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.
Re:736 Ray Ladbury says: 2 March 2010 at 6:30 PM
“Tim, my wife has some nice photos of some badass erosion in Madagascar. Email me.”
Wonderful! uh, how horrible. Perhaps I’m exceptionally dense today, but I’m unaware of your email address. You could send
it to me via the link for #708. Or can it be found on site?
As the observer, how would you (or she) construe a connection to climate change?
Thanks!
Hank Roberts 649 662 673
I found where my saturated ideas came from a few years back, it was probably from Weart’s web site. When he put the story on RC, he took from three different parts of his site. If you read the site today and don’t follow the right links, you can miss the saturation discussion. The RC write up is better, part 1 is not disjointed and part 2 explains the CO2 spectral bands.
Thanks for straightening me out.
721 doubting Thomas: “vis-a-vis the current volume of production of very highly radio-active spent fuels (indeed, we could throw the reactors into the same pit as the current waste”
There is no such thing as nuclear waste. That is recyclable fuel that is being wasted. In the old days, nuclear fuel was recycled. Then politics happened.
Gavin where are you?
731 David Miller: See: http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/
http://www.ecolo.org/
All of your assumptions overturned.
A bit OT, perhaps, but does anyone know where go the limits of access to publicly funded science within the defense departments?
Questions brought forth by some general news recently.
During the Falklands (or Malvinas) war the British Navy continued to broadcast weather observations made onboard their ships as usual. Reading this data from the world meteorological telecom network, the Argentinian military tracked hour-by-hour movements of the British naval force enroute to the conflict area.
A quite substantial part of the oceanic observations even today come from the world’s Navies. Such observations are part of the ship’s routine and are very important as there is a permanent shortage of oceanic data for the daily weather forecasts.
Any historian studying the deployments of military forces would be interested to access the same data. They apparently are also a part of the surface weather records now under discussion. Or are they?
I seem to remember that the British Meteorological Office is under the Ministry of Defense. If so, where go the boundaries of “public data” within that Ministry?
A FOIA process brought forth some of the Arctic area submarine data, though active support from the then vice-president Al Gore was needed. A precedent limited to U.S. law, of course.
Such limits are also very interesting with respect to commercial intellectual property rights, that being the reason why some of the weather data is covered by confidentiality agreements limiting distribution. Particularly in Europe the principle is “user pays”. The national weather services are legally required to charge for data and forecasts, except the most basic outline broadcasts.
Stefan N 618
My message is that the Internet is a dangerous place. Don’t count on the justice system to protect you from scurrilous acts like the CRU hack.
A contemporary of Kant (I believe?) Kurt Weill years ago wrote “Three Penny Opera”. Close to the end of the finale comes the moral (which I believe is a good life principle): (in English):
“In real life the ending isn’t quite so fine. Victorious messenger does not come riding often.
The reply to a kick in the pants, is just another kick in the pants,
so pursue – but not too eagerly – injustice”
Brian Dodge 667, JiminMpls 670,
Yes, you have raised good points concerning the graphs, where I did not adequately cover the period of interest. However, here follows my compilation for the last 18 years, (incl. 2010 to Feb), and you can see that for the Hume, there were good levels and low levels of varying annual patterns during the so-called “12-year drought”
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2775/4402149905_f678d272e4_o.jpg
This implies that within the catchment area there were some periods of good rainfall run-off, or in other words, the drought was not continuous for 12 years. Yet, even this observation is simplistic, because the Hume is only part of the system for the Murray, and its draw-downs probably have complex considerations, such as the state of other reservoirs, regional forecasts, and release for environmental flows, such as in 2009. (that was on top of a hot year in 2009). Incidentally, there was a case early last year when the Thompson was drawn-down heavily, (and it is still low at ~21%), because of perceived risk of run-off pollution from bushfires at that time.
Sou 670, calyptorhynchus 671
In addition to the regional implications in drought discussed above, Sou has written in part:
Not only are droughts difficult to compare centennially, but they are difficult to define and even observe in scope, in times of low population and poor communications/ horse-drawn transport.
I intend to show in my next post a compilation of the BOM rainfall distributions over SE Australia, which probably better illustrates the reported regional variations.
Temperature and flood records are more tricky!
calyptorhynchus also wrote in part:
I wouldn’t be too sure about that! Did you check out the following images per my 567? (Orange = dry, 1921 – 1940) Did you read and view about El Nino?
http://home.iprimus.com.au/foo7/157.gif and http://home.iprimus.com.au/foo7/141.gif
See full article @: http://home.iprimus.com.au/foo7/droughthistory.html
> Tinkerbell
> FOIA … Arctic …
Waitaminute, I’ve read a lot about that and never saw any mention of a FOIA request for the Arctic sea ice data. Where did you get that? This is a good example of why citing sources matters.
A subset of the Navy classified data was opened up (the “Gore Box” on the maps) on his initiative when he was VP, according to the Navy, e.g. here:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=102863
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=102863&org=NSF
“NRL developed GIS applications to digitize, spatially analyze and cartographically output statistical ice maps using common commercial software tools in support of a Vice President Gore initiative. Additionally sea ice charts were digitized and delivered representing temporal sea ice formations for the period 1972-1996 (Naval/National Ice Center). See GIS Ice Atlas transition….”
http://www7440.nrlssc.navy.mil/transitions.htm
Oh, this shouldn’t be omitted — the Arctic sea ice data sets were not just US data — information was released by both the US and the USSR. I’m _positive_ the USSR wasn’t covered by FOIA. Google finds this mention of it:
Science/AAAS | ScienceScope : 17 January 1997; 275 (5298)
… 45 years of data on the Arctic Ocean recently declassified by the United States and Russia. Earlier this week, Vice President Al Gore announced the release of the first volume of … Later volumes will feature data on Arctic ice and meteorology. …
735 Gilles: With enough energy, we can take CO2 out of the air and make it back into gasoline. That is un-economical. Somebody suggested making hydrazine instead. Un-safe since hydrazine is a monopropellant/explosive. But engines can run on hydrazine, even without oxygen.
You haven’t covered all of the sources of energy; nor have you thought of all of the other ways to use energy; nor have you thought of all of the ways to re-organize society. The inventions of the next 10 years will more than amaze you. They will re-organize society to such an extent that you won’t recognize it.
Fossil fuels will be obsolete. The only question is whether fossil fuels will be obsolete before or after environmental disaster causes civilization to collapse. We can have a super-advanced civilization without fossil fuels.
#756 BobFJ Why are you spending time on this, BobFJ – care to explain?
South East Australia is getting increasingly hotter. The rice industry at Deniliquin has all but folded. Every year maximum temperature records keep getting broken. Heat waves are becoming more frequent and go for longer, rivers and dams are under huge stress, farmers haven’t had the water they’ve paid for in years and some will quite possibly never again get their full quota. The dairy industry is looking ahead 50 years to work out the best farm strategies and pasture management regimes, given less water and higher CO2, in a world that will have a much larger demand for food.
This summer where I live we’ve had some very good rainfalls, although the intensity has been much greater than normal. I don’t take it as a sign that we’ll not get dry periods again. OTOH, it is very likely that all the extra growth this summer means higher fire danger next season.
As stated in the BOM Australia drought statement issued on 5 February this year:
Aside, has anyone heard anything from the “extended solar minimum” or “maunder-pondering” people lately?
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/sunspot.gif
Edward Greisch : you miss the essential point, which is : cost. What determines the cost of energy? basically, the amount of human time spent to extract it (including the production of all commodities and artifacts used to produce it), because you eventually only pay people, not barrels. So what is this human cost for oil, for instance? the average production cost of one barrel must still be around 10 $, and contain about 1600 kWh. This gives a cost of about 0.6 ct/kWh. Given that 1 kWh is close to the energy produced by one day of manual work, and taking an average of around 30 $/ work day (energy is often produced by rather poor workers), this means that production of oil has an incredible productivity of around 5000. By comparison, agriculture without fuels has a productivity of around 10, maybe. I don’t see how you can contest that the essential ingredient to explain the huge growth since 200 years has been the gradual implementation of this much more productive energy source and its use at all levels of the society.
Now you’re saying : that doesn’t matter that this hugely productive energy is gradually exhausted, there are plenty of alternative. Wait. To sustain our society, we need equally cheap alternatives, or at least to compensate the loss of productivity by an at least equal improvement of the efficiency of its use. You think that because ELECTRIC POWER (which is by itself an expensive energy) can be at some places, and partly, produced in a cheapest way than by burning directly fossil fuels, you have solved all the problems ??? we are VERY FAR from that. Not only the cost of alternative energies is much larger than the primitive cost of fossil fuels , but there use is less convenient in a number of applications, so their use will diminish the productivity. And much worse, the current cost is valid only because cheap fossil fuels are available every where. Cheap coal and oil to make steel, copper, glass, blades of windmills ,nuclear reactor vessels, not to speak of fusion reactors.. how do you think these things are built ? without cheap commodities, they would be much more costly ! and probably be economically out of range. Unfortunately, all these commodities have no chance of being cheaper without fossil fuels. That’s a basic fact. You can realize it equally well by asking yourself : am I really able to equip an african village with electric windmills or solar panels without fossil fuels? teach them how to build them without the existence of metallurgy, oil to transport them, and so on? obviously not. Nothing of our modern world is sustainable without that. Now of course metallurgy and oil won’t disappear just now or in some years. But they will eventually disappear, that’s a certitude. And you can’t connect a positive value to a vanishing one without decreasing at some time. I am not able to say now which asymptotic state we can reach without FF, but I’m pretty sure it will be much lower than the current one, so basically you can forget about the +2% growth in the next century. Now seeing the impact of a -1% recession on the world, I let you imagine the kind of issues it will cause.
“Anyone having ideas or examples of other effects of current
warming are welcome to submit suggestions. Links and photos
as well as permission to use photos would be helpful.
A picture is worth a thousand words.”
Does it matter if the pictures are 50 years old :-D ?
Hank Roberts #761: on the extended solar minimum, I see quite a lot of garbage about how it somehow nullifies global warming. The fact that temperatures have held up despite this somehow evades these people as confirming that warming is happening. There’s every reason to expect global temperatures to start increasing again as the solar cycle increases. GISS has already reported one of the warmest Januaries ever, and UAH has January 2010 as the warmest January ever; depending how the current El Niño develops, this year could be pretty warm. All of course just one data point but still, not consistent with the “it’s all the sun” theory.
Re Tim Jones (708)
This posting is headed “Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind”. Ironic that you shuold be requesting photos to support a propaganda of climate change scare stories. You list a random collection of problems and disasters with a veiw with linking all of them to climate change. An example:
“Pictures of the aftermath of violent weather would be
instructive. Floods and snowfall potentially derived by way of evaporation of warming seas.”
But (i) ‘violent weather’ has always ocurred, and always will. You can’t just assume its always due to climate change. (ii)and you suggest that any “flood” or “snowfall” can potentially be linked to warming seas. That’s pure speculation. And just comical.
If you want pictures and film to support your campaign, I’m sure Al Gore can help.
This behaviour simply demonstrates the typical approach of so many AGW-faithful. ‘We can use any evidence we can get hold of in any way we want – however misleading – to support the case for AGW’. This behaviour just gives your side a very bad name.
Prof Phil Jones’s name (#195) has appeared on my petition supporting climate science. I don’t count this as a signature because the purpose is to support his right to work without harassment (and of course others) but I’m pleased if this has helped him cope with the abuse.
Now at 200 (minus his signature and a few duplicates, about 195). Keep signing. It all adds up.
Sou Reur 760, keeping it to water availability issues at this time:
[1] If you are prepared to listen to some of the facts that I’m trying to show you, it may become clear.
[2] It doesn’t really make sense to grow rice on the second driest continent on earth with a history of drought does it? They measure the water usage in “Sydarbs” (Sydney harbours) don’t they? What was that inland sea in the USSR that dried-up because of rice growing water demands?
[3] Interesting comment!
[4] The link you gave does not give; in the text; good definitions of the parts of southern and eastern Australia so affected by drought. (temporally & spatially). A map would be good. The very short-term maps shown; (13 months, 7 months and 3 months); indicate that rather small areas are affected by low rainfall. Compare this time-span with the oft repeated statements elsewhere that the current warming/cooling plateau in global temperatures is too short to consider there to be any trend! However, more surprising is that the above average rainfalls, including notable floods during these periods, are not included on the drought graphs.
OK, moving on; let’s look at the ten-year averages in rainfall per other charts by the BOM that maybe you have not seen:
Thumbnail:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4030/4402732755_2428648d69_m.jpg
Larger version:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4030/4402732755_2428648d69_b.jpg
These are for decades 1911 through 1920.… 1986 through 1995.… 1996 through 2005, (latest available), in that order. Can you see that the ten-year averages are all remarkably similar?
This is a quick response to your 760, but I have more to show you on annual rainfall regionality and variability, per the BOM, when I have time.
747: Edward Greisch. “If you are talking about making electricity , NO. You can’t drill that deep. Pressure inevitably squeezes your bore casing to zero size before you get deep enough”.
No so. There is a 1 MW pilot plant coming on line this year in Australia. They did have some problems with the bore casing, but not pressure related. Something to do with some gases causing the type of steel used to become brittle. It seems a different type of steel will fix it. A 25 MW plant to be online in 2013. There are several “hot rock geothermal” startup companies listed on the Australian stock exchange.
re: #740 , typo:
The equation should have been
n = N exp(-t/T)
But unfortunately we now have a sum of perhaps five exponentials including one with the uncorrected typo (growing exponential) and about four with the minus sign (decaying exponentials).
Re: Correction of correction of #740.
The last sentence should be :
But unfortunately the measured CO2 concentration now and for the near future is best modeled with the uncorrected formula i.e. a single growing exponential.
“747
Edward Greisch says:
2 March 2010 at 8:26 PM
691 Barton Paul Levenson: Hot dry rock geothermal: If you are talking about heating homes, yes. If you are talking about making electricity , NO. You can’t drill that deep”
What is most domestic energy used for, Ed?
And what use you put the power to doesn’t make the rock harder to drill through.
I’d cut back on the histrionics, Ed.
John@755, OK, not to go all SIWOTI on you, but like much of what you post, you’re almost right. Kurt Weill was born in 1900 and wrote “Three Penny Opera” in 1928. It was in turn based on “Beggar’s Opera,” written by John Gay in 1728, when Immanuel Kant was 4 years old.
The thing is that once climate change starts in earnest, things won’t “work out right” even if “you’ve money in your pocket.”
“Ray Ladbury says:
2 March 2010 at 6:48 PM
doubting Thomas,
I to have long followed the progress of fusion. And I would say that the current efforts to “break even” are a whole helluva long way from a viable energy system–let alone, one that could be deployed globally on a short timescale.”
Ray, break-even power has been a fact for years. What ISN’T happening is sustaining it. And that is where the “any day now” issue of fission power comes in: plenty of ideas about what COULD cause a sustainable reaction, but reality has a different idea.
And until a breakthrough (which cannot really be predicted: if it were predictable, then we’d know what needs to happen. Knowing what needs to happen, we could make it happen sooner. But we don’t), fusion will remain unavailable as a domestic energy source.
For that reason we cannot rely on fusion as a saviour. We’d be as well off hoping that the Centauri come along with Jump Gate technology…
andrew adams (705),
The deniers deliberately, and after repeated correction, are conflating two different numbers. The lifetime of one carbon dioxide molecule in the air averages 5-10 years. The lifetime of a large pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere is 200 years. The difference comes about because CO2 isn’t just leaving the atmosphere, it’s also entering it, and it’s the net value that determines the latter number.
“728
oakwood says:
2 March 2010 at 4:54 PM
The ONLY reason CRU received FOI requests was because they refused to release their data, or at least confirm which stations they used.”
Nope, the reason they got 40 cut-n-paste FOI requests on one weekend was because Steve McIntyre exhorted His Faithful to spam the scientists, stopping them from doing their ACTUAL JOB and cause them trouble.
Decent article for a change.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-0228-climate-science-questions-20100302,0,4670437,full.story
Thomas (721),
It’s too energy intensive to launch waste into the sun. If you want to dispose of it in space, a lunar crater might work better. Or Asimov’s “Trojan Hearse” at one of the L4 or L5 points.
don (725),
Apparently you’re unaware that Venus actually absorbs less sunlight than the Earth does, due to its high reflectivity, and thus should be cooler than the Earth, not as hot as a self-cleaning oven.
Absorbed flux is
F = (S / 4) (1 – A)
with flux density F in watts per square meter, as is the local solar constant S. A is the bolometric Russell-Bond spherical albedo.
For Earth and Venus respectively, we have
S = 2611 W/m^2, 1366 W/m^2
A = 0.750, 0.306
which leads to F = 163 W/m^2 and 237 W/m^2, respectively.
Inverting the Stefan-Boltzmann law, the emission temperature is:
Te = (F / sb) ^ 0.25
where sb is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant (5.6704 x 10^-8 W/m^2/K^4 in the SI). This yields Te = 232 K for Venus and 254 K for Earth. The fact that their respective surface temperatures are 735.3 and 288.2 K are due to the greenhouse effect, which is much fiercer on Venus than Earth due to Venus’s thick greenhouse atmosphere–96.5% carbon dioxide.
oakwood (728): The ONLY reason CRU received FOI requests was because they refused to release their data, or at least confirm which stations they used. The ONLY reason they became what could be called a barage is because all earlier requests were ignored. No hiding the data = no FOIs. Simple.
BPL: 95% of their data was already in the public domain, and they listed all the stations they used. The other 5% was under proprietary agreements with national meteorological services and could not legally be released. And the barrage was due to a concerted campaign by Steve McIntyre and his blog readers.
No denier disinformation campaign = no FOIs. Simple.
Gilles (735): all what you mentioned has only been developed on a very small, experimental scale, sometimes in very specific locations
BPL: Denmark: 20% of electricity from wind, planned to rise to 50% by 2020.
Brazil: 100 million cars powered by sugar-cane ethanol.
US: 42% of new electrical generating capacity last year was wind, after 35% in 2008.
You’re wrong. Again.
Thomas (744): ~50 Quads are consumed in/as transportation fuels in the US. How do wind/solar address that
BPL: Electric trains. More mass transit. Electric cars. Cars fueled by electrolyzed hydrogen. And fuels from biomass rather than wind and solar, as with the 100 million cars fueled by sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil.
EG (747): Hot dry rock geothermal: If you are talking about heating homes, yes. If you are talking about making electricity , NO. You can’t drill that deep. Pressure inevitably squeezes your bore casing to zero size before you get deep enough. It only works where there are hot plutons near the surface.
BPL: The geothermal gradient is 25-30 K/km almost everywhere. The Tautona gold mine is 3.9 km deep (it reached 2 km in 1957), the East Rand Mine 3.585 km. Since we’re not stopping to do heavy mining work, we can probably routinely reach 3 km once we get going–call in 75 K. If Th is 363 K (almost boiling!) and Tl is 288 K, the Carnot efficiency is 21%. For contrast, a car’s internal combustion engine commonly has eta = 25%.
Low efficiency doesn’t much matter when the “fuel” (Earth’s internal heat) is free and the working material is water. HDR has been extensively studied and the potential power available is huge. See, e.g.:
http://www.glgroup.com/News/Hot-Dry-Rock-Geothermal-Energy—Too-Clean-Too-green-Too-Abundant-to-Ignore-41157.html
Philip,
I strongly urge you to add Dr. Jones’s name to the petition again. People generally do have the right to vote for themselves; presidential candidates always do. And you can petition about a wrong done to yourself.
BPL and others,
About Brazilian ethanol: it is indeed a large-scale program here in Brazil. Even gasoline cars (like mine) run on a 25%-ethanol mix. I’m not sure how worldwide spread it can get, though. I think of it more like a wedge.
About hot dry rock thermal: isn’t the needed drilling technology similar to oil drilling? There’s a lot of underwater oil here that can get as deep as 7000m. The technology is still under development (AFAIK), but I’m sure Brazil is not the only country capable of reaching that.
Regarding Gavin’s response to #107
[Response: Again, a complete strawman. Perhaps you’d care to point to anything any of us have ever published where we said this was true and above criticism? Just one. And if you want to come back and say ‘well I didn’t really mean it’, don’t bother. – gavin]
This is a direct quote from “The IPCC Fourth Assessment SPM”, dated 2 February 2007
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/02/the-ipcc-fourth-assessment-summary-for-policy-makers/
Key results [of AR4] include the simulations for the 20th Century by the latest state-of-the-art climate models which demonstrate that recent trends cannot be explained without including human-related increases in greenhouse gases, and consistent evidence for ocean heating, sea ice melting, glacier melting and ecosystem shifts. This makes the projections of larger continued changes ‘in the pipeline’ (particularly under “business as usual” scenarios) essentially indisputable.
“demonstrate” and “indisputable” sound to me words of the kind referred to by Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen
the RealClimate group and their allies in quite a few other countries deserve criticim less for their science than for how they have ‘marketed’ and ‘branded’ their research outputs as true and above criticism
Comment by Maurizio Morabito — 2 March 2010 @ 6:48
You are either not understanding what you are reading, or are trying to claim an apple is an orange. Gavin’s response was to the last line of hers that scientists have said the science, implying all of it, is indisputable and not to be challenged. Gavin is correct to dispute this characterization. As the scientists here have stated many times, the basics of climate change are indisputable: the planet is warming and it is largely due to GHG emissions.
Fudge much?
Ray, (#773) great catch on the musicology. I’m embarrassed, as that’s actually my area, more or less, but I missed the misattribution due to just skimming posts rather than properly reading them. It’s just as you said! John Gay was a contemporary of Handel, whom he was partly satirizing in Beggar’s Opera.
Hank (#762), now that you mention it, I’ve not heard much about “THE GREAT COMING SOLAR MINIMUM” for a while. Guess your graph illustrates why not!
[edit – OT]
Kevin McKinney,
I’ve always liked Brecht!
Re answers to #705 etc.
The fact that our different replies concerning lifetimes look so different, might be confusing, but they are just providing different bits of the story. This quite normal in RC’s comments. BPL’s reply in #775 is the best and simplest. He exposes the deniers common ‘trick’ of ignoring one side of a balance equation so as to mislead lay people about the accounting.
My remark about the 4 exponential decays also relates to #705, but particularly to supporting the comment about it at #719. [Hansen included a reference to a faster decay as well; this is how he suggests that the CO2 concentration might start falling later on if people follow his advice].
772Completely Fed Up says:
3 March 2010 at 5:53 AM
…
I’d cut back on the histrionics, Ed.
____________________
Oh please CFU. You are really tiresome. Have you ever made a post that contained anything other than histrionics? I’m almost convinced that you’re a troll who is trying to make those of us who support the science look vindictive and childish.
I love the science discussions here, but your personal attacks and general manner are, to say the least, counter productive. Either you’re the angriest most self rightous person I’ve ever encountered or a troll. Either way, tone it down. Between you and BPL predicting the end of civiliization in forty years you’re giving the denialists a lot of fodder.
Simple physics is on our side. We don’t need to engage in such hyperbole.
Re PETM, here’s a nice new core: Rate of ocean acidification the fastest in 65 million years
[edit – nuclear is OT]
BPL (778)
You’re kidding about the moon waste disposal, right? Once the nuclear waste is in space, I (personally) could just kick it into the direction of the sun, and let gravity do the rest. Moreover, it would just be a knat to the sun, and just be totally “atomized”, with no residue.
BPL (782)
If I didn’t know better, I’d almost be forced to ask, “Must ALL your answers include 100m sugar-based ethanol cars in Brazil?”. As 785 above pointed out above, 25% is much less than 100% – and the balance is…oil-derived gasoline! Regarding economics, it is very clear that what is driving the newly robust and healthy Brazilian economy is not ethanol from sugar cane, but OIL from PetroBras. The driver for ethanol investment there in the past was clearly the high cost of landed fuel imports. Sadly, that may change back to gasoline due to PetroBras’s abundant sub-salt, off-shore oil development, which with a little refining, will slow if not stop and reverse ethanol use transportation there.
Biomass is essentially just coal gasificiaton (ala Lurgi at SASOL), but with the additonal cost of feedstock gathering (also, vs coal, you are hauling mostly water) and non-homogeneity. Unless you are talking about biomass as wood burning, of course.
Gavin…thanks for letting me get waaay OTT on all of the above postings.
Hank (762),
I am having trouble with the NOAA sunspot graph. It looks to me as if it has ~7 “monthly values” already posted for 2010. (?)
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/sunspot.gif
arch
Interesting graph showing the predicted solar cycle. Noting that the record high temperatures for January and February 2010 were at pretty much at the very bottom of the cycle, it seems that the Danish solar researcher was right about temperatures being pretty much exclusively dependent on the solar cycle.. who cares about the phases being slightly off… On the other hand, it could mean that we are in for some toasty temperatures as the next cycle gets up to speed.
Recommended:
http://climatewtf.blogspot.com/2010/02/willis-eschenbach-deconstructed.html
Gillies: said
#*predicability : I’m ready to bet with you than within 20 years, the average temperature won’t have increased by more than 0.2 °C, but that oil production will have fallen by more than 20 %. Obviously if you were right, this shouldn’t be a big deal for the mankind, but I predict also that the world will have experienced the worst economic crisis in its history (worse than the current one, I mean).
Now that is interesting prediction. 0.2 in a decade isnt too far behind predictions – makes a change from those saying it won’t. But continued temperature rise also depends on what forcings are present. If oil production falls by 20% in 10 years, this would certainly be a good start in the mitigation stakes. If oil production dropped that quickly as a result of production constraints rather than fall in demand, then i would hate to think what that would do for price. An excellent impetuous for development of alternative energy. And as to economic crisis, well if that is what it takes to prevent 3degree plus by 2100, then so be it. Recession seems to me to be a whole lot more survivable for humanity as a whole compared to effects of rapid climate change.
Gilles (735): all what you mentioned has only been developed on a very small, experimental scale, sometimes in very specific locations
BPL: Denmark: 20% of electricity from wind, planned to rise to 50% by 2020.
”
Which doesn’t represent more than 10 % of energy, and is possible only because of power trade across borders in a larger connected grid. Relative to the grid, it will never exceed 20 %, and again electricity is not everything. BTW Denmark is one of the biggest CO2 emitter per capita in Europe, and will remain so.
”
Brazil: 100 million cars powered by sugar-cane ethanol.
”
don’t be silly. Brazil has less than 200 millions inhabitants , and much less cars than European countries or US. It’s ten times less, only 10 millions flex fuel cars for 200 millions inhabitants. I’d like to see US with this few number of cars. And sugar cane is cheap only because it’s grown by quasi-slaves. Brave world…
US: 42% of new electrical generating capacity last year was wind, after 35% in 2008.
percentage of growth doesn’t mean percentage of power, but of course you know that …
Phil :”Recession seems to me to be a whole lot more survivable for humanity as a whole compared to effects of rapid climate change.”
Maybe you’re right. May be many people wouldn’t share this opinion. In any case I’m pretty sure we won’t have the choice.
Ray (773)
Touche