Tag Archives: Climate Change

February Was Very Warm, Continues Upward Global Warming Trend

March 14, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, February, Global Warming, Global Warming, NASA GISSGreg Laden

The NASA GISS data for surface temperatures of the planet Earth are in for February, and February was warm. The anomaly value was 79, which means 0.79 degrees C above a the baseline NASA uses (1951-1980). So, while it looks like the planet has warmed by a about 8 tenths of a degree, since warming started well before 1880, it is really more like a whole degree or more. Depending on what you know and don’t know about how climate works, that may seem like a lot or a little. Trust me, it is a lot.

Most interestingly, the last 12 months were the warmest 12 months in the NSAS GISS database (you’ll remember that 2014 was the warmest year in that database as well as other). This continues an upward trend of temperatures that we expect with global warming.

February 2015 was the seventh warmest month in the entire GISS record, which goes back to 1880. All of the warmest months have been recent. February 2015 was the second warmest February in that record.

We are not going to know about March officially for another month (obviously!), but indications are that March has been warm and will continue to be warm, so I don’t see this trend turning around.

If you want a higher resolution version of this graphic, click here, then click through to the original file.

Here is a version of the above graph without the trendline:

Again, go HERE to get a higher resolution version (Scienceblogs is very efficient at scaling down graphics!).

New Study On How Global Warming Changes The Weather

March 12, 2015UncategorizedArctic Amplification, Climate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, severe weather, Severe weatherGreg Laden

Human caused greenhouse gas pollution has warmed the planet. Global warming means more extreme weather. Many meteorologist who watch the weather every day see this. More and more research shows that greenhouse gas pollution changes the weather in a way that causes even more change in the weather. Changing weather systems means more lightning, increased high precipitation events in certain regions like the US Northeast, including more frequent large snow storms.

Global warming has had uneven effects. The Arctic has warmed relatively more than most of the rest of the planet. The major movements of air masses are driven by a combination of the rotation of the Earth and the movement of extra heat from the Equator towards the poles, a process that sets up the trade winds and the jet stream. But the additional warming in the Arctic has changed this pattern measurably, resulting in these and other changes in weather patterns.

A new study out in Science, by Dim Coumou, Jascha Lehmann, and Johanna Beckmann, “The weakening summer circulation in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes,” demonstrates that storm activity in much of the Northern Hemisphere has changed in a way that matters to our weather, and is likely to change more in the future. From the abstract:

Rapid warming in the Arctic could influence mid-latitude circulation by reducing the poleward temperature gradient. The largest changes are generally expected in autumn or winter but whether significant changes have occurred is debated. Here we report significant weakening of summer circulation detected in three key dynamical quantities: (1) the zonal-mean zonal wind, (2) the eddy kinetic energy (EKE) and (3) the amplitude of fast-moving Rossby waves. Weakening of the zonal wind is explained by a reduction in poleward temperature gradient. Changes in Rossby waves and EKE are consistent with regression analyses of climate model projections and changes over the seasonal cycle. Monthly heat extremes are associated with low EKE and thus the observed weakening might have contributed to more persistent heat waves in recent summers.

The study has been written up by Chris Mooney, in the Washington Post, and Roz Pidcock at Carbon Brief. From the study’s press release,

“When the great air streams in the sky above us get disturbed by climate change, this can have severe effects on the ground,” says lead-author Dim Coumou. “While you might expect reduced storm activity to be something good, it turns out that this reduction leads to a greater persistence of weather systems in the Northern hemisphere mid-latitudes. In summer, storms transport moist and cool air from the oceans to the continents bringing relief after periods of oppressive heat. Slack periods, in contrast, make warm weather conditions endure, resulting in the buildup of heat and drought.”

“Unabated climate change will probably further weaken summer circulation patterns which could thus aggravate the risk of heat waves,” says co-author Jascha Lehmann “Climate simulations for the next decades, the CMIP5, remarkably show the same link that we found in observations. So the warm temperature extremes we’ve experienced in recent years might be only a beginning.”

Bjorn Lomborg Is Wrong About Bangladesh And Sea Level Rise

March 12, 2015UncategorizedBangladesh, Bjorn Lomborg, Climate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Sea Level RiseGreg Laden

Human caused greenhouse gas pollution is heating the Earth and causing the planet’s polar ice caps and other glacial ice to melt. This, along with simply heating the ocean, has caused measurable sea level rise. Even more worrisome is this: the current elevated level of CO2 in the atmosphere was associated in the past with sea levels several meters higher than they are today. Even if we slow down Carbon pollution very quickly, we can expect sea levels to be at least 8 meters higher, eventually. How soon? Nobody knows, nobody can give you a time frame on this because the rate of melting of the major glaciers in Greenland and the Antarctic is hard to measure. All we know for sure is that the rate of melting is speeding up, and that in the past, the current level of atmospheric CO2 has typically caused a very large amount of melting.

Bangladesh is low country. A very large percentage of the country is on the Bangladesh Plain, which is almost entirely below 10 meters in elevation. This is where a large portion of the population in that country lives, and where a large portion of the food is grown. The greenhouse gas pollution we have caused so far is sufficient to virtually guarantee that Bangladesh will become a very small country over the next generation or two. Much sooner than that, though, sea level rise in the region will affect, and is already affecting, freshwater reserves. We expect the largest tropical storms to become larger and more intense as an effect of human caused global warming. Sea level rise makes the storm surges from those events worse. So of immediate concern and becoming more of a problem every year is the threat of deadly and damaging tropical storms exacerbated by warming of the seas and increased sea levels.

The deadliest tropical cyclone on record occurred in Bangladesh; that was the Great Bhola Cyclone of 1970, which killed up to one half of a million people. The second deadliest cyclone known hit Bangladesh and India in great antiquity. Eight of the ten deadliest known tropical cyclones hit the region. So, tropical cyclones are already a problem in Bangladesh, and sea level rise and increased cyclone strength are going to make that much much worse.

Bjørn Lomborg, in a recent interview, told Bangladesh, the country, not to worry too much about global warming, and instead, to focus on other problems. He equated concern over sea level rise in a country where sea level rise is a very significant problem with immorality. While Lomborg may be correct to point out the obvious – that Bangladesh has a lot of problems in public health and other areas to worry about – he is wrong to suggest that sea level rise in that low lying country can be addressed just as the Dutch have managed the sea in The Netherlands.

Lomborg seems to not know much about sea level rise. He once noted that sea level rise had stopped, or even decreased, by referring to a single year’s worth of data (see graphic above). That statement and his suggestion that sea level rise should be a low priority in a country that may be the most threatened by sea level rise in the world (aside from island nations) is reminiscent of a statement by J.R. Spradley, a delegate at an international conference on climate change in 1990, speaking about sea level rise in Bangladesh. He was quoted in the Washington Post as saying “The situation is not a disaster; it is merely a change. The area won’t have disappeared; it will just be underwater. Where you now have cows, you will have fish.” (Washington Post, December 30th, 1990.)

Part of Lomborg’s argument is typical for him. He generates a straw man by equating concern over climate change with concern over a meteor about to smash into the earth. In the interview he said,

Projecting scary scenarios are probably unhealthy to deal with real issues. Now, if there was a meteor hurtling towards earth, we should tell people. If there was really something destroying the earth we should definitely be telling people and doing something about it. My point is if you, for instance, look at climate change, it is often portrayed as the end of the world. But if you look at for instance the UN climate panel, they tell us by about 2070 the total cost of global warming is going to be somewhere between 0.2 and 2% of the GDP. And that emphasises what I am trying to say – global warming is real, it is a problem, it is something we should fix, but it’s not the end of the world.

The problem with this is that sea level rise is, essentially, the end of the world, if you are Bangladesh.

The most troubling part of Lomborg’s statements is that he equates the Netherlands with Bangladesh. The Netherlands is about 25% below sea level, but the sea is kept back by dikes. Other than their cheese, chocolate, love of splitting the restaurant tab, this is probably what the Dutch are most known for. Indeed Dutch engineers were drafted into managing water related problems around the world for centuries. So maybe the Dutch can help Bangladesh keep the Indian Ocean off it’s turf when that ocean is 8 meters above the present level. Lomborg looks to the Dutch to do just this:

… how much of a problem is [sea level rise in Bangladesh]? The Dutch has shown us 200 years ago, you can handle sea level rise fairly, easily and cheaply, you can do the same thing here and you will do the same thing here. Remember when people say, global warming is a big problem and we need to put a wind turbine here – any amount of wind turbine or solar panels that we are going to put in the next 50 years, are going to have absolutely no impact on the sea level rise that towards the end of the century. They may make a tiny difference towards the 22nd century, but if want to do anything about sea level rise, it’s all about adaptation. Globally there seems to be actually less ferocious hurricanes, one measure is accumulated cyclone energy, which is sort of a good global estimate and it’s actually been at some of the lowest levels since we started monitoring in the 1970s. There is a theoretical argument that you will see slightly fewer but slightly stronger hurricanes towards the end of the century. Again, this is not by any means the end of Bangladesh.”

The Netherlands is about 41,543 square kilometers in size with about 17% of that reclaimed from the sea, this and other land kept dry by dikes. Bangladesh is about 147,570 square kilometers. The Netherlands does not get tropical cyclones very often. Bangladesh gets the worst of them. There are geological differences between the regions that matter as well. Bangladesh is, essentially, a giant delta (I oversimplify slightly) which means that part of is is sinking all the time even while the sea level goes up. Flooding along rivers becomes a big problem with sea level rise. Both regions have rivers. Bangladesh, however, is a country made out of rivers, and among them is the Ganges, which is the world’s third largest river by discharge. Bangladesh probably has more problems with flooding than any other nation. In 1988, 75% of the entire country of Bangladesh was covered by a flood.

It is estimated that a 1 meter rise in sea level would take about 17.5%, or 25,000 square kilometers, of Bangladesh. I’m a little unsure of that estimate (and others I’ve seen) because different researchers count or don’t count large regions of the country that are already flooded by the sea. Another estimate gives 16% of the land to the sea with a 1.5 meter sea level rise. (You can explore various scenarios here if you like.) In any event, an 8 meter rise in sea level, which is expected long term, would take a very large part of the country, displace most of the population, and destroy most of the agricultural land. In case it is not obvious, let me note that as sea level rise threatens Bangladesh, it also threatens The Netherlands, which might keep the Dutch rather busy in their own homelands.

It is also important to note that sea level does not treat all coastlines equally. Some areas are being affected more than others. A report in CBS news recently noted, “Seas are rising more than twice as fast as the global average here in the Sundarbans, a low-lying delta region of about 200 islands in the Bay of Bengal where some 13 million impoverished Indians and Bangladeshis live. Tens of thousands … have already been left homeless, and scientists predict much of the Sundarbans could be underwater in 15 to 25 years.”

The Dutch reclaimed so much of the sea, and developed defenses against storm surges and flooding, over a period of centuries. During much of this time, The Netherlands was a major player in the European economic theater, acting as a center during the development of the world economic and colonial systems of the 17th and 18th centuries. To suggest that somehow Bangladesh can do what the Dutch did while the entire world is also busy adapting to sea level rise is absurd.

Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute has done quite a bit of research on the potential effects of sea level rise, focusing on California (see, for example, Heberger M, Cooley H, Herrera P, Gleick P, Moore E (2009) The impacts of sea level rise on the California coast. California Climate Change Center, Sacramento, California. Paper CEC–500–2009–024-F). I asked him what he felt about the Lomborg interview. He said, “So a rich Dane tells poor Bangladeshis to stop whining and just ‘handle’ sea level rise, because that’s what the rich countries do? The reality, of course, is that even in rich countries, the poor will suffer most from sea-level rise. In our analysis of the risks to California from even modest SLR over the coming decades, nearly 500,000 people – disproportionately communities of color and low-income people – will be affected. And the cost of protecting them far exceeds the money available for coastal protection.”

There is also an absurdity to Lomborg’s assertion that we (our species) and Bangladesh (the country) should put off the global project of keeping the Carbon in the ground. We don’t know how long it takes for a warming planet to melt polar glaciers, but we do know that there is a pretty well established relationship between CO2 levels and global temperature, and between global temperature and sea levels. We know this from looking at numerous case studies from the past. It turns out that the relationship, ultimately, between CO2 levels and sea level rise is sigmoidal. Below about 400ppm, as CO2 levels rise, sea levels rise rapidly. Then, between about 400ppm and 650ppm, they rise more slowly, then above that level, the rate increases again.

Now, I want to pause for a second and clarify a very important point. We are now at 400ppm. This does not mean that sea levels will start to rise slowly. The expected sea level stand for 400ppm is probably close to 8 meters above the current level. In other words, the adjustment of sea level to CO2 that we expect should be very rapid, as fast as it generally goes (or nearly so) over coming decades. Once that level is reached, and CO2 continues to increase (and it will), then there may be a slowing down as we approach but have not yet reached about 650ppm.

So, what is absurd about Lomborg’s assertion? If we forestall efforts to keep the carbon in the ground for now, we will power through that range of decreased (but continuing) ultimate increase in sea level rise between the 400 and 650 levels of CO2, and nearly guarantee returning to the higher rate, and ultimately, seeing sea level rises in the tens of meters in coming centuries.

In his interview, as well as in a brief Twitter exchange we had, Lomborg made another error, one we often seen made by lesser informed people engaged in the climate or energy conversations. Lomborg seems to think that there is a fixed amount and class of resources and that one problem must be addressed at a time. But that is not how it works. First, there are resources primarily available for one thing such as public health, while other resources may be more generally applied. Also, we can in fact address more than one problem at once. I asked Professor Michael Mann, climate scientist, what he thought about Lomborg’s interview, and he told me, “Bjorn Lomborg is a master of the false choice, often claiming that dealing with climate change will somehow detract from our ability to deal with other societal problems. In reality, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can and must work on solving numerous societal problems. In reality, climate change exacerbates most of those problems. It is a threat multiplier. Lomborg conveniently ignores that!”

Speaking of the same problem, Peter Gleick told me, “Lomborg’s classic argument that other problems like disease are far more important than climate change and sea-level rise is a common Lomborgian false dilemma. Society can, regularly does, and must tackle multiple problems at once. This is like saying that because a patient has a broken arm the doctors shouldn’t treat her life-threatening pneumonia. Patently nonsense.”

I would add that increased flooding, decreased food supply, the mass exodus of people from inundated regions, etc. will create far more disease and starvation related public health problems than Bangladesh has at the moment. Forestalling or reducing the extent of this sort of disaster has to be a high priority.

Which brings us to the question of development. Bangladesh, like so many other countries, is likely to become more and more electric over time as it develops. Lomborg seems to want that to happen with the use of fossil fuels rather than clean energy sources. But, one of the obstacles to switching from fossil Carbon based energy to clean energy in the developed world is that our infrastructure is already set up to exploit mainly fossil Carbon based sources. In nations or regions where the use of energy is being developed every effort should be made to ensure this is done with clean energy. That is independent of any local or regional issues with sea level rise. This is what makes sense and this is what we have to do.

Lomborg is often wrong. I’ve noted this before (see: Are electric cars any good? Lomborg says no, but he’s wrong. and Bjørn Lomborg WSJ Op Ed Is Stunningly Wrong). Climate Hawks critiques Lomborg’s Bangladesh strategy here noting issues I did not cover above. Scientific American published a stunning takedown of Lomborg’s book here. Recently, Steven Newton of the National Center for Science Education expanded on that critique in a note about the support of Lomborg’s approach by the anti-science Discovery Intitute.

And in his statements on Bangladesh, he is wrong again.

ADDED: I’m adding a note to address, collectively and once, a number of comments that have been posted (some moderated) about scales of time.

This post is not about reconciling geological time with day to day time. I make as an assumption, in dealing with sea level rise, the idea that all recent estimates of polar glacial melt are at best minima, and fail to get at the real problem. I feel this is true because of my bias towards paleoclimate. I see in the ancient record changes in sea level stand that seem to occur over time periods that don’t look like a few mm a year of melting. I may be wrong, but the paleo record is pretty hard data while the melt estimates are a very preliminary stab at a very large problem that we are only starting to get a handle on.

This is not the point of the present post, but several commenters, who generally deny the importance of climate change and would prefer that we do nothing about it, seem to feel a) it does matters if large proportions of Bangladesh or other low lying countries are obliterated in 30 years or 300 years. The people who will be affected ten instead of 2 generations from now don’t matter; b) the ultimate multi meter rise in sea level, which will happen, is beyond their level of credulity, so they argue from that position that therefore a one meter rise in a region that is mostly about one meter above sea level does not matter; and c) feel that our ignorance of how to reconcile geological time scales of climate change in paleoclimate (mostly) is somehow evidence that there is not change; d) as usual, failure to accept the muddled yammering that arises from these starting points constitutes a lack of true scientific rational thinking, or a liberal bias, or some other such hogwash.

There is a handful of other annoyances that come with this group of deniers, but that’s mainly it. So, now, the questions you have had, are having now, or may have in the future, have been address in this area.

If you want a higher resolution copy of the graphic at the top of this post, click through to HERE then click on the graphic.

Climatology Versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics

March 11, 2015UncategorizedBook review, Books, Climate Change, Climate Change, Climatology and Pseudoscience, Dana Nuccitelli, Denialism, Global Warming, Global Warming, Lies and DenialGreg Laden

Dana Nuccitelli is a key communicator in the climate change conversation. He is co-writer with John Abraham at the Climate Consensus – the 97% blog at the Guardian, and has contributed hundreds of entries to John Cook’s famous site SkepticalScience.com. He has measurably helped people to understand climate change science and the nuances of the false debate based over climate manufactured by science deniers.

And, he’s written a book!

Graphic from Cook, Nuccitelli, Et Al 2013 paper quantifying the consensus on climate change. This figure also appears in "Climatology and Pseudoscience" — Graphic from Cook, Nuccitelli, Et Al 2013 paper quantifying the consensus on climate change. This figure also appears in “Climatology and Pseudoscience”

Climatology Versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics fills a wide open niche in the climate science discussion. Dana powers through the literature on climate science, identifying and describing instances of the predictions, projections, or assertions made by climate science and compares these with assertions made by climate science contrarians, also known as deniers. (Though the distinction between denier and non-denier emerged later in the full time frame addressed in the book.) Simply put, Dana compares the two at several points to see which is correct: the projection that human generated greenhouse gas pollution warms the Earth and changes the climate, or the projection that it does not.

It turns out it does! But you knew that. But what you might not have realized is the overall time frame of how this situation has developed. Dana skillfully documents the deeply disturbing fact that the issue of global warming (and related things) has been settled for a very long time. Were it not for mainly fossil fuel industry funded anti-science activists, we would not be having this discussion today, and Dana would not have had to write his book. Rather, science would be focused on figuring out the remaining and important details of how the Earth’s climate system responds to human pollution as well as natural changes, and policy makers would be busy working out how to keep the Carbon in the ground. We probably would have had a price on Carbon years ago, and we’d probably be running our civilizations off of a very high and ever increasing percentage of clean (non fossil carbon) energy. But no, those denialists had to ruin it for everyone with their fake skepticism.

I asked Dana Nuccitelli, “What surprised you most while researching and writing this book?” and he told me,

I was surprised at how accurate mainstream climate scientists’ predictions about global warming have been, even using the earliest global climate models as early as 43 years ago. The earliest model predictions were based mainly on the warming expected from the increasing greenhouse effect, so it goes to show what a dominant factor carbon pollution has played on global temperature changes over the past half century.

Climatology Versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics is engagingly written, clear, accurate, non-technical but not watered down. If you know the stuff in this book you can be more confident than ever having those conversations with with your friends Denialist Dan and Warmest Willie. In fact, I would recommend Climatology Versus Pseudoscience along side Michael Mann’s book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines for a comprehensive treatment of the history of both denialism and the science itself.

I asked Dana who he had in mind as the most likely audience for this book. I’m sure it is for general readership, but I also felt it could be used in classes.

I wrote the book with the general public as my intended audience. I wanted to make explanations about some basic climate science concepts accessible to everyone. My publisher told me that they anticipate that universities and libraries will be the main purchasers of the book though, so they may have had class use in mind more than I did!

Dana covers the early days of climate science, discusses the “Astounding Accuracy of Early Climate Models (Chapter 3), discusses the development of the scientific consensus on climate change, and provides an excellent overview of the current situation with greenhouse gas pollution caused climate change.

Over the last year or so, it seems that the climate conversation is starting to shift. Major media outlets are changing their approach, not following the dictum of false balance. Climate change is starting to become a bigger factor in elections, in a good way. The President of the United States has openly called on Americans to reject science denialism. I asked Dana where he thought the climate change conversation might be going over the next couple of years, and if we might see addressing climate change as more routine rather than highly controversial in the future.

I think much of the media is starting to shift towards more accurate, responsible, and truly balanced coverage on climate change. The Washington Post has been doing a great job since they hired Chris Mooney. The Guardian’s climate coverage is excellent. TV media coverage has been improving, and some great shows like Years of Living Dangerously and Cosmos have tackled climate change.

I think journalists and producers are starting to understand the difference between false balance and actual balance in climate reporting, and that media shift will be critically important in accurately informing the public on this critical issue. Most people vastly underestimate the level of scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, and I think that can mostly be blamed on media false balance. If you regularly see one-on-one debates, it’s natural to assume the experts are divided and debating the issue at hand.

With human-caused global warming, that’s obviously no longer true, but that perceived debate explains why people still don’t view climate change as a top priority. That needs to change, but that won’t happen until we have truly balanced media coverage accurately informing the public. That was one of my key motivations in writing this book – to hold the climate contrarians accountable for their bad science and failed predictions, because so far the media has failed to do that.

Dana’s final chapter talks about the future, about what can and should happen. He notes that we have the technology in hand to solve the climate crisis, and that we are starting to apply it.

I strongly recommend this book for the general reader, but I would also suggest it for use in certain classes, either in high school or college. If you are a teacher and want to thoroughly cover the “Debate” over climate science, get this book.

Published by Praeger; 214 pages; copious notes; index; cool graphic.

And now, for a little video fun related to Dana’s book, climate science, and the scientific consensus on greenhouse gas pollution and its effects:

Dana on Typhoon Haiyan and Climate Change:

The Climate Consensus Project (John Cook, Dana “Nutelli” Nuccitelli, and others):

A typical climate science denier, John Spencer, talking about the Consensus Project. on “Andrew Neil vs Dana Nuccitelli”

What climate scientists and communicators do when they are not being challenged by climate contrarians:

Dana’s Ice environmentally thoughtful Ice Bucket Challenge:

Congressman Grijalva is doing the right thing

March 4, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Lies and Denial, Raul Grijalva, Willie SoonGreg Laden

Raúl Grijalva Investigates

Raúl Grijalva is the US representative from Arizona’s 3rd congressional district, a Democrat, and a supporter of environmental initiatives. As the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee, he recently sent letters to seven universities requesting documents related to the background of climate change research, as a response to recent revelations in the New York Times of seemingly inappropriate failure to disclose industry funding sources by Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Willie Soon. These letters requested the following:

The university policy on employee financial disclosure.
For specific researchers or projects, drafts of government testimony and communications regarding testimony preparation.
Information on funding sources for the specific researchers, including the source, amount, reasons for the funding, description of funded research, and communications regarding the funding.
Copies of financial disclosure forms listing the university.
Information on the researcher’s compensation for a specified period of time.

All seven letters went to institutions housing researchers who are regarded to some degree or another as having published material that might be seen as favorable to fossil fuel industry supporters, who, in turn, are generally regarded as potentially benefiting from policy inaction regarding human caused greenhouse gas pollution. In other words, Congressman Grijalva was looking for Soon-like instances of industry support for bogus research that would ultimately be used by, among others, climate science denialists in Congress to delay action on climate change.

This makes sense to do, Grijalva has the legal power to do this, and indeed, the responsibility to do this.

Reconsidering Grijalva’s Strategy

However, several people and institutions, including those who tend to protect the interests of Big Fossil but also, those who are interested in advancing good science and good policy based on that science, felt that some of these requests went to far. Rather than trying to represent others’ views, I’ll give you my own view on this.

In this world of electronic communication, the private conversation, or the closed door meeting, has been partly replaced and extensively augmented by electronic communication. This means that ideas we may float or open, honest, unfettered conversations we may have, are often recorded in electronic form, at least in part. The words we speak as part of a private conversation in a hallway or office dissipate into the air; the only physical result is the small additional heat generated as the sound waves we generate vibrate some of the molecules around us. At some point these frank, sincere, and honest (or not in some cases) conversations may turn in to some form of documentation. The conversation around the table at a faculty meeting turns into minutes. The chattering among scientists at the Monday Morning Lab Meeting turns into a memo from the lab director about what the graduate students and post docs have to start (or stop) doing. Ideas tossed around among a set of researchers may turn into a grant proposal. Endless conversations about the data and the analyses of those data turn into a draft paper. And so on.

But many of these conversations, these days, do not simply dissipate as heat, with the best or most important parts written down. Now, much of that chatter, because it takes the form of electronic communications, is unintended documentation of the process.

I worked for many years in the Congo rainforest, and lived there among the Lese people. The Lese have a saying that is absolutely wonderful. This saying is used when someone wants to say something to you that you might find objectionable, but they don’t want to push the issue too far. It goes, “Let me give you these words. If you don’t like them, give them back and we’ll pretend they never existed.”

Life is full of conversations that work that way. If scientist, administers, students, teachers, and everybody else were unable to communicate with each other without the prospect of these private conversations being made public by a freedom of information request or a Congressional demand or a legal subpoena, then those conversations would have to stop happening. That would be unthinkably stifling and destructive to the process of advancing and applying knowledge.

Grijalva Does The Right Thing

Anyway, a number of people had similar thoughts, and expressed them to Representative Grijalva. And he listened. Not long after sending out the letters, he realized that his request included a certain degree of overreach. According to the National Journal,

“The communications back-and-forth is honestly secondary, and I would even on my own say that that was an overreach in that letter,” Grijalva, the top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, told National Journal on Monday. “I want the disclosure [of funding sources]. Then people can draw their own conclusions.”

I applaud, as we should all, Grijalva’s efforts to look into the practice of industry-bought research results, and their potential use in delaying action on climate change. That is the central narrative here. It may even be the case that in some instances looking at private correspondence will be necessary as part of one investigation or another. But at this point in time, the only thing Representative Grijalva needs is the subset of requested information that relates to disclosure, and it appears that that is the information he is now focused on. So, I applaud his rational thinking and sensible approach in this regard as well.

Cry for me, Willie Soon

March 3, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Harvard Center for Astrophysics, Heartland Institute, Lies and Denial, Science Denialism, Willie SoonGreg Laden

And by “me” I mean all the children of future generations.

Willie Soon is a soft-money scientist at Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been producing highly questionable ‘science’ casting, for several years, faux light on the reality of the human caused process of global warming. It appears that most or all of Soon’s funding came directly or indirectly from the fossil fuel industry or supporters of that industry. (See also John Mashy’s comment below about tax breaks.) Recently the dung has struck the rotating blades and the nexus of denialist ‘science,’ fossil fuel funding, and Willie Soon has been brightly illuminated for all to see. Soon’s activities have actually been known for quite some time. Indeed, one of the denialist arguments that this isn’t really a story is the based on the assertion that this isn’t really a new story. (Pro tip: something like this going on for years is a bigger, not smaller, story!) What is different this time is that mainstream media, currently undergoing a transition away from maintaining a false balance debate about climate change has started to get real, and the main main stream media outlet in the US, the New York Times, anointed the Soon story as a story.

Even though Soon is ensconced at Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (which is more of a Smithsonian thing than a Harvard thing, but the links to Harvard are very real I am ashamed to admit) he recently made a public written statement about his situation and chose to convey that statement via the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is the infamous Libertarian ‘think’ tank that supported the tobacco industry in their bid to cover up the dangers of smoking, and that has been involved in a range of rather nefarious activities vis-a-vis climate change science denialism. Soon has been an affiliate of Heartland for some time now. Soon’s statement reads:

In recent weeks I have been the target of attacks in the press by various radical environmental and politically motivated groups. This effort should be seen for what it is: a shameless attempt to silence my scientific research and writings, and to make an example out of me as a warning to any other researcher who may dare question in the slightest their fervently held orthodoxy of anthropogenic global warming.

Um, Imma let you finish reading the statement but first I want to comment on that first paragraph. The “radical” groups include Greenpeace, which I would argue is a radical group, but also, the New York Times, which I would regard as centrist, as well as a number of climate and environmental advocacy groups and individuals including mainstream scientists. What Soon calls an “orthodoxy” is actually a broadly held scientific consensus, like the “Germ Theory,” and “Einsteinian Physics” and such. By “question in the slightest” he must mean, since he is speaking circumspectly of his own work, “radical contrarianism of the important findings of climate science.” So, ladies and gentlemen, we see the magic of rhetoric at work. Soon is the radical, which is why he calls others radicals. OK, you may continue reading now.

I am saddened and appalled by this effort, not only because of the personal hurt it causes me and my family and friends, but also because of the damage it does to the integrity of the scientific process. I am willing to debate the substance of my research and competing views of climate change with anyone, anytime, anywhere. It is a shame that those who disagree with me resolutely decline all public debate and stoop instead to underhanded and unscientific ad hominem tactics.

Soon is famous for deflecting attempts to engage him in Q&A periods after the talks he gives. So forget about the debate. Soon is indeed being subjected to parallel attacks; scientists have been saying for years that his science sucks. That is not ad hominem. It is just that his science sucks. But also, his ethics are now being newly questioned, as he seems to have failed on numerous occasions to properly declare his industry funding. If accusing someone, copious evidence in hand, of ethical violations is ad hominem, then that is what it is. Soon’s reference to ad hominem is misguided. People are saying “Your science sucks. And your ethics are questionable.” The ad hominem fallacy would apply here only if people were saying “Your science sucks because your ethics suck.” No, his science does not stand on its own. OK, sorry for the interruption. Back to the statement.

Let me be clear. I have never been motivated by financial gain to write any scientific paper, nor have I ever hidden grants or any other alleged conflict of interest. I have been a solar and stellar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for a quarter of a century, during which time I have published numerous peer-reviewed, scholarly articles. The fact that my research has been supported in part by donations to the Smithsonian Institution from many sources, including some energy producers, has long been a matter of public record. In submitting my academic writings I have always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally, consistent with the level of disclosure made by many of my Smithsonian colleagues.

Whether or not Soon or any other author of a peer reviews paper is motivated by financial gain is irrelevant to the question of proper disclosure of funding. Who knows, he may be right. After all, it was just a million or so dollars, who would be motivated by that? That is a distraction. Do note his reference to grant money coming to him via the Smithsonian. We’ll return to that later. I find his reference to “many” of his Smithsonian colleagues interesting as well.

If the standards for disclosure are to change, then let them change evenly. If a journal that has peer-reviewed and published my work concludes that additional disclosures are appropriate, I am happy to comply. I would ask only that other authors-on all sides of the debate-are also required to make similar disclosures. And I call on the media outlets that have so quickly repeated my attackers’ accusations to similarly look into the motivations of and disclosures that may or may not have been made by their preferred, IPCC-linked scientists.

Just to be clear, there really is no question that Soon failed to disclose funding sources in violation of journal policies and standard practice. I should note that his failure to disclose has been on the table for some time and at no point did he address that issue, as far as I know. I suspect that Soon’s repeated references to “others” is a deluded hope that everyone should realize that everyone has been acting unethically and this will motivate everyone to back off. (See this interesting pot by Ugo Bardi on disclosure in science.)

I regret deeply that the attacks on me now appear to have spilled over onto other scientists who have dared to question the degree to which human activities might be causing dangerous global warming, a topic that ought rightly be the subject of rigorous open debate, not personal attack. I similarly regret the terrible message this pillorying sends young researchers about the costs of questioning widely accepted “truths.”

Actually, some of those people are not questioning human cause, but they are questioning the danger. But I digress.

There is indeed a message here to the young and upcoming researchers. Keep your ducks in a row when it comes to ethics and similar concerns. Otherwise, this is exactly the fight Soon says he is ready for. If you produce research that asks questions of a widely held consensus, more power to you! You may well be making an important contribution. But if your research is shown to be seriously wanting time and time again, you may want to refer to that old adage of unknown attribution about doing the same thing that does not work over and over again.

Finally, I thank all my many colleagues and friends who have bravely objected to this smear campaign on my behalf and I challenge all parties involved to focus on real scientific issues for the betterment of humanity.

This sentence really pisses me off. Willie Soon and his denialist colleagues in science and Congress have measurably stalled our collective action on climate change. How dare you play the victim, Willie Soon. You are one of the perpetrators of what could be defined, and some day will be defined, as a crime against future generations (though this isn’t technically illegal, of course). The young pre-school age children of today will suffer more than they otherwise might have because of this delay. Shame on you. Don’t tell us about the “betterment of humanity.” Don’t ask us to cry for you, Willie Soon. You are in a hole. You dug that hole, and got paid a million or two bucks along the way. You tossed our children under the bus, and now you are whinging about your own fate?

And now, for the last part of the statement:

Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Why is Willie Soon of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics releasing a statement indicating he is of that institution via the Heartland Institute, rather than from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics? I think it is very weird that he released a statement that he is not an industry shill through an organization that is an industry shill. Beyond that anything in his convoluted statement makes equal sense.

Note that in his statement, Soon throws the Smithsonian under the bus, or perhaps, drags the institution under his own bus, by reminding everyone that the grants actually came (he claims) to him from the Smithsonian, to which Big Fossil had made donations. Note also that Soon implies that failure to disclose is normal for his colleagues at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, or perhaps, the Smithsonian in general. Wow. One can only imagine the conversations going on behind closed doors between Garden Street and Concord Avenue, Cambridge, MA.

I strongly suspect that the only question that remains in the Willy Soon Gate affair is who is going down with Willie. We see the usual denialists lining up with him, and they are of no consequence. They have already crashed and burned. But we also see various so-called ‘contrarians’ choosing to jump in Willie’s hole, or not, and I strongly recommend not.

Science Denialists Have Delayed Action On Climate Change: Soon vs. the Hockey Stick

March 2, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Denialism, Global Warming, Global Warming, James Inhofe, Lies and Denial, Michael Mann, The Hockey Stick, Willie SoonGreg Laden

If you have not been living in a cave, and had you been, I’d respect that, you know about Willie Soon Gate. Willie soon is a researcher on soft money at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Soon is well known for producing research of questionable quality that anemically attempts to buck the scientific consensus that human caused greenhouse gas pollution is rapidly raising the Earth’s temperature. Soon’s links to the fossil fuel industry have been known for some time, but recently, he has gotten into even more hot water over having published papers without properly disclosing that the work was funded by Big Fossil. The story is complex and I will not recite it here. What I want to do instead is to place the story in a larger context.
Soon did not arrive on the horizon recently. His involvement with anti-climate change science activism goes back over ten years. The rise of Willie Soon and the early effects of his ‘research’ on policy have been well documented in Michael Mann’s book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

Let me give you the short version first, followed by elaboration using a handful of quotes from Mann’s book. Really, though, you should just go read the book. (By the way, if you do read it, consider leaving a review at Amazon; there has been a concerted effort by science denialists to leave bogus one star and otherwise horrid, inaccurate reviews on that site!)

The following graphic shows the march of global surface temperatures over the period we call the “Instrumental record,” which is the period of time best measured by thermometers and, later, satellites. The inset is a version of the famous “Hockey Stick Graph produced by Michael Mann and colleagues, showing recent warming in the context of previous natural variation. The inset shows both the “Hockey Stick” (in blue) and an independent reconstruction by the PAGES2k group (in green) which is an independent validation of the original Hockey Stick result.

This shows a the very end of period of mainly “natural variation” followed by a dramatic increase in surface temperatures owing to increased greenhouse gas pollution.

Here is a closeup of the same graph showing just the period of time over which the surface temperature variation, which amounts to an average increase, that is unambiguously anomalous compared to the past. This increase is pretty much entirely due to the effects of humans.

I’ve marked off a section of this graph that shows just the data since about 2003. This is the year that these two things happened: 1) Willie Soon co-authored two papers arguing that global warming wasn’t really happening, or was not human caused; and 2) Senator Jim Inhofe held Congressional hearings on climate change at which Soon, Mann, and others, testified.
There is no doubt whatsoever that action to reduce climate change has been slowed or even simply stopped in some cases by Big Fossil funded anti-science activism, which generally has involved an unholy marriage between crappy science and political maneuvering in Congress and elsewhere, a marriage involving a big dowery from fossil fuel interests. Willie Soon’s papers and Inhofe’s use of bad science is only part of the picture, but a key part, and at least, illustrative of the process. The following are brief quotes from Mann’s book describing part of the story. Again, read the book to get the full context and all of the details.

Soon after Mann and his colleagues published the Hockey Stick research, there was a range of reactions among which were attacks from the denialist community. One of these was a non peer reviewed piece put on a web site.

“The Summer of Our Discontent” (August 1998), had been invited from Sally Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. [Suggesting] that we had extended the MBH98 hockey stick no further back in time than A.D. 1400 for fear of encountering the warmer temperatures of the medieval warm period—a charge that … is nonsensical, since the stopping point was entirely determined by objective statistical criteria. Second, they claimed that our reconstruction suffered from an issue known as the “divergence problem”…

(I’ve discussed the divergence problem at length elsewhere on this blog.)

In a section of his book called “The Paper That Launched a Half-Dozen Resignations,” Mann talks about the Soon and Baliunas paper. Both Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon were at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Soon being a protege of Baliunas’. She had previously worked on the role of the sun in the Earth’s climate system.

The two went on to publish a number of articles analyzing the relationships between records of past solar variability and climate. … the Soon and Baliunas article took the form of two nearly identical papers published simultaneously in two different journals in spring 2003. One version of the paper appeared in the journal Climate Research while the other (which, it turns out, was simply a longer, unedited version of the first, but with three more coauthors added) was published in the journal Energy and Environment. Duplicate publication of a paper is highly unusual, and in fact is strictly forbidden by most academic journals. That both the authors and the study had been supported by the American Petroleum Institute—each of the authors had a long history of fossil fuel industry funding—combined with the highly unusual dual publication of the paper raised some eyebrows. Questions had been raised, moreover, about the two journals that jointly published the paper. Climate Research had in the recent past published a spate of contrarian papers of questionable scientific merit. Some members of the editorial board had already expressed concern that one editor at the journal known for his advocacy for the fossil fuel industry.

[One of the journal’s editors,] Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen … quite remarkably confessed in an interview … “I’m following my political agenda—a bit, anyway. But isn’t that the right of the editor?” The Soon and Baliunas study claimed to contradict previous work—including our own—that suggested that the average warmth of the Northern Hemisphere in recent decades was unprecedented over a time frame of at least the past millennium.

Mann goes on to explain in detail why the papers were scientifically flawed, and notes that …

The authors in many cases had mischaracterized or misrepresented the past studies they claimed to be assessing in their meta-analysis … Paleoclimatologist Peter de Menocal of Columbia University/LDEO, for example, who had developed a proxy record of ocean surface temperature from sediments off the coast of Africa, indicated that “Mr. Soon and his colleagues could not justify their conclusions that the African record showed the 20th century as being unexceptional … My record has no business being used to address that question.”

In response to Soon and Baliunas,

A group of twelve leading climate scientists joined me in authoring a rebuttal to Soon and Baliunas in Eos, the official newsletter of the American Geophysical Union. … The American Geophysical Union considered our rejoinder important enough to issue a press release entitled “Leading Climate Scientists Reaffirm View That Late 20th Century Warming Was Unusual and Resulted from Human Activity” in early July 2003, just prior to the article’s publication. Nevertheless, the Soon and Baliunas study was immediately taken up by the U.S. Senate’s leading climate change denier, Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

This brings us to the use of Soon’s and other denialist work as a tool to develop a contrarian argument in a Senate Hearing. Senator James Inhofe, famous for claiming that climate change is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public, chaired the hearing which was held in July 2003. Again, you should read Mann’s account for all the amazing details; it is a rousing story! In essence, Soon and his work were being used to argue against the importance of Global Warming, and Mann represented the scientific view. The story also involves Hillary Clinton (in case you were wondering about her position on climate change). Here’s the part of Mann’s recounting I want you to see:

Midway through the hearing, [ranking member] Jeffords dropped a bombshell. He announced that his staff had received a note from Hans Von Storch announcing his resignation as chief editor of the journal Climate Research, in protest over the publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper. Von Storch was no scientific ally of mine. Indeed … he and I had had disputes in the past regarding the relative merits of statistical climate reconstruction methods. But ally or not, Von Storch was outraged that such a transparently flawed paper had been published in his journal. His note, which Jeffords read aloud, was to the point: “My view … is that the review of the Soon et al. paper failed to detect significant methodological flaws … The paper should not have been published in this forum, not because of the eventual conclusion, but because of the insufficient evidence to draw this conclusion.” Von Storch’s resignation had been precipitated by the refusal of the journal’s publisher, Otto Kinne, to allow him to publish an editorial expressing his view that the peer review process had clearly failed with the Soon and Baliunas paper. Several other editors quit as well (ultimately six editors—half the editorial board—would quit in protest over the incident)….

Perhaps the single most troubling issue to arise from the Soon and Baliunas affair was that of apparent editorial malpractice. At the two journals that published versions of the paper, the peer review process appears to have been compromised to produce a study in the scientific literature that could be seized upon by those with a contrarian policy agenda. … It is particularly pernicious when that process is compromised or co-opted for political ends.

Funded, I’ll add, by Big Fossil.

I asked Michael Mann how much damage he reckons Soon and Baliunas, and others like them, have done to the process of developing good policies to combat climate change. He told me, “Well, they are the hired hands of the “Merchants of Doubt”, the ones who do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by muddying the waters and confusing the public into thinking that there is still a scientific debate about whether climate change is happening, whether it is due to human activity, and whether it is a problem. There is none. It is hard to know just how much damage these deniers-for-hire have done to our civilization and our planet by needlessly delaying the action necessary to avert dangerous climate change.

As a follow-up, I wondered if he thought the recent exposure of climate science denials tactics would change the nature of future Senate hearings for the better. “I do—in my dreams,” he said. “Sadly, we are not there yet. While there is a worthy debate to be had about how we confront the challenge of averting the climate change threat, there is no legitimate debate to be had about whether or not the problem exists. Currently we have a congress that is committed to keeping that fake debate alive, as we have seen all too recently in the antics of folks like Senator James “climate change is a hoax” Inhofe, who now controls the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. We have to get past that.”

Finally, I asked Mann if he saw evidence that the peer review process has ultimately been improved as a result of clear abuses by denialist authors, or the reaction of publishers to those abuses. He told me, “Well, I certainly think that the scientific community is now far more aware of some of the bad faith efforts that have been made by industry-funded climate change deniers to pollute the peer-reviewed literature with antiscientific, agenda-driven screeds. Cracks still exist in the system, but slowly they are being repaired as scientists and editors increasingly learn more about the forces of antiscience that are still very much at play today.”

The Hydraulic Hypothesis and the End of Civilization

March 2, 2015UncategorizedArchaeology, Climate Change, Climate Change, Global Systems, Global Warming, Global Warming, Origin of Agriculture, Origins of AgricultureGreg Laden

OK, I admit the title of this post is possibly a bit extreme but I could not resist the symmetry. Here, I refer to both ends of civilization, the start and the finish.

I’d like to talk about a recent review published in Science, titled “Systems integration for global sustainability” written by my colleague Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute together with Jiangou Liu, Harold Mooney, Vanessa Hull, Steven Davis, Joane Gaskell, Thomas Hertel, Jane Lubchenco, Karent Seto, Claire Kremen and Shuxin Li. But I want to put this paper in a broader perspective, dipping into my training as an archaeologist. But first a relevant digression.

The so called “Hydraulic Hypothesis” is an idea first fully characterized by the historian Karl Wittfogel. His original idea was part of a larger model for the origin of civilization that we see today as having several problematic aspects, but the key idea is still valid. If agriculture is the basis for a society, and it is carried out in a semi-arid region, then the management of water through various forms of irrigation and the centralized control of the agricultural cycle lends itself to centralized despotic leadership. or at least, some kid of cultural and social change allowing for organized effort to predominate over individual self interest. (In fact irrigation based systems have emerged without despotic leadership, and complex society has emerged absent a hydraulic beginning, so this is an oversimplification, just so you know.) But in its simplest form we can correctly say that the emergence of stratified, hierarchic, complexly organized societies was often linked in no small part to the emergence of organizational (and technological) solutions to growing food where there is not enough rain at the right time of year. There is a great advantage to growing food in this manner. The crops become, in essence, invasive species, because human activity provides the crops with a leg up on all the other plants in the region. A plant that in wild form is found primarily in limited microhabitats, out competed everywhere else by more arid-adapted plants, suddenly has a free ride across a vast landscape. Despite the fact that the Hydraulic Hypothesis is an oversimplification, we can appreciate the fact that the beginnings of human “civilization” (as a social and economic system, which we retain today by and large) is linked partially but importantly to managing water to grow food.

At present the news story that never fails to occupy the front page is ISIS, the Islamic State, making a nuisance of itself in Syria and Iraq. It is generally thought that ISIS emerged in large part because of the quasi-failure of Syria. Syria transited from being a run of the mill Middle Eastern Kingdom with some powerful connections to a quasi-failed state for a number of reasons, but one of the big factors turns out to be water. Or, really, lack thereof. In a recently published paper (not the one in Science mentioned above), Peter Gleick made this point:

The Syrian conflict that began in 2012 has many roots, including long-standing political, religious, and social ideological disputes; economic dislocations from both global and regional factors; and worsening environmental conditions. … key environmental factors include both direct and indirect consequences of water shortages, ineffective watershed management, and the impacts of climate variability and change on regional hydrology. Severe multiyear drought beginning in the mid-2000s, combined with inefficient and often unmodernized irrigation systems and water abstractions by other parties in the eastern Mediterranean, including especially Syria, contributed to the displacement of large populations from rural to urban centers, food insecurity for more than a million people, and increased unemployment—with subsequent effects on political stability. There is some evidence that the recent drought is an early indicator of the climatic changes that are expected for the region, including higher temperature, decreased basin rainfall and runoff, and increased water scarcity. Absent any efforts to address population growth rates, these water-related factors are likely to produce even greater risks of local and regional political instability, unless other mechanisms for reducing water insecurity can be identified and implemented.

Two key graphics from Gleick’s paper demonstrate the role of climate change. First, the drop in available water due to decreased rainfall and, probably, increased evaporation:

Second, the decrease in annual average discharge of a key river in the region:

Adaptation to an arid environment allowed the development of agriculture, and required the development of complex states, thousands of years ago, in this region. Subsequent increases and decreases in aridity and other natural climate factors have been recognized as creating local collapses around the Mediterranean during subsequent millennia. But now, climate change (together with the other factors Gleick mentions) has pushed the system over the edge. Thousands of years of technological adaptation and cultural evolution to address the problem of growing grains and orchards in dry country together with modern technology to the extent it has been applied have been insufficient to allow the system to continue in some localities, and everything we know about climate change strongly suggests that this is going to get worse, eventually encompassing the entire region. Expect most of the Middle East to become a client region for global agricultural production over the next decade or two. The term Arab Spring is deeply ironic; the spring is running dry.

So this is how the Hydraulic Hypothesis bookends civilization. Cultural technological management of limited or badly timed natural water were adaptations to semi-arid climate conditions and contributed to the development of what we call civilization. As climate conditions shift to the point where these adaptations become unreliable, the system fails. And, the failure is in part because of prior success. As a highly integrated but organic system it is unable to manage deep and causative change. If Vulcans ran the Earth, the Syrian farmers would have been, logically, put on some sort of dole and eventually retasked, and there would not have been a civil war. But since we rely so much on organic system evolution (which includes in part the much vaunted “free market”) that is not what happened.

The review in Science addresses the large scale system dynamics. From the paper:

Global sustainability challenges, from maintaining biodiversity to providing clean air and water, are closely interconnected yet often separately studied and managed. Systems integration—holistic approaches to integrating various components of coupled human and natural systems—is critical to understand socioeconomic and environmental interconnections and to create sustainability solutions. Recent advances include the development and quantification of integrated frameworks that incorporate ecosystem services, environmental footprints, planetary boundaries, human-nature nexuses, and telecoupling. Although systems integration has led to fundamental discoveries and practical applications, further efforts are needed to incorporate more human and natural components simultaneously, quantify spillover systems and feedbacks, integrate multiple spatial and temporal scales, develop new tools, and translate findings into policy and practice. Such efforts can help address important knowledge gaps, link seemingly unconnected challenges, and inform policy and management decisions.

The study focuses on biofuels and “virtual water” to illustrate the broader concepts. Since we’re talking about Hydraulic adaptation at the beginning and end (maybe) of human civilization, let’s look more closely at the virtual water.

What is virtual water, you ask? Let’s say you and I are the farmers (there are no other farmers) and together we produce all of the food. We live in different places and the food gets traded back and forth. You may be surprised to hear that for every liter of water the people who live in our hypothetical two-farm world drink as refreshment, we farmers require something like 100 liters of water to match that in food (that is a very rough estimate). But the water requirement varies tremendously by the kind of food. Let’s say I grow wheat and you grow eggs. That means that every person-year of food (in terms of calories) that I grow requires a very small fraction of the water that you need to grow one person-year of calories. Plants generally require a fraction of the water that animal products require. Even among plants the differences are rather large.

So, if we trade wheat and eggs (I give you wheat and you give me eggs) evenly by calorie, than we are simultaneously trading water, but very unevenly. When I give you 1000 calories of wheat, I’m giving you something like 1000 liters of water, virtually. When you give me 1000 calories of eggs, you are giving me perhaps a million liters of water, virtually. If you are farming in a water rich region and I’m farming in a water poor region, that makes sense and it may even be the reason I grow wheat and you grow egg chickens. Or, if we started out with plentiful water relative to production in both regions, but your farms experience increasing aridity, there is now a pressure for us to change our virtual water trading practices. You should be growing some wheat and I should be growing some chickens.

Alternatively we could eat less animal product. Or, if you like you can experience a regional civil war in your part of the world and create a religious state that everybody hates. Whatever.

In real life, virtual water is quite complex. From the review:

The main virtual water exporters (sending systems) are water-rich regions in North and South America and Australia, whereas Mexico, Japan, China, and water-poor regions in Europe are the main importers (receiving systems)… Asia recently switched its virtual water imports from North America to South America. On the other hand, North America has engaged in an increased diversification of intraregional water trade while trading with distant countries in Asia. China has undergone a dramatic increase in virtual water imports since 2000, via products such as soybeans from Brazil (nearly doubling from 2001 to 2007 and amounting to 13% of the total global world water trade). The spatial shift in the use of soybean products in Brazil from domestic to international has led to water savings in other countries, but at the cost of deforestation in Brazilian Amazon. Within-country virtual water transfer is also common. For example, virtual water flow through grain trade from North China to South China goes in the opposite direction of real water transfer through large projects, such as the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, that aim to alleviate water shortages in North China.

Or, in the form of a picture, from the review:

To me one of the key issues raised when taking a system level look, and this refers back directly to the Hydraulic Hypothesis, is the role of regulatory process and government. After all, we created these governments (as part of civilization) for the exact reason of managing the emerging complex system of agriculture (oversimplified again … and there were other reasons of course). So I asked Peter Gleick what he thought about the relationship between free market economics, regulation, and government (or higher level) involvement. He told me, “Free markets are both a solution and a problem. There is growing evidence that for a number of critical global challenges, government oversight and regulatory institutions are critically important to correct the failure of free markets. We encourage trade in goods and services worldwide, which has led to a remarkable trade in “virtual water” — the water required to make those goods and services. This is a good thing, in my opinion, because it permits countries that could never possibly be self sufficient in food because of insufficient water (most of the Middle East and North Africa) to use their limited water for higher valued economic activities and then buy food on the market. But the market failure here is that natural ecosystems do not compete or play a role in such “markets” — permitting the complete extinction of endemic fish from the Aral Sea to grow cotton in the Central Asian republics for export. I could give other examples of gross free market failures with global consequences (ozone hole, climate change). So, yes, balance markets with strong government regulatory oversight to protect public goods.”

This makes sense because of one of the things people almost always forget when it comes to market forces. The free market model assumes that the system is made up of “ideal free actors.” Ideal free does not mean free of ideals! (Maybe there should be a comma there.) The actors in the market are “ideal” in that they are identical in their access to information and ability to act on it, and they are free in the sense that there are no external constraints on those actions. So, ideal actors regulated (not free) do not make up a free market (that is the point usually made by Libertarians) but more often than not, the actors are not “ideal.” It is a major failure of integration of economics theory and social theory to place the non-ideal parts in the category of “external costs” and ignore them. One actor’s external costs is another actor’s non-idealness.

I also asked Gleick to elaborate on the relationship between regional collapse and the global system, as a means of integrating the two studies I cover above. He responded, “… can regional collapses influence or perturb global systems, rather than the other way around? I would argue for example that perturbed global systems are influencing regional collapses (for example, climate, drought, and Syria). A functioning global systems approach would have to be able to handle regional perturbations. Could you argue that the political collapse in the US Congress is a major barrier to a global systems approach to cut greenhouse gas emissions? Yes. But that US government failure can be bypassed by other mechanisms, as we’re seeing now with California’s cap/trade system; collaborative state efforts; federal efforts that bypass congressional constraints using other mechanisms.”

Peter Gleick has written up his own comments on the Science review, on his blog, here.

Citation: Liu, J. H. Mooney, V. Hull, S.J. Davis, J. Gaskell, T.Hertel, J. Lubchenco, K.C. Seto, P.H. Gleick, C. Kremen, S. Li. 2015. Systems Integration for Global Sustainability. Science, Vol. 347, No. 6225. 27 February 2015. DOI: 10.1126/science.1258832

New Research Demonstrates Link Between Greenhouse Gas Pollution and Global Warming

March 1, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, CO2, Global Warming, Global Warming, Radiative ForcingGreg Laden

New Research on the Effects of CO2 Pollution

A paper just published in Nature reports on the direct measurement of the effects of human greenhouse gas pollution on the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere. This is empirical verification of anthropogenic global warming.

Since the Industrial Revolution, when humans started polluting the Earth’s atmosphere with copious amounts of long lived greenhouse gases released from entombment as fossil fuels, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has skyrocketed from close to 250 parts per million (ppm) to about 400ppm. In fact, February was the first month since records have been kept to average over 400ppm, though that value has been reached several times over the last year or so. This is the highest concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in a very long time. Direct measurements of air trapped in glacial ice confirms that CO2 has been well below 300ppm for the last 800,000 years. We can’t measure CO2 as easily for periods before this, but it can be estimated, and the best estimates suggest that the last time our planet has had CO2 levels of 400ppm or more is during the very early Pleistocene or, more likely, the Late Pliocene, between roughly 2.5 and 3.5 million years ago.

The transition from higher CO2 levels, and a warmer Earth to a cooler Earth changed the planet’s ecology considerably, giving rise for the the first time to widespread grasslands (much of that now converted to vast farmlands), reduced forests, repeated glaciations and other changes. It is generally accepted that these changes directly or indirectly caused many of the key steps in human evolution. So, millions of years ago, the planet changed to one inhabited by our immediate ancestors and eventually our own species, and our physiology, culture, technology, psychology, and everything else evolved in this new context. Re-heating the Earth to Miocene levels in a very short period of time will have dramatic consequences and will possibly make it impossible for Humans to live as we do now on this planet.

The science behind this is somewhat complicated but the basics can be easily understood. The sun provides heat to the Earth, but if our atmosphere consisted only of non-greenhouse gases, much of that heat would immediately escape and our planet would be very cold. Adding greenhouse gasses to such a hypothetical Earth would cause a heat imbalance that would eventually increase the average temperature of the oceans, the air near the surface (where we live), the upper several meters of the Earth itself. This heat imbalance would also eventually melt persistent ice such as found today in the world’s glaciers, which in turn would cause a dramatic rise in sea level. Around the edges of the Earth’s continents are preserved ancient beaches or shorelines where the Miocene (or earlier) ocean once ended. Between these ancient shorelines and the modern shoreline, in most places, exist a very large percentage of the Earth’s human population and, in some areas, vast regions that are farmed to produce the world’s supply of food.

We know how this works mainly from two different sources of information. First, there is the basic physics, backed up by laboratory experiments, showing that added greenhouse gasses provide the heat imbalance that causes what we call global warming. Second, we have been measuring the surface temperature of the Earth for many decades, and we can see the heating. One of the most important things to know about this is that the current level of heating is not that expected for the current level of CO2. The current concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases should produce much more heating but it takes time, in the order of decades, for the imbalance to even out. In other words, the increase in greenhouse gases caused by human pollution so far is expected to produce continued warming for decades to come. The primary driver, CO2, is not expected to leave the atmosphere for centuries. So, we are currently locked in to a significant rise in heat, and as we continue to add more CO2 to the atmosphere, the total effect will increase.

In between these two basic facts — the physics of greenhouse pollution and the observation of the effects of greenhouse pollution — is the direct observation of what scientists call “radiative forcing.” Radiative forcing is the degree of perturbation of the planet’s heat energy balance caused by these changes in the atmosphere. To measure radiative forcing, one would observe the energy provided to a given location by the sun, and observe the heat leaving the planet, at two different time periods with different concentrations of greenhouse pollution.

This has been done only a few times, using a range of different technologies. In 2001 scientists reported satellite-observed changes in greenhouse pollution forcing between 1970 and 1997, providing “… direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect that is consistent with concerns over radiative forcing of climate.” This study was replicated and extended in 2013. In 2004 researchers published a paper that reported measurements at eight meteorological stations in Europe, at various elevations and locations. They measured energy flux that they could attribute to a combination of increased vapor (a greenhouse gas naturally present but enhanced by added CO2) and CO2 over eight years. “… after subtracting for two thirds of temperature and humidity rises, the increase of cloud-free longwave downward radiation (+1.8(0.8) Wm?2) remains statistically significant and demonstrates radiative forcing due to an enhanced greenhouse effect.” The science of directly measuring the “smoking gun” of greenhouse gas pollution is further discussed here: Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming

The current study, Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010 by D. R. Feldman, W. D. Collins, P. J. Gero, M. S. Torn, E. J. Mlawer and T. R. Shippert, takes a different approach than the earlier studies and in some ways is a more direct measurement. They used very precise spectroscopic instrumentation located at two sites, one in Oklahoma and one in Alaska, to measure what was happening with the Sun’s energy. They also measured variables that influence the behavior of the energy, such as ambient temperature, water vapor, and clouds. After factoring out everything but the CO2, they were able to accurately measure the effects of radiative forcing. The study was carried out from 2000 to 2010, during which time the atmospheric concentration of CO2 rose 22ppm. From the paper, these “…results confirm theoretical predictions of the atmospheric greenhouse effect due to anthropogenic emissions, and provide empirical evidence of how rising CO2 levels, mediated by temporal variations due to photosynthesis and respiration, are affecting the surface energy balance.”

So, what’s new? In a way, nothing. This is one of those scientific findings that could easily result in a “well, duh” response. We already knew the basic physics, and we already observed the global warming that results from human greenhouse gas pollution. However, it is important and appropriate to directly measure and describe processes that underly such an important phenomenon. Daniel Feldman, lead author, told me, “CO2 concentrations have been measured at several surface stations for decades, including the prominent Keeling curve. The actual radiative forcing (like in IPCC AR5 WG1 Chapter 8), which is distinct from surface temperature, is based, for the most part, on calculations which are informed by laboratory measurements and quantum mechanics. In 2001, John Harries et al published a paper in Nature in which they inferred the greenhouse effect at the TOA based on differencing two satellite instrument data records, but our study is the first to see the effect at the surface from observations.”

The two very far apart sites were chosen to allow comparison of two very different areas of the Earth. I wondered if the CO2 concentrations were different in the two areas (they should be the same, but worth asking just in case!) and if the basic nature of the forcing was similar. Feldman told me that the CO2 levels were not different, and that “we were not able to see a significant difference in the forcing per unit CO2 at the two sites.”

The researchers produced a video showing their results:

Caption from the press release: How carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have changed (blue line) and their warming effect (‘forcing’) on the climate over the same time period (orange line), for the southern Great Plains site (first graph shown) and the northern Alaska site (second). The seasonal fluctuations are caused by the rise and fall in plant photosynthesis in summer and winter, respectively. Source: Feldman et al. ( 2015)

Why Is Greenhouse Gas Pollution Important?

Global warming means more extreme weather. Many meteorologist who watch the weather every day see this even if not all admit it. In some cases, greenhouse gas pollution changes the weather in a way that causes even more change in the weather. Changing weather systems means more lightning, increased high precipitation events in certain regions like the US Northeast, including more frequent large snow storms. Even though concern about this differs with how close one lives to the sea, sea levels are rising and will continue to do so.

Many kinds of storms are more frequent or will become more frequent. We are seeing an increased number of spectacular global warming worsened disasters like Typhoon Haiyan and Frankenstorm Sandy. Some recent tropical cyclones have been so bad that we are talking about adding a new category to the Saffir-Simpson scale.

Heatwaves, obviously, and drought, are expected to be more common and more severe.

There are reasons to think that the effects of human caused climate change are coming on faster than previously expected.

Human caused global warming is real and the amount that humans have heated up the surface of the Earth is dramatic and getting worse, even though corporations, ideological think tanks, and individuals deny the science. Denial of climate science takes many forms and is carried out for many reasons. There are those who appear to be paid by “Big Fossil” to lie to congress, or to publish highly questionable science without disclosing their sources. Another strategy is to mischaracterize the importance of climate change presumably to divert interest and concern away from it. This and other forms of denialism have the effect of slowing down how quickly we address potentially catastrophic carbon pollution.

But the tide is turning on the public and political understanding of scientifically proven greenhouse gas pollution. In 2014 and early 2015, major media outlets openly discussed the use of terms like ‘skeptic’ and ‘denier’ and increasingly made climate change stories front page news. Anti science activists can no longer attack and libel scientists without there being consequences. ‘Skeptics’ who had questioned the reality of global warming from within science carried out research to disprove it and found that they were unable to do so. For the first time ever, the President of the United States is actively calling out anti science denialism. Even Big Fossil or its representatives increasingly admit that human caused global warming is a critically important issue that must be dealt with.

New Research Suggests Global Warming Is About To Heat Up

February 26, 2015Uncategorized#FauxPause, Climate Change, Climate Change, ENSO, Global Warming, Global WarmingGreg Laden

A paper just published in Science Magazine helps explain variation we see in the long term Carbon-pollution caused upward trend Earth’s surface temperatures. The research also, and rather ominously, suggests that a recent slowdown in that trend is likely to reverse direction in the near future, causing the Earth’s surface temperature to rise dramatically.

The graph shown above represents the ongoing warming of the Earth’s surface owing to the increased atmospheric concentration of human generated greenhouse gas pollution, mainly CO2. But, have a look at the following graph of changes in concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s Atmosphere:

As you can see, the increase in CO2 is very steady, while the changes in Earth’s surface temperature is very squiggly. Why? In particular, the Earth’s surface temperatures seem to undergo a series of rapid increases or decreases, and now and then, seem to squiggle up and down along a slowly ascending plateau, as has been happening recently. Climate science deniers have taken this recent slowing in the increase of temperature as a signal that the link between CO2 concentrations and global surface temperatures is a hoax. But real climate scientists focus instead on actually explaining, rather than making up stories about, this variation.

There are several different factors that may cause the shorter term squiggles that we see superimposed on the longer term warming trend. The sun’s energy varies over decades, and this contributes a small amount to the variation. Aerosols (dust), either from human activities or volcanic activity, can produce a cooling effect, and this effect varies across time. If you look at the graph of temperatures, you’ll see a strong downward trend associated with the vast eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, for example. A third source of variation in the upward march of the Earth’s temperature is not really a source of cooling or heating at all, but rather, a shift in where the heat goes. The graph on the top of this post is of “surface temperature,” which is a combination of land-based thermometers at roughly head-height, located at weather stations around the world, and sea surface temperatures. But well over 90% of the heat added to the Earth’s system by the human-caused greenhouse effect actually ends up in the ocean. A small percentage of variation in how much heat goes into, or comes out of, the ocean can cause a large variation in the “surface temperature.” You can think of the surface temperature measurements as a relatively small tail attached to a rather large dog, where the dog is the ocean and the tail is the land based thermometers and the sea surface. (I’ve developed this analogy here.)

That the behavior of the ocean is important can be understood by noting that while surface temperature increase has slowed in recent years, the temperature in the top couple of kilometers of the world’s oceans has continued to increase apace. You can also look at the relationship between the squiggle of the surface temperature curve and El Niño and La Niña events. The former are periods of time when the Pacific ocean is sending heat out into the atmosphere, and the latter are periods of time when the Pacific is sucking more heat in. The following graphic from Skeptical Science illustrates this nicely.

“ENSO” refers to the El Niño-La Niña cycling. The top line, in red, represents the change over time in surface temperature just during El Niño periods, while the blue line, along the bottom, represents change over time in surface temperature just using La Niña years. As you can see, many of the ups and downs in the long term surface temperature trend seem to represent ENSO variation.

Now, to the recently published study. The paper is “Atlantic and Pacific multidecadal oscillations and Northern Hemisphere temperatures” by Byron Steinmann, Michael Mann, and Sonya Miller, and is published in tomorrow’s Science. (Yes, I have a time machine.) From the abstract:

The recent slowdown in global warming has brought into question the reliability of climate model projections of future temperature change and has led to a vigorous debate over whether this slowdown is the result of naturally occurring, internal variability or forcing external to Earth’s climate system. To address these issues, we applied a semi-empirical approach that combines climate observations and model simulations to estimate Atlantic- and Pacific-based internal multidecadal variability (termed “AMO” and “PMO,” respectively). Using this method, the AMO and PMO are found to explain a large proportion of internal variability in Northern Hemisphere mean temperatures. Competition between a modest positive peak in the AMO and a substantially negative-trending PMO are seen to produce a slowdown or “false pause” in warming of the past decade.

The research (also reviewed here by Chris Mooney) combines observational data (temperature records and the indices for the AMO and PMO) with sophisticated modeling techniques to parse out the contributions of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the big dogs of climate change (the Pacific being the much bigger dogs) on surface temperature variability. Essentially, they are trying to determine how much of the squiggling, specially the recent slowing down of temperature increase, is accounted for by “internal variability” as opposed to “forcings.” The former includes the interactions of the surface and the ocean. “Forced” variation is, according to Michael Mann, means “… governed by drivers, be they human (increased greenhouse gas concentrations, sulphate pollutants) or natural (volcanoes, solar output changes). The internal variability is what’s left, it is the purely natural oscillations in the system that have no particular cause, just as weather variations on daily timescales have no particular cause, they just happen.”

One of the findings of this paper, important in climate research but perhaps a bit esoteric, is that the Pacific and Atlantic have mostly independent effects as sources of internal variation. This is not really new, but confirmed by this work. More exactly, treating them as independent provided good results.

But the most important finding is summarized in the following figure, taken from Figure 3 and also reproduced in a writeup by author Mann at Real Climate:

This shows the AMO, PMO, and the derived (combining the two) NMO values over time. Assume that the highest and lowest values are close to the maximum and minimum that these measures normally reach. Note that there is something of a periodicity in these values. That there would be makes sense. These values represent the way in which the oceans interact with the air, and we know that although there is not perfect periodicity (regularity) in that relationship, historically, every year the ocean is in a phase of removing heat from the atmosphere there is an increased chance of a reversal in that relationship. Now, step back from the contentious issue of climate change for a moment, and imagine that these are values of a blue chip stock you are thinking of investing in. Remember the cardinal rule of getting rich on the stock market: Buy low, sell high! Now, decide if you want to put your hard earned money ito the AMO or the PMO. Clearly, the PMO is at a minimum. Buy now because it is going to go up soon!

Remembering that the PMO was found to be a much bigger source of internal variability than the AMO, and that it is a major player in determining surface temperatures, this can only mean one thing. Things are going to heat up soon. Study author Michael Mann told me, “The PMO appears to be very close to a turning point, based on the historical pattern. So we don’t expect it to continue to plunge downward. We expect a turning point soon.” In his summary of the work in Real Climate, Mann notes that “the most worrying implication of our study [is] that the “false pause” may simply have been a cause for false complacency, when it comes to averting dangerous climate change”

We just had the warmest calendar year on record. Last month, January 2015, was probably the second warmest January on record. Using a 12 month moving average (like in the graph at the top of this post), the last 12 months were the warmest 12 months on record. I hear rumors that February, the month we are in, is relatively warm. We have been seeing signs of the Pacific belching out more heat lately, with El Niño threatening. This could all be a very short term trend, as we expect to happen frequently with the general upward march of surface temperatures owing to greenhouse gas pollution. But this latest paper indicates that it might not be; it could be the beginning of a longer upward trend. Whatever effects of surface warming you might be concerned with — increased storms, drought, more rapid melting of glacial ice, killer heat waves — expect more over the next decade than we have over the last decade. And we had quite a bit of that over the last decade.

Smithsonian issues statement on Willie Soon

February 23, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Willie SoonGreg Laden

The following statement was issued this afternoon by the Smithsonian:

Smithsonian Statement on Willie Soon, researcher at the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory.

The Smithsonian is greatly concerned about the allegations surrounding Dr. Willie Soon’s failure to disclose funding sources for his climate change research.
The Smithsonian is taking immediate action to address the issue: Acting Secretary Albert Horvath has asked the Smithsonian Inspector General to review the matter. Horvath will also lead a full review of Smithsonian ethics and disclosure policies governing the conduct of sponsored research to ensure they meet the highest standards.

Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon is a part-time researcher at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. He was hired to conduct research on long-term stellar and solar variability. The Smithsonian does not fund Dr. Soon; he pursues external grants to fund his research.
The Smithsonian does not support Dr. Soon’s conclusions on climate change. The Smithsonian’s official statement on climate change, based upon many decades of scientific research, points to human activities as a cause of global warming.

Smithsonian Statement on Climate Change

Global Warming Changing Weather in the US Northeast

February 23, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Precipitation, Severe weather, Uncategorized, weather whiplashGreg Laden

A newly published study has identified changes in precipitation patterns in the US Northeast, which are likely caused by human pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, which has resulted in global warming. According to the study, there has been an increase in extreme precipitation events, and an increase in the clumping across time of precipitation, with longer or more intense rainy periods, and longer dry periods.

Generally, climate and weather watchers have noticed that arid regions are drier, wetter regions are wetter, and many feel this is a consequence of global warming. Increased temperatures may increase the intensity of precipitation; this is a matter of physics. As air temperature increase, the air is able to hold more water, and this increase is not linear; a little more heat means a lot more moisture.

Also, the overall pattern of movement of air currents seems to be affecting the distribution of precipitation. For example, the main jet stream that influences weather in the Northern Hemisphere seems to be more often wavy and slower moving. This causes low pressure systems that bring precipitation to move more slowly, so a given area may have both more intense rainfall and rainfall over a longer period of time. Nonetheless, while an increasing number of climatologists are thinking that global warming is changing the weather, it has only been happening for a few years, and it is a system with a high level of natural variability. This means the basic observational data may be difficult to bring to bear on understanding what is going on. The physics predict these changes. Modeling of climate has demonstrated a high likelihood of these changes. Direct observations are beginning to show these changes.

In a recent paper, “Quasi-resonant circulation regimes and hemispheric synchronization of extreme weather in boreal summer,” Dim Coumou, Vladimir Petoukhov, Stefan Rahmstorf, Stefan Petri, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber noted the emergence of more frequent “Rossby Waves” in the jet stream, indicating that these waves have become more common and more persistent. They said, “We show that high-amplitude quasi- stationary Rossby waves, associated with resonance circulation regimes, lead to persistent surface weather conditions and therefore to midlatitude synchronization of extreme heat and rainfall events. Since the onset of rapid Arctic amplification around 2000, a cluster of resonance circulation regimes is observed involving wave numbers 7 and 8. This has resulted in a statistically significant increase in the frequency of high- amplitude quasi-stationary waves with these wave numbers. Our findings provide important new insights regarding the link between Arctic changes and midlatitude extremes.” (I elaborate on this finding here: More Research Linking Global Warming To Bad Weather Events.)

Climate Scientist Jennifer Francis, writing in Scientific American, notes,

One thing we do know is that the polar jet stream—a fast river of wind up where jets fly that circumnavigates the northern hemisphere—has been doing some odd things in recent years. Rather than circling in a relatively straight path, the jet stream has meandered more in north-south waves. In the west, it’s been bulging northward, arguably since December 2013—a pattern dubbed the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” by meteorologists. In the east, we’ve seen its southern-dipping counterpart, which I call the “Terribly Tenacious Trough.”

Different research teams differ somewhat in their explanation of this phenomenon, some seeking explanations in the warming Arctic, others in sea surface temperatures in the Pacific. Either way, the phenomenon seems to be real and important. I asked Justin Guilbert, lead author of the paper under consideration here, about this, and he noted, “The current very persistent atmospheric setup consists of a ridge in the west and a trough in the east. This setup is causing drought in the west and extreme cold and storminess in the east. All of which is consistent with recent studies suggesting that amplified planetary waves contribute to persistence. Such conditions tend to lead to persistent surface weather conditions because it is thought that high-amplitude waves do not move laterally as fast as lower-amplitude waves. The real weather story this year and last is the combination of persistent cold and repeated storms affecting the northeast. While we did not explore temperature persistence in the record, our analysis of the data shows that such setups may be on the rise concurrent with recent climate change.” So, the phenomenon of changes in precipitation patterns in the Northeastern US is yet another example, it seems, of warming induced changes in weather patterns. This applies as well to the cold many of us have been experiencing during our northern Winter.

So, now on to the details of the new paper just out in the American Geophysical Union addresses change in weather resulting from anthropogenic global warming. This study looks specifically at precipitation in the Northeastern United States. The paper is timely (though only by accident, the timing of peer reviewed publication and that of news cycles are entirely unconnected!) because of the recent heavy snows in New England. The study concludes that there is “… evidence of increasing persistence in daily precipitation in the Northeastern United States that suggests global circulation changes are affecting regional precipitation patterns… Precipitation in the northeastern United States is becoming more persistent; Precipitation in the northeastern United States is becoming more intense; [and these] Observed trends constitute an important hydrological impact of climate change.”

The paper is “?Characterization of increased persistence and intensity of precipitation in the Northeastern United States” by Justin Guilbert, Alan Betts, Donna Rizzo, Brian Beckage and Arne Bomblies.

The study used data from 222 weather stations in the US Northeast (defined as Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia, but in the end excluding DC and Maryland because the data did not meet the study criteria). They used data from stations that had over 50 years of measurements and ran to past January 1, 1990, and excluded station data missing too many years of observation. The various data sets go back in time to as far as 174 years, with a mean coverage of about 84 years.

How do you count rain?

It is hard to count rain. If it rains on Friday and Saturday, you will get two records in a weather database, one for each day. But isn’t that just one storm? Maybe. Maybe not. Say it starts raining. It stops. It is still cloudy. It starts raining again, the same day. Or the next day. Is that one or two precipitation events? Is the rain from one low pressure system all one storm? Probably. So, OK, go back to 1882 and look at the rain gauge data for a particular town. It rained Monday and Tuesday. Were those the same low pressure system? Well, just check the satellite data for those days. But wait, satellites were still science fiction then! This is why most climate scientists a) don’t like the Weather Channel naming storms; you often can not define the boundaries of a given weather event unless it is something very compact like a hurricane or tornado, and even then, it can be a problem; and b) often have little hair.

The method used in this study is complicated but appropriately so. To measure precipitation extremes, they took precipitation data and subjected it to two streams of processing. First, they looked at the lower 75th percentile of daily precipitation values, and second, they looked at the upper, remaining, tail. Various appropriate distributional statistical analysis were applied. The data were then looked at using a moving 30 year window, so any given representation would have plenty of data to dampen out variation caused by low sample sizes. (Remember, the station data varies in density across time and space.) This information was then characterized as a median trend (typical rainfall) and extreme (high rainfall events). Then time trends were tested for. The research team did not find large changes in average precipitation, but they did identify increases in extreme events.

More than … two-thirds … of the 222 stations show positive trends for [extreme precipitation events] in the months of October through May and at least half of the stations display significant (p<0.01) positive trends during every month except July and September. The strongest regional trend in the 95th percentile of daily precipitation was observed in April when the average trend was +0.7 mm per day per decade. ... these trends are not spatially uniform. The entire region experienced an average trend of +0.5mm per decade in annual 95th percentile daily precipitation while Connecticut was found to have the greatest increase with a trend of +1.1mm per day per decade in annual 95th percentile daily precipitation . No trend was found for West Virginia in annual 95th percentile daily precipitation.

How dry I am

The other weather pattern the study looked at was, essentially, clumping of rain. We seem to see this a lot lately. Here in Minnesota, we experienced what Paul Douglas called a “Flash Drought” a few years ago. Not enough dry to make a full on drought, but the rain falling across the larger region seemed to be clumped in time and space such that there was very little in the Upper Midwest corn belt. Last summer, by contrast, it rained nearly every day in Minnesota from just before the start of June up through the end of June. We got totally clumped on by rain. (See: Minnesota’s Current Weather Disaster — Don’t worry we’ll be fine.)

The research team figured out a way to characterize this by looking at the relationship between two simple questions: Is it raining/not raining now? Is it raining/not raining the next day? That is an oversimplification of their methods, but I think it gets the point across. Imagine that today’s conditions with respect to precipitation is used to predict tomorrow’s, based on experience. If so, changes in the distribution across time of events would change the way that prediction would work out. The researchers found that “For daily precipitation events, the warmer months show the greatest increase in wet persistence, the colder months show larger increases in the magnitude of extremes, and dry persistence increases in early spring and decreases in early fall. … on an annual basis, it is likely that the study region will experience increasingly persistent and intense precipitation events.”

These findings confirm observations made by many people in the weather industry. They also may relate to patterns we see in things like snowfall in New England. Prior to the late 1970s, New England seemed to have the occasional large scale snow storm or blizzard (they are not exactly the same thing). Since then, the frequency of these events seems to have risen to about one every other year, at least in Southern New England. This year seems to be exceptionally snowy even by those standards. The concern here is that places like Boston have an infrastructure adapted to the occasional debilitating winter storm, but the storms may not remain occasional. One can imagine the T (that’s what they call the public transit system there) welding snow plows on to the front of the trollies.

I asked Guilbert if his team could put a time frame on these changes. Did alterations in precipitation patterns start at a certain point in time, or is there an acceleration in the rate at which these changes are happening? He told me, “Unfortunately the record is not long enough to robustly explore this question. I used a linear model to represent all the changes that were discussed so that a positive or negative symbol could be assigned to trends in persistence and intensity of precipitation. I looked back at the data on an annual level across the entire region to see if there was any evidence of non-linear behavior happening or if there appeared to be a ‘start time’ of which I found no evidence for either. However, this does not mean that there hasn’t been an acceleration in our metrics, it’s just that we haven’t been able to detect anything yet.”

A few days ago, using data from Jeff Master’s blog at Weather Underground, I plotted out the major snow storm events at four locations in the general vicinity of Boston, and got this graph:

There certainly were major storms before the cluster you see here, but early enough, or located in the wrong place, so that they don’t show up at these weather stations. So even though the study being discussed here does not directly address the question of “start time” there is an indication of this being a relatively new phenomenon with timing suggestive of a global warming related cause. We also know that weather related natural disasters in the US have been on the increase in recent decades. This graph is of events, not costs of events (that would go up just with inflation):

Note that the snow event graph above ends before the last few large events in New England. Note also that the natural disaster graph is not fully up to date. Also note that the Guilbert et al study reported here does not run up to the present. One gets the impression that the changes we are observing in weather patterns are happening quickly, a bit too quickly for longer term, carefully done studies, to keep up with. That simply means that whatever you were thinking based on the peer reviewed research, changes are, global warming’s effects are coming on faster than previously thought.

More Willie Soon

February 23, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Denialism, Global Warming, Global Warming, Lies and Denial, Willie SoonGreg Laden

The Willie Soon Story broke on Saturday night, having cloned off the front page of the Sunday New York Times into a few secondary sources. But we all saw it coming. Since then there has been quite a bit more written and there will be quite a bit more.

The main thing I want to add to the discussion is this. It is clear that Willie Soon was taking piles of Big Fossil money for his climate research. It is clear that his research was widely discredited in the mainstream scientific community. It should have been easy to check to see if he was using the money properly (mainly, with respect to disclosure on publication) and to discover that he was not. So, why did it take an article in the New York Times to alert the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics of a problem going on under their roof for over a decade? Was the administration of HSCA compliant? Ignorant? In short, what did they know and when did they know it? And, will there be any effort by the Smithsonian, or Harvard for that matter, to address this?

Worth thinking about.

The image in the above meme is Senator Jim Inhofe referring to a list of some 58 “climate scientists” who oppose the global warming consensus. One of them is Soon. Many of the others are not climate scientists, or even scientists. Many are well known deniers. This list was provided by the discredited Heartland Institute. Expect new scrutiny into each of those individuals over the next few days, to see if there are any other Willie Soons on the list.

Anyway, here are a few more items of interest that came across my desk this morning.

The venerable journal Nature has weighed in on #WillieSoonGate: Documents spur investigation of climate sceptic: Questions raised about conflict-of-interest disclosures by Willie Soon.

Davies drew attention to Soon’s funding disclosures last month after Soon and three colleagues published a paper in the Chinese journal Science Bulletin2 that presented results from a simple climate model to argue that burning all recoverable fossil fuel reserves would result in little more than 2.2°C warming. By comparison, models assessed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on average project around 4° of warming with unabated fossil fuel use by 2100 and further warming beyond that time. The paper was appended with the statement: “The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.” Davies wrote to the journal insisting that Soon’s past funding sources do constitute a conflict of interest that should have been reported.

Science Bulletin’s conflict of interest policy states that authors must disclose “all relationships or interests that could influence or bias the work,” including “professional interests or personal beliefs that may influence your research.” The policy also gives a series of example disclosures. The first reads, “Author A has received research grants from Company A.”

The Willie Soon-Ken Cuccinelli Link: Blue Virginia has Cooch Cited Fossil-Fuel-Funded Climate Science Denier Willie Soon in Witchhunt vs. Michael Mann

…as it turns out, our old pal Ken Cuccinelli, when he was (appallingly) Attorney General of Virginia and waging a witch-hunt against climate science (and specifically against leading climate scientist Michael Mann), was busy citing some of those fossil-fuel-funded climate science deniers. That includes, as you can see below (from Cooch’s “Civil Investigative Demand” against the University of Virginia, none other than…that’s right, Willie Soon, who was falsely smearing the meticulous research of Michael Mann and many other scientists on the famous “hockey stick” graph. Not that Cuccinelli acting like this comes as a big surprise, but still, it’s yet more evidence of how “in bed” with fossil fuel interests Cuccinelli was when he was Attorney General of Virginia. Now, can someone please explain to me why THAT is legal, even as Bob and Maureen McDonnell face possible jail time for their corrupt (but arguably, FAR less severe and damaging than Cooch’s) behavior?

The Daily Climate points out the high frequency with which climate deniers denounce the funding of climate science by legitimate means, and contrasts those staw arguments to what appears to be Willie Soon’s prostitution to Big Fossil: At last, proof of a climate scientist getting rich pedaling science.

Inside Climate News has “A Guide To Willie Soon’s Climate Research Funded by Fossil Fuel Companies”

A watchdog group called the Climate Investigations Center alerted nine scientific journals Monday that studies they published most likely breached conflict-of-interest protocols. The studies in question were co-authored by Willlie Soon, a prominent climate-change skeptic whose work was funded by fossil fuel interests.

The letters grew out of the release Saturday of public records showing that Soon failed to disclose industry funding in 11 studies published by those journals.

More of that here.

Eli Rabett has two items on the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Hi-Jinks1

“…Much of the commentary on the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics hi-jinks has concerned how one of Dr Willie Soon’s sponsors the Southern Company had the right to examine and review any manuscripts that Dr. Willie Soon submitted for publication…”
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Hi-Jinks2
“…Amanda Preston was hip deep in the financials of Willie Soon’s support network. As the Advancement and External Affairs Officer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics she negotiated the terms for his support from Exxon Mobile among other things. Today she has moved on to be Executive Director of the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard University, where, amongst other things she works works with faculty to squeeze out more dimes. …”

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for Soon

February 21, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysics, Lies and Denial, Willie SoonGreg Laden

A few days ago I suggested that Willie Soon’s career may be taking a nose dive soon. I was right. ~~Tomorrow’s New York Times has a story that has as many leaks as an old canoe, so we can see it now in various outlets.~~ The story is out and linked to below.

Before going into detail I just want to note that Justin Gillis is doing a great job at the New York Times.

Anyway, you can read the following items, the most recent listed here:

Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for a Doubtful Climate Scientist

Willie Soon Gate

Willie Soon, will he soon be fired?

It really looks like Willie Soon has been paid by Big Fossil to write papers, which generally suck as science, suggesting that Anthropogenic Global Warming isn’t much of a thing. A lot of us have known this for some time, and have been complaining about it. Climate science deniers have been denying. Now, major media is putting the story together. Suddenly, we are looking at a sea change, and it is pretty wavy, and Willie needs a bigger boat.

First, the most important fact:

Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.

So, our planet, his deliverables. To the tune of over $400,000 pieces of silver. Nice going, Willie, this makes you kind of an asshole.

Then, this from the big boss at Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysics:

Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, acknowledged on Friday that Soon had violated the disclosure standards of some journals.

“I think that’s inappropriate behavior,” Alcock said. “This frankly becomes a personnel matter, which we have to handle with Dr. Soon internally.”

Soon is employed by the Smithsonian Institution, which jointly sponsors the astrophysics center with Harvard.

“I am aware of the situation with Willie Soon, and I’m very concerned about it,” W. John Kress, interim undersecretary for science at the Smithsonian in Washington, said Friday. “We are checking into this ourselves.”

Charles, I’m not that impressed with you either. You let this go on in your institution for many years, and Soon isn’t the only climate science denialist you are harboring. WTF? Well, thanks for finally getting on with this. I do hope you have the wits to suspend his activities until the end of the HR investigation, because that could take some time. Otherwise he might pinch off a few more papers under your aegis.

I asked climate scientist Michael Mann what he thought of this news. He told me, “Willie Soon (as amply documented in my book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars”) was instrumental in the early attacks on the Hockey Stick by James Inhofe and other fossil fuel industry-funded politicians. Now we know for certain that his efforts were a quid pro quo with special interests looking to discredit my work as a means of calling into question the reality and threat of climate change.” (Mann’s book is here.)

UPDATE: Senator Edward Markey will launch an investigation of Big Fossil company funding of bogus climate change studies, according to the Boston Globe:

“For years, fossil fuel interests and front groups have attacked climate scientists and legislation to cut carbon pollution using junk science and debunked arguments,” Markey said in a statement. “The American public deserve an honest debate that isn’t polluted by the best junk science fossil fuel interests can buy. That’s why I will be launching this investigation to see how widespread this denial-for-hire scheme stretches within the anti-climate action cabal.”

Markey will be looking into over a million dollars of funding from such companies as ExonMobil, Southern Company, Texaco, etc.

The President’s Science Advisor Answers Your Climate Questions

February 20, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, John HoldrenGreg Laden

From here:

Since last November, Dr. John Holdren — the President’s science advisor — has been encouraging the public to ask him anything about climate change on social media using the hashtag #AskDrH. In his first set of answers, he covered a lot of ground — the connection between climate change and extreme weather, temperature trends, how we know that climate change is human-cased, and more.

Today, Dr. H is answering more of your questions — this time from students and classrooms across the country.

As the community leaders, city planners, innovators, and entrepreneurs of tomorrow, America’s students will be instrumental in efforts to tackle the climate change challenge. That’s why, this past December, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy launched the Climate Education and Literacy Initiative — aimed at ensuring a climate-smart citizenry, and connecting Americans of all ages with the best-available, science-based information about climate change.

Later today, we’ll be celebrating eight Champions of Change for Climate Education and Literacy — local heroes who are doing extraordinary work on the ground to enhance climate education and literacy in classrooms and communities across the country.

Greg Laden's Blog

Tag Archives: Climate Change

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Raúl Grijalva Investigates

Reconsidering Grijalva’s Strategy

Grijalva Does The Right Thing

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The Hydraulic Hypothesis and the End of Civilization

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New Research Demonstrates Link Between Greenhouse Gas Pollution and Global Warming

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Why Is Greenhouse Gas Pollution Important?

New Research Suggests Global Warming Is About To Heat Up

Smithsonian issues statement on Willie Soon

Global Warming Changing Weather in the US Northeast

How do you count rain?

How dry I am

More Willie Soon

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for Soon

Other posts of interest:

The President’s Science Advisor Answers Your Climate Questions