Part of me felt a little nostalgic yesterday watching the last Senate hearing on climate change that will be chaired by Sen. James Inhofe. It all felt very familiar and comforting in some strange way. There was the well-spoken ‘expert’ flown in from Australia (no-one available a little closer to home?), the media ‘expert’ from the think tank (plenty of those about) and a rather out-of-place geologist. There were the same talking points (CO2 leads the warming during the ice ages! the Medieval Warm Period was warm! it’s all a hoax!*) that are always brought up. These easy certainties and predictable responses are so well worn that they feel like a pair of old slippers.
[Read more…] about Inhofe’s last stand
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Further comment on the Supreme Court briefs
Comment from Scott Saleska (elevated from previous post). The discussion refers to the brief submitted in support of the EPA position organised by CEI in opposition to the ‘Scientists’ brief‘ that Scott was a party to.
Was there was a reply to CEI brief?
There was no formal venue for a reply, at least not before the court. The general consensus of those of us who discussed it was that the CEI brief was pretty poor anyway. For what it is worth, below are some comments I emailed to my colleagues after I reviewed the CEI brief, followed by comments by Dr. Curt Covey, whose work was cited in the CEI brief:
— begin quoted excerpts of my email —
Our climate scientist brief focused narrowly and conservatively on two questions: (1) whether the state of the science was accurately represented by the EPA and by the lower court, and (2) whether the science is sufficiently compelling to support a judgement that the legal standard for regulation is met (i.e., may greenhouse gas emissions “reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare”?)
A relevant claim that our scientists brief is wrong or misleading would therefore have to consist of an argument that either (1) the state of the science was in fact accurately characterized by the EPA or the Appeals Court, or (2) that in fact, greenhouse gas emissions may NOT be reasonably anticipated to endanger public health or welfare. The CEI brief does neither, so I suspect it will not have much relevance to the case at hand.
The CEI brief discusses a range of broad questions on which the Climate Scientist’s brief takes no position (e.g. whether the “net” effects of CO2 emissions “will” endanger public health or welfare, or what history would have been like if industrial development had taken a less CO2-intensive trajectory), and quibbles with technical details which have little or no effect on the answer to the overall question no matter how they are resolved (e.g. whether the NRC/NAS statement in 2001 that post-1950 ocean warming was 0.050C is meaningfully different from the Levins et al. 2005, more recent figure of 0.037C).
As far as the technical details, a quick survey convinces me there is not much there. Just to cite a few, taken more or less at random (I have not had time to look at all):
CO2 growth rates (CEI, p. 11): arguments about what growth rates for CO2 emissions that some models use are besides the point of what the science says about the climate sensitivity of the earth system (emissions growth rates are if anything an economic question). It is well-recognized that many of the original emissions scenarios in IPCC overstated the trajectories that were actually realized (indeed, this was a minor point made in the NRC/NAS 2001 report that was picked up on, and misunderstood or misrepresented, by the Appeals Court), but so what? Unless they are arguing that actual BAU emissions will be so low as to prevent CO2 from any further significant build up (or at least stay under a doubling), this is a detail entirely irrelevant to climate science, and almost entirely irrelevant to the question about “reasonable anticipation of endangerment”.
Hurricanes (CEI, p. 16). We barely mention this, as a parenthetical (not as a “prediction” but as a citation of IPCC TAR’s reference to “likely increases” in tropical storm intensities). I am surprised they went after this, with all the recent work showing that the evidence for this has only gotten stronger since 2001. Yes, there is still debate about whether it has reached canonical levels of statistical significance (95% confidence), and there are problems with data quality yet to be fully resolved, but the standard in the law is lower (“may reasonably anticipate” endangerment). Are they arguing, in the light of Emanual 2005, and Webster et al., 2005, that it would be entirely unreasonable to anticipate stronger hurricanes in the future? If not, what is the point?
Satellite and surface temp records (CEI p. 23). The main substantive thing we said with respect to this is that “all available data sets show that both the surface and the troposphere have warmed,” which the CEI brief criticizes. But the quote they criticize is not ours, it is from the U.S. CSSP (2006) re-assessment (the subtitle of which is “understanding and reconciling differences”). An author of the CSSP (and of the Executive Summary, from which our quote is taken) is John Christy, who is an amicus on the CEI brief. Is he arguing against himself? Perhaps he didn’t realize this CEI comment was in there when he signed on.
—- end Saleska quotes —-
With regard to the CO2 scenarios, the CEI brief cited a paper by Curt Covey. My colleague and co-amici David Battisti inquired of Dr. Covey if he had any comments about the way CEI cited his work, and he responded, saying we were free to circulate his comments. Here they are:
— begin quote of Covey email —-
Dear Prof. Battisti,
Part of my job here at LLNL is to accurately communicate the results of my work to scientific colleagues and the public. Accordingly, you should feel free to share the comments below.
Page 11 of the brief begins, “As shown below, computer models predicting future warming must overestimate warming, because they generally use an incorrect increase in carbon dioxide concentration of 1% per year.” It is not true that models “generally use” this rate of increase. Model
simulations of 20th century global warming typically use actual observed amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide, together with other human (for example chloroflorocarbons or CFCs) and natural (solar brightness variations, volcanic eruptions, …) climate-forcing factors. Model simulations of future global warming use analogous input; of course it is not possible to observe the future, so a variety of scenarios involving possible atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, etc., are employed. These range from stabilization of atmospheric carbon dioxide at twice its pre-industrial value by the end of this century (IPCC SRES B1) to continuously increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide at the rate of a bit less than 1% per year (IPCC SRES A2). Each climate model simulating the future is run several times, with several different scenarios. All of this has been standard practice in climate modeling for the past ten years.Pages 11-12 quote my 2003 review paper correctly regarding idealized simulations in which atmospheric carbon dioxide is assumed to increase at the precise rate of 1% per year. Note that in the end of the quoted passage, I say that this rate of increase could “perhaps” be considered realistic “as an extreme case in which the world accelerates its consumption of fossil fuels while reducing its production of anthropogenic aerosols.” I’m no expert on scenarios, but from what I hear about China and India I wonder if the world is already on that track. In any case, the purpose of the 1%-per-year scenarios is to compare different models’ responses to identical input — not to produce realistic possibilities of future climate. For the latter purpose, climate model output from the IPCC SRES B1, A2 and other scenarios has been widely used for several years and has been publicly available for
over two years on my group’s Web site at http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/about_ipcc.php.Finally it is not true, as implied on Page 12, that “sole reliance on models to the exclusion of observed behavior” is the basis of future climate prediction. As noted above, modern climate models are used to
retrospectively simulate the 20th century as well. Simulation of 20th century global warming is an important confidence-builder for climate models. Indeed, the observed warming during the 20th century cannot be explained other than by assuming that the models are reasonably accurate
in their response to greenhouse gases. This point was clearly made by the IPCC report published in 2001. Pages 12-13 ignore all this and instead use “a constant-rate warming” of 1.8 degrees C per century “based on actual observations.” A constant-rate (i.e. straight-line) extrapolation of global warming from the 20th to the 21st century, as in the brief’s Figure 2, is a favorite technique of one of the authors, Pat Michaels. This technique gives 21st century warming at the low end of the spectrum of possibilities resulting from the different model-input scenarios. It is one possible future, but it’s never been clear to me (or to anyone else I know besides Pat) why the other possibilities — all of which involve more global warming — should be ignored.Sincerely,
Curt Covey
—- end of Covey email —
Hope that is helpful to you and other interested parties.
Best,
Scott
A Linkage Between the LIA and Gulf Stream?
Michael Mann & Gavin Schmidt
The precise factors underlying the so-called “Little Ice Age” (LIA) have been intensely debated within the scientific community. One key metric in this debate is the spatial pattern of cooling which may provide a ‘fingerprint’ of the underlying climate change, whether that was externally forced (from solar or volcanic activity) or was part of an intrinsic mode of variability.
Surface temperatures in parts of Europe appear to have have averaged nearly 1°C below the 20th century mean during multidecadal intervals of the late 16th and late 17th century (and with even more extreme coolness for individual years), though most reconstructions indicate less than 0.5°C cooling relative to 20th century mean conditions for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole. There is much less data during these time intervals for the Southern Hemisphere, and that severely limits what conclusions can be drawn there. Just what combination of factors could explain this pattern of observations has remained somewhat enigmatic. A new ingredient in this debate comes with a recent paper in Nature by Lund et al.
[Read more…] about A Linkage Between the LIA and Gulf Stream?
Supreme Court Amicus Curiae from scientists
In the wake of the NY times editorial yesterday, we’ve been asked to provide a link to the Amicus Curiae (draft) written by David Battisti, Christopher Field, Inez Fung, James E. Hansen, John Harte, Eugenia Kalnay, Daniel Kirk-Davidoff, James C. Mcwilliams, Jonathan T. Overpeck, F. Sherwood Rowland, Joellen Russell, Scott R. Saleska, John M. Wallace and Steven C. Wofsy in the current Supreme Court case (Commonwealth of Massachusetts et al vs. US EPA et al). Some discussion of this statement is also available at Prometheus.
Update: The actual brief (of which the first link was a draft) is available here (see comments below).
Update 2: We also note that on the final brief, Mario Molina, Ed Sarachik, Bill Easterling, and Pam Matson were additional signers.
Historical climatology in Greenland
Gavin Schmidt & Michael Mann
Extending the instrumental record of climate beyond the late 19th Century when many of the national weather centers were first started is an important, difficult and undervalued task. It often is more akin to historical detective work than to climatology and can involve long searches in dusty archives, the ability to read archaic scripts and handwriting, and even Latin translations (for instance, when going through the archives of the Paris Observatory) (sounds like a recent bestseller, only less lucrative, no?).
[Read more…] about Historical climatology in Greenland
The sky IS falling
A timely perspective article in Science this week addresses the issues of upper atmosphere change. ‘Upper’ atmosphere here is the stratosphere up to the ionosphere (~20 to 300 km). Laštovička et al point out that cooling trends are exactly as predicted by increasing greenhouse gas trends, and that the increase in density that this implies is causing various ionspheric layers to ‘fall’. This was highlighted a few years back by Jarvis et al (1998) and in New Scientist in 1999 (and I apologise for stealing their headline!).
The changes in the figure are related to the cooling seen in the lower stratospheric MSU-4 records (UAH or RSS), but the changes there (~ 15-20 km) are predominantly due to ozone depletion. The higher up one goes, the more important the CO2 related cooling is. It’s interesting to note that significant solar forcing would have exactly the opposite effect (it would cause a warming) – yet another reason to doubt that solar forcing is a significant factor in recent decades.
Update: The best explanation for the cooling trends can be found on ESPERE (alternative site), in particular, figure 3 (alt. version).
Avery and Singer: Unstoppable hot air
Last week I attended a talk by Dennis Avery, author with Fred Singer of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years (there is a summary here). The talk (and tasty lunch) was sponsored by the Heartland Institute, and was apparently enthusiastically received by its audience. Still whoozy from a bit of contention during the question period, a perplexed member of the audience told me privately that he thought a Point/CounterPoint discussion might be useful (he didn’t know I wrote for realclimate; it was just a hypothetical thought). But here’s my attempt to accommodate. [Read more…] about Avery and Singer: Unstoppable hot air
English vineyards again….
Readers may recall a thorough examination of the history of English wine here a few months ago – chiefly because the subject tends to come up as a contrarian climate talking point every now and again. The bottom line from that post was that the English wine industry is currently thriving and has a geographical extent and quality levels that are unprecedented in recorded history. So whether vineyards are a good proxy for climate or not, you certainly can’t use the supposed lack of present day English vineyards in any serious discussion about climate….
So along comes this quote today (promoting Fred Singer’s latest turnaround) (my emphasis):
“The Romans wrote about growing wine grapes in Britain in the first century,” says Avery, “and then it got too cold during the Dark Ages. Ancient tax records show the Britons grew their own wine grapes in the 11th century, during the Medieval Warming, and then it got too cold during the Little Ice Age. It isn’t yet warm enough for wine grapes in today’s Britain. Wine grapes are among the most accurate and sensitive indicators of temperature and they are telling us about a cycle. They also indicate that today’s warming is not unprecedented.”
Hmmm…. so where did that bottle of Chapel Down in my fridge come from? (thanks Dad!) Or the winners of the ‘Best Sparkling Wine’ for the last two years at the International Wine and Spirit Competition? This is of course a trivial point, but it demonstrates (once again) that our contrarian friends don’t even have a semblence of a desire to get it right. The lure of a talking point clearly trumps the desire for accuracy.
In vino veritas (though not in this case).
Update: We had the Chapel Down Flint Dry last night. Fruity, hints of apple and pear and one of better whites I’ve had in a while. Highly recommended!
Broadly Misleading
Just when we were beginning to think the media had finally learned to tell a hawk from a handsaw when covering global warming (at least when the wind blows southerly), along comes this article ‘In Ancient Fossils, Seeds of a New Debate on Warming’ by the New York Times’ William Broad. This article is far from the standard of excellence in reporting we have come to expect from the Times. We sincerely hope it’s an aberration, and not indicative of the best Mr. Broad has to offer.
Broad’s article deals with the implications of research on climate change over the broad sweep of the Phanerozoic — the past half billion years of Earth history during which fossil animals and plants are found. The past two million years (the Pleistocene and Holocene) are a subdivision of the Phanerozoic, but the focus of the article is on the earlier part of the era. Evidently, what prompts this article is the amount of attention being given to paleoclimate data in the forthcoming AR4 report of the IPCC. The article manages to give the impression that the implications of deep-time paleoclimate haven’t previously been taken into account in thinking about the mechanisms of climate change, whereas in fact this has been a central preoccupation of the field for decades. It’s not even true that this is the first time the IPCC report has made use of paleoclimate data; references to past climates can be found many places in the Third Assessment Report. What is new is that paleoclimate finally gets a chapter of its own (but one that, understandably, concentrates more on the well-documented Pleistocene than on deep time). The worst fault of the article, though, is that it leaves the reader with the impression that there is something in the deep time Phanerozoic climate record that fundamentally challenges the physics linking planetary temperature to CO2. This is utterly false, and deeply misleading. The Phanerozoic does pose puzzles, and there’s something going on there we plainly don’t understand. However, the shortcomings of understanding are not of a nature as to seriously challenge the CO2.-climate connection as it plays out at present and in the next few centuries.
Cuckoo Science
Sometimes on Realclimate we discuss important scientific uncertainties, and sometimes we try and clarify some subtle point or context, but at other times, we have a little fun in pointing out some of the absurdities that occasionally pass for serious ‘science’ on the web and in the media. These pieces look scientific to the layperson (they have equations! references to 19th Century physicists!), but like cuckoo eggs in a nest, they are only designed to look real enough to fool onlookers and crowd out the real science. A cursory glance from anyone knowledgeable is usually enough to see that concepts are being mangled, logic is being thrown to the winds, and completely unjustified conclusions are being drawn – but the tricks being used are sometimes a little subtle.
Two pieces that have recently drawn some attention fit this mold exactly. One by Christopher Monckton (a viscount, no less, with obviously too much time on his hands) which comes complete with supplementary ‘calculations’ using his own ‘M’ model of climate, and one on JunkScience.com (‘What Watt is what’). Junk Science is a front end for Steve Milloy, long time tobacco, drug and oil industry lobbyist, and who has been a reliable source for these ‘cuckoo science’ pieces for years. Curiously enough, both pieces use some of the same sleight-of-hand to fool the unwary (coincidence?).
But never fear, RealClimate is here! [Read more…] about Cuckoo Science