Tag Archives: Climate Change

Understanding Storms and Global Warming: A Quaint Parable

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A quaint New England rocky creek

Imagine standing next to Parable Creek, an imaginary rocky brook in New England. The water is rushing past you from left to right, around the rocks that emerge tall above the surface of the stream, mounding over the top of those that are lower down. The deepest parts of the steam are relatively flat but show ripples that belie the presence of other rocks and sunken branches that are well below the water line.

While you are observing a young boy of about 11 years old comes along, carrying his fishing pole. “Hey mister, how’s it going?” he says, as he steps into the stream. “I’m going fishing over there,” he says pointing in the direction of a mill pond a mile or so away. As he crosses the stream you notice that whenever he puts is foot down, some of the water mounds up on the upstream side as it rushes by him. He continues across the stream and climbs the opposite bank, running off to his destination. You wish him good luck with his fishing and return to your observations.

You can see large eddies here and there that seem to persist though they may change shape or grow or shrink a little. Smaller eddies, mini vortexes, form in certain parts of the stream, and rush down slope only to disappear as the water crashed into an obstruction. Every here and there there is a splash caused by the rushing water hitting a rock or branch just the right way.

Now, imagine that you are a compulsive data collecting scientist standing next to the rocky brook with nothing else to do for a while. So you start measuring things. Every where you see a mound of water built up in the current alongside a rock, that is a bit of kinetic energy (water moving) converted momentarily in to potential energy (water rising against gravity). So you estimate the number of mounds and their collective mass. This is a measurement of one form of energy in the stream.

You make a prediction. If the amount of water coming down this stream increases for a while, the total energy of the stream will increase, and this will be visible as an increase in total potential energy in the mounds you’ve been measuring.

Coincidentally it has been raining heavily upstream and just as you have formulated your hypothesis you see the water rising. Aha! A chance to test your prediction. At first, your hypothesis seems supported. As the water rises, the relative height of the mounds increases, and some new mounds form. You take some quick measurements, by eye, and note that the total potential energy stored in water mounds has increased, presumably as an effect of more overall energy in the stream. You gain confidence in your theory and congratulate yourself on your brilliance.

But then, as the water level continues to rise something different happens. More and more of the stream is now above the obstructing rocks. Therefore, there is less conversion of kinetic to potential energy. Most of the mounds disappear and the overall surface of the stream is much smoother. You take a new set of measurements and estimate that the total potential energy stored in water formed into mounds is an order of magnitude LOWER than your original measurement. Apparently, you think, something is wrong with this stream.

Just then a troop of Brownies comes along. The little girls want to cross the stream to take a short cut to their picnic grounds. They ask, “Hey, Mister, do you think it is safe to cross this stream?”

You had a nice theory linking total energy and a specific observation, which seemed to be confirmed by some of your research. The total energy of stream flow is linked to the total mound-i-ness of the stream’s surface. Now, the stream’s surface is smoother than it was before. Therefore, the total energy of the stream is at the low end of its known variation. A while back you saw a small boy cross the stream with no problem. Clearly, it is safe to cross now.

So, you say, “Actually, I’m sure it is quite safe. Go ahead and cross, and have a nice day!”

The brownies jump happily into the stream and start wade through the water. Half way across the stream, one by one but over just a few seconds of time of time, they are carried away by the water and drown.

“Hmmmm,” you think. “Maybe I had that wrong.”

Rivers Of Air

Air flowing over the surface of the land is a bit like water running down a stream or river. The air interacts with the ground (especially things like mountains). There are different layers, mounds, streams, and eddies of air that interact with each other. The overall form of movement is shaped by the spin of the earth, the tendency of warm air to form in certain areas (i.e., near the equator, or over water during winter and over land during summer, etc.) which causes the air to pile up and spill into nearby eddies. There are all sorts of ways in which batches of air interact, and when you thrown in differential amounts of moisture in different air masses, and things like night vs. day, and so on, you get the surface of Parable Creek. Metaphorically. In real life, we call the The Weather.

When the total energy in the system of air movement changes the way those crazy zany air masses move and what sorts of weather form can also change. For example, there is in total more energy on the hemisphere (north vs south) that is sticking its face towards the sun. It seems that one result of this is that the hemisphere with more energy (the summer end of the earth, as it were) has hurricanes, severe thunder storms, tornadoes, and so on while the hemisphere with less energy has less of that stuff.

However, a tornado is like a small eddy in the stream, and a hurricane like a large eddy, and a line of thunderstorms like the outer edge of one the mounds and the rainstorms are like the splashes at the edge of the log and so on and so forth. As Parable Creek’s level rises, exactly which phenomena are predominant changes, even as the total ability of the stream to wash away Brownies increases to the level where it can also wash away Girl Scouts and eventually Brawny Construction Workers and Bikers. Having said that, while a rocky stream converts to a large and deep river by adding a LOT of water, which may have a smooth surface despite the total energy of the river being orders of magnitude greater than Parable Creek’s energy, the system of air movement is not likely to become smoother owing to various limitations in the system.

Too Much Variability

You can’t measure the energy in the stream by only looking at one of the many phenomena that are the manifestations of that energy. In order to understand the relationship between global warming and storminess, it is minimally necessary to measure all of the storminess and find some way to combine it.

I remember when I first moved to Minnesota. That summer we had numerous straight line wind events of the sort never seen before. Maplewood, a community near where I lived famous for it’s tree lined streets lost almost all of its trees in one storm. That same storm also took out most of the stock of most of the new car companies in that town, famous for its numerous car lots. The cars were pitted with hail stones. Every single home for about three miles along a street right near where I lived had it’s vinyl or aluminum siding drilled with hundreds of holes and dents from large hail stones being driven by a 60–100 mile per hour wind. It was one of the worst weather years in Minnesota, with insurance companies practically going bankrupt.

There were only a few tornadoes in the area that year.

The next year there were hardly any straight line wind storms of the magnitude just described. But that is the year of the Saint Peter tornado. It was one of the largest tornado events ever; It was a twister that lifted and dropped a couple of times, so ‘nato-pedants divide it into multiple events, but that’s absurd. It was an F3 and F4 event, and it tracked for 67 miles and was up to one and a half mile wide.

There were a lot of tornadoes that year.

The atmosphere over central and southern Minnesota had a lot of energy those two years, for whatever reason. If we want to understand the total energy, and its effects on life and property, we would be doing a disservice to our pursuit of understanding if we failed to consider both straight line winds and tornadoes together (though obviously also separately).

The Big Picture

Weather comes in bands. The biggest and most obvious band is the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a band of thunderstorms that rings the entire planet and is pretty much always active. Another band is the arid band that rings the earth; actually there are two of them, one in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern Hemisphere. Almost every major desert on the earth is in one of those bands. In fact, any desert that is not in one of those bands has to explain itself, and the excuse is usually a mountain rain shadow. Conversely, any wettish areas in those bands also have some ‘splainin to do. The southeastern US is in the Northern Hemisphere’s arid band, but the Gulf of Mexico keeps that region pretty wet much of the year.

Severe weather is also patterned in these bands, to some extent. Hurricanes form in the bands just north or south of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Tornadoes tend to be confined to subtropical and southern temperate bands away from the equator. In a sense, one could say that most tornadoes that are not spinoffs from hurricanes occur in a certain band either north or south of the equator, and if we are going to count tornado activity, measure its total intensity, etc., we should be looking more globally at those zones, not just parts of those zones.

This of course applies to national borders as well. Tornadoes occur in the US but also in Canada, but the most easily available tornado data for North America is always presented as US tornadoes. Also, years are tricky. Events that span Jan 1st are hard to track if we count things by calendar years.

Some have been harping about the “tornado drought of 2012” as evidence that there is not an increase in tornadoes owing to global warming. Well, there are very few US tornadoes in January, but the January with the most tornadoes ever (in our records) was January 2012. Also, Canada had a lot of tornadoes in 2012. Has anyone looked to see what the combined US and Canadian count would be? And, how do you count a Canadian Tornado? The very fact that a tornado forms 1000 miles north from where most occur has something to do with the nature and distribution of atmospheric energy across the plant’s surface. I’m not making a specific claim about the distribution of tornadoes across time and space. I am saying, rather, that counting tornadoes within an arbitrary boundary in space (or time) can be misleading.

Then, there is the problem we have with all of these storm types, especially tornadoes and hurricanes, of how to actually measure them. Even using standard severity scales, tornadoes can be very different from each other in ways that are not counted in the usual statistics. An F3 tornado that is extra wide and stays on the ground for 100 miles involved significantly more energy than an F4 that formed momentarily and disappeared. Indeed, the different kinds of tornadoes (funnel vs. wedge, for example) really may be very different (but closely related) weather phenomena that should be examined separately at the very same time we combine vastly different storm types to measure and understand at a larger, global scale.

Tornadoes are not a good canary, in the canary in a coal mine sense. But they are obviously important. When we see people stating clearly and plainly that we need not be concerned about the frequency of tornadoes increasing with global warming, we should ask why they are saying that. We should be concerned with increasing storminess … there is almost no way that is not going to happen, and likely, it already has. If tornadoes are part of that increase storminess, we may want to get smart about it fast. For instance, we might want to take seriously the problem of schools and workplaces, where people tend to concentrate, having actual storm shelters instead of just hallways that some administrators says is a storm shelter, for protection when a big tornado comes along. Don’t you think?

See also this post which more directly addresses the question of tornadoes and global warming.

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Are there more tornadoes because of global warming?

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There are good reasons to believe that global warming leads to more storminess, but the exact nature of that transition is unclear and hard to measure. Part of the reason for this difficulty is that a given type of storm may become more likely under certain conditions caused by climate change, while a different kind of storm may become less likely, with the “storminess” overall increasing but doing so indifferent ways across time. Also, the most severe, and thus possibly the most important, weather events are infrequent so it is difficult to see changes over time with any statistical confidence. I address many of these issues here and here.

Looking at the raw data, it is clear that there are “more tornadoes” over time in the US. Have a look at this graph:

Annual number of tornadoes for the period 1916-1995; the dashed line connecting solid circles shows the raw data, the red heavy solid line is the result of smoothing. Also shown in the green light solid line is the number of tornado days (i.e., days with one or more tornadoes) per year.
Annual number of tornadoes for the period 1916-1995; the dashed line connecting solid circles shows the raw data, the red heavy solid line is the result of smoothing. Also shown in the green light solid line is the number of tornado days (i.e., days with one or more tornadoes) per year.

At first glance, his graph makes it look like there are a lot more tornadoes, but there is a strong effect of observer error; earlier tornadoes were simply missed much of the time, so the big increase you see here, while it may reflect an underlying increase in number of tornadoes, is not reliable and cant’ be taken as evidence. However the later years shown here, from 1950-something to the 1990s, seems to show an increase that could be taken as meaningfull

However, when people speak of tornadoes they often show this graph as evidence that there are not more of them over time:

Looks like the number of tornadoes does not go up over time.
Looks like the number of tornadoes does not go up over time.

Looking only at this graph it looks like the number of tornadoes per year in the US is pretty variable but not increasing, as one would expect if global warming was causing more of them.

There is a problem with this graph, however. Actually, a couple of problems (other than those pointed out here). The main problem is that the most frequent tornadoes are left off this graph. If we look at F0 grade tornadoes, not included here, we see that they have actually increased in frequency over time. If we include ALL tornadoes, and not just the kinds that don’t seem to increase in frequency over time, we get this graph:

Huh. Maybe the number of tornadoes DOES increase over time!
Huh. Maybe the number of tornadoes DOES increase over time!

Compare the scales of the last two graphs. It turns out that the number of tornadoes at the smaller end of the scale goes up quite a bit. It might be hard to see. The upper graph goes up to 900, the lower graph goes up to 1900. So, if we add all the data instead of just select data, we get many hundreds more tornadoes per year.

The proportion of tornadoes that are F0 increases over time as shown here:

Tornadoes_Ratio_of_F0-RatioofEF0s

… and the overall distribution of tornadoes by strength changes over time as shown in this very cool graph:

It isn't just the F0 tornadoes changing over time. The overall pattern of tornadoes shifts with time.
It isn’t just the F0 tornadoes changing over time. The overall pattern of tornadoes shifts with time.

As I point out here, one of the contributing factors to variation over time in tornado frequency is the fact that we have somewhat arbitrary boundaries in which we measure them. For instance, the US-Canada border provides an arbitrary line across our data set. By not counting all North American tornadoes the same way, we may be adding unnecessary variability to the data. To demonstrate this, have a look at this graph showing tornado frequency per year in France and Germany, two countries that are right next to each other:

Frequency of tornadoes in France and Germany ... seems to be uncorrelated.
Frequency of tornadoes in France and Germany … seems to be uncorrelated.

This shows a few things. For one thing, they don’t have too many tornadoes in that part of the world. For another thing, there is an increase in overall frequency over time, and this is not because of lack of reporting. The reporting problem in the US is partly because the western and central states were relatively empty in the old days, and also more technology was available for spotting tornadoes later. But the European and US data have the same shape over a similar time span, but France and Germany do not have the missing observations owing to vast unoccupied (sort of) territories.

But the main thing I want to demonstrate with this graph is the fact that dividing a largish area of land up into arbitrary units can cause your data go go all flooey. Increased variability in data owing to partitioning is a well known phenomenon and this is what it looks like.

Another part of the problem is that the largest storms, which may be the most important ones, have a great deal of variation in their occurrence. Compare any of the graphs above of all tornadoes or all excluding the F0 tornadoes of this graph of just the largest storms:

Pay attention to the vertical scale, but note that there is a lot of variation over time in these large events. This kind of data almost has too much variability to track change over time meaningfully
Pay attention to the vertical scale, but note that there is a lot of variation over time in these large events. This kind of data almost has too much variability to track change over time meaningfully

Not only is there a lot of variation in numbers of tornadoes at the larger end of the scale, but I suspect there is a lot of variability among the tornadoes in each class in terms of overall energy represented. An F4 tornado that lasts five minutes compared to an F4 tornado that lasts 20 minutes are hugely different, but this is not reflected in this sort of data.

Here is a graph showing the amount of storm damagein adjusted dollars over time in the US (pink) with average temperature (blue). Clearly, the total amount of damage goes up, and probably for a number of reasons including there being more stuff to damage, but also, likely overall increases in storminess including hurricanes, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, etc.

More storm damage over time
More storm damage over time

Here is another graph that shows something similar:

Increasing bad stuff over time.
Increasing bad stuff over time.

There are many who do not want to link increases in severe weather to global warming. They are probably wrong. Global warming seems to increase severe weather overall. The best way to deny this is to cherry pick the data by ignoring variability across space, leaving out entire categories of storms, or focusing on just some kinds of storms. I suspect the size and severity of tornadoes at the larger end is increasing now, but did not start increasing until recently; time will tell if this is right. But overall tornadoes are so variable across time and space that they are not a reliable canary, as it were. But overall storminess seems to be on the increase, in accordance with expectations from the basis physics of climate, under warming conditions.

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Why Global Warming’s Effects Will Be Worse Than You Were Thinking

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The story of climate change has always been more of worst-case, or at least, worser-case scenarios developing and less about good news showing up out of nowhere and making us unexpectedly happy.

A few decades ago, it became clear that the release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere primarily as CO2 was going to cause a greenhouse effect (yes, dear reader, we’ve known this for looooong time … the idea that this is a recent and still untested idea is a lie you’ve been fed so many times some of you may have begun to believe it). At that time climate scientists thought, reasonably, that there would be a diverse set of responses to the increase in CO2 and/or the increase in heat, some of which would accentuate the effects (positive feedback) and others would reduce the effects (negative feedback). Over time, the list of possible ameliorating effects became shorter and shorter and eventually pretty much disappeared. There is no double secret save-our-butts-at-the-last-minute Carbon “sink” nor is there any natural response that would cause cooling to somehow be caused by warming. Meanwhile, the list of accentuating effects has grown. Melting permafrost releases copious green house gasses. Melting sea ice in the Arctic allows the Arctic Sea to warm even more. Global warming-caused aridity causes numerous fires which coat the Greenland ice with soot, causing it to melt faster and do less of the work of reflecting sunlight back into space. And so on and so forth.

For these reasons, several years go you’d have climate scientists saying “well, this is important, and change is coming, but there’s good news and bad news” and then the good news all went away and the bad news all stuck around, and every now and then, a new bad news item not previously thought of came along and lengthened that list. So already, climate change is worse than we thought.

Then we have the problem of scary empirical reality.

The Ghost of the Eemian

One of the most significant negative effects of global warming is likely to be sea level rise. Sea level rise so far has been significant, measurable, and important, but not large. As the earth warms because of increased levels of greenhouse gasses, the temperature of the ocean has increased, and this has caused the water in the ocean to expand, raising the level of the sea. At the same time, glaciers have been melting all across the planet, adding additional water to the sea, causing additional sea level rise.

So you can see that there is a link between temperature and sea level rise. More heat, more sea level rise. But there’s a problem with this model. Based on prior experience, it seems that our planet normally responds to heat like we are experiencing now with a much higher sea level. During the Eemian period, the last time conditions were similar to the present, sea level was about 5 to 7 meters higher than now. In other words, given an admittedly small sample of 2 instances, when global temperatures are roughly like they are now, sea level can be anywhere between their current levels and 7 meters higher than current levels.

This is not the kind of relationship between important variables that allows us to say that sea levels are going to go down, or stay at their current level, or rise very slowly. These are the kinds of numbers that tell us that we really don’t know what is going to happen over the next few decades, but that the chance that sea level will drop is zero, and the chance that sea level will rise only a little is slim, and the chance that sea level will rise quickly and a great deal at some point in time, or in a few spurts, is pretty good.

Predicting genocide using information about voting patterns

Which brings us to more details about the problem of sea level. Sea levels will rise the most not because of warming oceans but because of glaciers … whopping big continental glaciers … falling apart and slipping into the sea, or melting very rapidly and sending copious meltwater into the sea. Everything we know about the Greenland and Antarctic glaciers seems to indicate that at least some of this is going to involve large events, where big parts of big glaciers slide into the sea, rather than melting slowly like an ice cube in your sink. Also, the rates of melting during a handful of events observed over the last couple of years were entirely unpredicted and shocked scientists watching the process. Also, previously unknown causes of rapid melting are as we speak being discovered and measured.

Putting this another way, it would be a reasonable guess that the rate of continental glacial melting will be much higher than previously estimated, but also, the timing and speed of this ice wastage is pretty much unknown, and quite possibly unknowable except in very broad terms.

We have some very fancy models based on physics of ice melting and a few other variables that can be used to estimate ice melt and sea level rise. The problem is, these unpredictable and large scale catastrophic events have never been observed to happen. Yet, we think that they can happen in part because the rate of sea level rise thousands of years ago at the end of the last glacial maximum was so fast at times that it must have involved some pretty rapid events, more rapid than our models are able to predict. Our models can’t predict these events not because the events can not happen but because the models have no way of dealing with them.

This problem reminds me of my days living in the Eastern Congo. Things were mostly peaceful. But, there were some tensions among various social factions, including different ethnic groups, different classes, and so on. There was tension along the borders between Zaire, Rwanda, and Uganda. But there was nothing whatsoever going on during my time there that would have predicted the Rwandan Genocide, the Congo War I or the Congo War II, or any of the troubles that I now realize were just starting then. This would be especially true if we were making careful sociological observations, measuring variables, taking polls, counting things, and so on and so forth. Major social upheaval comes when it comes, and is rarely accurately predicted by those carefully measured and modeled variables, and the timing and magnitude of those upheavals is never known in advance. And as human society so often goes, so may well go the glaciers of Greenland and the Antarctic. Our physics based models are going to look rather silly, predicting a melting rate of several centimeters a year, when three or four big-gigantic glacial monster fragments fall into the ocean within a year or two of each other along with a steady stream of slush causing ten years worth of sea level rise faster than you can say “property values in New York City may be slightly depressed” three times.

The Good News

There is no good news. But what often happens is that a bit of research comes along and looks like good news. This research is then identified, pointed to, repeated again and again, over-interpreted, used to argue that global warming is not real, and even used to argue that those who have been saying all along that global warming is real are making it up, on someone’s payroll, are part of some huge conspiracy, etc. etc.

In other words, the progress of understanding of the potential future effects of climate change is set back significantly every time a research project with slightly good news, or even just less bad news than usual, is reported. This is ironic, because so many of those research projects have flaws in them that if taken account of suggest that the good news is not really there to begin with.

For example, a recent study seemed to show that the response of the planet to increased Carbon Dioxide is less than we expected it to be, but only over the short term. The difference between long term “climate sensitivity” (the amount of warming you get from a certain amount of greenhouse gas) and short term is probably where the heat goes not how much is added. Over the last few years, the ocean has been taking on a larger share of the heat from global warming, so the atmosphere has not warmed up as much (though it has warmed). But, the partial story … that “sensitivity” is less for the present decade has been translated by various re-tellers of the science to suggest that we’ll be fine. In fact, the slowdown in rate of atmospheric warming, which is still warming (like I just said) is called a “stall” in warming. But it is not a stall. It is a slow down in rate in atmospheric warming and a speed up in rate of oceanic warming. That is not really good news though it is reported as good news. But there isn’t good news, just slightly more complicated news. (See this for a summary of that particular story.)

Not long ago another set of nuanced scientific observations were converted by the once reputable Matt Ridley in a piece in the Wall Street Journal, an outlet guilty of publishing this sort of misleading commentary on a regular basis, into “good news.” In …

“Cooling Down the Fears of Climate Change,” [Ridley] (falsely) asserts observations suggest global warming will be so low as to “be benificial.” This risible piece by Matt Ridley is so riddled with basic math and science errors it raises the question of how the Journal can possibly maintain its reputation as a credible source of news and financial analysis.

Ambiguous News

Of particular poignancy at the moment, since as I’m writing this the bodies of third graders are being pulled from a tornado-ravaged elementary school in Oklahoma, is discussion of the relationship between global warming and storminess. Storms are complicated. They vary in number from year to year, they vary in where they strike, and they vary in intensity per storm. Nonetheless there are patterns. There has been exactly one Atlantic hurricane in the south Atlantic ever, as far as we know. They only occur in the north. Tornadoes don’t occur randomly; they are clustered mostly in certain regions of the world and mostly occur during certain months, though there is a lot of variation. (I discuss this at length here and here.)

Hurricanes are fueled by warm seas, and ripped apart by high level winds. Global warming causes sea surfaces to warm, and may also strengthen tropical and subtropical high level winds. So, does global warming mean more hurricanes or fewer? Or fewer but when they happen, stronger ones? Or what?

In the US, severe thunderstorms, bad straight line winds, and swarms of tornadoes typically arise from moist and warm unstable air masses organized along west to east and south to north moving fronts, with the heat and moisture starting out in the Gulf of Mexico, which is a big warm wet place during the summer. It stands to reason that if you heat up the Gulf, you’ll get more of this, and global warming is heating up the Gulf. But the actual distribution and behavior of these fronts will also depend on the distribution of the famous “Jet Streams” and that is potentially altered by climate change. So, will global warming involve more tornadoes, stronger ones, or will they simply occur somewhere else? Or what?

There is one thing we know about storms. They are ultimately manifestations of heat, and more specifically, they result from the uneven redistribution of heat originally from the sun concentrated in tropical regions and moving towards polar regions by currents of water and air. In a heated up world there is more energy to feed storms. It is impossible to imagine a significantly warmed ocean and a significantly warmed atmosphere without significantly more storm activity and/or stronger storms, and maybe even some new kinds of storms. The problem is that it is hard to say what kinds of storms will increase, if there will be more of some kind of storm or more severe instances. For that matter, maybe all storm types will “increase” at one time or another, taking turns being the big storm problem for a few years, and sometimes that increase will be in numbers, sometimes in strength, sometimes manifest as a change in location of the patterned storm activity. That would be a statistical nightmare. It would be a lot of “moreness” of various phenomena but distributed across a range of different manifestations so that counting storms or measuring storms of specific types will show a pattern only after decades. This is why we sometimes look at overall damage to property from meteorological events over time, and there we do see a steady increase. It is also why the insurance companies, who are not stupid about these things, are so worried.

“Global warming appeasers” (people who pretend to understand the science but who are really trying to make climate change sound like it is not a big deal, like Ridley) and denialists alike are taking advantage of the statistical difficulty of measuring changes in patterns of storms to assert that “we can’t link storms, or storminess, to climate change.” But we can. We know there will be a link between a heated up earth and storm patterns, we are just more than a little uncertain as to what kind of change that will ultimately consist of.

Again, there will be no good news about storminess. Just more detailed news, and possibly a more nuanced understanding, which unfortunately will require more nuanced reporting and commentary.

Good luck with that.

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The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania

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There is a book called “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania” produced by the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is famous for doing all that work to prove that smoking is not bad for you, and more recently, that climate change is not real or is not important or is not human-caused etc. etc. Heartland is a libertarian “think” tank that receives money form big corporate interests like Tobacco and Petroleum and then uses that money to advance the interests of those corporate entities, regardless of the actual truth of the situation. They also use some of their money to threaten law suits against people like me who object to their activities. (But they do so very ineffectively.)

This is one of those books that contains political propaganda, is printed in large(ish) numbers, then sent around to teachers, academics, policy makers, etc. whether they want a copy or not; it is a sort of high level form of spam. You may remember Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) or J. Philippe Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior : A Life History Perspective (2nd Special Abridged Edition), also produced by entities with an anti-social (in this case, racist) agenda, with piles of free copies sent out to a gazillion people. This is the same thing, but for climate change. It is a climate denialist book.

I’m not going to critique The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania because my friend and colleague John Abraham has already done a great job of that:

Heartland Institute wastes real scientists’ time – yet again

This spring, I began receiving calls and emails from colleagues about a strange little book that was mailed to environmental science professors around the country. This was a big mailing, in total, a reported 100,000 copies were sent out. What was it about this little book that got us talking? Many things. First….

CLICK HERE to read John’s excellent blog post. You won’t want to miss this. Also, while you are there look at the other posts at John’s new blog, written with Dana Nuccitelli.

Since we are on the subject of books and science denialism, may I recommend that you read, if you’ve not already, Shawn Otto’s excellent book Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America.

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Investing in fossil fuel free portfolios

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Apparently that is a thing:

NEW YORK and COLORADO SPRINGS, May 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Over half of sustainable, responsible, impact (SRI) investment industry professionals say that retail investors (65 percent) and institutional investors (53 percent) are currently expressing interest in fossil fuel-free portfolios in the face of growing signs of climate change, according to First Affirmative Financial Network’s Fossil Fuels Divestment Survey.

Read the rest here.

See also this:

Securities of fossil fuels firms, as an economic sector, may soon be on the decline.

Predictions as to when oil and gas will become a smaller part of the investment society makes into its total energy mix, in favor of renewables such as solar, wind and ocean energies, vary, ranging from 2060 on the long side (this prediction from oil industry powerhouse Shell) to 2030 or even sooner on the shorter side (as reported by Bloomberg). But so far, markets appear to be mispricing the risk this presents to fossil fuels companies, and their share prices for now remain high. In our opinion, it’s not too soon to consider divesting from fossil fuels while one might still recover significant value.

The rest of that story is here.

Global Warming Consensus: We can haz it!

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An important study has just been published1 examining the level of consensus among scientists about climate change.

ResearchBlogging.orgThe issue at hand is this: What is the level of agreement in the scientific community about the reality of climate change and about the human role in climate change? The new paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, address this question and the answer is very clear. The number of climate scientists who question the reality of global warming or the human role in global warming is vanishingly small.

This is not the first study to look at this question, but it is the most thorough effort. This should, however, be the last paper to report this kind of research because, really, we’re there; climate scientists are in very strong agreement about this issue and with this landmark study further demonstration of this fact is superfluous. (John Keegan discusses the merits of this paper relative to other similar efforts and closely examines issues such as sample size and bias here.)

How do we know there a consensus among scientists about human-caused climate change?

The research team, John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah Green, Mark Richardson, Barbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs and Andrew Skuce, examined 11,944 abstracts published in peer reviewed scientific journals from 1991–2011 that covered the topics “Global Climate Change” or “Global Warming.” They coded the abstracts to signify the apparent position on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and found that 66.4% expressed no position, 32.4% indicated acceptance of AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% expressed uncertainty as to the cause of warming.

Removing those papers that did not express an opinion, 97.1% “endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”

The paper also looks at change over time in scientific consensus. The bottom line is that there isn’t much; consensus is not especially new. But there is a small trend, discussed by lead author John Cook in the video I provide below. Also, a look at the “reject AGW” papers shows that there are some patterns. Most are looking at large scale (known) change or cosmic sources of climate change, and they tend to be dated to the earlier part of the time range. Rabbet Run lists them here.

Consensus is often implied and not stated in peer reviewed papers

The researchers then invited the authors to rate the papers they had published. When this was done, the number of papers indicating no position on AGW dropped precipitously to 35.5%. In this rating system, 97.2% of papers endorse the consensus on AGW.

This is important for a couple of reasons. For one, it is an indication that the original coding was conservative, and did not involve assumptions about what the authors may have been thinking. It also shows something about how the scientific process works. If you look at any major scientific concept in the literature, you may find very little explicit endorsement of the overarching theoretical construct or model (like “Natural Selection” or “Germ Theory”) if that concept is fully established. Early writings on a particular major concept often refer to the concept itself and may cite early authors. For example one might see something like “Darwin’s concept of Natural Selection is being increasingly applied to understand the physical features of butterflies” with a reference to The Origin of Species. But after a while scientists stop mentioning the no-longer-novel overarching consensus and stop citing the seminal works. Climate science has moved into this state with respect to the human-caused warming of the earth because of the preponderance of evidence of AGW.

The Climate Change Consensus Gap

Depending on which poll you look at, and when the poll was taken, somewhat more than half of Americans either reject global warming as even being real, reject the human role, or simply don’t know about it. Given the scientific consensus, this is a little like saying that over half of Americans don’t accept Evolution as a valid set of theories and observations, despite the preponderance of evidence for that! (Hey, wait a minute…)

consensus_gap

The point is, the gap between scientific consensus and public opinion is real, and very important. The consensus gap causes bad things to happen. For instance, it is quite reasonable for a government agency to fund or support public service announcements on drunk driving. There is a consensus that drunk driving causes deaths, injuries, and accidents. There is not a consensus gap in that area. But global warming also causes misery and mayhem. Shouldn’t there be public service announcements on saving energy and using alternative sources? The consensus gap means that there can’t be.

This of course has a direct effect on public policy, as noted by Naomi Oreskes writing for Science Magazine:

Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, “As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change”. Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.

Leadership is when those with influence head directly for the truth, talk about the right thing to do, and help other people to do the right thing. Main Stream Media does not have that … that leadership thing. Main Stream Media does not look at the scientific consensus and then make judgements about what stories to cover and how to cover them on that basis. Rather, Main Stream Media looks at the range of public opinion and treats that as consensus (or lack of) and acts accordingly. Which, in turn, reinforces or even sometimes widens the gap.

This also causes problems in the liminal area of media commentary. Opinion editorials in major outlets like the Wall Street Journal often exploit the Consensus Gap, manufacturing uncertainty or attracting readers from among the misinformed part of the public, and again, reinforcing or even widening the gap and enhancing the level of public misunderstanding or just plain old ignorance. With respect to global warming, it is time for that to stop. As noted by Brendan DeMelle:

It does not get any clearer than this. It should finally put to rest the claims of climate deniers that there is a scientific debate about global warming. Of course, this bunch isn’t known for being reasonable or susceptible to facts. But maybe the mainstream media outlets that have given deniers a megaphone will finally stop.

Global Warming, Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster

Editorials in Main Stream Media that exploit the consensus gap could be compared to editorials at the New York Times or in the Scientific American or your local newspaper that demand more attention be given to the plight of Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster. The degree of scientific consensus that those creatures do not exist is about the same as the degree of consensus that AGW is real, though the public “belief” in crypto-critters is less than the public “belief” that AGW is not real. Why? Because Main Stream Media has not taken Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster seriously in quite some time.

Ten years from now it will be interesting to look back and see how Main Stream Media’s editorial writers who today are sticking with “the jury is still out” on AGW managed their reputations as they looked more and more like they belonged at the National Enquirer rather than a respected news outlet.

John Cook, the study’s lead author, has also blogged about it here and also has a video summarizing the paper, which he discusses some of the earlier research as well:

Dana Nuccitelli, another co-author, blogged about the research here and here.

This work was also covered by The Weather Channel.

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1The embargo ended overnight last night, even though several climate science denialists failed to respect the embargo, thus, seemingly on purpose, violating a pretty standard ethical rule in academia.

The Consensus Project has a web site HERE and the twitter tag is #TCP

This is the paper:
Cook, J., Nuccitelli, D., Green, S., Richardson, M., Winkler, B., Painting, R., Way, R., Jacobs, P., & Skuce, A. (2013). Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature Environmental Research Letters, 8 (2) DOI: 10.1088/1748–9326/8/2/024024

Dark Snow Project on The Weather Channel

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The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is a problem, and it seems to be happening faster than scientists had originally thought it might. This is probably because of soot darkening the snow, which collects solar heat and melts the ice. Some, perhaps much, of this soot may come from the extensive fires we are experiencing. That increase in fires is probably caused by global warming. The problem is, we don’t know enough about the “Dark Snow” phenomenon. There is a group of scientists trying to study this, and they have turned to Crowd Funding to help make this possible.

Here is recent coverage on The Weather Channel.

Click here to find out more and, hopefully, donate a few bucks to help save the planet.

Blockading A Coal Plant in Massachusetts (Breaking news)

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Environmental activists have just taken up a position off shore of the Brayton Point coal plant, near Fall River Massachusetts, in an effort to block access by a ship attempting to deliver coal there.

This is the boat.
This is the boat.
THIS is their web site, where there is a live Ustream.

One of the activists, Jay O’Hara, is tweeting from here: @oharjo and using the hashtag #coalisstupid

Here is a press release related to this event:

BREAKING NEWS: ACTIVISTS BLOCKING COAL SHIP “ENERGY ENTERPRISE” AT BRAYTON POINT COAL PLANT IN MASSACHUSETTS

Activists have begun a blockade of an incoming coal ship at the Brayton Point Power plant, outside Fall River, Massachusetts.

…

At 9 am this morning, environmental activists Ken Ward, 57 of Jamaica Plain, MA, and Jay O’Hara, 31, of Bourne,MA, anchored their 32’ lobster boat, the Henry David T, in the channel opposite the Brayton Point coal power plant.

They intend to block the “Energy Enterprise,” a coal tanker en route to deliver fuel to the power plant. The boat is transporting “mountain top removal coal” from Hampton, Roads, Virginia –and is expected to arrive later today.

Activists are calling for the immediate closure of BraytonPoint Power Station in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

“The world is teetering on the brink of climate chaos from which there will be no retreat,” said Jay O’Hara, captain of the Henry David T, a 1965 wooden lobster boat. “We know exactly what must be done to avoid the very worst. And the single most important action is to stop burning coal.”

The Brayton Point plant is the single largest coal polluter in New England.

In a separate announcement, members of 350 New Jersey and 350 Massachusetts today released a letter that was hand delivered to Dominion President and CEO, Thomas F. Farrell II and New Jersey-based Energy Capital Partners founder and Senior Partner Doug Kimmelman, opposing the sale of Brayton Point and calling on Dominion Energy to work with Massachuetts Governor Deval Patrick to close the plan.”

At 9:30 am, Ken Ward called the Somerset police to inform them, “We are conducting a peaceful nonviolent protest against the use of coal. We have anchored near the pier atBrayton Point.”

The men were inspired to take action by 350.org co-founder Bill Mckibben’s call for a summer of climate action, and galvanized by the proposed sale of the BraytonPoint Power Station by Dominion Energy to Energy Capital Partners.

Image from the power station’s web site.

Crowdfunding the Dark Snow Project

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New research indicates that the reflectivity of the surface of the Greenland Glacier is decreasing due to the deposition of dark particles from fires on the surface of the ice. This phenomenon is contributing to unprecedented melting of the ice sheet. This is a huge concern. One of the most significant outcomes of global warming will be the melting of large portions of the world’s glaciers, causing the sea level to rise dangerously.

There is a project called The Dark Snow Project which is an effort to measure this newly discovered effect. A large part of this research is being crown-funded, and of course, you can and should contribute to this.

The Dark Snow project is carrying out a major funding initiative right now.

From Leo Hickman’s blog at The Guardian:

Jason Box, a climatologist based at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, is hoping to raise $150,000 over the coming months to pay for an expedition this summer up onto the “ice dome” of Greenland to gather samples of snow. …

The climatic impact of “black carbon” and wildfire smoke is much in the news and yet remains little understood. Last year, Box presented satellite observations (pdf) showing how soot particles drifting from tundra wildfires spread across Greenland. The big as-yet-unanswered question is whether this soot contributed towards the region’s record melt during the summer of 2012. And, if so, by how much.

Here’s a video giving an overview of the project:

You can contribute to the Dark Snow Project by clicking here, where you will find couple of options for making a much needed donation.

Dear [Elected Official] Please Note the 400 ppm benchmark!

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Here’s a template for a letter I hope you will consider sending/emailing to all of your elected representatives at the municipal, state, and federal levels, if you are in the US. Thanks

Dear [elected official]

I am writing to ask you to join the very small but hopefully growing number of elected representatives and executives in noting the important news this week regarding the human contribution to the amount of atmospheric CO2. This week the landmark value of 400 ppm was reached, which is a significant amount more than the pre-industrial baseline level of about 280 ppm. As an elected official, it seems appropriate for you to make a public note using any of your usual outlets that this important event has occurred, in order to bring more focus to the national and regional discussion of climate change.

Here is a link to the NOAA web site giving the details:

http://researchmatters.noaa.gov/news/Pages/CarbonDioxideatMaunaLoareaches400ppm.aspx

Thank you very much,

[your name here]