The Cowardice of the Media

Another approach to understanding the cowardice of the media is to contemplate the litigious nature of the partisans.

Journalist Amy Fisher on being sued by anti-vaccine extremists for accurate reporting:

So, we won. But not before thousands of hours (and countless dollars) were spent proving how fair the story was. This is the nature of the beast. And the beast doesn’t tire, it seems, of taking whacks at those who dare to describe it.

A few weeks ago, Age of Autism caught wind of the fact that my Wired article is going to be included in the next edition of the annual compilation Best American Science Writing. The site promptly published a post. “Remember Amy Wallace? I sure wish I didn’t,” the writer began, adding: “For those lucky enough not to, I apologize for ruining your day.”

The post then asserted that the inclusion of my Wired piece in the book was simply payback from the pharmaceutical industry. How, you may wonder, did they make that leap? Well, this year’s collection is being edited by Dr. Jerome Groopman, the Harvard professor, scientist and writer. And according to Age of Autism, “Drug companies Immunex and Hoffman-La Roche have funded Groopman’s research. He has authored a chapter on viral infection in a symposia published by Novartis, and has served on the speaker’s bureau of Ortho Biotech, a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson...”

They keep going in their list of supposed conflicts, but you get the idea. The point is this: When you enter the vaccine-thicket, one thing you can rely upon is that experts will be vilified. To the extent you attempt, with thorough reporting, independent research and cogent analysis, to become something of an expert yourself, you likely will be labeled a villain, too.

And then, what if a partisan gets to be attorney general?

The fact that the courts seem to remain sane on many of these cases is some consolation. But litigation is not fun (especially for the defendant) or cheap, and not every judge is all that well-grounded in reality.

Props for Jay

Jay Rosen is the person best at making sense of modern journalism, especially in America.

He doesn't usually think of science journalism in particular, but his comments are often strikingly on target for our interests as well.

There's an excellent interview with Rosen in The Economist

Some of it reflects on the quandary that someone like Revkin faces:

I do not think journalists should "join the team". They bridle at
that, for good reason. Power-seeking and truth-seeking are different
behaviours, and this is how we distinguish politics from journalism. I
think it does take a certain detachment from your own preferences and
assumptions to be a good reporter. The difficulty is that neutrality
has its limits. Taken too far, it undermines the very project in which
a serious journalist is engaged.

Suppose the forces that want to convince Americans that Barack Obama
is a Muslim or wasn't born in the United States start winning, and
more and more people believe it. This is a defeat for journalism—in
fact, for verification itself. Neutrality and objectivity carry no
instructions for how to react to something like that. They aren't
"wrong", they're just limited. The American press does not know what
to do when neutrality, objectivity, balance and "report both sides"
reach their natural limits. And so journalists tend to deny that there
are such limits. But with this denial they've violated the code of the
truth-teller because these limits are real. See the problem?

Yep.

That's the whole problem in a nutshell, along with the fact that journalists are stunningly blind to the problem.

There is a tradeoff between valid goals: on the one hand, journalistic independence, and on the other, journalistic participation in actually evaluating the truth of competing narratives. On the whole, journalists overvalue independence and undervalue truth. In the limiting case they become utterly useless.

---

Portrait of Jay Rosen lifted from the cited Economist piece

Fox Clears Everything Up Tonight

via National Review

Sean Hannity will host a special on global warming tonight at 9 p.m. EST on Fox News.

They clearly dedicated time and energy to this over the past several weeks, including lengthy interviews with me and a couple of colleagues.

DVR it to torture certain dinner and holiday guests.

Chris Horner

I am sure Fox will apologize for all the wild allegations of the last few months, right? Right?

Quote of the Week, Elaborated

Hi Michael - as I write below, I was indeed pleased and surprised to see my quote at the top of your blog. But it is sufficiently different from what I would say if I were to craft the sentence carefully, that I felt motivated to elaborate. I don't want you to alter the quote itself because any alteration would be no more faithful to the original than your version. But if you feel like posting the letter, I try to clarify and justify the argument. Fairly concisely, or at least that was my goal.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks,

--Paul

A word from the horse’s mouth…

I was surprised and pleased to see my words at the top of MT’s blog. It wasn’t a perfect quote of what I think I said, but I’d already forgotten the exact words when Michael asked me to repeat it mere seconds after.

What do I mean “to scare the people out of their wits”? Well, the “out of their wits” part is just melodrama. But the part about scaring people is completely serious.

I believe strongly that the threat of anthropogenic climate change is such that fear is the proper response. In a very real sense what we are doing may kill (many of) us. For those of us in the wealthy world, the risks may be smaller and come later. But deaths from extreme events, famines or other causes are growing steadily more likely with our GHG emissions, and while we may or may not be the victims, we are responsible even if we are not. And it is first and foremost those who understand best why that is so – the scientists who study the subject – who must convince the rest of us to fear the consequences of not acting.

This of course is a major simplification of the situation. I will not raise issues of the transmission of ideas and arguments between scientists, politicians, activists, the media and others. But the point is this: those of us who have seen the picture and have been scared by it – a reaction that is widespread in the scientific community – are morally obligated to do our best to get others to feel the urgency and severity of the problem. For there to be a possibility to act to prevent it, it is necessary both to believe that climate change is a huge risk, and to have an emotional reaction to that belief.

The last part of the quoted statement – that scientists are ill-trained and ill-suited for this task – I suspect is less controversial than the claim that it should be our task. The question then is, if you buy the premise that how to deal with the fact that scaring people is not part of our job description: what we should actually do? I will end here with only this thought: it can't be done quickly, but it can't be done quickly enough.

"Super-Extreme" Weather in Indonesia

Jakarta Globe, August 19 2010:

Jakarta. Indonesia has been experiencing its most extreme weather conditions in recorded history, meteorologists warned on Wednesday as torrential rains continued to pound the capital.

All regions across the archipelago have been experiencing abnormal and often catastrophic weather, an official from the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) said.

“We have reached a super-extreme level of weather this year, the first time in our history, and this is much worse than what we experienced back in 1998, when the La Nina caused extreme weather in the country,” Edvin Aldrian warned.

Edvin, who leads the climate change and air quality division at the agency, told the Jakarta Globe that a combination of a heating planet and the La Nina climate cycle were behind the unseasonable downpours.

“The combination of global warming and the La Nina phenomenon makes everything exceed normalcy,” he said, adding that global warming causes higher temperature in sea waters, and La Nina boosts humidity and the likeliness of rains.

Sea temperatures, Edvin said, were also at a level considered normal for Indonesia’s rainy season, not for the dry season. “It is about 28 to 29 [degrees] Celsius now. Normally, for August it should have been around 24 to 26 degrees.”

Mongabay.com August 16, 2010:

A large-scale bleaching event due to high ocean temperatures appears to be underway off the coast of Sumatra, an Indonesian island, reports the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

An initial survey by the conservation group's "Rapid Response Unit" of marine biologists found that 60 percent of corals were bleached. Follow up assessments "revealed one of the most rapid and severe coral mortality events ever recorded" with 80 percent of some species dying.

"It's a disappointing development particularly in light of the fact that these same corals proved resilient to other disruptions to this ecosystem, including the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004," WCS Indonesia Marine Program Director Dr. Stuart Campbell said in a statement.

Campbell, and other members of the research team, linked the event to a sharp rise in sea surface temperatures in the Andaman Sea. Temperatures reached 34 degrees Celsius (93°F)—4 degrees Celsius higher than long term averages for the area—in May 2010.

“If a similar degree of mortality is apparent at other sites in the Andaman Sea this will be the worst bleaching event ever recorded in the region,” according to Dr. Andrew Baird of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University. “The destruction of these upstream reefs means recovery is likely to take much longer than before”.

This appears to be, at least as yet, nothing on the scale of what has happened elsewhere in terms of human impact, but is another substantial climatological anomaly. There appear to be some crop losses in Indonesia as well.

Of course, coral mortality leads to reduced fish catches, too.

Is Anthropogenic Forcing Quasi-Linear?

In following up on the World Climate Report (Pat Michaels' sute) article comparing 1936 to 2010


July 1936 T anomaly



July 2010 T anomaly


a couple of folks have hastened to provide anomaly maps of 1936 and 2010 on the same scale. Sure enough, they are not exactly identical. (Click for better images) Surely the author of the article ought to have done as much. In fact, it isn;t difficult to produce comparable anomaly maps here as contributor NewYork points out.

I'm not sure how compelling this all is either way.

What I find even less compelling is the argument on the WCR site from telconnection indices. That just restates the problem; it doesn't resolve it. And then there is this:

The WCR article concludes:

There are several things of note:

1) The July 2010 combined value is the highest since 1950—nearly 50% greater than the second highest value which occurred in 1952.

2) The combined index has been mostly positive since 1981, and mostly negative from 1955 through 1980. This behavior imparts an overall positive trend since 1950.

3) The 2010 value is about 3 times greater than the value expected based on the trend alone.

Is anthropogenic global warming behind any of this behavior?

It is hard to know for sure, but one thing that is certain is that if global warming does have a hand in the game (perhaps through the trend term), what it’s holding is pretty weak.

(emphasis added).

The argument seems to be that since this year is so far off the trend line, that the anomaly cannot possibly be caused by the same "thing" that caused the trend. One would expect a sounder argument from a professional, but I am seeing versions of this all over the place. The system is nonlinear. There are thresholds, and regime shifts. "Tipping points" if you will. The current year is so anomalous in so many ways that it demands explanation. The fact that it is off the trend line is no secret. The idea that its strangeness cannot possibly be because of anthropogenic forcing since the trend itself has been modest simply doesn't hold water.

Examples in mundane life? How about blowing up a balloon? The more pressure you put into the balloon, the larger it gets. Up to a point. Then the balance of forces shifts, and it finds a new equilibrium, in shreds all over the room.

This reminds me of the argument that n-g made about the fraction of the Nashville flood (the earlier one, remember?) attributable to anthropogenic change. I simply don't think these linear arguments stand. There are reasons to anticipate new configurations of the atmosphere during the rapid shifts we have now initiated. It's not reasonable to assume that it's just business as usual plus a gentle additive trend in all variables. It may turn out that way (one can hope) but you can't assume it. And on the evidence of this year, that mild scenario is not the one that is going to play out.

To be fair, the WCR article didn't really commit to this argument, but it seemed to me to wave in that general direction. A lot of the people who think we are not in very deep trouble seem to have a small-perturbation view of anthropogenic climate change. But it's only a small perturbation until it ain't, and nobody really knows when nonlinear adjustments cut in. The simulation models seem unexcitable on this front, but how much do we trust the simulations outside the realm of observational experience?

Fair is Fair

I'm not a great fan of Pat Michaels. But whether you like a person or not doesn't affect whether they are right or wrong.

In the context of whether recent events in eastern Europe and western Asia have a precedent, Michaels comes up with this.


Surface temperature anomalies (°C) for July, 1936 (figure from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies).

It certainly looks like the same pattern we saw this year over the eastern hemisphere, perhaps slightly less intense, but not much so. North America is different, but ENSO is neutral to cool and the Atlantic is hot, similar to this summer. This calms me down a bit, since I don't actually want an unprecedented climate disaster.

Further, let's admit this gives ammunition to RP Jr., who says disasters are MORE about human habitation and management practices than about weather extremes. In fact that is true, and Roger's tendency to overemphasize it at the expense of other factors shouldn't cause us to forget it.

While this may take a bit of the edge off of recent arguments, neither of these items should encourage us to let down our guard too much. First of all, the Pakistan human disaster is BECAUSE of water management, not despite it: the population has greatly increased because the Indus river has been channelled and diverted all across the otherwise barren land. So now there is a much enhanced population in a much expanded flood plain. (I think Russian mismanagement of their environment both pre and post communist is well-known and demonstrated here.)

Secondly, even if the pattern is not entirely unprecedented, it is not a good pattern. So while the attribution to climate change may be weakened (and again, let's not jump the gun in either direction here, let's let the weather guys think about it for a while) it still isn't good news that we are seeing wild oscillations, and we still have reasons to suspect these are becoming more frequent.

Finally, we still have an open question. How will we know when we've "rolled a 13"?

Seeking Inexpert Review

I realize that the Red and Blue dialogs here and here are not my usual fare. I have often said that this blog isn't intended for a general audience, though of late I've been trying to shift toward a broader appeal.

The dialogs are a proposed format for an extended series of outreach pieces for a very broad audience.

I'd like feedback, not so much from regular readers, as from their associates who might not be especially interested in science or who might be young novices.

So if you would be so kind as to pass these pieces on to such people of your acquaintance and ask them to contribute an opinion, I'd greatly appreciate it.

I seek feedback on whether this informal dialog format is seen as accessible, and effective in at least identifying and describing the issues. (I don't expect it to be entirely convincing as yet; that will take some more work.) In particular, I would like to know whether some people outside the climate tribes find it interesting enough to want more.

The Red and Blue Show, Episode 2

Yo, Blue!

Hey Red, How are things?

Not too bad, but didn't we leave off in the middle of something important a few days ago?

I guess so, ready to move it on forward a bit?

Sure.

So, like, remind we where we left off, cause there was quite a lot of it!

Sure. Do you remember where we started?

You asserted the existence of the greenhouse effect and increasing CO2...

I asserted with confidence that the greenhouse effect is real and commonplace, and that CO2 is increasing demonstrably.

Would you say "the science is settled"?

I would say that the question of whether there is a greenhouse effect, and how it works in enormous and precise detail, is worked out about as well as anything in physics.

I would say that the observation of anthropogenic carbon dioxide not just increasing in the air but ACCUMULATING in the air is observed about as well as any observationally based conclusion in earth sciences.

Seriously, Blue, would you say the Science is ... ... Settled???

I try to avoid those exact words ("The S is S") because of an old denialist trick that they will be happy to wheel out on any occasion. But if you're serious, sure, those two questions are two settled questions. OK?

Whooaa... Chill... dude...

So then I asked if it was enough CO2 to make a difference, as if I didn't know the answer to that one.

Yeah, but it was the right question to ask at that moment, so thanks. Then what?

I asked about global warming and the conversation suddenly got all complicated and you were all worked up about something.

Worked up! You have no idea!

OK, We'll review, cause this is the part where we start diverging from the conventional wisdom a bit.

First of all, the sensitivity is likely between 2.5 C and 3 C per CO2 doubling or equivalent. Nature might add to the carbon we release, but (knock wood) probably not immediately that much. Our distant descendants, should we manage to have any, may have to deal with it on a big scale in thousands of years.

Um, didn't you used to say that about ice sheets?

Err, yes, we used to, and we don't anymore. Heh. Anyway, let's leave the methane business aside for now, we are trying to get at the core of the argument.

So 2.5 C to 3.0 C?

Probably between 2.5 C and 3 C per CO2 doubling or equivalent (or really 0.6 to 0.7 C perW/m^2 at the TOA).

err, I'll take the first one, thanks

and almost surely between, say 1.5 and 5C .

Hang on! Hang on! I saw you said 2.5 on Kloor's. Isn't that false precision?

It's spelled "2.5", its pronounced "roun' two 'n'hafferso", and it means "between 2.5 C and 3 C" . Did you want me to say "2.75"? That would be even worse false precision and sound even more arrogant!

Why not just "about three", so you don't sound stuck up like that?

Because then them sumbutches'd get on muh case for exaggeratin'!!!

Say, how come you sound all Texan when you get excited?

Wah thuhail not?

So now you're going to talk about the weird events in Asia?

We'll talk about it after the commercial break

COMMERCIAL BREAK

What was that all about?

Man's got t'earn a livin'

OK, so you have this sensitivity number pinned down, and so you know more or less how much co2 or equivalent would cause so much heating? But how much is too much?

"Warming" is better than "heating" here... It's an important distinction.

That said, that's the part that is what you might call "unsettled". There's been an international consensus on the political side that we ought to avoid so much climate change that it is "dangerous", which brings us to what people are starting to call "climate disruption". But at this point it gets out of physical science and a whole lot of other stuff kicks in.

Like what, for instance?

There's ecology and wildlife management. There's agriculture. There's water supplies. There's public health. There's flood control. There's tourism. There's shipping. Lots of really big systems developed in a stable climate and need to ask themselves what will happen to them. And all the other systems will change too. And all of this will feed back through the economy and back into energy demand.

Many major systems natural and artificial are adapted to a stable climate

All that from a couple of degrees?

Well, a lot of people ask that question. Some folks just argue, look how as soon as we got air conditioning, how so many people moved out of the northern areas and into the southern areas in the US. The guy who first said people might warm up the planet, Arrhenius, was a Swede, and apparently he thought this would be a beneficial side effect of progress. Lots of people think that's right.

But consider that only 5C separates the present world from the ice age. As I explained last time, for the past several thousand years the temperature has apparently been extremely steady.

A lot of other changes come along with the smallish-sounding temperature change

Remember that I'm trying to say it isn't the warming that causes the change. The warming is just part of the change. You might even say the climate disruption causes the warming.

Wait, what was that about several thousand years? The famous "hockey stick" only goes back a few hundred years, maybe a thousand, right?

Yeah, but there's plenty of evidence it has been cooling gradually for about eight thousand years from the interglacial peak.

You mean it was hotter eight thousand years ago?

Yup, pretty much everybody agrees to that.

So why all the excitement to prove that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, when climate science already admits there is a precdeent to being warmer than today in the geologically recent past?

That is a fine question, and one which I for one have no answer!

But if it's recently been warmer than this, why worry at all? I mean, who is to say today's temperature is better than some other temperature?

A reasonable question, one of the better ones in the skeptics' quiver, yet one with many answers.

First of all, there's the temperature, but there is also the rate at which it changes. It's really the rate of change where we are getting into territory that nature doesn't normally see. Second, as I said last time, the temperature isn't really the problem; it's just a measure of the problem.

When climate changes slowly, both artificial and natural systems adapt without really even making a big deal of it. Skating on the canals comes in and out of fashion in Holland over the centuries, vineyards start up or fail here and there, but these are tiny, slow, incremental changes. Whereas no, we are talking about rapid climate change, getting faster and faster with each decade.

So to some extent, it is the rate of change that matters. But then there is the total change, which matters a lot for sea level rise, and some other things like mountain runoff and so on. 8000 years ago, we didn't have megacities near the shorelines. Nor did we have cities in places like Phoenix or Las Vegas.

Well, there weren't any cities by modern standards, were there?

No, not really. Two hundred years ago there were no cities of a million people. Now we have dozens of swaths of city that have ten million or more. So in terms of how we organize ourselves, everything has changed very recently. Modern civilization has never seen a period of moderate natural climate change, never mind super-accelerated change.

The anticipated rates of change are far outside human experience and are almost unheard of in the entire geological record.

ALMOST unheard of?

There were a couple of weird events that seem connected to abrupt climate change, the most recent being about 55 million years ago. Here, look:

The event saw global temperatures rise by around 6°C (11°F) over 20,000 years, with a corresponding rise in sea level as the whole of the oceans warmed.[2] Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations rose, causing a shallowing of the lysocline. Regional deep water anoxia may have played a part in marine extinctions.

This was about the time of the first mammals. A very long time ago. Nothing like that since then, and here we are looking to do that in a century or two, not 20,000 years.

Changes in GMST of a few degrees in the geologic record are associated with major rearrangements of nature

OK, so this brings us back to the big question. How much warming is dangerous?

Or, really, how much warming will correspond to a dangerous level of climate disruption?

Yep, that's the real question alright. We know how to connect CO2 to warming, give or take a factor of two. We know that 5 C or 6 C on a global scale is huge. But we don't know where the danger point is.

Wait, wasn't everybody saying 2 C is the "limit posed by science", just last fall before the Copenhagen blowout?

A lot of people were saying that, and some of them were scientists. I'm not sure they should have, though, because we don't really know where that danger point is.

So it could be 3 C or 4 C, giving us way more time?

Yes, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a man I admire greatly, was one of those talking about the 2 C limit, and he admitted as much in a recent article.

SCHELLNHUBER:From today's scientific perspective, we could possibly live with a warming of two to three degrees. ... The overwhelming majority of climatologists assume that a global temperature rise of four degrees would be an immensely dangerous route that we should avoid at all costs.

DER SPIEGEL: Why then have you, as one of the creators of the two-degree target, imposed such a magical limit to which all countries must slavishly adhere?

SCHELLNHUBER: Politicians like to have clear targets, and a simple number is easier to handle than a complex temperature range. Besides, it was important to introduce a quantitative orientation in the first place, which the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change managed to elegantly wangle its way out of. And let's be honest: Even if we aim for the two-degree target, we'll end up somewhat higher. Whenever there's a speed limit, most drivers tend to go a little faster.

Hans von Storch objects vehemently: "I would say, this is pretty shocking, and clearly non-Mertonian: Scientific assertions taylored according to political utility."

And here we see the rock and the hard place yet again, the dilemma between clarity and effectiveness that the late and lamented Stephen Schneider was the first to discuss publicly. In this case, trhough, von Storch has a strong case. I felt all through the run-up to Copenhagen that this claim needed some sort of caveat.

The truth is, 2 C is the lowest we could possibly have gotten, and 2 C is already possibly dangerous.

The reason, again, is not that 2 C of warming is an issue. It is that 2 C of warming will be accompanied by many other changes. 2 C is a measure of the problem, but is not actually the problem.

We don't actually know the threshold of dangerous human interference in climate.

Aha, so you guys really are alarmist chicken littles, right? We have decades to get our act together!

Again, again, and yet again. We have to say it until it bores us to tears, and then maybe the message will get through. Uncertainty cuts both ways.

Uncertainty cuts both ways. It's possible that the threshold of dangerous climate change is lower than 2 C. Suppose it were around 0.7 C for instance?

But... Isn't that about where we are now?

Yep.

That's ridiculous. That's a third of what they were saying at Copenhagen. And even that was sort of made up just to get people moving! what possible evidence could you have for 0.7 C being dangerous?

Well, there's this for instance...

Er, yeh. Yikes...

That's a satellite view of eastern Russia about a thousand miles square. You can see the location of Moscow noted in the lower left, but you can't see any sign of the huge city because it's obscured. The white puffy bits are ordinary clouds, but the smoky bits are, well...

Smoke...

The recent events in eastern Europe and South Asia may well change the balance of evidence to make matters even more urgent than they appeared last year.

So is it too late?

It's never too late to make things better, but things may already be worse than we thought.

Here, have a nice cup of coffee...

Wild Image and Tame Text from NASA

Here's the July temperature anomaly according to GISS:



NASA's gloss on the Earth Obervatory site is measured:

The extreme weather events in Russia and Pakistan have fueled speculation about the role of climate. The GISS release stated, “The location of extreme events in any particular month depends on specific weather patterns, which are unpredictable except on short time scales. The weather patterns next summer will be different than this year. It could be a cooler than average summer in Moscow in 2011.” The GISS release went on to explain, however, that global warming does affect the probability and intensity of extreme events. Climate can drive precipitation because temperature affects the amount of water vapor that air can carry. Likewise, in areas experiencing drought, global warming can increase temperature extremes that exacerbate wildfires.

Nothing about the peculiarity of the peculiar pattern, though. And that's the question.

Thank God Global Warming is a Hoax!

Mark Morford writes in the SF Chron today:

Wouldn't it be horrible if all this stunning, insanely mounting, irrefutable evidence -- death, floods, fires, heat waves, the worst this and the most violent that in 1,000 years -- were some sort of surefire, cumulative sign that we have, if not directly caused, then wildly accelerated and amplified the imminent implosion of this planet?

But we didn't! And we haven't! And we aren't! I mean, whew.

I am delighted to remember that hardcore science has lied, misguided, misnomered and whatever else weird science does to confuse the world about the real impact humanity has had on global ecosystems. All those thousands of highly trained scientists educated at the finest universities, learning the most difficult and fraught information of our age, all in universal agreement that humankind's actions directly affect climate change, and they are all totally full of it because they are clearly in cahoots with Nazi Liberal Jesus, the solar panel manufacturers and the hippies who want me to compost my KFC Double Down wrapper.

Much more at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/08/18/notes081810.DTL#ixzz0x0fheoPh.

When it Rains it Pours

Harvey Taylor sends along a link to an article entitled "Magnitude of Pakistan Floods is Unprecedented". If we consider the Russia and Pakistan catastrophes as part of the same event, we have easily thirty million people directly affected and loss of life in the tens of thousands.

We also have more ammunition for claiming a very high weirdness index for the event.

Two especially interesting quotes:

We had an extraordinary event in northern Pakistan, where ten times the normal annual rainfall for one of those areas fell in four days. This is unprecedented. And, of course, you see the similar sorts of things happening in Africa, in Asia, in Central America. The farmers no longer know when to plant, because the rains don’t come at the time they used to come. All these are the kind of effects of climate change that we’ve feared and are beginning to come to pass, I’m afraid. - John Holmes, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator

Just to give you a sense of how bad the rain was that caused this flooding initially, on the 28th of July, there was 318 millimeters of rain just on one day. To put that into context, the record, all-time record, for rain in Peshawar, which is where this number is from, for one month, the month of July, was 217 millimeters. So it rained more in one day than it had ever rained in an entire month for the monsoon season. The floods that have ensued—and there’s been two waves of these floods now—there’s no government in the world that could have prepared for this or that could have responded to this in the way that we would have liked it to. - Mosharraf Zaidi columnist for The News of Pakistan and Al-Shorouk of Egypt

Rolling a thirteen

Australian Prof. Steven Sherwood of UNSW says the same sort of thing I have been trying to say very nicely in a statement recently quoted on Dot Earth:

The “loading the dice” analogy is becoming popular but it misses something very important: climate change also allows unprecedented (in human history) things to happen. It is more like painting an extra spot on each face of one of the dice, so that it goes from 2 to 7 instead of 1 to 6. This increases the odds of rolling 11 or 12, but also makes it possible to roll 13. What happens then? Since we have never had to cope with 13’s, this could prove far worse than simply loading the dice toward more 11’s and 12’s. I’m not sure whether or not what is happening in Russia or Pakistan is a “13″ yet, but 13’s will eventually arrive (and so will 14’s, if carbon emissions continue to rise).

I think we have just rolled our first thirteen. I don't know how to prove it. (update - or maybe our second, if you count Australia last year)

I can define a fourteen easily. We will have rolled a fourteen when there is no controversy at all about whether the given event was in the range of unforced natural variability.

My attempt to raise this issue at Kloor's went like this:

As the climate, i.e., the distribution of weather events, changes rapidly, the space occupied by the tails of the distribution sweep out territory that were not meaningfully in the distribution before.

So we will occasionally see things we could not have seen before, and some of them may be things we have not imagined before. We will see not only known but previously unlikely conditions (e.g. extreme heat), but also previously unsuspected vulnerabilities (smoke).

It is impossible to predict what these weird events will be. The simulation models are too coarse and too conservative, and we wouldn’t know what to look for in their output anyway. You can’t really do statistical attribution on single events, and causality is pretty complicated in a tightly coupled system. So it’s hard to say much about this beyond that we should not only expect the unexpected, we should expect a great deal more of it.

Sherwood's analogy is very succinct and expresses the same point.

Silver Lining

I think one of the minor benefits of the huge catastrophes has been an increase in contact between climatologists and operational meteorologists. I am looking forward to conversations with a couple of them as we try to figure out exactly how weird the recent events in Asia actually were in some sort of objective sense.

Niger

Alexander Ac writes:

Anybody noticed Niger?

"Niger is now facing the worst hunger crisis in its history, the UN's World Food Programme says, with almost half the population - or 7.3 million people - in desperate need of food."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/world-africa-10976093

From the link:

After a prolonged drought, heavy rains have now hit parts of the country, killing at least six people.

The WFP says 17% of children, or one in five, are acutely malnourished.

...

The UN said more than 67,000 people lost their homes after severe rains in the past week.

The River Niger - the third largest in Africa - reached its highest level for 80 years, said the regional river authority, the ABN.

But the rains came too late to rescue this year's crops, which have already failed.

"This year was a double whammy," Christy Collins of the aid agency Mercy Corps told the Associated Press news agency.

Update: Via Wikipedia

Population
- July 2009 estimate 15,306,252
- 2001 census 10,790,352
- Density 12.1/km2 (31.2/sq mi)

Truth Continues to Lose Ground

While Russia burns and Pakistan drowns, political sentiment hardens in some groups convinced that the whole climate change business is meaningless. We continue to work ourselves toward the nightmare scenario. It would be good to do something different.

Ron Johnson, running against Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, is the latest in a line of Republicans to take a shot at the validity of global warming.

“I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change," Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday. "It's not proven by any stretch of the imagination."

Former Republican Rep. Steve Pearce, running for his old seat in southern New Mexico, told POLITICO that climate scientists should be questioned more thoroughly because of the stolen e-mails.

“I think we ought to take a look at whatever the group is that measures all this, the IPCC, they don’t even believe the crap,” Pearce said in Artesia, N.M. “They’re the ones who say in the e-mails we’ve got to worry about this, keep these voices quiet. If they don’t believe it, why should the rest of be penalized in our standard of living for something that can’t be validated?”

Sharron Angle, the GOP opponent for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada, said on her website in June that she thought legislation to curb greenhouse gases “is based on an unscientific hysteria over the man-caused global warming hoax.”

At least one Republican candidate, though, holds what might be called a more realistic view

Charlie Baker, the front-runner for the Massachusetts GOP governor’s nomination, has taken a more nuanced stance. ... “You’re asking me to take a position on something I don’t know enough about. I absolutely am not smart enough to believe that I know the answer to that question.”

Ideally, this should cost the outspokenly wrong candidates votes, or even the election. But will it? Obviously they have calculated otherwise.

UAH Temps Remain Extraordinary

See for yourself here

Per BCL's request, here are 1998, 1999, 2009 and 2010, (colored respectively RGBO) near surface temps, so you can distinguish particular years of interest. I am not sure what caveats are needed. This is not considered a primary GMST dataset, but I don't know why. Any help on this one would be appreciated. I've been looking at this graph evolve for months; it seems to be telling a scarier story than GISS or Hadley does.

You can click on the images for a clearer picture.

Energy Collective Jumps the Shark

A completely worthless article is running on The Energy Collective. Almost every fact it quotes is wrong.

I have removed their logo from my blog for now. If I see another example this bad, I will ask them to remove my name from their contributors' list.

The point of curation is to keep the worthless crap out of view. If a multi-author site can't do that, it provides no service that Google and blogs can't.

Update: I received a friendly and concerned letter from the moderator/community manager which had the opposite of the intended effect. It further convinced me that The Energy Collective is not useful. I won't quote the whole thing but here's my reply which quotes the disappointing part:

I might write an article, but it will not be a rebuttal of his point of view.

There are people with whom I vehemently disagree whose opinions I read, and there are some with whom I largely agree that I ignore. This is not about agreement. This is about competence.

Garnet's point of view is irrelevant because it is based on purported facts that are wrong. The purpose of a site like yours is to provide a place for a variety of informed opinion to contend. This article makes me very concerned that you don't have the capacity to distinguish between informed opinion and bar room bluster. There is no shortage of the latter, and if your site provides that, it is not useful.

I think web community manager is an important role; I go to SXSW Interactive; I have been to a couple of community manager sessions. I understand the complex balance you are trying to navigate. But a lot of what is talked about in such sessions is not relevant to the sort of web product that interests me, which is where the product is expertise, not opinion, not enthusiasm, not personality, not humor.

I will be watching TEC closely to decide if I am willing to be associated with it. If I find articles which are based on confusion about facts, I will conclude that you provide no useful service and will withdraw.

I am sorry to be so harsh. Unfortunately I have no choice.

If you are paid to moderate a largely technical discussion and don't have the expertise and experience to do so, you are in a difficult spot. I really do sympathize. But you either can or can't perform the curatorial job that is needed to make an effective site of this type, no matter how well designed, promoted, and coded the site may be.

You say

> "it presented a particular view on a controversial subject, neither of which has been
> frequently presented on the site, and it is our belief that it's important
> to encourage all points of view, especially on issues as critical as our
> climate."

If that's all you think there is to it, I can't help you and you can't help me. If you were hired to fly a plane (presuming you have no pilot training) I would feel sorry for you but I still wouldn't get on the plane.

A fifth of Pakistan?

A fifth of Pakistan is NOT under water. It's intense and horrible, but it has not actually reached a condition that is physically impossible.

Update: Via CNN,

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said Saturday that as many as 20 million of his countrymen have been affected by the flooding. The Pakistan Humanitarian Forum put the number at 14 million on Monday.

The death toll from the flooding that's raged more than a fortnight is up to 1,463, and more than 2,000 people have been injured, the National Disaster Management Authority said Sunday.

With about one-fifth of the country underwater, almost 900,000 homes had been damaged, the agency said.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday that while he has visited sites of natural disasters around the world, he has never seen anything like the devastation created by flooding in Pakistan. He said the disaster is worse than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2005 Pakistani earthquake combined.

So, a "fifth underwater" is an official Pakistan statement! But NASA says different. However, contrary to my expectation, it turns out much of Pakistan is flat terrain. So maybe it depends how you count. Maybe the satellite doesn't see puddles, which nevertheless may be enough to damage crops.

(via Wikipedia)

It's hard for me to reconcile 900,000 homes damaged in a country of 120,000,000 with 20% by area "under water". If the homes were evenly distributed that would be 25 people per home; if the homes were preferentially in the flooded area that would be more. Normally if you had a building "under water" you'd expect some damage.

I still doubt it. If we had a better press they would be showing us pictures of typical conditions in low lying areas, as well as worst conditions.

Seeking Precedent for Asian Jet Stream Anomaly

One way to approach this is just through the local temperature anomaly in and around Moscow.

Weather isn't really Gaussian. Physical constraints truncate the tails of temperature distributions. So we can ask this as a relevant objective question: has a prior calendar month on record anywhere ever been 4 standard deviations hot or cold?

Update: There is a 30 day period in a place called Lukojanov that seems to be pushing 6 standard deviations.

That's handy because we can refer to the industrial literature, where "six sigma" is a commonly stated ambitious goal. If the distribution were Gaussian, this would happen 3.4 times per million samples, or once every 300,000 months or about 25,000 years. Maybe there are 250 regions on this scale, so generously we have a slight chance of matching this on the observational record, and a pretty good chance of a historical match. But as I said, that's probably a huge overestimate, because I don't think the tails are occupied.

But, it becomes an objective question.

Confusing words

Tread carefully in public communication among words with multiple meanings:

• global warming
• consistent with
• uncertainty
• model
• chaos

Any other nominees?

It makes you sound stuffy to get it right, but it just adds to the confusion if you don't define what you mean in the context where you mean it. Best to avoid these words if you can make your point otherwise. Unfortunately, these are obviously key concepts. But precise communication is what we need, and without considerable care, these words lead into hopeless argumentative tangles.

All they need is two people: a clueless person whom you try to get the idea across to in broad brushstrokes, and a persnickety person trying to find an edge case that leads to a contradiction. If you find yourself trying to talk to both at the same time, you are doomed. Go too broad, and the persnickety person finds plenty to snipe at. Go too formal, and the clueless person finds grounds to say you are making no sense and hiding something. Try to walk the tightrope and they both find stuff to come at you with. Both people can be perfectly sincere. Your message will sink into a mire of suspicion, hostility and missing the point, and your opponents will pride themselves on a worthy job well done.

Woe to the person who has an important message that has any subtlety to it. And woe to the world that is so eager to find ways not to listen.

We'll return to our "why this summer is different" saga soon. Thanks for listening.

The Name of the Problem

Honest to God, they think we're happy about this.

And much as I'm both exhausted and all wound up tonight, I have to say what I think is going on. I think it's starting to really hit the fan. That is really really bad. It's way too early.

WE DIDN'T KNOW WHEN IT WAS GOING TO HIT THE FAN

But I'm very sad and worried that we might know now.

WE MIGHT KNOW NOW

See there are a bunch of questions. Let's do a Q and A. I'll ask the questions in the right order, and then I'll answer them. See if things come a little clearer as a result, and let me know.

---

HOW MUCH OF THE CARBON STAYS IN THE AIR?

First, despite odd year-to-year variability on WHERE the carbon seems to be going, the amount that stays in the atmosphere seems a relatively constant fraction. For big picture approximation, a half is just fine, though some argue it might slip to three quarters.

HALF THE CARBON WE EMIT STAYS IN THE AIR PRETTY MUCH PERMANENTLY ON POLICY TIMESCALES.

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WHY DOES THAT MATTER?

I think everybody agrees that until the Great Bush Economic Glitch, (and let's call it by such a name, please) this amount was increasing rapidly, and there is enormous pressure, especially in China and the US, to get this back on track. Anyway, the amount we dig up out of the ground and spew isn't going down much. And because carbon doesn't really go away on the time scale of human lifetimes, the amount in the atmosphere keeps growing, and roughly speaking, will keep growing until we stop emitting carbon altogether.

CARBON ACCUMULATES

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SO IS THAT ACCUMULATING, LIKE, ALOT?

"A lot". Two words, there, dude. Pet peeve. You get allotments, I get allitlements, and you end up allotted with a lot. Anyway...

Carbon accumulates, as do other greenhouse gases, but let's assume we can at least get a grip on those. But those others make matters worse. Either way the upshot of what ALL the economists tell us is that if we work really hard, we can, if we try really hard, limit the damage at the point where we get just shy of a doubling of preindustrial CO2, if you count all the other greenhouse gases as if they were CO2.

ACCUMULATING CARBON DIOXIDE AND OTHER GREENHOUSE GASES ADDED IN AS EQUIVALENT CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE WILL AT THE VERY LEAST BE ALMOST THE EQUIVALENT OF DOUBLE PREINDUSTRIAL CONCENTRATIONS. (WHICH IN TURN WERE QUITE HIGH COMPARED TO THE MOST RECENT 3 MILLION YEARS. SO THE EARTH IS AT LEAST TEMPORARILY ENTERING A RADIATIVE REGIME WHICH IS LITERALLY WITHOUT PRECEDENT.)

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UM, WITHOUT PRECEDENT? SO MEANS THATS GONNA WARM US UP AL... ER, A GREAT DEAL, RIGHT?

No, hang on. I knew we were gonna jump the gun on this "global warming" thing,

So there's a lot of attention to Global Mean Surface Temperature. A lot of it is greatly overvalued. I think this is because of the dreadful misnomer "Global Warming".

Yes, we are warming but that isn't really the point. That's inside baseball. The thing that the general public should understand is we are monkeying with the whole climate, not just the temperature.

The globe, which is to say, the surface of the earth, is indeed warming, and that is indeed as a result of greenhouse gas accumulations (and somewhat counterweighed by dust form pollution).

But the cartoon version, that it is a direct result, leaves a lot out. We hear people saying that "global warming is gonna cause HUUGE CHANGES in the weather" but that is causally all screwed up when you really look at it. Aerosols change the pattern of incoming energy, and greenhouse gases change the pattern of outgoing energy, and the land surface is also changing more and more rapidly in various places. We are kicking around the only home we have in the universe as if it were an old tin can. One of the things that happens when you kick this can in this way, we are pretty sure, is warming. But the can never warms that much without a whole lot of other crazy stuff going down. You don't just hold a match to it. You change where the energy comes in and where it goes out. The whole engine of climate is to move the energy from where it comes in to where it goes out and we are changing THAT.

THE HUGE CHANGES WE ARE MAKING IN THE CLIMATE ARE GOING TO CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING

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SO WHY DOES EVERYBODY TALK ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING ALL THE TIME? I MEAN IF IT'S JUST A CONSEQUENCE?

There are a bunch of reasons, some good ones and some really terrible ones. A lot of confusion comes from the fact that people insist on calling the problem "global warming" and not "climate change". In fact, just to make things clear, I'm not going to say "global warming" again after this paragraph. The words "global warming" confuse and obscure. If I'm going to talk about the surface of the earth warming on average, I'll talk about increasing Global Mean Surface Temperature or "increasing GMST" or if I'm feeling particularly geeky, "++GMST".

But it's also the fact that, left to its own devices, the global mean surface temperature is extremely stable. One place may have a cold year and another place may have a warm year, but the world pretty much stays the same temperature. Now that is only relatively recent. It's only been like that for ten thousand years. But if humans hadn't come along, the signs are the happy animals would be having a long break before the next ice age would kick in. Because the ice sheets have settled down, because the orbital forcing is in a very moderate part of the cycle, and because the sun is calm and stable these days, and because there haven't been any asteroids or supervolcanoes, the climate was able to settle down. And once it settled down, its temperature became almost solid as rock, like Uncle Sam's pulse, constant, unvarying. The energy was coming in and going out at the same rate, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. The ocean sloshed around enough to move mild hot spots from one place to another on longish time scales, but the average seems to have been very steady.

So things have stayed the same until pretty much the last few decades, but they're starting to drift. Pretty much in exactly the way that was predicted by a conclave of the world's best meteorologists and oceanographers in 1979.

So if things start to drift, it isn't because the climate fairy went around the world giving an extra 0.7 degrees C to every town and village and keeping the weather the same. It's because the weather is changing that the system can find a new temperature. Climate change causes increasing GMST, not the other way around. So one of the reasons we study GMST is because it gives us a measure of how much the climate is changing.

Think of taking the planet's temperature as being, like, seeing how bad a fever the earth has.

INCREASING GMST IS A MEASURE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

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SO HOW MUCH CHANGE IN TEMPERATURE IS BAD?

LET ME GET BACK TO THIS ONE, AFTER WE TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH WARNING WE'RE GOING TO GET

---

SIGH. SO HOW MUCH IS IT GOING TO WARM UP THEN?

THE QUESTION HAS TWO PARTS. THE FIRST PART IS WHAT THE SENSITIVITY IS.

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UM, DID YOU JUST CHANGE THE SUBJECT? SENSITIVITY? LIKE, CHICK FLICKS?

Climate sensitivity. Actually, that has a bunch of meanings, and I suspect that's why Lindzen and Spencer keep managing to get the answer they want. What we usually mean is, what's the number that connects CO2 radiative forcing to temperature change.

Now for various technical reasons, it's usually stated as equilibrium change in GMST per CO2 doubling. There are reasons to expect that that number is roughly the same, no matter where you start the doubling from, over a broad enough range to cover what humans could ever possibly do.

And we think we have a good grip on this number. It's probably between 2.5 C and 3.0 C per doubling, pretty much certainly between 1.5 and 5 C.

Now this number does sweep under the rug the problem that we may jostle the system enough to inadvertently release natural carbon too. Methane deposits are especially scary because there is a lot of methane, it causes a lot of greenhouse effect, and when it finally breaks down its carbon ends up as CO2 anyway, to plague us approximately forever. Fortunately, this looks not to be fast enough of a process to change the picture too drastically. That's not a lock, though. Let's hope it holds up.

SO IF CO2 DOUBLES, WE'RE LOOKING AT A WARMING OF AROUND 2.5 C, GIVE OR TAKE

---

SO IS IT GONNA DOUBLE? QUADRUPLE? WHAT?

A couple of years ago, it looked like we would run out of fossil fuels pretty soon, but there's been a huge burst of invention. There are various deposits around the world that nobody would have dreamed of touching a few years back that are now online and producing at scale, notably tar sands and nonporous rocks. So at this point it's hard to come up with a constraint on natural gas or coal, though petroleum itself is getting harder to find. Now some people think that is a showstopper, but I don't see it. It will drive up the price of gasoline, so electric cars and trains will replace cars and trucks. The question is mostly where we get our electricity.

And basically, between the day we decide to take this problem seriously, and the day it stops getting worse, there's probably about forty years.

Deciding to take the problem seriously mostly has costs immediately and benefits decades in the future. This is why it is an ethical problem. And it gets more and more expensive to deal with the longer action is delayed. The increase in technological prowess will have a very hard time even keeping up with the increasing population, increasing demand, increasing dirtiness of the remaining fossil fuels, and increasing climate impacts on aggregate wealth. Those who insist we delay while progress gets us further are asking us to bet the farm on an inside straight.

So, we could be looking at anywhere from double to eight times CO2 by the time all is said and done. Maybe more but nobody even has the remotest idea of what life would be like at 16xCO2. The good news, I suppose, is it would promote space travel.

WE COULD BURN ENOUGH CARBON TO PROMOTE SPACE TRAVEL

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SPACE TRAVEL???

WELL, THERE'D BE NO PARTICULAR ADVANTAGE TO STAYING ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, REALLY. IT'S SPACESUITS OR NOTHING AT THAT POINT.

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SERIOUSLY?

I DON'T KNOW. BUT IF WE DON'T TAKE THIS ON NOW, WHEN WILL WE? NOT WHEN WE'RE RUNNING AROUND IN SPACESUITS, I'LL WAGER.

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OK, BUT HOW ABOUT BY THE YEAR 2100?

THE BETTING IS, IF WE TAKE WHAT IS CALLED "NO ACTION", MEANING WE KEEP MONKEYING WITH THE SYSTEM FOR INDIVIDUAL GAIN AND NO REGARD FOR MUTUAL LOSS, ABOUT 3 OR 4 C INCREASE IN GMST AND STILL RISING IN 2100; SOME SAY EVEN MORE.

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SO HOW BAD DOES THAT SUCK?

Well, now we come to the hard question. How much suckage comes with each degree.

Mark Lynas wrote a relatively alarmist book about that, and there has been some TV made around the book. It's plausible. But we are somewhat out of the physical sciences and into economics and biology with that question. The science of ice sheets, while quite physical, has no precedents to base its predictions on. So to some extent we're guessing.

We haven't talked about climate simulation models yet. The thing about climate models is that they have to be tuned to present day conditions to be useful as simulations. The more phenomena you add, the harder that is in principle. So the models have always had kind of a stodginess to them; one of their worst they do not deliver extreme events at the rate and extent that the real system does. And one of the biggest questions we have to ask is about extreme events. Eventually, it is possible that reality will be too far afield from where the models are tuned, and the models will get much further from reality than they are in present and recent past simulations. One of the ways they may fail is in telling us about extreme events.

Now there are lots of theoretical reasons to expect more extreme events. And lots of reasons to expect the models can't predict them well. At some point, it is plausible that the models will simply not represent some of the phenomena that the system actually gets.

AT SOME LEVEL OF CLIMATE CHANGE MODELS LOOK LIKELY TO FAIL TO TRACK THE GENERAL WEIRDNESS LEVEL

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SO?

So we don't know if or when that time will arrive. We know climate will change, but in what ways, with what consequences. In other words, we don't know at what temperature the changed climate really starts to bite. This has allowed us to delay policy, after all a change of 0.7 C locally is barely even measurable, never mind noticeable. How could it possibly matter as a change in GMST?

WE DON'T KNOW AT WHAT GMST LEVEL THE WEATHER CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE KICK IN. OR...

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OR...?

OR AT LEAST WE DIDN'T UNTIL RECENTLY

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HUH?

WELL, IT APPEARS AS IF IT MAY BE HITTING THE FAN ALREADY

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YIKES! DO TELL!

IT'LL HAVE TO WAIT FOR ANOTHER DAY

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Anyway, that's what I think

As one takeaway, names are important. Let's call increasing GMST "increasing GMST" and anthropogenic climate change "climate change" please, or we will continue to get horribly confused by calling just about everything "global warming".

And let's call the Bush Recession by its name too.

Thanks ever so much.

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Update: Woot! Moranoed on account of the spacesuits bit.

Welcome, folks, please come back for the planned sequel...

Update: The sequel is here.