There is currently a twitter argument happening, along with a bit of a blogging swarm, over a chimera of a remark made by John Stossle and Bjorn Lomborg. They made the claim that a million electric cars would have no benefit with resect to Carbon emissions. The crux of the argument is that there is a Carbon cost to manufacturing and running electric cars. When we manufacture anything, we emit Carbon, and when we make electricity to run the cars, we emit Carbon, etc. etc.
Lomborg is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. But here I want to focus on one aspect of why he is wrong that applies generally to this sort of topic.
My point is very simple, really. We can take any green and clean technology, such as making Ethanol from corn (to replace gasoline produced from fossil fuels), or building windmills, or running electric cars on juice produced in coal plants, and so on, and count the fossil Carbon released by the process against the savings of Carbon by the process. But that is wrong. The reason it is wrong is that we need to keep the Carbon in the ground. If there is fossil Carbon being released by a coal plant that is running, ultimately, electric cars (or buses or trains) than there is a savings for the simple reason that running vehicles with electricity is a) more inherently efficient than using countless tiny explosions of fossil fuel, and b) almost always uses a mix of non-fossil-carbon energy sources such as wind power, hydro, nuclear, and solar. But that is not the point. The point is that ultimately we have to change the energy source from coal and natural gas to other sources. When we see a variable in the Carbon savings for a given technology that involves releasing fossil carbon, we have to hunt down that source and change it to non-fossil energy production. We need to build the electric cars in plants that are run on non-fossil energy, and use materials that are obtained, shipped, and processed with non-fossil energy, and run the vehicles on electricity made with non-fossil sources.
And increasingly, this is happening. If you have a plug in EV car now, there is an increasing number of places where you can plug the thing in and get non-fossil fuel juice to charge it up. This of course is developing too slowly. Every park and ride lot, the big giant parking lot at the mall, and your garage, should all have solar cells on the roof to provide at least some of the energy used to charge cars that plug in for some juice. Individual home owners should opt, where possible, to buy wind generated energy over fossil fuel generated energy. And so on.
The argument that “you can’t do this thing to avoid using fossil fuels because the thing uses fossil fuels” is countered by the argument that “if you are using fossil fuels than you need to find a way to not use fossil fuels.” The entire argument that the use of fossil fuels is involved in the non-use of fossil fuels is real, but temporary, and is really nothing other than an argument to not use fossil fuels in ALL areas we are currently using them, eventually.
It is possible that this is the most important Earth Day. Earth Day is part of the process of broadening environmental awareness and causing positive change in how we treat our planet. We are at a juncture where we must make major changes in what we do or our Grandchildren, to the extent that they can take time away from the daunting task of survival in a post-Civilization world, will curse us.
I wrote a massive multpart blog post about Earth Day a four years ago, and here I’m giving you a slightly modified version of it, covering just a few aspects of the thing, and telling a couple of personal stories. There are politics, explosions, and folk singers. So put on your Love Beads and your Tie-Dyed MuuMuu and enjoy. Or not enjoy. This is not really for your enjoyment.
The First Earth Day
The First Earth Day. More Black and White than Green.The first Earth Day was a red letter day in the long, hard struggle to make being good to the environment … to the Earth … normal instead of a fringe idea held only by quirky college professors and stoned-out hippies. This year, the first significant health care insurance reform bill was passed and it will be a red letter event in a long, hard struggle to make universal quality heath coverage and care normal instead a fringe idea held only by Kenyan born socialist Negro from Chicago. Or whatever the teabaggers are calling it now. So today, at the beginning of a true change in how we do things, we can look back and reflect on another, similar (yet different) change in the way we do things.
If you listen to the right wing republican rhetoric just long enough to hear the topic shift a couple of times, the environmental movement will inevitably be brought up, in bitter tones. If you are below a certain age, you may hear this and wonder about it sometimes. Well, for years, the right wing fought environmental regulation tooth and nail. They fought it at the local and state level, they fought the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), they fought environmentally friendly activities by all other government agencies. And they lost. Not a first. At first, they marginalized environmental conservation, demonized it as socialism and communism, explained how the apocalypse would come if we started to regulate industry. At first they held their ground. But eventually, they lost.
Recently placed billboard of the anti-science Heartland Institute.And they came to the debate armed and dangerous. The exact tactics of anti-environmentalists of the day were not the same as the teapartiers of today, but one got a very similar feeling. When a major national park was dedicated in northern Minnesota back in those days, a family of Yahoos living next door, who had opposed the park simply on the grounds that all gummit activities were evil, chainsawed a dozen or so thousand year old virgin white pines that were on their land and visible in the background of the dedication ceremony. So the dedication ceremony itself was carried out to the sound of a Bachmanesque fugue of chain saws and falling trees … trees that would have otherwise never been cut down, that would have stayed standing for hundreds of more years were it not for this Libertarian spite. Freedom trees. Dead freedom trees.
The right wing has never forgiven the progressives and liberals for the EPA and the massive shift this country underwent with the environmental movement.
And guess what. Progressive liberals old enough to remember have generally not forgiven the right wing for making the transition we all knew had to happen take 20 years instead of five.
And, of course, the transition is still needed, and is still underway. What we did then was important and under appreciated today: The air and the water are significantly cleaner now than they were in 1970. Had industry not been regulated, with increasing demands on manufacturing, things would have only gotten worse, and today, while things are better in the US and many other Western countries, we know that a significant amount of this extra demand is being met with dirty third world industry.
My first Earth Day was the first Earth Day. I remember those days well. I was a child warrior for the environment. I remember being disgusted with the river we lived near, which was always covered with dead fish and an oily slick, turgid, smelly, occasionally on fire. Well, OK, it never really caught fire, but it could have. I remember being disgusted with the smoke belching out of the large apartment buildings we lived next to. I remember watching SUNY Albany Professor Robert Reinow, on Sunrise Semester, showing photos and films of Gary Indiana and seeing the haze outside and realizing, because the meteorology was good enough to know this, that some of the cause of my mother’s complaint about gray whites and dull colors if she hung her laundry out to dry came from the Rust Belt, between 500 and 1,500 miles away and upwind.
It all seemed so hopeless, yet there were things that could be done.
Pete Seeger joins the Nature Conservation Club (NCC)
The flames were so hot that we could feel it on our faces over 300 feet away as we stood near the corner of Delaware and Whitehall avenues. At first we gawked at the burning factory from about 100 feet away, but a large explosion caused us all to turn and run. But not too far. While watching from some 200 feet away, the police came by and pushed us back to the 300 foot mark just before several explosions in a row came along. The stuff that came down on us out of the sky was cooled enough to not burn, and some of the bits were recognizable as small fragments of brightly colored billiard balls.
Albany Billiard Ball FactoryIt turns out that billiard balls are highly explosive, as are many of the materials used to make them. We’re talking modern, synthetic billiard balls, not the ones made of ivory. I believe the synthetic billiard ball was first manufactured by the Albany Billiard Ball factory (though not the exact one that we were watching in the state of total immolation) back in 1868 or so, much to the relief of elephants everywhere. Early versions of the billiard balls were highly explosive and occasionally blew up during an actual game of billiards. One such event apparently started one of the famous gun fights out west back in cowboy days. I’m not sure when the factory was moved to Delaware Avenue, but there it was, as I was a kid, around the time that the first Earth Day was declared, burning.
Out Delaware Avenue a few blocks, the relatively urban neighborhood I grew up in suddenly stopped and gave way to forest and farmland. The boundary of the city was the Normanskill, a creek who’s valley is one of the many claimed to be the Vale of Tawasentha. We used to go down to that creek to play, cutting off the newly built Delaware Avenue and taking the old “Yellow Brick Road” (yes, a road made of yellow brick exactly like in the movie), past the Old Witches house (yes, well, sort of, she was the Avon lady but her house looked kinda scary and we were insensitive kids) to the old Whipple Wrought Iron Bridge on one path, and the brick bridge on the other, and eventually back up to grade at the ice cream shop in the next town over. And along that road was where the Albany Billiard Ball Factory dumped their industrial waste. So we would scour the ditch along the road below the waste dump looking for fragments of billiard balls, hoping to find fragments with the numbers on them, hoping to eventually collect a complete set (which no one ever seemed to manage).
And now, standing some 300 feet back from the factory, fragments of the billiard balls were falling on our heads. But only a few, and none with numbers, and they were mostly burned. And, when the police noticed certain bits and pieces of the landscape around us starting to steam with the cooking heat, realizing that we were all standing in a gas station’s parking lot, we were eventually shoo’ed too far away to make standing around watching worth it. So we went over the the school yard and sat on the swings listening to the occasional distant explosion and the more frequent siren of this or that emergency vehicle.
That same summer or the one after (forgive my memory) the sloop came to town. The Clearwater was a replica of an old Hudson River sloop. Built to original spec, it was too tall to pass under one of the Albany bridges unless the crew ran back and forth across the deck in perfect timing to cause the tip of the mast to bow lower than the base of the bridge’s i-beams, as the captain churned the boat forward at just the right speed. At low tide. Which was funny to watch.
Pete Seeger aboard the Clearwater.Anyway, there was a big party because the Clearwater, built by hippies, staffed by hippies, funded by hippies, was going to sail up and down the Hudson River brining awareness of the plight of that river and many other’s like it until the river was cleaned up.
So at the big party, I had an inspiration. I got some paper and some crayons and I made membership cards with tear-off receipts for an organization I invented right then and there on the spot. I called it “NCC” for “Nature Conservation Club.” And as soon as I invented the club, I went looking for its first member. And it could only be one person: Pete Seeger, the folk singer who was a friend of Woody Guthrie and mentor to Woody’s son, Arlo. The man who wrote “Where have all the flowers gone” and “If I had a hammer” and “Turn, turn turn” and that one about the guy who was stuck on the train but his wife made him lunch every day. He was there at the party, of course, along with Arlo. I found Mr. Seeger, politely explained my goals to clean up the planet and stuff, and asked him to be the first member of my organization, the “Nature Conservation Club.”
He agreed instantly, signed on, and …. well, the rest is history.1
The Clearwater sailed up and down that river again and again despite severe opposition from the Right Wing. Who fought the Clearwater and who fought every effort to stop the cleanup.
It took years, but the Clearwater did its job and you can now catch a live striper in the Hudson after decades of that being impossible. You will still likely get cancer if you eat too many of them, but that’s a start.
Arlo Guthrie Falls Through The Ice Because Of Global Warming
So, it seems that Arlo Guthrie was hauling firewood or something with his tractor out at his place in western Mass, and he took the usual shortcut across the pond. The pond was too deep for the tractor to drive in unless, of course, it was frozen, as it always was in mid January. And, as Arlo drove his tractor across the pond, in mid January, the ice gave way bit by bit, in stages, and his tractor went in. Somewhat comically, or so he tells it.
Arlo Guthrie singing about the tractor. Well, not really, but he could have sung about the tractor.Arlo blamed that event on anthropogenic global warming.
So, a couple of years after that happened, when I asked him to write an article for the “Global Warming Special Edition” of a monthly newspaper I was editing, that was the story he contributed.
In the same issue, I wrote a lengthy story about global warming, explaining why we thought global warming was happening, making the then-confused (in the public’s mind) distinction between the “ozone hole” and global warming, and so on. That would have been back around 1991 or so, and I swear to you, there is almost nothing in that article, written for the general public, that I would need to change to day to keep it accurate.
Svante Arrhenius figured out the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 1896, for crying out loud.Yes, ladies and gentleman, Arlo and me, and most climate scientists actually, knew about global warming back then, and even today, 20 years later, we are having a hard time convincing our friends in the right wing.
Because they’re morons or because they are paid off by industry. Take your pick. Either way, they’ve got a lame excuse.
You’d think they were getting paid enough by the health care industry to finally let the environment alone for a while.
Earth Day is I Told You So Day for a lot of us.
Plank’s Constant
In the US, political parties have what is called a “platform” which is a list of assertions … “we want this” and “we want that” sort of assertions. The “platform” is made up, quaintly, of “planks” with each plank being about one issue. Like for my local Democratic Farm Labor party unit, one of our Planks a few years ago was to get the damn road fixed over at Devil’s Triangle, a particularly bad intersection down on Route 169. That’s a local plank, but if we go to a party event, and a gubernatorial candidate is answering questions, she or he is expected to know what the heck is being talked about if someone brings up “Devil’s Triangle.”
“… No, no, it’s not in the Caribbean. It’s in Maple Grove …. At the lights, on 169 …. you know, that place with all the traffic…”
You often hear that party platforms are not important, but nothing can be farther from the truth. Once an issue gets plank status, that issue is on the table and can be brought to the floor even if you are not a chair. In other words, any Joe Sixpack or Sally Minivan can bring a plank issue up at a committee meeting, public meeting, whatever, without looking like a dork or a crazy person by saying “I’d like to refer to an item in the state convention’s platform… bla bla bla”
This is because the planks are given credibility by the process. They are suggested and voted on at caucus meetings, and then passed on to committees, and eventually combined and winnowed down, and voted on again, and so on and so forth (it’s complicated) so that many hands have touched them, similar ideas have been combined, and the ideas have been refined.
That’s the Minnesota version. Every state has its process, some more accessible by the average citizen, some less so.
People make fun of it, but it’s a thing.I have three reasons for talking about planks and platforms and such on Earth Day.
1) Parties have platforms. Independent candidates do not, and some parties like the Independence Party don’t either because they don’t believe in them. But platforms are good. Party politics is potent. If you have believed the oft repeated rhetoric and think parties are bad or dead or old hat or ineffective, then you’ve been convinced to get out of the way and let others do the policy building for you. Don’t be chump. Decisions are made by those who show up. At your party’s platform meetings!
2) Which simply leads to the conclusion that you must think globally and act locally. On this Earth Day, please spend some time finding out what you need to do to become involved locally with your party. Local planks become district plans which become state planks and some of those planks go to Washington DC. No kidding. If enough people in your state organize (and this can be done with 20 people or so if they know what they are doing) they can get a plank to the national convention that says “No genetically modified crops ever, for any reason.” Or “Fund homeopathy as well as you fund regular medicine.”
3) Which leads me to my third and final point: When it comes to woo, there is a significant parallel between the environmental movement and health care. Well, to be exact, there is a lot of woo in both places, and it exists in these political discussions that happen locally and that make a difference. But you can manage that problem. If you are a supporter of science, you need to become a locally active politically operative person.
Get involved in the plank building process, and build meaningful planks that will persist. Also, support candidates for office that make Climate Change either THE number one issue for their campaign, or equal to one or two other number one issues, and who are serious about it. We don’t have much time, and we have to keep the Carbon in the ground, and it is up to you to do this.
For the Earth.
1Obscure, lost history of no consequence, but history nonetheless.
John Stossel, writing at Real AnnoyingClear Politics, (which is not a terrible place except for John Stossel) quotes some guy named Bjorn Lomborg about electric cars, thusly:
Do environmentalists even care about measuring costs instead of just assuming benefits? We spend $7 billion to subsidize electric cars. Even if America reached the president’s absurd 2015 goal of “a million electric cars on the road” (we won’t get close), how much would it delay warming of the Earth?
“One hour,” says Lomborg. “This is a symbolic act.”
There are a lot of reasons that this is wrong. First, cars are not nearly the problem that buildings are. The vast majority of carbon released from fossil stores into the atmosphere (as CO2, mainly) has to do with buildings … heating them, cooling them, lighting them, and running the stuff we do in them. Vehicles are important but they are a smaller contribution. But they are still important. Anti-Earth people like Stossel and Lomborg seem to have an extra bit of hate for electric cars, and I think the reason for that is that the widespread deployment of electric cars can actually help with the buildings. One thing we need to make a smart grid work well is a lot of batteries. If there were charging stations at both home and work and most people who drove at all drove electric cars, the top 20 percent or so of the battery storage in all those cars (in the US there are hundreds of millions of vehicles) could be used to allow individuals to express their Liberties in the Free Market of Electricity, storing and supplying surplus juice at a profit. If you do this right you can probably drive your car for free this way, depending on your driving patterns.
Also, this is a very difficult number to calculate and is probably one of those things where you can make up any number and then find an equation that equals it.
Cars? Whose cars? Cars around the planet (one billion or so) or cars in the US (a quarter of that)? Which cars? The lower or higher milage ones? Who is driving them and how far? If we are only replacing hybrids, you wouldn’t get much. If you are replacing Ford F3000s, you’d get a hella lot. Also, these people are anti-global warming science. If you are anti global warming science, are you even allowed to calculate things using — global warming science? Can you insist that climate change is not real, or not related to CO2, or that important things like climate sensitivity (how much heat arises from how much CO2, simply put) are not known or not properly calculated, and still use those mathematical relationships to make up some dumb argument like this one?
No. You can’t.
Anyway, it probably can be calculated but I’d rather see the calculations done by someone who knows what they are talking about, so I asked atmospheric scientist and energy expert John Abraham about this and here’s what he said.
If you put 1 million clean cars on the road and have them last 15 years before removing them, and if you take the typical emissions of a vehicle (5700 kg CO2 per year), you have saved 8.6 e10 kg of CO2 in the 15 years. Now lets assume you don’t put any more clean vehicles on the road. How many hours is this worth of global emissions?
We emit about 36 billion tons of CO2 per year which is about 4.1e9 kg CO2 per hour.
Therefore, those cars, over their lifetime, would have saved 21 hours of emissions from all CO2 sources.
So, he was only off by 2100%
In addition, I asked my friend J. Drake Hamilton at Fresh Energy if she had a handy link to an article somewhere that would address this question, the question of the efficacy of electric cars and such, and she game met the following. Thanks J.
A new study from North Carolina State purportedly shows that electric vehicles won’t reduce pollution in the long term. A closer look at detailed results reveals that the study actually shows the opposite: that higher electric vehicle adoption can significantly reduce carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide emissions. That’s right–despite the confusing spin–the North Carolina state study confirms what the vast majority of studies have shown: electric cars are a key part of our longer-term strategy to cut carbon and smog-forming pollutants.
An important Virginia Supreme Court finding came out today, related to the hugely complicated maneno that I feel totally unqualified to explain to you … but Michael Halpern of the Center for Science and Democracy is:
The Supreme Court of Virginia today found unanimously in favor of the University of Virginia in its attempt to protect its employees from unwarranted intrusions into their privacy through the commonwealth’s Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA). In doing so, the Court rebuffed efforts by the American Tradition Institute (ATI) to gain access to the private correspondence of UVa researchers. The Court’s decision signals to scientists at public universities that the pursuit of scientific knowledge will be protected in Virginia, no matter how their research results might be received.
For brevity’s sake, you can catch up on the events leading up to this decision in my preview of the court case and summary of oral arguments.
I get the impression that some of my colleagues are concerned about the phrase “War on Carbon” because it is bad messaging. That is wrong. We need to carry out a War on Carbon. We need to keep the Carbon in the ground. You know why.
Meanwhile, though, we can have some fun with the idea:
My own personal opinion: The authors of the retracted paper and their followers are doing the climate change crisis a tragic disservice by attacking people personally and saying that it is ethically ok to identify them in a scientific study. They made a monumental mistake, refused to fix it and that rightfully disqualified the study. The planet is headed for a cliff and the scientific evidence for climate change is way past a debate, in my opinion. Why even debate this with contrarians? If scientists think there is a debate, then why not debate this scientifically? Why help the ostriches of society (always are) keep their heads in the sand? Why not focus even more on the science of climate change? Why not develop potential scenarios so that society can get prepared? Is that not what scientists do? Does anyone really believe that a public lynching will help advance anything? Who comes off as the biggest nutter? Activism that abuses science as a weapon is just not helpful at a time of crisis.
I’m not sure if this being his own personal opinion gets him out of trouble here. As an assistant field chief editor that is.
The authors of the retracted paper
Please avoid the passive voice. “As the authors of the paper I supervised the undue retraction of.” There, I fixed that for you.
and their followers
Oh, I see, you think is a cult or something. Interesting.
are doing
Actually, I think it is you who is doing something here. They just wrote a paper in their field of expertise, published it in a peer reviewed journal, etc.
the climate change crisis a tragic disservice
No, this research is important in understanding the astonishing and critically important fact that there is a virtually 100% consensus among scientists that climate change is real, human caused, and important in contrast to something closer to a 50-50 distribution of belief among the general public that it is even a thing. This discordance is one of the most important facts of our age, because a) climate change is one of the most important things happening on this planet right now and b) humanity seems entirely unable to address it. There are reasons for this and one of those reasons is the behavior, strategy, and tactics of the denialist community. Recursive Fury was a scholarly study of an important aspect of that. Which you published. Then, the denialist community pressured you into retracting it. That, good sir, is a tragic disservice. You are the perpetrator of a tragic disservice.
by attacking people personally and saying that it is ethically ok to identify them in a scientific study.
Writing about and analyzing public comments without referring to the source is unethical. You have this backwards, It is generally accepted by the research and publishing community that you have this wrong.
They made a monumental mistake,
Well, you got that right. They should have picked a different journal. Generally, I think it would be a good idea henceforth for people to pick a different journal.
refused to fix it
Even though the paper is fine the way it is they did not “refuse to fix it” but rather worked with the editors of Frontiers (perhaps you should meet them some time!) to follow one or more paths to addressing this issue. So, that’s just a lie, apparently.
and that rightfully disqualified the study.
Disqualified the study? That you published?
The planet is headed for a cliff and the scientific evidence for climate change is way past a debate, in my opinion. Why even debate this with contrarians?
Since you are acting as a hobgoblin of the climate science denialists, I’m a little surprised to see that you accept the reality of climate change so readily. But that’s good, good for you. As to why there should be an academic study of denialism, there are two answers to that. a) academics traditionally study whatever they want, and b) see above.
If scientists think there is a debate,
They don’t, yet there is one and that debate is hampering our efforts to do something about it. This is worthy of study and investigation. Somebody should do that!
then why not debate this scientifically?
There isn’t a valid debate, but there is a debate nonetheless. THAT issue is worthy of scientific study. Lewandowsky et al. did that. You have repressed the study.
Why help the ostriches of society (always are) keep their heads in the sand?
Exactly. Let’s address this faux debate. In this case, we need to understand it better. Academic study of the debate is a good thing. Which the authors did. Which you agreed to, published, then under pressure from the denialists, retracted.
Why not focus even more on the science of climate change?
This is a very interesting question. Lewandowsky is not a climate scientist. Others involved both in this paper and other projects are also not climate scientists. For that matter the vast majority of denialists are not climate scientists either. But the issue of climate change has many aspects, including denialism, which was the subject of an academic study that your journal accepted, published, then under pressure from science denialists, retracted.
Why not develop potential scenarios so that society can get prepared?
Get prepared? Oh, I see. You actually ARE a denialist! There are many kinds of denailists, including those who think there is nothing we can do about climate change. This statement seems to suggest that this is your position. That is very interesting. This may be the most important statement I’ve seen coming out of Frontiers. This could explain the whole retraction thing. Huh.
Is that not what scientists do?
What scientists do is they study stuff and write papers and put the papers in peer reviewed journals, and part of that is the process of editorial oversight and review. That is what Lewandowsky et al did. They did what scientists did. You, and Frontiers, did something else, something that editors should not do about the science in their journals. Repress it.
Does anyone really believe that a public lynching will help advance anything?
Most people believe that study of denialism is important. Most people believe that public lynching of scientists who study climate change or climate science denialism does not help advance anything. Did I answer your question correctly? 🙂
Who comes off as the biggest nutter? Activism that abuses science as a weapon is just not helpful at a time of crisis.
Did you just call the authors of the paper you repressed nutters? Wow.
First, as I’ve mentioned before, there is a Reddit “As Me Anything” (AMA) going on right now with Stephan Lewandowsky, and if you are into Reddit AMA’s and climate change related issues you should check it out. Lewandowsky is a co-author of the famous Frontiers Retracted paper, though the subjects being discussed at the AMA range far beyond that particular issue.
Second, there is new paper out that looks very interesting. I’m still trying to absorb it and I’ve asked the author for some clarifications on some issues, but already the Global Warming Deialosphere is all over it, so it must have some merit! 🙂
Is global warming just a giant natural fluctuation?
An analysis of temperature data since 1500 all but rules out the possibility that global warming in the industrial era is just a natural fluctuation in the earth’s climate, according to a new study by McGill University physics professor Shaun Lovejoy.
…Rather than using complex computer models to estimate the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions, Lovejoy examines historical data to assess the competing hypothesis: that warming over the past century is due to natural long-term variations in temperature.
“This study will be a blow to any remaining climate-change deniers,” Lovejoy says. “Their two most convincing arguments – that the warming is natural in origin, and that the computer models are wrong – are either directly contradicted by this analysis, or simply do not apply to it.”
Lovejoy’s study applies statistical methodology to determine the probability that global warming since 1880 is due to natural variability. His conclusion: the natural-warming hypothesis may be ruled out “with confidence levels great than 99%, and most likely greater than 99.9%.”
…
“We’ve had a fluctuation in average temperature that’s just huge since 1880 – on the order of about 0.9 degrees Celsius,” Lovejoy says. “This study shows that the odds of that being caused by natural fluctuations are less than one in a hundred and are likely to be less than one in a thousand.
“While the statistical rejection of a hypothesis can’t generally be used to conclude the truth of any specific alternative, in many cases – including this one – the rejection of one greatly enhances the credibility of the other.”
This Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego website provides daily updates, analysis, and information on the state of climate. Follow @Keeling_curve to get daily updates of the CO2 value. Through this site, the public can also help support the continuation of the iconic Keeling Curve and of complementary measurements of atmospheric oxygen made at Scripps. These measurements enable society to witness climate change and inform strategies to address it.
On April 14th, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg during her maiden voyage. The collision occurred at 11:40 PM ships time, and by 2:20 AM the ship broke apart and foundered with over a thousand people still on board. Of the 2,224 people on board just over 700 were rescued.
There have been a number of theories about the iceberg; where did it come from, why were there so many icebergs in the area at the time, how big was it, and so on. It has become general belief that the number of ice bergs in the area was exceptionally large. However, a new paper released a few minutes ago suggests that this is not the case, and also questions some of the other theories about ice berg calving that year are also now in question.
Yes, there were a lot of icebergs that year, about 2.5 times above the average year. Iceberg experts focus on the number of ice bergs that float south of 48 degrees N latitude, and during the iceberg season of 1912 it is estimated that 1038 of the things passed that line. So that’s a lot, but according to this research, it is less than the 90th percentile for the century-plus period for which data are available.
Importantly, the number of icebergs in the region has gone up recently. Figure 4 from the paper shows the erratic annual data, with a clear increase in the last several decades.
There are probably a few reasons for this. The main reason is probably the IIP itself, which keeps track of icebergs and provides important information to the ships. Another set of reasons probably has to do with the technology of seeing icebergs and communicating about them. This makes the iceberg situation along the Labrador and Newfoundland coast a microcosm of a larger question we have these days about the effects of climate change. There has been a recent and rather heated debate about this. Roger Pielke Junior has produced a number of studies that seem to show that there has been no effect of climate change on the outcome of natural disasters such as major storms. There are a number of reasons that this research is probably wrong, including the fact that the effects of major storms has increased in some cases because of factors directly linked to climate change. The most obvious of this includes increased sea surface temperatures powering up a handful of otherwise already large hurricanes to cause more of a punch (eg. Katrina, Haiyan, Sandy) and increased sea levels resulting in higher storm surges. But also missing from Pielke’s analysis is the fact that some of the effect, or more exactly, the cost, of such events is prepaid in the form of preparation. New York City was aware of the fact that their subways were likely to flood when Superstorm Sandy came along (which itself may have been an effect of climate change due to increased sea surface temperatures and unusual steering winds resulting from Arctic Amplification effects) so they were able to shut down or otherwise secure certain systems. For that to happen there needed to be an ongoing system of making predictions about tropical storms. Similarly, rebuilding or retrofitting infrastructure to handle larger storm surges is something we are going to see all along coastal areas. Also, properties that may have been high value because of their sea-side location in many areas now have very little residential or commercial value because they have to be disoccupied.
In the case of North Atlantic Icebergs, ships don’t run into them because we have spent time, effort, and money to not let that happen, every year since the Titanic. If one did a Pielke style analysis of the effects of icebergs in the region it might look like this:
A Pielke Style Analysis of the effects of climate change via iceberg-ship collisions
And that would be misleading.
The current budget of the IIP is just under 6.0 million dollars a year, which doesn’t seem like much given the benefits, but to this we must add the additional costs of ships following suboptimal routes because of iceberg threats and the costs of all those technologies and procedures that they follow. The point is, the cost of increased icebergs in the North Atlantic is not zero based on a lack of collisions. It is non-zero and to the extent that there is a correlation between bad iceberg years and costs, it is increased with more icebergs and there are more icebergs.
The researchers carried out a nifty modeling program of iceberg formation in the Titanic year, in part to test some of the ideas previously presented. One of the more interesting ideas was that an exceptionally high tide had lifted the glacial margins more than usual and this caused the production of more icebergs than usual. But this research sowed that the Titanic iceberg came from a part of the Greenland coast that would have been frozen fast during that short interval, so this is unlikely. Also, the increase that year as well as at other times of iceberg formation is thought to be related to a change in weather conditions in Greenland. This is complicated and not well understood, and the subject of work in progress by one of the authors. For now, it appears that relatively warm conditions in the Arctic result in changes in snowfall pattern that affect iceberg formation in the fall, which then propagates to additional icebergs passing south of 48 degrees North latitude over the next few years.
Between the increase in iceberg formation under current warm Arctic conditions and the extreme lack of sea ice in the region which tempts ships north, we can expect there to be more potential contacts between boat and ice over coming years. I’m thinking the International Ice Patrol should get a funding bump. Just in case.
Stephan is a cognitive scientist who has done a lot of important work related to climate change. He’s doing a reddit “Ask Me Anything” on Monday, April 14th from 7:30AM EST onwards. Which, conveniently for him, is 7:30PM in Australia, if I have my time zones right.
There are two topics he mentioned to me that he’d like to address, which I will describe to you by citing blog posts:
I needed a copy of the “False Hope Graph” that Michael Mann painstakingly created for his Scientific American piece “Earth Will Cross the Climate Danger Threshold by 2036” for a presentation I’m doing, but it had to be simpler, leave some stuff off, and be readable across the room on a screen. The original graphic looks like this:
It is a major contribution showing the relationship between climate sensitivity and climate change in the future depending on various important factors. The graphic I made from it is here (click on it to get the big giant version):
You’ll notice I left only one sensitivity + aerosol forcing line on it because in my talk I’ll use that as the most likely. Some of you might find it helpful.
You should go read the original post, but here’s a key part of it:
Frontiers retracted a perfectly fine (according to their own investigation) psychology paper due to financial risks for themselves. It can only be seen as at best a rather lame excuse or at worst rather patronizing, if Frontiers were to claim to be protecting their authors from lawsuits by removing the ‘offending’ article. This is absolutely no way to “empower researchers in their daily work“. In the coming days I will send resignation letters to the Frontiers journals to which I have donated my free time for a range of editorial duties.
And now, on a completely unrelated note, for your amusement:
It is said that global warming has taken a break over the last decade or so. This is not true. Surface temperatures (air, sea surface, and ice) have increased over this period of time, though less so than previous years. Also, there are various indicators that the coming year or so may be extra warm, depending on what happens in the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps more importantly, deep sea temperatures seem to have gone up, and since most of the effects of anthropogenic global warming are seen in the ocean (over 90% of the extra heat goes there), changes in the rate of global warming at the surface can easily be the result of short term changes in exactly where the heat goes. (I discuss this in detail here: The Ocean is the Dog. Atmospheric Temperature is the Tail and About That Global Warming Hiatus… #Fauxpause.)
Recent research has suggested that part of the recent slow down in global surface warming, and other fluctuations, have resulted from the fact that the Earth’s surface is not as evenly sampled as one would like, and certain areas that have heated up quite a bit lately such as the Arctic and interior Africa are underrepresented in the data.
Some of the variation in surface warming has been attributed by some researchers to a phenomenon known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). “Oscillations” are a common phenomenon in climatology. Generally speaking, this is where a major variable (temperature or air pressure) in a given area or between two areas shifts back and forth around a mean. The AMO in particular has been a bit difficult to figure out, or for that matter, to prove that it really even exists. Part of the problem is that a single oscillation, which involves seas surface temperatures over the Atlantic Ocean, may have a period of forty or even eighty years. For this reason, the high quality record of surface temperature change allows us to only see a couple of full oscillations, and this makes it hard to characterize and even harder to explain causally.
According to Michael Mann, lead author of a paper just out addressing the pause and its relationship to the AMO, “Some researchers have in the past attributed a portion of Northern Hemispheric warming to a warm phase of the AMO. The true AMO signal, instead, appears likely to have been in a cooling phase in recent decades, offsetting some of the anthropogenic warming temporarily.”
One application to understanding recent changes in the rate of warming in the context of the AMO is the so-called “Stadium Wave.” This is an actual Stadium Wave, a phenomenon seen at sporting events:
The climate Stadium Wave idea as proposed by Judith Curry suggests that certain changes in surface conditions related to the AMO result in swings in surface temperature that actually explain the long term “global warming curve” enough to discount or reduce the presumed effects of global warming. Curry’s Stadium Wave is a kind of emergent property of climate, where this and that thing happens and results in a large effect because of compounding variables.
It’s complicated. Here is an abstract from a paper by MG Wyatt and JA Curry explaining it:
A hypothesized low-frequency climate signal propagating across the Northern Hemisphere through a network of synchronized climate indices was identified in previous analyses of instrumental and proxy data. The tempo of signal propagation is rationalized in terms of the … Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. Through multivariate statistical analysis of an expanded database, we further investigate this hypothesized signal to elucidate propagation dynamics. The Eurasian Arctic Shelf-Sea Region, where sea ice is uniquely exposed to open ocean in the Northern Hemisphere, emerges as a strong contender for generating and sustaining propagation of the hemispheric signal. Ocean-ice-atmosphere coupling spawns a sequence of positive and negative feedbacks that convey persistence and quasi-oscillatory features to the signal. Further stabilizing the system are anomalies of co-varying Pacific-centered atmospheric circulations. Indirectly related to dynamics in the Eurasian Arctic, these anomalies appear to negatively feed back onto the Atlantic‘s freshwater balance. Earth’s rotational rate and other proxies encode traces of this signal as it makes its way across the Northern Hemisphere.
This led to a number of statements and predictions by Curry, which have been parsed out here.
For the past 15+ years, there has been no increase in global average surface temperature…
The stadium wave hypothesis provides a plausible explanation for the hiatus in warming and helps explain why climate models did not predict this hiatus. Further, the new hypothesis suggests how long the hiatus might last.
The ‘hiatus’ will continue at least another decade
Climate models are too sensitive to external forcing
Hiatus persistence beyond 20 years would support a firm declaration of problems with the climate models
Incorrect accounting for natural internal variability implies: Biased attribution of 20th century warming [and] Climate models are not useful on decadal time scales
So, the Stadium Wave model goes a long way to explain recent surface temperature trends, and seriously calls into question the viability of climate models that show a strong human influence on global warming and that predict future catastrophic warming. For this reason, the Stadium Wave hypothesis brings up key questions, and if there is evidence either supporting it or falsifying it, that would be of utmost importance.
The paper under consideration here, “On Forced Temperature Changes, Internal Variability and the AMO” by Michael Mann, Byron Steinman, and Sonya Miller, addresses the Stadium Wave issue (and other matters). This is a very complicated study and if you really want to understand it I recommend getting at least a Masters Degree in Atmospheric Science then sitting down with it for a long time. The way I got through the paper was asking the lead author a bunch of questions. Here, I mainly want to address the Stadium Wave issue. The short version of the story is this: Curry’s Stadium Wave is an artifact of her methods. A second and probably more important finding is that the AMO, previously thought to have contributed to warming surface temperatures over the last ten years, is now thought, based on this new analysis, to have contributed to a relative flattening out of the warming, and thus may account for the so-called “hiatus” in part.
Previous work, including that done by Curry but also others, treated the AMO as a long term change in sea surface temperature that could be identified by removing other signals using some standard statistical techniques, most notably “detrending.” Detrending is where you have a known (or presumed) signal that imposes a certain pull on the system over time. This is then numerically removed from the signal as a linear adjustment. For example, if I want to know the average heart beat rate of a set of people, I could just hook them up to a monitor and collect data and get an average. But say I don’t want my signal to be messed up by certain factors, such as caffeine intake, aerobic exercise, or watching episodes of exciting TV shows. So, I estimate the effects of these other activities on heart rate using some independent information and come up with a linear fudge factor. Then, I record when my subjects are drinking their Latte, engaged in their Cardio-Kick class, or watching The Walking Dead. For those periods of time I adjust the heart rate data based my numerical model of those effects, and the result is the detrended heart rate.
A more straight forward use is found in climate studies. We know that there is long term global warming caused by the release of fossil Carbon (mainly as Carbon Dioxide) into the atmosphere. So if we want to observe something like the AMO all by itself, we take the long term temperature record of sea surface in the Atlantic, subtract a numerical value representing anthropogenic global warming over time, and what is left should be the AMO.
But there is a problem with that technique.
The relationship between different variables in a complicated system has to be known or assumed to do this kind of adjustment. For example, let’s say that drinking a latte before Cardio-Kick makes the effects of Cardio-Kick five times more intense on the heart rate. If you didn’t know that, than your detrending of heart rate would get messed up. If you knew about this non-linear relationship, you could adjust for it, but if you don’t know about it, or assume it to be not significant and thus ignore it, than your results will be wrong.
Here’s another analogy that may help. Let’s say you know how to drive a car. That includes how to steer the car through a turn. This involves turning the wheel in a certain direction a certain amount as the car goes through the curve, then straightening out the wheel to go straight after the curve. Now, lets say you get a job flying a high performance fighter jet. But, you slept through flight school. Now, you are flying the jet and you want to make a small turn, so you turn the “wheel” of the plane a bit, then straighten it out to continue in a straight line after the turn.
If you did that, you would actually tilt the plane with your first turn of the wheel, and it would stay tilted indefinitely thereafter, continuing with the turn. To properly turn the jet you have to tilt it, let it start flying in the new direction, then untilt it. In other words, if you fly a jet fighter like you drive a car, you will fly it wrong because you made incorrect assumptions about the relationships between the key variables leading to the final outcome (the direction you are going in). I recommend that you don’t do that with fighter planes or climate data.
Mann, Steinman and Miller, in this new paper, tried something interesting. They recreated a set of scenarios in which they could observe the AMO and other climate variables over time, but rather than having the AMO be a variable subject to emergence after other factors are accounted for, they introduced a known AMO. This way they could see the exact effects of the AMO on surface temperatures and other variables and explore the relationship between the variables. They call this the “differenced-AMO approach.” Knowing the true AMO signal they were able to produce a correct climate signal, and when the AMO signal was detrended in this scenario, the final result failed to match known internal variability. In other words, using the previously applied techniques, such as used by Curry, the modeling did not work. More importantly, the detrended AMO signal had an artificially increased amplitude, with lower lows and higher highs, and these peaks occurred at the wrong times.
Go back to the fly vs. drive analogy. Imagine you are now driving something … a car or a plane … with a blindfold. Your job is to drive or fly around for a while then later show your path on a map. You know how to drive a car. You drive around a bit at a regular speed, make four left turns, and when you are done you may be able to draw your path on a map with reasonable accuracy because you have an accurate expectation of what happens when you turn the wheel of a car. Now, do it with the high performance jet fighter but using your car-driving expectations. You think that first turn to the left made your path turn 90 degees to the left but it really sent you into an unending circle. Now you make two more left turns and you think you’d be back to the starting point like you would be in a car, but what you’ve really done is to send the jet into a tighter and tighter turn and while you think you flew in a big square, your actual path is more like something a kid might draw with a Sprograph(TM). That appears to be what Judith Curry did.
The Stadium Wave is alleged to happen when the AMO and other related climate factors peak and wane in sync, but this new paper shows that this is a statistical artifact. According to Mann, “Past studies arguing for a large AMO temperature signal with a substantial contribution to recent warming have assumed that the forced component of climate change (human factors such as greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols, as well as natural factors such as volcanoes and solar output changes) is a simple straight line, a linear trend. That is the null hypothesis they assume. They subtract off that linear trend and interpret what is left over as an “oscillation”. But the significance of that oscillation rests upon the validity of the null hypothesis of a simple linear forced signal. That null hypothesis is just wrong.”
Driving a jet plane like a car.
“We estimate the forced signal (which includes a cooling component from 1950s–1970s due to human-generated sulphate aerosols) using a variety of climate model results, and show that the residual “internal variability” that results when you subtract off a more valid estimate of the forced climate trend is very different. The AMO signal turns out to be much smaller (and the estimated amplitude is consistent with findings from coupled model simulations that exhibit an AMO oscillation).”
So, the Stadium Wave hypothesis now looks more like this:
As I mention above, another important finding of this work is that the AMO probably accounts for part of the recent decade’s warming being less than previous years. According to Mann, “Rather than contributing to recent warming, the correctly-estimated AMO signal appears to have contributed cooling over the past decade, i.e. it offset some greenhouse warming.”
The previously used detrending also missed the contribution of other factors that probably make the AMO look like something it isn’t. There have been a number of other effects on surface temperatures that are left behind after anthropogenic warming is detrended out of the data, especially the effects of sulfate aerosols, which come from power plants and such. “These aerosols have cooled substantial regions of the Northern Hemisphere continents in recent decades, thus masking some of the warming we otherwise would have seen,” Mann told me. “But aerosols have tailed off in recent decades thanks to the Clean Air Acts, etc. That has allowed the hidden warming to emerge in recent decades. If you subtract off a straight line from the temperature trend, you will appear to have an “oscillation”, but that oscillation is just mostly due to the non-linear nature of the long-term forcing, with a substantial positive forcing (warming through 1950s, then slight warming or even cooling from the 1950s–1970s due to a large sulphate aerosol cooling contribution), followed by the accelerated warming in recent decades as aerosols have tailed off. We show in the paper that subtracting off a simple linear trend when you have this more complicated time history of human forcing of climate, gives rise to a spurious apparent “oscillation”.”
Go back, if you dare, to the abstract from Curry’s paper. Back when I used to teach multi-variate statistics for grad students (co-taught with a brilliant statistician, I quickly add) this is the kind of abstract we would look for to use in class. It demonstrates an all too common error, or at least potentially demonstrates it well enough to examine as an exemplar of what not to do. Climate systems are complex. There are a lot of known variables and accessible data sets, but those variables and data sets have often hidden relationships, or important factors are unknown, either entire variables or relationships between variables. If you take a set of possible causal variables and one or two ideal outcome variables, it is possible to mix and match among the candidate causal variables until you get a model that matches the outcome. Perhaps, in doing so, you’ve figured something out. Or, perhaps you just made up some stuff. One way to know if you’ve really explained a phenomenon is to have a sensible, even expected, physical process that links things together. In other words, you have a logical cause as well as a statistical link. The latter without the former is potentially wrong. A second way to evaluate your finding is to seek internal statistical or numerical relationships that result in apparent meaning but that are actually artifacts of your methods. In this case, Mann et al have done this; as demonstrated in this new paper, Curry’s stadium wave is one possible, but meaningless, outcome from the process of making statistical stone soup. Such is the way many theories of everything, large or small, seem to go.
Mann also told me that some of the other large scale oscillations that make up part of the standard descriptions of Earth climate systems could be subject to similar artifactual effects. It will be interesting to see if further work allows further refinement of our understanding of these systems over coming months or years. The models climate scientists use are pretty good, but this would make them more useful and accurate.
Paul Douglas’s overview of current wether and climate effects.
Published on Apr 7, 2014 WeatherNationTV Chief Meteorologist Paul Douglas goes over the continuing dangerous drought occurring across the western US. Some places need over a foot of rain just to break even! Is there any relief in sight?
