Like all human endeavours, the IPCC is not perfect. Despite the enormous efforts devoted to producing its reports with the multiple levels of peer review, some errors will sneak through. Most of these will be minor and inconsequential, but sometimes they might be more substantive. As many people are aware (and as John Nieslen-Gammon outlined in a post last month and Rick Piltz goes over today), there is a statement in the second volume of the IPCC (WG2), concerning the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are receding that is not correct and not properly referenced.
The statement, in a chapter on climate impacts in Asia, was that the likelihood of the Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035” was “very high” if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate (WG 2, Ch. 10, p493), and was referenced to a World Wildlife Fund 2005 report. Examining the drafts and comments (available here), indicates that the statement was barely commented in the reviews, and that the WWF (2005) reference seems to have been a last minute addition (it does not appear in the First- or Second- Order Drafts). This claim did not make it into the summary for policy makers, nor the overall synthesis report, and so cannot be described as a ‘central claim’ of the IPCC. However, the statement has had some press attention since the report particularly in the Indian press, at least according to Google News, even though it was not familiar to us before last month.
It is therefore obvious that this error should be corrected (via some kind of corrigendum to the WG2 report perhaps), but it is important to realise that this doesn’t mean that Himalayan glaciers are doing just fine. They aren’t, and there may be serious consequences for water resources as the retreat continues. See also this review paper (Ren et al, 2006) on a subset of these glaciers.
East Rongbuk glacier just below Mt. Everest has lost 3-400 ft of ice in this area since 1921.
More generally, peer-review works to make the IPCC reports credible because many different eyes with different perspectives and knowledge look over the same text. This tends to make the resulting product reflect more than just the opinion of a single author. In this case, it appears that not enough people with relevant experience saw this text, or if they saw it, did not comment publicly. This might be related to the fact that this text was in the Working Group 2 report on impacts, which does not get the same amount of attention from the physical science community than does the higher profile WG 1 report (which is what people associated with RC generally look at). In WG1, the statements about continued glacier retreat are much more general and the rules on citation of non-peer reviewed literature was much more closely adhered to. However, in general, the science of climate impacts is less clear than the physical basis for climate change, and the literature is thinner, so there is necessarily more ambiguity in WG 2 statements.
In future reports (and the organisation for AR5 in 2013 is now underway), extra efforts will be needed to make sure that the links between WG1 and the other two reports are stronger, and that the physical science community should be encouraged to be more active in the other groups.
In summary, the measure of an organisation is not determined by the mere existence of errors, but in how it deals with them when they crop up. The current discussion about Himalayan glaciers is therefore a good opportunity for the IPCC to further improve their procedures and think more about what the IPCC should be doing in the times between the main reports.
Update: This backgrounder presented by Kargel et al AGU this December is the best summary of the current state of the Himalayas and the various sources of misinformation that are floating around. It covers this issue, the Raina report and the recent Lau et al paper.
@ Septic Matthew in 1371
You haven’t read carefully what I wrote. The fact is that unless a miracle happens and we engineer a photosynthetic process an order of magnitude more efficient than the one plants use now, photosynthesis can only convert between 1 to 5 (at most, sugar cane grows so well only in Brazil) percent of sunlight to useful chemical energy. This means that if solar panels can do, say, 15%, you will need between 3 and 15 times bigger area than the already huge areas to be covered with solar panels to get the same amount of energy. And on top of that, the nutrient cycle has to be closed, otherwise productivity won’t last very long.
P.S. Your suggestions regarding water in California only show how little you have thought about how the various sustainability problems interact with each other. California has just enough water to maintain its agricultural production at the current level. Where is the water (and land) going to come from for fuel crops to be grown there? You will have to cut down agricultural production, but this only means even more hunger worldwide. However you are thinking in terms of “how much is it going to cost?” and not in terms of “Is there enough water? If there is, how much energy would it take to move it around/across states? What does this do to the net EROEI of biofuel production?”.
Septic Matthew 1385:
“The technologies that we have today are sufficient to do the job.”
Can you clarify:
1. what you mean by “doing the job”
2. which technologies exactly can do it
This is unfortunate:
Utah Legislature panel votes against ‘climate data conspiracy’ – BYU scientists defend climate science
I read a discouraging British press account regarding
“India forms new climate change body”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7157590/India-forms-new-climate-change-body.html
“The move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation that his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035.”
The account was given to suggest India was forming its own IPCC.
Is the British tabloid press any more than a cult of liars, each each day striving to one up the other? Take an “edit” here to mean disgust with Britain’s popular press.
I’m thinking here’s the truth of it.
“Manmohan Singh’s compliment to Dr Pachauri for contribution to climate change agenda”
http://connect.in.com/manmohan-singh/blog/manmohan-singh-s-compliment-to-dr-pachauri-for-contribution-to-climate-change-agenda-311-b33725b26107fc59173c4b31ed84b0f144ef5a23.html
by Bhavesh
Fri 05 Feb 2010
“New Delhi: Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh on Friday said that ”The Energy Research Institute” (TERI) under the leadership of Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, has helped in meeting the twin challenges of energy security and climate change.
Praising Dr Pachauri, Dr Singh said, “The Energy Research Institute (TERI), has, under the able and far-sighted leadership of Dr. R.K. Pachauri, earned well-deserved respect and international acclaim for its contributions to the global effort in meeting the twin challenges of energy security and climate change.”
…
Dr Singh further said the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has to be the centerpiece of global cooperation on climate issues.
“The purpose of the Copenhagen Accord is to contribute to the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol and on Long Term Cooperation. It is not a substitute but a complement to these core international agreements,” added Dr Singh.
Dr Singh said, ” A successful international agreement will require a consensus in two crucial areas. The first is on the science of climate change. The second is the ethical framework for giving expression to the central UNFCCC principle of ”common but differentiated responsibility”.
“One of the Missions under our National Action Plan is on Strategic Knowledge for Climate Change to promote high quality and focused research on various aspects of climate change,” he added.
Dr Singh further said, “We have established an Indian Network for Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment, a network of over 120 research institutes, which will bring out regular reports on the impacts of climate change on different sectors and different regions of the country.”
“The first such assessment will be released in November this year. We seek international collaboration to make this network effective,” he added.
Dr Singh also talked about the Centre”s plan to establish a National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology in Dehra Dun hoping to get international cooperation in this vital area.
“The lack of global consensus on burden sharing is an even greater barrier to securing an agreement. Industrialised countries in our view need to recognise more clearly their historical role in the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
…
I’m sure there’s pertinent information in the snips.
Flxible :”for Gillies, if it doesn’t already exist [“fact” to him] it is an impossibility: “we’ve never done it differently” – which shows a complete of imagination, creativity and the ability for abstract cognition”
You’re doing exactly the same with AGW : assuming that mankind will be unable to adapt to some degrees more . Which is obviously contradicted by its history, beginning with the massive migrations that have always existed.
CFU : you’re wrong if you think that I don’t care about the future. I care about what I think it matters.
Consider please these two assertions :
Assertion 1 : it is very difficult to maintain our life style with some more °C, but it is rather easy (with some effort) to maintain it with much less fossil fuels.
Assertion 2 : it is very difficult to maintain our life style with much less fossil fuels.but it is rather easy (with some effort) to maintain it with some more °C.
Would you agree that it summarizes quite simply our different points of view?
Then now , obviously, Assertion 1 means that our lifetstyle must be much more sensitive to the temperature than to FF consumption, whereas assertion 2 says exactly the opposite.
Considering the very large variety of lifestyles in the world , it seems that it shouldn’t be too difficult to find some statistical way of testing these two hypothesis, isnt’it ?
so what would you propose to do, based on objective facts, to decide which one is the more relevant ?
This morning’s Guardian carries a leader setting out the results of their investigation into the East Anglia business. In this, they repeat :
[quote]we have uncovered an abject failure to ensure essential records were kept on Chinese weather stations, determined manoeuvring to exclude critics from leading journals and international reports, and suggestions of deleting potentially embarrassing correspondence with a view to evading the Freedom of Information Act.[/quote]
Almost all the comments to this article are hostile. Notable among them are a number from people who say that they are scientists, and who claim that the scientific community has now known for some time that there is something rotten in Climate Science. A typical early comment is :
[quote]Reading their corruption of my profession made me feel physically sick, and seeing the likes of Michael Mann (partially) exonerated by Penn State University brings shame on them as an institution and on my profession as a whole.[/quote]
Another reads :
[quote]As a scientist, I have looked on with increasing concern at the behaviour of the climate science establishment. It helps if you understand how such groups work. Circling the wagons to withstand invaders is all too common. However, it is usually the case that objective people keep control of the integrity of the discipline. Unfortunately, this happened far too late for this group: ClimateGate shows how the IPCC became controlled by politics and a serious scientific error gave a false sense of security. I have come across such issues before: a failure to understand basic physics causes the project to fail.[/quote]
Is this the sound of chairs being noisily scraped as scientists in other disciplines draw back from your table? If it is – and I have noticed other signs of this on Guardian blogs recently, as well as in rather more illustrious places – then you may be finding yourselves increasingly isolated. (Even Monbiot shows signs of wavering).
Over the last month I have seen a number of posts here asking how you could make out a better case to the public at large. At the moment, you are losing not only the public, but possibly a part of the public that is scientifically literate. I suspect that you really need to pursue that conversation.
There is an interesting poll on the BBC (UK) website…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/05_02_10climatechange.pdf
This shows that since November there has been a massive shift against the theory of CO2 driven climate change.
In outline….
1. Climate change is happening and it is due to CO2.
November 41%
February 26%
2. Climate change is happening, but it is not yet proven that it is CO2 driven
November 32%
February 28%
3. Climate change is happening but it is environmentalist propaganda (sic) that it is an made.
November 8%
February 10%
4.Climate change is not happening.
November 15%
February 25%
The polling organisation say:
“It is very unusual indeed to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period,” Populus managing director Michael Simmonds told BBC News.”
An interview with Rajendra Pachauri
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15473066
Feb 4th 2010 | From The Economist online
Joseph Romm on ClimateProgress.org actually called Dr. Lal, BTW, and was told that Lal had never said to the Mail or anyone else that the incorrect figure had been known to be incorrect but included anyway. The story is nonetheless being trumpeted about by some major news outlets. Strange that they accuse the IPCC of irresponsible reporting when they can not be bothered to fact-check their own stories.
Tim Mason@1406,
Really, please tell me that you are not sufficiently gullible that you take as gospel the credentials that anonymous intertube posters claim.
The Guardian article represents piss poor reporting, poor fact-checking and a degree of gullibility that is hard to countenance in a news organization. And the posters probably include the usual mix of idiots, wannabes, and professional shills you find in any anonymous internet forum.
All of this may be a lot of fun for the denialists, but it doesn’t make the evidence, which is overwhelming, go away. It will be there waiting once humanity gets tired of its orgy of denial and decides to return to an evidence-based outlook again. Hopefully that will not be too late.
Gilles says: “You’re doing exactly the same with AGW : assuming that mankind will be unable to adapt to some degrees more . Which is obviously contradicted by its history, beginning with the massive migrations that have always existed.”
Gee, Gilles, I must have missed the stories of massive migrations that have occurred since humanity developed a complex, global civilization of 5-7 billion people. And given that the current changes are GLOBAL and likely to be unprecedented since the advent of modern man, just what planet do you propose we migrate to?
Gilles, there are two types of people–those who keep telling us everything will be OK and those who throughout history have worked their asses off to make things OK. If you don’t feel like working, that’s fine. Those of us who are trying to address this crisis will either succeed (in which case you’ll say “See, everything turned out all right”) or we won’t (in which case you’ll undoubtedly find a way to blame us). However, we would appreciate it if you didn’t try to blow sunshine up the collective skirts of humanity and tell them that self-delusion is admirable.
Steve Smith says, “The idea that errors are excusable in a report of this size because of its size is debatable.”
This obviously comes from a man who has never published anything longer than a 4 page term paper! The errors that crept in are exactly the sort that would not stand out unless, for example, one had visited the Himmalayan region in question. They also have nothing to do with the basic scientific case. Humans make mistakes. If you don’t like it, find a new species to join. Science at least makes it possible to find and correct the most egregious of the errors–you know, the ones that actually influence the conclusions.
Doug Bostrom (#1396) waxes sarcastic on the subject of the unlawful conduct in which CRU apparently engaged. “Whoop. Dee. Doo,” he says.
Doug, I agree that illegal and unethical conduct is not, in itself, an objection to climate-science orthodoxy. But it doesn’t inspire trust or confidence! The discussion in this thread arose when I countered the claim that the impact on public opinion of the recent embarrassments was “overblown.” I cited data — you’re familiar with the concept of “data,” I think — showing a marked decline in public belief in, and concern for, CAGW claims, a decline that commenced even before the recent embarrassments. And I suggested that it might not behoove CAGW advocates to deny or minimize the significance of such illegal or unethical conduct, since that will scarcely help to restore trust and confidence.
As though to prove the point, Barton Levenson (#1351) denied that there had been any finding of illegal conduct. (Interesting, wasn’t it, that he didn’t feel the need to say anything about ethics. In his mind, perhaps “legal” and “ethical” are one in the same. But I digress.) So I posted evidence (you’re familiar with the concept of “evidence,” I think) that there had been a finding by responsible enforcement officials of unlawful conduct, albeit occurring before the running of the applicable statute of limitations.
Now you post snarky comments to the effect that unlawful conduct is no big deal. Full circle! I wonder just how common is the attitude that unlawful or unethical denials of access, or procedural transparency, are unimportant to scientific endeavor.
Happily, RC’s principals are conspicuously unwilling to express such views. I commend them for that.
Ray Ladbury says: All of this may be a lot of fun for the denialists, but it doesn’t make the evidence, which is overwhelming, go away. It will be there waiting once humanity gets tired of its orgy of denial and decides to return to an evidence-based outlook again.
Just so.
> Gilles
> assuming that mankind will be unable to adapt
Nonsense. Rate of change is the problem.
If you accept paleo studies you can look at the rate of change and the rate of adaptation to change, repeatedly, in Earth’s past history. (If you don’t accept the paleo work, and evolution, you can’t imagine this.)
Once you read the paleo work and understand the rate of change, you’ll be prepared to discuss this. Until you have the basic information, you will continue to rely on the little you know and the misinformation you’ve searched out as the basis for your beliefs.
You may be more typical of how people think than the scientists are.
That doesn’t change the physics.
Have you wondered why?
Gilles@1405
I’m actually saying that man can adapt, not only to “some degrees more” [which will be unavoidable now], but to the changed extremes of weather that are becoming evident, as well as to being MUCH less dependent on a fossil-fueled lifestyle. You are saying that the only thing we can [or need to] adapt to is higher temperatures – a single aspect of climate change inextricably bound to other aspects that will more severly affect our viability on major areas of the planet – and you believe the only way we can adapt is by continued, increased, dependence on fossil fuels, or “migration”, a very maladaptive and myopic approach. And the reason various countries find it necessary to turn their borders into armed fences.
In addition, your myopia is further demonstrated by the massive failure of logic shown in your “two assertions”, neither of which include the critical variables of non-temperature effects of climate change, nor the “fact” of declining petroleum supplies, which of course you simply deny.
As I said, your position is well summed by the statement “we’ve never done it differently” [therefore it can’t and needn’t be done].
1401, Georgi Marinov: P.S. Your suggestions regarding water in California only show how little you have thought about how the various sustainability problems interact with each other. California has just enough water to maintain its agricultural production at the current level. Where is the water (and land) going to come from for fuel crops to be grown there? You will have to cut down agricultural production, but this only means even more hunger worldwide. However you are thinking in terms of “how much is it going to cost?” and not in terms of “Is there enough water? If there is, how much energy would it take to move it around/across states? What does this do to the net EROEI of biofuel production?”.
The source of the water would be San Francisco Bay, and land that is not now used would be converted to biofuels. I was specifically referring to salt-tolerant plants, and since S. F. Bay is a bay and not a lake, the amount of water available is great.
I didn’t say that it was economical (compared to someone’s [unstated] ideal), only that it was possible. If the true cost of AGW is sufficiently high (which I doubt, but it might be), then it would be worth doing. In light of costs of coal and deploying troops to Iraq, and diminishing oil, it is probably worth doing at some slow and consistent rate.
1402, 1. what you mean by “doing the job”
2. which technologies exactly can do it
1. Reducing net anthropogenic contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere by 65%.
2. Read this:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/305/5686/968.pdf
“Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies”, Science, 2004, vol 305, p. 968.
Note that was 6 years ago. The world produces about 30 times as much energy from non-hydro renewables as it did then, the cost of wind and solar has dropped, the variety and size of the non-ethanol biofuels industry has exploded, and the international reforestation effort has increased dramatically. The salt-tolerant mangrove forest of Eritrea has been international news (e.g. National Geographic) and a science award for the leader; Senagal and Indonesia have each planted millions of salt-tolerant mangroves. Central and South American forests that were cut down have regrown surprisingly well (despite the ongoing destruction of forests in different places), and Mexico has planted more than a million new trees. In addition to its big push in renewable energy sources, China has an enormous reforestation/afforestation program underway.
About your word “exact”. Since the project will take decades, and since improvements are being made in all the technologies all the time, the “exact” mix of all technologies can not be foretold. A factory in Arizona makes PV cells at a cost of $1/watt of max capacity. Someone, somewhere will eventually reduce that cost to $0.25/watt; by then someone, somewhere will be manufacturing the newer more efficient and cheaper wind turbines, and some genetic engineers will have produced a bacteria or algae with 5 times the oil producing capacity of the current best organism (like humans did with milk and corn production). OK, maybe not, but those are simple extrapolations of recent trends into the near future without increasing the current rate of new investment.
Even with current rates of investment, the energy industry of the world will be much different in 2020 from what it is now. Making an accurate “exact” prediction beyond that is hopeless.
Re: 1394
Steve Smith says:
5 February 2010 at 5:31 PM
“What I question is whether there are any errors in the report that cut against alarmism or if all the excusable oversights, in some kind of coincidental fashion, support the claims that we are on the verge of the end of the world as we know it.”
Why don’t you read the document and see for yourself? But yes there are errors that make the AR4 too conservative.
It’s most likely underestimating the rate of Arctic sea ice melting. It also underestimates the rate of sea level rise due to Greenland’s ice cap melting. The rate that the east and west Antarctic ice sheet is melting is underestimated as well.
“AR4 understates the danger of climate change”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_IPCC_AR4
I would suggest that the too-conservative oversights are more significant than the so called alarmist prediction and other oversights are.
Of course no-one’s head was being sought when that happened. It was only when the right wing CC denier mob got its teeth into the 2035 error found by climate scientists that the hue and cry for the governments of the world to fire chairman Pachauri and completely redo the IPCC and all the evidence appeared.
1402, Georgi Marinov: And on top of that, the nutrient cycle has to be closed, otherwise productivity won’t last very long.
The nutrient cycle can be closed. Nitrogen and mineral rich products come out one side of the refinery, C, H (and maybe O) rich fuel comes out the other side. The trucks that carry the feedstock to the refinery carry the nutrients back to the farms. This is taken into account in the energy computations that show that even corn ethanol (probably the worst known biofuel) produces more energy than it consumes. (Even corn ethanol does not have that much negative impact — we merely have to reduce our overconsumption of meat. There is not much doubt that, in the aggregate, we in the U.S. eat more meat than is good for us.)
I have to comments about your overall approach:
1. you don’t seem to know very much about all the work that is already being done;
2. you assert that each component of the proposed plan (e.g. algal fuel) is insufficient to solve the whole problem, something I think everybody already agrees on;
3. you assert that it is uneconomical to do it all at once.
#3 is Bjorn Lomborg’s point, but even he does not argue against a measured, steady, and consistent effort to improve the diversity and sustainability of energy production. His argument is against doing too much, too soon, too narrow-mindedly.
Here is a funny story about the EU contemplating reclassifying oil palm plantations as “forests”:
http://euobserver.com/9/29410
Could be, I suppose. It depends on the ratio of the carbon-sequestering capacity of the oil palms to the carbon-sequestering capacity of the forest that is removed to plant the oil palms. Next up: salt-tolerant oil palms!
Another side of the biofuels debate is here:
http://bst.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/29/3/205
In short: biofuels production consumes more energy than it produces.
While entertaining a contrarian over at SkepticalScience I was just neatly punk’d as this fellow led to me discover that Kehrwald’s 2008 paper on missing isotopes in a Himalayan glacier includes in its conclusions a cite to an obviously wrong WWF-supplied statistic on Tibetan Plateau ice cover.
The cite in no way affects the central proposition of the paper, but it tells how some clever contrarians are doubtless beavering away with citation indexes to discover places where folks who did not get the memo on IPCC WG2’s “relaxed” citation standard are using the WG2 report as an authority.
Conundrum: WG2 report was allowed to use grey literature, but WG2 itself is treated as a peer reviewed source of information. Hence whoever wrote section 6 of Kehrwald 2008 used WWF numbers to say the Tibetan Plateau has 500,000km2 of ice cover. If the author of section 6 had bothered to really look at the WG2 reference they’d have probably noticed it looks distinctly duff, but that did not happen. Not good.
I doubt Kehrwald’s group were the only ones to be tripped this way. Expect more.
I’m sure this problem will be fixed in the next go ’round, but what a mess.
“Gilles: show me an economy where this represents more than 10 % of the total. Wind power never produces more than 20 % of the global grid it is connected to.
BPL: Denmark gets 23% of its electricity from wind now and is planning to double that over the next decade.”
Denmark is inteconnected with neighboring grids, especially the swedish one -with a lot of nuclear. And have a look on the CO2 production per capita in Denmark, compared to similar countries.
Ray, I think that hundreds of millions of Europeans have spread all over the world, discovering new countries with very different climates, and mainly adapting to them. And I guess than we have now much better ways of coping with climate problems, thanks to fossil fuels of course. You can migrate where you want- I think you’ll be able to adapt. If there is a problem in the world, it’s overpopulation, and it won’t be solved by reducing FF- just the opposite I guess.
And, apart from personal judgements about my small person, do you have an idea of how to measure the sensitivity of standard of living to the temperature and to the fossil fuels consumption ?
I thought of a kind of “welfare” indicator W, either GDP/capita or any other indicator you like, fitted by a multilinear regression as a function of average fossil fuel consumption/capita F and average temperature of the country T
W = a+bF+ cT, and compare the values of sensitivities b and c. Should be funny non? and if you prefer variations, we could alternatively fit the change in GDP/capita as a function of change in fossil fuel consumption and anomaly of temperature for 100 yrs… good beginning to evaluate a sensitivity.
Again, I’m not saying that everything will be ok. I’m saying the problems will be much more coming from “b” than “c”.
Is climate change hiding the decline of maple syrup?
http://newsletters.environmentalhealthnews.org/t/35701/175/44946/0/
“The burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases carbon dioxide that alters the balance of carbon isotopes naturally found in the environment — an effect that is now being found in food, reveals a US study.”
Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100205/full/news.2010.56.html
See also:
Arctic melting to cost $2.4 trillion U.S. by 2050: Study.
http://newsletters.environmentalhealthnews.org/t/35701/175/44947/0/
“The cumulative cost of the melting Arctic in the next 40 years is equivalent to the annual gross domestic products of Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom combined, according to the authors of the study prepared for the Pew Environment Group.”
Canwest News Service
http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Arctic%20melting
%20cost%20trillion%202050%20Study/2527615/story.html
&
Arctic warming will cost world billions: Pew study
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/02/05/pew-arctic-warming-cost.html
Friday, February 5, 2010
See also:
Arctic climate changing faster than expected-study
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N05232902.htm
05 Feb 2010
One of the things the anti-science, anti-climate scientist and anti-IPCC campaigns are all about. A Republican activist Supreme Court has seen to it that unlimited corporate money can be invested to see this through.
Movement to suspend California’s global-warming law gathers steam
http://www.kansascity.com/400/story/1730224.html
By MARGOT ROOSEVELT
Los Angeles Times
Fri, Feb. 05, 2010
“Republican politicians and conservative activists are launching a ballot campaign to suspend California’s landmark global-warming law, in what they hope will serve as a showcase for a national backlash against climate regulations.
“Supporters say they have “solid commitments” of nearly $600,000 to pay signature gatherers for a November initiative aimed at delaying curbs on the greenhouse gas emissions of power plants and factories until the state’s unemployment rate drops.
“GOP gubernatorial candidates and Tea Party organizers paint the 2006 law, considered a model for other state and federal efforts, as a job-killing interference in the economy. Talk radio is flailing at what John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, drive-time hosts on a Los Angeles radio station, call “the global-warming final solution act” promoted by “fascist, Nazi” officials.”
“We are on fire,” said GOP Assemblyman Dan Logue, a sponsor of the proposed initiative. “People are calling from all over the country. This will be the most intense campaign the state has seen in 50 years.”
“Mary D. Nichols, chairwoman of the state’s Air Resources Board, which is implementing the law, known as AB-32, called the initiative “a campaign that has to be taken seriously”
[…]
Re Comment by Leighton — 6 February 2010 @ 11:12 AM:
You have presented excellent evidence of opinions regarding behaviors revealed by the CRU e-mail theft. Unfortunately for your argument there is, as yet, no evidence of any actual moral, ethical, or illegal behavior related to this issue. Opinions about this affair, including yours, are not worth anything (Insert relevant Dirty Harry quote about opinions here).
Steve
Tim Jones (#1426) expresses an ignorant opinion on a topic far removed from climate science, namely, a recent US Supreme Court decision on the intersection between the Speech Clause of the First Amendment and campaign-finance reform legislation. I’d be happy to explain why Tim is wrong but am concerned that First Amendment jurisprudence might be, you know, just a tad off topic for this blog. (Is there an emoticon for “rolling eyeballs”?)
Gilles, You are the master of the impertinent response. What the hell does migration from Europe have to do with forced migration due to climate change? I really have to wonder:
Are you really so obtuse that you think such things are relevant?
-or-
Do you mistake impertinence for cleverness?
Given your unwillingness to engage on a serious level, I think we’ll have to put you down for “troll”.
Leighton says: 6 February 2010 at 11:12 AM
“Doug Bostrom (#1396) waxes sarcastic on the subject of the unlawful conduct in which CRU apparently engaged. “Whoop. Dee. Doo,” he says.
…
“Happily, RC’s principals are conspicuously unwilling to express such views. I commend them for that.”
Yes, RC is not so free to express itself as am I.
The daylight between your opinion and mine is a matter of emphasis, of setting priorities.
On your part, you’re outraged that a group of scientists were sorely tested by a mob and some were found to have patience less than saintly. For you, that is the main significance of the matter.
For my part, perhaps better informed in some ways than you because I’ve worked in a situation highly exposed to the public and where I was not free to hide as a pseudonym, I’m not very surprised with the behavior we’ve seen and I’m much more impressed with the actual work these people perform, the importance of their collective research as opposed to the failings they may exhibit when tested as human individuals on matters of no particular importance.
The FOI failure means nothing, tells us nothing about science and what it may say that is useful to public policy. The FOI failure was a synthetic artifact produced as a side-effect of a misbegotten witch hunt. It’s not even a matter of “ends justify means” or some moral ambiguity of that sort; the FOI failure had nothing to do with the pursuit of the research.
So Whoop. Dee. Doo.
And, by the way, apropos Brian Watson’s and Chris Field’s remarks, quoted in tomorrow’s The Sunday Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017907.ece), is it yet premature to nominate “The IPCC Is Not Infallible” for the Understatement Of the Year Award?
[edit]
Tim Jones says: 6 February 2010 at 4:40 PM
“We are on fire,” said GOP Assemblyman Dan Logue”
How very richly ironic.
I must say, I’m amazed at how the fossil interests are gutting out the timing here, absolutely counting on folks not connecting the dots of the many little fires being set as a means to deal with attempts to account for C02 pollution at the federal level.
Further to Leighton:
“Last year in July alone the unit received 60 FoI requests from across the world. With a staff of only 13 to cope with them, the demands were accumulating faster than they could be dealt with. “According to the rules,” says Jones, “you have to do 18 hours’ work on each one before you’re allowed to turn it down.” It meant that the scientists would have had a lot of their time diverted from research.
A further irritation was that most of the data was available online, making the FoI requests, in Jones’s view, needless and a vexatious waste of his time. In the circumstances, he says, he thought it reasonable to refer the applicants to the website of the Historical Climatology Network in the US.
He also suspected that the CRU was the target of a co-ordinated attempt to interfere with its work — a suspicion that hardened into certainty when, over a matter of days, it received 40 similar FoI requests. Each applicant asked for data from five different countries, 200 in all, which would have been a daunting task even for someone with nothing else to do.
…
“We were clearly being targeted,” says Jones. “Only 22% of the FoI enquiries were identifiably from within the UK, 39% were from abroad and 39% were untraceable.” What irked him was that the foreign applicants would all have had sources closer to hand in their own countries.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017905.ece
And you, Leighton, would have done the right thing, I’m sure. Not a chance you’d have thrown up your hands in disgust, right? You’re quite sure, yes?
Off-topic, but finally there’s an article that allows Phil Jones to tell his side of the story: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017905.ece
Excerpts:
Excerpts:
The leak was bad. Then came the death threats.
“He now accepts that he did not treat the FoI requests as seriously as he should have done. “I regret that I did not deal with them in the right way,” he told The Sunday Times.”
“But he pleads provocation. Last year in July alone the unit received 60 FoI requests from across the world. With a staff of only 13 to cope with them, the demands were accumulating faster than they could be dealt with. “According to the rules,” says Jones, “you have to do 18 hours’ work on each one before you’re allowed to turn it down.””
“A further irritation was that most of the data was available online, making the FoI requests, in Jones’s view, needless and a vexatious waste of his time. In the circumstances, he says, he thought it reasonable to refer the applicants to the website of the Historical Climatology Network in the US.”
“He also suspected that the CRU was the target of a co-ordinated attempt to interfere with its work — a suspicion that hardened into certainty when, over a matter of days, it received 40 similar FoI requests. Each applicant asked for data from five different countries, 200 in all, which would have been a daunting task even for someone with nothing else to do. It was clear to Jones that the attack originated from an old adversary, the sceptical website Climate Audit, run by Steve McIntyre, a former minerals prospector and arch climate sceptic.”
> $600,000 to pay signature gatherers
Yep. But remember, you and the unions are equally free to buy your side of the election. Just dig deep into your pockets and let the richest man win.
Following is the 2nd half of the LATimes article reprinted in the Kansas City Star.” The players are clearly pointed out. So is the game. These are right wing libertarians fighting tooth and nail to maintain their industrial might, no matter what the cost to the rest of us. They should learn how to adapt instead of resisting the inevitable.
Effort underway to suspend California’s global-warming law
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ballot-warming6-2010feb06,0,5959308.story
“Conservatives propose an initiative that would delay curbs on greenhouse gas emissions until the state’s unemployment rate drops to 5.5%, a level not seen since 2007.”
By Margot Roosevelt
February 6, 2010
“Industries have lobbied intensely against proposed regulations. Auto manufacturers unsuccessfully sued to overturn rules to slash carbon dioxide emissions from tailpipes. Oil refiners and truckers filed suit this week against a measure to reduce the carbon content of gasoline and diesel.
“Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has made climate change one of his signature issues, is reportedly asking major companies to remain on the sidelines. The governor “absolutely opposes” the initiative, said spokesman Aaron McLear, adding that it is “deceptively written to protect big polluters and would keep us from staying No. 1 in the country in creating clean tech jobs.”
“GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner has endorsed the initiative. His rival, Meg Whitman, contends that AB 32 “will discourage job creation and could kill any recovery,” and vowed to impose a one-year moratorium on AB 32 on her first day as governor.
“Businesses that benefit from greenhouse gas curbs are meeting with environmentalists to mobilize against the initiative. Many are connected to Silicon Valley’s deep pockets.
“Suspending AB 32 “would be the real job-killer,” said Susan Frank of the California Business Alliance for a Green Economy. “The mere passage of AB 32 has generated green job growth even as the rest of the economy has contracted.” A December study by Next 10, a San Francisco-based think tank, found that jobs in California green businesses grew 36% from 1995 to 2008, while total employment expanded only 13%.
“A report on the proposed rollback of AB 32 by the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office last month said that the measure could lead to greater short-term profits for some businesses, but would dampen investments in clean technology and green jobs.
“The report said the initiative would invalidate a Schwarzenegger executive order requiring that a third of all retail electricity sellers get their power from renewable sources by 2020. And it would suspend the regulation to slash carbon intensity of fuels by 10%.
“However, half of the state’s measures to bring greenhouse gases down to 1990 levels by 2010 would survive, the analyst report concluded, notably the rules to cut tailpipe emissions, because they were enacted under different statutes.
“A crowded ballot in November could work against the measure, but Costa, who was active in the successful effort to recall former Gov. Gray Davis, says his group’s Internet outreach will spawn “a new coalition.”
“Look at what happened in Massachusetts,” he said, referring to the “tea party”-supported election of Sen. Scott Brown. “I see that happening with AB 32. Blue-collar voters think the government has gone too far. We’re told we’re somehow warming the planet. But they don’t see the evidence.”
Ingenious media distributions of evidence may well will win the contest, despite the comment: “What it seems extremely difficult for some RC adherents to understand is that what works in the real world is not fundamental scientific evidence…”#1074.
Perhaps AxelD is trying to make a subtle distinction. Whatever the case more images of evidence, of Alaskan villages sliding into the Bering Sea, homes tumbling into fissures in permafrost and perhaps drunken forests and receding glaciers and bark beetle infestations with maybe some talk about ocean acidification just up north would be the illustrations we need.
A picture speaks a thousand words.
http://earthlightimagery.com/gallery/penguins/_ANT2906W.jpg
Perhaps if people were given to understand that these baby gentoos’ fellow species are facing extinction they might not want to destroy the habitat of this Adelie: http://earthlightimagery.com/gallery/penguins/_ARC2099_ICW.jpg
by overheating the planet.
Georgi Marinov @ 1188:
(I know — I’m a few pages back, but I keep seeing this, so I’m sure it’s in between page 24 and page 29 …)
As my business grows I keep getting opportunities to work on ever larger projects. My current largest project is a 60KW solar-assisted car charging station. I can’t discuss all of the technology involved, because it’s proprietary, but 60KW isn’t a small amount of power, and “car charging” isn’t a trivial matter either.
This stuff is happening RIGHT NOW. It isn’t “next year” or “next decade”. The projects that I’m involved with add up to a pretty hefty amount of power — in some cases enough that utilities are starting to care A LOT about how that power is delivered, and that means that we’re starting to impact how the grid functions, and we’re doing it without some massive build-out of technology or infrastructure.
My company is also starting to push for alternative uses to solar system structures — that is, solar power systems that have high value as something other than producers of electric power. The comparison to wired versus wireless telephones is a good one — just as cellular phone technology has created new uses for communication equipment, readily available solar power is creating new ways to use and manage power.
What strikes me as extra bizarre about the present debate is that THIS is a generation of people who saw computer technology explode. Many of the problems with using renewable energy sources can be solved with microcontrollers that can recognize when the grid has surplus power or not and adapt. This is already being done — washers and dryers that “take a break” when the grid is running low, and automatically pick back up with their work when things stabilize. Thermostats shut down for 10 or 15 minutes during peak demands. Commercial cold storage buildings that cool down early in the day, when power is cheaper, and warm up later in the day when power is more expensive. That’s all being done right now and it’s already improving how the grid functions and adapts to renewable energy sources.
Far from being some kind of no-growth future, the green future is very bright. I look forward to Spring when the weather warms and I can ride my electric motorcycle, charged from my own solar panels, and reap the benefits that nay-sayers insist we’re not going to reap. Some thought computers weren’t going to amount to much and they were wrong, too.
Tim : “The research project involved more than 370 scientists from 27 countries who collectively spent 15 months, starting in June 2007”
Summer 2007 was an exceptional melting season, more due to a special regime of winds than temperature. Now we are back to 2005 levels. Extrapolation of 2007 data are bogus.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
Extrapolating ten or even twenty years for the next 30 years has no scientific basis, if you don’t know the past variability and the amplitude of oscillations at this scale. Precise data are only 30 years old, which is not enough to separate multidecadal oscillations from linear trends.
Now for the cost, again, knowing that each t of C produce on average 6000 $, what is the wealth produced by the amount of C that we should not burn to avoid the (putative) melting ? if you don’t compare the two values, the argument is useless. I already said that cars, even electric ones, will cause dozens of millions of casualties, and nobody asks for their banning.
Giles @ 1424:
Your continued insistence that GDP cannot be decoupled from fossil fuel consumption is a complete non-sequitor. When someone turns on their office computer and sits down to be more productive than the person using an abacus, the computer doesn’t check the source of those electrons — that increase in productivity is a product of having those electrons in the first place, not their origin’s fuel source.
Renewables, as an energy source, is an emerging technology, and as with all emerging technologies, it is subject to declining costs. I did a service call as a favor for a client of mine — their customer’s system was 11 years old. The main inverter, a 4KW AC Trace SW 4024 cost $5,000 new and had far fewer capabilities than it’s modern replacement, which is less than half the cost. The solar array was tiny compared to modern arrays, yet cost more when installed originally that the 3KW DC arrays that are more typical today. The charge controller — the device that converts DC power from the array to the batteries — was grossly inefficient. And that’s just 11 years and not adjusting for inflation.
When I cut my power consumption from about 15MWh per year to 4MWh per year, I didn’t cut my standard of living. Last year I got my old stereo out of storage, bought a pair of speakers at a garage sale, and hooked it up in my bedroom. Home theatre in the den, stereo in the bedroom. Two years ago I added two more wide-screen TVes and cable boxes. When I started my company last year I picked up three new printers. By any measure, my “standard of living” has increased dramatically, ignoring that I’m trying to get a new company going.
People I know who’ve aggressively undertaken a reduction in energy =waste= have found the same thing. By carefully monitoring energy consumption they become aware of phantom and vampire loads that do =nothing= for their standard of living. “Smart” power strips are readily available that turn off accessories when televisions and computers are turned off. Reductions in permissible power consumption for Energy Star rated appliances continue to drive down the amount of energy used by major appliances, all while those appliances include more features. As their energy consumption falls, they have more money for other uses — declining fossil fuel use, rising standard of living.
Two hundred years ago, “horseshoes used per household” would have been a good proxy for standard of living. One old mule? Not so much. Half a dozen horses? Entirely different matter. But today “horseshoes used per household” is a lousy proxy. How many horses are Bill and Melinda Gates using?
Right now 8.6% of the electric power in Texas is coming from wind. Yesterday, 110% of my electric power came from my roof. As those numbers increase, the equation you keep pushing has no choice but to change.
Ray Ladbury @ 1410
I’m not sure that my gullibility is of much interest here; in fact I personally remain as convinced of your case as one can be if one is not capable of following the science. Those of us who are outside the tent are forced to rely on best authority, and I have done so and will continue to do so.
But it is on such free-for-all forums as the Guardian comment boards that opinions are thrashed out in the ‘advanced’ economies. As one of the posters here points out, there has been a sea-chage in public perceptions over the last months. Today we learn that the Tory Party leadership are under pressure to come out against Global Warming. In the United States, the tea-party crowd have placed the crusade against ‘warmism’ at the spearhead of their campaign.
This is part of general turn against science. See, for just one example, the ignorant bluster of Simon Jenkins, inweighing against waht he calls ‘Mad Scientist Disease.’ Epidemiology, Biology, Physicsc – all are under attack. And yet one gets the feeling that within the domain of science itself, the old hierarchies persist, and that each of the sub-disciplines looks down its nose at the next, as if they were so many tigers watching aloof as their con-specifics were mauled to death one by one by a pride of mangy lions.
After I left the message here, several people joined the thread from which I quoted to defend the science. It would be nice to see a robust defense of Phil Jones. It seems that he needs it.
Gilles: “I thought of a kind of “welfare” indicator W, either GDP/capita or any other indicator you like, fitted by a multilinear regression as a function of average fossil fuel consumption/capita F and average temperature of the country T”
Correlation is not causation.
What is your causation.
How would that causation act and to what strength.
Does such causation explain the correlation.
These are what scientists do because they are skeptical of their ideas.
It is what ditto denialists like you do NOT do because you have no aim except to destroy anothers work.
Gilles: “Denmark is inteconnected with neighboring grids, especially the swedish one -with a lot of nuclear.”
So therefore the swedes take a lot of renewable power from Denmark.
After all, that grid sharing goes both ways.
Septic: “In short: biofuels production consumes more energy than it produces.”
In short, wrong.
Most avenues for biofuel production produces more energy than it consumes.
If this were not possible, animal life would not exist.
“Doug, I agree that illegal and unethical conduct is not, in itself, an objection to climate-science orthodoxy. But it doesn’t inspire trust or confidence!”
However, LEighton has absolutely NO problem with trust or confidence in denialist dittos stating that this is all a scam and that the IPCC scientist should be executed for crimes against christianity (really).
Nor when they state they haven’t got the data they asked for and yet it turns out they’ve had it for years.
Nor when they’ve changed their arguments to suit the topic of the day, then changed back again.
Gilles: “Considering the very large variety of lifestyles in the world , it seems that it shouldn’t be too difficult to find some statistical way of testing these two hypothesis, isnt’it ?”
Yup.
Have a look at the migrations of the Etheopians.
Even as low a CO2 load and concomitant baggage of civilisation, they have had to move to neighbouring countries.
Mayan descruction was at the hands of resource loss and climate change.
You can also look at the gardners growing zones and how they’ve changed and the problem of Canadian softwood pine trees being denuded by a beetle that is surviving the milder winters in the trees they have and therefore getting a good head start on parasitising the trees to the detriment of the trees and canadian lumber industry.
Now what process do we have that shows our life DEMANDS ONLY fossil fuels to ascend to “civilisation”?
Any?
Leighton: As though to prove the point, Barton Levenson (#1351) denied that there had been any finding of illegal conduct. (Interesting, wasn’t it, that he didn’t feel the need to say anything about ethics. In his mind, perhaps “legal” and “ethical” are one in the same…)
BPL: That dragging noise is the sound of goalposts being moved.
BPL: Denmark gets 23% of its electricity from wind now and is planning to double that over the next decade.”
Gilles: Denmark is inteconnected with neighboring grids, especially the swedish one -with a lot of nuclear.
BPL: So what? If they’re 23% wind-powered and 77% powered by evil dirty foreign energy (EDFE), and they plan to go to 46% wind and 54% EDFE, doesn’t that help the situation?
Septic Matthew:
1. Reducing net anthropogenic contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere by 65%.
2. Read this:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/305/5686/968.pdf
“Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies”, Science, 2004, vol 305, p. 968.
You got it wrong – the goal is to prevent a global Malthusian crash and preserve civilization with the knowledge accumulated so that we don’t get back to caves forever. Reducing emissions while necessary to get there is not sufficient because climate is only one of the crises we are facing. and they all arise from the same fundamental problem – exponential growth within a finite system.
I have to comments about your overall approach:
1. you don’t seem to know very much about all the work that is already being done;
2. you assert that each component of the proposed plan (e.g. algal fuel) is insufficient to solve the whole problem, something I think everybody already agrees on;
3. you assert that it is uneconomical to do it all at once.
#3 is Bjorn Lomborg’s point, but even he does not argue against a measured, steady, and consistent effort to improve the diversity and sustainability of energy production. His argument is against doing too much, too soon, too narrow-mindedly.
Again, you got it wrong – I have never argued against switching to renewables – exactly the opposite. What I am trying to get people to understand is that you can not switch to renewables and continue BAU with respect to everything else – there is only so much energy available that can be realistically harvested with the resources we have, and it can be done only so fast (i.e. not before we crash due to the combination of Peak Oil and the first serious manifestation of climate change). That’s why reduction in total energy and resource consumption will have to be the other main component of any plan, and because right now we have about 5 billion people whose consumption is expected to rise, this can only happen by reducing both consumption per capita and population
Interesting read. Another clue? When does weather become climate? That is, when have we seen enough of extreme and extraordinary to get the message?
The extreme floods in Cumbria.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4cae3af6-112d-11df-a6d6-00144feab49a.html
06Feb10
“For all their drama, the floods should not have come as much of a surprise. Twenty years ago, Britain’s first climate change predictions told us we should prepare for drier summers and wetter winters, with more intense rainfall and flooding the likely consequences.”
http://newsletters.environmentalhealthnews.org/t/35743/175/11511/0/
London Financial Times, United Kingdom.
1429: “Gilles … What the hell does migration from Europe have to do with forced migration due to climate change? I really have to wonder:
Are you really so obtuse that you think such things are relevant?”
There have been many large-scale human migrations due to disaster and political persecution that had significant impact on both the sending and receiving regions. If it weren’t for plant diseases and religious persecutions, my ancestors wouldn’t be here. Most of those events happened across time scales more abrupt than what is predicted for climate change. Catastrophes, economic conditions, and political upheavals have caused large local migrations even recently.
For more developed countries, is disruptive at both ends, but we adapt. Living in California, where we have lots of immigrants, I believe it is beneficial for the receiving country. Others believe otherwise. For developing countries, it is just another problem for which NGO’s and international aid become necessary. Sometimes it leads to horrible human suffering, as in Darfur, and requires international intervention.
You seemed to be making the point that we have never seen human migration on the scale of what some believe will occur due to climate change. I think history shows otherwise. Your exact words were “massive migrations that have occurred since humanity developed a complex, global civilization of 5-7 billion people.” Obviously not, since the world’s population reached 5 billion in the 1980’s (and the world’s borders were pretty much frozen during the Cold War). But proportionally, I think the migrations that occurred during the 19th and early 20th centuries were nearly equivalent in scope and proportion.
This seems to be another disagreement between those who believe that all aspects of climate change will be unparalleled disasters that will destroy civilization (therefore requiring urgent, immediate action), and those who believe that it is a slow-moving problem that we will largely have to adapt to.