New Climate Blogger

I'd like to welcome Kate of ClimateSight to the climogosphere.

In addition to a few xkcd-ish cartoons, Kate has remarkably sophisticated observations about the climate debate. I feel like qualifying that with "for a high school student" but that would be unfair. If most of the population had a tiny fraction of the insight Kate brings to this question we'd be vastly better off.

Kate describes herself as an "aspiring climatologist". Watch out, world!

PS - Yes, she's Canadian, of course.

The Return of Forecasting Principles

Remember "Forecasting Principles"? 

J. Scott Armstrong, a B-school investment forecaster, took on climate theory based on the validity of financial forecasts! Sure enough, he concluded that we are overextended! 

Not satisfied with the fool he made of himself at the time, Armstrong was quick to take up the invitation (!) from the Financial Post to revisit the question in the light of the MIT probabilistic forecast. (I am inclined to be skeptical, myself, about that publication, but that doesn't mean I am willing to make up silly counterarguments.)

Armstrong's substantive contribution, in association with Dr. Willie Soon (of the "Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics" no less) is as follows:

With Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, we found that simply predicting that global mean temperatures will not change results in quite small forecast errors. In our validation study that covered the period 1851 to 2007, we compared the no-change forecast with the IPCC global warming forecast that temperatures will climb at a rate of 0.03C per year. We compared the IPCC projection of 0.03C per year with what actually happened after 1850. The errors from the IPCC projection were 12 times larger than no-change benchmark. Consider the accuracy of the no-change model: On average the 50-years ahead forecasts differed by only 0.24C from the global mean temperature as measured by the Hadley Centre in the U. K.

What a clever test! It turns out that the temperature change over the past 150 years is closer to zero than to 4.5 C. Therefore, wait for it...

Based on our analysis, we expect the annual global mean temperature for every year for the rest of the 21st Century to be within plus-or-minus 0.5C of the 2008 mean.

Therefore the sensitivity is zero! Haha! Look, the three lines of code were written by an astrophysicist! Zero! Hahahaha!

Building Green

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this LEED certified green building, a single-family home.

The NYTimes says

Set on 74 partly wooded acres with a private lake, Windermere promises to be very lavish and, believe it or not, very green — as in energy-saving and preservation minded.

Windermere is the first project of NRDC Residential, a new division of the National Realty and Development Corporation of Purchase, N.Y., which wants to develop a niche as a builder of “architecturally driven, planned communities with an environmental consciousness,” said Mark Robbins, the division president.

The Times also confidently asserts this:

It is the first of 24 homes planned for a development named after an area in the English Lake District, and built in a style meant to evoke 19th-century English country houses.

Have a look at the picture and see if you find it evocative, and if so, tell me, exactly, evocative of what.

Update: Somebody just hit this article, first posted April of 08, so I looked again. On the whole I think this item missed the attention it deserved, so I am reposting it.

The Postcautionary Principle

You-all reg'lar reader types know, by now, that I really really don't like lazy articles that drum up an impression of a false symmetry where there is none to be had in reality. But I've stumbled across a very striking and real symmetry, and one that I think is at the core of our lazy polarization. 

In my talk last week before my trip to Montreal (chilly and drizzly, thanks, it was wonderful) I attempted top take the edge of the partisan global wamring debate by emphasizing that neither "yes" nor "no" are meaningful answers to the question "how much CO2 should we tolerate?" So many people, though, aren't thinking in those terms.

On the one hand, we have the "precautionary principle":

No action of any kind should be tolerated unless it can be proven beyond doubt that it has no net negative impact on the earth as a whole system.

On the other, we have a libertarian philosophy which can be summarized as almost the diametrical opposite:

No restrictions of any kind on individual behavior should be tolerated unless it can be proven beyond doubt that they infringe on the rights of others.

It doesn't really have a name that i know of, but it certainly has some proud adherents.

Now, see, most people think science is about "proof", which shows what a terrible job we are doing of conveying the stuff of science to the world, but that's another topic. The point here is that in both cases the person making the claim is asking for a sort of proof that is totally impractical even in the best of circumstances. To take matters further, of course, people who choose not to be convinced by evidence of something they find intuitively distasteful just won;t be convinced. Your evidence, no matter how well corralled and paraded before them, will surely be insufficient, and they will have a vast array of well-formatted pseudoscience, replete with charts and graphs for every legitimate piece of work you show them.

Yes, as I look at it the symmetry to me seems almost perfect.

What's more, both principles, that of maximum self-determination, and that of maximum respect for future generations, have a core dignity and appeal to them. It's a hard heart that isn't tempted to sign up for both sides!

Unfortunately, both principles, however noble in intent, are unworkable. The real world is one of guesswork, tradeoffs, and tightropes. Neither principle offers useful guidance. The implicit contention of the two is doing real, fundamental damage to our ability to compromise and reason about our circumstances.

Life is uncertain. We might just screw up the economy AND get no real benefit on the climate change front. That's an easier and likelier outcome than the opposite one, really. As long as we are pulling in opposite directions, the odds of us coming through this mess in a semblance of dignity keep going down.

The times don't call for small measures, but they don't call for digging our heels in and sticking to absolute principles either. 

You've got your rock here, you've got your hard place there; don't be getting all superstitious about where you step at a time like this.

 

Update: Wikipedia describes the precautionary principle thus: 

The precautionary principle is a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action

The main problem is that "proof" thing.

Robert Reich Gets It

Now we are getting somewhere. 

I guess economists don't count Robert Reich as serious, but political scientists, I think, do. So maybe the light is starting to dawn in Punditia.

My prediction, then? Not a V, not a U. But an X. This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.

The X marks a brand new track -- a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can't "recover" because it can't go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin. More on this to come.

Would be a Nice Tool

The Nature Conservancy has some global change projections available at http://www.climatewizard.org/index.html

It's a nice looking page. Unfortunately, the attention to presentation exceeds the attention to detail. Several model views are available as well as an ensemble average, but the latter is identical to the HadCM output.

Hope this gets fixed soon so we can have a little more confidence in what we are looking at. I have contacted them with a bug report.

Change

http://imgur.com/gallery/1b89I

Bug Report

http://xkcd.com/258/

To clarify: I feel the same way xkcd (aka Randall Munroe) does about conspiracy theories in general.

I mention it here because I was specifically thinking about the idea that there is a vast conspiracy of scientists to convince people of the otherwise absurd idea that there might be some problem about releasing too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and to squelch any arguments to the contrary.

Instead of, you know, overwhelming evidence.

Inexcusable Austin/Singer/Lindzen Letter

The denialist sites are all over this  open letter signed by a bunch of physicists and emeriti including Singer and Lindzen. My comments are in green.

TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES: YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

Obviously. But by whom?

You have recently received an Open Letter from the Woods Hole Research Center, exhorting you to act quickly to avoid global disaster. The letter purports to be from independent scientists, but that Center is the former den of the President's science advisor, John Holdren, and is far from independent. This is the same science advisor who has given us predictions of “almost certain” thermonuclear war or eco-catastrophe by the year 2000, and many other forecasts of doom that somehow never seem to arrive on time.

Great! Let's keep up the good work of avoiding the various pitfalls, then, shall we?

The facts are:

The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for ten years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists' computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.

Shameless bastards. These are Ph.D.s; they should understand the possibility of cherrypicking from a noisy record. The earth is not cooling in any way that isn't just an argumentative artifice.

The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore? Can John Holdren? 

Weather is not climate. Can Lindzen really have sunk to the point that he is willing to sign this? 

We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact

THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE; IT DOESN'T EXIST.

That is news to most of us. What is all this evidence-shaped stuff in the journals, then, anyway?

The proposed legislation would cripple the US economy, 

How do you know? It's those infallible economic models isn't it?

putting us at a disadvantage compared to our competitors. 

Why? Is the US so decadent by now that we can't compete on energy technology? I think we should be future oriented, not become one of those declining societies holding on to a vanishing past.

For such drastic action, it is only prudent to demand genuine proof that it is needed, not just computer projections, and not false claims about the state of the science.

What do you mean by "genuine"? Would ANYTHING satisfy you?

SCIENCE IS GUIDED BY PROOF, NOT CONSENSUS

Consensus is a key mechanism for the advancement of science. That is how it works. 

And proof? Well, here's a funny thing. Science NEVER PROVES ANYTHING ABOUT NATURE! You can only prove things ABOUT MODELS OF NATURE. And models, well, either they are fit for purpose or they aren't. 

I am absolutely stunned that a bunch of Ph.D. scientists are promoting this essentially ignorant idea of what science is. Even if climatology really is bathwater...

This is nothing short of treachery toward science. Every one of these people must know that science is not about proof. This one has me absolutely slack-jawed. I understand polemicists undermining science in the name of their pet cause. For scientists to join them is very strange.  

Finally, climate alarmism pays well. Alarmists are rolling in wealth from the billions of dollars floating around for the taking, and being taken. 

Hey, George Soros, where's my check, dammit? 

It is always instructive to follow the money.

Something I can agree with at last. Follow the damned money.

Really, the opposition gets more shameless each year than you could even have imagined the year before.

Age discrimination

I find it interesting that age discrimination is frowned upon in most situations but celebrated in science. It's a bit demoralizing now that I am on the losing side of the proposition, but I can see both sides of the argument. 

What's odd is how science is so explicit and comfortable about age constraints that would not be acceptable elsewhere.