Errors in the IPCC and perspective
It was inevitable. The IPCC AR4 is over 3000 pages long, there are bound to be some errors contained within. But some perspective is needed when they are found; jumping to the conclusion that any error in the IPCC is proof that climate science is bunk, or that global warming is a sham is absurd.
Cool Mr Watts
Last year, NOAA issued a comment indicating that the temperature record produced only by the weather stations that Watts’ surfacestation.org project classified as good or best was statistically equivalent to the whole temperature record. This indicated that the question Watts had asked about the reliability of the surface temperature records (and it was a good question) was answered; it just wasn’t the answer Watts was looking for. According to the criteria set out by Watts and his surfacestation.org project the surface record was reliable.
There was just one problem, the comment made by NOAA wasn’t very detailed. Now the paper On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record (Menne 2010) has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research looks at the issue in greater detail, and the results are definitely not what Watts has in mind. The poorly sited weather station show a slight cooling bias!
Mann exonerated, deniers claim this proves a conspiracy
Michael Mann (of the hockey stick fame) has been exonerated by Penn state in in its inquiry into Mann’s actions in light of the recent leaked emails. Here is what they found:
Going away
I am going away for a while, and might not have time/internet access readily available, so posting will slow to a craw, if not completely halt. Also I am turning on comment moderation to keep the trolls and spammers at bay, so be patient if your comment doesn’t appear immediately.
I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.
Why we need to cut emissions today, not tomorrow
The longer we wait to cut emissions, the more drastic our emissions cuts will have to be in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. Had we listened to the warnings of scientists in the 80s the reductions needed would have have been relatively easy to achieve. Had we taken the emissions targets of the Kyoto protocol seriously, our task would have been easier. Instead we waited, and are now faced with a problem that seems insurmountable, yet tomorrow it will be even more difficult to solve.
Steve Easterbrook explains why clearly and succinctly:
Climatologist criticizes IPCC, says its conclusions are valid
News has been making the rounds that respected Canadian climatologist Andrew Weaver has throw his hat behind those that criticize the IPCC. And in some respects he has done just that, but importantly he has not called into question the science included in the IPCC reports, nor the conclusion that our GHG emissions are responsible for the recent warming trend.
Banks move away from emissions trading
Amazon(non)gate
Once more, we find that the IPCC WG2 made an error. Only the error is not what is being trumpeted by deniers.
There was a dire warning in chapter 13 of the report of IPCC Working Group II:
"Up to 40% of Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation," it observed.
"It is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannas."
Closer inspection reveals that the authors referenced for this work are, in fact, an expert linked to environmental group WWF and a green journalist.
Sounds, like the same type of issue as the Himalayan glacier error, citing the grey-literature, rather than the peer-reviewed literature. But on closer inspection the text of the IPCC is correct, and consistent with the science. The error was lazy citation. They should have cited the peer-reviewed literature, rather than a report from WWF.
Deniers are not making scientific arguments
Deniers are not making scientific arguments. Scientific arguments require consistency, something which deniers make no pretence of striving for.
Unfortunately, people assume genius at one thing means genius at all things
Unfortunately, people assume genius at one thing means genius at all things
The Impossible Hamster
I like this (and not just because I am a fan of giant space hamsters, and even miniature giant space hamsters), but I think the focus is wrong. It is not the size of the economy that maters but rather the environmental footprint of that economy. Typically the size of an economy is positively correlated to its environmental footprint, but that relationship is not set in stone, and if we wish to avoid disaster (be it climate related or some other environmental catastrophe) we need to ensure that the environmental impact of our economy becomes truly sustainable in the not too distant future.
Otherwise we will be faced with one environmental problem after another, each increasing in severity and becoming more difficult to solve, eventually coming across one that we are unable or unwilling to solve, and we will all be much worse off because if it.
So we have two options, try to deal with each environmental problem as they crop up (and our experience with global warming is hardly encouraging), or work on a broader fix that addresses the root cause of environmental degradation. I think we need both.
Neither of these will be easy, but the only alternative I see is a planetary crash.
(h/t Michael Tobis)
The Himalayas circa 2035
Once again we see that scientists are not perfect, but flawed like the rest of us (duh), and it turns out the reports made by those flawed humans are also not perfect (duh).
Science works fine in aggregate, but this idea that science must have only flawless people doing impeccable work is a strawman set up by the superstitious to discredit empiricism through nutpicking. -Tim F.
The IPCC Working Group 2 report (yes there are more than 1 IPCC reports included in the overall assessment) claimed that the likelihood of the Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035″ was “very high”. This was wrong. Very wrong. And it highlights why sticking to the peer-reviewed literature is so important. This particular claim came from a 2005 WWF report, which got its estimate of glacier loss from a 1999 article in New scientist.
And while both WWF reports and New Scientist are generally reliable, they are not peer-reviewed and thus should be viewed with increased scepticism. The IPCC failed to do this, and thus included an estimate for Himalayan glaciers that was obviously wrong.
As Mauri Pelto, director of the North Cascades Glacier Climate Project, says:
Graham [Cogley] and I both reviewed the IPCC section on glaciers and ice sheets, and the 2035 date is not there. It is in the regional section where only regional scientists reviewed the information…
[Himalayan Glaciers] show a sustain substantial retreat that is worrisome, but again the retreat rate average is between 10 and 20 m per year on large glaciers… One of the poster glaciers for Himalayan retreat is the Gangotri Glacier, this glacier is noted as retreating around 15 m year, and is 15 km long. How can we get rid of this anytime soon?
Even though the 2035 date is obviously wrong, it doesn’t mean that Himalayan glaciers are not in receding. They are. At alarming rates.
So is this the climate scandal that many are making this out to be?
No. Of course not.
Surveillance makes our communication networks less secure, and helps totalitarian states
An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don’t… Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. – Bruce Schneier
Western countries have passed laws that demand that communication networks have eavesdropping capabilities built in to them, and such capabilities inherently make those networks less secure, thus enabling the attacks on Google and others by China.
In essence our surveillance laws help totalitarian states like China… and they don’t make us any safer, in fact they can make less safe.
Quote of the Day
The greatest failure of modern media is a chronic inability to differentiate experts from cranks -ScruffyDan
Elitist scientists
(h/t Rationality Now via Michael Tobis)
Bjorn Lomborg, wrong with a dash of socialism
Bjorn Lomborg isn’t genuine in his arguments against putting a price on carbon. His latest op-ed in the Washington Post is a prime example.
Take a look at Lomborg’s calculation of costs:
All the major climate economic models show that to achieve the much-discussed goal of keeping temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius, we would need a global tax on carbon emissions that would start at $102 per ton (or about 90 cents per gallon of gasoline) — and increase to $4,000 per ton (or $35.51 per gallon of gasoline) by the end of the century. In all, this would cost the world $40 trillion a year. Most mainstream calculations conclude that this is 50 times more expensive than the climate damage it seeks to prevent.
Ignoring Lomborg’s claim that global warming will cost less than 1 trillion dollars, and the implication that most economists think tackling climate change is not worth it (most say it is), Lomborg misleads us my claiming that the cost placed on carbon is a reduction of global gross domestic product. The fact is that a cost on carbon means that money changes hands, nothing more. In other words paying 100 dollars a ton is does not reduce GDP by 100 times the number of tons of GHG’s. The money collected is not lost, it is spent elsewhere, or given back to the tax payers if the carbon pricing policy is revenue neutral.
Yes this will have large impacts on some industries (that is the point), but it wall also benefit other industries (also the point), and this will likely have an effect on total GDP (almost certainly negative, especially in the short-term, but nothing major).
Lomborg’s estimate of costs is so far off the map, it is not even wrong.
Quote of the Day
I contend that some part of the anti-consensus group deliberately sows confusion, misinformation, and doubt about the achievements of climate science to date. I think it is very difficult to separate out the perpetrators from the victims from the people who succeed in fooling themselves. It’s very easy to distinguish between what they do and real science, though, in their argumentation techniques –Michael Tobis
Long-term trends vs cold snaps
Also see the recent misrepresentation of Mojib Latif’s work, this paper and this recent article by James Hansen et al.":
If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold?
An illustration of the climate change debate, part 2
Michael Tobis has elaborated on what his illustration of the climate change debate means.
Why is the news media comfortable with lying about science?
When the news industry catches its own making up the content of a news story—especially involving politicians—the result is typically scandal, firings, and some public soul-searching. Why isn’t the same true when it comes to science?
Inadequate proof that global warming is bunk
Given that lack of any real temperature record breakers since 1998 (technically that is not true, 2005 was slightly hotter, and we just emerged from the hottest decade on record), it isn’t surprising that deniers who don’t understand the science have repeatedly made claims that the past decade somehow invalidates global warming. Or that global warming stopped in 1998.
Pro tar-sand bias in the Canadian government?
No we are not cooling, nor are we entering into a mini-ice age!
Here we go again, for another round of misrepresenting Mojib Latif’s work showing a levelling off of temperature followed by rapid warming. This time it was kicked off by the cold spell over parts of Europe and North America. But it is worth noting that the Arctic is much warmer than usual, and it is rather warm here in Vancouver as well, so much so that there are worries about there being a snow shortage for the upcoming Winter Olympics.
Take a look at the above graph, what do you see? Does it look like a cooling trend? Nope, but according to the crack reporters (or is that reporters on crack?) over at the Daily Mail it certainly does show cooling. 30 years of cooling, perhaps even a mini-ice age!
Quote of the day
There are numerous newspapers, radio stations and television channels all trying to get our attention. Some overstate and some want to downplay the problem as a way to get that attention… We are trying to discuss in the media a highly complex issue. Nobody would discuss the problem of [Einstein's theory of] relativity in the media. But because we all experience the weather, we all believe that we can assess the global warming problem. -Mojib Latif
More on this tomorrow.
Also it reminds me of what William Connolley said a while back.
The climate consensus visualized
The fact that denier science is rejected by the peer-reviewed literature is not evidence of bias, or conspiracy
Climategate has renewed calls that the peer-reviewed literature is either biased against global warming deniers, or is actively conspiring to prevent those with dissenting views from publishing their work. But the fact that this is happening is not evidence that such bias or conspiracy exists, as Michael Tobis writes:
On full body scanners and underwear bombs
Bruce Schneier sums up this whole absurdity nicely:
CO2 is, and has always been, the biggest climate control knob in the earth’s history
CO2 is the biggest control climate knob. And it has been the biggest knob as far back as we can tell. So says Richard Alley. Actually it isn’t so much him saying this, as the latest science. Richard Alley is merely summarizing the science
Steve Easterbrook has a great summary for those of you who don’t have 50 minutes to watch the above video (but really you should watch the video, it is mostly accessible to laypersons, and is very interesting).
Quote of the day
It’s no longer possible to delve into our relationship with the global environment without drawing conclusions that make you seem like a raving fanatic to those who have yet to delve. -Stephan Faris
Jobs, not tree
Happy New Year!
By Marc Roberts
