Tag Archives: climate change

A Better Term

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The past week or so, there’s been a lot of discussion on the blogs I read about whether or not we should use the term “global warming”. Simon Donner covered it, then Michael Tobis put in his two cents, and Peter Sinclair discussed it on live TV. It got me thinking.

The term “global warming” doesn’t cover the implications of a rising temperature, just the fact that the average global temperature is rising. “Climate change” covers everything.

However, the public is far more acquainted with the term “global warming”, so it makes sense to keep it in use so we are understood. However, this term has led to many misconceptions. To the public, it’s often interpreted as “everywhere-in-the-world-all-the-time warming”. So every time it’s cold in Europe, or it snows on the Atlantic Coast, there are comments of “where’s global warming” from the usual suspects, and even reasonable people start to doubt the phenomenon.

Because we’ll never be able to completely replace the term “global warming” with something more accurate, I think it would be best to slightly alter it, in a way that will reinforce the idea of averages rather than variability, even to people who don’t use it. I think we should call it “net global warming“.

Really, this is exactly what the folks at NASA, NCDC, or any of the other global temperature monitoring stations calculate. They add up all the regional anomalies from thousands of weather stations to find a net anomaly for the entire planet. This way, we don’t know precisely what the absolute global temperature is, but we know how much it has changed overall. Some places are warmer, some places are colder, but this single annual value shows us at a glance what the planet’s temperature is doing.

Even that value doesn’t consistently warm every year – we don’t set a new temperature record every year – because the global climate has enough internal variability to slightly change, from year to year, the percentage of the planet’s heat that is stored at the surface, which is what NASA et al measures. La Niña, which made 2008 cooler than previous years, doesn’t actually change the total heat energy stored on earth. It just sucks some of it out of the atmosphere and into the oceans.

Luckily, La Niña has a friend, El Niño, which does the opposite to net global surface temperatures, so they basically cancel each other out every five years or so. All these short-term cycles of variability – ENSO, sunspots – average out over the years, and as time goes on we stop seeing the noise and start to see the trend. Look at the red line in NASA’s graph, rather than the jagged black line, to see less noise and more trend.

If we can get the idea of “net global warming”, rather than “everywhere-in-the-world-all-the-time warming”, into the public consciousness, our collective understanding of this problem will shoot up. Plus, we’ll be less prone to misleading statements like “It’s cold today, so there is no global warming” or “Warming stopped in 1998“.

Open Letter from U.S. Scientists on the IPCC

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Joining the push for better climate science communication are over 300 US scientists. On March 13, they sent an open letter to US federal agencies about why a few errors in the IPCC AR4 do not impact our understanding of the climate system and the changes occurring, and should not impact our efforts to mitigate and adapt to such changes.

The introduction to the letter reads:

Many in the popular press and other media, as well as some in the halls of Congress, are seizing on a few errors that have been found in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in an attempt to discredit the entire report.  None of the handful of mis-statements (out of hundreds and hundreds of unchallenged statements) remotely undermines the conclusion that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. Despite its excellent performance for accurately reporting the state-of-the-science, we certainly acknowledge that the IPCC should become more forthcoming in openly acknowledging errors in a timely fashion, and continuing to improve its assessment procedures to further lower the already very low rate of error.

Read the full text here.

Over 300 US scientists have signed the letter, and signatures are still being collected. You can view the list of signatures here. I see a few familiar names already (eg Scott Mandia)!

However, I must say that I am profoundly disappointed that the letter can only be signed by American scientists. Although it is intended for American federal agencies, what the US does about climate change will impact the whole world. Firstly, many countries (*cough*cough* Canada) plan to delay action on climate change until the US has a clear plan, so they can follow suit. And, perhaps most importantly, having the largest per-capita emissions and cumulative emissions, as well as the second-largest annual emissions, the US is driving the changes in the climate system with disproportionate responsibility. As its actions will have international repercussions, both politically and environmentally, I believe that the list of signatures should be open to scientists worldwide.

The Best Satire Ever

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A few days ago we covered analogies, and Dan Olner pointed me to a great one that has sparked this post.

It was written as an April Fools’ on RealClimate, and reads in part:

A “consensus view” amongst climate scientists holds that the Northern Hemisphere will be warming this month, as spring is coming. This is thought to be due to the Earth’s orbit around the sun and the inclination of the Earth’s axis, tilting the Northern Hemisphere progressively towards the sun throughout March and April and increasing the amount of solar radiation received at northern latitudes.

In a new novel, State of Euphoria, bestselling author Michael Crikey uncovers major flaws in this theory and warns against false hopes for the arrival of spring.

This is not merely fiction: Crikey underpins his thesis with numerous scientific diagrams. He presents measurements from over a dozen weather stations in the Northern Hemisphere where temperatures show a cooling trend in March. He further cites scientific results which show that in some places, snow and ice have increased in the past weeks, counter to climatologists’ claims that they should be melting away in the spring sun. He further argues that even the average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere has not increased steadily; during one week of March, it showed a slight cooling despite the increase in solar radiation.

“This casts a grave shadow of doubt on the theory of the seasons”, says Crikey. “Consensus science is not good science.” He says we should not trust computer models projecting that June will be much warmer than March in most of the Northern Hemisphere. “These models cannot even predict the weather in two weeks time – why should we believe what they say about temperatures in two months?” He also says that only six months ago, scientists were predicting a cooling.

This wasn’t the only time that RC wrote a satirical post for April Fools’ Day. One of their most popular posts is the Sheep Albedo Feedback:

The hypothesis begins with the simple observation that most sheep are white, and therefore have a higher albedo than the land on which they typically graze. This effect is confirmed by the recent Sheep Radiation Budget Experiment. The next step in the chain of logic is to note that the sheep population of New Zealand has plummeted in recent years. The resulting decrease in albedo leads to an increase in absorbed Solar radiation, thus warming the planet…..There is in fact an important destabilizing feedback in the system: as climate gets warmer, there is less demand for wool sweaters and wooly underwear. Hence the sheep population tends to drop, leading to even more warming. In an extreme form, this can lead to a “runaway sheep-albedo feedback.”

The Christian Science Monitor did an April Fools’ article of its own, which never fails to cheer me up, unless I make the mistake of reading the comments below it. Anyway, it begins:

In an unprecedented move Wednesday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee rescinded the Peace Prize it awarded in 2007 to former US vice president Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, amid overwhelming evidence that global warming is an elaborate hoax cooked up by Mr. Gore.

A press release from the committee quotes a chagrined Rajendra Pachauri, the UN climate panel’s chair, who claims that he was the victim of a “cunning deception spanning decades”:

“I am deeply ashamed for having unwittingly perpetuated such a massive fraud on the governments of the world,” said Mr. Pachauri.

“It turns out that all that data from satellites and radiosondes, surface temperature readings, borehole analysis, measurements of rising sea levels, melting glaciers and permafrost, phenological data, and proxy reconstructions of paleoclimatic conditions were all fabricated out of thin air by my former friend, Al Gore. Now that I think about it, I suppose that we should have instituted some sort of peer-review process before publishing such alarming conclusions. Once again, I’m very sorry.”

If we’re going to talk about satire, we can’t forget DenialDepot, a great example of Poe’s Law. The “About” tab on the home page reads:

I believe that one day all science will be done on blogs because we bloggers are natural skeptics, disbelieving the mainstream and accepting the possibility of any alternative idea.

We stand unimpressed by “textbooks”, “peer review journals” and so-called “facts”. There are no facts, just dissenting opinion. We are infinitely small compared to nature and can’t grasp anything as certain as a fact.

Nothing is settled and we should question everything. The debate is NOT over Gore! When so-called “experts” in their “peer reviewed journals” say one thing, we dare the impossible and find imaginative ways to believe something else entirely.

Be sure to check out the posts on snowstorms, exponentials, the Oregon Petition, and the new theory of climate.

Anything I’ve left out? Share your favourite climate change satire in the comments below.

What The Press Should Cover, and Won’t

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The first of three investigations into the CRU emails has been released. You can read the British House of Commons’ entire report here, but I found the summary on page 7 to be just as useful. In part, it reads:

We believe that the focus on CRU and Professor Phil Jones, Director of CRU, in particular, has largely been misplaced. Whilst we are concerned that the disclosed emails suggest a blunt refusal to share scientific data and methodologies with others, we can sympathise with Professor Jones, who must have found it frustrating to handle requests for data that he knew – or perceived – were motivated by a desire simply to undermine his work.

In the context of  the sharing of data and methodologies, we consider that Professor Jones’s actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community. It is not standard practice in climate science to publish the raw data and the computer code in academic papers. However, climate science is a matter of great importance and the quality of the science should be irreproachable. We therefore consider that climate scientists should take steps to make available all the data that support their work (including raw data) and full methodological workings (including the computer codes). Had both been available, many of the problems at UEA could have been avoided.

We are content that the phrases such as “trick” or “hiding the decline” were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead. Likewise the evidence that we have seen does not suggest that Professor Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process. Academics should not be criticised for making informal comments on academic papers.

In the context of Freedom of Information (FOIA), much of the responsibility should lie with UEA. The disclosed e-mails appear to show a culture of non-disclosure at CRU and instances where information may have been deleted, to avoid disclosure. We found prima facie evidence to suggest that the UEA found ways to support the culture at CRU of resisting disclosure of information to climate change sceptics. The failure of UEA to grasp fully the potential damage to CRU and UEA by the non-disclosure of FOIA requests was regrettable. UEA needs to review its policy towards FOIA and re-assess how it can support academics whose expertise in this area is limited.

DeSmogBlog also has a great summary which you can read here.

We know that the system of climate science is not perfect, and that the folks at CRU did not handle things in the best of ways all the time, but who ever does, especially when you are the target of organized campaigns to discredit your field? The real problem, though, is that everyone who keeps up with North American or British news heard that climate scientists were accused of fudging and manipulating data. There is no evidence to support these allegations, and the House of Commons’ report confirms this. However, I’m not naive enough to believe that the media will cover the result of this “scandal” as intensely as they covered the allegations themselves.

Imagine that you read in the newspaper that a man has been charged with murder. It will be months before you find out the verdict of his trial, and unless it’s OJ Simpson, you probably won’t hear the verdict at all. Many, perhaps most, people would assume that the man is guilty.

We assume that allegations have merit, when – at least when it comes to climate science – they just as often do not.

The Best Analogies Ever

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An analogy is a powerful tool in science communication. Here are two of my favourites to do with climate change.

The first is of my own creation (although it isn’t too original) and came about after I had presented to high school students a few times. As anyone taking high school physics learns pretty quickly, when using the formula F=ma, to find the net acceleration (the actual, observable result) you must always use the net force. If three people are pushing a box three different directions, you can’t just take one person into account. You have to look at all of them to see which way the box will move, and how fast.

Similarly, to analyze observed climate change, you can’t just take one forcing into account. You can’t only look at greenhouse gases and expect that they will track perfectly with the global temperature. You have to look at what the sun is doing, what aerosol levels are doing, where the ENSO cycle is. Climate is influenced by a combination of factors, and it will never track perfectly with any one. But if only one is changing significantly, and the others are staying pretty much steady, it’s obvious which way the box is going to move.

I found the second analogy in David Archer’s book Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast. I’m only two pages in and already I found something that I want to share here!

[The energy budget/climate equilibrium] is analogous to a sink with water flowing in from a faucet. The faucet fills the sink at some constant rate, while outflow down the drain depends on the water level in the sink. The sink fills up until water drains out as fast as it comes in.

It is possible to change the average temperature of the Earth by altering the energy flow either coming in or going out. In our sink, one way to raise the water level is to turn up the faucet and wait a few minutes. The water will rise until it finds a new equilibrium water depth. We can also alter the water level by partly constricting the drain. Egg shells and orange peels work well for this purpose. If the drain is partly obstructed, the equilibrium water level will rise.”

Brilliant, no? I think that Greg Craven had a similar analogy (the “bathtub”) in his book.

What are your favourite analogies – of your own creation or that you heard elsewhere? Share them in the comments below.

Academic Culture From the Inside – a Guest Post by Steve Easterbrook

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Steve Easterbrook is a comp-sci professor at the University of Toronto who has also worked at the University of Sussex and NASA. Recently, he decided to apply his software engineering expertise to the challenge of climate change, particularly relating to climate models.

This post began as a comment on a recent RealClimate post about media coverage of the CRU hack. I liked it so much that I requested his permission to reprint it here. Enjoy!

I’m afraid to say that a lot of the personal emails between academics in any field are probably not very nice. We tend to be very blunt about what appears to us as ignorance, and intolerant of anything that wastes our time or distracts us from our work. And when we think (rightly or wrongly) that the peer review process has let another crap paper through, we certainly don’t hold back in expressing our opinions to one another.

Of course, this is completely different to how we behave when we meet one another. Most scientists seem able to distinguish clearly between the intellectual cut and thrust (in which we’re very rude about one another’s ideas) and social interactions (in which we all get together over a beer and bitch about the downsides of academic life). Occasionally, there’s someone who is unable to separate the two, and takes the intellectual jabs personally, but such people are rare enough in most scientific fields that the rest of us know exactly who they are, and try to avoid them at conferences!

Part of this is due to the nature of the academic research. We care deeply about intellectual rigor, and preserving the integrity of the published body of knowledge. But we also know that many key career milestones are dependent on being respected (and preferably liked) by others in the field, such as the more senior people who write recommendation letters for tenure and promotion and honors, or the scientists with competing theories who will get asked to peer review our papers, etc.

Most career academics have large egos and very thick skins. I think the tenure process and the peer review process filter out those who don’t. So, expect to see rudeness in private, especially when we’re discussing other scientists behind their backs with likeminded colleagues, coupled with a more measured politeness in public (e.g. at conferences).

Now, in climate science, all our conventions are being broken. Private email exchanges are being made public. People who have no scientific training and/or no prior exposure to the scientific culture are attempting to engage in a discourse with scientists, and these people just don’t understand how science works. The climate scientists whom they attempt to engage are so used to interacting only with other scientists (we live rather sheltered lives- they don’t call it the ivory tower for nothing) that they don’t know how to engage with these outsiders. What in reality is a political streetfight, we mistake for an intellectual discussion over brandy in the senior commonroom. Scientists have no training for this type of interaction, and so our responses look (to the outsiders)  rude, dismissive, and perhaps unprofessional.

Journalists like Monbiot, despite all his brilliant work in keeping up with the science and trying to explain it to the masses, just haven’t ever experienced academic culture from the inside. Hence his call, which he keeps repeating, for Phil Jones to resign, on the basis that Phil reacted unprofessionally to FOI requests. You don’t get data from a scientist by using FOI requests, you do it by stroking their ego a little, or by engaging them with a compelling research idea you want to pursue with it. And in the rare cases where this doesn’t work, you do the extra work to reconstruct it from other sources, or modify your research approach (because it’s the research we care about, not any particular dataset itself). So to a scientist, anyone stupid enough to try to get scientific data through repeated FOI requests quite clearly deserves our utter contempt. Jones was merely expressing (in private) a sentiment that most scientists would share – and extreme frustration with people who clearly don’t get it.

The same misunderstandings occur when outsiders look at how we talk about the peer-review process. We’re used to having our own papers rejected from time to time, and we learn how to deal with it – quite clearly the reviewers were stupid, and we’ll show them by getting it published elsewhere (remember, big ego, thick skin). We’re also used to seeing the occasional crap paper get accepted (even into our most prized journals), and again we understand that the reviewers were stupid, and the journal editors incompetent, and we waste no time in expressing that. And if there’s a particularly egregious example, everyone in the community will know about it, everyone will agree it’s bad, and some will start complaining loudly about the editor who let it through.

Yet at the same time, we’re all reviewers, so it’s understood that the people we’re calling stupid and incompetent are our colleagues. And a big part of calling them stupid or incompetent is to get them to be more rigorous next time round, and it works because no honest scientist wants to be seen as lacking rigor. What looks to the outsider like a bunch of scientists trying to subvert some gold standard of scientific truth is really just scientists trying to goad one another into doing a better job in what we all know is a messy, noisy process.

The bottom line is that scientists will always tend to be rude to ignorant and lazy people, because we expect to see in one another a driving desire to master complex ideas and to work damn hard at it. Unfortunately the outside world (and many journalists) interpret that rudeness as unprofessional conduct. And because they don’t see it every day (like we do!) they’re horrified.

A First Step

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Scientists are beginning to fight back against inaccurate climate change journalism, and Simon Lewis is taking one of the first steps. He officially complained to the UK Press Complaints Commission about an “inaccurate, misleading and distorted” article by Jonathan Leake in the Sunday Times.

It’s one of Leake’s many “IPCC errors uncovered” – the AR4’s claim that “up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation”. There was a referencing error for this claim, as Daniel Nepstad explains here (citations within), but the statement is correct.

Tim Lambert contacted the scientists that Leake interviewed and discovered that three different people had told him that the claim was correct before the Times article was published – but he went ahead and called it “bogus” anyway.

Hopefully the PCC will do its job and correct the errors that were made in Leake’s article. However, the misinformation has spread beyond that. Newspapers all over the world – even the highly respected Globe and Mail – have repeated Leake’s allegations. There are a lot of ripples here that can’t be undone.

“There is currently a war of disinformation about climate change-related science, and my complaint can hopefully let journalists in the front line of this war know that there are potential repercussions if they publish misleading stories,” says Simon Lewis.

If only it were as simple as that. Still, it’s a first step.

Sea Turtles and Kids

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A true story. I found it incredibly inspiring, so I wanted to share it with all of you.

A seven-year-old girl was doing a school project on sea turtles, and found out something interesting – that the sex of a fertilized egg depends largely on the temperature in which it is laid. Climate change, therefore, could lead to too many female sea turtles and not enough males, which could further endanger the species. I did a bit of research on this myself (here’s a review paper on the subject) and am absolutely amazed that a seven-year-old was able to grasp something of this complexity.

She told her parents about it that night, and her dad’s reaction confused her. He said that he didn’t believe this theory – that he didn’t think there was any warming and so sea turtles would be just fine.

So the girl went back to school a little confused, and asked her teacher about it, and possibly did some more research, but the gist of the story is that she kept the part about climate change in her sea turtle project. And she presented it to her parents when she was done.

It gives me hope that, even in this time of rampant miscommunication and misconceptions about climate science, there are still people who know how to assess credibility. And some of them are only seven.

A Good Discussion Starter

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How did you become interested in the issue of climate change? What sparked your interest, and why?

For me, it was purely a coincidence. I wanted to get involved in school groups and so I joined the environmental club. I liked a lot of the people in it, and found the discussions very interesting.

Around the same time, my friends and I enjoyed watching the vlogbrothers’ YouTube channel, mostly because they had the same nerdy sense of humour as us. One of the two brothers, Hank Green, ran an environmental technology website called EcoGeek as his day job.

So I was sifting through the archives of EcoGeek and stumbled upon a post about Greg Craven’s Manpollo Project. I watched the embedded first video and was completely hooked. This was exactly the kind of thing I loved – critical thinking, thoughtful discussion with a purpose, lots of science and graphs.

When I caught the flu a few months later, I watched the entire six-hour series over the course of a day. From that point, there was no turning back – I began to research climate change almost every day. I owe my interest/obsession in this topic largely to Greg Craven, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. It’s amazing the ripples one person can make!

What sparked your interest? I’d love to read about it in the comments.

Staying Sane

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A long time ago, I learned to turn off the emotional half of my brain – can’t remember whether it’s right or left – when I read studies about climate change. I look at model results and projections from a purely analytical standpoint. I register how awful the scenarios are, but I don’t let it all the way in. I don’t let myself really think about the consequences. Instead, I think about how cool it is that we can study climate in this way, and how powerful math can be, so I find it quite easy to stay positive and not go completely insane.

I find this much more difficult when I read about climate change communication or policy. I think the analytical, math-loving side of my brain doesn’t have anything to do, so the full weight of the issue falls on the emotional half, and I go sort of nuts.

Take, for example, the bill that’s close to passing through the South Dakota government, requiring schools to teach climate change in a “balanced” fashion, framing it as a “largely speculative theory” that is disproven by astrology (?) Look at how US Senator James Inhofe, former Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, has decided to criminally investigate 17 climate scientists with no evidence of criminal activity. Or how misconceptions spread by several British journalists have even made it into the Globe and Mail. The only misinformation that doesn’t make me angry anymore is the writing of the Heartland Institute and S. Fred Singer, because it’s so ridiculous that it seems like satire, even if it’s intended to be serious.

How do you stand it? How do you stay sane? How do you walk around all day without feeling the heavy weight of the world’s future, tossed aside by people who won’t be around to care?

I find it easy to stay happy when I only look at the scientific side of this issue. But as public communication is becoming absolutely vital for climate scientists, we can’t submerge ourselves in math anymore. Just look at how many editorials Nature has written lately on the abysmal state of climate change journalism. Even the peer-reviewed literature can’t stay separate from public communication and policy.

Most of you have been at it longer than I have. How do you cope? We’re going to need to figure it out, because our sanity is needed now more than ever.