Guest commentary from Ben Santer
Part 2 of a series discussing the recent Guardian articles
A recent story by Fred Pearce in the February 9th online edition of the Guardian (“Victory for openness as IPCC climate scientist opens up lab doors”) covers some of the more publicized aspects of the last 14 years of my scientific career. I am glad that Mr. Pearce’s account illuminates some of the non-scientific difficulties I have faced. However, his account also repeats unfounded allegations that I engaged in dubious professional conduct. In a number of instances, Mr Pearce provides links to these allegations, but does not provide a balanced account of the rebuttals to them. Nor does he give links to locations where these rebuttals can be found. I am taking this opportunity to correct Mr. Pearce’s omissions, to reply to the key allegations, and to supply links to more detailed responses.
Another concern relates to Mr. Pearce’s discussion of the “openness” issue mentioned in the title and sub-title of his story. A naïve reader of Mr. Pearce’s article might infer from the sub-title (“Ben Santer had a change of heart about data transparency…”) that my scientific research was not conducted in an open and transparent manner until I experienced “a change of heart”.
This inference would be completely incorrect. As I discuss below, my research into the nature and causes of climate change has always been performed in an open, transparent, and collegial manner. Virtually all of the scientific papers I have published over the course of my career involve multi-institutional teams of scientists with expertise in climate modeling, the development of observational datasets, and climate model evaluation. The model and observational data used in my research is not proprietary – it is freely available to researchers anywhere in the world.
The 1995 IPCC Report: The “scientific cleansing” allegation
Mr. Pearce begins by repeating some of the allegations of misconduct that arose after publication (in 1996) of the Second Assessment Report (SAR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These allegations targeted Chapter 8 of the SAR, which dealt with the “Detection of Climate Change, and Attribution of Causes”. The IPCC SAR reached the historic finding that “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. Information presented in Chapter 8 provided substantial support for this finding.
I served as the Convening Lead Author (CLA) of Chapter 8. There were three principal criticisms of my conduct as CLA. All three allegations are baseless. They have been refuted on many occasions, and in many different fora. All three allegations make an appearance in Mr. Pearce’s story, but there are no links to the detailed responses to these claims.
The first allegation was that I had engaged in “scientific cleansing”. This allegation originated with the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) – a group of businesses “opposing immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.
In May 1996, a document entitled “The IPCC: Institutionalized ‘Scientific Cleansing’?” was widely circulated to the press and politicians. In this document, the Global Climate Coalition claimed that after a key Plenary Meeting of the IPCC in Madrid in November 1995, all scientific uncertainties had been purged from Chapter 8. The GCC’s “scientific cleansing” allegation was soon repeated in an article in Energy Daily (May 22, 1996) and in an editorial in the Washington Times (May 24, 1996). It was also prominently featured in the World Climate Report, a publication edited by Professor Patrick J. Michaels (June 10, 1996).
This “scientific cleansing” claim is categorically untrue. There was no “scientific cleansing”. Roughly 20% of the published version of Chapter 8 specifically addressed uncertainties in scientific studies of the causes of climate change. In discussing the “scientific cleansing” issue, Mr. Pearce claims that many of the caveats in Chapter 8 “did not make it to the summary for policy-makers”. This is incorrect.
The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the IPCC SAR is four-and-a-half pages long. Roughly one page of the SPM discusses results from Chapter 8. The final paragraph of that page deals specifically with uncertainties, and notes that:
“Our ability to quantify the human influence on global climate is currently limited because the expected signal is still emerging from the noise of natural variability, and because there are uncertainties in key factors. These include the magnitude and patterns of long term natural variability and the time-evolving pattern of forcing by, and response to, changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and land surface changes”.
Contrary to Mr. Pearce’s assertion, important caveats did “make it to the summary for policy-makers”. And the “discernible human influence” conclusion of both Chapter 8 and the Summary for Policymakers has been substantiated by many subsequent national and international assessments of climate science.
There were several reasons why Chapter 8 was a target for unfounded “scientific cleansing” allegations. First, the Global Climate Coalitions’s “scientific cleansing” charges were released to the media in May 1996. At that time, Cambridge University Press had not yet published the IPCC Second Assessment Report in the United States. Because of this delay in the Report’s U.S. publication, many U.S. commentators on the “scientific cleansing” claims had not even read Chapter 8 – they only had access to the GCC’s skewed account of the changes made to Chapter 8. Had the Second Assessment Report been readily available in the U.S. in May 1996, it would have been easy for interested parties to verify that Chapter 8 incorporated a fair and balanced discussion of scientific uncertainties.
Second, the “pre-Madrid” version of Chapter 8 was the only chapter in the IPCC Working Group I Second Assessment Report to have both an “Executive Summary” and a “Concluding Summary”. As discussed in the next section, this anomaly was partly due to the fact that the Lead Author team for Chapter 8 was not finalized until April 1994 – months after all other chapters had started work. Because of this delay in getting out of the starting blocks, the Chapter 8 Lead Author team was more concerned with completing the initial drafts of our chapter than with the question of whether all chapters in the Working Group I Report had exactly the same structure.
The reply of the Chapter 8 Lead Authors to the Energy Daily story of May 22, 1996 pointed out this ‘two summary’ redundancy, and noted that:
“After receiving much criticism of this redundancy in October and November 1995, the Convening Lead Author of Chapter 8 decided to remove the concluding summary. About half of the information in the concluding summary was integrated with material in Section 8.6. It did not disappear completely, as the Global Climate Coalition has implied. The lengthy Executive Summary of Chapter 8 addresses the issue of uncertainties in great detail – as does the underlying Chapter itself.”
The removal of the concluding summary made it simple for the Global Climate Coalition to advance their unjustified “scientific cleansing” allegations. They could claim ‘This statement has been deleted’, without mentioning that the scientific issue addressed in the deleted statement was covered elsewhere in the chapter.
This was my first close encounter of the absurd kind.
The 1995 IPCC Report: The “political tampering/corruption of peer-review” allegation
The second allegation is that I was responsible for “political tampering”. I like to call this “the tail wags the dog” allegation. The “tail” here is the summary of the Chapter 8 results in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers, and the “dog” is the detailed underlying text of Chapter 8.
In November 1995, 177 government delegates from 96 countries spent three days in Madrid. Their job was to “approve” each word of the four-and-a-half page Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC’s Working Group I Report. This was the report that dealt with the physical science of climate change. The delegates also had the task of “accepting” the 11 underlying science chapters on which the Summary for Policymakers was based. “Acceptance” of the 11 chapters did not require government approval of each word in each chapter.
This was not a meeting of politicians only. A number of the government delegates were climate scientists. Twenty-eight of the Lead Authors of the IPCC Working Group I Report – myself included – were also prominent participants in Madrid. We were there to ensure that the politics did not get ahead of the science, and that the tail did not wag the dog.
Non-governmental organizations – such as the Global Climate Coalition – were also active participants in the Madrid meeting. NGOs had no say in the formal process of approving the Summary for Policymakers. They were, however, allowed to make comments on the SPM and the underlying 11 science chapters during the first day of the Plenary Meeting (November 27, 1996). The Global Climate Coalition dominated the initial plenary discussions.
Most of the plenary discussions at Madrid focused on the portrayal of Chapter 8’s findings in the Summary for Policymakers. Discussions were often difficult and contentious. We wrestled with the exact wording of the “balance of evidence” statement mentioned above. The delegations from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait argued for a very weak statement, or for no statement at all. Delegates from many other countries countered that there was strong scientific evidence of pronounced a human effect on climate, and that the bottom-line statement from Chapter 8 should reflect this.
Given the intense interest in Chapter 8, Sir John Houghton (one of the two Co-Chairs of IPCC Working Group I) established an ad hoc group on November 27, 1996. I was a member of this group. Our charge was to review those parts of the draft Summary for Policymakers that dealt with climate change detection and attribution issues. The group was placed under the Chairmanship of Dr. Martin Manning of New Zealand, and included delegates from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Kenya, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Sir John Houghton also invited delegates from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to participate in this ad hoc group. Unfortunately, they did not accept this invitation.
The ad hoc group considered more than just the portions of the Summary for Policymakers that were relevant to Chapter 8. The Dutch delegation asked for a detailed discussion of Chapter 8 itself, and of the full scientific evidence contained in it. This discussion took place on November 28, 1996.
On November 29, 1996, I reported back to the Plenary on the deliberations of the ad hoc group. The Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti delegations – who had not attended any of the discussions of the ad hoc group, and had no first-hand knowledge of what had been discussed by the group – continued to express serious reservations about the scientific basis for the detection and attribution statements in the Summary for Policymakers.
On the final evening of the Madrid Plenary Meeting, debate focused on finding the right word to describe the human effect on global climate. There was broad agreement among the government delegates that – based on the scientific evidence presented in Chapter 8 – some form of qualifying word was necessary. Was the human influence “measurable”? Could it be best described as “appreciable”, “detectable”, or “substantial”? Each of these suggested words had proponents and opponents. How would each word translate into different languages? Would the meaning be the same as in English?
After hours of often rancorous debate, Bert Bolin (who was then the Chairman of the IPCC) finally found the elusive solution. Professor Bolin suggested that the human effect on climate should be described as “discernible”.
Mr. Pearce – who was not present at the Madrid Plenary Meeting – argues that the discussion of human effects on climate in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers “went beyond what was said in the chapter from which the summary was supposedly drawn”. In other words, he suggests that the tail wagged the dog. This is not true. The “pre-Madrid” bottom-line statement from Chapter 8 was “Taken together, these results point towards a human influence on climate”. As I’ve noted above, the final statement agreed upon in Madrid was “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”.
Is “suggests” stronger than “points towards”? I doubt it. Is “The balance of evidence” a more confident phrase than “Taken together”? I don’t think so.
The primary difference between the pre- and post-Madrid statements is that the latter includes the word “discernible”. In my American Heritage College Dictionary, “discernible” is defined as “perceptible, as by vision or the intellect”. In Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, one of the three meanings of the verb “discern” is “to recognize or identify as separate and distinct”. Was the use of “discernible” justified?
The answer is clearly “yes”. Chapter 8 of the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report relied heavily on the evidence from a number of different “fingerprint” studies. This type of research uses rigorous statistical methods to compare observed patterns of climate change with results from climate model simulations. The basic concept of fingerprinting is that each different influence on climate – such as purely natural changes in the Sun’s energy output, or human-caused changes in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases – has a unique signature in climate records. This uniqueness becomes more apparent if one looks beyond changes averaged over the entire globe, and instead exploits the much greater information content available in complex, time-varying patterns of climate change.
Fingerprinting has proved to be an invaluable tool for untangling the complex cause-and-effect relationships in the climate system. The IPCC’s Second Assessment Report in 1995 was able to draw on fingerprint studies from a half-dozen different research groups. Each of these groups had independently shown that they could indeed perceive a fingerprint of human influence in observed temperature records. The signal was beginning to rise out of the noise, and was (using Merriam-Webster’s definition of “discern”) “separate and distinct” from purely natural variations in climate.
Based on these fingerprint results, and based on the other scientific evidence available to us in November 1995, use of the word “discernible” was entirely justified. Its use is certainly justified based on the scientific information available to us in 2010. The “discernible human influence” phrase was approved by all of the 177 delegates from 96 countries present at the Plenary Meeting – even by the Saudi and Kuwaiti delegations. None of the 28 IPCC Lead Authors in attendance at Madrid balked at this phrase, or questioned our finding that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. The latter statement was cautious and responsible, and entirely consistent with the state of the science. The much more difficult job of trying to quantify the size of human influences on climate would be left to subsequent IPCC assessments.
Mr. Pearce’s remarks suggest that there is some substance to the “political tampering” allegation – that I was somehow coerced to change Chapter 8 in order to “reflect the wording of the political summary”. This is untrue. There was no political distortion of the science. If Mr. Pearce had been present at the Madrid Plenary Meeting, he would have seen how vigorously (and successfully) scientists resisted efforts on the part of a small number of delegates to skew and spin some of the information in the Summary for Policymakers.
The key point here is that the SPM was not a “political summary” – it was an accurate reflection of the science. Had it been otherwise, I would not have agreed to put my name on the Report.
A reader of Mr. Pearce’s article might also gain the mistaken impression that the changes to Chapter 8 were only made in response to comments made by government delegates during the Madrid Plenary Meeting. That is not true. As I’ve mentioned above, changes were also made to address government comments made during the meeting of the ad hoc group formed to discuss Chapter 8.
Furthermore, when I first arrived in Madrid on November 26, 1995, I was handed a stack of government and NGO comments on Chapter 8 that I had not seen previously. I had the responsibility of responding to these comments.
One reason for the delay in receiving comments was that the IPCC had encountered difficulties in finding a Convening Lead Author (CLA) for Chapter 8. To my knowledge, the CLA job had been turned down by at least two other scientists before I received the job offer. The unfortunate consequence of this delay was that, at the time of the Madrid Plenary Meeting, Chapter 8 was less mature and polished than other chapters of the IPCC Working Group I Report. Hence the belated review comments.
The bottom line in this story is that the post-Madrid revisions to Chapter 8 were made for scientific, not political reasons. They were made by me, not by IPCC officials. The changes were in full accord with IPCC rules and procedures (pdf). Mr. Pearce repeats accusations by Fred Seitz that the changes to Chapter 8 were illegal and unauthorized, and that I was guilty of “corruption of the peer-review process”. These allegations are false, as the IPCC has clearly pointed out.
The 1995 IPCC Report: The “research irregularities” allegation
The third major front in the attack on Chapter 8 focused on my personal research. It was a two-pronged attack. First, Professor S. Fred Singer claimed that the IPCC’s “discernible human influence” conclusion was entirely based on two of my own (multi-authored) research papers. Next, Professor Patrick Michaels argued that one of these two papers was seriously flawed, and that irregularities had occurred in the paper’s publication process. Both charges were untrue.
On July 25, 1996, I addressed the first of these allegations in an email to the Lead Authors of the 1995 IPCC Report:
“Chapter 8 references more than 130 scientific papers – not just two. Its bottom-line conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate” is not solely based on the two Santer et al. papers that Singer alludes to. This conclusion derives from many other published studies on the comparison of modelled and observed patterns of temperature change – for example, papers by Karoly et al. (1994), Mitchell et al. (1995), Hegerl et al. (1995), Karl et al. (1995), Hasselmann et al. (1995), Hansen et al. (1995) and Ramaswamy et al. (1996). It is supported by many studies of global-mean temperature changes, by our physical understanding of the climate system, by our knowledge of human-induced changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, by information from paleoclimatic studies, and by a wide range of supporting information (sea-level rise, retreat of glaciers, etc.). To allege, as Singer does, that “Chapter 8 is mainly based on two research papers” is just plain wrong”.
In the second prong of the attack, Professor Michaels claimed that a paper my colleagues and I had published in Nature in 1996 had been selective in its use of observational data, and that our finding of a human fingerprint in atmospheric temperature data was not valid if a longer observational record was used. Further, he argued that Nature had been “toyed with” (presumably by me), and coerced into publishing the 1996 Santer et al. Nature paper one week prior to a key United Nations meeting in Geneva.
My colleagues and I immediately addressed the scientific criticism of our Nature paper by Michaels and his colleague Chip Knappenberger. We demonstrated that this criticism was simply wrong. Use of a longer record of atmospheric temperature change strengthened rather than weakened the evidence for a human fingerprint. We published this work in Nature in December 1996. Unfortunately, Mr. Pearce does not provide a link to this publication.
Since 1996, studies by a number of scientists around the world have substantiated the findings of our 1996 Nature paper. Such work has consistently shown clear evidence of a human fingerprint in atmospheric temperature records.
Disappointingly, Professor Michaels persists in repeating his criticism of our paper, without mentioning our published rebuttal or the large body of subsequently published evidence refuting his claims. Michaels’ charge that Nature had been “toyed with” was complete nonsense. As described below, however, this was not the last time I would be falsely accused of having the extraordinary power to force scientific journals to do my bidding.
A Climatology Conspiracy? More “peer-review abuse” accusations
Mr. Pearce also investigates a more recent issue. He implies that I abused the normal peer-review system, and exerted pressure on the editor of the International Journal of Climatology to delay publication of the print version of a paper by Professor David Douglass and colleagues. This is not true.
The Douglass et al. paper was published in December 2007 in the online edition of the International Journal of Climatology. The “et al.” included the same Professor S. Fred Singer who had previously accused me of “scientific cleansing”. It also included Professor John Christy, the primary developer of a satellite-based temperature record which suggests that there has been minimal warming of Earth’s lower atmosphere since 1979. Three alternate versions of the satellite temperature record, produced by different teams of researchers using the same raw satellite measurements, all indicate substantially more warming of the Earth’s atmosphere.
The focus of the Douglass et al. paper was on post-1979 temperature changes in the tropics. The authors devised what they called a “robust statistical test” to compare computer model results with observations. The test was seriously flawed (see Appendix A in Open Letter to the Climate Science Community: Response to A “Climatology Conspiracy?”). When it was applied to the model and observational temperature datasets, the test showed (quite incorrectly) that the model results were significantly different from observations.
As I have noted elsewhere, the Douglass et al. paper immediately attracted considerable media and political attention. One of the paper’s authors claimed that it represented an “inconvenient truth”, and proved that “Nature, not humans, rules the climate”. These statements were absurd. No single study can overturn the very large body of scientific evidence supporting “discernible human influence” findings. Nor does any individual study provide the sole underpinning for the conclusion that human activities are influencing global climate.
Given the extraordinary claims that were being made on the basis of this incorrect paper, my colleagues and I decided that a response was necessary. Although the errors in Douglass et al. were easy to identify, it required a substantial amount of new and original work to repeat the statistical analysis properly.
Our work went far beyond what Douglass et al. had done. We looked at the sensitivity of model-versus-data comparisons to the choice of statistical test, to the test assumptions, to the number of years of record used in the tests, and to errors in the computer model estimates of year-to-year temperature variability. We also examined how the statistical test devised by Douglass et al. performed under controlled conditions, using random data with known statistical properties. From their paper, there is no evidence that Douglass et al. considered any of these important issues before making their highly-publicized claims.
Our analysis clearly showed that tropical temperature changes in observations and climate model simulations were not fundamentally inconsistent – contrary to the claim of Douglass and colleagues. Our research was published on October 10, 2008, in the online edition of the International Journal of Climatology. On November 15, 2008, the Douglass et al. and Santer et al. papers appeared in the same print version of the International Journal of Climatology.
In December 2009, shortly after the public release of the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Professors David Douglass and John Christy accused me of leading a conspiracy to delay publication of the print version of the Douglass et al. paper. This accusation was based on a selective analysis of the stolen emails. It is false.
In Mr. Pearce’s account of this issue, he states that “There is no doubt the (sic) Santer and his colleagues sought to use the power they held to the utmost…” So what are the facts of this matter? What is the “power” Fred Pearce is referring to?
- Fact 1: The only “power” that I had was the power to choose which scientific journal to submit our paper to. I chose the International Journal of Climatology. I did this because the International Journal of Climatology had published (in their online edition) the seriously flawed Douglass et al. paper. I wanted to give the journal the opportunity to set the scientific record straight.
- Fact 2: I had never previously submitted a paper to the International Journal of Climatology. I had never met the editor of the journal (Professor Glenn McGregor). I did not have any correspondence or professional interaction with the editor prior to 2008.
- Fact 3: Prior to submitting our paper, I wrote an email to Dr. Tim Osborn on January 10, 2008. Tim Osborn was on the editorial board of the International Journal of Climatology. I told Dr. Osborn that, before deciding whether we would submit our paper to the International Journal of Climatology, I wanted to have some assurance that our paper would “be regarded as an independent contribution, not as a comment on Douglass et al.” This request was entirely reasonable in view of the substantial amount of new work that we had done. I have described this new work above.
- Fact 4: I did not want to submit our paper to the International Journal of Climatology if there was a possibility that our submission would be regarded as a mere “comment” on Douglass et al. Under this scenario, Douglass et al. would have received the last word. Given the extraordinary claims they had made, I thought it unlikely that their “last word” would have acknowledged the serious statistical error in their original paper. As subsequent events showed, I was right to be concerned – they have not admitted any error in their work.
- Fact 5: As I clearly stated in my email of January 10 to Dr. Tim Osborn, if the International Journal of Climatology agreed to classify our paper as an independent contribution, “Douglass et al. should have the opportunity to respond to our contribution, and we should be given the chance to reply. Any response and reply should be published side-by-side…”
- Fact 6: The decision to hold back the print version of the Douglass et al. paper was not mine. It was the editor’s decision. I had no “power” over the publishing decisions of the International Journal of Climatology.
This whole episode should be filed under the category “No good deed goes unpunished”. My colleagues and I were simply trying to set the scientific record straight. There was no conspiracy to subvert the peer-review process. Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are easy to disseminate. Many are willing to accept these theories at face value. The distribution of facts on complex scientific issues is a slower, more difficult process.
Climate Auditing – Close Encounters with Mr. Steven McIntyre
Ten days after the online publication of our International Journal of Climatology paper, Mr. Steven McIntyre, who runs the “ClimateAudit” blog, requested all of the climate model data we had used in our research. I replied that Mr. McIntyre was welcome to “audit” our calculations, and that all of the primary model data we had employed were archived at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and freely available to any researcher. Over 3,400 scientists around the world currently analyze climate model output from this open database.
My response was insufficient for Mr. McIntyre. He submitted two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for climate model data – not for the freely available raw data, but for the results from intermediate calculations I had performed with the raw data. One FOIA request also asked for two years of my email correspondence related to these climate model data sets.
I had performed these intermediate calculations in order derive weighted-average temperature changes for different layers of the atmosphere. This is standard practice. It is necessary since model temperature data are available at specific heights in the atmosphere, whereas satellite temperature measurements represent an average over a deep layer of the atmosphere. The weighted averages calculated from the climate model data can be directly compared with actual satellite data. The method used for making such intermediate calculations is not a secret. It is published in several different scientific journals.
Unlike Mr. McIntyre, David Douglass and his colleagues (in their International Journal of Climatology paper) had used the freely available raw model data. With these raw datasets, Douglass et al. made intermediate calculations similar to the calculations we had performed. The results of their intermediate calculations were similar to our own intermediate results. The differences between what Douglass and colleagues had done and what my colleagues and I had done was not in the intermediate calculations – it was in the statistical tests each group had used to compare climate models with observations.
The punch-line of this story is that Mr. McIntyre’s Freedom of Information Act requests were completely unnecessary. In my opinion, they were frivolous. Mr. McIntyre already had access to all of the information necessary to check our calculations and our findings.
When I invited Mr. McIntyre to “audit” our entire study, including the intermediate calculations, and told him that all the data necessary to perform such an “audit” were freely available, he expressed moral outrage on his blog. I began to receive threatening emails. Complaints about my “stonewalling” behavior were sent to my superiors at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and at the U.S. Department of Energy.
A little over a month after receiving Mr. McIntyre’s Freedom of Information Act requests, I decided to release all of the intermediate calculations I had performed for our International Journal of Climatology paper. I made these datasets available to the entire scientific community. I did this because I wanted to continue with my scientific research. I did not want to spend all of my available time and energy responding to harassment incited by Mr. McIntyre’s blog.
Mr. Pearce does not mention that Mr. McIntyre had no need to file Freedom of Information Act requests, since Mr. McIntyre already had access to all of the raw climate model data we had used in our study (and to the methods we had used for performing intermediate calculations). Nor does Mr. Pearce mention the curious asymmetry in Mr. McIntyre’s “auditing”. To my knowledge, Mr. McIntyre – who purports to have considerable statistical expertise – has failed to “audit” the Douglass et al. paper, which contained serious statistical errors.
As the “Climategate” emails clearly show, there is a pattern of behavior here. My encounter with Mr. McIntyre’s use of FOIA requests for “audit” purposes is not an isolated event. In my opinion, Mr. McIntyre’s FOIA requests serve the purpose of initiating fishing expeditions, and are not being used for true scientific discovery.
Mr. McIntyre’s own words do not present a picture of a man engaged in purely dispassionate and objective scientific inquiry:
“But if Santer wants to try this kind of stunt, as I’ve said above, I’ve submitted FOI requests and we’ll see what they turn up. We’ll see what the journal policies require. I’ll also see what DOE and PCDMI administrators have to say. We’ll see if any of Santer’s buddies are obligated to produce the data. We’ll see if Santer ever sent any of the data to his buddies”
(Steven McIntyre; posting on his ClimateAudit blog; Nov. 21, 2008).
My research is subject to rigorous scrutiny. Mr. McIntyre’s blogging is not. He can issue FOIA requests at will. He is the master of his domain – the supreme, unchallenged ruler of the “ClimateAudit” universe. He is not a climate scientist, but he has the power to single-handedly destroy the reputations of exceptional men and women who have devoted their entire careers to the pursuit of climate science. Mr. McIntyre’s unchecked, extraordinary power is the real story of “Climategate”. I hope that someone has the courage to tell this story.
Benjamin D. Santer
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow
San Ramon, California
February 22, 2010*
*These remarks reflect the personal opinions of Benjamin D. Santer. They do not reflect the official views of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or the U.S. Department of Energy. In preparing this document, I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Tom Wigley, Myles Allen, Kristin Aydt, Graham Cogley, Peter Gleckler, Leo Haimberger, Gabi Hegerl, John Lanzante, Mike MacCracken, Gavin Schmidt, Steve Sherwood, Susan Solomon, Karl Taylor, Simon Tett, and Peter Thorne.
John Peter@547 – Rebuttals already available at Skeptical Science, and on your Iphone no less, as discussed in the earlier post
Re #542
As pointed out by Raypierre, its the short wave heating from above which enables extra gh gas to produce cooling:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/01/the-carbon-dioxide-theory-of-gilbert-plass/comment-page-2/#comment-153414
[It is less long winded in equation form, but it survived the ‘peer review’ offered by RC’s other commentators]
> 455, 549, “World Climate Report”
That points to a misleading source, at best.
Watch 511 for an update from Jim.
See also 487, 505, and 518
Perhaps Avatars point is being missed or maybe the point of RC is being missed (perhaps RC doesn’t feel it’s their job to sell the message of AGW. It is easy for this website to forfeit any authority whenever they wish. Avatar correctly points out that this is a marketing campaign. Right now my evaluation is that the campaign is being lost by the AGW side. You may have the best, most revolutionary product on the market, but if you can’t sell it it’s worthless (happens all the time). Do not bemoan this fact of life, but use it to your advantage if you hope to win.
Do not cling to the hope that people will eventually figure out how radiative heat transfer operates or how historical temperature records are constructed.
As I see it, your salesman right now on the world stage is Al Gore. He is losing the battle tremendously and causing great harm to your message (at least from my perspective.
Dissect your audience and you may earn some respect from them. Until then, no one sympathetic to your plight wants to hear the whining. Fight fire with fire.
“Those that[sic] live in glass houses should not be throwing stones!”
Mine is made of Lexan.
> 542
better info on stratospheric cooling:
http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2009/08/e-pur-si-scalda.html?showComment=1250485939966#c5022610716385114537
and various posts before and after that one.
Take this stuff with a reminder that anything _I_ write here is bound to be way oversimplified; I’m trying for simple language that doesn’t go too far wrong, always. To paraphrase myself, any explanation of radiation physics without the mathematics is poetry, at best.
Septic Matthew (469)
It’s an American tradition to try to sell a model’s future predictions by back-testing. This helps to get action now (buy this stock) rather than wait for the future.
As far as I can tell, 5 to 10 years ago climate scientists shifted away from heavy dependence on models to building more and more of their case on physical/chemical science, an enormously difficult task because of the many interactions, scarity of lab like data and, in some cases incomplete physical/chemical science.
Even should they now have a strong purely physical/chemical science case for AGW, not requiring models, there is the problem of explaining to the public.
In a recent interview of Michael Mann, the interviewer asked:
“So what type of climate patterns are there, in your team’s model of the past, that also
appear in the more recent climate record where there is temperature data, not proxy data?”
Mann then described El Niño, La Niña and the so-called North Atlantic Oscillation, or Arctic Oscillation.
The interviewer then asked “What aspects then, more precisely, of your team’s model of the past may help in
predicting current climate change?”
Mann answered “Well, there are really two very interesting observations in the reconstructed patterns that we were actually able to test against climate model predictions. And so, we took those same periods – that Medieval Climate Anomaly period and the Little Ice Age period – …and we ran two different climate models… (NCAR coupled), (NASA GISS) …and what we observed was …counter-intuitively…Medieval temperature patterns look more like the (cold) La Niña phenomenon…and (LIA) patterns look more like (warm) El Niño state…”
Interviewer asked “So is it your team’s intention, then, to try to get your model(s NCAR/NASA in IPCC) included in the next assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC?”
Mann “Yeah, exactly. So the – yeah, I think that it’s useful, and in the next IPCC assessment, it
may very well be the case that there will be a new section that deals with the question of how paleoclimate data can inform our understanding of some of these fairly complex, dynamical responses of the climate. So, while I don’t see our results as being made explicitly part of an IPCC projection, I do see them as potentially informing our assessment of the extent to which we think the current generation models are, or are not, capturing some of the regional mechanisms that may be important in making regional
climate change assessments.”
The interview can be found at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/data/326/5957/1287-b/DC1/1
It seems to me that the MSM and, by extension, John Q. Public want there to be back-tested models. We need to fix this if we want their trust.
Hank (542), you said, “…The CO2 in the stratosphere still does emit heat to space.” Do you actually mean emits proportionally less to space?
549 John Peter:
Here’s the pdf of the actual article:
http://water.washington.edu/research/Articles/2008.global.continental.drought.pdf
Here are some followup articles by Jim Bouldin and flxible. I’ve just started reading them, but so far I’ve been able to find each one by just Googling it. Thanks; this is one of the things I really like about this blog.
From Jim Bouldin:
[ Here’s a few–there are others as well. The Pierce etal and Bonfils etal papers are the two with the strongest attribution base.–Jim
Western USA/N. Am.:
Regonda et al, 2005, J Climate.
Andreadis et al, 2005, J Hydrometeor.
Pierce et al, 2008, J Climate.
Bonfils etal, 2008, J. Climate
Mountains: Stewart, 2009, Hydrol. Process.
CA:
Howat and Tulaczyk, 2005, J Geophys. Res.
Howat and Tulaczyk, 2005, Annals Glaciology.
From flexible:
Human-Induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States, 2008
Detection and Attribution of Temperature Changes in the Mountainous Western United States, 2008
Detection and Attribution of Streamflow Timing Changes to Climate Change in the Western United States, 2009
Structure and Detectability of Trends in Hydrological Measures over the western United States, 2010
fixible (551)
Thanks, it’s a good start, but not enough for a letter IMO. I was hoping for more of an RC bullet proof approach from Gavin.
Organizations like e.g. “Hands-On” have tried common emails. This requires coordination. I’m suggesting that, instead of or in addition to griping about a specific MSM piece you write a letter to that MSM’s reporter or editor.
479, Barton Paul Levenson, thanks for the link.
Others studies of the models that I have read produced poor approximations to the data records.
Rod, I don’t know what you mean “proportionally” — what to what?
I tell ya what we need is someone competent with Javascript to take this image
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/10.1175_2008BAMS2634.1.pdf
and give us one of those lovely slider thingies like the one here
http://hot-topic.co.nz/keep-out-of-the-kitchen/ and page down a ways
The Kiehl picture could be animated to show how as greenhouse gases change, the radiation transfer numbers change (the width of the arrows could change accordingly)
Point is, as CO2 increases throughout the atmosphere, the incoming solar energy (mostly visible) stays the same, and goes right on through (minus and plus what clouds, sea ice, and new open ocean do of course) –while the outgoing heat (infrared) is rearranged for a while, til the planet heats up to a new equilibrium temperature.
Any takers wanta animate that? Or has it already been done with Modtran data somewhere, which I think would be the right source to look into?
John Peter:
As far as I can tell, you’re a liar.
The physical/chemical science goes back to Tyndall, and was nailed 50-60 years ago before the first climate models were built.
If this were true, the strongest so-called scientific argument against AGW wouldn’t be UNKNOWN EFFECTS OF GALACTIC COSMIC RAYS>
Think about this, a bit. And then more.
By your thinking, the physical science essentially doesn’t exist. By skeptical science thinking, the case is so strong that they’re reduced to insisting on sky fairies (GCRs).
Think hard. And then more.
And, of course, there have been. Climate models are used in paleoclimatology all the time.
Re: 539
Hey Moderator (Jim):
You said: “Get your facts straight before basing a false conclusion on a suggestion of fraud. The last 1000 years does not constitute the Holocene, and moreover, many reconstructions now exist that show this same pattern of 20th century uniqueness, as anyone looking at the topic with the intent to understand knows”
Glad to see I ruffled your feathers! You said ‘fraud’, not me!
[edit]
[Response: Thanks for telling us what your aim is in posting here. As for the rest of your post, don’t waste our time with word games. When you want to ask genuine questions without impugning motives, come back.–Jim]
Hank:The increased CO2 in the stratosphere isn’t getting as much heat from below, because it’s “shaded” by the extra CO2 below it.
Jerry ;”the combination of reduced energy input from below…”
Ok, may be I got it wrong, so you’re saying that the cooling of stratosphere is just a transient phenomenon during the warming of the Earth and will stop when a new equilibrium temperature is reached, even if the concentration of CO2 in the stratosphere has eventually increased (because then I understand that the input solar power will be exactly balanced by the output power ) ? Anyway, even if it’s right, it means that it is controlled by the fact that the heat content of the Earth is increasing – but natural cycles can do that anyway, like during El Nina events.
Ray “Gilles, OK, so you are willing to admit that CO2 cools the stratosphere, but not that it causes warming in the troposphere?”
I never said that CO2 does not warm the troposphere. I said that I think that the combination of climate sensitivity, available resources, and human sensitivity to climate (which is actually relatively low…) doesn’t converge towards a catastrophe climatic scenario , and that the overall effects of warming are very likely to be much less severe that the disappearance of fossil fuels. Please first read what I am saying before discussing it .
In response to various comments claiming recent unusual drought in Australia; Here are three stanzas from Dorothea McKellar’s poem of 1904
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die –
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.
Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.
Then see an old sepia photo of horse-drawn SUV’s on the dry bed of the Murray River and a centennial history.
[photo]During the Federation drought it stopped flowing for about 6 months
http://home.iprimus.com.au/foo7/droughthistory.html
“554
Sean says:
28 February 2010 at 8:36 PM
Avatar correctly points out that this is a marketing campaign.”
So if the marketing campaign says that gravity doesn’t exist, we all fly off into space???
“547
John Peter says:
28 February 2010 at 7:25 PM
Gavin (454)
Another crazy idea. Why not have on RC a simple and bullet-proof single paragraph rebuttal.”
Because it’s already done here and in other places.
But those who do not wish to learn won’t read it (how many pepople have complained about a lack of, say, hindcasting to verify models, when the IPCC report says that they do this?) and if someone dares to take that single paragraph as proving AGW, these same people who don’t want to learn will say “they’re ignoring X, Y and Z and it’s not proof anyway, show where that heating is due to CO2, heh?”. Leaving us nowhere.
Or else you explain why the simple paragraph answer doesn’t work.
“526
David Harington says:
28 February 2010 at 3:57 PM
There will be no libel or defamation writs issued in the UK or anywhere else. Why? Because the truth is the nuclear defence to any claim of defamation or libel”
Wrong.
If it is deemed to be a truth exposed to damage, it is in the UK still defamation.
Think on Blackmail: if it were not the truth, then there would be no leverage. Yet this truth is illegal: blackmail is a crime.
Journalism, old-school journalism, is in delcine, along with the primacy of the written word. This is part of a larger story, part of cultural shift in our civilization that’s really quite dangerous, for reasons too numerous to go into here.
Increasingly journalism and the presentation of “news” is coming to resemble advertizing, or if you like, propaganda, carefully disguised as “objectivity.”
Facts and truth, the rational element, don’t matter very much anymore, not even in the so-called quality newspapers, why?
Because “rationality” is a direct threat to the fairytale, or myth, or the leading ideological narratives, our corporate state is built on.
The primary myth is the following, the myth all the others are built on; that it’s possible to have unlimited, infinite growth, on a limited, finite, planet.
In essence the entire debate about “climate change” pushes this dogma, of unlimited growth, into the centre of discourse, and this is itself, is highly controlversial and questions the basic, fundamental assumptions which our modern society is based on.
Obviously, such a discussion, cannot be anything but highly political, as we are dealing with the distribution of wealth and power, and consumption, in global, corporate/capitalist society.
Clearly, anything that dares to question the basic assumptions, ideology, and dogmas, of “capitalism” isn’t exactly going to be greeted with open arms and smiles by our ruling elite who profit so disproportionally from business as usual, and this is why these fundamental questions are increasingly sidelined, deflected, and sabotaged by powerful interests determined to defend their way of life, even at the expense of the rest of us.
To single out and blame CO2 as a major driver in this AGW process is only an educated guess based on the evidence I have seen, because the limitations of other drivers are so poorly understood in particular the effects of solar irradiation. To build a whole political castle in the sky based on alleged CO2 pollution is irresponsible and asking for trouble.
Comment by Bob Close — 26 February 2010 @ 12:13 AM
Anyone else less than impressed by the Denialist claiming not to be a Denialist shtick? It ain’t CO2? What an obvious “tell.”
Cheers
512 Barton Paul Levenson: “BPL: PDSI < 3.0: 12% of Earth's land surface 1970. 30% 2002."
WOW! I think you said that before, but it didn't sink in because you also mentioned the really scary number for later this century.
========================
537 Gilles: I'm glad to find out what was really bugging you. Since you are worried about the end of fossil fuels: We need energy, not fossil fuels. Why not learn to get along without fossil fuels before they run out? Then fossil fuels will no longer matter to you. There is plenty of energy available that does not come from fossil fuels. We can be just as rich or richer without fossil fuels. We used fossil fuels in the beginning of the industrial revolution because that was the limit of our knowledge and technology. We now have much greater knowledge and technology. We can avoid the collapse of civilization caused by energy shortage, by switching to non-fossil energy now. We can get far more energy from non-fossil sources and be even richer than we are now.
How much food is grown in Saudi Arabia? Saudi Arabia is a desert. Saudi Arabia Imports food. What happens when the places that grow the food become deserts?
So Gilles is going to wait until there is no food in the grocery store before acting on global warming. Once there is no food in the grocery store, guess what? No matter how much money you have, you will not be able to get food. Oh yes, you can buy an airplane and fly to Antarctica. You will arrive just in time to see somebody else eat the very last bite of the very last penguin. That is when Gilles will understand what we are saying.
[Woops! Nobody will be interested in money if there is no food. In a typical civilization collapse, when there is no lunch, people just drop their tools wherever they are and wander off looking for food. Who needs a job when there is no food?]
Gilles; we CAN avoid both the energy problem and the famine problem. We CAN prevent the collapse of civilization. We have to start now. There is no reason to allow civilization to collapse. The solution to the warming problem is also the solution to the energy problem: Switch to non-fossil energy sources. This switch will also create jobs and grow the economy, creating new wealth. If you own a coal mine, now is the time to sell it.
PS: I am now reading "The End of Energy Obesity" by Peter Tertzakian. He says we will soon be telepresence-commuting rather than commuting in cars.
529 Dave G
It does not depend on anything other than the accusation being made being demonstrably false.
If you felt that your reputation had been unjustly inpuned then you have a recourse in law to sue for defamation of character, if you are convinced that such defamation was unjustified, untrue and caused you actual reputational damage, and you could prove this on the balance of probabilities, then you would take action.
[edit]
[Response: Only if you had unlimited access to a large legal fund, some confidence that legal proceedings would not make the situation worse, and an appetite for endless and time-consuming dealings with lawyers. Assuming that something is not defamatory purely because there is no suit is false logic (particularly in the US, where to win a case you need to prove that things were said maliciously if you are a ‘limited public figure’ – it is not enough simply for them to be false). – gavin]
@BobFJ – your post and tag suggests a person of sentiment (I used to ride in an old holden as well, when it was new!).
Undoubtedly the Murray would be dry now if not for the dams built since the days of the horse drawn carriages – and those dams have got pretty low recently, with the Hume Dam down as low as 4% just last year.
An old favourite poem doesn’t mean squat against actual measures. Australia is indeed the second driest continent on earth after the Antarctic. But in this second driest continent, although the Federation drought was widespread and lasted seven years, the drought just passed is the longest on record lasting 12 years in many parts of the country.
The temps across south eastern Australia last year were the highest on record. The heatwave in November just this past summer in south eastern Australia was also a record, with the MONTHLY MEAN MAXIMUM for Melbourne 27.1C, a whopping 6.7C above the 1961 to 1990 November average of 21.8 (that’s 12.1 degrees Fahrenheit for those in the USA). And that’s not a misprint – it’s for the whole month, not just a single day. And it’s compared to a recent 30 year average – not temps of a century ago.
If you visit the BOM website, it’s hard to argue that here in Australia it’s not a tad warmer than it used to be.
BPL: Do you know how to multiply?
Fraction of Earth’s land surface “severely dry” by Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI < 3.0) in 1970: 12%.
In 2002: 30%
Gilles: strange : the food production per capita has increased by more than 20 % in the same period, with a doubling population. Any explanation ?
BPL: Yeah. Fertilizer. You could have looked this up yourself.
The question was whether drought had increased worldwide. Don Shor said flatly that it hadn't. I gave confirming evidence that it had.
Stop moving the goalposts.
I was sufficiently surprised at Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen’s #107 to email her to ask if it was for real, or posted by an impostor. No reply yet.
Even for Energy and Environment, the posted attitudes border on the surreal, and are more conspiracy-theoretic than scientific or even social science.
I think it’s worth repeating again: science is not a matter of opinion. A theory stands or falls by evidence. A better theory explains the evidence better. Vaudeville acts, unsubstantiated accusations of fraud, stealing emails and arguments constructed out of erroneous data or invalid data analysis techniques do not qualify.
Meanwhile I’m still soliciting signatures for my pro-science petition.
Sean,
You know, there’s a bitter irony in denialists using high-tech to broadcast their distrust of science. Sean, there are very good reasons why the message of anthropogenic global warming is hard to sell. First, it is telling people something they don’t want to hear. Second, the most severe consequences are decades away, and humans have trouble considering risk unless it is imminent. Third, the very reason we cannot ignore this risk is that its consequences are daunting–even the destruction of human civilization cannot be ruled out. When confronted with such severe, even mortal consequences, humans tend to simply shut down rational thought and construct narratives that make the fear go away. Think of how a smoker reacts to the prospect of lung cancer.
There are good evolutionary reasons for all of these responses. They allowed humans to devote their concentration to risks (e.g. large carnivores) that could kill them NOW, rather than the prospect of dying of hunger during the next winter. Unfortunately, now that large carnivores are no longer the major threat we face, these vestigial tendencies are maladaptive and in themselves pose a serious threat to our longterm survival.
Science is a tool for cutting through our tendency toward self delusion. It can help us realize which risks we are under-emphasizing (e.g. smoking and climate change) and those we are over-emphasizing (e.g. terrorism). The problem is that for science to do this, we need to pay attention when it delivers bad news. Now, one would think that science had proved its mettle, having utterly revolutionized the way we live for the better in 400 short years. Your post and others make it clear that not everyone realizes that worth.
Science is about finding as close an approximation to truth as humans can muster. Realclimate is about sharing that process with a lay readership. It is about education, not salesmanship, and the distinction is important. The salesman tries to appeal to the unconscious mind to get people to act in the interests of the salesman–and sometimes counter to their interests. The educator tries to bring the approximation of truth supplied by science into the rational mind so that the individual can make conscious informed decisions. Compare what you find here on RC to any other resource on climate, and you will find the ratio of information to advocacy is astoundingly high. (After all, you are here, aren’t you?) If humans are not smart enough to tell the difference betwee such education and a salesjob, then I don’t hold out a lot of hope for the long-term future of our species.
Yeah, BobFJ, we know: Oz is dry. And it’s getting drier–that’s what you get from statistics that you don’t get from poetry or photos. Try it sometime.
Further on McIntyre and demanding that intermediate calculations be made public, in fields of science with vast amounts of data, that is not a reasonable request. As long as the calculation methodology is known and the source data is available, anyone with competence in the field can and should redo the calculations, a valuable check on whether there was any error in the original processing. The substance of McIntyre’s complaint appears to be that he was not interested in that original processing but in the data analysis method on the intermediate results. However, the effort for him to do the intermediate work would probably have been less than all the fuss, FOI requests, etc. that essentially amounted to avoiding doing what any normal scientist would have done: redo the basic calculations himself.
A good trick to try: use Google Scholar to check out as many published papers as you can and see how many have comprehensive published data sets (look for supplementary material). Many do not, because they do work derived from published data, using reproducible methods. Imagine now the bottleneck in scientific productivity if everyone wanting to do follow-up work badgered an author for their intermediate results. McIntyre is not being reasonable. The only defence against his tactic is if everyone in climate science publishes their intermediate results, which is not a good thing for science, because the incentive to check by recreating them from scratch goes away.
BPL: “Fraction of Earth’s land surface “severely dry” by Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI < 3.0) in 1970: 12%.
In 2002: 30%”
strange : the food production per capita has increased by more than 20 % in the same period, with a doubling population. Any explanation ? – Gilles
More irrigation, more use of (fossil fuel based) fertilizers, more effective pesticides, new crop varieties, better storage and transportation facilities, bringing more land into cultivation. Did you really think agricultural technology had stood still since 1970? You are right that some of these gains will be threatened by rising oil prices, among other factors (e.g. shortage of phosphates, soil erosion, failing ground-water reserves), in the coming decades. Makes sense to find alternatives to fossil fuel use as fast as possible, and avoid a shift to high-fossil-fuel-input agriculture where it doesn’t already exist, doesn’t it? Moreover, prominent among the other factors is anthropogenic climate change: while this is likely to increase yields at high latitudes up to about a 2-3 degree rise, the opposite is projected for lower latitudes, where the ability to import food will be limited by financial constraints for many countries.
Most media institutions in the U.S. and Britain are owned by groups or individuals with large interests in the status quo as far as fossil fuels are concerned.
This goes well beyond left-right ideology, which fossil fuel companies view as irrelevant to their bottom line, by and large. Some have reluctantly backed cap-and-trade, seeing it for what it is – a shell game designed to fool the public into believing actions is being taken – but others have declined and are pursuing the same “Global Climate Coalition” agenda as before. Others are using “clean coal” and “carbon capture” PR as the basis of their efforts to expand heavy oil production. All recognize that taking action on global warming will wipe out their profitability, however – unless they get out of the fossil fuel business.
The Guardian has never written any exposes on “carbon capture” – it’s treated as scientific fact, when it reality it doesn’t even exist in prototype format. Oh, you can capture CO2 after combustion – but it costs energy. How much energy? Almost all the energy produced by combustion of the coal!
Renewable portfolio standards, photovoltaics coupled to energy storage, photochemical hydrogen production, wind turbines, electric cars – those are real threats to the fossil fuel industry, as are regulations imposed due to global warming. You see almost no media discussion of this reality, not in Britain or in the U.S. – namely, that renewable energy and global warming could put an end to the era of fossil fuels – and of fossil fuel-based wealth.
P.S. If anyone wants a more comprehensive climate politics history of the 1980s and 1990s, they should read ‘The Carbon Wars’ by Jeremy Leggett.
You would think Fred Pearce would have read this book prior to launching his bizarre retro attack… but apparently not.
Regarding the GCC efforts to discredit the IPCC 2nd Assessment:
Remember, the goal of the fossil fuel lobby is to make sure binding emissions targets, which would spur renewables and undermine their profits, are not implemented.
Some things haven’t changed at all, such as the media’s willingness to promote a handful of the fossil fuel tobacco scientists (just look at the NYT’s Andrew Revkin’s reliance on ‘skeptics’ like Don Easterbrook, Roger Pielke, etc.) to the same “level of authority” as the entire climate science community. Fred Pearce is just following in his predecessor’s footsteps. As far as the main issue?
That’s described well enough above, and the IPCC rejected those claims:
.
You can see the kind of dirty tricks being employed here – but it all goes right back to the fossil fuel lobby, which included Saudi oil interests as well as Canadian tar sand interests and Midwestern coal interests – and yes, U.S. politicians are closely allied with these interests, even Presidents.
Obama spokesperson Tommy Vietor: “Sen. Obama believes investing in coal technologies is an important part of weaning the United States off foreign oil. He also believes that through investment and innovation, we can make these technologies cleaner.” Vietor pointed to ongoing research into sequestering the carbon released by coal gasification and suggested that similar strides could be made with the coal-liquefaction process.
None of that is backed up by any scientific proof – these are the coal industry’s talking points, lifted verbatim. The same goes for tar sands – which were given an export permit by the U.S. State Department (the EPA was not allowed to comment), again under Obama.
Yes, you are seeing some more support for solar now – the DOE set up a $1.5 billion guarantee for a southwestern solar project – but it pales in comparison to the much larger support for coal gasification and liquefaction (as well as nuclear).
“579
Nick Gotts says:
1 March 2010 at 6:34 AM
More irrigation, more use of (fossil fuel based) fertilizers, more effective pesticides, new crop varieties, better storage and transportation facilities, bringing more land into cultivation.”
Which is why the EROI for farming has reduced massively.
However, it’s likely that after the first few years of production, the yield is lower than that for less intensive farming. It just jumps early on and then you’re stuck because you’re told if you don’t use more chemicals, you’ll lose productivity.
It does drop and some studies in third world areas going back to local farming techniques (which is more than just “don’t dose with chemicals”, so the attribution is problematical) show that less intensive use increases yeild.
However, that could itself be a temporary change just as chemical agri-business practices were.
Completely Fed Up@583,
I wouldn’t disagree with what I take to be your main point – that intensive, high fossil-fuel and industrial-input agriculture (at least as currently practised) has seriously adverse long-term agricultural consequences, some of which I identified. Another is the shift in power from small farmers to agribusiness and related TNCs. However I’m not convinced EROI is a useful measure here – agriculture produces food and other essential products like fibre, not simply “energy”. It’s not true in general that yields fall after a few years of intensive farming – if it was, the continual rise in yields/hectare for all crops over the past four decades could not have happened. Getting through the next few decades without major food shortages would be a difficult challenge even without AGW; taking that into account, it requires major socio-economic, political and cultural changes, including a reversal of the tendency to increased meat and dairy consumption, and the much better focused use of technology, including artificial fertilisers and pesticides, deployed in ways that empower small farmers. Such uses of technology can also help with reducing GHG emissions and increasing carbon sequestration on agricultural land.
Okay, here is my (very tentative!) prediction for the NASA GISS land-ocean temperature anomaly for 2010:
0.58 K.
68% chance it will be between 0.48 and 0.67.
95% chance it will be between 0.39 and 0.76.
About a fifty-fifty chance that it will be the warmest year on record.
David Harrington says:
1 March 2010 at 3:49 AM
“529 Dave G
It does not depend on anything other than the accusation being made being demonstrably false.”
As I said, it depends on what was said, so your assertion that “there will be no libel or defamation writs issued in the UK or anywhere else” isn’t actually based upon anything, as you haven’t specified which comments you are referring to.
When Monckton accused AGW supporters of being “Hitler Youth” and “Nazis”, was that true?
All the accusations of “scientific fraud” seem to be based upon a (deliberate?) misunderstanding of the meaning of emails.
I’d like to see a climate scientist sue the people responsible for the more outrageous comments. Unless and until they do, it will only get more and more extreme. We’ve had people on national television shows suggesting that climate scientists should commit mass suicide. Where does this nonsense stop? In the courts, IMO. The sliming will continue until the deniers are taught, in a court of law, that they can’t just get away with saying anything, no matter how untrue and damaging.
“The primary myth is the following, the myth all the others are built on; that it’s possible to have unlimited, infinite growth, on a limited, finite, planet.”
Michael, the myth is that “everyone” thinks it won’t happen in their time. It’s always someone else.
This myth jars with the myth that makes people *hate* inheritance tax: “how come I can’t give my wealth to my family? I WANT to give them every advantage!”.
But if you use up all the cheap stuff and leave a mess, you’re not just leaving them your money, you’re leaving them a bigger threat to their lives.
Rather schizoid.
“However I’m not convinced EROI is a useful measure here – agriculture produces food and other essential products like fibre, not simply “energy”.”
Correct, but until we stop burning hydrocarbons for the majority of our energy needs and as long as we don’t commit to large increases in efficiency AND enormous reductions in waste (really, reduction in waste SAVES money, but people prefer not to be told, preferring to be told to tell someone else what to do), EROI is a very beneficial metric.
Would you rather eat or drive a 4l sports van?
PS on “It’s not true in general that yields fall after a few years of intensive farming – if it was, the continual rise in yields/hectare for all crops over the past four decades could not have happened.”
This is done by increasing use of agrichemicals and more complex procedures.
I don’t know (I only remember the three year result of IIRC Northern India trials of local knowledge and abandonment of agribusiness methods) whether it was a genuine rise or just a relaxation of one of the other limits of growth by changing processes. That’s what happens with overuse of fertilisers, etc.
I’ll see if I can at least dig up the region they did the test on.
@586 Dave G:
While taking on board the fact that you have to pick your battles, I think that if scientists were able to get an organisation to sponsor an international fund to fight this stuff, they they might have a shot. (It’s a rare scientist who’d have the money for a lawsuit on their own.)
If a fund could be set up, many of us non-scientists would willingly contribute a few dollars. If every climate scientist put in even $100 to a ‘fighting fund’ the kitty might be large enough to finance a case in the UK, especially if a top firm could be found who’d give it a go maybe partly pro bono (or paid by result). If those of us who are concerned about this added to the kitty, then enough money surely could be raised. Everyone would be a winner even if all that happened was that the media article (or whatever) was shown to be false. (The scientist in the test case might also be willing to put excess damages back into the international fund to fight future cases for others.)
I don’t know if the US laws are designed to protect those defamed, but in the UK (or Australia) there’d be a good chance of winning if the right case was selected.
The NFF in Australia did this with farmers contributing and it worked a treat, allowing farmers to win some test cases against governments. The fund is still going strong.
” There is plenty of energy available that does not come from fossil fuels. We can be just as rich or richer without fossil fuels. We used fossil fuels in the beginning of the industrial revolution because that was the limit of our knowledge and technology. We now have much greater knowledge and technology.”
Of course, that’s the key point that makes our points of view so different. I know perfectly your speech. I just think that’s the greatest illusion of the current epoch : just seeing fossil fuels as a possible source of energy, only used because of some historical reasons, polluting and dangerous, and that we could easily eradicate with some limited efforts.
I understand you believe that. I simply don’t share this opinion. Fossil fuels can not be replaced cheaply for a number of essential applications. Most of the so-called “alternatives” are only possible for producing a limited amount of electrical power. That’s all. And that’s not enough to sustain civilization. Fossil fuels can’t be replaced for metallurgy, organic chemistry, cheap and fast transportation, fertilizers, and even stable electric grids in most countries, or more exactly the replacement would be so difficult and expensive that the whole economy would collapse. What is essential for a modern society is not “energy”, but “cheap, abundant, and easy to use energy”. That’s not exactly the same…
Simple experiment. Look at a village in Africa, and at a village in America. Just make a list of everything that makes life so different in these two places. And ask yourself how you could bring these things to african people without using any fossil fuels. The answer will be immediate, I guess….
“Which is why the EROI for farming has reduced massively.
However, it’s likely that after the first few years of production, the yield is lower than that for less intensive farming. It just jumps early on and then you’re stuck because you’re told if you don’t use more chemicals, you’ll lose productivity.”
I agree. But the economic growth is not driven by EROEI but by productivity per capita – which has increased a lot throughout the use of fossil fuels. You can accept a bad EROEI if the fuel is cheap and abundant. On the opposite, diminishing the productivity per capita can only produce recession. And if you extrapolate to ZERO fossil fuels, then it is hard to imagine how productivity per capita could increase, since everything else is more expensive. That’s the obvious basic issue.
Re : Cooling stratosphere
I am sorry to return to this well ploughed topic but I have been provoked by earlier comments on this thread. First this is a relatively important educational issue because it is one of the finger-prints for gh warming which discriminates against e.g. solar forcing. I should imagine that it probably also discrimates against cosmic rays (?). That is why it is not a good idea to repeat a dodgy analogy, (I plead guilty of doing this in the past) e.g. that of cooling the loft by putting thermal insulation between the joists. This is because the analagous loft should have its own heators and the loft is cooling because a crack is appearing in the roof (sorry the analogy is now a bit forced).
Simplifications are part of the toolbox for both scientists and educationists. But some are better than others. The stratosphere has its own physics. The warming of the Earth from the gh effect can be attributed to the raising of the effective level from which escaping infra-red is emitted. Higher > colder> less radiation emitted > less heat loss> Earth warms. But in the stratosphere this does not work because higher > warmer. Interesting, but not good eneough because it does not refer to the temperature of a bit of the stratosphere. I like this brief version:
“In response to increased CO2 concentration, the atmospheric temperature
increases in the troposphere but decreases in the stratosphere (Manabe and Wetherald 1967; Manabe and Wetherald 1980). The temperature decreases in the stratosphere occur because to first order the dominant balance in the stratosphere is between warming due to shortwave absorption by ozone and cooling due to longwave emission by CO2 (e.g. Held 1993). Therefore an increase in CO2 leads to more longwave cooling in the stratosphere.
http://www.aos.wisc.edu/~deweaver/lorenz_deweaver_uchange.pdf
[See beginning of paper.]
I enclosed the entire argument in italics. Simplified? Yes, it ignores all sorts of things such a rival mechanism caused by the ozone hole effect and possibly other mechanisms. But at least it is a mechanism which makes sense, unlike the one which concentrates on the reduction of the IR coming up from below which was already the junior partner in determining the temperature. As I see it now, IR absorption only matters near radiative equilibrium when the temperature of the gas is so low that IR(abs.) and IR(em.) are of similar magnitudes. This will be valid when there is no short wavelength heating. More simplification?? Yes the troposphere appears to be more complicated than the stratosphere, in the sense that it is less likely to be in radiative equilibrium; one layer gets heated while another layer gets cooled even before you start adding more gh gas. This is compensated by convection so that you end up with a steady state. Thats before we create a mess by burning fuel.
Am I wrong?
“You seem to be mocking the very idea of testing models.”
No, Matthew, and pardon my sarcasm, but I am mocking those who have formed passionate opinions on this issue, but have so little interest in how science actually works that they actually think that “hindcasting” is a new idea. It’s done with every model, with every scenario. A model that doesn’t accurately recreate the past, given the starting conditions, isn’t ready for prime time and would not be presented as predictive of the future.
I respect the desire to work things out for yourself and look for flaws in the science, but a careful study of what you are criticizing is an essential prerequisite to that effort.
#508 John Peter
John, not being prosecuted yet is much different than still facing indictment and having more felony charges brought against a person. You’ll see from my link the “hacker” is still in a bit of hot water to say the least.
Of course I don’t really see a comparison to what happened in the case with the server being accessed without authorization and the Palin e-mail “hack”, other than they are both illegal as opposed to ,say, the Lori Drew and the MySpace case which I thought was distortion and manipulation of the laws to bring a case against her. Though her actions may have been immoral they were not illegal, they were not illegal under the letter of the law. A jury did find her guilty, but even the judge had to dismiss the case on that same letter of the law.
http://linkstomemphis.com/2009/10/trial-delayed-again-for-alleged-palin-e-mail-hacker-david-kernell.html
Anyway, I think I’m done with this topic. Clearly what happened on the server was illegal. I think I support that position in several posts.
At the least I’m glad I could direct you to some interesting and maybe useful information out there concerning the topic of cybercrime.
Gilles 565: “. . . the heat content of the Earth is increasing – but natural cycles can do that anyway, like during El Nina events.”
I’d guess that as a first approximation 98% of those commenting here have had more education in physics than I, but I’ll take a stab at this one. Natural cycles such as El Nino events, can redistribute heat, and temporarily increase surface temperature (think 1998), but they can’t increase the heat content.
“590
Sou says:
1 March 2010 at 10:10 AM
I think that if scientists were able to get an organisation to sponsor an international fund to fight this stuff, they they might have a shot.”
Which would be even more obviously political. How much hassle as the NON POLITICAL IPCC had? How much more would a politiciking program have?
When one side doesn’t care about the truth, there’s not a lot you can do against it. Don’t play their game. It’s the only way to win.
If you still lose, it’s not because of something you did, but something someone else did. Something that politicians should be a lot more on board with (you don’t torture enemies just because they torture your people: you lose the battle against their evil by doing it yourself. As an example).
RE: http://climateprogress.org/ says Senator Inhofe is accusing you of crimes.
Don’t your universities have law schools? Can’t you professors talk to law professors over lunch? Doesn’t NASA have staff lawyers you could talk to about legal issues?
I assume Senator Inhofe’s insane accusations are meeting a wall of silence at the Obama Department of Justice and Attorney General’s offices. Do you have any updates?
I ought maybe to say I’m not against the idea, Sou, just that I don’t think it’s going to do anything but play in the same tarpit that the denialists play in.
Don’t let them frame it as a PR battle.
Keep repeating it framed as science.