Monthly Archives: Sep 2009

What if the IPCC is Wrong?

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Looking at this title, what do you imagine my implications to be?

By “wrong” do you think I mean “global warming turns out to be natural/nonexistent/a global conspiracy”?

A very interesting sociological phenomenon……In the popular media, we hear so much from people who think that the dangers of climate change have been overstated by the IPCC, and virtually nothing from those who think the dangers have been understated. In fact, I can’t remember ever reading the latter viewpoint in the popular press, while the former presents itself almost weekly on the editorial page.

See, for example, this gem. I haven’t even looked into the quoted statistics (as they’re all from the Science and Public Policy Institute, truly the epitome of credibility….) and already I can guess what sorts of tricks are being played. Picking two convenient years from the last decade, calculating a linear regression, extrapolating that to rate of change per century, comparing that to the IPCC’s worst-case future predictions, and saying “oh look, the IPCC is wrong!” Works for temperature, CO2 concentration, and sea levels.

When the public reads “the IPCC is wrong” enough times in this context, they start to unconsciously equate it with “the IPCC is overestimating the dangers of global warming”. That’s my knee-jerk reaction, too.

I wasn’t even aware of this phenomenon, however, until I read an as-yet-unpublished poll of scientists’ opinions on the IPCC. The abstract says that “there is not a universal agreement among climate scientists about climate science as represented in the IPCC’s WG1”, “there remains substantial disagreement about the magnitude of [climate change’s] impacts”, and “there are….a significant number of climate scientists who disagree with the IPCC WG1 perspective”.

Reading this abstract, it sure sounds like the report found a lot of scientists who think the IPCC has overstated global warming. However, the report found that the IPCC perspective was the mean opinion of climate scientists, and there was a fairly equal minority on each side. 18% thought the IPCC was overestimating, 17% thought the IPCC was underestimating, and the rest thought it was about right.

I am in no way endorsing the findings of this study – as, not being peer reviewed, it wouldn’t pass our comment policy. I am simply using it as an example of how “significant disagreement with the IPCC” really has to be spelled out. The public has been so indoctrinated with the idea that “the IPCC is wrong” equates to “the IPCC is overestimating”, while in reality, it can mean exactly the opposite too.

(To be honest, I’m quite glad that this report wasn’t published without changes to the abstract, because it would be all-too-easy for WUWT et al to take the abstract quotes out of context and parade around saying “look the IPCC is wrong!” A furious blogging storm would begin. We’d be hearing the quotes out of context for years. Peter Sinclair would have to make a video about it.)

There certainly is a chance that the IPCC is overestimating or underestimating the impacts of global warming. In particular, the lag time between collecting data for a publication and the release of the IPCC report could increase error. Gwynne Dyer, in his book Climate Wars (review coming soon), estimated that “most of the data that formed the basis for the IPCC’s 2007 report actually refer to 2002 and earlier.” As few things become out of date faster than climatology data (for example, my chem notes still say that CO2 is at 350 ppm), what we’ve learned in the past 7 or 8 years would likely alter the findings of the IPCC. If we were somehow able to produce a new report instantly, it would interesting to see how the new data made it differ from the AR4. (Does anyone know of a good resource which compared the TAR to the AR4 in this way?)

Another way that the IPCC may seem to underestimate global warming is really very tricky. A lot of their future projections, understandably, are unable to model all the aspects of climate change. Many feedbacks cannot be modelled, especially the release of methane hydrates, so greenhouse gas levels don’t include such feedback processes. The collapse of ice sheets cannot be modelled, so sea-level predictions only account for thermal expansion.

Most of what they can’t model would make the projections a lot worse, but they have no way of knowing how much worse, so they just include, “not including uncertainty in carbon cycle feedbacks”. If you weren’t looking for this disclaimer, you wouldn’t know it was there. And try finding it in the summary for policymakers, which is the only part of the report most people will read.

Gwynne Dyer says it best:

“Leaving the biggest potential feedbacks – methane and carbon dioxide release from thawing permafrost in the higher latitudes, and carbon dioxide release from warming oceans – out of the climate change scenarios that the IPCC generates is defensible in scientific terms, for the did genuinely lack the ability to model them accurately. But, in a report intended for non-scientists, this omission ought to have been highlighted in warning yellow, not buried in the footnotes.”

Does anyone know of a peer-reviewed source which has attempted to include such feedbacks in future projections? In an interview with Dyer, Dennis Bushnell from NASA mentions a rough estimate which calculated a 6 to 12 C warming by 2100 if feedbacks were included. However, I can’t seem to track this down….

The IPCC may seem extreme in some circles, as it supports the drastic notions that the Earth is warming and carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. This basic support for the mechanisms of anthropogenic climate change has led the IPCC to be boxed in to the “climate change is real” camp in the general media, which faces off with an omnipresent “climate change is fake” camp. However, we must realize that there is also a camp that says “climate change is real and even worse than the IPCC estimates”. The IPCC, really, is the median scientific opinion – the “truth somewhere between the two extremes” that the public so wholeheartedly supports. Newspapers obviously aren’t too good at averaging.

Overlap

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It really annoys me when people treat climate change purely as an environmental issue.

I care about the environment, probably more than most people. I pick up litter so birds won’t eat it and get sick. I’m maintaining three composting systems at the moment. When I have my own house one day, I’m going to tear up the sod and let prairie grasses take over the lawn so it becomes a habitat conducive to frogs and sparrows.

But I hold climate change in an entirely different category. It hardly even overlaps with the “environment” section of my brain.

Climate change certainly will severely impact ecosystems and the environment. Wildlife will be forced to adapt, shift its range, or face extinction. Droughts will lead to lower water levels in some areas, which increases the concentration of pollutants. Habitat loss, the other major threat for species, will be aggravated in many areas: forests, coral reefs, year-round ice, and lakes – to name a few – face stress from changes in temperature and precipitation.

But it doesn’t end there. Climate change is way too complex and far-reaching to be labelled as “just another environmental issue”. Yes, it is an environmental issue. But that’s the least of it.

Consider agriculture. A recent study in Science claims that average temperatures in the tropics and subtropics – areas which are home to more than 3 billion people, the majority of whom depend on community agriculture for sustenance and income –  are highly likely (>90%) to exceed even the warmest temperatures on record by the end of this century. “Experimental and crop-based models for major grains in these regions show direct yield losses in the range of 2.5 to 16% for every 1°C increase in seasonal temperature,” the report states, and “despite the general perception that agriculture in temperate latitudes will benefit from increased seasonal heat and supply food to deficit areas, even mid-latitude crops will likely suffer at very high temperatures in the absence of adaptation.”

An even more fundamental requirement for human survival is drinking water. More than one-sixth of people worldwide depend on glacial/snowpack meltwater to drink (IPCC AR4 WG2, 3.4.3), a source which could become threatened in the near future, as “many small glaciers, [especially in the Andes], will disappear within the next few decades, adversely affecting people and ecosystems.”

One of the scariest impacts is sea level rise. Nearly every major city in the world is coastal, and could be wiped out in the centuries to come. We’re only expecting an increase of 0.6 m by 2100, but there’s enough ice in the world to increase the sea level by 80 m, should sufficient warming come to pass. This would take at least a few hundred years, but consider how long some of those coastal cities, such as Amsterdam and Shanghai, have been standing, and how many years of cultural significance they contain. Imagine that we only have a few centuries left before we have to move everything in them – or lose them altogether.

It gets even scarier when you start looking at climate change from a national security perspective, at its potential for political conflict and resource wars. Scientists give the best estimate; but military officials prepare for the worst possible scenario. Unfortunately, most of these documents are classified – I can’t find anything unclassified that would qualify as an acceptable source under our comment policy. However, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (a bipartisan foreign policy think tank) recently published a fairly terrifying report on this topic. I’m also reading a book called Climate Wars, by Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer, which contains cheery scenarios such as the breakup of the European Union (due to drought in southern Europe, leading to conflict with the north for food supplies) and a “Colder War” over Arctic sovereignty.

It’s not just about polar bears. It’s about the life, security, and prosperity of our civilization. It seems radically unfair to classify climate change as one of many environmental problems – somehow implying that it is just an environmental problem, no worse than commercial pesticides or eutrophication. We can’t fix this with a single law. We need more than a change in what kinds of products we buy. This is one of the worst problems, if not the worst problem, of our time purely because its impacts are so far-reaching and it is so hard to fix.

And that’s why it takes up so much more space in my mind.

More Records Threatened….

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The NCDC August report is in! My favourite monthly nerdfest.

(As we can see, the trough situation in central North America has calmed down a bit since earlier in the summer. Actually, since the beginning of September, we’ve had near-record highs in my area. I think July and September switched places.)

This has been the second warmest August on record; the oceans alone are the warmest on record.

Another interesting thing about this month’s report is that we can now see the summary for the season (June-August):

The third warmest on record, behind 1998 and 2005. The oceans were the warmest on record for June-August.

We’re approaching the top of the charts here. It’ll be interesting to see the GISS data when it comes out in January. I wonder how long until we surpass 1998 and 2005?

(Of course, I’d much rather that we never surpassed those years…..but since it seems somewhat inevitable, on the track we’re on……..it’s pretty interesting to watch and wonder.)

Question: are El Niños becoming more common – didn’t we just have one in 2007? – and are they expected to do so with climate change?

Update (22/9/09): Thanks to Joel, who tracked down some citations for the ENSO question – according to part 10.3.4.5 of the IPCC AR4, “there is no consistent indication at this time of discernible future changes in ENSO amplitude or frequency”.

Update (23/9/09): Due to some confusion in the comments, I’d like to clarify that the comment policy for acceptable citations does still apply when we’re discussing ENSO and temperature trends.

An Analogy

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I can’t remember where I first read about this phenomenon. It could have been here, here, or somewhere else entirely.

Whoever it was wrote a brilliant post about the widespread public belief that “the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes”. This belief was a fallacy, the author argued, as one side could easily make themselves as extreme as possible – moving their end of the spectrum so that the centre moves closer to their original position.

“The warming is natural” sounds ridiculous until you compare it to “it hasn’t been warming at all.” Someone says that “CO2 accumulation is caused by volcanoes”, but then someone else claims “CO2 doesn’t even affect the global temperature.” Little by little, the centre – the position between the two extremes, which the public is most inclined to trust – shifts.

This phenomenon reminds me of a math problem from a few years back, which, for whatever reason, stuck in my mind. It had to do with different car companies, and what form of simple averaging – mean, median, or mode – was the most appropriate to honestly convey to customers the price of a typical car.

One company had cars with prices $25 000, $28 000, $23 000, $30 000, and $21 000. (No, I don’t remember the exact numbers. Yes, I am making them up.)

Another company had cars priced $35 000, $31 000, $38 000, $34 000, and $10 000.

See the analogy?

Make one end of the spectrum as extreme as possible, and the mean average – or public opinion – will shift accordingly.

In a public debate such as climate change,  I don’t think we should use the mean. We should use the median. That way, even if the same scientists become progressively more extreme in their views, the public’s interpretation of the credible opinion will stay relatively the same. It’ll only significantly change if that minority of scientists is able to convince the others of their views.

Time-Lapse Glaciers

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James Balog has an amazing, but terrifying, presentation of how different glaciers are retreating, shown on time-lapse cameras that take pictures every hour. Watch it here.

(It looks like I should be able to embed the video, but it’s not working. I hardly know html so I’m probably missing something – I am using the “code” and “/code” buttons, though. Any suggestions?)

The Role of Government

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I think I’m somewhat libertarian. At least that’s what the Political Compass tells me, and it seems to make sense. I tend to believe that people are generally good and will make good decisions when they’re properly informed. I care more for the needs of the individual citizen than I do for the power of the whole state.

I’d certainly rather have socialism, which aims to spend money to help as many people as possible, than conservatism, which aims to save money and maximize personal wealth. Money is imaginary; suffering is not. I’ve known for ages that I’m left-wing, but far more along the lines of Gandhi and Mandela (libertarian) than Stalin (authoritarian).

My ultimate belief is that the actions of the government should adequately reflect the needs and interests of the people. I believe that it’s difficult to achieve this when too much power is given to one person. My ideal system of government, should it become feasible (it certainly would cost a lot), would be a direct democracy – where citizens have the option to vote on every bill, instead of just on their representatives. The government would still exist, but as the group that dished out funding for projects the citizens had voted on, rather than the group that made all the decisions.

It’s not too hard to find examples of how the government’s actions don’t always represent the needs and wants of their citizens. Look, for example, at the American cap-and-trade bill. A Zogby poll found that 71% of Americans favour cap-and-trade, that 67% thought the government was doing either the right amount or not enough about climate change, and that a staggering 45% wanted the government to do more. Here in Canada, where we have more than two parties, 45% support would almost certainly create a minority government. Add in the 22% that thought the American government was doing enough, and you could easily pass all kinds of emissions legislation.

And what is the American Senate doing? Waiting until next year to look at cap-and-trade because they need to spend time on health care. The government is both too large (making all the decisions themselves, whether or not they accurately reflect those who voted for them) and not large enough (unable to focus on more than one major issue at a time).

When we decide what to do about climate change, I strongly believe that our decisions should be based on how the costs and benefits of action vs inaction will affect individual, average people of the world. I am far more concerned about the water security of those who depend on glacial meltwater to drink than I am about the income of an American oil executive.

Everyone is a citizen of the world, even those who can’t vote. Rich people aren’t worth more than poor people. Everyone is equal. And if we held a worldwide referendum on climate change, I have no doubt that we’d find an overwhelming demand for action. Humans are a species like any other, and like all species, we are first and foremost interested in survival.

That’s my take on it. What’s yours?

How and Why

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Ever since Tamino linked to me, essentially tripling my blog hits, it’s become obvious that a lot of my readers and regular commenters are very knowledgable in this issue – more than a few are actually scientists who study climate change.

This has been absolutely fantastic. Whenever I have an inkling of a scientific question, five or six people immediately provide me with further information and links. I’m considering compiling all the questions I have (the answers to which are obviously common knowledge, but researching them is almost impossible as over half the Google hits are from places like the Heartland Institute or Climate Depot, trying to explain how it’s all a big conspiracy) and putting them in a post one day.

This summer, I’ve been reading and researching an incredible amount about climate change, and have even m0re books, websites, and PDFs waiting for my attention. This is what I want to study one day, and every new discovery I make or mechanism I understand is just so cool.

However, I don’t want to lose sight of what this blog is about. I don’t want to get into debates about proxy reconstructions or climate models when I don’t even know calculus yet. I don’t want to try to disprove Steve McIntyre. I don’t want to try to write like Tamino or RealClimate. One day, maybe, and I’m certainly reading that kind of material. But I don’t want to be writing that kind of material, pretending that I know what I’m talking about when I usually don’t.

I’m not a scientist. I’m not even of voting age, and don’t have the educational qualifications to earn anything more than minimum wage. But if climate change is indeed a problem, we have limited time. I’m not going to wait until I know everything about the science and then write about that. While I’m learning the science, I’m going to write about what I do know.

The ultimate purpose of ClimateSight is and always has been to find, expose, and eliminate the discrepancies between scientific knowledge and public knowledge regarding climate change. As it wasn’t too long ago that I knew only what Al Gore and the newspaper told me, and as I’m surrounded by people in that situation in my day-to-day life, I believe I have a very intimate connection to what average non-scientists think about climate change, and why.

A lot of people believe that there are two, fairly equal, competing sides in the scientific community regarding whether or not humans are causing climate change. I believe this stems overwhelmingly from a sense of artificial balance in the media.

A lot of people will read an editorial written by someone who thinks the world isn’t warming, or that humans aren’t causing it, and believe them totally because it seems logical and the more credible sources don’t usually write editorials.

A lot of people seem to think that the scientific question of whether or not human-caused climate change is a physical reality is a personal opinion.

And almost everyone needs to know how to assess credibility and how to find the more credible sources.

I don’t believe that the public decision of whether or not climate change is a problem will really be influenced by technical arguments, regarding a single method or report, between blogs. I don’t believe that these two blogging sides will ever really convince each other. I’m certainly not interested in convincing anyone who has their mind firmly made up. I don’t think we’ll get anywhere, and it won’t really make a difference in the end result.

I believe the answer lies in an informed public. When people know where to get accurate and credible information about climate change, when they know who is and is not worth listening to, when they stop trying to figure out the science themselves and instead decide which scientific sources they will rely on…..then I believe the public will finally either demand swift and dramatic action against climate change, or set it aside as a non-problem.

As someone very connected to the public opinion, I strongly feel that the first outcome is far more likely. Maybe I’m biased, or maybe I’m just hoping too much. But I believe that people generally care about the future, and that the current policy of waffling around the issue of climate change is in direct contradiction to what people would demand if they were fully informed about what the prevailing scientific opinion actually is.

But either decision will only happen if and when the public becomes fully informed, especially about the nature of science and risk management. Our society lives in a democracy, which is a luxury many people in this world, and especially in history, do not enjoy. However, a democracy can easily be misled, and for it to work properly, a fully informed electorate is essential.

And that’s what I’m trying to do here.

A Course for Beginners

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This summer, I’ve spent so much time corresponding with people who know more than I do about climate change – like many of our regular commenters – that it’s always sort of strange to talk to people who are new to this topic. When they don’t know about the Milankovitch cycles, the concept of radiative forcing, or the water vapour feedback, it’s sort of hard to know where to begin.

The purpose of this blog has never been to report on advanced scientific topics. I’d say that I created ClimateSight to explore the discrepancies between scientific knowledge and public knowledge on climate change, and to provide readers with tools and strategies to gain accurate scientific information on the topic.

In the almost-two-years since I became interested in climate change, I’ve read a lot of books, watched a lot of documentaries, and visited a lot of websites. I’ve come across far too many sources which are absolute garbage, a lot which are okay but oversimplified, and a fair few which are absolute gems.

So, if you’re totally new to the topic of climate change, or know a little but want to know more, or know a lot but are always on the lookout for good sources, behold: Kate’s Climate Change Reading List.

The very first place I would start is by reading the book What’s the Worst That Could Happen? High school science teacher Greg Craven discusses the nature of science, credibility, objectivity, and risk managment – all framed around climate change. It’s designed to help the reader make a decision about whether or not climate change is a problem, without having to do any of the science themselves. This book can be ordered from pretty much any major bookstore. I wrote a review of it here.

For those who are interested in how climate science works, the next place to look is Environment Canada’s Frequently Asked Questions about the Science of Climate Change. This PDF document is incredibly thorough, covering every question from “What is climate and how does it differ from weather?” to “Could changes in cosmic radiation from outer space have caused global warming?”, all in a very easy-to-read format using relatively simple language.

Once you’ve read and understood that document, you’re probably ready for the most recent IPCC report. This report, which is a compilation of current scientific knowledge on climate change, is widely considered to be the most credible source of information on the topic. The best place to start is with the Summary for Policymakers, which is much less technical (and much more concise!), but if you want more information on any of the subjects discussed, it’s very easy to choose the appropriate chapter and find what you’re looking for.

By this point, you’ll probably have realized that there are a lot of people out there who are working very hard to prove the idea of human-caused climate change wrong. Many, if not most, of their arguments have no scientific backing. Journalist Peter Sinclair, in his YouTube series Climate Denial Crock of the Week, debunks the most common of these claims, from “it’s the sun” to “global warming stopped in 1998”, all in an incredibly logical and entertaining fashion.

Less visually appealing, and without the background music, but much more comprehensive, is Coby Beck’s series of articles entitled How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic. It’s pretty hard to find an argument against human-caused climate change that isn’t covered here, and you don’t need a lot of scientific training to understand what he’s talking about.

If you liked Greg Craven’s book, by this point you’ll love his video series How it All Ends. It’s directed at a more knowledgable audience than his book did, and contains a lot more to think about and really sink your teeth into, plus some goofy hats, entertaining subtitles, and occasional explosions.

If you feel like you basically understand the mechanisms of climate change, but want to stay on top of current developments, I subscribe to a long (and growing) list of climate change blogs written by scientists. Only In It For The Gold, Island of Doubt, A Few Things Ill Considered, Deltoid, More Grumbine Science, and Tamino are my favourites (commenters are more than welcome to suggest additions to this list).

Enjoy. This is a complex and politically charged subject, but definitely one worth investigating.