In a balloon

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

So there are two managers who are ballonists for a hobby, and they get blown off track and a bit lost. So one of them yells at someone he sees down on the ground:

"Heyyy! Yes youuu! Wherre arre weeee?"

to which the reply comes back

"You're in a balloooooon!"

The ballonist shrugs and says ruefully to his companion "That must be an engineer. He responded exactly to my question, everything he said was precisely correct, and yet I am no better off than I was before."

Have a look at Gavin Schmidt's response to this provocative posting by Steven Mosher on RealClimate. Notice how it responds exactly to the question and is correct in every detail. Notice how it nevertheless in no way offers any assistance to the questioner.

The answer makes it clear that the denialists have no significant participation in the discussion. Unfortunately, that is one of the few points on which they agree with the consensus. They are promulgating a different model of why this is so.

There is nothing in Gavin's answer to allay the suspicions others may have that climatology is an arrogant and closed-minded community. In failing to address exactly those suspicions, it seems likely that he confirmed them for many readers.

It is much harder to explain how and why certain topics are relegated to the fringe than to assert that they have been. Confidence building is hard, but in a situation like this, confidence erosion is easy. It is better to shut up than to dash off an impatient answer, however correct.

Mosher's position, whether benignly intended or not, is well formulated and worth of a response that holds together both factually and polemically. As a polemical response Gavin's reply is very counterproductive.

I didn't start this blog because I wanted to jump on Nisbett and Mooney's bandwagon. (As far as I see it I scooped them, for whatever that's worth.) I started this blog because I see realclimate backfiring. This is a case in point.

Update: The inimitable Dr Bunny has more evidence of RC folk being somewhat at the end of their rope. I am sure I do not always follow the gist of Eli's bemused commentary, but I am equally sure there is a lot in the exchange he points to that will not do much to attract fence-sitters, to say the least.

Today's Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail is Canada's newspaper of record, serving the purposes of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Today's Globe features two climate change stories on the front page, and one on the editorial page.

The editorial sums up the Globe's position on the main story. The story asserts that Canadian Kyoto compliance would require a 1/3 reduction in greenhouse gas net emissions per year spread over the next five years. So it is not hard to credit the following:

"I believe the economic cost would be at leaqst as deep as the recession in the early 1980s. ..." Mr. Drummond writes in a letter.

It will be difficult for the Liberals to attack Mr. Drummond, a senior Canadian economist whom [the Liberals among others] have consulted over the years.

Showing that for politicians, having politics trump actual reality is not a phenomenon that is unique to one side or the other of the political spectrum, the Liberals are happy to score cheap points off a problem that is of their own making. (They were the majority party during most of the Kyoto years, while Canada's emissions burgeoned.)

I am interested in making a case that economists should not be listened to on long time scales, but the other side of the coin is that their advice is indeed valuable on short time scales.

Canada has already procrastinated to the point where meeting Kyoto protocols is an impractical goal. It is ludicrous to suggest starting now to meet those goals, and it is offensive for the party that promoted those increases to blame the failure on the new conservative government.

Canada should strive to meet and exceed Kyoto goals as quickly as is possible without major disruption. Avoiding major disruption is, after all, the point of reducing emissions. Starting out with a major disruption misses the point.

(None of this is to offer much enthusiasm for the Harper government which is making plenty of other mistakes, like rolling back gun registration laws. But that's for another time and place.)

Indeed, the Globe's editorial page, in my opinion, more-or-less rightly summarizes:

The opposition MPs, led by the Liberals, have let crass politics trump their policy judgment. The federal government cannot and should not take such drastic action to meet Kyoto goals.

None of this letts Ottawa off the hook. Global warming is real. The Tories have a duty to produce a substantive package of market-based policies that would foster real reductions, albeit at a slower pace. But the federal government cannot destroy Canada to save it.

Well, whether the policies are market-based or not, they need to happen. The idea of Kyoto was that we would have 15 years to reduce modestly, not ten years to grow rapidly and then 5 to shrink spectacularly. The second plan makes no sense, and pretending it does to make cheap political points is not the way out of our predicament.

The second GHG related story states that Ontario intends to eliminate sales of incandescent bulbs by 2012. Good. Not market based at all. Purely regulatory, and perfectly appropriate.

Geoengineering and Intergenerational Ethics

EnvironmentalResearchWeb has a very interesting article by Steve Gardiner of "the other UW", on the subject on the ethics of geoengineering as an alternative to mitigation or adaptation.

A Passionate Defense of Optimism

Inel points us to a remarkable talk by Jeffrey Sachs to the Royal Society, and excellent replies to defeatist mutterings by presumably "conservative" m'luds in the audience. Get it while you can; apparently the mp3 will not be available past the end of the week.

(Such ringing language doesn't really roll of the tongue of someone with what I take to be a "gimme-a-break" urban Chicago accent, but his message overcomes his nasal whine easily enough...)

It's awfully cogent stuff for an economist (though he acknowledges Stern in the most effusive terms). The important point is moral. We can't afford fatalism about "human nature". This sort of defeatism, attachment to the insurmountability of human flaws, is a bizarre reading of what "conservatism" means. It certainly has nothing about conservation in it under present circumstances. What exactly is being conserved?

No matter how badly off we may be there is always a best outcome, and we must always strive for it. Setbacks are no excuse for surrender. There is no excuse for surrender. This is the only world we've got.

In short, making the best of it is pretty much the best we can make of it. It's only slightly less a tautology to say that we must always act on our hopes, else there is little hope.

Where I think Sachs missed the boat in response to this sort of muddleheaded defeatism is this: stasis is not an option, stability is not on the table. Things will either change for the better or for the worse.

For the reasons Sachs catalogs, as well as one, exponentially increasing consumption, (which, unsurprisingly, as an economist) he explicitly eschews, the situation is fundamentally unstable.

There is no "business as usual" anymore. Something has got to give.

Latest delusionism from the WSJ

Because we have been successfully Godwinned out of calling the self-proclaimed "skeptics" "denialists", I join the new trend in calling them "delusionists".

Here's a slightly edited instant messaging transcript you may find interesting. "mt" below is me. The other two people speaking are not climatologists. One (here called 'Fred') is well-known as an author of operational weather forecasting codes. The other (here called 'Barney') is a very clever high performance computing expert who has seen weather and climate codes but does not specialize in them.

It is interesting that Barney was quick to violate Godwin without any prompting. I do not think he has heard of "denialism".

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS

mt says, "The Wall Street Journal is at it again." [linked]

... pause ...

Fred: Mr. Jenkins is pissing in the wind. If the world scientific community *and* the U.S. Supreme Court aren't enough for him then I guess he's just gonna have to suffer.

Fred says, "I like how he slams Gore for what Jenkins thinks Gore's going to say."

Fred says, "Ought to at least let him say the thing first before criticising it. What's wrong with public discourse in this country?"

Fred says, "Are the people I agree with this strident and obnoxious too, and I just don't notice it because I agree with them?"

Fred . o O ( I'd like to think not, but we're all creatures of our own biases. )

Barney . o O ( What's wrong with "such a belief [being] the 'consensus' of scientists"? Perhaps Mr. Jenkins only shares beliefs with a plethora of tooth faries, or he only believes things written in invisible ink he cannot see drafted by an invisible man he does not know, or maybe god just tells him what to believe... or maybe he just knows better. )

Barney says, "A consensus of scientists have a theory of gravity -- but they're all wrong: The earth just sucks."

Barney says, ""Obviously we need a better theory than Mr. Inhofe's of when head-counting is a useful way of estimating the validity of a factual proposition and when it isn't." Yeah... How about a "scientific theory"?"

Barney assumes fetal position on floor in corner.

Barney can't tell if the WSJ is anti-science, or anti-intellectual.

Barney says, "What other well documented facts does WSJ provide coulmn space debunking? Anything on holocaust denial? What, exactly, is WSJ's point in running this dribble?"

Barney says, "There's a reason why it's always non-scientists who discover "mistakes" in cimate change studies: Lack of skill in the field leads to difficulties in self-assessing one's own incompetence."

Fred says, "Well said. I like the tooth fairy plethora consensus."

Is climatology a real science?

An article referenced at RC asks whether climatology is a real science.

The article is rife with the usual denialist sleight of hand and drivel, but it is not at all clear that the author is insincere.

The answer is yes, but why should anyone believe me? This leads me to broaden the question. How should one answer "is academic community X doing real science?"

After all, I have been known to ask whether economics is a real science. So I have to admit that the class of question is admissible.

I can't just point to the best climatologists I know and say "if that's not a scientist, I'm a blue armadillo". Any economist could argue similarly.

Values of X where this is very uncertain from my point of view include:

economics
psychology of consciousness
sociology
artificial intelligence
string theory

Others ask this of fields for which, for me, the answer is obviously affirmative, notably evolutionary biology, geology, climatology, any field which can't function in the context of a hypothetical world created ten thousand years ago.

I think the class of question is legitimate, and that high dudgeon is not a useful answer. What then constitutes a science? Is there some reasonable way for society to distinguish between sciences and intellectual disciplines that are not sciences?

I suspect that the question has no objective test, which puts us in a pretty pickle.

Annan vs Hegerl goes Nuclear in a Hurry

Strange day.

I just returned from a day that included a talk by Gabrielle Hegerl to discover that James Annan has a poster criticizing an aspect of her work.

In fact, the point that James makes, was, in essence, covered in her talk. She said the data alone was insufficient to remove the long tail, but she was clear that the long tail was almost certainly an artifact of
the way the problem was set up. I believe that James' approach amounts to begging the question: if you assert a prior where there are no tails, you can't say the data has constrained the tail. This seems to me like hair-splitting, though I expect James will disagree.

OK, fine, here I am at Bayesian central, I suppose seeing some technical battles between my virtual friends and my real-world acquaintances is to be expected in the rough and tumble world of science, but it's a bit of an odd coincidence.

So to see if there is some ongoing longer feud between these two, I googled "Annan Hegerl", and who should pop up but Lubos Motl! My God, this article was uploaded tomorrow (dateline artifacts). It appears negativeland is already all abuzz with the fact that a climate scientist would dare to criticize another!

(We are damned if we criticize each other and dmaned if we don't, but still, this is ridiculous.)

And see this on the SEPP site (with similar comments from Motl):

Three weeks ago, Hegerl et al. published a text in Nature that claims that the 95 percent confidence interval for the climate sensitivity is between 1.5 and 6.2 Celsius degrees. James Annan decided to publish a reply (with J.C. Hargreaves). As you might know, James Annan - who likes to gamble and to make bets about global warming - is

an alarmist who believes all kinds of crazy things about the dangerous global warming;

a weird advocate of the Bayesian probabilistic reasoning".

However, he decided to publish a reply that

the actual sensitivity is about 5 times smaller than the Hegerl et al. upper bound which means that the warming from the carbon dioxide won't be too interesting;

Now, leaving aside how weird it is for anyone, let alone the ever-rigorous James, to be called "a weird advocate of the Bayesian probabilistic reasoning" (!!!!) doesn't this read like weird Bayesian James has become almost Lindzenite, putting an upper bound on the sensitivity at 6.2/5 or about 1.25 C?

No. Weird Bayesian James advocates using 20/5 or 4 C as an upper bound. Elsewhere he comes up with 3 C as a best estimate. Which is higher than Gabi's!!!

I assure you Hegerl knows the long tail is an artifact; that the higher the cutoff the longer the tail; that it tells us nothing.

The only question is how to handle it. It can easily be misinterpreted either way you approach it. James' approach can be seen as begging the question. Can you really put your hypothesis in as your prior?

And how (to get back to my blog theme) do we go about explaining any of this to the general public now that the engines of apoplectic confusion are gearing up to make a case out of this?

Note to the lay reader; James will correct me if I am wrong, but I am pretty sure he does not claim that the sensitivity is certain to be less than 1.3 C.

Anyone care to make a bet?

[Update: apparently all this denialist noise was from last year. Still...]

Isotope evidence

Of course, the fact that modern humans are the source of new carbon is stunningly obvious if you look at the shape of the concentration curve against time.

I'd always heard that carbon isotopes were the clincher, but when asked for evidence, all I'd been able to find was an unsupported assertion in the IPCC TAR, which always irked me. Of course, IPCC has a rule of not referring to anything that isn't published in peer review, and this bit of data is so widely known and accepted among anyone who might conceivably care in a professional capacity that perhaps it appears nowhere in the primary literature.

A sort of catch-22!

Fortunately, Tamino has found a source for enough raw data to make the point.

Anyone who claims the CO2 (never mind the warming) is natural variability hasn't had a leg to stand on for a long time. This is just the icing on the cake.

So (to get meta again for a second) I am not arguing against logical argument. It's necessary, just not sufficient, is all I'm saying. It's nice to finally have solid evidence to point to on this matter.

The Invisible Audience Problem

Fergus Brown asks, in a comment to "frames and frames":

This idea [writing to your audience] might work well enough when you are considering the context of a speech or presentation, but how does it map into the blogosphere? Who is our audience here? Do we define them by our position, or do they define our position by their response? In other words, how does the idea of a frame work when the sudience is (in principle) arbitrary?

This is a timely question considering my disappointment with Coturnix's essay; see "More on the framing frame" (OK, OK, I've used that too "frame" frame too much...) and comments thereto.

I think what I am realizing is that the advice "frame for your audience" has to be tempered. You also have to frame for whomever else might wander by.

If we are trying to attain trust by projecting authority, we must minimize the number of people we irritate and confront. Of course if you irritate nobody ever, you achieve nothing. (It used to be you could sell a lot of colorful and vapid magazines, but I think those days are drawing to a close. There: I irritated magazine writers.)

So while I agree with N&M, I also need to say something that must be obvious to journalists but seems far from obvious to scientists. In a public communication, you have two framing tasks.

In the past, this didn't apply to scientific papers. Dr. X. might "disagree with the IPCC's assessment in Section 6.5.4.3" and not worry about it. Now Dr X needs to recast his statement lest his statement be turned into "Dr X disagrees with IPCC" and "Dr X disagrees with so-called climate consensus" and "Dr X is among the many scientists who think this product of the UN bureaucracy is unjustifiable" (and this is even before it crosses into outright misstatement.)

In the present environment, everything you say in public can come to the attention of anyone.

The overall effectiveness of the communication is not dominated by its evidence or logic, but by how effectively we build and maintain social networks of trust. This is much harder because people are deliberately trying to break that trust. This makes it all the more urgent that we pay attention to the whole thing.

In summary, what I am coming to is:

1. Identify and address your primary audience. Serve their needs.
2. Think about who else might be most negatively affected if they see it, treat them as a secondary audience, and if possible do what you can to soften the blow and avoid making enemies unnecessarily
   
3. When you are done think about whether what you say will do more harm then good. Once in a while be willing to throw the whole thing away. Substitute some dry lecture on Clausius-Clapeyron and be done with it.

This is no different for the web than it was in the days of paper. If anything, while it's easier to get published, it's also easier than ever for your words to reach someone they might offend. The intrinsic formalism of public communication exists for a reason.

In the end we are all in the same boat.

Frames and Frames

[Factored out of the previous posting for clarity.]

There are two meanings of the word "frame" that are getting confused here; one is the Overton Window stuff (the limits of what society tolerates as acceptable opinion can shift, and a good way to influence history in the long run is to move the perceived frame).

Climate science has suffered from a very sneaky placement of that frame, where the IPCC (which is a deliberate and careful attempt to explain the center of scientific opinion) is cast as the extreme of a debate, while one of the two actual extremes (Lovelock's position, I suppose) simply isn't in the public eye at all.

For clarity, perhaps we should call this the "window" and not the "frame".

What Nisbet and Mooney are talking about, in their discussion of framing that has gotten so much attention, is how to present your information to one or another audience: it refers to a given communication effort, not to the whole context.

Even in this case, despite the knee-jerk reactions of some, the word "framing" isn't about "lying". You say different things to different audiences because they have different needs and interests. That doesn't mean the things you say are inconsistent with each other or with truth as you understand it.