"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Monday, August 29, 2011

The Truth About the Truth About Greenhouse Gases

REVISED

I've been asked to comment on William Happer's "The Truth about Greenhouse Gases", and finding no competent discussion of it anywhere on the first three pages of hits have agreed to take it on.

To give you an idea of the tenor of the document, it starts off modestly, like this:
“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the
most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been
excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to
show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and
gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles
Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular
Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary
moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations
of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous
consequences for mankind and for the planet. This contemporary
“climate crusade” has much in common with the medieval crusades
Mackay describes, with true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry
governments, manipulators of various types, and even children’s
crusades.
Yes, Happer, who holds a named chair in physics at Princeton, is of the paranoiac school of skepticism, the one that would rather believe in a grand conspiracy than to consider for a minute the possible need for collective action on this matter.

After this blistering start, he takes some time to get warmed up. A few pages go on about how plants like CO2 and CO2 is necessary for life, so we shouldn't call it a pollutant until we start suffocating. This, before taking on the climate question, is plainly putting the cart before the horse, but it takes up a few pages. And by now we are convinced that the reason the fellow is not getting around to making a point is that he hasn't got one.

That is to say, William/Belette/Stoat's point is basically the right approach:
So the question is, how can Happer not be aware of this? He is not obliged to agree with the IPCC report, but he cannot but realise that it is the authoritative voice of the position he disagrees with; he is obliged to at least know what it says and (if he is being honest) he is obliged to report (and then, if he can, refute) its arguments. It is dishonest of him to substitute strawmen.
I summarize the case at greater length than William does:
  • Most of the constituent gases of the atmosphere are transparent at the frequencies of the earth's thermal radiation.
  • Most of the opacity in the infrared ("greenhouse effect") is due to carbon dioxide and water vapor, and clouds (liquid and solid water emulsions) which of course are also opaque to incoming radiation
  • Human activity directly increases carbon dioxide, mostly due to fossil fuel consumption, but also through deforestation and chemical processes related to manufacture of cement. Human activity also affects the radiative properties of the atmosphere via a few other trace greenhouse gases, and via increases in aerosol dust.
  • Finally, human interference in surface processes over land can have large regional effects.
  • As these perturbations increase in rough proportion to economic activity, the carbon dioxide comes to dominate over time because of its long residency in atmosphere-upper-ocean-land system. Though exchanges among these reservoirs is large, that does not reduce the net amount of carbon in the atmosphere. To a first approximation, carbon is removed on the time scale of the deep overturning of the ocean, on the order of a thousand years.
  • While of course the sun is by far the dominant energy source for the system, its variability is small (measured in energy) compared to the disruptions due to greenhouse gases and aerosols. Climate forcing is dominated by anthropogenic effects, of which warming is expected to increasingly dominate.
  • Water vapor feedbacks are well characterized and are known to approximately double the temperature sensitivity of the system. Cloud feedbacks, which potentially might be ameliorating or exacerbating, remain poorly characterized.
  • Various forms of evidence are in rough agreement that sensitivity is on the order of 2.5 degrees per doubling, but the uncertainty has proven stubborn. Probably this is correct within a multiplicative factor of 2, i.e., almost certainly between 1.25 C and 5 C per doubling.
  • Simulation of the atmosphere (using GCMs) is a useful tool within science, but its results should not at present be considered as reliable projections of the future, even given emission scenarios. Simulations are tuned to the present day, be expected to understate risks and fail to represent unprecedented configurations of the climate system.
  • Very little is known about the potential geochemical feedbacks which clearly exacerbated the glacial cycle in the geologically recent past. These could potentially greatly amplify the dangers without actually affecting the sensitivity as usually measured. It is expected and hoped that these feedbacks would take a long time on human scales to appear, but we may be committing future generations to deal with them.
I think all the above is uncontroversial. Happer addresses none of it. What does he come up with instead?

At the bottom of page four we come to the first mention of climate, and we are well into the fifth page before the famous physicist manages to construct the following argument:
The argument starts something like this. CO2 levels have increased from
about 270 ppm to 390 ppm over the past 150 years or so, and the earth
has warmed by about 0.8 C during that time. Therefore the warming is
due to CO2. But correlation is not causation. The local rooster crows every
morning at sunrise, but that does not mean the rooster caused the sun to
rise. The sun will still rise on Monday if you decide to have the rooster for
Sunday dinner.

There have been many warmings and coolings in the past when the CO2
levels did not change.
Yes, after five pages he leads with a version of the "dinosaurs had no SUVs, QED" argument!

What's more , he defends it with the "wine exported from Greenland" meme. I myself am responsible for tracking this one down to an archaeologust who showed that wine was imported into Greenland. A horse of a different color, you'll admit.

So by the time we reach page five we have four pages of waffling, a stunningly weak fallacy, and an incorrect anecdote raised in support of it. Hardly an auspicious start.


Bah. My bad. It was wine "exported from England". I jumped to a conclusion because the whole Greenlandic wine incident tickles me so. I have found lots of evidence, by the way, that wine was produced in the south of England in the middle ages for local consumption, but so far no evidence of any export. But that's a quibble.

But it's all in service of a ludicrous claim. Nobody has ever said that CO2 is the ONLY influence on global climate. This is a childish bit of misdirection, not befitting a scientist.

En passant, it's worth noticing, Happer manages this howler:
Yet there are strident calls for immediately stopping further increases in
CO2 levels and reducing the current level (with 1990 levels the arbitrary
benchmark).
There are no such strident calls. Everybody knows that CO2 will continue to rise for some considerable time. It is emission levels that form the arbitrary benchmark. Again, the whole reason that CO2 is the key to anthropogenic forcing is that concentrations are approximately cumulative, that the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere/upper-ocean/land-surface system is very long.

Then
another rationale for reducing CO2 is now promoted: to
stop the hypothetical increase of extreme climate events like hurricanes
or tornados. But dispassionate data show that the frequency of extreme
events has hardly changed and in some cases has decreased in the 150
years that it has taken CO2 levels to increase from 270 ppm to 390 ppm.
Hurricanes and tornados have very noisy statistics with components at interannual time scales. There is also contention about the theoretical expectations, particularly regarind hurricanes. It will be some considerable time before we have much confidence in what the trend is.

But do we have theoretical and modeling reasons to expect increased floods and increased droughts in the greenhouse-enhanced world, and here the record is strongly supportive of those expectations. Happer carefully tiptoes around this evidence.
But these records show that changes
in temperature preceded changes in CO2 levels, so that CO2 levels were
an effect of temperature changes. Much of this was probably due to
outgassing of CO2 from the warming oceans or the reverse on cooling.
That the effect goes one way does not preclude it from going the other way. That, in fact, is what "feedback" means. There remains much for the scientific community to learn about the glacial cycles of the geologically recent past. But we are certain that it cannot be explained without the greenhouse effect. The energetics do not add up otherwise. Accounting for the CO2 brings temperatures back into balanace.
During the “Younger Dryas” some 12,000 years ago,
the earth very dramatically cooled and warmed -- as much 10 C in fifty
years -- with no apparent change in CO2 levels, and with life -- including
our human ancestors -- surviving the rapid change in temperature just
fine.
Um. No. The 10C in fifty years was the temperature shift in Greenland. Most life was not affected by it.
Our present global
warming is not at all unusual by the standards of geological history,
No, though it is unusual in human history. But this is not the point. The anticipated rate of CO2 increases, especially in the absence of a globally supported mitigation policy, are unprecedented in geological history (with the possible exception of the disastrous K-T PETM transition which nearly wiped out all ocean life, probably in a burst of ocean acidification). And the rate and duration of the incipient CO2 spike lead to a strong expectation of a very large shift in temperature to be anticipated over the coming century.
The organization charged with producing scientific support for
the climate crusade, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), finally found a solution. They rewrote the climate history of the
past 1000 years with the celebrated “hockey stick” temperature record
This is tendentious nonsense. Research advanced. The graph in the 1990 report was a rough schematic.
[M & M] showed that the hockey stick was not supported by observational data.
They nitpicked. The millenial preindustrial data remains unexciting. The evidence for a global Medieval Warm Period remains marginal and roughly irrelevant. And its removal has negligible impact on any serious estimation of the prospects. It's really not in any way significant whether or not these events occurred. It would merely be incorrect to claim that they are in the global record, though to be sure regional changes did occur on this time scale.
One of the most consistent themes of the e-mails is the need to hide raw data from anyone outside the team. Why the obsession on withholding data? Because the hockey stick lost credibility when it was possible to see the raw, unmanipulated data on which it was based.
This, I am sorry to say, is not just vicious but quite wrong. The reticence is based on a distaste for cooperating with people who had shown themselves to be rude and malicious. There is a long story here with raw feelings on both sides, but one side of it starts with a desire to avoid what was perceived as unpleasant people and time-wasting interactions. But the general outlines of the hockey stick remain. Numerous independent procedural investigations have concluded that no data was altered or misrepresented, and numerous scientific investigations have confirmed the general outline of the result, albeit some with a bumpier "shaft" to the hockey stick, a perfectly ordinary point of research contention.

But finally we come to the central myth of post "Climateg*te" bunk:
Peer review in climate science means that the ”team” recommends publication of each other’s work, and tries to keep any off-message paper from being accepted for publication. Why this obsession with cleansing the “scientific” literature of any opposing views? Because it allows climate extremists to claim that they represent all of science and anyone who questions their message is at war with all of science, except for a few “flat-earthers”, “deniers,” or others scorned with carefully researched epithets, designed to discredit dissenting scientific opinion
This is simply begging the question. If there is in fact legitimate scientific argument that the consensus position is wrong, then it is wrong for people to keep these positions out of the literature. But if the so-called skeptic papers are garbage, scientific flat-earthism, it is the legitimate function of editors to keep them out of the literature and out of the literature review.

This can only be addressed by actually looking at the science, which Happer refuses to do. He simply repeats the usual political talking points, trying to justify doing so by his position and his reputation. But his reputation is as a physicist, not as a politician. He does himself and us no favors by repeating shabby talking points from the political press.


It goes on. Shabby attacks on the models:
John von Neumann once said, “With four
parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle
his trunk.” Climate models have dozens of parameters, not unlike the
epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy.
Yes, but with dozens of parameters, climate models simulate systems with millions of degrees of freedom at the implementation level, and at least thousands at the physical level. This can only be possible with an actual underlying physical model. It cannot be a coincidence.
No model predicted the lack of net warming of the
earth’s temperature that we have experienced over the past ten years
Well, we don't have a date on this publication, or I didn;t find one at least. For a brief moment in 2008-9 one could actually make this case without being blatantly dishonest, but of course even so it is just cherry-picking. In other words, it is at best a truth of a mendacious sort. As has been explained many times, there is unforced interannual variability which can mask the trend over relatively short time intervals. If Happer had any genuine interest in the material, he would know this. And indeed, a later paragraph shows that he does understand how this works, yet he repeats the flawed argument in the very next breath.
All of the proposed controls that would
have such a significant impact on the world’s economic future are based
on computer models that are so complex and chaotic that many runs
are needed before we can get an “average” answer. Yet the models
have failed the simple scientific test of prediction.


etc. etc.

The last several pages are reduced to conspiracy-mongering of the worst kind and make no pretense to engaging the science at all. As with Dyson, the points of actual substance are few, incoherent, and ill-informed. But at least Dyson manages an air of decency and humility. Happer is blazing with anger and contempt, without showing any signs of having listened to the people he is criticizing.

It's true that the intellectual style of earth science is different from that of pure physics. But it's not as if Happer were remotely as intellectually lazy as this empty attack would indicate. Politics seems able to override reason. This is a pile of political talking points, not any sort of engagement with the evidence. It's a shame.

Climate science could well do with competent criticism. It increasingly appears that serious concerns about the science must be impossible, because all the critiques are so spectacularly non-serious.

--
pic: William Happer from his lab's website





29 comments:

Lars Karlsson said...

Good grief: "wine exported from Greenland"!

Steve Bloom said...

Hmm, they seem to have fixed the error. As of this moment the doc says exported from England, not Greenland, which is merely irrelevant as opposed to absurd.

Pangolin said...

As a physicist he should know where to submit works he wants to be considered as serious and worthy of scientific respect.

Short of submitting an article to an appropriate scientific journal he's just another blowhard. His opinions have about as much value as well, mine.

The difference being that I do refer to relevant scientific journal articles to the best of my knowledge and defer to the opinion of Nature and Science on virtually everything.

Lars Karlsson said...

About the hockey stick:

"This damnatia memoriae of inconvenient truths was simply expunged from the 2001 IPCC report, much as Trotsky and Yezhov were removed from Stalin’s photographs by accommodating dark-room specialists in the later years of the dictator’s reign. There was no explanation for why both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, very clearly shown in the 1990 report, had simply disappeared eleven years later."

This is at the same level as the dumber comments over at WUWT.

Magnus said...

Take a look at the ACADEMIC ADVISORY COUNCIL, do they really sand behind this crap?

Magnus said...

Sorry missed this part.

Views expressed in the
publications of the Global
Warming Policy Foundation
are those of the authors,
not those of the GWPF,
its Trustees, its Academic
Advisory Council members
or its Directors.

Still why publish such a crap report? why have anything to do with some one that does? This should be used as a reminder of what crap GWPF stands for.

Paul Daniel Ash said...

Well, the expanded comment is welcome, though one thinks you nailed it when you wrote over at the Plus-terf*ck that "It is disturbing, given that Happer is a physicist, that his paper contains no physics whatsoever."

The "paper" is a statement of beliefs. Now, it should be taken as read that Professor Happer has as much right to his beliefs as does, say, Governor Perry. The question should be: do someone's beliefs (even those of the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics) help us understand physical phenomena?

Marion Delgado said...

If that guy were a blog COMMENTER instead of an op-eder, he'd be the kind I wouldn't respond to, because there'd be nothing even remotely civil to say :)

That's simply trolling. Especially at this late date. It's to give cover to the delayers - they can point to still-existing denial and say, hey, let's compromise by acknowledging reality, but in return you have to agree to delay doing anything about it.

William M. Connolley said...

In the unlikely event of you not noticing: I AOL'd you at http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2011/08/the_truth_about_the_truth_abou.php

David B. Benson said...

Esteemed?

Not by me...

Unknown said...

I am new to climate science, but I would like to understand the main argument. By reading this, it seems to me, that there are a lot of things around, that however are not so important for the main argument, that seems to be the following (can you please correct me, if I misunderstood something?):

1) Historical record shows, that the CO2 rises *after* (like 800 years or so) temperatures rise, as such, it is highly probable, that the temperatures are driving the CO2 changes. To establish, that also CO2 are responsible for changing the temperatures, we have the following arguments:

* there is no evidence, that it is impossible
* glacial cycles cannot be explained without a greenhouse effect
* accounting for CO2 brings temperatures back into balance

2) The problem with humans adding more CO2 into the cycle is that:

* the *rate* of CO2 increase is unprecedented
* this leads to an expectation of a very large shift in the temperature (best estimates so far 1.25C to 5C per doubling CO2)
* the above prediction is not based upon GCM (even though GCM doesn't seem to be in blatant disagreement)

3) The overall effect of increasing the temperatures and also CO2 by 1.25C up to 5C would be disastrous for the earth. 1.25C might not be that bad, but 5C would be really bad, so it's better not to play with this at all.


I am mainly interested about the CO2 role, because this is what the political debate is mostly about (right?), that is, regulating the emissions or not, based on the outcome of 3). There are just too many things going on for me, so for now I would like to understand just the main thing. Is the above correct, or is there some inaccuracy?

Prof. Happer is saying, in nutshell:

1) CO2 rise after temperatures, thus there is no direct proof, that by emitting some CO2 by humans will cause any problems
2) increasing CO2 by itself will be very good for agriculture
3) The overall increase in temperature will be by 1C, so it will not cause big problems.

As such, the problem with it is that it understimates the temperature changes (up to 5C), as well as that the *rise* of CO2 might actually influence the temperature. Right? Everything else are just little things, secondary to the whole debate. The above is the main argument. Did I get it right?

Ondrej Certik

Anonymous said...

Ondrej Certik,

Climate sensitivity upon doubling CO2 is very likely between 2 - 4.5C. There is no number here that is considered "safe" with BAU emissions or even safe for small reductions in CO2. The most likely number is 3C. The real argument is about what we should do. It's about finding ways to effectively reduce future risk with prudent and ethical solutions. Happer appears to want to do nothing. He's sailing an empty boat that reasonable skeptics jumped off already. Trying to find an effective solution between 'do nothing' and 'do something effective and reasonable' isn't an argument many of us really want to engage in any longer. It's tedious and time consuming and dangerous and risky and a million other things. I'm not asking you to take Micheal's words on faith, but understand that starting off arguing Happer's points will make your quest for the real debate long and difficult.

For more on Happer's fantasy island.

Paul Daniel Ash said...

Ondřej, forgive me, but a bit less liberal use of the comma would be helpful. I presume English is your second language - and your command of it is otherwise excellent - but this quirk makes it difficult to parse what you are trying to say.

There is no assumption that historical deglaciations were caused by CO2; rather, it has to do with changes in the Earth's tilt and therefore insolation. The lag seen in ice core records is, rather, due to an easily understandable dynamic: as ocean temperatures rise, the solubility of CO2 in water falls, so CO2 is released into the atmosphere, which amplifies the warming trend, leading to yet more CO2 being released.

The physics of radiative transfer are not in dispute even among so-called skeptics. Ray Pierrehumbert wrote a nice introductory-level piece on that in Physics Today. GHGs cause warming: it's the magnitude of that warming that's unclear. The "climate sensitivity," or temperature rise caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is, however, rather well-constrained on the low end: it is unlikely that it's less than 1.5° K, most probably around 3° K as Grypo notes, and entirely possible that it is significantly higher than that.

It's a complex field and I have no better than a moderately bright layman's understanding of it. Comprehension, though, is never helped by coming at a topic with a foregone conclusion.

Marco said...

Ondrej,

The main argument is not that "there is no evidence, that it is impossible", but that physics shows it must have an impact.


Paul Daniel,

You will find some so-called skeptics who DO question radiative transfer. Some of those are active scientists. Just a reminder that some of them really are way beyond their true mental capacity.

Michael Tobis said...

Ondrej, approximately but not exactly. I will try to clarify later.

Anonymous said...

Nit. re: "K-T transition". P-Tr or PETM, no?

And I agree with PDA: 'you nailed it when you wrote... "It is disturbing, given that Happer is a physicist, that his paper contains no physics whatsoever."'

Michael Tobis said...

On further investigation of Happer's publication record, he has not listed a first authorship (except on a single non-technical article) on anything since 1994.

Interestingly, Dyson was a coauthor on that 1994 one.

Michael Tobis said...

rust, yeah, fixed, thanks.

John Mashey said...

Happer: read pp.125-16 of:
CCC
especially the quote from Daily Princetonian.

If need be, go back to:
APS Petition.

Michael Tobis said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Michael Tobis said...

I'm seconding John Mashey's recommendation to read about Happer in his linked investigation report.

Happer's association with Singer would seem to put him well out of genuine skeptic territory. There are few people I am willing to frankly call "denier" but Singer is one of them. Hanging out with Singer is a very bad sign.

I find Happer's association with Dyson on Happer's last first-authored scientific publication to be interesting. Unlike Happer and Singer, Dyson seems to me like a very decent sort (if a bit arrogant, as physicists tend to be). It is a shame he has been bamboozled.

David B. Benson said...

Ondřej Čertík --- I encourage reading Ray Pierrehumbert's "Principles of Planetary Climate"
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/PrinciplesPlanetaryClimate/index.html
for a thorough understanding, if more than hiw revew article is required.

David B. Benson said...

Paul Daniel Ash --- It may well be that English is Ondřej Čertík's fourth language.

dbostrom said...

What's odd about Happer's screed is its lack of originality. It's as though he did a swab of the Bore Hole over at Real Climate, plus gathered a few scrapings from garden variety pseudo-skeptic comments at SkS. All very threadbare material. It all smacks of bankruptcy, really, throwing down a handful of completely debased currency.

I'm afraid it must have been very boring to write this review.

Michael Tobis said...

Doug, yes, it bordered on excruciating. Dyson was much more fun because at least he was wrong in ways that were original.

This really is the standard crap. He probably had a student write it for him.

But somebody had to slog through it, and I did have this request.

Unknown said...

Thanks everybody for your comments. Let me address it one by one:

Grypo, thanks for the sensitivity correction. Also for the point that a lot of people would rather like to move over this debate and start acting. Honestly I think that this debate actually hardly started --- I think it very much depends on the circles of people that you have around you. So I want to use this opportunity to truly learn what exactly is wrong with prof. Happer's arguments, and then ask him for comments. I am truly curious of what he will say (if anything which would also be a statement), and I'll keep you posted.

Paul, I'll ask my wife (native speaker) to help me with the commas, I need to learn how to use them properly. Also with articles, that's another problem as these things are really unintuitive for me (totally different from Czech, my mother language). Anyway, thanks for the other points and the link.

Marco, I'll add it to my points.

Michael, that would be great. I want to have a set of rational points against Happer's article, so that I can write him and ask for comments. So for that, I want to know exactly what the "case" is (so that Happer is not arguing a strawman), and then what exactly is wrong with Happer's claims.

David, thanks for the book. Used one is $50, I will think about it (just paid my tuition), but I'll try to find it in a library. It looks (by peeking into it at Amazon) as a solid book on the subject, so I'll try to educate myself. Believe it or not, I actually worked for an atmospheric science group at Dessert Research Institute for half a year, solving Euler equations for a sea breeze model, and it is really hard to get things working properly. And that was just a simple model. P.S. English is my third language (after German), but I am not very talented, so I only speak English and Czech fluently. But I know at least 10 computer languages. :)



Btw, who Happer meets and his associations with other people in my opinion have nothing to do with the actual debate, in fact I find it quite disturbing that people with different opinions are analyzed, who they meet, for example here:

http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/2009%20science%20bypass%20v3%200.pdf

I think that lots of personal information is revealed with the aim to discredit the people who signed the petition. Reading this, I would think twice to sign such a petition, to have my name be dragged in pdf documents like that one. I know that you have all probably heard the following, but I really think it applies: communist regimes also used the same method on people who dared to speak loudly against the regime -- they persecuted them by analyzing their lives, who they meet, and discrediting them, so that majority of people don't "sympathise" with them (and thus not much oppose their actual arrests and worse things). Now we know, that most of these prosecuted people were normal people and that the prosecution and discreditation was absolutely unjust. Climate change is absolutely not communism (I want to stress this, so that there is no misunderstanding). However, what is similar is that there is a vocal majority opinion (let's say in the APS), and the vocal minority is publicly discredited, ridiculed and so on. You might think, well, Happer (and people who signed the petition) are wrong, so they deserve this. Well, I don't think so (next time, it can be you in their position). However I think that they absolutely deserve a rational answer why their arguments are wrong.

Another frequent argument is that they are not climatologists, and so their opinion is as valid as my next door neighbors. I agree. And I think that my next door neighbor deserves the same rational answer, why his opinion is wrong.

Sorry for the longer post, and I'll wait if Michael replies to my "simplified analysis", and then craft a reply to prof. Happer, I'll ask here for feedback before I send it.

Unknown said...

Thanks for all the comments.

I sent a longer reply some time ago, but it didn't get through. Was it moderated?

In any case, Michael, I would be interested, if you could clarify my analysis.

Michael Tobis said...

Ondrej please be patient. Traveling. Will try to answer by tuesday.

Unknown said...

No rush, I got busy at work too. But I do want to get this discussion wrapped up in a reply to prof. Happer eventually. Please ping me (on G+ for example) once you reply.