Any book that manages to link together the lessons of the Bible, Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, and Lady Gaga (not to mention Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Bob Dylan, and Jerry Seinfeld), can’t be all bad. With Joe Romm’s new book Language Intelligence, it is, in fact, ALL good. There are lessons galore for the scientists among us who value public outreach and communication. The book is a de facto field guide for recognizing and assimilating many of the key tools of persuasive language and speech, something that is ever more important to science communicators who face the daunting challenge of having to communicate technical and nuanced material to an audience largely unfamiliar with the lexicon of science, sometimes agnostic or even unreceptive to its message, and—in the case of contentious areas like climate change and evolution—already subject to a concerted campaign to misinform and confuse them.
[Read more…] about Language Intelligence – Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga: A Review
Search Results for: Hockey Stick
Yamalian yawns
Steve McIntyre is free to do any analysis he wants on any data he can find. But when he ladles his work with unjustified and false accusations of misconduct and deception, he demeans both himself and his contributions. The idea that scientists should be bullied into doing analyses McIntyre wants and delivering the results to him prior to publication out of fear of very public attacks on their integrity is ludicrous.
By rights we should be outraged and appalled that (yet again) unfounded claims of scientific misconduct and dishonesty are buzzing around the blogosphere, once again initiated by Steve McIntyre, and unfailingly and uncritically promoted by the usual supporters. However this has become such a common occurrence that we are no longer shocked nor surprised that misinformation based on nothing but prior assumptions gains an easy toehold on the contrarian blogs (especially at times when they are keen to ‘move on’ from more discomforting events).
So instead of outrage, we’ll settle for simply making a few observations that undermine the narrative that McIntyre and company are trying to put out.
[Read more…] about Yamalian yawns
Another well-deserved honor: Oeschger medal awarded to Michael Mann
As many will have already heard, our colleague, RC co-founder and friend Michael Mann will receive the Oeschger medal from the European Geosciences Union this week in Vienna. We are delighted to announce this and to congratulate Mike.
Hans Oeschger was a Swiss scientist originally trained as a nuclear physicist. His name is well known in climate science, especially because of his discovery, with Willi Dansgaard, of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events (the rapid climate changes during the last glacial period, first observed in Greenland ice cores). He was even better known in the radiocarbon research community as famously having developed one of the first instruments (the “Oeschger counter”) for measuring carbon-14. This paved the way for determining the age of very small organic materials, including samples from deep-sea sediment cores, which eventually led to the validation of the Milankovitch theory of ice ages. Oeschger and his colleagues in Bern were the first to measure the glacial-interglacial change of atmospheric CO2 in ice cores, showing that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 during the glacial period was 50% lower than the pre-industrial concentration, a result predicted by Arrhenius nearly a century earlier. Oeschger may thus be credited with work that was critical to validating two of the most important theories in science: the role of CO2 in climate change, and the role of changes in the earth’s orbit. Oeschger was also an accomplished musician, and was known to join colleagues in playing chamber music at the International Conference on Radiocarbon.
Oeschger left rather large shoes to fill, and it is a great honor for Mike Mann to win an award bearing Oeschger’s name. Most everyone will probably assume that the award is for Mike’s well known “hockey stick” work. No doubt this is part of it, but the Oeschger award has never been given simply for the publication of one study, but rather for a career’s-worth of outstanding achievements. Most of the previous medalists are a good deal more senior than Mike Mann, and include paleoceanographer Laurent Labeyrie, limnologist Francoise Gasse, ice core pioneers Dominique Raynaud and Sigfus Johnsen and number of other major names in the climate and paleoclimate research, including RC’s own Ray Bradley.
Mike’s work, like that of previous award winners, is diverse, and includes pioneering and highly cited work in time series analysis (an elegant use of Thomson’s multitaper spectral analysis approach to detect spatiotemporal oscillations in the climate record and methods for smoothing temporal data), decadal climate variability (the term “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation” or “AMO” was coined by Mike in an interview with Science’s Richard Kerr about a paper he had published with Tom Delworth of GFDL showing evidence in both climate model simulations and observational data for a 50-70 year oscillation in the climate system; significantly Mike also published work with Kerry Emanuel in 2006 showing that the AMO concept has been overstated as regards its role in 20th century tropical Atlantic SST changes, a finding recently reaffirmed by a study published in Nature), in showing how changes in radiative forcing from volcanoes can affect ENSO, in examining the role of solar variations in explaining the pattern of the Medieval Climate Anomaly and Little Ice Age, the relationship between the climate changes of past centuries and phenomena such as Atlantic tropical cyclones and global sea level, and even a bit of work in atmospheric chemistry (an analysis of beryllium-7 measurements). Mike’s earliest work, as a physicist, involved studying the behavior of liquids and solids, and trying to understand phenomena such as the structural ordering of high temperature superconductors. In the earth sciences, he has published on topics as varied as the recovery from the KT-boundary mass extinction event and the factors driving long-term changes in the volume of the Great Salt Lake. He has studied and published on the impacts of historical and projected climate change on everything from the behavior of the Asian Summer Monsoon, to Atlantic Hurricanes, to rainfall patterns in the U.S. And for those interested in the hard-nosed statistics by which a scientist’s productivity gets measured, a quick check on the ISI web site will tell you that he has an “H Index” of 40 (that means that 40 of his papers have been cited at least 40 times), more than twenty of his papers have over 100 citations each, and two have over 700. Those are high numbers by any comparison.
But back to the hockey stick. Mike has weathered some rather intense scrutiny and criticism over the years, mostly over the details of a paper nearly 15 years old. Yet the basic conclusions of the “hockey stick” remain, and indeed have been strengthened by subsequent work. Most will be aware, for example, that the conclusion that the past few decades are likely the warmest of the past millennium — i.e. the conclusion of the best-known of Mike’s papers in Nature and Geophysical Research Letters –has never been seriously challenged. But well beyond the simple fact of having been right, Mike’s work was seminal, like Oeschger’s, in playing a pivotal role in launching an entirely new field of study. Although some earlier work along similar lines had been done by other paleoclimate researchers (Ed Cook, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Ray Bradley, Malcolm Hughes, and Henry Diaz being just a few examples), before Mike, no one had seriously attempted to use all the available paleoclimate data together, to try to reconstruct the global patterns of climate back in time before the start of direct instrumental observations of climate, or to estimate the underlying statistical uncertainties in reconstructing past temperature changes. Since Mike’s pioneering work (starting in 1995), hundreds of papers have adopted the basic approach he pioneered, and numerous PHD projects have been launched to try to improve upon it. Methods have improved of course, and no doubt will improve further (paleoclimate reconstruction using weather forecast data assimilation methods is the latest and most promising recent development). That Mike is a co-author on many of the latest and most innovative publications in this area — with dozens of different people — attests to the groundbreaking nature of his work.
We look forward to seeing Mike’s award lecture in Vienna, and we offer our heartfelt congratulations to a well-deserved honor. And while we are at it, we should congratulate Mike in advance for his election as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union; that honor will be bestowed this fall in San Francisco.
Finally, we would be remiss to not mention that Mike has spent much of the past few months touring and lecturing on his experiences as an accidental and reluctant public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change, as detailed in his recent book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.
P.S. For those at EGU, you should also check out glaciologist Ian Joughin’s award lecture (Wednesday evening) for the Agassiz medal, for his important work in documenting and understanding the acceleration of Antarctica and Greenland’s glaciers.
Climate cynicism at the Santa Fe conference
Guest commentary by Mark Boslough*
The Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate Change was held during Halloween week. It was most notable for the breadth of opinion — and the span of credibility — of its speakers. I have long complained about the lack of willingness of most contrarians to attend and present their arguments at mainstream scientific conferences. After three years of convening climate-related sessions at AGU, I have yet to receive an abstract that argues against anthropogenic global warming. Such presentations can usually only be seen at conferences held by the Heartland Institute. There isn’t much chance of a mainstream scientist attending a meeting organized by a political think tank known for its anti-science activism, so opportunities for interaction between the groups are rare.
[Read more…] about Climate cynicism at the Santa Fe conference
Friday round-up
A few items of interest this week.
Paleoclimate:
1. A new study by Spielhagen and co-authors in Science reconstructs temperatures of North Atlantic source waters to the Arctic for the past two millennia, adding another very long-handled Hockey Stick to the ever-growing league.
2. From last week, an article in Science Express by Buntgen et al reconstructing European summer temperature for the past 2500 years, finding that recent warming is unprecedented over that time frame, and providing some historical insights into the societal challenges posed by climate instability (listen here for an interview with mike about the study on NPR’s All Things Considered).
3. The team of ice core researchers at WAIS Divide reaches its goal of 3300 meters of ice. [WAIS Divide, central West Antarctica, is a site of significant warming in Antarctica, over at least the last 50 years, a result recently confirmed by the study of O’Donnell et al. (2010); Stay tuned for more on the that soon].
Other Miscellaneous Items:
1. More in Nature on data sharing.
2. A great primer in Physics Today on planetary energy balance from our very own Ray Pierrehumbert (link to pdf available here).
3. Now shipping are David and Ray’s The Warming Papers and Ray’s Principles of Planetary Climate.
Doing it yourselves
We’ve been a little preoccupied recently, but there are some recent developments in the field of do-it-yourself climate science that are worth noting.
[Read more…] about Doing it yourselves
The Montford Delusion
Guest commentary by Tamino
Update: Another review of the book has been published by Alistair McIntosh in the Scottish Review of Books (scroll down about 25% through the page to find McIintosh’s review)
Update #2 (8/19/10): The Guardian has now weighed in as well.
If you don’t know much about climate science, or about the details of the controversy over the “hockey stick,” then A. W. Montford’s book The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science might persuade you that not only the hockey stick, but all of modern climate science, is a fraud perpetrated by a massive conspiracy of climate scientists and politicians, in order to guarantee an unending supply of research funding and political power. That idea gets planted early, in the 6th paragraph of chapter 1.
The chief focus is the original hockey stick, a reconstruction of past temperature for the northern hemisphere covering the last 600 years by Mike Mann, Ray Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes (1998, Nature, 392, 779, doi:10.1038/33859, available here), hereafter called “MBH98” (the reconstruction was later extended back to a thousand years by Mann et al, 1999, or “MBH99” ). The reconstruction was based on proxy data, most of which are not direct temperature measurements but may be indicative of temperature. To piece together past temperature, MBH98 estimated the relationships between the proxies and observed temperatures in the 20th century, checked the validity of the relationships using observed temperatures in the latter half of the 19th century, then used the relationships to estimate temperatures as far back as 1400. The reconstruction all the way back to the year 1400 used 22 proxy data series, although some of the 22 were combinations of larger numbers of proxy series by a method known as “principal components analysis” (hereafter called “PCA”–see here). For later centuries, even more proxy series were used. The result was that temperatures had risen rapidly in the 20th century compared to the preceding 5 centuries. The sharp “blade” of 20th-century rise compared to the flat “handle” of the 15-19th centuries was reminiscent of a “hockey stick” — giving rise to the name describing temperature history.
[Read more…] about The Montford Delusion
The Economist does not disappoint
The March 20th -26th cover story of The Economist, “Spin, science and climate change,” deftly bypasses the politics surrounding ‘climategate’, to tackle the more important issue: whether any of this has any bearing on climate change science and policy. This is a refreshing bit of journalism that everyone should read.
[Read more…] about The Economist does not disappoint
Climate scientist bashing
A new popular sport in some media these days is “climate scientist bashing”. Instead of dealing soberly with the climate problem they prefer to attack climate scientists, i.e. the bearers of bad news. The German magazine DER SPIEGEL has played this game last week under the suggestive heading “Die Wolkenschieber” – which literally translated can mean both “the cloud movers” and “the cloud traffickers” (available in English here ). The article continues on this level, alleging “sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations”. By doing so DER SPIEGEL digs deeply into the old relic box of “climate skeptics” and freely helps itself on their websites instead of critically researching the issues at hand.
[Read more…] about Climate scientist bashing
The Guardian responds
We recently ran two articles that were quite critical of aspects of the Guardian’s coverage of the stolen emails. This is a response from Dr. James Randerson, the editor of the Guardian’s environmental website.
I edit the Guardian’s environment website and was part of the editorial team that produced the 12-part investigation by veteran science journalist Fred Pearce into the hacked East Anglia climate emails. I’m very grateful to RealClimate for giving us the opportunity to respond to the recent posts on the investigation: “The Guardian Disappoints” and “Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind”.
[Read more…] about The Guardian responds