High-quality climate
I'd like to echo and amplify the comment by manysummits on my last post: "What a surprise when I turned on my computer this morning, and found 41 comments on this blog!!!!!!!!! I note the magnitude of the response, and the quality of the responses as well."
A couple of mornings on and we're up to 73 comments - and with many on a previous post dealing with similar issues, it's time for a new thread.
It's especially nice to read comments from several posters who appear to be working scientists, and great accounts of some of the scientific and social complexities involved, not least from paulvanp and kalense.
Regular readers of this blog will know that personally I find discussion of BBC climate change coverage a lot less interesting than discussion of climate change itself, which is just a little more important in the overall scheme of things.
So I'll have a quick bash at the BBC-relevant points first. BishopHill, you and others raise the question of Chris Field's credentials and why his comments at the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science merited media coverage.
As the new co-chair of the IPCC working group on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, he now has a leadership role in the periodic assessments of global climate change that are the most politically significant documents in the field; so his views on the subject will presumably carry some political weight, and are therefore worth reporting.
As to how well qualified someone who started life as a biologist is to pronounce on climate change; well, if you look at the scope of that IPCC working group, it's extremely broad, and I suggest it would be impossible to find anyone who has formally studied all of the relevant disciplines.
That situation, though, is hardly unknown in science. Even within universities, a dean of science could hardly be expert in every subject in his or her faculty; yet many intelligent and able people seem to make a decent fist of it, and it's highly unlikely, I would suggest, that Chris Field would have got the job if his peers didn't think him qualified.
PAWB46, you ask what evidence there is to back his "contention that things are moving faster than the IPCC projected in its major 2007 report" - well, I listed some of those pieces of evidence in my last post, as well as a few things that point in the other direction - so I'm not sure what's unclear.
(UPDATE 1: I mentioned in the previous thread that more research on this would be published early this week.
It's in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and aims to show that the chances of some major impacts occurring for a given temperature rise are higher than when the IPCC performed its previous major assessment in 2001. It's not available on the PNAS website yet, but in the meantime Andy Revkin of the New York Times has taken a look at it here.)
CuckooToo, you mention that the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) recently acknowledged errors in satellite readings of Arctic ice cover and asked whether I could "confirm all the BBC's headlines about sea-ice loss will be amended accordingly".
The answer is "no, I can't". The last story we ran using NSIDC data dates from December
2008, whereas NSIDC believes the satellite malfunction only affected readings from January 2009 onwards. If the error turns out to have affected earlier readings significantly, then we'll take another look.
A couple of other things to clear up from the last post. iainsteele, you ask whether I'm proposing "a kind of 'number of papers' type argument in deciding if climate change is/is not real". To clarify - absolutely not.
But if you take an issue such as temperature trends in Antarctica, what you see in the scientific literature is a succession of papers that have taken different approaches to the question, using datasets that have become richer over time - so the picture is built up gradually, I would suggest, rather than consisting of a single "Eureka" moment.
(I hope that clarifies what you found bizarre, RolandGross.)
The point you raise, programmer101, is highly germane here. While some studies look for temperature trends across Antarctica, others (including the GRACE satellite mission) are looking for net changes in mass; yet others are studying the dynamics of ice melting at the continent's edge. All are important in building a complete picture.
kalense, your comment on whether scientists take positions on evidence or belief is incisive and much appreciated.
I think it varies depending on the precise question being asked. As you point out, the states of knowledge on questions such as "is the climate changing?" and "what will the impacts be in a century's time?" are very different; they're both important questions, but we're far more capable of answering the first from currently available evidence than the second, and therefore any scientist's view on the second must depend more on belief than on the first.
Stephen_McIntyre, you ask that I clarify my post because "there should be no dispute" about who pointed up errors in the recent "Antarctic warming" paper published in Nature by Eric Steig and colleagues.
(For anyone new to the specialist climate science blogosphere, Steve McIntyre's blog Climate Audit regularly analyses datasets and mathematical techniques used by climate researchers.)
On this occasion, Steve, I'm going to disappoint you. I wrote on my initial post that "accounts vary as to who pointed them out", and they clearly do; the tale at RealClimate (again for the uninitiated, a specialist blog run by a group of climate scientists, including Eric Steig) differs from yours, and starts here at comment 148.
So there is some dispute, and it's a dispute I'm not going to get into any further; as I've written previously, this blog is aimed at the general reader, it covers all environmental topics, and there is a level of detail which is inappropriate here.
(You'll see from another RealClimate thread, pmbbiggsy, that there's also another side to your contention that "Eric Steig has refused to release the code he used".)
BishopHill, you raise a small straw man by asking why I don't "link to Climate Audit when discussing the Antarctica study? Is it more than your job's worth?"
But I did link to Climate Audit...and now we have Steve McIntyre's comment...so presumably the P45 is on its way.
(UPDATE 2: Climate Audit is back online so here's the link as promised.)
On a previous post, calcination, you wrote that you "would like open access to scientific journals. It would let the illiterate cherry pick papers to support their case, but I think that would be outweighed by the ease with which they can be combated with corrections, and anyone interested could browse the databases."
I couldn't agree more. I first had the thought a decade ago when covering the infamous controversy over the MMR vaccine.
One study showed the UK public believed that the scientific community was split roughly equally on whether the vaccine led to autism. In reality, only a tiny minority of academics gave credence to the idea, and the evidence in the scientific literature was overwhelmingly against it.
If access to all those studies in the original journals had been open, perhaps public perceptions would have been different, and perhaps we would not now be seeing cases of measles in the UK.
A few years ago, open access was all the talk in the scientific publishing world - I recall making a radio documentary about the pros and cons - but it seems to have died down now. If any of you have a finger on this particular pulse, perhaps you could let me know why.
And I'd be interested in your further thoughts on what open access would mean for public perceptions of climate science too.
I'm Richard Black, environment correspondent for the BBC News website. This is my take on what's happening to our shared environment as the human population grows and our use of nature's resources increases.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~43~RS~)
Comments
Sign in or register to comment.
I'm not qualified to comment on the subject of climate change, but on the subject of open access:
The first point is that the concept is still very much with us. Several of the benefits to researchers of open access to their papers have been validated by recent findings - more people read and cite papers; the developing world in particular, and those outside classical academia, otherwise have no real hope of getting hold of these resources. Open Access is generally taken seriously these days, so I think that might be where the drama has died down; the OMGWTF nature of the idea of giving papers away for free has just turned into a much less exciting (but equally worthy) debate about practicality, timescales, funding, persuasion and so on.
Many publishers have understandable and valid concerns. The marketing of OA as an idea has primarily focused on technical and scientific markets, so the arts and humanities have been rather left out until now - and if you were a small-press publisher of a journal or monograph series to which perhaps a hundred people subscribe, you would be concerned about OA as well. At present we're seeing slow incremental change of adoption and adaptation to the OA model.
That said, if climate change is not one of the areas in which the relevant literature is made openly available, I am surprised and disappointed in absolutely everybody involved. NERC at least have previously made a clear commitment to open access where possible:
"NERC has mandated that any published, peer-reviewed paper which has been supported by NERC funding since October 2006, is to be deposited in a repository (in full text). This is of course subject to publisher's agreements."
Complain about this comment
Re the link to Climate Audit I stand corrected.
Re open access publishing, this is indeed still a goer (I work in scientific publishing) but it's largely irrelevant to the climate debate. Here the issues revolve around access to data and methods and the inadequacy of the due diligence of the papers in the IPCC reports. The withholding of data and code by climate authors is a scandal which has been entirely ignored by global warming promoters in the press. So there you go, Richard, how about an article looking at that?
Other topics of interest might include conflicts of interest among IPCC authors (reviewing their own work) and the inadequacy of due diligence by the IPCC (it's just a literature review - no attempt to replicate anything).
If you want sceptics to shut up, these are the issues that need to be aired and sorted.
Complain about this comment
Many thanks, CompSciGuy. I'm intrigued by the practical implications of the caveat "subject to publisher's agreements" - I wonder what proportion of climate research that covers?
Complain about this comment
Richard,
"The answer is "no, I can't". The last story we ran using NSIDC data dates from December 2008, whereas NSIDC believes the satellite malfunction only affected readings from January 2009 onwards. If the error turns out to have affected earlier readings significantly, then we'll take another look."
Thanks, I guessed that would have to be your answer, I'm just a little concerned that a lot of school kids are having AGW drummed into them, when the science is not even in, let alone settled.
Complain about this comment
I wouldn't ask the BBC to change old news reports (what's the point?), but I would hope that new ones would be accurate and balanced.
Chris Field's recent claim is pure alarmism, based on CO2 emissions rising 3.5% per year for 2000 to 2007. At the same time, there has been no increase in ocean heat content since 2002, and a slight atmospheric cooling. Go figure.
This is interesting, from the NSIDC website regarding the Arctic sea ice data error:
"Some people might ask why we don’t simply switch to the EOS AMSR-E sensor. AMSR-E is a newer and more accurate passive microwave sensor. However, we do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data. Thus, while AMSR-E gives us greater accuracy and more confidence on current sea ice conditions, it actually provides less accuracy on the long-term changes over the past thirty years. There is a balance between being as accurate as possible at any given moment and being as consistent as possible through long time periods. Our main scientific focus is on the long-term changes in Arctic sea ice. With that in mind, we have chosen to continue using the SSM/I sensor, which provides the longest record of Arctic sea ice extent."
Draw your own conclusions.
I don't think the BBC reported the record high for Antarctic sea ice in 2007, just the satellite record low in the Arctic in the same year.
As for the Steig/Mann Antarctic temperature reconstruction - I repeat that all the data needs to be supplied so that others can try to replicate it - I'll check what's missing, but I don't think the study will stand up to objective scrutiny.
Meanwhile, we have good evidence that the West and East Antarctic have divergent climate histories over the past 14 million years - the East Antarctic ice sheet is stable at least in the central region, but the WAIS is unstable:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/320/5880/1152
We have this PR for a 2008 GRL paper, which has a nice graphic showing regional Antarctic cooling:
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2008/antarctica.jsp
“The authors compared recently constructed temperature data sets from Antarctica, based on data from ice cores and ground weather stations, to 20th century simulations from computer models used by scientists to simulate global climate. While the observed Antarctic temperatures rose by about 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius) over the past century, the climate models simulated increases in Antarctic temperatures during the same period of 1.4 degrees F (0.75 degrees C).”
Clearly climate models over-estimate Antarctic warming by a factor of almost 4, according to Monaghan et al, but the paper confirms a warming West, and a cooling in the majority of the East Antarctic.
So why is the Steig et al paper ‘better’ than the Monaghan et al study? I don’t think that it is. The two papers are contradictory to an extent, although they agree on the West Antarctic.
Complain about this comment
Richard
Your desire to defend the BBC is natural and even commendable. Still, any defence of the Feb 15 "Global warming 'underestimated'" article is untenable.
That article is clearly misleading.
Field is described as a "leading climate scientist". As you state, Field is a leader, and a scientist, and a biologist with experience in the potential impacts of climate change: but by all means is no "climate scientist".
What was wrong in describing Field as "leading biologist in the field of climate change"? As things stand instead, casual readers of that article will have no clue of the fact that Chris Field's take on future temperatures is not a climatologist's.
A quick search in past BBC news reports reveals how Brian Austin for example, Dean of Science at Heriot Watt University, was characterised first and foremost as the exact kind of expert he was (microbiologist) ("Sponge puzzles superbug experts", 26/12/2005).
The BBC faux-pas about Field is perhaps telling of a mindset that conflates all kinds of experts under the all-encompassing umbrella of "climate", whenever anybody mentions climate change/global warming within the IPCC orthodoxy, thereby cheapening up the very concept of "climatologist".
Complain about this comment
Richard
With respect to Chris Field's credentials you state that he is now "co-chair of the IPCC working group on impacts, adaptation and vulnerabilty".
This is an excellent use of his biological background.
However the IPCC working group on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability has absolutely nothing to do with forecasting climate change. The working group's conclusions should be based entirely upon what the climate scientists say are the likely scenarios with respect to how the climate will change - he therefore should not be commenting, in an official capacity, on things being worse than forecast due to above forecast increases in CO2 concentrations as this is not part of his job; as it is for the climate scientists to decide if this is the case.
His comments were therefore outside of his capacity and expertise and so shouldn't have been reported as widely as they were.
The problem with appealing to the IPCC as the be-all and end-all of climate change is that the vast majority of people who write the reports are not climate scientists and, moreso, aren't scientists at all. Most of the scientists that work on IPCC reports are not climate scientists either. This isn't a bad thing as it is what the IPCC report is all about - but it should be noted by news organisations that working on IPCC reports and working groups does not make you a climate scientist.
Complain about this comment
Further to your question regarding open access I totally agree. Too many times I have read a news story regarding something that interests me that has recently been published. Going to the journal in question to read the story in more depth (and without much of the press-release gloss) I've been hit by the dollar barrier where I'm asked for money to read further.
What annoys me more is that, very often, the researchers have been using taxpayers' money and taxpayer funded resources as part their research - which effectively means that I have already paid for the research so why should I have to pay again to read about the results?
I also think that open access should extend to all data produced and reviewed, all computer code written and all printed or emailed discussions between the researchers. This will aid people replicate the results which, after all, is what science is all about. Now that most scientific advancement is down to improved computer analysis enabling more detailed study it is of paramount importance that other people can replicate this without having to start from scratch.
Complain about this comment
Richard - Open Access:
I asked the public library here in Calgary for computer access to the most recent articles from journals such as Nature , Science, and Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences, or that they bring these journals in to the local branches.
I was courteously replied to, but the answer was no. The main branch has subscriptions, but they are downtown, in the basement, and can't be taken out.
So I go to a college library within walking distance, call up the article I want on their free computer, and print it off on their high quality color printer. Of course I realize I live in a big city, and not everyone does.
So for this blog I did a little surfing, and was able to obtain PDF exact copies of two articles I recently had printed off at that local college I referred to. They were:
1) "Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH, by Ken Caldeira and Michael Wickett, Nature; Sep 25, 2003; 425, pg. 365.
Here it is for free:
[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
2) "An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics", by James C. Zachos et al...; Nature, vol451, 17 Jan, 2008, pgs. 279-283.
Here is where I found this one - for free:
[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
I don't know how common this is, but I suspect very??
Typically I'll read something in a book or magazine, such as Scientific American etc..., and if the subject demands it, I'll go to the source, as I have for this climate change work.
But I'd like to point out that for the non-specialist, these 'originals' are of limited value, or at least for me they are.
To get at the truth, I employ other means.
Undoubtedly these will be scorned as unscientific, but I reserve the right to my own means. For example, I recently 'youtubed' both Dr. Lonnie Thompson, the tropical and mountain glacier climatologist, and Dr. Richard Alley, of Greenland and Antarctic fame.
I like to think I can pick up a lot from a persons face, and talk, and body language. Very useful on big mountains when your life is sometimes in others' hands, by the way.
And I read extensively - often off topic. For example, I've followed Dr Peter Ward, the paleontologist, for a few years now, through deserts in South Africa etc..., and find that the picture of the man I see in my mind's eye very useful when I evaluate his thoughts on past and present greenhouse warmings and extinctions in his recent book - "Under a Green Sky."
I bring these seemingly unrelated points to make this one:
Climate scientists are not the only ones who have a deep understanding of climate, as a few of your bloggers have suggested.
Take Dr. Steven Mithin, of Reading University, I believe, and his wonderful book, "After the Ice, a global Human History from 20,000 to 5000 B.C." He is an archaeologist with an obvious interest in climate, and one's appreciation of climate both past and present is enhanced by this different perspective. Same for Peter Ward's survey of the past 500 million years of evolving climate and atmosphere in his "Out of Thin Air."
Personally, I am happy to see a biologist, a life sciences man, involved at a high level with the IPCC. We're not talking about abstruse science here, we're talking, some of us think, about the very survival of our species. We are terraformers now, like it or not, surprising as this may seem, and I think it behooves us all to widen our perspectives.
That's one of the reasons for climbing mountains - to get a better view.
- From Calgary -
Complain about this comment
I suggest everyone go and read comment 90 by wfmgeo on the previous thread "A questioning climate"
Complain about this comment
I hope the alarmists aren't going to claim the disappearance of the aurora borealis is caused by AGW ;)
Complain about this comment
Richard,
You wrote:
"personally I find discussion of BBC climate change coverage a lot less interesting than discussion of climate change itself, which is just a little more important in the overall scheme of things."
I couldn't agree more, however, what seems to be missing from the discussion recently is "what actions can I make personally to change things for the better" which is a whole lot more important still in the overall scheme of things.
Of course the simple answer is (according to the IPCC : http://www.ipcc.ch/ and the UK Government's DECC: http://offsetting.defra.gov.uk/cms/offsetting-explained-4/)
1: Calculate your personal carbon impact
2: Reduce where you can
3: Offset the rest
The problem is that back when this pragmatic approach was news and discussion worthy the threads were constantly hijacked by doubters questioning the basic science rather than discussing the actions. Now the underlying science is finally more accepted, isn't it time for us to revisit the issue of what we should all be doing to take affirmative action?
It puts me in mind of something Al Gore said in his Inconvenient truth lectures.
"Too many people move from denial to despair without an intervening period of doing"
Let's not forget about the 'doing' part.
Complain about this comment
@yourcast
read this first and then remind why the science is settled:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2009/02/need_for_a_cooler_climate.html#comment90
Complain about this comment
Would open access help the average person?
Not sure it would.
To get a representative view of a complex subject - eg. MMR - would require a systematic review of the literature. That's pretty skilled. In health care they pay big money for a team of trained academics to do something like a 'cochraine review' Systematic search for all the literature, inclusion/exclusion criteria, evaluation of the quality of individual papers, formal methods of meta-analysis etc. (Even then, some of the reviews are of limited value)
Could an 'ordinary' person do that? If not then they could just mislead themselves in a bigger and more credible way.
Personally I'd just like to see an end to (some) scientists, politicians and media actively trying to create a climate of fear.
Complain about this comment
As someone who has works within the scientific community and has been briefly involved in the peer review process, I can safely say that the idea of open-access is a very good one.
Being able to actually assess the data used in generating a scientific paper, rather than just looking at numbers in a pdf table would bring huge advantages and greatly improve dissemination of scientific ideas.
However, while open access is a noble aim, there are a number of points to consider:
1) Does the journal author have the right to put the data in the public domain - i.e. who owns the data? It might be the scientist, the research centre, the funding body - what about joint research with other institutes?
2) Ability for onward usage of the data. Some journals already allow online publication of data, but some claim ownership of data once its published (American Chemical Society springs to mind) so anyone coming to the website can look at the data but cannot do any more work with it. Is that actually useful? In my view, only at the most basic level.
3) Should journals hold the data in the first place? Are we guaranteed that these organisations will be around in 5 - 10 years time? If not, should the data not be placed in a repository with public access, much as what happens with NERC's Data Centres, such as BODC and BADC.
Complain about this comment
@CuckooToo
re: wfmgeo's comment.
I think, on reflection, I would rather take the consensus opinion of the IPCC's scientific panel over that of a Crocodile Dundee quoting 'toxic site' cleaner who advocates the benefits of his predicted ice age to perform an 'intelligence upgrade' (and implied population cull) on the human race as an answer to anything. ;o)
Complain about this comment
Yourcast at #16:
So you believe in consensus science (even if the consensus is a figment of the imagination of politicians and bureaucrats). You aren't a scientist then. Wfmgeo is very obviously a very intelligent scientist. He certainly did not advocate or imply a population cull. Does quoting Crocodile Dundee diminish one's intelligence? Is there anything wrong in being a toxic site cleaner? To me that seems like doing something useful for the environment rather than doing what you suggest - namely carbon offsetting, which is what your quoted politician Al Gore does for his private jets, fleets of limos and grand mansions.
Complain about this comment
Well done for responding to the comments you have received in such detail.
Complain about this comment
Carbon offsetting is a very uncertain route to go down. Firstly, there is no clear evidence of exactly how many trees etc. need to be planted to remove X tonnes of CO2 from the air. Secondly, there are numerous organisations out there offering 'carbon offset' schemes which do nothing to help reduce CO2 emissions.
Easyjet for example offer a carbon offset scheme on their flights - a good idea you might think. So did I, until I looked into it and found their idea of carbon offsetting was constructing a megadam in the middle of Ecuador. The environmental damage involved in the construction of the dam and the limited life-cycle of the electricity generated, before the dam silts up as they all do would mean there would be minimal actual positive environmental effects from any 'carbon offsetting' done.
Complain about this comment
"broken URLs" in #9?
here they are via tinyurl
"Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH, by Ken Caldeira and Michael Wickett, Nature; Sep 25, 2003; 425, pg. 365.
http://tinyurl.com/38bjuh
"An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics", by James C. Zachos et al...; Nature, vol451, 17 Jan, 2008, pgs. 279-283.
http://tinyurl.com/c99b4f
Complain about this comment
To "yourcast", post # 12:
I'd like to second your call to action.
You quote Al Gore: "too many people move from denial to despair."
This reminds me of Noam Chomsky's book, "Hegemony or Survival". On p. 139 he says:
"What remains of democracy is largely the right to choose among commodidties."
I think back to our recent elections here in Canada and the United States, where perhaps slightly more than half exercise their right to vote, and I wonder, "Who is being fooled here - the people who vote, or those who do?" I like to think that it's 'them', but a doubt always creeps in.
And your query, 'what are we doing?', strikes home.
Abraham Lincoln once said:
"Public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail, against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions. He makes possible the enforcement of these, else impossible."
I mentioned in a previous post the apathy and cynicism which modern society seems to engender in us. My personal solution was to devote myself to the climbing of mountains for seven years, a sort of Toynbee 'anchorite'.
What surprised me is that it worked! I now have a wife and a four year old son. We don't have a car anymore, we live day to day, and we prefer this life to our old.
The problem, as I see it, is not technical. We are already, in fact, terraformers, capable of both preventing another ice age, or of casting ourselves 'back to the Eocene', as Peter Ward might put it.
The problem is psychological. We have forgotten how to be bold, or even to recognize merit in those who are.
To paraphrase Ronald Wright, in his book, "A Short History of Progress", we have been civilized, like our dogs and cats and cattle.
I think of John F. Kennedy, and his admonition:
"Let us throw our cap over the wall of space - and follow it. Let us climb that wall - strongly and confidently - and see what wonders lie on the other side."
I compare this man with those now in power, and I shudder. I am not a religious man in the conventional sense, but I think it was somewhere in the Bible where it was said:
"Where there is no vision, the people perish."
Never mind the controversy over the translation, we all know this to be true, in our hearts. Enough of pure intellect - lets try following our hearts again!
- On a snowy day in a warming world - from Calgary -
Complain about this comment
Hi Richard. Thanks for reading and responding to comments (very different to your average blog - especially politicians).
The frustration in my previous comment came from the fact that complicated science is very, very easy to misrepresent. There is a huge amount of very sound science that is always lost in the frenetic search for a faulty sensor or bad reading from one site in Antarctica.
In this respect open access to the science may help, but most people will still rely on science correspondents.
For those that do not have the time or inclination to pour through the papers, the debate has to come down to trust and I would say that the mainstream, active scientific community and the national scientific bodies are pretty trustworthy!! There is nothing like this weight of support for the 'denialist' view.
That's not to say there aren't a few surprises around the corner but the basics will not change. Probably the biggest shift in science was from newtonian physics to relativity but it didn't stop newtonian physics being useful for most applications.
Complain about this comment
@ Yazbod #19
You post responded to mine where I mentioned carbon offsetting as a '3rd recommended action' (after first working out what we contribute to the problem and then making our best efforts as individuals or companies to reduce our direct climate polluting activities)
I am not advocating carbon offsetting as a replacement for making individual (or corporate) reduction actions first. My personal opinion is that it makes sense to responsibly offset what cannot realistically be reduced directly.
The interesting thing about your post I think is that it illustrates 2 really important points:
1. There are bad, unverifiable or otherwise undesirable offsets being sold. (ref: your Easyjet example) which risks undermining the positive part offsets should play as part of an active carbon reduction plan.
2. It is not obvious how we should distinguish between the good and the bad quality offsets, or other behaviors for that matter.
There is reference in the Carbon Offset Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset#Quality_Assurance_Schemes) to a new UK government quality scheme and a forthcoming Australian one, does anyone know any more about those?
It would seem to me the government has a role to play here in informing the public and regulating this sector, this seems to be a new development and if they are doing that effectively I for one would applaud the effort.
Complain about this comment
@ Yourcast 23
Thank you for your link to Wikipedia for the DEFRA offsetting link.
You make the point about "it makes sense to responsibly offset what cannot realistically be reduced directly"
This is the area that concerns me as presently, I think it almost impossible to be certain that an offset you choose can be responsible (as per my previous example).
I agree that the Government has a big role to play in regulating the offsetting industry, making them responsible to certain standards and on the surface, the DEFRA scheme seems to cover the main areas of concern.
My worry is that unless such schemes have regulatory teeth and are compulsory for offset companies to comply with, it will be just another piece of public relations flim-flam, all style and no effect.
Complain about this comment
Yazbod and yourcast:
What you are saying is that offsetting is just another scam where someone is making loads of money, to nobody's (or the environment's) benefit and we all pay for it. Just like a carbon tax is a scam that fleeces taxpayers and wind turbines are a scam that fleece electricity consumers.
Complain about this comment
@25 PAWB46
What I'm saying is that presently, there is indeed the possibility for people being scammed by supposed offset schemes.
I however, don't agree with your statement that wind turbines are a scam. Yes, wind turbines are expensive at present (but not prohibitively so), but that is related to economies of scale and cheaper availability of fossil fuels - once the fossil fuels we are addicted to start running out quickly, the costs of wind verses traditional electricity sources will swing the other way.
Complain about this comment
@ PAWB46 #26
As I'm sure you can see for yourself I am not saying that 'offsetting is a scam'.
Just because some swindler impersonates a legitimate charity collector and steals money for his own enrichment, do we claim that no-one should donate to charity? That the charity being abused should be abolished? No, of course not.
Likewise, I believe it is important that consumers should be able to make informed decisions about the products they buy, safe in the knowledge that they are NOT being conned by the small minority of opportunists who will seek to subvert even the most well intentioned of systems if they see an opening.
It is this quality assurance and, if necessary, regulation of the sector which yazbod and I are discussing.
Complain about this comment
You could describe the situation regarding offsetting at present as something similar to booking a holiday over the internet.
You see a website which looks well presented, is all glossy and refers to various reviews all claiming that the agency are great, wonderful etc., but what obvious measure do you have to be sure that the organisation you are booking with are reputable?
For travel agencies, there is ABTA, which has a regulatory framework attached to it, to ensure that you get what you book. Without booking an ABTA holiday, you take a risk - it might come off, it might not.
What I am saying at present is that such a regulatory framework does not exist in the offset industry, so there is the potential for fly-by-night operators to pose as legitimate offset traders, take your money and not do anything environmentally beneficial with it.
Like Yourcast said in the previous post though, this does not mean that offsetting itself is a scam, just that a framework of some description needs to be emplaced to ensure abuse does not take place. This is important, as well managed and regulated carbon offsetting in future will I'm sure, form part of most peoples lifestyles.
Complain about this comment
Yazbod at @ 26:
Wind turbines will always be expensive. They are already just about at the limits of scale. It is the low energy density of wind and its intermittency that are the main problems with wind. No matter how many wind turbines you have, you always need traditional power stations for when the wind doesn't blow (usually when it's cold and demand is high). What we need is nuclear power (as in France where over 80% of their electricity is nuclear) and in the future, fusion power. We need governments to invest in fusion research and to stop wasting money on wind power.
Complain about this comment
@yourcast
"re: wfmgeo's comment.
I think, on reflection, I would rather take the consensus opinion of the IPCC's scientific panel over that of a Crocodile Dundee quoting 'toxic site' cleaner who advocates the benefits of his predicted ice age to perform an 'intelligence upgrade' (and implied population cull) on the human race as an answer to anything. ;o)"
As I have said, according to Schlesinger, who is an IPCC devotee, "80 percent of the IPCC had no dealing with the climate whatsoever." This means only 500 people have some knowledge of climate science. We are expected to stump up trillions on the basis of 500 peoples say so, when there is a list of over 650 climate scientists* (and growing) who say AGW is false.
*I am using the term climate scientist in the same way that the BBC call Chris Field a climate scientist or expert
Complain about this comment
wow!
just heard about NASA's CO2 satellite exploding - that's a real shame and i'm not trying to be facetious
Complain about this comment
PAWB46 @ 29:
I never claimed wind turbines didn't have problems. The only thing I said was that it wasn't a scam - which it isn't.
Of course it has problems, and on its own won't solve all our energy needs, but wind power is part of a sustainable energy solution.
Regarding nuclear fission - yes, there are no carbon emissions and power generation is not weather dependent and you give the example of France as a nation whose power needs are served by fission, but I think this is a false example.
The main point to consider is that fission is just another finite source of power - there is only so much uranium and plutonium in the ground and once it's gone, it's gone, just like coal and oil. The political issues surrounding locations of future nuclear power stations mean fission is viewed as a huge negative by most people and the waste issues cannot simply be ignored, even if they do allow for some fuel recycling. In addition, construction times for nuclear power stations are much longer than for other power generation methods, which is another negative. I have seen quotes of 15 - 20 years for construction which will not happen under private utility suppliers.
Fusion power - everyone agrees this is the Holy Grail and there is always the news that it is 'just over the horizon' and we just need to increase the amount of research funding and it'll be sorted. However, I'm sure if you ask a fusion research scientist or engineer, they'll tell you that the issues that need to be solved before fusion could be used routinely to supply power to a national grid would take 30 - 40 years to solve. I don't think this means we shouldn't fund fusion, I think we should as the benefits are massive, but at the same time, we shouldn't put all our eggs in the fusion basket, so to speak.
Complain about this comment
Perhaps as a non scientist you can explain a few things to me:
1. Why is NASA modifying global temperatures so they appear higher after 1998 than before?
2. How can a planet that survives huge CO2 swings not cope with a sub 3% CO2 swing.
3. Why are we concentrating on the UKs less than 1% CO2 output in transport when deforestation accounts for way more than that by ton.
Complain about this comment
Yazbod @32:
No, there's enough uranium to last a long long time; and then we could use breeders; and then there's thorium, which will last a few more hundred years.
Modern nuclear power stations can be built in 5 years. Sizewell B was built in about 6 years, 20 years ago.
Even many greens are now saying we need nuclear. See http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/nuclear-power-yes-please-1629327.html
Complain about this comment
To omnologos; post #20:
Thanks for providing 'unbroken URL's'.,, re my post # 9. Thanks very much!
I tried yours, and of course they work. But on my address bar I get the 'broken' URL that was deleted by the moderators, and I still don't know what I am doing wrong? Is it the '%20' (for a space) parts that are the problem?? Perhaps a moderator could email me and let me know??
Nuclear!!
I went into the oil business rather than hard rock looking for uranium on the Canadian Shield after I researched nuclear way back in 19778/78.
"Project Ploughshare" was the name of the book, I believe, and I was struck again when I saw the second chapter of William Marsden's book, "Stupid to the Last Drop" (2007), devoted to one of this project's ideas.
Dr. James Hansen is advocating fourth generation nuclear as an alternative energy source. I'm frankly ambivalent at this point in time. I'd really like to hear what former president Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer, has to say on this, or someone knowledgeable who visits this blog.
Fusion - helium 3 from the moon and beyond, space stuff?? Sounds good - so did oil at one time. Still, I think we have little choice but to go forward, and make some more mistakes. It seems to be a part of our nature.
To 'CuckooToo':
Yes, big shame about NASA's mission failure in launching the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. The European equivalent failed too, I understand. That leaves the Japanese GOSAT CO2 hunter. Hats off to Japan, it's not only cars they build well.
Sure do miss Werhner von Braun and the NASA team of the sixties.
And CuckooToo, I'm halfway through "Censoring Science", and it's not just Jim Hansen that was intimidated. It looks like anyone in climate science with a potential public audience, at NASA, at NOAA, and at JPL were intimidated and subjected to a neocon campaign of disinformation and spirit/esprit de corps wrecking. Sickening actually.
Still cold here in Calgary - it's a La Nina year, isn't it?
Complain about this comment
To Sceptic_Kev (Post #33):
Since omnologos was kind enough to post unbroken URL's that work, I'd like to recommend that you take a look at these two articles, form the journal 'Nature', both original pieces of science, and ones that may partially answer your query #2. My understanding is that the first article below is where the term 'ocean acidification', came into the literature:
[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
Good luck in your further researches.
- From Calgary -
PS: Maybe there is more value to "Open Access" than I thought. Perhaps you could tell us, Sceptic_Kev, if you find these two articles helpful?
Complain about this comment
@manysummits
The point is Hansen gave 1400 interviews. He says he was censored. How many more interviews did he want to do, if he thinks that is censorship?
And if you want to talk about censorship, why didn't the BBC's Climate Wars mention M&M's report on MBH 98/99 and why didn't they mention Wegman? Or is the debunking of the Hockey Stick not relevant in the story about Climate Wars?
Complain about this comment
CuckooToo, good point, and why did 'climate wars' not even mention the fact that temperatures haven't risen for the last ten years?
Richard, it is all very well for your blog to be balanced and to mention Steve McIntyre etc, but the number of people reading this is tiny compared with the huge number who see or hear the misleading headlines. As long as the BBC continues this bias and breaking of its own charter, people will continue to complain.
Last August we heard from the BBC that Lewis Pugh was going to Kayak to the N Pole to show how the ice was melting. The fact that he got stuck in the ice after 1/10 of the journey was never mentioned.
We heard recently that Antarctica was warming, but no mention of the fact this claim was based on erroneous and non-existent data.
We heard that 'a leading climate scientist' said that future temperatures will be beyond anything predicted, but not that this guy was a biologist.
And this morning they are at it again - another brief headline on Radio 4 about Antarctic warming, with no detail or explanation.
Complain about this comment
To Roland Gross - post #22:
Yes, thanks to Richard for responding to so many individually!!
And thanks to Richard Bilton for this morning's report on the visit to Antarctica by the representatices of sixteen nations:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7909305.stm
I've been waiting for this to happen. There are signs that I look for - re. climate change being taken seriously. The attempted launch of three CO2 satellites was one (one success - Japan), and this story represents another.
I hear the refrain about models in science, for example the general circulation models in climate science, and how you only know you're doing good science when you can quantify things and model them. OK, there's some truth there, but give me a careful and intelligent observer any day - in the field, hands in the mud, or in this case, on the ice. I've noticed that good observation is almost eternal, if fact and fancy are kept separate. The CO2 monitors on Mauna Loa and around the globe are such observers, as are the first hand reports from the ice of men like Richard Alley and Lonnie Thompson.
As Richard Bilton reports in the article I mentioned above:
[Sharam Syan came from the Indian government. "Seeing is believing," he says]
@CuckooToo, #37:
The real point CuchooToo is what I mentioned in post #35 - it appears it was the scientific community at large, from three institutions, NOAA, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who were threatened.
As for your hockey stick - there's nothing to debunk. The evidence grows stronger each day. That's what I see.
What in the world are you seeing CuckooToo? There have always been contrarians, will you at least admit that?
But what puzzles me - why are you one of them? Where really are you coming from? How did you get to this point? I'm interested - I think many of us are.
- Calgary -
Complain about this comment
@manysummits #39
Re: Censorship
When you get a chance could you post examples of this censorship, so I can take a look. I can accept that censorship does take place in organisations, but I’m not sure Hansen’s view that he has been censored stands up.
Re: The Hockey Stick and it’s derivatives:
Have you read the history of the HS here:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
Now I know this is a blog, but the unfortunately named article does give a blow by blow account of the HS history and includes references to the various studies.
The Wegman Report here
http://www.climateaudit.org/
at the bottom listed under links (it’s a pdf, so I can’t link directly to it) severly criticises the HS methodology and the incestuous relationships of the peer review group
The National Academy of Sciences report here:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309102251
confirms temperatures have not been the highest in 1000 years as claimed by Mann
The Senate Committee Hearing here:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_house_hearings&docid=f:31362.wais
cross-examined the author of the NAS Report as follows:
“CHAIRMAN BARTON. I understand that. It looks like my time is expired, so I want to ask one more question. Dr. North, do you dispute the conclusions or the methodology of Dr. Wegman's report?
DR. NORTH. No, we don't. We don't disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report. But again, just because the claims are made, doesn't mean they are false.
CHAIRMAN BARTON. I understand that you can have the right conclusion and that it not be–
DR. NORTH. It happens all the time in science.
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Yes, and not be substantiated by what you purport to be the facts but have we established–we know that Dr. Wegman has said that Dr. Mann's methodology is incorrect. Do you agree with that? I mean, it doesn't mean Dr. Mann's conclusions are wrong, but we can stipulate now that we have–and if you want to ask your statistician expert from North Carolina that Dr. Mann's methodology cannot be documented and cannot be verified by independent review.
DR. NORTH. Do you mind if he speaks?
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Yes, if he would like to come to the microphone.
MR. BLOOMFIELD. Thank you. Yes, Peter Bloomfield. Our committee reviewed the methodology used by Dr. Mann and his coworkers and we felt that some of the choices they made were inappropriate. We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr. Wegman.”
The most recent of Manns HS contains much the same errors as before, plus he manages to confuse Spain and Africa and, whilst I accept mistakes happen, we are talking about something that is paraded as proof of MMGW. The least they can do, before we spend trillions of dollars, is to double check their data to make sure the sums add up.
So in answer to your question about the Hockey Stick, that’s what I see - not evidence growing stronger every day
Re: Contrarians
Of course there have always been contrarians – Galileo springs to mind, as does Teslar – and I don’t think I am a contrarian, because I know that climate changes. Climate changes all the time.
I have read a lot of papers and books on this whole issue and it seems to me that we have flawed evidence in the HS, we know the MWP existed – just have a look over at CO2 Science for the evidence:
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
so we are left with computer models as proof that man is responsible for global warming. These computer models are simply inadequate to forecast any future climate, they are based on insufficient evidence.
Read up on people like like Svensgard and Shaviv for alternative explanations for the rise in temperature. I’m not saying they are correct, the science isn’t in yet, but they certainly have plausible explanations.
Complain about this comment
manysummits
I'd also like to point you towards this comment on Roger Pielke Jr blob, which I think is relevant:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/not-a-peep-from-scientists-4962#comment-12295
Complain about this comment
To Sceptic_Kev (post #33)
As I am having no luck with URL's, please see my post #9 for the two 'Nature' articles I recommended to you. Google the full title of the article, then a comma, then the lead authors name. Both should be found on the first or second Google page, but if you click on the 'Nature' websites, you will only get an abstract and a request for payment.
To CuckooToo:
I am impressed by your database, and the time and effort you obviously put into this climate change business.
I looked briefly at the links you posted, and as usual, I am trying to make sense of your devotion to these views. At best they are skeptical reviews, at worst disinformation, meant to cast doubt, for they are surely not written in a way which would clarify issues.
RE: censorship/intimidation at Nasa and NOAA, as documented in Mark Bowen's 2008 book, "Censoring Science".
This book would be my post to you CuckooToo. In detective like fashion, the author has scrupulously reproduced a near legal case for the attempted censorship of, among others, Dr. James Hansen. That he refused to give in says much, I think.
I learned more than a few things in this book, not the least of which is that the president of the United States Academy of Sciences considered James Hansen probably the very best climatologist in the world.
The second half of the book is more pure climate science, told as only Mark Bowen can tell it - clear, to the point, with abundant and formidable historical background to boot.
His life history of James Hansen, for example, includes personal details, such as his marriage, etc..., where he grew up, influences, thesis advisors ... You get a real sense of who this man is and where he is coming from, something which, I note in passing, you steadfastly refuse to answer yourself. Of course this is your right, it is none of my business, unless you choose to open up and tell us why you are able to deny the evidence from the world scientific community, en masse?
Please don't reiterate the very tired "science by concensus' theme. You and the other contrarians, or perhaps super-skeptics, are in effect saying there is a vast conspiracy, aimed at what, fooling us all???
By implication, many of us AGW believers, as you might put it, are either very gullible, or just plain not very smart.
To All Blogg Readers - re OPEN ACCESS:
1) There are the specialists, the climatologists, the atmospheric and oceanic chemists, the physicists and mathematicians, etc... Super educated, often fanatically devoted and competitive, working eighty hours per week since university days...
2) There are the interpreters - the middle men. Professional journalists and investigative reporters, authors such as Mark Bowen, occassionally someone like Carl Sagan or David Suziki or David Attenborough, specialists also but with a gift for public speaking.
3) Then there is "us" - we the people. Maybe we've been too busy with other things, living, raising families, enjoying the great outdoors, having 'fun', trying just to make the rent?
QUESTION???
Which group has the last say? Who stopped the Vietnam war? Who will say coal or no coal, nuclear or no? Who foots the bills of government, in the final analysis?
Who 'speaks for Earth', in the end?
ANSWER - US !!!
We're a little slow off the mark perhaps, but in the end, we prevail, as we always have.
As always, we'll get badly hurt, many of us won't make it. But we will endure, and we'll do whatever has to be done, rest assured.
- From Calgary -
Complain about this comment
Manysummits #42
You say: Who 'speaks for Earth', in the end? ANSWER - US !!!
I profoundly disagree. The world (nature or natural world) speaks for itself. To put it politely, we are arrogant to think otherwise.
The book of Job in the bible speaks volumes of historic wisdom in this respect.
Just in my little part of the world (west coast of America) in the next 30 years San Francisco and Los Angeles will be flattened by earthquakes. Further north in the next 50 years the Cascades is due a massive shift which will flatten cities from Vancouver BC to Eureka CA and send a tsunami that will wipe out coastal Hawaii and Japan like the last one in 1701. These are historically known recurring events.
Volcanoes will erupt and the earth will be darkened and massive swings in climate will occur. The populations of all creatures (yes humans included) will need to migrate and change lifestyles to adapt. All of this quite naturally and as it always has been.
And here we are getting hysterical about an insignificant rise in a life giving gas (CO2) and a piddling rise in temperature (which appears to be a debatable point). I find it so hard to get engaged in this debate.
Complain about this comment
@manysummits:
"I looked briefly at the links you posted, and as usual, I am trying to make sense of your devotion to these views. At best they are skeptical reviews, at worst disinformation, meant to cast doubt, for they are surely not written in a way which would clarify issues."
I'm almost lost for words. The articles I have linked to show conclusively that the HS is based on poor science. These articles deserve more than a brief look. In the case of M&M it is a peer reviewed and published paper. Wegman and NAS agree that the HS is wrong and you call it disinformation!
Beggars belief
Complain about this comment
@manysummits
I'm curious.
You asked me why I am a contrarian. Could I ask you, why, after reading the above articles debunking the HS, including reports from NAS, who were actually AGW-friendly, you still have an unswerving loyalty to the believe in AGW? And why do you call NAS report disinformation?
Complain about this comment
To timjenvey #43:
We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair. —2 Corinthians 4:8
"Man is the measure of all things"
- Protagoras (Greek)
It may sound arrogant at first glance, but it is not meant to be.
First, I consider us a part of nature, and that what we have done is a part of the natural cycle. We found a resource, fossil fuels, and used it, fueling the Industrial Revolution and the population explosion in the process. Any species will do this, given the chance.
But we seem to have a curious and far reaching intellect, capable of doing stable isotope ratios, and unstable ones, and of looking into the past, and discovering where we came from and who we are.
This massive technological prowess has manifested itself in ways which are also natural, but not usually considered 'good' by most of us. The destruction of the habitable biosphere springs to mind, and the initiation of the 'sixth mass extinction' (Leakey), now without question underway.
The bacteria were here before us, they have always been Earth's dominant lifeform, and from what we can see of the future, they always will be.
But we must find our own way, we homo sapiens sapiens. I love the artists, who summarize so effectively.
Ian Tyson, form these parts, cowboy singer:
"The high flying hawk, the dark awkward crow, the white gull alone, on the high rolling sea, must make their way home, best way that they know, no different, for you and for me."
We speak for Earth, because we are so narrow, so unable to communicate with bacteria or whales. There is only 'us' to listen to and to speak to, in a literal if not a metaphorical sense.
And our ongoing actions are having consequences, undreamed of consequences.
To CuckooToo & timjenvey:
I continue in my AGW world from personal experience - a lifetime devoted to learning and science. I have considered all the evidence which I have time for, and continue to do so. You cannot easily summarize some four or five decades of learning in a few sentences, except to say this:
It is my considered opinion that anthropogenic global warming is both real, demonstrably so, and poses a threat of possibly biblical proportions to 'us' and to many lifeforms on Earth.
There is a better way, a future with much diminished dependence on fossil fuels, and we can find it. We have to find it, for fossil fuels are a one time bonanza. I was a 'hunter' of fossil fuels, and a good one I think. And I am still glad of the part I played in the field, looking for the resources we all need and use - just now! But now is not tomorrow!
The points about the hockey stick, bad science etc..., of course there are mistakes in the data, in individuals abilities to collect and interpret. But these appear to me to be details, important to rectify, but as far as I can see, they do not diminish the overall conclusions of the IPCC and others.
I like to think that I am very watchful, and not altogether stupid.
- From Calgary -
Complain about this comment
@manysummits
Mistakes in the data, that have reduced whole sections of historic temperature to "blips" and which presents a completely difference aspect on the current temperature rise.
Setting aside that fact that the peer review process is supposed to pick up these errors, if you go over to CO2 Science and go through the list of studies, there is clear evidence that the MWP happened and it was global.
The IPCC relies on the Hockey Stick and similar flawed evidence to prove AGW, but choose to ignore evidence that shows the MWP existed and dismissed M&M. They also chose to include papers by Wahl and Amman that weren't even published, and should therefore been excluded.
That to me is not science, but then the IPCC is a political body set up to prove the existance of AGW, not a scientific body.
So, why do you call the NAS Report disinformation?
(PS, nobody said you were stupid - you are clearly not stupid)
Complain about this comment
Manysummits [comment 9] got access to journals such as 'Nature' etc via the internet in a University library - because the University pays an annual site licence fee to enable students and staff to do so. (You can probably join your local University library for an annual fee. Mine local one is reasonable (£25pa), I can't take books off the premises, but can make photocopies.)
In most cities the main public reference library will usually be held in the central library; reference libraries do not allow books, journals etc to be taken from the premises; that is why these books are not part of the lending collection.
In the UK I also make use of the inter-library-loan system (it can even obtain books from the British Library, it may not cover journals.) but there is a small charge to help cover costs, which I think is reasonable.
Open access is a call for papers to be made available online, it arose so that academic researchers in the developing world, where research funding and University libraries are not as well funded as they are in western countries, could have access; there are some online journals and repositories e.g.
opensciencedirectory.net/
doaj.org/
plos.org/
It is important in this 'open access' debate to look at all research fields, not just the climate one, for there are vast numbers of researchers in many, many different disciplines.
Every academic field - including the humanities, history, literature etc - have journals that researchers aim to be published in; these are often commercial publishing houses, founded to make a profit by catering to a niche market, some journals are extremely specialist. e.g. 'American Anthropologist', 'Journal of Engineering Mechanics', 'Journal of Archaeology for Asia and the Pacific' etc and will have small readerships and will look to cover its costs via charges, subscriptions etc.
Inevitably some journals are held in higher regard than others and have acknowledged international reputations; others have much smaller readerships etc.
Smaller journals attract less advertising revenue and have smaller sales, mainly subscriptions by academic libraries and organisations; therefore publishers may well be resistant to giving content away for free.
'Nature' (and its stable of specialist journals Nature Medicine, Nature Cell-biology, Nature Genetics etc.) generates around £30 million in sales and advertising each year. I imagine 'Science' makes similar revenues. Much of this is ploughed back into non-research-article content (e.g. news, articles, book reviews, commentaries, editorials etc.) as well as funding the overheads of peer review process. (90% of articles submitted to Nature - in many disciplines - don't get published.)
The shareholders of the parent company (Macmillan Publishers in Nature's case) also look for some profit.
Researchers aim to submit papers to the major journals (think of them as football Premiership clubs) in their field and if rejected (everyone is at some point) they then submit to the next division of journals (Championship, then League's one, two and so on.) until they get published.
Some researchers do also put PDF copies of their published papers on their University websites, or after an interval discreetly donate a copy to an open-access-repository.
Often, if a researcher in a developing country contacts an author they'll be sent a copy of the paper gratis.
Quite a lot of University 'hard science' research nowadays is funded in part or whole by commercial companies e.g. pharmaceuticals, engineering, mining etc that will have obvious interest in not allowing rivals to have access to commercially sensitive research.
There's a major difference between wanting 'open access to scientific journals or papers' and wanting "all data produced and reviewed, all computer code written and all printed or emailed discussions between the researchers" that comment 8 demands.
Particularly if the intent is for it to be 'audited' by certain blogs with a partisan interest in finding against any paper with conclusions they disagree with.
(And ask anyone, in any job, for copies of 'all printed or emailed discussions' and see what response you get; are you all willing to CC all your emails to me for example?)
Cardinal Richelieu once said: 'If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.'
That seems to be the approach taken by some participants in the climate debate; do you really expect the Turkeys to vote for Christmas?
Complain about this comment
jayfurneaux:
I'm sorry to disagree with you, but all publicly funded general research should be available for others to either replicate or use as the basis for further research. That is how science advances (and things like cold-fusion get knocked on the head). If there is something in research that is wrong, then it is in everybobody's interest that it is found and corrected. No scientist should be afraid to have his work scrutinised by others. There is no shame in making mistakes (we all do it) and we should all be pleased if somebody finds a mistake and it can be corrected.
It is so easy these days to archive all data, codes, memos, letters, emails etc. There should not be anything in there that needs to be hidden.
I worked for over 30 years in industry and had all my work verified and reviewed. Even 30+ years ago my work was being archived and it should all be there today for anybody in the industry to look at; code data, reports, memos, letters (we didn't have emails then, but in later years they would be archived).
So I strongly disagree with your statement "(And ask anyone, in any job, for copies of 'all printed or emailed discussions' and see what response you get; are you all willing to CC all your emails to me for example?)"
Complain about this comment
In my field (not climate) there is no requirement for emails to be archived (most are mundane admin matters) and workloads are high enough. Outcomes are what we're judged on, not processes. I suspect many fields work this way and asking for any and all emails is unrealistic.
BTW: As a member of the public how would I get to see all your notes, letters etc. Is there a process?
----------
"No scientist should be afraid to have his work scrutinised by others."
Not if it by someone truly independent and fair.
But yes, there is something to fear if it's being demanded by those who are ideologically opposed to a case and determined to find something that can be used to discredit a paper's conclusions and therefore that case.
There is at least one blog that claims to 'audit' climate research; when has any paper ever been endorsed by them if its conclusions (that AGW is real) are at odds with their well know 'skeptic' ones?
Is it at all likely that a AGW paper and its conclusions will ever be fully endorsed by it? I doubt it.
Hence my quoting of Cardinal Richelieu:
'If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged'
If those wanting to 'audit' research genuinely are interested in contributing to the 'science' they would better spend their time producing a stat's package [their field of expertise I understand], to be verified by other statisticians and then supplied to scientists to aid their work.
Complain about this comment
@jayfurneaux
one of wegman's recommendations is that climate scientists work with statisticians to create accurate reconstructions. AFAIK no climate scientists has consulted or asked the statisticians to review their work
Complain about this comment
"no climate scientists has consulted or asked the statisticians to review their work" Comment 51.
Perhaps they've not consulted those ideologically driven auditing blog statisticians; but elsewhere:
'American Statistical Association Endorses Conclusions of the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on Climate Change' (05/12/2007)
"The Board of Directors of the American Statistical Association released a statement on climate change, including an endorsement of the conclusions of the Fourth Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
http://content.yudu.com/Ay8eb/Jan08/resources/8.htm
"The importance of the study of global climate change, and the role of statistics and statisticians in this research, cannot be overstated,” said Mary Ellen Bock, 2007 ASA President." . . . 'the Board also recommended greater involvement of statisticians in both the IPCC and the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) in addition to the 'already extensive and healthy collaboration between statisticians and scientists in basic research on climate change'. . .
The ASA strongly urges statisticians to collaborate with other scientists in order to advance our understanding of the nature, causes, and impacts of climate change. . . In addition to the obvious benefit to the geoscience, the ASA states that these topics may well push the boundaries of statistics and suggest new methods, algorithms and theory."
[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
Complain about this comment
jayfurneaux @50:
Of course I'm not talking about admin emails. I'm talking about technical information. All relevant technical information would be given a unique identifier before archiving. The process in scientific work is extremely important, not just the output. Without the process how do you know the output is correct. And somebody else can use that process or find a better one if it is all available and archived. If something changes, you need to go through the same process again, which you can only do if it is available. An example in climate science would be if you got another 10 years measurements and wanted to repeat your GCM calculations. How would you do that if the process wasn't archived?
As a member of the public you wouldn't get to see my work because it was owned by the company I worked for; but all employees of the company would have access to it. It wasn't paid for by the taxpayer.
If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear from being scrutinised by whomsoever. In my opinion Steve McIntyre and ClimateAudit (you don't seem to want to mention the name) have done a wonderful job shining a light into certain climate work - and still he gets ignored and the climate scientists go on producing work which has poor or little statistical validity. There is more than enough statistical methodology out there for climate scientists to use without Steve McIntyre reinventing the methodologies for them. The climate scientists only have to consult expert statisticians and their work could (would) gain credulity.
Complain about this comment
As I pointed out in comment 52 (someone clearly disliked it enough to 'mod' me) the American Statistical Association released a press release on 5th December 2007 stating that the: "American Statistical Association Endorses Conclusions of the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on Climate Change."
In this the ASA states: "Key to the endorsement were the recommendations of prominent statisticians and climatologists who participated in an ASA sponsored workshop."
If you do a Web search using the title it's available online. So, it seems that climate scientists already are working with highly reputable statisticians.
In any discipline, if widespread doubts (in the scientific community) arise about the methodology of a particular paper then it should be referred to a body that is truly independent and likely to be fair-minded.
I don't believe that a person [or a group of people] that have demonstrated past hostility towards a particular case and set of conclusions are in any way, shape or form an appropriate body to do this, as they are the least likely to be independent and fair-minded. (Virgil wrote a long time ago: 'Whatever it is, I fear Greeks, even bearing gifts.')
If you believe that there is a need for such an independent body, then by all means campaign for one to be set up. (I also refer readers back to what I wrote in the 2nd part of comment 50, rather than repeat it here.)
Complain about this comment
To jayfurneaux #54:
Problem I have as a regular Joe is that I observe the real world events that are opposite to what was predicted. I see hysterical alarmism turn out to be naught. I see con-men feasting on our misfortunes and the ever increasing shrills of the so called environmentalists’. I see political bodies increase in power with no basis of a mandate and the active silencing of dissension.
And you wonder why we would like a second opinion?
Complain about this comment
@jayfurneaux
the reason your link was referred to the mods is because it contained a pdf. House rules forbid links to pdf's, it was most likely a mod who referred your post. It has happened to us all at some stage, even Richard.
Nothing sinister in being referred to the mods
What the ASA appears to be endorsing is the IPCC's position on AGW, even though they were not involved in the process, and calling for statisticians to become involved. One of there conclusions is "Reducing uncertainty in key observational datasets by advising on how best to combine data from different measurement devices and deal with biases and changes in various measurement systems", which is what Wegman called for to ensure temperature reconstructions were robust.
Complain about this comment
jayfurneaux:
Reconstructing past data (temperastures, CO2 etc) from proxy data should be performed by statisticians. Not the people who go out and take tree ring samples, or lake bed sediments or whatever. The reconstruction is pure statistics. The problem is that the reconstructions are done by people who have no statistical background and a desire to obtain the "right" result, be it a hockey stick or whatever they are trying to prove; "we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period" springs to mind.
Statisticians participating in a workshop is hardly getting involved in the science.
Complain about this comment
I'm afraid a lot of what is posted here is nonsense. i've followed ths debate for years now and the stories get more and more ingenious.
a note of caution, these comments reflect a wide range of views from the well-informed to the ill-informed (or worse).
if you're interested in the science you really should go to to a respected scientific body and read what they have to say.
Complain about this comment
Richard,
Any comment on the complete mawling the Steig et al paper on Antarctic warming has received at WUWT by the two Jeffs? It says something about peer-review by Nature when such a paper as that by Steig et al can get published containing such fundamental flaws. Or would you say it is the article by the two Jeffs that cannot be believed because it has not been peer-reviewed (except by the unofficial review by hundreds of bloggers (many experts)) and is openly presented?
Complain about this comment
@RolandGross
Don't make statements like that, please. If you can show that statements you disagree with are false, please give links and argue the point. This way we all learn something
Complain about this comment
PAWB46, CuckooToo, timjenvey (CuckooToo. Hat-tip for the advice re PDFs.) Hope you had good weekends?
The American Statistical Association recognises there is: "already extensive and healthy collaboration between statisticians and scientists in basic research on climate change". Unsurprisingly it asks statisticians to become more involved in climate related work.
Greater involvement by statisticians requires greater funding, so statisticians can be appointed to such roles; you seem to agree with that, so make that case (lobby) to policy makers and funding bodies.
But in the USA, at least, it looks as if greater links are being forged between climate scientists and statisticians, as Wegman desired.
The American Statistical Association doesn't appear to have any major concerns about the conclusions of the IPCC and the methodology of the climate scientists.
Myself, I'm comfortable about taking much of the work on past climate as being robust. Much of the work from past climate reconstructions is also reinforced by the findings of historians and archaeologists looking at changes in human settlement, societies and their environments.
Much past climate work is quietly done as part-and-parcel of day-to-day archaeology and also by oil, gas and mineral surveys etc. (Quite a lot of research into earth's past geography, life and climates in deep-time is quietly done by geologists that survey for oil and gas companies, using cores etc from exploratory drilling etc.)
A lot of the work in analysing the data from field-work is handled by specialist lab's that return results from samples sent to them; by no means is it all done by the researchers that collect the data.
To use sediment and rock cores as an example, research includes studies of diatoms, foraminifers, nannofossils, radiolaria, lipids and pollen together with magnetic data, radioactivity counts, major chemical and element content (e.g. oxygen 16 - 18, carbon 12 - 13 %s), C14 dates, X-ray and trace element analyses; the stratigraphy, type and mineral content breakdown of clays, sands, gravels and calcium-carbonate and so on.
If climateaudit wishes to produce a stat's package for distribution (after testing and verification) to climate scientists then they should do so; it could be a positive move. This debate too often is polarised into "you say it's day, we say it's night" camps which does nothing to move it forward, nor does simple dismissing of all evidence on spurious grounds [an approach creationists have taken with aspects of geology and evolution].
Asking for climateaudit and fellow travellers to be the arbiter of climate research is a bit like a group of young-earth-creationists wanting to 'audit' the work of geologists, biologists and geneticists; do you really think the young-earth-creationists would ever say: "hey this is good work, boy were we wrong about the age of the earth and evolution, it's completely changed our minds . . ." :- )
timjenvey C-55: I understand the problem, there's a mass of conflicting claims and it's a complex multi-disciplinary subject. I find it disappointing that many high profile sceptics turn out (if you do a little digging) to be economic libertarians pushing anti-interventionist agendas and/or evangelicals.
Mix in every crackpot jumping on the bandwagon; that many of the public don't have much scientific or historical knowledge, that people tend to think only in the short-term (weather) and it's no wonder people are confused and suspicious.
Read around the subjects as widely as possible, don't stick to just one source or viewpoint. There's more high quality information to be found books, rather than on blogs etc.
At present I find the 'sceptics' unconvincing.
Complain about this comment
jayfurneaux
you're welcome for the heads up
you said "This debate too often is polarised into "you say it's day, we say it's night" camps which does nothing to move it forward, nor does simple dismissing of all evidence on spurious grounds" and i totally agree, although i see the work by McIntyre, Watts, Idso etc as not being within that view.
It seems to me there are 3 main thoughts behind AGW - reconstructed historic temperatures, CO2 as a driver of climate and the computer climate models.
I have commented here before about the HS and it's derivatives. The work by McIntyre, Idso and others, shows that the Medieval Warm Period really did exist and cannot be thrown in the bin because it is inconvenient
CO2 has been shown to be higher in the recent past and even the 280 ppm pre-industrial level has been shown to be based on dismissal of perfectly good data to arrive at an idealised measure of CO2.
The climate models are simply unrealistic. They are unable to simulate clouds, are unable to scale down to correct levels and cannot model past climate adequately.
Whilst the above is obviously simplified, I can't see how alarmists can justify their position without proving the above is wrong and AFAIK, they haven't done so.
Complain about this comment
jayfurneaux
I think that I would be right in saying that Climate Audit policy is simply to look at whether there are any errors in high profile climate related articles (whether pro or anti AGW - although most are pro as those are the most high profile papers) that could result in their conclusions being invalidated.
Steve McIntyre himself frequently states that if he were in power he would be following the findings of the IPCC.
As for producing a stats package for use there are many already out there, climate scientists, however, only appear to use invalidated algorithms or algorithms that were not designed for use in climate-like fields. This may be due to the results of using those algorithms being desirable, or it may be just that they are comfortable with them. However having an expert statistician on the research team would give them a wider range of options. Also the Climate Audit blog sets out to do just that - audit. As auditors you rely on other people's calculations and try and ascertain their validity.
While very few people in the field have asked for Climate Audit to do an audit (although I believe there have been one or two which have and subsequently amended their findings pre-publication) it should not warrant the abuse of the findings of the "auditors" that frequently occurs (although as an auditor myself I understand and have experience of the reactions to people when you find a material defect in their work).
Complain about this comment
jayfurneaux
With respect to emails I can't see the difficulties in archiving them myself. Within my firm we are required to manage our client data as part of our jobs (obviously post-Enron it became more important).
It takes me 5 minutes at the end of each day to tag my emails with the relevant metatags (ie client, job, type of communication). Admin emails all get tagged to admin and personal ones are exempt from tagging.
Data archiving is very simple, very quick and frequently an exceptionally useful thing to do - especially when somebody leaves and you take over their workload.
Complain about this comment
@jayfurneaux
Now that climate scientists have stated they don't know why the climate is cooling and may continue to cool for the next 30 years, can we finally agree that climate models are unable to predict future climate?
Afterall, 30 years is average climate and the models didn't see that one coming ;)
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/02/global-warming-pause.html
Complain about this comment
To RolandGross (#58)
I'm going to second your comment, i.e.,
"I'm afraid a lot of what is posted here is nonsense."
To business:
James Hansen has been with NASA since 1967. When he arrived, he studied the atmosphere of Venus, but he soon became more interseted in 'our home planet', and has concentrated on this ever since.
He is perhaps the best overall climate scientist on Earth, and he is certainly one of it's most outspoken.
His website I find very user friendly - simple and to the point. Having designed and operated my own website for years, I appreciate its attributes.
I see in visiting his website recently that he testified before the United States House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means (February 25, 2009).
This testimony is available for free download on his website, which I will attempt to post at the end of this blog.
I also found there a very interesting article, written in 2008, about wildlife and the effects of climate change in that vein.
(see 'Other Articles' - "Tipping Point: Perspective of a Climatologist")
It is a very clear summary of the stste of affairs re climate change and state of the world, and it seems to flow very well, perhaps because of the subject matter?
For those with a technical bent, I just finished his 2005 article for "Science", vol 308, 3 June:
"Earth's Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications".
It is available, also for free download, as a pdf, in color - see his website, "Scholarly Publications".
Here is a link to his website:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/
If this is disallowed by the moderators, simply google "James Hansen", and look for the Columbia University address.
- From Calgary -
Complain about this comment
#36
Can't get the links to work!
Complain about this comment
- Who Speaks For Earth - - Now???
I grew up watching Jacques Cousteau, who leased his ship 'Calypso', in the year I was born.
The "Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau" mesmerized many, I imagine, and certainly myself. The blend of science, exploration, and a unique individual proved a potent combination.
In the 1970's and 80's along came Carl Sagan, and his TV series "Cosmos". The universe itself was Carl's domain, and it became ours too.
Both men were humanists, in love with their planet and all of its inhabitants, and both died within a couple of months of each other, Carl in December of 1996, and Jacques in January of 1997.
Now, towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we face different prospects.
Perhaps some words from Carl Sagan would be appropriate here, in this post "High Quality Climate."
From Carl's 1994 book, "Pale Blue Dot", in the chapter entitled,
'Exploring Other Worlds and Protecting This One':
"Some of the most important recent work on global warming has been done by James Hansen and his colleagues at the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, a NASA facility in New York City...
He courageously testified before Congress in the face of a politically generated order from the White House Office of Management and Budget (this was in the Reagan years) to exaggerate the uncertainties and minimize the dangers. His calculation on the explosion of the Philippine volcano Mt. Pinatubo and his prediction of the resulting temporary decline in the Earth's temperature (about half a degree Celcius) were right on the money. He has been a force in convincing gorernments world wide that global warming is somethng to be taken seriously.
How did Hansen get interested in the greenhouse effect in the first place? His doctoral thesis (at the University of Iowa in 1967) was about Venus...
The other planets are a superb training ground for students of the Earth. They require both breadth and depth of knowledge, and they challenge the imagination."
In fact, Carl and Jim Hansen were friends, and met through their mutual professional interest in the planet Venus.
In Mark Bowen's 2008 book, "Censoring Science", in the chapter 'The Veil of Venus', which details their professional association (Carl Sagan and Jim Hansen), Mark quotes a conversation he had with Jim about
Sagan's ability to communicate science to the public' - says Jim Hansen of Carl:
"We're actually missing him now in this global warming thing."
I think the torch has been passed, and it has passed to Jim Hansen.
We humans seem to need a spokesman, or perhaps a tribal elder, in the way of our ice age ancestors.
From what I can gather, remembering and venerating your ancestors was also a way of life in our collective past.
I see this most clearly repeated in the modern world in the works of science, for example, both of Mark Bowen's recent books, "Censoring Science,", and "Thin Ice".
At considerable effort Mark has quite naturally documented the history of climate science and greenhouse investigations through the centuries, honoring and acknowledging 'the ancestors.'
In my own way, I am doing the same.
- From Calgary -
Complain about this comment
#68, poignant and well said, the passing of Jacques and Carl was a great loss to humanity.
I think everyone in this forum cares for the environment, even the sceptics. If we didn't we wouldn't be here arguing.
The problem is that any attempt to fix it comes with problems, the one that comes to mind is bio fuels causing deforestation.
But taking Carl's point here are some interesting facts:
1. The winds on Venus one of the hottest planet in the solar system has wind speeds of a heady 5 to 6 miles per hour.
2 The winds on Neptune one of the coldest planets has winds up to 1,200 miles per hour.
We all know weather is worse in winter than summer, so where is the evidence that a few degrease temperature increase will cause catastrofic weather?
Complain about this comment
Surely we are missing the point here.
The number of scientists pro or against a theory is irrelevant, science is not a popularity contest, (at least its not supposed to be).
The global warming debate is being observed through the filter of the global media, this obviously distorts and corrupts any findings by scientists in their relevant fields and makes us all (ignorant) experts.
Lastly, we can all empirically observe changes in the environment, wether this is caused by weather or by climate change, (man made or natural). The ultimate decision on action or inaction will be taken by politicians not scientists, so ultimately this bickering between various viewpoints is actually counter productive.
Complain about this comment
To Sceptic_Kev (#69)
"Where is the evidence that a few degrees temperature increase will cause catastrophic weather?"
That's the nub of it allright. It's the way I thought until a few years ago.
As it turns out, to summarize a complex subject, the evidence is in two places:
1) The past
2) Global Circulation Models, physics. and the insights of gifted individuals.
The best global circulation models use proxy evidence from the past - ice cores, ocean sediment cores, etc..., the list is long, to check their physics against the real world.
The past is the subject of many disciplines, and all have contributed.
The results are in effect modern climatology and paleoclimatology.
As there are many references readily available on both subjects, I will not attempt to list them here.
However, if you or anyone else 'out there' is looking for some really deep background, I will suggest one of my favorite books:
"The Floor of the Sea", (1974), by William Wertenbaker.
It's not about climatology at all, and yet it is. You'll find out who Maurice Ewing was, and how Lamont - Doherty Earth Observatory was founded, and the ocean basins mapped and sampled. How plate tectonics was born and confirmed, what geomagnetic reversals are and how they were discovered, and most important, you'll see the face of science in Maurice Ewing.
- From Calgary -
We are all human - even the scientists.
Complain about this comment
@manysummits
"As it turns out, to summarize a complex subject, the evidence is in two places:
1) The past
2) Global Circulation Models, physics. and the insights of gifted individuals.
The best global circulation models use proxy evidence from the past - ice cores, ocean sediment cores, etc..., the list is long, to check their physics against the real world."
1) You are of course correct, there is evidence in the past that climate changes. The climate changes all the time. Past climate changes were, as I am sure you will agree, completely natural and have happened at a very fast rate. An example is the change in land / sea that over here we call Doggerland. Doggerland was once open fields where, 8-10000 years ago man and beast roamed. 8-10000 years ago Doggerland flooded to fast that it is believed the flooding was in the region of 1m per day. You have agreed the MWP existed, so there is no real precedent for assuming the rise in recorded temperatures is down to man.
2)First of all, AFAIK, the models are unable to simulate past climate without being tweaked with a number of fudge factors. The climate models are unable to simulate clouds, which has a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. The atmosphere is far too complex to model in a computer and the models are not scale-able and use too many parameters to simulate things that we don't understand like clouds. In short, climate models are simply not capable of simulating future climate. They can't even simulate past climate without fudging and we have a good idea what happened in the past.
You are clearly a reader, manysummits, please could I suggest you read "The Chilling Stars" by Calder and the work by Shaviv for an alternative view of climate change? There are other, viable reasons for the rise in temperatures / climate change, but if you only read pro-AGW books and articles, you won't get a balanced view.
The "insights of gifted individuals" you mention doesn't mean they are right. History is full of "gifted individuals" who got it wrong. The great Lord Kelvin believed the earth was only 400 million years old, which caused Darwin to leave out of later additions of his work, his calculated age for the earth, which was pretty accurate.
Manysummits, please read alternative views, if only to see where we are coming from
Complain about this comment
btw, the ability of computer models to forecast climate change will be discussed at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York City on March 9.
Don't expect to read about the conclusions in the media unless one of the gifted individuals declares it irrelevant because the debate is over
Complain about this comment
but i'll bet the media report on this!
http://info.uwe.ac.uk/news/UWENews/article.asp?item=1438
"This conference aims to strengthen our awareness of the challenge facing us and to enhance our capacity for effective decision-making and action. It will do this by bringing together a group of people - climate change activists, eco-psychologists, psychotherapists and social researchers - who are uniquely qualified to assess the human dimensions of this human-made problem.
So now, sceptics are not only badly compared to holocaust deniers, but we are now psychologically challenged.
BTW how are "climate change activists" "uniquely qualified to assess the human dimensions of this human-made problem" and what on earth is an "eco-psychologist" anyway?
Complain about this comment
To CuckooToo (#72)
Hi CuckooToo! Good to hear from you.
Yes, I agree the Midieval Warm Period existed, and that it was in all probability the result of natural, (ex-human) causes.
Changes in climate are the norm, as far back as we can discern, and all ex-human induced. True.
It is also true that the Holocene has been remarkably stable when compared to the changes seen in proxy records from the past Pleistocene epoch, especially the ice age parts and the transitions from ice age to interglacial and vice-versa.
The Holocene epoch, the last 11, 600 years, is the latest in a long series of interglacials.
And yes, the English Channel was once dry land, and probably flooded very quickly, perhaps ridiculously quickly. These investigations into the rate of change are ongoing, and there is a pattern. The more we learn, the more we see that the rate of changes in the past are faster than originally thought.
That's a bit of a sweeping generalization, I agree, but it gets to the heart of the matter, which is something careful scientific language is often not good at.
And so there would be no need to invoke the climate changes we are seeing and documenting, and ascribing them to 'us', except for the almost omniscient gaze of science.
Some of us (keen, curious observers, many of them scientists), had observed the effects of a gas called carbon dioxide before the fossil fuel age. It was then often referred to as carbonic acid.
The 'father' of modern mountaineering, for example, Horace-Benedict de Saussure, was also an inventor of scientific instruments, among them the heliothermometer, which he used in 1788 on the Col de Geant, near the summit of Mont Blanc.
According to Mark Bowen, in his book "Thin Ice", (chapter 'First Signs'), this instrument, modified, was then used by the great French polymath Joseph Fourier to investigate the greenhouse effect.
Finally, the Irish physicist and great mountaineer John Tyndall put "greenhouse science on a solid footing" (Mark Bowen), ca 1870, just as we were beginning our prolific use of fossil fuels.
Then comes Svante Arrhenius - again - Mark Bowen:
"Thus, by 1896, the great Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius had both the motivation and the necessary tools to take a first swipe at a comprehensive theory of the greenhouse, which he based on the principle of radiation balance...
Of the five sections of Arrhenius's treatise, the one that has left the most enduring impression is found under the not particularly pithy heading "Calculation of the Variation of Temperature that would ensue in consequence of a given Variation of the Carbonic Acid in the Air." It was there that he made the first estimate of what has become the central parameter in global warming research, so-called climate sensitivity: the average change in temperature that would accompany a doubling of the carbon dioxide level in his day, which is now called the "preindustrial level." He put the change at between five and six degrees Celcius..."
...More than a century and tens of billions of dollars worth of research later, scientists are still coming up with slightly lower numbers, but not by much."
As Mark Bowen, a mountain climber and physicist, so eloquently puts it:
"An undaunted ability to face the unknown serves both the exploration of large mountains and the pursuit of science."
And the rest, as they say, is history.
We thus learned, before both the fossil fuel and the Industrial Ages really got rolling, the physics of carbon dioxide, how it allows sunlight to pass, but absorbs and then reemits this energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, and we even quantified these findings, good, for all intents and purposes, to this day.
And it is because of this curious gaze of science that we began to wonder, and then become alarmed, as the burning of fossil fuels and consequent release of CO2 became prodigious, such that we , that's "US", now emit some one hundred times the amount of CO2 into the atmosphere today, per year, than all of the world's volcanoes do per year, on average, and that's including the some 60,000 kilometers of mid-ocean ridge volcanoes.
CuckooToo, the scientists, the specialists, who do the calculations, they know all this.
They know and understand the physics.
The results have been confirmed by literally thousands of 'peer-reviewing' scientists, and seconded by the United Nations IPCC, and by every major scientific organization in the world.
The numbers fit. We are significantly altering the atmosphere, and at a rate which appears at the moment to have no analogue in the past, unless it be massive bolide (meteorite) impact, or perhaps the speculative release of methane clathrates at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
Very roughly, I repeat, VERY ROUGHLY - forty percent of our releases have stayed in the atmosphere, forty percent have been absorbed by the oceans, and twenty percent is 'missing', something the Orbiting Carbon Observatory was going to look for, and which failed the other week on launch.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide is now up to 387 ppmv, from an estimated 280 ppmv in the Holocene preindustrial age. That's an increase of thirty-eight percent.
Ocean pH has dropped by some twenty to thirty percent, the coral reefs are bleaching, and may soon die, and the base of the aeorobic ocean food chain is being threatened by our 'acidifying' oceans.
And things are getting worse, faster and faster.
It is sobering to realize that during the ice-ages, i.e., before the Holocene inter-glacial, CO2 was about 180 to 200 ppmv. Thus an increase of from 80 to 100 ppmv CO2, 55 percent on the one hand and 40 percent on the other, respectively, is correlative with the transition from a planet with thirty percent ice cover, and Doggerland, to one with ten percent ice cover, today.
The primary driver of change then was probably not CO2, it was very possibly orbital forcing, hence the slight lag time in curve matching.
That initiated a cascade of fast, amplifying feedbacks - CO2, water vapor, nitrous oxide, methane, albedo, etc.., and some slow feedbacks, as well as counterveiling negative feedbacks, all of which are being furiously investigated. Doubtless there are ones we should be investigating, and are as yet unaware of.
Some of the best scientists in the world have and are turning their attention to this matter, which we in our ignorance have only recently realized poses a grave threat to ourselves and many other species now extant upon the Earth.
This time the forcing is not orbital. The eccentricity of the orbit is at present minimal, and the heliopause this year was January 4, i.e., the time when in our yearly orbit around our Sun we are closest to it.
That means northern winters are being 'moderated' by the current state of affairs, i.e., the precession of the equinoxes. North is where two thirds of the land is - that's important!
Eleven thousand years ago the precessional cycle was inverted, i.e., heliopause would have been during northern winter.
We know all this - and more.
Good, decent people, far more capable than I in matters of this nature, know this, and are trying to find out more, quickly, and a few of them are trying to get the message out to the public and the governments of the world.
They deserve our respect and perhaps, one day, they will have our eternal gratitude.
- From Calgary -
Complain about this comment
Addendum to post #75:
1) Where I mentioned heliopause (twice !), please change that to perigee, i.e., Earth's closest approach to the sun in it's yearly orbit.
2) Where I mention bolide impact and clathrate release, please add 'large igneous provinces', i.e., flood basalt events, from deep seated plumes, as a third option.
Just goes to show why it's not optimal to write at three in the morning, and it also points out the value of 'peer revue', which would in all probability have caught these errors immediately.
Please feel free to improve the content of my post #75.
- From Calgary -
PS: Peter D Ward, one of my favorite paleontologists, is coming out with yet another book, this April so I understand.
It's called: "The Medea Hypothesis", in direct contrast to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis.
It will discuss past greenhouse extinction events, I imagine, and much more.
Complain about this comment
Hi Manysummits
Great, we agree the MWP existed and therefore Mann and his Hockey Stick was wrong and we agree the holocene has been remarkable benevolent when compared to "normal" climate history.
You quote "Thin Ice":
"Thus, by 1896, the great Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius had both the motivation and the necessary tools to take a first swipe at a comprehensive theory of the greenhouse, which he based on the principle of radiation balance..."
You'rtelligent, all i ask is you read a few sceptical views to get a balance
Complain about this comment
To CuckooToo:
Yes, we agree on the Midieval Warm Period.
However, it is a logical fallacy to conclude from this that the 'hockey stick' is wrong.
Also, it is not Mann's hockey stick, it is now more or less a public property of 'the tribe', endorsed in its main conclusion by mainstream science, despite a little massaging, as you call it.
As to skeptical views, please present them, maybe just one at a time. That might be instructive?
In fact, I was just putting in order my climate science binders, with the recent original source peer reviewed articles I am so increasingly fond of, when I came across a Scientific American offprint from my days at McGill University in Montreal.
I was taking a course in 1970 on marine geology, and one of the offprints provided to us was the July 1959 article "Carbon Dioxide and Climate", by a giant in the field, the physicist Gilbert N. Plass, who worked on the atomic bomb during the war, and in Mark Bowen's words, later "moolighted" on the side on the Earth's radiation balance and infrared absorption bands of carbon dioxide, water vapor and ozone.
A truly remarkable article, prescient in its predictions, and brilliant in its conception and presentation.
Except for the inevitable new knowledge gathered since 1959, the physics of the whole greenhouse gas effect appears to have been right on fifty years ago! Here is one of the 'gifted individuals' I alluded to in a previous post.
I quote his final paragraph in full:
"We shall be able to test the carbon dioxide theory against other theories of climatic change quite conclusively during the next half century. Since we now can measure the sun's energy output independent of the distorting influence of the atmosphere, we shall see whether the earth's temperature trend correlates with measured fluctuations in solar radiation. If volcanic dust is the more important factor, then we may observe the earth's temperature following fluctuations in the number of large volcanic eruptions. But if carbon dioxide is the most important factor, long term temperature records will rise continuously as long as man consumes the earth's reserves of fossil fuels."
- Gilbert N. Plass (1959)
I have placed this article immediately behind a Jim Hansen et al article in Science, vol 308, 3 June 2005, entitled:
"Earth's Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications"
I quote the abstract in full, noting that this article is free in its entirety at Jim Hansen's website at Columbia University - look under 'Scholarly Publications':
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/
"Our climate model, driven mainly by increasing human-made greenhouse gases and aerosols, among other forcings, calculates that Earth is now absorbing 0.85 (plus or minus) 0.15 watts per square meter more energy from the Sun than it is emitting to space. This imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of increasing ocean heat content over the past ten years. Implications include (i) the expectation of additional global warming of about 0.6 degrees C without further change of atmospheric composition; (ii) the confirmation of the climate system's lag in responding to forcings, implying the need for anticipatory actions to avoid any specified level of climate change; and (iii) the likelihood of acceleration of ice sheet disintegration and sea level rise."
- James Hansen et al (2005)
Note - Gilbert Plass mentioned the volcanic 'parasol' effect. As mentioned in a previous post of mine, Carl Sagan complimented Jim Hansen directly for predicting quantitatively the exact effect of the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption with the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences global climate model, which Jim created back in the mid-seventies.
Not surprising, as James Hansen cut his teeth on the parasol effect on Venus, as a planetary atmospheric scientist in 1967 and the years immediately following at Goddard.
- From Calgary -
PS: I just acquired a new book, by Alanna Mitchell, voted by Reuter's Foundation in the year 2000 as the world's top environmental reporter:
"Sea Sick - The Global Ocean in Crisis", by Alanna Mitchell, 2009.
From a quick survey of the contents, it looks like it's all there - ocean pH changes, coral bleaching, ties to the atmosphere etc... And the author actually went on the research ships all over the globe!
Complain about this comment
manysummits
"As to skeptical views, please present them, maybe just one at a time. That might be instructive?"
Here is an interesting article about CO2 called "Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics" by Gerhard Gerlich, Ralf D. Tscheuschner (version 4 dated 4 March 2009)
http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161
You need to click on the pdf in the top ght hand corner to get the full article.
It's long, but I know you like reading. The abstract reads:
All the best
- from Blighty -
Complain about this comment
Here is a response to that paper:
[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
Complain about this comment
Or here:
http://atmoz.org/blog/2007/07/10/falsification-of-the-atmospheric-co2-greenhouse-effects/
Complain about this comment
This one i found quite interesting:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/02/example-of-why-ethon-flew-in-using-way.html
Complain about this comment
- Tipping Points and Thresholds -
In creating a mountaineering expedition to a far-off place,
there comes a time when self-doubt vanishes and the gestation
period ends.
One commits, and in the words of Sir Richard Franci Burton:
"The blood flows with the fast circulation of chidhood".
(Zanzibar, ca. 1856)
I hope the year 2009 is such a time, when the world unites
to prevent climate and ocean change Armageddon.
\\\For my Irish mother ///
- Manysummits, B.Sc.
Complain about this comment
View these comments in RSS