Navigating Climate Science Denialism: Resources for you

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I have four things for you, two of which you already know about and one that is brand new and very exciting.

You already know that Skeptical Science is a web site that addresses most, perhaps all, of the questions that people raise about climate science. These questions might come from your Uncle Jeb who just figures global warming is a fad and not very important, or they may be questions that come from trained trolls who travel the Intertubes attempting to systematically disrupt the most important conversation we can have in the early 21st century. Skeptical science is also like an intro textbook of climate science, you can learn pretty much everything at a basic or intermediate level without having to know too much math. THE SITE IS HERE and there are also apps you can get for your smart phone so you can science circles around Uncle Jeb.

Very quickly, the second thing: My own “Climate Science Search Engine” which is a customized Google search that scans only sites that are not denialist. It is in the right side bar of this blog.

Third, check out the Debunking Handbook.

Fourth, and this is new, is Media Matters’ Mythopedia!

Mythopedia allows you to search for the truth about a variety of right-wing lies and misinformation. It should work on your desktop or mobile device as a web site. At the start, the database underlying Mythopedia has a few hundred of the most common myths about subjects including climate change. Media Matter expects to expand the data base on a regular basis. Think of it as a highly specialized Snopes Snooper.

Mythopedia is HERE.

Here’s a video:


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A New Fake Report On Climate Change.

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Who What When Where

Nic Lewis, an unaffiliated self described climate scientist, and a journalist, Marcel Crok, also unaffiliated, are known climate science denialists. The two of them have an objection to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conclusions regarding an important thing called “Climate Sensitivity.” Perhaps unable to get their work in the peer reviewed literature, the two of them wrote “a report” titled “OVERSENSITIVE: How the IPCC hid the good news on global warming,” that is available here. They make a claim which is totally incorrect but if it was correct it would be important. But it’s not. Either.

Imagine a Spherical Earth

Climate sensitivity is a term that refers to more than one thing, but the basic idea is this. If CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were to double, how much would global surface temperatures rise? It is usually considered from a “baseline” of 280 parts per million (ppm), which is the pre-industrial level. We are currently at 400 ppm and we are heading for 560, the doubling, with little apparent serious effort (in my opinion) to curtail the rise. Climate sensitivity is expressed in degrees Celsius. So if some one says “climate sensitive is 2” than they mean that we can expect global surface temperatures to reach 2 degrees above baseline given 560 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Imagine a spherical earth. Imagine no water vapor in the atmosphere, and just to keep things simple, let’s have only land surface and no ocean. But the amount of air and its overall composition minus the water vapor is like our actual earth. On this imaginary earth, climate sensitivity is about 1.2. That’s apparently pretty easy to figure out because it is a matter of how CO2 operates as a greenhouse gas and how much energy the sun supplies, etc.

However, there could be negative and positive feedbacks that would make this work out differently. This would be things that either make some of the sun’s energy have less of an effect or more of an effect. Aerosols (dust) in the atmosphere, such as volcanic dust, can reflect sunlight away before it hits the earth’s surface, so it will have less of a contribution to heating the planet (which sunlight mainly does at the surface where it converts to infrared radiation). Ice and snow also reflect sunlight away (that’s called albedo). Water vapor in the atmosphere will generally act like a greenhouse gas and cause more heat by, to oversimplify a bit, interfering with the process of infrared heat leaving the atmosphere. Increased CO2 ultimately leads to more water vapor in the atmosphere, thus significantly amplifying warming. Warming can cause the release of methane into the atmosphere, another greenhouse gas, which in turn causes more warming until it oxidizes into CO2 and water. Water vapor can also get organized as clouds distributed in such a way as to add to albedo, reflecting away sunlight and decreasing warming.

With all these (and other) effects tugging this way and that on the temperature of the earth’s surface (by which we mean the atmosphere and the upper layer of the seas), how is one to figure out what actual climate sensitivity is?

Well, it is hard, and there has been a lot of work on it. There are papers coming out all the time on this topic. The IPCC spent a lot of effort on it. And, there are two answers to the question “what is the sensitivity of the climate?”

(Before giving you the answers, I want to point something out that is very important. The Earth’s surface does not warm up instantly as CO2 is added. It takes time. In fact, the changes that happen after CO2 is added to the atmosphere will continue for something like thousands of years. But the initial change, which involves the air heating up and weather systems changing and all that, would be observable over decades and reach a short term level of some stability in less time, measured in many decades or centuries. So there are two “climate sensitivities,” long term equilibrium and transient, the latter being what is generally talked about, with the idea of a mutli-decade time scale. So, the question we are asking is what will the earth be like at the end of the century, given a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere?)

So, back to the answers. One answer is the simple answer, and it is 3. This is the number that climate scientists seem to settle on when you hold them down and say “shut up with the mumbo jumbo, just give me a number.” The other answer is about 1.5 to 4.5 but possibly higher at the higher end.

Some who wish to minimize the importance of climate change will say things like “1.5. That’s a small number, what are you worried about?” Those people are boneheaded idiots and they are hoping you are too. Is 1.5 a small number? A large number? It depends. If I take 1.5 pennies from you it is a small number. If I kill you 1.5 times, it is a large number. Suffice it to say that 1.5 is a big enough number that we should be worried about it. Also, it is a low ball estimate of climate sensitivity. Almost nobody believes it. By one reckoning, there is something like a 5% chance that the sensitivity is actually around 6. Holy crap. That would probably melt almost every single drop of glacial ice on the planet and the map of the United States would look like this, in a couple/few centuries:

Extreme_Sea_Level_Rise_Scenario

It would matter if there was a 20% chance that this is the map of the US your great grand children get to live with. They would actually have to remove stars from the US flag. If there is a US.

Below I supply a list of web pages you can check out to learn all about climate sensitivity.

But what about this report? Well, it’s a doozy. First, it has a forward extolling the virtues of Lewis and Crok. That’s nice. But the foreword is written by Climate Science Denialist Judith Curry. That does not bode well. Following this, the report is mainly a journey through a cherry orchard.

The adventures of Lewis and Crok

The report cherry picks a subset of scientific results that show lower sensitivity estimates and does a poor job of ruling out the other results that give higher estimates. They criticize the IPCC report, which summarized sensitivity studies, for leaving out the “good news” that climate sensitivity is actually very very low, by reporting a wide range of research indicating that it is not low. In other words, and I know this seems confusing but I think this is the point, Lewis and Crok are saying that the IPCC report is wrong because it reported all of the relevant scientific findings rather than just the ones Lewis and Crok would like to have seen noted.

DOES THE IPCC NOT KNOW ABOUT CHERRY PICKING YOU MAY ASK???

Sorry for shouting.

The authors suggest that the teams of scientists working on the IPCC report did not understand basic statistics, and that this contributed to their alleged overestimate of climate sensitivity. That part made me laugh.

Lewis and Crok put a lot of weight on what they term the observational record, which as you might guess if you have been following the denialist’s literature is one of the best places to pick cherries. Also, astonishingly and, really, laughably, they rely on Lewis’ prior publications suggesting low ball estimates of climate sensitivity. Yes, some guys have been pushing a particular scientifically difficult to support position; the world’s scientists in a major international effort produced a summary of countless hours of research and dozens of peer reviewed papers that disagree with those guys; those guys write a report about how what they’ve been saying all along, which differs with the established science, must be right because they’ve been saying it all along!

Yes, that’s about what this report amounts to. It’s a bunch of hooey.

For further reading on climate sensitivity I recommend the following:

NEW: GWPF optimism on climate sensitivity is ill-founded

“On Sensitivity” at Real Climate

“A Bit More Sensitive” on Real Climate

Climate-Change Deniers Must Stop Distorting the Evidence

How sensitive is our climate? at Skeptical Science

Other posts of interest:

Also of interest: In Search of Sungudogo: A novel of adventure and mystery, which is also an alternative history of the Skeptics Movement.


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Can Recent Extreme Weather Be Attributed To Climate Change? U can help answer that question.

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There are few different, related, ways in which climate change, including anthropogenic global warming, can cause extreme weather events. One is that climate zones move. This may result in “normal” weather for a different location occurring elsewhere. For example, if southern warm air system shift north, than the frequency of low and high temperatures, and their distribution throughout the year, can change. Another is the rise of entirely new conditions that were previously either rare or virtually unknown. One example of this might be the steering of Hurricane Sandy into the northeastern U.S. coast a couple of years ago. Hurricanes do plow into that region now and then, but they almost always come from the south and bump into land in the narrowing North Atlantic. Sandy did something different, moving north out at sea in the Atlantic, like many Atlantic hurricanes do, but then making an abrupt left turn, owing to an unusual configuration of the atmosphere, plowing into Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. That was a single unusual event, to be sure, but if such air patterns become “normal” (even occurring only every few years rather than almost never during hurricane season), that would be a qualitative shift in weather patterns. If that shift is caused by the phenomenon of Arctic Amplification (the relatively increased warming of the Arctic as the entire planet warms) that would be a shift in the kinds of weather patterns we have due to global warming. A third kind of change is what is often called “loading of the dice.” This is where events that have a low probability of happening simply happen more often. The dice analogy is tricky because it is often used differently by different people; one idea is that a rare event is rolling two sixes with two die. That would be rare. But climate change adds one or two more die, allowing for a greater chance of two of them coming up as a six. That’s a difficult analogy because there really isn’t an equivalent to extra die in the climate system. The point here is that probabilities of rare events changes.

My distinction between zone shifting, qualitative shifts, and probability changes is not something climate scientists or meteorologists generally say; this is just my way of talking about changes in variance of weather patterns. Also, these three different things are not necessarily that different, but rather, three faces to the same multi dimensional coin.

People used to say, and fortunately this is becoming rare, that you can’t attribute a given weather event to climate change. That has never been true. The reason people said that is not because weather events are somehow unlinked to climate change (they can’t be; weather and climate are the same thing at different scales of time and space). Rather, people said that because of the statistical difficulty of teasing out a given event from climate change. The fallacy behind this statement, which has been co-opted by “false balancers” and science denialists to reduce the importance of climate change, is easily exposed by asking a few simple questions.

Go to the desert in Arizona. Measure the temperature, daily, throughout the year for a few years. At the same time, have your friend go to the east slope of the Canadian Rockies, and also measure the temperature every day for a few years. Summarize your data by averaging across years per month. Now, go back to your study sites and measure the temperature on a given day and look up the time and place (month, Canadian Rockies vs. Arizona Desert). Compare the temperatures you’ve measured with the summary of data. Do this a few times. Notice a pattern? Yes, of course. The temperatures in Arizona will generally be higher than Canada, and this fits with the two or three years of data you’ve collected. Can you attribute the difference between your new measurements in Canada and Arizona to the differences between these locations based on your long term data? Yes, you can. The variation you see in your current measurements of the weather is patterned by the climate you estimated from your long term measurements. Climate predicts weather. Weather matches climate, plus or minus. Climate is weather with variation attenuated by greater sampling. You can attribute the weather you observe to the climate you are observing it in.

If you start in Arizona and measure the weather for a few days, then fly up to Canada and measure the weather for a few days, the differences in your measurements will reflect a difference that is explained by the longer term observations you made. The difference in weather you observe is explained by the different patterns of climate you characterized with your long term collection of information. So, if you change the climate, the weather will change, and you can attribute that to the climate change as well. It was never true that you “can’t attribute a single weather event to climate change” because it is always true that you can attribute all of the weather you observe to the climate you are observing it in. The weather is simply a low frequency sampling of the climate, so it will vary a lot more from observation to observation than will multi-year data. So while it was never true that you could pretend there was no link between climate and weather, it was always true that you could not ever separate observed weather from the region’s climate. They’ve always been linked.

But, there is a problem and it comes back to that word “attribute.” To meaningfully and quantitatively attribute daily weather observations to a change in any given variable is difficult because there are so many variables that affect weather. If we want to attribute a certain frequency of rare events such as major floods or killer heat waves to a given change in the climate in a way that allows us to convincingly and quantitatively link the that change in climate to the change in frequency of the events, we could observe for a very long time. Instead of just measuring temperature and rainfall for a few years, which would give us pretty good climatic dat, we’d have to observe and measure rare events for a very long time. For example, if we want to see if a theoretical “thousand year flood” has become more common so it is now a “hundred year flood” we’d have to observe floods for many decades in order to get enough data to re-calibrate flood frequency.

This presents two major problems if we want to understand the relationship between global warming and weather events. First, we will have to observe the weather for so long that policy makers waiting for our scientifically valid conclusion will not be able to act on the basis of the data in a timely manner. The second problem is that climate change may be happening so fast that zonal, qualitative, and quantitative shifts in climate may roll right past our humble data collection enterprise. If the climate fundamentally changes fast enough that every decade is different from the previous decade, than it will be impossible to get a nice twenty year long sample of any given phenomenon. Some aspects of climate change seem to be moving along at this rate, a great example being the annual rate of Arctic Sea ice melting. There is no twenty year period that reflects the current rate because the rate has gone up so fast. We can’t develop a “climatology” of Arctic Sea ice melt based on stable well behaved 20 year periods because there aren’t any.

One way to handle this problem is with simulation studies. If we have a good model that can simulate a year’s worth of climate and weather activity then we can run that model a large number of times and see how often particular weather events occur. Since this is a model run in a computer (or several computers) we can simulate a year of climate with and without the global warming related changes, and compare those two years. Thousands of times. This way we get a version of climatology, long term measurements, that is statistically better than any real life measurements would allow. Climate models, that run the Earth’s climate in a computer on demand, are good enough to do this.

So let’s do that. Let’s get a computer program that runs climate simulations, change the variables to reflect climate change vs. no climate change scenarios, run the model a gazillion times, and see if weather events like the historic flooding in the United Kingdom this year are likely to occur at a higher frequency with global warming, and if so, estimate what that frequency might be. Check it out:

A new citizen science project launched by climate researchers at the University of Oxford will determine in the next month or so whether global warming made this winter’s extreme deluge more likely to occur, or not. …

The weather@home project allows you to donate your spare computer time in return for helping turn speculation over the role of climate change in extreme weather into statistical fact….

The Weather@home 2014 project is located HERE and you can sign up to help.

Here’s a video explaining the project:

I’ll probably set up a computer to be used mainly for this purpose and give them a few days of processing time. I’ve read through the requirements and all the important information needed and it looks pretty straight forward. If I do this I’ll let you know how it goes.


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Climate Change on MSNBC: Bill Nye and Jeffrey Sachs

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Nice coverage of climate change that is NOT A “DEBATE” ASSUMING SOME KIND OF DUMB FALSE BALANCE. Way to go, MSNBC. Thank you.

Summer weather in Sochi, a record-drought in California and a polar vortex. The evidence for climate change is all around us. Bill Nye and Jeffrey Sachs talk about the climate debate and need for energy research.

See also this guy:

It is funny that this guy got two people who are also not climate change scientists, but whatever.


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A Letter From John Holdren Regarding Roger Pielke Jr's Statements

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The following is also found HERE on the White House web site. I provide it here without comment because it speaks for itself. But if you want more, check out “Global warming action: good or bad for the poor?” by John Abraham, and “Keeping The Carbon In The Ground Elsewhere: Developing Nations” by me.

Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr

John P. Holdren, 28 February 2014

Introduction

In the question and answer period following my February 25 testimony on the Administration’s Climate Action Plan before the Oversight Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) suggested that I had misled the American people with comments I made to reporters on February 13, linking recent severe droughts in the American West to global climate change. To support this proposition, Senator Sessions quoted from testimony before the Environment and Public Works Committee the previous July by Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., a University of Colorado political scientist. Specifically, the Senator read the following passages from Dr. Pielke’s written testimony:

It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.

Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less, frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century”. Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”

Footnotes in the testimony attribute the two statements in quotation marks within the second passage to the US Climate Change Science Program’s 2008 report on extremes in North America and a 2012 paper by Sheffield et al . in the journal Nature, respectively.

I replied that the indicated comments by Dr. Pielke, and similar ones attributed by Senator Sessions to Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, were not representative of main- stream views on this topic in the climate-science community; and I promised to provide for the record a more complete response with relevant scientific references.

Dr. Pielke also commented directly, in a number of tweets on February 14 and thereafter, on my February 13 statements to reporters about the California drought, and he elaborated on the tweets for a blog post on The Daily Caller site (also on February 14). In what follows, I will address the relevant statements in those venues, as well. He argued there, specifically, that my statements on drought “directly contradicted scientific reports”, and in support of that assertion, he offered the same statements from his July testimony that were quoted by Senator Sessions (see above). He also added this:

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that there is “not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought.”

In the rest of this response, I will show, first, that the indicated quote from the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) about U.S. droughts is missing a crucial adjacent sentence in the CCSP report, which supports my position about drought in the American West. I will also show that Dr. Pielke’s statements about global drought trends, while irrelevant to my comments about drought in California and the Colorado River Basin, are seriously misleading, as well, concerning what is actually in the UN Panel’s latest report and what is in the current scientific literature.

Drought trends in the American West

My comments to reporters on February 13, to which Dr. Pielke referred in his February 14 tweet and to which Senator Sessions referred in the February 25 hearing, were provided just ahead of President Obama’s visit to the drought-stricken California Central Valley and were explicitly about the drought situation in California and elsewhere in the West.

That being so, any reference to the CCSP 2008 report in this context should include not just the sentence highlighted in Dr. Pielke’s testimony but also the sentence that follows immediately in the relevant passage from that document and which relates specifically to the American West. Here are the two sentences in their entirety (http://downloads.globalchange.gov/sap/sap3- 3/Brochure-CCSP–3–3.pdf):

Similarly, long-term trends (1925–2003) of hydrologic droughts based on model derived soil moisture and runoff show that droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century (Andreadis and Lettenmaier, 2006). The main exception is the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where increased temperature has led to rising drought trends (Groisman et al., 2004; Andreadis and Lettenmaier, 2006).

Linking Drought to Climate Change

In my recent comments about observed and projected increases in drought in the American West, I mentioned four relatively well understood mechanisms by which climate change can play a role in drought. (I have always been careful to note that, scientifically, we cannot say that climate change caused a particular drought, but only that it is expected to increase the frequency, intensity, and duration of drought in some regions ? and that such changes are being observed.)

The four mechanisms are:

  1. In a warming world, a larger fraction of total precipitation falls in downpours, which means a larger fraction is lost to storm runoff (as opposed to being absorbed in soil).

  2. In mountain regions that are warming, as most are, a larger fraction of precipitation falls as rain rather than as snow, which means lower stream flows in spring and summer.

  3. What snowpack there is melts earlier in a warming world, further reducing flows later in the year.

  4. Where temperatures are higher, losses of water from soil and reservoirs due to evaporation are likewise higher than they would otherwise be.

Regarding the first mechanism, the 2013 report of the IPCC’s Working Group I, The Science Basis (http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_TS_FINAL.pdf, p 110), deems it “likely” (probability greater than 66%) that an increase in heavy precipitation events is already detectable in observational records since 1950 for more land areas than not, and that further changes in this direction are “likely over many land areas” in the early 21 st century and “very likely over most of the mid-latitude land masses” by the late 21 st century The second, third, and fourth mechanisms reflect elementary physics and are hardly subject to dispute (but see also additional references provided at the end of this comment).

As I have also noted in recent public comments, additional mechanisms have been identified by which changes in atmospheric circulation patterns that may be a result of global warming could be affecting droughts in the American West. There are some measurements and some analyses suggesting that these mechanisms are operating, but the evidence is less than conclusive, and some respectable analysts attribute the indicated circulation changes to natural variability. The uncertainty about these mechanisms should not be allowed to become a distraction obscuring the more robust understandings about climate change and regional drought summarized above.

Global Drought Patterns

Drought is by nature a regional phenomenon. In a world that is warming on the average, there will be more evaporation and therefore more precipitation; that is, a warming world will also get wetter, on the average. In speaking of global trends in drought, then, the meaningful questions are (a) whether the frequency, intensity, and duration of droughts are changing in most or all of the regions historically prone to drought and (b) whether the total area prone to drought is changing.

Any careful reading of the 2013 IPCC report and other recent scientific literature about on the subject reveals that droughts have been worsening in some regions in recent decades while lessening in other regions, and that the IPCC’s “low confidence” about a global trend relates mainly to the question of total area prone to drought and a lack of sufficient measurements to settle it. Here is the key passage from the Technical Summary from IPCC WGI’s 2013 report (http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_TS_FINAL.pdf, p 112):

Compelling arguments both for and against significant increases in the land area affected by drought and/or dryness since the mid–20th century have resulted in a low confidence assessment of observed and attributable large-scale trends. This is due primarily to a lack and quality of direct observations, dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice, geographical inconsistencies in the trends and difficulties in distinguishing decadal scale variability from long term trends.

The table that accompanies the above passage from the IPCC’s report ? captioned “Extreme weather and climate events: global-scale assessment of recent observed changes, human contribution to the changes, and projected further changes for the early (2016–2035) and late (2081–2100) 21 st century” ? has the following entries for “Increases in intensity and/or duration of drought”: under changes observed since 1950, “low confidence on a global scale, likely changes in some regions” [emphasis added]; and under projected changes for the late 21 st century, “likely (medium confidence) on a regional to global scale”.

Dr. Pielke’s citation of a 2012 paper from Nature by Sheffield et al ., entitled “Little change in global drought over the past 60 years”, is likewise misleading. That paper’s abstract begins as follows:

Drought is expected to increase in frequency and severity in the future as a result of climate change, mainly as a consequence of decreases in regional precipitation but also because of increasing evaporation driven by global warming 1–3. Previous assessments of historic changes in drought over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries indicate that this may already be happening globally. In particular, calculations of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) show a decrease in moisture globally since the 1970s with a commensurate increase in the area of drought that is attributed, in part, to global warming 4–5.

The paper goes on to argue that the PDSI, which has been relied upon for drought characterization since the 1960s, is too simple a measure and may (the authors’ word) have led to overestimation of global drought trends in previous climate-change assessments ? including the IPCC’s previous (2007) assessment, which found that “More intense and longer droughts have been observed over wider areas since the 1970s, particularly in the tropics and subtropics.”

The authors argue for use of a more complex index of drought, which, however, requires more data and more sophisticated models to apply. Their application of it with the available data shows a smaller global drought trend than calculated using the usual PDSI, but they conclude that better data are needed. The conclusion of the Sheffield et al . paper has proven controversial, with some critics pointing to the inadequacy of existing observations to support the more complex index and others arguing that a more rigorous application of the new approach leads to results similar to those previously obtained using the PDSI.

A measure of the differences of view on the topic is available in a paper entitled “Increasing drought under global warming in observations and models”, published in Nature Climate Change at about the same time as Sheffield et al. by a leading drought expert at the National Center for Climate Research, Dr. Aiguo Dai. Dr. Dai’s abstract begins and ends as follows:

Historical records of precipitation, streamflow, and drought indices all show increased aridity since 1950 over many land areas 1,2. Analyses of model-simulated soil moisture 3, 4, drought indices 1,5,6, and precipitation minus evaporation 7 suggest increased risk of drought in the twenty-first century. … I conclude that the observed global aridity changes up to 2010 are consistent with model predictions, which suggest severe and widespread droughts in the next 30–90 years over many land areas resulting from either decreased precipitation and/or increased evaporation.

The disagreement between the Sheffield et al. and Dai camps appears to have been responsible for the IPCC’s downgrading to “low confidence”, in its 2013 report, the assessment of an upward trend in global drought in its 2007 Fourth Assessment and its 2012 Special Report on Extreme Events (http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/) .

Interestingly, a number of senior parties to the debate ? including Drs. Sheffield and Dai ? have recently collaborated on a co-authored paper, published in the January 2014 issue of Nature Climate Change, entitled “Global warming and changes in drought”. In this new paper, the authors identify the reasons for their previous disagreements; agree on the need for additional data to better separate natural variability from human-caused trends; and agree on the following closing paragraph (quoted here in full):

Changes in the global water cycle in response to the warming over the twenty-first century will not be uniform. The contrast in precipitation between wet and dry regions and between wet and dry seasons will probably increase, although there may be regional exceptions. Climate change is adding heat to the climate system and on land much of that heat goes into drying. A natural drought should therefore set in quicker, become more intense, and may last longer. Droughts may be more extensive as a result. Indeed, human-induced warming effects accumulate on land during periods of drought because the ‘air conditioning effects’ of water are absent. Climate change may not manufacture droughts, but it could exacerbate them and it will probably expand their domain in the subtropical dry zone.

Additional References (with particularly relevant direct quotes in italics)

Christopher R. Schwalm et al., Reduction of carbon uptake during turn of the century drought in western North America, Nature Geoscience, vol. 5, August 2012, pp 551–556.

The severity and incidence of climatic extremes, including drought, have increased as a result of climate warming. … The turn of the century drought in western North America was the most severe drought over the past 800 years, significantly reducing the modest carbon sink normally present in this region. Projections indicate that drought events of this length and severity will be commonplace through the end of the twenty-first century.

Gregory T. Pederson et al. , The unusual nature of recent snowpack declines in the North American Cordillera, Science, vol. 333, 15 July 2011, pp 332–335.

Over the past millennium, late 20 th century snowpack reductions are almost unprecedented in magnitude across the northern Rocky Mountains and in their north-south synchrony across the cordillera. Both the snowpack declines and their synchrony result from unparalleled springtime warming that is due to positive reinforcement of the anthropogenic warming by decadal variability. The increasing role of warming on large-scale snowpack variability and trends foreshadows fundamental impacts on streamflow and water supplies across the western United States.

Gregory T. Pederson et al., Regional patterns and proximal causes of the recent snowpack decline in the Rocky Mountains, US, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 40, 16 May 2013, pp 1811–1816.

The post–1980 synchronous snow decline reduced snow cover at low to middle elevations by ~20% and partly explains earlier and reduced streamflow and both longer and more active fire seasons. Climatologies of Rocky Mountain snowpack are shown to be seasonally and regionally complex, with Pacific decadal variability positively reinforcing the anthropogenic warming trend.

Michael Wehner et al., Projections of future drought in the continental United States and Mexico, Journal of Hydrometeorology, vol. 12, December 2011, pp 1359–1377.

All models, regardless of their ability to simulate the base-period drought statistics, project significant future increases in drought frequency, severity, and extent over the course of the 21 st century under the SRES A1B emissions scenario. Using all 19 models, the average state in the last decade of the twenty-first century is projected under the SRES A1B forcing scenario to be conditions currently considered severe drought (PDSI<–3) over much of the continental United States and extreme drought (PDSI<–4) over much of Mexico.

D. R. Cayan et al ., Future dryness in the southwest US and the hydrology of the early 21 st century drought, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 107, December 14, 2010, pp 21271–21276.

Although the recent drought may have significant contributions from natural variability, it is notable that hydrological changes in the region over the last 50 years cannot be fully explained by natural variability, and instead show the signature of anthropogenic climate change.

E. P. Maurer et al. , Detection, attribution, and sensitivity of trends toward earlier streamflow in the Sierra Nevada, Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 112, 2007, doi:10.1029/2006JD08088.

The warming experienced in recent decades has caused measurable shifts toward earlier streamflow timing in California. Under future warming, further shifts in streamflow timing are projected for the rivers draining the western Sierra Nevada, including the four considered in this study. These shifts and their projected increases through the end of the 21st century will have dramatic impacts on California’s managed water system.

H. G. Hidalgo et al ., Detection and attribution of streamflow timing changes to climate change in the western United States, Journal of Climate, vol. 22, issue 13, 2009, pp 3838–3855, doi: 10.1175/2009JCLI2740.1.

The advance in streamflow timing in the western United States appears to arise, to some measure, from anthropogenic warming. Thus the observed changes appear to be the early phase of changes expected under climate change. This finding presages grave consequences for the water supply, water management, and ecology of the region. In particular, more winter and spring flooding and drier summers are expected as well as less winter snow (more rain) and earlier snowmelt.


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California, Drought, Pineapple Express, Geological Imperative, Evacuations

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If water had its way, this is what California would look like:

Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 9.33.20 PM

Think about it for a second. Every single moment, currents of air move, slowly or rapidly, across every land surface on the planet. Anything loose gets blown slowly or rapidly, to lower places. Every now and then, in some places rarely and in other places commonly, liquid water falls from the sky on almost every land surface on the planet. Now and then, in certain limited areas, frozen water builds up to great heights, thousands of feet hight, and moves along, scraping deep hollows and grooves the size of big lakes out of these land surfaces. Now and then the earth shakes and stuff falls down. Most of the earth’s surface is ocean, only a small percentage is land. With all this blowing and washing and scraping away, you would think that all the stuff on the land would eventually end up in the ocean and all of the land would look like this:

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There are several reasons this does not happen. One is that mountain building happens because continental shelves push against each other. Another is that volcanoes occasionally spew ash, lava, and stuff out onto the land surface. Also, there is another, less often known about by the average person but incredibly important reason that the land does not look like this …

Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 9.33.20 PM

Underneath the land there is melty-squishy-hot stuff that tends to push upwards a little bit almost everywhere, and a lot in some places, though it is usually pushed back upon by the weight of the land itself. If you remove a bunch of stuff from the surface of the continent, this pushing gets a bit of traction. So, if you have a big piece of continent with erosion happening all the time on the top, this pushing will happen from below, and the continent will not disappear below the surface of the sea. The Congo basin is probably an example of this. It rains a lot, there is constant erosion. So, the land surface across most of the Congo has been eroding for something like a couple or few hundred million years, at least, like it is now. As the surface is eroded away, the underneath slowly rises. So now, much of the Congo basin has deeply eroded rivers, and all the hills between the rivers are made of stuff that is like granite, the cooled down, hardened melty-squish-hot stuff. In fact, a lot of Africa is like that.

In California, the last calendar year was the driest one on record. California has been so dry over the last few years that it is nearly dried out. The reservoirs are puddles, the groundwater is a mystery, and the state is in a state of crisis. But today, the first Pineapple Express of the rainy season arrived, and dumped huge amounts of rain in parts of the state.

California is uplifted. Unlike Louisiana, Mississippi, and nearby areas, which are all very close to sea level, California stands up high over the ocean. When you head for the ocean from inland, depending on where you start, you may have to cross significant mountain ranges or linear arrangements of tall hills, and just before getting to the sea you will have your brakes on a lot of the time because you’ll be going down hill. The shoreline of California is roughly synonymous with the continental shelf, in contrast to other coastlines in the US where the shelf edge may be hundreds of miles out to sea.

The dry conditions over the last few years have resulted in a lot of fires on the hills in this hilly, uplifted country. The geological stuff underneath the surface in much of California is not like the deep hardened magma of the Congo, or for that matter, New Hampshire, Maine and the Maritimes. It is soft, to varying degrees. The top, exposed areas on those hills is made of rocks and dirt. When torrential rains flow over the surface, this material is held in place by a combination of plant roots and luck. The force of the rains is attenuated by the upper parts of the vegetation. But with the vegetation either burned off or dead(ish) from drought, or both, the water washes away the softer smaller particles, leaving the larger stones and rocks exposed, and rivulets start to form and erosional gullies deepen and widen. Meanwhile the ground soaks up water and becomes both loose and heavy at the same time. All these factors together constitute a step in the process of making California look, eventually, like this:

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And if your house, or the road to your house, or anything, is in the way, it will get washed down stream or buried under other stuff washing down stream. For this reason, evacuations are underway in parts of the Sunshine State.

There’s good news, though. Even though the forces of nature seem intent on making California eventually look like this:

Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 9.33.20 PM

There are other forces of nature that are intent on making California look like this:

Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 9.33.23 PM

That’s the good news. The bad news is that those other forces are, well, earthquakes.


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Keeping The Carbon In The Ground Elsewhere: Developing Nations

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John Abraham has an interesting post up at the guardian called “Global warming action: good or bad for the poor?” It is a response to a post by a group of guys who tend to write annoying stuff about climate change (you can go to John’s post for that information). Here, I want to make a brief comment related to John’s excellent post.

The crux of John Abraham’s post is this, in two parts: 1) Some have argued that mitigation against climate change is bad for “the poor” (read: people in developing countries) because they have a right to go through the same phases of technological and social development we (read: The West) have done, which would presumably include building numerous dirty coal plants so everyone can have a washer and dryer and blender and other stuff. This, John argues, is wrong at several levels. 2) As John demonstrates through is own activities, described in his post, it is possible to skip the 19th and 20th centuries in developing energy technologies and go right to the mid 21st century, installing carbon-free efficient inexpensive easily maintained and sensible technology.

I worked for several years in South Africa, as you probably know. When I first started to work there, we had problems with communication because we were usually in remote areas where there was no phone. We did get cell phones, but there were two problems with them. First, there were two major TeleCom carriers, and we worked in areas that were serviced, if they were serviced at all, by one or the other but usually not both. So we’d get two sets of cell phones. Second, as just implied, there was no cell phone service in many areas. During one field season we worked in a remote area of the Northern Cape. We were working on a farm not far from Upington for a while. We could get brief and unreliable cell phone service if we climbed a hill and stood near a certain water tank and held the phone up really high in the air. Sometimes. Farther out in the bush, where we spent considerable time, we had no cell phone access at all. There were land lines here and there but this required traveling way out of our way to use an unreliable pay phone.

During a later year, we prepared for our return to that remote area by getting the usual two cell phones, and also, carrying out all of the communications we could prior to leaving, letting people know we’d be mostly out of touch for a few weeks at a time. We packed up the Toyota Prado and the trailer with our gear and food, piled into the vehicle, and set out across the southern African subcontinent. A few days later we came to a key stop in our journey, the entranceway to what was then known as the Kalahari Gemsbok Reserve, on the border of Namibia and Botswana. I was chatting with the students who were on the field school about how our cell phones would be useless here, but there was a land line at the park headquarters that we could use now and then with the TeleCom cards we could purchase at the gift shop. As I was saying this, my field manager, Lynn, drove the car out of the river bed we had been following, and we ascended a hill overlooking the campsite at the entrance of the park. From there we could see dozens of camp sites, occupied by South African campers with their 4X4 vehicles, their amazingly tricked-out trailers deployed to form bedrooms and kitchens. The campers were standing around cooking their braai (that’s South African for BBQ) as it was nearing dinner time, late in the afternoon.

Two sights took my breath away. Well, not really, but these two sights made me stop talking and change my story about making phone calls. First, there was the huge cell phone tower ascending from behind the camp site, the alp glow of the setting sun accentuating it’s technological glory. The other was this: About half the people standing around in the camp site, cooking their boerwors and t-bones, were chatting on their cell phones.

Remember World War II? Yeah, I don’t either. But it happened. Part of World War II involved bombing the crap out of German Industry. Japanese Industry was also bombed but there was probably less of it to begin with. The point is, at the end of the war, German and Japanese industry was toast, and those two countries were under occupation. Then there was the Marshall Plan and all that. This involved rebuilding industry in those two countries. Then, later, each in their own way, Germany (well, West Germany) proceeded to kick our industrial asses by more or less starting from scratch, combining in-place ingenuity, effective corporate culture, and brand new factories to grab several major international markets. There were a couple of decades there, overlapping with the ones I grew up in, during which it was not uncommon to hear Americans griping about that. Those guys, they started the war, we defeated them, then we gave them all this stuff, and now my commie neighbor drives a Japanese car. Dammit and get off my lawn. That sort of stuff.

I remember doing an archaeological survey in a newish exerb in the Boston area during one of those periods when Americans were especially mad at the Japanese for making great cars. In that particular neighborhood, some good ol’ boys (yes, they have the in the Greater Boston Area) had gone around the neighborhood and, using chalk, marked up the driveways of anyone who had a Japanese car. They drew nasty pictures and wrote obnoxious and racist words. So, part of Western Culture, mainly that sub-part that arises from the Allied Powers, or maybe just America (but I suspect the United Kingdom as well) developed an anti-Japanese, and to a lesser extent, anti-German thing based on post Marshall plan resentment.

John Abraham is a nice guy and I am not. Perhaps. John saw the article he critiqued in his blog post as being misinformed and stupid. Fine. I suspect, in my not-as-nice-guy way, that there is something deeper. Let me review before I reveal.

First, some climate change science denialists make the argument that mitigation against climate change by implementing new technologies will hurt poor people in third world countries.

Then, an expert on climate change and energy, John Abraham, notes that this is wrong, because we can implement the newest technologies in places like Sub Saharan Africa and go right from a sort-of-pre-industrial state to a 21st century state.

I note that not only is John right, but that it has happened before, in Japan, Germany, and with my example here South Africa, with various industries (cars, TeleCom, etc.)

And then we have this idea that people in the West have been known to resent those who have sailed past us in technology achievement because they ended up in a situation where they needed to move from the stone age (into which they had been bombed) to absolutely modern, or even next-gen, times.

If we give effective, inexpensive, workable, modern non-carbon energy technology to Africa and help it get deployed, then African nations will, in the near future, show up at international climate change summits with a new message that climate change science denialists and carbon-based energy magnates will not want to hear. They will say this. “Look, we’re doing pretty well without carbon based energy technologies. We’re advancing the standard of living without destroying the planet. Why haven’t you done that, The West?”

And, when it comes to production, new ideas, technology, stuff you want to buy, the raw material of the global free market, the Africans are going to kick our asses.

And that will be great. But some are afraid because of a thing they have. It’s called racism.


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Talk on Evolutionary Psychology, Sunday, March 2nd

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I will be giving a talk in Saint Paul, at the Best Western Kelly Inn, on Evolutionary Psychology.

The original plan was to get two people to debate the topic, but it was hard to find two people in town to do that. One idea was to get PZ Myers over here, and then he and I would debate the topic. Problem with that is that we probably agree a lot more than we disagree so that would be boring. Well, I’m sure we’d make it interesting but we’d have to switch topics.

So it ended up being me. There will be a debate. I’ll handle both sides. Seriously.

I’d love to give you a working link to meetup.com for this event, but meetup.com appears to be undergoing a massive, extended DDoS attack. From some very lonely person, I assume. Here’s the link in case it works.

Anyway, this talk is sponsored by the Critical Thinking Club of Saint Paul. Details:
Sunday, March 2, 2014
10:00 AM
Best Western Kelly Inn
161 Saint Anthony Ave
Saint Paul, MN 55103

Evolutionary Psychology is a late 20th century scientific discipline created for the explicit purpose of understanding how the brain works (mechanisms) and why the brain works that way (adaptations). It assumes the adaptations we observe in the brain are to the environment in which they arose. Unfortunately, this new discipline was created in human brains (as opposed to some other really smart species) and human brains did not evolve in an environment in which understanding the workings of brains was important. Rather, human brains evolved in an environment in which outsmarting other people may have been more important than getting things right. In this talk, we will see what is right, and perhaps not right, about evolutionary psychology.

Greg Laden is a biological anthropologist who has studied key transitions in human evolution, including the ape-human split and the rise of our genus, Homo. He was present at the birth of Evolutionary Psychology, in room 14A of the Peabody Museum, at Harvard, and has been observing the field ever since. Greg writes about evolution, climate change, and other issues on his blog at National Geographic Scienceblogs, often provides public talks or interviews on these topics.

Breakfast Buffet $12.00 Coffee only $3.00. We need to plan for the room setup and meal, so if you are going to attend, please RSVP by Friday, February 28.

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The Faraday Electric Bike

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Powered bikes have been around for a long time, and there are many electric bikes available now. But it seems that this new one is a significant change from prior versions.

The Faraday Bike doesn’t even look like it could possibly be powered. But apparently it is. The frame is, more or less, the battery. The motor is small because electric motors can be small. It has a computer, and apparently, LED lights.

It does not operate without human power, but it adds power to your stroke, by about 300% (but that is adjustable) according to the manufacturer.

It costs a mere $3,500. But it is coming out very slowly; 200 will be shipped by some time in March.


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Denying Climate Science in Multiple Dimensions

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The famous Polar Vortex has come and gone in North America. Then, it came back. What a jerk.

NewPolarVortexMemeAs I write this the outside temperature is 13 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and tomorrow morning’s Bus Stop Temperature promises to be about –25F windchill here in central Minnesota. Meanwhile my Twitter stream is polluted with climate science denialist tweets pointing out that it is too cold outside to believe in global warming, even though the entire land area of the United States, where this cold is being experienced as a cultural and physical phenomenon, is about one and half percent of the planet Earth, and the Northern Hemisphere has just experienced its fourth warmest January during the period known as “Since Records Began” which in this case is about 1880 to the present.

Releasing the Carbon Kraken

There are multiple dimensions along which denialists either get it wrong (because they are not paying attention or don’t understand the data) or making it wrong (because they have an interest in misdirection and misleading others). One is pretending that the weather outside their window is the climate. The other is pretending that climate change only started after Al Gore said it did, or after some other recent date, ignoring the fact that we have been releasing the Carbon Kraken since the early or mid 19th century, when industrialists figured out they could make more money using coal, rather than water, to run their ever expanding acreage of dark satanic mills.

It is hard to say exactly when Anthropogenic Global Warming began because at the start any signal from this effect may have been swamped by non anthropogenic (sometimes called “natural”) variation. The available data suggest that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million (ppm) in the 18th century, and started to rise during the last half of the 19th century. After World War II, the rate of rise increased significantly. We know added CO2 increases the global surface temperature and the temperature of the oceans, and melts glacial (and sea) ice through the greenhouse effect. This graph, from here, combines various data sources to show the increase in CO2 emissions over time:

CO2_since_mid_18th_century

When we look at temperatures over time, we see a close relationship between CO2 and temperature, and we see a slow rise prior to World War II with a more rapid increase after. Another graph, from here:

CO2_and_temperature_since_mid_19th_cen

The increase in temperatures are slow and steady but measurable prior to World War II, and much steeper thereafter. It would be nice to see a graph like this that goes back a little farther in time to match the CO2 graph, but the “instrumental record” mostly post dates the Civil War, and really, the better quality record post dates about 1880. There are records that go way back, tens of millions of years, but they are “proxy” records of a different scale and it is hard to get them on the same graph.

People who (unbelievably) deny that global warming is a real thing will often point to climate events earlier in the 20th century that may resemble modern day events that we think could be related to warming, and say “see, it happened then, so there is no global warming now.” There are several reasons that is wrong. First, often, older records of spectacular weather events may be wrong, incomplete, or not measured like we would like them to have been measured, so going back to old newspaper accounts and such is highly unreliable. So this means that people are criticizing a carefully assembled and verified set of data (recent changes in CO2 and temperature) and complaining that it is no good because of cherry picked observation from “data” that is not controlled or verified. The second reason this is wrong is that there have been very few weather events that could not, really, have happened any time. This does not apply so much to sea level enhanced weather events. If sea level rises then sea or estuary flooding can happen in places it could never have happened before, so that is a qualitative, or base-line, difference. But for the most part, a major cold snap, a high precipitation event, drought, or other event can happen at any time. Climate scientists do not think that there are very many weather events that happen now that could never, ever have happened in the past. Rather, there is concern that some of these classes of events are happening with significantly greater frequency now than in the past.

Was Kansas Not In Kansas Any More For A Decade Or Two?

A third reason this is wrong, which is rarely pointed to but I think important, is that we really don’t know what the association is between two important factors and weather events. First, just how much new CO2 added to the atmosphere does it take to change the weather? Since CO2 records show an increase that started prior to the better quality instrumental record, the entire instrumental record is potentially affected by higher CO2, though of course, this effect would be much less prior to World War II than during more recent times. Second, and related, is this: There may be weather related effects that come not from the specific amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, but from changes in the CO2. The warming effect of added CO2 is not instantaneous, but rather, takes a long time during which time climate or weather related things may change. Adding a specific amount of CO2 to the atmosphere is like turning the stove on under a pot of tap water. The water starts out cool, and over time heats, then it eventually reaches boiling. After that, the temperature does not change; due to the boiling point, the pot of water has reached a new equilibrium and has stopped increasing in heat. But before equilibrium is reached there are constant changes in the heat level of the water inside the pot as well as other things the water is doing, such as pushing out various gasses, forming bubbles, and circulating thermally in the pot. That is a very simple analogy; there may be either simple or complex changes that happen in the Earth’s heat circulation system that occur as a result of added CO2, that involve changes over time, then reach an equilibrium of some sort and stop happening. Perhaps this occurred during the early days of increased CO2.

I have a hypothesis that I’m not aware has been examined. During the 1920s and 1930s, in the US at least, there seems to have been a handful of extreme weather events, including some major tornadoes, big hurricanes, an historic and history changing drought, and a few other things. The Wizard of Oz, the writings of John Steinbeck, and other cultural phenomena are a very interesting proxy for those climate events, in a way. I’m afraid that at the moment the data required to examine this period are not sufficient. But I wonder, looking at the above graphs, if the earlier part of the 20th century saw a metastable shift – changing from one equilibrium to a new and different equilibrium – in weather patterns, caused by CO2 induced warming, the effects of which arose for a while then faded away.

The possibility that extreme events may have happened during some period of a couple of decades early in the 20th century due to anthropogenic global warming does not explain all, or even a majority, of the denialist claims. Most of those claims are probably references to incorrect data or cherry picking of events. The largest and most frequent weather related effects of global warming probably date to the last 20 years. Weather events are known of over many decades before that, and to some extent, even centuries into the past. Therefore, the historical bowl of cherries from which denialists may choose is large. That ratio, between the expanse of historical information and the more limited recent past, is large enough that there are dozens of past events that can be cited, as misrepresentations of reality.

Bicycles Going Backwards

You wouldn’t think it easy to ride a bicycle backwards but it turns out it is. Climate science denialists are good at it, and they can use multiple bicycles at once.

In a recent twitter conversation, an Australian MP challenged John Cook with the false assertion that several studies confirmed that global temperatures have stayed steady or gone down over the last decade or so. When Cook asked for the studies, the MP replied not with any studies, but with a comment about climate models. When pressed further for the studies, the MP claimed he had not promised any such studies and when pressed further changed the conversation to the last 150 years of data. When that did not work he shifted to mention of work that he claimed defied the nearly perfect consensus among both scientists and their peer reviewed papers about climate science. When that did not work he shifted to references in a non-peer reviewed anonymous blog, and then to perceived problems in the peer reviewed process. About that time another climate science denialist attempted to shift the conversation to the alleged (and non-existent) inability of alternative energy sources to work when it is really cold out.

If you have one thing to say that is wrong, it is hard to sustain argument. If you have ten things to say that are wrong, you can sustain the argument by shifting among them as each falsehood is effectively challenged. That form of argument does not advance understanding, but it does sustain the argument, but in a rather vacuous form. It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. Science denialism thrives in a vacuum.

Fighting With Words

Another dimension along which climate science denialists operate is linguistic. The terms “global warming” and “climate change” mean different things. The former is part of the latter, and in fact, “global warming” is not exactly the same as “anthropogenic global warming.” Within science, we sometimes see extended discussions of the meanings of specific terms. What is a gene? What exactly is the relationship between “founder effect” and “genetic drift?” When is an “adaptation” really an “aptation” or an “exaptation?” These conversations have three characteristics. First, they reflect changes in understanding, or sometimes, conflict between perceptions of natural phenomena that arose independently and then crashed into each other in the literature or at conferences. Second, they are useful conversations because they can expose uncertainties or ambiguities in our actual understanding of nature. Third, despite their short term utility, they eventually become boring and misleading and scientists move beyond them and get back to the actual science, eventually.

But terminology has another use, and that is obfuscation. It is often said by denialists that scientists changed from using the term “global warming” to “climate change” for one or another nefarious reasons. We also see denialists claiming that scientists used to study “climate change” and that included both global warming and global cooling, but then changed to global warming because they could make more money on it. (I wish I knew how that worked!) Recently, Rush Limbaugh, the intellectual leader of the American right wing, claimed that scientists made up the term “Polar Vortex” in order to advance tax and spend liberal ideas. The famous NBC weatherman, Al Roker, and others, noted that the term “Polar Vortex” was already there, as a term referring to a real thing, and Roker even showed the term in use in his meteorology textbook from the mid 20th century. Indeed, here is a Google Ngram Viewer result of a search for the term “Polar Vortex” in all the books Google has indexed:

Polar_vortex_Google_Ngram

Note that the term is way old, predating 1950, and had a peak in usage druing the late 80s and through the early 90s, probably related to an increased rate of study of this phenomenon that happened because of concern over the Ozone Hole.

Fighting with words was codified by, if not invented by, the Ancient Greeks. It is called sophistry, or at least, is a subset of that practice, whereby arguments are made in large part on the basis of rhetorical style or method. You see people do this all the time. If someone you know is in a grumpy mood, or does not want to admit they’ve made a mistake, they may resort to a sophistic argument.

“Sorry I’m late, I got lost because they changed what’s on the corner of your street and it confused me.”

“They never changed what’s on the corner of my street.”

“Yes they did, there used to be a coffee shop, now it’s a pet grooming place.”

“Yeah, but it’s still the same building, they never changed what’s on the corner. You got lost because you don’t like me any more.”

That sort of thing.

Science denialists look silly when they do this sort of thing, but apparently they don’t know that. And, the method is related to the backpedalling bicycles. You can always shift the conversation to the apocryphal shift between the terms “global warming” and “climate change,” implying a conspiracy among scientists, when the going gets tough.

This seems to happen a lot with hurricanes. When the Bush Administration wanted to avoid taking responsibility for a poor response to Katrina, someone actually said that the major damage done to New Orleans was not due to Katrina, but rather, to flooding. This idea was bolstered by noting that the hurricane had made landfall at a different time and place than the flooding. That, in turn, was based on the idea of “landfall” being related to the location of the eye of the storm; but the eye of a hurricane is tiny compared to the entire storm, which may be hundreds of miles across. We saw this again with Sandy. Sandy was a pretty bad hurricane, but it lost its hurricane status just before making “landfall” (though the leading edge of the storm had been on land for a long time already). Just before hitting land, Sandy integrated with another storm system, which actually made the thing a super storm with much more impact than just a hurricane, but in so morphing changed enough that it no longer fit the definition of a hurricane. Then it hit New Jersey and New York. So, those who wish to deny the importance of hurricanes simply claim that when Sandy flooded Manhattan and the New Jersey shore, and caused widespread damage, loss of life, and injury in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey, that did not count as a hurricane related event. Sophistry.

But Galileo!

The final dimension of argument I want to mention is perhaps the silliest of all, and we see it in widespread use far beyond the area of climate science denialism. The idea is simple. All major advances in science have come about when almost everyone thinks a certain thing but they are all wrong, but a small number of individuals know the truth, like Galileo’s attack on a geocentric universe.

While it is true that such things have happened, in history, they have not happened that often in science. For example, Einstein’s revision of several areas of science fit with existing science but modified it, though significantly. Subatomic theory did not replace the atom, but rather, entered the atom. The discovery and characterization of DNA was a major moment in biology, but the particulate nature of inheritance had long been established. Darwin did not change the existing science of nature, but rather, verified long held ideas about evolution and, dramatically, proposed a set of mechanisms not widely understood in his day. Science hardly ever gets Galileoed, and even Galileo did not Galileo science; he Galileoed religion. Even his insightful contribution was accretive.

There is a demented logic behind the Galileo claim. If every one thinks one thing, and one person thinks something different, that high ratio of differential is itself proof that the small minority is correct. But the truth is that consensus, or what we sometimes call “established science,” is usually coeval with alternative beliefs the vast majority of which are wrong, most of which do not even come from the science itself, but rather, from sellers of snake oil, individuals or entities that would benefit from the science being questioned, or from individuals with delusional ideas. Even if there is now and then a view held by a small minority that is actually more correct than the majority view, we can’t establish veracity by measuring rarity. Chances are, a view of nature held by only a few is wrong. This simple numbers game is not how we should be seeking truth, but if one does engage in the numbers game, then dissenting views of established science can be assumed to be wrong, if you were going to place a bet.

Climate Science Denialism along Multiple Dimensions

It seems to me, and others have noted this, that there is an uptick in the activity levels of climate science denialism. This seems to have started just prior to the release of the first draft documents of the IPCC report on climate change last year. Perhaps it is also being fueled by efforts linked to approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Denialists have recently used the fact that about one or two percent of the Earth’s surface is experiencing a dramatic cold wave, which is quite possibly an effect of climate change, to question global warming, even in a winter where the Earth is exceptionally warm. Sophistry abounds. There is so much cherry picking going on that I fear for a shortage of cherries, which really should be reserved for making pies and jam. Backwards pedaled bicycles are whizzing about. But the denialists do not seem to have increased in number or even reach. Last November, there was a project called #ClimateThanks in which people were asked to tweet thanks, using the #ClimateThanks hashtag for those individuals and organizations who have been doing or promoting the results of good climate science. The denialists jumped on that bandwagon, producing numerious anti-science tweets and retweets. But if you look at the tweets and the tweeters from the denialist gaggle, while they were many most had few followers, and some of the tweeting entities even seemed to have been made up or brought out of mothballs for the purpose. They amounted to little more than a large collection of small wanna-be-Galileos.

It is probably true that the biggest problem we have in advancing a productive conversation about climate change is the tenacious insistence on false balance in the media. It isn’t just FOX News that thinks it is OK to place real science and politically motivated propaganda on the same stage, as though they had equal merit. False balance, which may be spreading as a phenomenon in major media at a time it should be diminishing, is probably the best friend of the denialist community.

Meanwhile, the denialsts have repeatedly shown themselves to be wrong, along many and diverse dimensions.


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