Tag Archives: science

Essays CAN be Enjoyable!

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I’ve been working on two different essays for school this past week. One is about the Grapes of Wrath. Bleccch. The other, however, was much more enjoyable. Compare three journalism texts on the same topic, see how they differ, and why.

I chose to cover the publication of the Kaufman et al study, with articles from the Winnipeg Free Press, New York Times, and Sydney Morning Herald. As my essay ended up being very relevant to the purpose of this blog, I thought I’d publish it here. Enjoy.

On September 4th, 2009, one of the foremost scientific journals in the world published a significant study regarding global warming. Scientists have known for years that the Arctic has been warming at an unusual rate, but, by putting the recent trend in historical perspective, the Kaufman et al study was able to show just how unusual. Nearly every major newspaper in the world covered the publication of the study, some more accurately than others. In this document, three articles, from Canada, the United States, and Australia, are examined.

This issue is not about the warming of the Arctic but, rather, a specific study regarding the warming of the Arctic. Therefore, it is fairly easy to gain an objective basis of the issue, simply by reading the study. The conclusions of the study can then be compared to the newspaper articles to see how well they summarize its findings.

The study in question, “Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling”, was published in Science magazine, which is one of the most reputable scientific journals in circulation. The study was in the field of paleoclimatology, which uses lake sediment, glacier ice, and tree rings to reconstruct past climates. Notably, this study was the first of its kind to reconstruct 2000 years of Arctic climate at a high resolution (temperature measurements which were only years or decades apart). Previous studies of this resolution only measured the Arctic climate of the past 400 years.

The results were striking. As expected from calculations of the Earth’s cyclical changes in orbit, the Arctic was cooling for the first 1900 years. The Holocene thermal maximum (warmest part of the interglacial) was between 6 000 and 10 000 years ago, and the Earth has been slowly moving toward another ice age ever since. However, in the past century, anthropogenic greenhouse gases caused this trend to sharply reverse. The rapid warming, at a rate of 1.4 C/century (compared to the previous cooling of -0.022 C/century), caused the Arctic to become even warmer than it had been at the beginning of the graph. The period of 1999-2008 was, therefore, the warmest decade in the past 2000 years.

It is important to note that the focus of the study was on the previous cooling trend, not the recent warming trend. As observational data is present for the past 100 years of Arctic temperatures, reconstructions were unnecessary. The recent data simply had to be inserted at the end of the process. Therefore, the rapid warming was only mentioned at the very end of the study, occupying less than one page out of four. The recent warming trend, especially in the Arctic, is already common knowledge in the scientific community. It is unsurprising that it took such a minor role in a paper which was, after all, about reconstructing climate from past centuries.

However, “Arctic warmer than in last 2000 years, new study finds”, printed in the Winnipeg Free Press, did not properly articulate this focus. The author, Bob Weber, called the study “groundbreaking”, which is very true, as it provides the first detailed reconstruction of Arctic climate going back farther than 400 years. However, Weber then devoted nearly the entire article to the recent spike in temperatures, implying that it was this recent anthropogenic trend, rather than the detailed reconstruction, which was so groundbreaking. For example, in the introductory paragraph, the study is referred to as providing “real-world evidence to back mathematical climate models that suggest greenhouse gases are behind global warming”. The authors of the study did compare the reconstruction to model simulations, but primarily in the context of the previous cooling, to see how well their data correlated with orbital calculations. They cared much less about how the observational warming data matched up with computer models, as that has been done countless times in other studies. Also, the models do not merely “suggest” that greenhouse gases are behind global warming. “Suggest” is likely too weak a word, especially for members of the general public, who are not well-phrased in the tentative language of science. In fact, there is not a single climate model which has been able to explain the recent warming without taking into account human activities. If there was, you can be very sure that everyone in the climate blogosphere would have heard about it far too many times from angry commenters.

A similar error is made when Weber writes, “The study says the fact that no other major variables changed about that time – there were no large volcanic eruptions, for example – suggests there could be only one culprit for the warming Arctic: carbon dioxide emissions that began increasing rapidly during the Industrial Revolution.” This error is somewhat more grievous than the last, as the study never made such a claim. The lack of an alternative explanation for the recent warming certainly is well known in the scientific community, but it is not covered in this particular study. Saying that it is implies that the study was focused on recent trends in temperature, rather than paleoclimatic reconstructions. Therefore, since the study is “groundbreaking”, the idea of an anthropogenic influence on climate is portrayed as groundbreaking as well – when, in actuality, scientists first began to examine the issue over a century ago. Svante Arrhenius’ claim, in 1896, that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could one day warm the planet was groundbreaking. This study making such a claim was not.

However, changing the focus of the study was not the only error in the Free Press article. Weber made an incorrect choice of words which would have made anyone well-phrased in climatology cringe. When discussing how the study used lake sediment, glacier ice, and tree rings to reconstruct past climate, Weber stated that “all three methods are well-accepted ways of estimating weather.” It is really quite incredible that a science journalist could have gotten away with such an error, as the difference between weather and climate is covered in the first chapter of nearly every book about climate change. In reality, estimating weather with proxy reconstructions is virtually impossible, unless paleoclimatology were to advance to a point where proxy temperature measurements could be determined on a weekly scale. All that can be done – and all that really matters for our purposes – is to estimate climate, the standard conditions of temperature, precipitation, and variability in an area. Climate refers to a long period of time (classically 30 years). It is not affected by conditions of day-to-day weather. As it is, Weber’s assumption that the two words are interchangeable only serves to reinforce public confusion on their differences.

The article concluded with a statement about climate models, claiming that they “are often used by scientists to predict the effects of global warming and are just as often criticized by skeptics as mere speculation”. It is difficult to understand who Weber is referring to as “skeptics”. Does he mean the mobs of angry laypeople, omnipresent on YouTube, amateur blogging sites, and letters to the editor sections, nearly all of whom have little to no scientific background? If so, should we really trust them on the matter of how reliable climate models are? Do their shouts really count as criticism if they don’t know what they’re talking about? Alternatively, perhaps Weber is referring to actual scientists, who understand the physics, mathematics, and statistics of climate models, yet feel that they are little better than random guesses. We have no solid figure as to how many of these scientists exist worldwide, but minimal research shows that most, if not all, of them also hold the belief that humans are not affecting the climate. Such scientists make up roughly 3% of the climatological community (Doran and Zimmerman, 2009). They perhaps make up roughly a dozen worldwide. Giving them space in an article about a credible peer-reviewed paper reinforces yet another public misconception – that scientists are fairly equally split on whether or not humans are the cause of global warming.

Finally, the article was published on page A2 of the Free Press. Any regular reader of this newspaper will know that such a page is the most trivial in the issue. Page A2 is almost entirely covered by ads and indexes. There is a tiny space for an article, which is usually about someone’s lost parrot, or how a digital image of a squirrel is taking over the Internet. It is surprising that such a “groundbreaking” study was printed on this page, instead of in the “Science” or “World” section. What does it say about our mainstream media when an article of such scientific importance is squeezed into the easiest possible place to overlook? What does it say about our society?

Luckily, “Global Warming Could Forestall Ice Age”, printed in the New York Times, did not contain these errors. It was printed in the “Environment” section. Its focus was on the Earth’s glaciation cycles rather than the recent trends in temperature. It did not mention skeptics. The only similar mistake made was a mischaracterization of what was and was not stated in the study. Andrew Revkin, the author, writes that “summer temperatures in the Arctic region would be expected to cool for at least 4000 more years, given the growing distance between the Sun and the North Pole during the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, the study says.” The study did not say such a thing – it was common knowledge long before the study was written, since Milutin Milankovitch first calculated the Earth’s orbital cycles in 1941. Similarly, Revkin states that “the next [ice age], according to recent research, could be 20 000 or 30 000 years off discounting any influence by humans.” Again, this research is not recent. Portraying it as so implies that it is still somewhat shaky and unproven, which could lead the public to wonder if scientists really understand ice ages. Some individuals would be all too eager to claim that the Earth was simply approaching a new thermal maximum, which was causing the warming, not greenhouse gases.

A much more serious and troubling error appears later in the article. Revkin writes that “the ability to artificially warm the climate, particularly the Arctic, could be seen as a boon as the planet’s shifting orientation to the Sun enters a phase that could initiate the next ice age.” Anthropogenic greenhouse gases certainly could offset the next ice age. However, Revkin phrases this idea in a way which suggests that it is a good thing. Multiple misconceptions are present in this chain of logic. Firstly, Revkin assumes that warming is better than cooling. This is an easy assumption to make when you live at high latitudes, such as in the United States. However, from a broader, but still anthropocentric, worldview, it is the amount of change in climate which matters more than the direction it moves in. For example, warming might have some local benefits in North America and Russia, but it also causes subtropical drying, making agriculture in areas such as North Africa, Mexico, and Australia less and less viable. Cooling, in the other hand, allows the boreal forest to expand southward into richer soils, but it also makes the climates of high latitudes less conducive to human settlement. Both warming and cooling would have impacts on ocean and wind currents. Alternatively, perhaps Revkin believes that warming is more conducive to life on Earth. This assumption is incorrect, even at high latitudes – just look at the giant mastadons and other mammals which were present throughout North America during previous ice ages. Warming also causes desertification in some areas of the world, leading to water stresses that can threaten species. It seems obvious that the best situation for any species, including humans, is for the global climate to remain stable. Therefore, the magnitude of any change matters much more than whether it is warming or cooling.

So, let us look at the magnitude and rate of change in the transition to an ice age compared to the observed and expected warming. As the study states, the Arctic was previously cooling at a rate of     -0.022 C/century. This rate remains relatively steady as the Earth moves into a glacial state. However, the present warming is occurring at a rate of 1.4 C/century – 60 times faster, which is expected to accelerate dramatically as it progresses. Obviously, the current change in climate is much more dramatic than a descent into an ice age, and will cause much more stress for people as well as other life on Earth. Anthropogenic global warming is in no way preferable to an ice age.

Critically examining these two North American articles makes one lose faith in popular science journalism. However, when we look at the opposite corner of the world, Australia, a much more accurate article emerges. “Cooling trend of 1900 years reversed in decades” was published online through the Sydney Morning Herald. It is significantly shorter than the other articles, but contains none of the glaring scientific errors. In fact, the study is perfectly summarized in the first sentence of the article, which reads, “The Arctic was cooling for 1900 years because of a natural change in the Earth’s orbit until greenhouse gas accumulation from the use of fossil fuels reversed the trend in recent decades, scientists say.” In a remarkably concise fashion, Renee Schoof, the author, is able to convey the purpose, focus, and conclusions of the survey. The article goes on to explain how the Arctic would still be cooling if it weren’t for human activities, how global warming is expected to affect the Arctic first and foremost, and how warming in that area has serious implications for sea level rise and the stability of methane hydrates. Although the article was short, it lacked the editorial slant of the previous two pieces. One wonders if the Australian society is more accepting of the idea of anthropogenic climate change than North America is, as its media, at least in this instance, does a remarkably better job reporting it.

What does this analysis tell us about the reporting of science, particularly climate change, in North America? As we can see, it’s much worse here than it is in other parts of the world, as the two North American articles contained glaring errors, misrepresentation, and editorial slants which only served to perpetrate popular myths about climate change. The Australian article, in contrast, perfectly summarized the study. Are the Australians better informed, and therefore demand accurate journalism on climate change? Or are their media simply more responsible? Conversely, are North Americans blind to scientific situations which might have policy implications, and thus welcome journalism that downplays the status of the science? Or are the North American media corporations influenced by individuals and think tanks who wish the public to remain confused about whether or not climate change is a serious threat? Perhaps the two sides of the situation, the public and the media, feed off each other. The media influences what the public thinks, and the public expects the media to confirm their preconceived opinions. Once this feedback loop begins, it is difficult to stop. Hopefully it is not impossible.

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?)

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.

Moments of Revelation

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Dr Iain Stewart holding a rock

Dr Iain Stewart holding a rock

Over the past few days I’ve worked my way through the three-part BBC series, Climate Wars, hosted by Dr Iain Stewart, a geology professor with a very cool Scottish accent. An excerpt from this series was featured in one of Peter Sinclair’s videos, which looked quite fascinating, and anything Peter refers to as “brilliant” is probably worth watching.

Worth watching indeed. I’d recommend anyone and everyone to watch this series. It’s basic enough for someone with little to no knowledge of this issue, yet presented in such a compelling way that the most experienced climate scientist wouldn’t get bored.

One of the film’s major strong points was simply the way it was organized. Dr Stewart traced the history of both the science and the politics around climate change, splitting it into three parts:

Part one: Scientists had known for decades that anthropogenic greenhouse gases could cause warming of the Earth, but now, following thirty years of aerosol-induced cooling, global warming was starting to show; almost every year was record-breaking. James Hansen was the first to “stick his neck out” – testifying to Congress that he believed anthropogenic climate change was underway. He later claimed that he had weighed the risks of being wrong and looking stupid, versus doing nothing and not telling the world about such a huge potential threat. Sort of like an early Greg Craven, I suppose. I found this part to be the least interesting of the three. It also began strangely – Stewart mentioned a letter to the US president, signed by top scientists, which warned of an impending ice age. I’d never heard about this before. Does anyone else know more about this letter?

Part two: The skeptics fought back as strongly as they could, questioning absolutely every scientific claim regarding global warming. I found this to be absolutely fascinating; it solidifed a lot of issues in my mind and helped to unify my knowledge on the topic. Stewart went through the research which showed that the Earth was warming as a result of human activities – and showed how all the yelling from skeptics helped to make the theory even stronger. He also “infiltrated the walls” of the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change, which I found to be absolutely hilarious. They had a comedian making bad jokes about how New York could handle some global warming, Monckton and Singer making their usual accusations of fraud (Stewart remarked that “when these become the talking points, then I know that the scientific debate is really over”), and Patrick Michaels publicly admitting “Yes, the second half of the century did show some warming, and it was the result of human activities…..and now you all hate me for saying that…….” Dr Iain Stewart explained that, even though the controversy doesn’t really exist anymore in the scientific literature, the claims of skeptics still live on in the popular media and on the Internet. Instead of fighting a scientific battle, they’re now doing public relations.

Part three: Scientists knew that humans were causing global warming, but how bad would it be? After the brilliance of the second part, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the last segment quite as much…….but I was proven very, very wrong. It both terrified and fascinated me. Terrified because it discussed the Younger Dryas, something I hadn’t really heard of before, where it warmed about 5 C in just a few years. So far beyond anything I thought was possible. When this research was released, the idea that the climate was steady and slow-moving could no longer be embraced.

And then it fascinated me because it was the first time that climate models seemed really, really cool.

The idea of modelling something – anything – on the computer is somewhat unremarkable to me. I am of the generation that literally grew up using computers; I vaguely remember playing astronaut addition games on Windows 3.1 when I was four. I have seen so many things digitalized; the prospect of modelling climate is obviously immense, but it doesn’t amaze me.

But then Dr Stewart made a “dishpan climate model” with a spinning bowl, water with some dye, an ice-cube Antarctica, and a Bunsen-burner Sun. He set it all up and before long…..you could actually see regular patterns in the water’s movements that looked like the prevailing winds. It was so, so amazing. Even more amazing than a complex model on the computer because it was real and tangible and you could touch it. Like a little Earth on the countertop. All of the complex processes of our climate eventually come back to these simple factors. (I want to make one myself. But I don’t have one of those spinny things.)

And then I started wondering what computer modelling would be like, and remembering how much I loved physics last year, how I liked to put four or five algebraic equations together and solve it all in one complicated step to reduce error. Manipulating variables and shifting things around. Like a little puzzle. I was remembering how much I love hard math problems, because you actually have to use your brain, try everything you can think of, stretch the limits of your logic…..and you feel such a sense of accomplishment when you finish that all the work is worth it.

Is a climate model just a really large and complex collection of equations and puzzles that have to fit together in the right way? It would be pretty cool if it was. I knew that studying climate change required a lot of math, but this is the first time that I can see a clear path showing how an issue I care deeply about could coincide with aptitudes I enjoy.