Alphabet Soup Press Release

IDLO / CISDL Legal Working Paper Series

on Sustainable Development Law on Climate Change

The International Development Law Organisation (IDLO) and the Center for International Sustainable Development Law (CISDL) are pleased to present our 2010 Legal Working Paper Series on Sustainable Development Law on Climate Change. This Legal Working Paper Series gathers recent and updated works by IDLO Experts and CISDL Legal Researchers, addressing key issues from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change COP 16 negotiations:

• * Freya Baetens, Foreign Investment Law and Climate Change: Legal Conflicts Arising from Implementing the Kyoto Protocol through Private Investment.
• * Sébastien Jodoin, Rights-Based Framework for Climate Finance.
• * Sarah A. Mason-Case and Prof. Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger, International Law and Climate Finance.
• * Benoît Mayer, International Law and Climate migrants.
• * Frederic Perron-Welch, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation: Mexico’s Solution for Offsetting Emissions while Respecting Indigenous and Local Community Rights.
• * Josh Roberts, Linking Climate Change with Biodiversity-Related Multilateral Environmental Agreements.
• * Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger and Markus Gehring, Trade and Investment Implication of Carbon Trading for Sustainable Development.
• * Sean Stephenson, Making Jobs Work: The Right to Work, Jobs and Green Structural Change.
• * Dr. Charlotte Streck, How Climate Change can Catalyze Sustainable Land-Management.
• * Verki Michael Tunteng, Legal Aspects of Climate Change Policy.
• * Patricia Parkinson and Dr. Andrew Wardell, Legal Frameworks to Support REDD Pro-Poor Outcomes.

Please visit http://www.cisdl.org/news.html to access these papers. Comments and thoughts are welcome and may be sent to aharrington@cisdl.org

Kilowattses

Via the ever-interesting Daily Dish, a link to "vorjack"

It’s kind of a shame that reality is too slippery for us to quantify the amount of wrongness. Think of how useful it would be to if we had a unit of wrongness. Let’s say we had a unit – for absolutely no reason at all let’s call it a “beck” – that would allow us to express how wrong something is. “Ooh, close, but you’re wrong by 3 millibecks.” or “Whoa, off by a kilobeck.”

Of course, in our turf the right unit would be a watts. This could lead to some confusion between, say, kilowatts and kilowattses, but watt can you do?

Being Such a Scientist

Anna Haynes writes:

Hey Tobis, O/T but can you maybe open a thread please for discussion of the latest Benshi post?
(Beating Up the Nerds: The Profession of Science has a Full Scale Public Relations Crisis)

(I want to make the point that medical science isn't climate science, and so to tar the latter with the former's failings is obfuscatory. But there being no comments thread there, I must bite my tongue (or fingers))

Slashdot is on this turf today too.

I am a bit overwhelmed but will note in passing that this is (yet another) topic I hope to get to someday: how much trust to put into the imperfect scientific process, or keeping the baby while doing something about all that bathwater.

It is in fact the case that the problem being identified here is specifically a case of medical science going off the rails; the closest analogy in the climate world is much more in the turf of its critics than of its practitioners. But that's very far from a claim that climate science is our healthiest and best functioning institution these days. It's a mess, partly because of the mix of malign and merely skeptical attacks, partly because universities and national labs are organizational backwaters. But it's not a complete mess, and the specific vulnerabilities discussed by Lehrer don't apply.

How should we deal with a flawed but not broken institution delivering important and unwelcome advice? Not the way we're doing it, clearly.

What ARE the real flaws? I've been reluctant to address them publicly. Is that right or wrong? People are having enough trouble with much simpler concepts...

Update via Daily Dish:

Jonah Lehrer revisits the "tendency of many exciting scientific results to fade over time":

One of the sad ironies of scientific denialism is that we tend to be skeptical of precisely the wrong kind of scientific claims. Natural selection and climate change have been verified in thousands of different ways by thousands of different scientists working in many different fields. (This doesn’t mean, of course, that such theories won’t change or get modified—the strength of science is that nothing is settled.) Instead of wasting public debate on solid theories, I wish we’d spend more time considering the value of second-generation antipsychotics or the verity of the latest gene-association study.

Garbled Reasoning at WUWT

Stop the presses, huh?

The WUWT folks have been making hay out of some completely garbled nonsense as usual. They habitually (at best) don't understand what they are looking at and proceed to interpret it to support their peculiar certainty that modern CO2 greenhouse effect somehow doesn't work, so we can spew as much of it as we like, and of course that was always guaranteed by liberty or something.

Anyway there's a particularly striking example up on an article by Don Easterbrook.

First, he shows a graph by Richard Alley, no less:



And then somehow jumps to:

So where do the 1934/1998/2010 warm years rank in the long-term list of warm years? Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.

Well, this is quite silly. You aren't exactly comparing apples to oranges, but you are comparing apples to applesauce. 1998 and 2010 are contenders for warmest year in the instrumental record. As such, they are probably the warmest yearss in the last 2000 years or so, but certainly not in the past 8000 years. Mainstream climatology ha[[ily stipulates that the period from 8000-6000 years ago was warmer than today, but not by much.

Mentioning 1934 (a contender for warmest year in the USA) is just silly beyond belief.

But the global mean is about 15 C, and the graph is centered around -31 C, so what accounts for the 50 C (90 F) difference? Well, the graph refers to a signal called the delta-O18 temperature proxy. It is a regional temperature for the region of Greenland. What's more, this proxy is effectively a multidecadal running average, not an instantaneous temperature. And finally, the "present day" is geologists' jargon for 1950. The last 60 years don't show up in ice cores or in the record as shown.

So, to recapitulate:

2010 is the hottest year on record or close to it globally

2010 or 1998 is likely the hottest in thousands of years globally

6000 to 8000 years ago was a bit warmer than today. We will probably cross that threshold soon enough but we haven't yet.

By the end of the century, unless we get a grip we will be seeing the warmest years in the last tens of millions of years, but we are not there yet.

The graph measures multidecadal running averages regionally up to 1950 and cannot be directly compared to annual global averages.

It's nonsense.

I like it better than the recent nonsense in Forbes magazine because it only makes one uninformed point rather than a dozen. But it's noise. Noise, noise noise.

It is still pretend science and not real science. Somehow the political sector needs to learn to tell the difference. A tall order, but crucial.

Update: Gareth has more at Hot Topic.

Main Street, Richland Springs TX

Click on the image for more detail. Visit my photo blog for more odd pictures of odd places.

My Top Ten List

I find top ten lists of the year tedious. Nobody knows what is important about a year writing from within that year, except in the most extreme cases.

Herewith my top ten (or so) list of climate-science related events of the 20th century in chronological order. Off the top of my head. Any suggestions for stuff I've missed?

Happy New Year Y'All!

Stay tuned for the next in this series on New Year's Eve 2110!

TOP TWENTY OR SO CLIMATE EVENTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

ca. 1900: Bjerknes identifies the "primitive equations", the enhanced Navier-Stokes system for the atmosphere (including moisture state changes and rotational dynamics). Lays out a program for scientific meteorology.


1938: Callendar, G.S. "The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Climate." Quarterly J. Royal Meteorological Society 64: 223-40. (h/t WVhybrid) Callendar was the first to get a good quantitative understanding of the situation.

1942: Sverdrup; generalized linear theory of oceanography

1950: Charney Fjortoft and von Neumann: the first computer simulation of the atmosphere

1955: Suess, Hans E. finds the istopic fingerprint. "Radiocarbon Concentration in Modern Wood." Science 122: 415-17 (h/t WVhybrid)

1958: Charles Keeling's Mauna Loa CO2 time series begins (h/t Nosmo)

1963: Lorenz' treatise "The General Circulation of the Atmosphere"

1963: Lorenz paper brings "chaos" into physical sciences

1966: Arakawa first publishes on his global atmospheric model

1968: Bryan & Cox first global ocean dynamics model

1969: Bryan & Manabe first idealized-geography coupled climate dynamics model

1975: Bryan & Manabe first realistic coupled climate dynamics model

1975: Manabe & Wetherald first computational assessment of anthropogenic global warming (h/t Kooiti Masuda)

1975: Wally Broecker paper “Climate Change: Are we on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” (h/t Kooiti Masuda)

1979: The Charney commission reports on the threat of global warming. concurring Jason report also written in 1979 with similar conclusions. These reports are quite similar to the IPCC position today.

1983: Luyten and Pedlosky: theoretical explanation of deep ocean flow

1990: IPCC first Assessment Report: "Thus the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability; alternatively this variability and other human factors could have offset a still larger human-induced greenhouse warming. The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect is not likely for a decade or more."

1992: UNCED "Earth Summit" conference at Rio de Janiero and foundation of UNFCCC: committed signatories' governments to a voluntary "non-binding aim" to reduce atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases with the goal of "preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth's climate system."

1997: Kyoto protocol; A set of steps which, if implemented, would have left us far better off today, was signed by all parties, but never ratified by the USA. The senate was nearly unanimous in opposition. Mostly honored in the breach.

1998: Unprecedented amplitude El Nino event; the start of climate disruption?

Extra Dimensions

This is a very creative way to display what many of us wish everybody knew.



Stolen from Lou Grinzo who stole it from CarbonTracker.

Climate BS of the Year

"BS" of course stands for "Bad Science". Make of it what you will.

Without appropriate risk management action, the United States will be hit hard. There is no safe haven. Yet confusion and uncertainty about climate change remain high in the minds of too many members of the public and Congress.

Why? In large part because of a concerted, coordinated, aggressive campaign by a small group of well-funded climate change deniers and contrarians focused on intentionally misleading the public and policymakers with bad science about climate change. Much of this effort is based on intentional falsehoods, misrepresentations, inflated uncertainties, and pure and utter B.S. about climate science. These efforts have been successful in sowing confusion and delaying action -- just as the same tactics were successful in delaying efforts to tackle tobacco's health risks.

To counter this campaign of disinformation, we are issuing the first in what may become a series of awards for the most egregious Climate B.S.* of the Year. In preparing the list of nominees, suggestions were received from around the world and a panel of reviewers -- all scientists or climate communicators -- waded through them. We present here the top five nominees and the winner of the 2010 Climate B.S.* of the Year Award.

- Peter Gleick, Kevin Trenberth, John Cook, Tenney Naumer, Michael Ashley, Lou Grinzo, Gareth Renowden, Paul Douglas, Jan W. Dash, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Brian Angliss, Joe Romm, Peter Sinclair, Michael Tobis, Gavin Schmidt, plus several anonymous nominators, reviewers, and voters.

My contribution to the document was marginal, but I'm happy to sign onto it and pleased to be in such eminent company.

I think it's an odd idea to put the same document in multiple places on the internet. Sort of unwebby, if you will. Of the several choices I'll link to the copy at Lou Grinzo's place, though it will appear in many other places, some of them, not necessarily deservedly, more prominent than Lou's.

Alternate Universes

New Zealand Climate Scientists Admit To Faking Temperatures: The Actual Temps Show Little Warming Over Last 50 Years

The above cited articles do not show the revision to the temperature record in question.

Witness the massive revision to the record below:



Graph via Gareth Renowden

The definition of chutzpah used to be the fellow who murdered his parents and pled to the court for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. But now we have a new definition:

Spokesman for the joint temperature project, Richard Treadgold, Convenor of the CCG, said today: “We congratulate NIWA for producing their review of the NZ temperature record — more than a year after we challenged it — and we think it’s great that NIWA have produced a graph with full details behind it.

“But we note that, after 12 months of futile attempts to persuade the public, misleading answers to questions in the Parliament from ACT and reluctant but gradual capitulation from NIWA, their relentless defence of the old temperature series has simply evaporated. They’ve finally given in, but without our efforts the faulty graph would still be there.”

and

“The review is lengthy and full of detail, which we applaud, and it will take some time to examine. We won’t comment on scientific aspects of the 7SS until that has been done. However, we have some initial observations.

“Almost all of the 34 adjustments made by Dr Jim Salinger to the 7SS have been abandoned, along with his version of the comparative station methodology.

“NIWA is clearly not prepared to defend the adjustments exposed in Are we feeling warmer yet? But it took a court case to force them into a corner.

“NIWA makes the huge admission that New Zealand has experienced hardly any warming during the last half-century. For all their talk about warming, for all their rushed invention of the “Eleven-Station Series” to prove warming, this new series shows that no warming has occurred here since about 1960. Almost all the warming took place from 1940-60, when the IPCC says that the effect of CO2 concentrations was trivial. Indeed, global temperatures were falling during that period.

“The new temperature record shows no evidence of a connection with global warming. Since that’s the reason this tempest in a teacup has brewed in the first place, it should simmer down now.”

So, admittedly, I am trusting Gareth's graph here. On the other hand, these guys do not seem to be producing, amid all their self-congratulation, a picture of the old and the revised record.

The Republicans and similar parties elsewhere are behaving with regard to sustainability issues in a manner that appears to be insane.

But it is not entirely insane. It is, to a large extent, victimized. The bizarre attitudes are held by people who are the victims of organized bullshit, which although it isn't exactly criminal, it is far more unethical than many forms of criminal activity will ever be.

The whole world is at risk due to these brazen lies. The review of the New Zealand record produced no significant change whatsoever. Whether or not it was a waste of effort is an interesting question. But it's vicious and malign and deeply dishonest to call the result anything but a vindication.

Limits to Texas Growth

Texas appears to be exceptional in the matter of limits to growth!

The population of Texas, close to 25 million, increased by 20% in the past decade, at the expense of pretty much every other state. My wife and I are included among that 20%, debiting Wisconsin where we lived at the time of the last census. It's easy enough to understand on a glorious shirtsleeve weather winter solstice day like today; what's more, unlike Florida we actually have some resources and industries, and unlike California we have plenty of flat land to expand our population onto.

Of course, this is unsustainable. At this rate the population of Texas will be 127 million by 2100, and will exceed a billion just after 2200. I have heard that reaching 50 million in the foreseeable future is considered a best estimate by the Texas Water Development Board.

Texas, of course, is the source of much climate skepticism. This may be real estate boosterism, Texas being hot, dry, and flash-flood prone with much of its infrastructure and property value barely above sea level. Texas is foolish in this regard, with its access to wind and solar power and energy infrastructure expertise. We ought to be leading the world in the transition to sustainability. Nobody here is willing to face the fact that when the really big problems start to get handed out, Texas will be near the front of the line.

But the culture has never had much respect for the land, which is harsh, scrubby and inhospitable, or the fauna, which tend to be as ornery as the short-tempered folk who famously first occupied this territory not too terribly long ago. The idea of farming was never to create a legacy for future generations. The early farmers would "use up" or "wear out" a farm and move on. And of course the real cowboys spirit opposed the fencelines in the first place.

This is not a place which takes kindly to limits. It respects its peculiar legacy but doesn't go out of its way to respect its posterity, and never has. Texans have somehow managed to prosper (mostly due to the happenstance of fuel-rich geology, though the mythos speaks endlessly about persistence, diligence, and effort, and hardly at all of dumb luck). That this prosperity is barely a century old, that it carries no warrantee, that it stands to vanish as a result of the very activities that began here and are the source of the present prosperity, warnings like these are unwelcome. The sky, we say, is the limit.

The world sees the northeast and California as the sources of American culture. Indeed, in a remarkable way they are the source of Texas culture; the myth of the west having grown up simultaneously with the west, first in newspaper reports and then in movies and television. GeronimoSitting Bull went from being a real chief to being a circus entertainer, seemingly hardly missing a beat. But the mythical Texas they created lives on, stitching together the cultures of the west and the south, to a remarkable extent forging the identity of the strange, isolated, proud and arrogant, joyous and angry, pious and profane, vicious and generous culture of the American heartland.

Convincing this boisterous, extroverted culture that it is leading the world in a headlong rush to crash against its actual limits is tricky business.