Climate Models: Best Hope of Policy Gradualism

There's much to consider in Ray Pierrehumbert's latest posting on RealClimate, "The Debate is Just Beginning on the Cretaceous". For now I'd like to focus on Ray Ladbury's comment #22. Ray L says something much like I've been saying, though he expresses it somewhat differently. Logically, I have argued that the less you believe the models, the more you should support vigorous (ok, ok, I'll say it, "draconian") policy to restrain emissions.

Here is how Ray L explains it:

Excellent post as usual. The seeming glee that denialists sieze upon any result that could be interpreted as calling model results into question has always amused me. The empirical data are sufficient to establish that warming is occurring. The fact that nobody can construct even a semblance of a scientific model that explains these data without anthropogenic CO2 being the driver establishes convincingly the cause. And the paleoclimate is sufficient to establish that the consequences of rapid, significant warming can be severe indeed. The models are the only tools we have that could LIMIT how much we should be concerned. Right now it is the models that are suggesting scenarios by which we could limit the consequences of climate change without significantly harming our global economy. If the models are wrong, the upside risk of climate change cannot be limited, and arguments for draconiam measures are strengthened rather than weakened. That is why I keep telling responsible skeptics that the models are the best friends they have.

Drought and Nukes

I mentioned this last August: nuclear plants are thirsty. Though they help with the carbon problem, they are also vulnerable to climate shifts. (The article I referenced then seems to have expired.)

(Why are newspapers so silly? I am sure that paid archives achieve less for them than ongoing advertisements. The NY Times seems to have figured it out...)

Here's another article in the same vein: the southeastern drought is causing power shortages over there by shutting down nukes. Let's hope that this eases before the summer cooling season kicks in.

AAAS Supports Science Debate

American Association for the Advancement of Science today announced that it has joined a major effort to mount a presidential debate on science, technology and the economy.

“It’s a new, global knowledge economy. Dealing with that is going to be a pretty major policy question for the next president – one that affects the pocketbook of every American. When you add global warming, the healthcare crisis, biotechnology, and transportation, it starts looking like many of the major issues the next president will face are not being seriously debated,” said Otto. “That’s why a leading organization like the AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society, is signing onto our citizen initiative.”

(emphasis added)

Antarctic Melting Accelerates

JPL Press Release Jan 23 2008:

Ice loss in Antarctica increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years due to a speed-up in the flow of its glaciers and is now nearly as great as that observed in Greenland, according to a new, comprehensive study by NASA and university scientists.

...

Rignot said the losses, which were primarily concentrated in West Antarctica's Pine Island Bay sector and the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, are caused by ongoing and past acceleration of glaciers into the sea. This is mostly a result of warmer ocean waters, which bathe the buttressing floating sections of glaciers, causing them to thin or collapse. "Changes in Antarctic glacier flow are having a significant, if not dominant, impact on the mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet," he said.

The Free Market Fairy

Linked from Bryan L's blog this AM, a remarkable blog called bitworking.

I'm very fond of the recent Free Market Fairy article:

You know the one where you put your problem under the pillow and during the night the Free Market Fairy visits and your problem is solved the next morning.

Now no one on the right is using the term Free Market Fairy - they use is "free markets", or very rarely "invisible hand" - but let's be very clear that they are invoking not a general theory of markets nor a deep understanding of economic systems, but instead a magical mythical benevolent force that can do only good and can never do harm and will solve all the world's problems if only we'd let it. I will refer to that force as the Free Market Fairy.

The Free Market Fairy is a very different creature from the original Invisible Hand of Adam Smith, who only mentions it briefly in all of his works where it is couched in a whole framework of economic theory. Today we know that Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is the operation of free markets to maximize efficiency. It is the beginning of an understanding of emergent behavior, the power of individuals, acting locally, that can produce globally things no individual could produce.
...

I certainly believe in the power of a market economy to maximize efficiency and in the power of emergent systems. What I want to do away with is the Free Market Fairy, a fluffed up fraud injected into the conventional wisdom

Please Get Out of the Way

Andrew Revkin has an article and a video up on the NYT site about Kevin Conrad, representing Papua New Guinea at the Bali talks, whose outspoken challenge to the US tipped or at least appeared to tip the US delegation into a more cooperative stance.

I had wanted to hear more about this and I very much appreciate Revkin's work on this story.

Personal News: Long Term Project Found

It looks like I have 50% funding more or less indefinitely on a software project for which I have great enthusiasm. It's not directly about climate models but it does support climate as well as other sciences; improving applicability to climate science is one of my goals on the project. It will also leave me in a position to keep bugging NSF about alternative approaches to climate modeling.

It may be some time before this is official. I'll let you know more once the last i's are crossed and t's dotted (this is a quite mathematically intensive package :-) ) but it looks like my association with U of Texas is likely to persist.

I've actually dropped back to halftime on my existing work, partly to extend my appointment but partly to find time to attend to my health and especially my weight problem. So it looks like I'll be back to full time in late spring and half time in the interim (which also means it may be a good period for writing and blogging). Then from fall onward I am at least 50% funded which looks sustainable.

Irene and I also just finished moving into our trite but solid little Texas ranch house, and her psychology practice looks to be successfully spinning up. So things (keyn ahora) are looking good for us down here.

Inhofe 399

Let's subtract one at least.

Presentation Tonight in Austin

Local folks who read this blog may be interested in the following presentation at the Austin Forum:

Three Case Studies: Cities and the Use of Technology to Achieve Urban Sustainability

Steven Moore is the Bartlett Cocke Professor of Architecture and Planning in the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin. In 2001, Moore co-founded the UT Center for Sustainable Development. He is a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and a Loeb Fellow of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has authored numerous books.

Moore will present case studies of three very different cities that aspire to develop sustainably — Austin, Texas; Curitiba, Brazil; and Frankfurt, Germany. His experience as a practicing architect and his knowledge of science, technology, geography, and planning allow him to study the built environment as a socio-technical artifact. He also uses Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis to model the physical impacts of public policy choices and relates this directly to his work.

You can also glimpse the current champion world's most powerful computer (actually online now! yay!) blinking through a wall of glass and if you ask me nicely I'll show you my office too, both in the same building.

Research Office Complex
J.J. Pickle Research Campus
10100 Burnet Road
Building 196
Austin, Texas 78758-4497

Update 1/17: Nobody took me up on this which is just as well. The talk was not entirely boring but it far from knocked my socks off. The title of the talk was utterly misleading, and I would venture that the speaker knows very little about technology or for that matter about the sorts of thing I would call science. More to follow.

Nice Flipped Question Presentation

On the GlobalChange list, Roger Coppock points to this wonderful graphic from the UKMO.

Rather than a noisy time series, we get a rather elegant view of an unmistakable trend. It's the same information presented in a more cognitively accessible fashion. The accompanying story is here.

Rather detracting from the value of the image is the fact that the vertical extent of the colored bars is not explained in any detail. It "feels like" some sort of uncertainty measure (older years indeed do have wider bars) but the source of the data and the analysis represented by the bars should be explained somewhere accessible from the page. It would be dramatcially more useful that way.

That said, the image itself is a very nice illustration of Tufte-esque principles, and it makes the actual situation (right, the actual warming trend) much more cognitively accessible than does the usual time series.

Update:Per Hank's suggestion in the comments, here is a tweaked version optimized for the most common form of color blindness: