorial

— eric @ 8 December 2009

The following editorial was published today by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like The Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page. The Guardian, the editorial is free to reproduce under Creative Commons.
RealClimate takes no formal position on the statements made in the editorial.

---

Copenhagen climate change conference: Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generationToday 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.
Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.
Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.
The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.
Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.
But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”
At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.
Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.
Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world’s biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.
Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of “exported emissions” so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europe”, must not suffer more than their richer partners.
The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.
Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.
But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.
Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.
Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.
It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.
The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.