Photo Essay: A Scientific Congress

For readers who haven't attended a large scientific meeting, this is an attempt to capture the scene.



You arrive in an attractive corner of an attractive city, which you will not find time to explore. In this case it is the "Fall AGU" meeting in San Francisco, with about 16,000 attendees from earth, planetary and solar sciences. The AGU is the American Geophysical Union. Some atmospheric scientists go to this meeting. Others prefer the American Meteorological Society's meetings which are almost as large but more thematic.

As you approach the conference center, you see an increasing concentration of nerdy looking people, some prominently wearing nametags with a blue ribbon denoting "MEMBER". In the following picture, the two grinning vaguely Euro guys with bad haircuts (one has red sneakers) are almost certainly scientists, for example.



As you enter the main building, the scale of the event begins to dawn upon you.



You encounter four enormous hallways, each lined with large meeting rooms.



For most of the day, brief 15 minute talks are being given in each room. Sessions are about two hours, and eight or so related talks are typically given.



The schedule for each room is posted outside the room



Choosing which sessions to attend can be challenging.



Much of the real activity takes place in the hallway, though, where tables are set up for impromptu meetings. Colleagues whose paths have diverged re-establish old acquaintances and thrash out new ideas, and new alliances are forged.



At AGU, the poster session is in a separate building, and there's much pedestrian traffic between the two.



Not every proposed talk is accepted, but almost everyone is welcome to put up a poster in a poster session.



Although the poster section is enormous, posters are only up for one day.



Each poster's author is available at a specified time to discuss his or her poster. (*)



There is also a trade show for books



for special purpose equipment



and for shiny rocks! (*)



At AGU the trade show and the poster session are in the same massive hallway. (*)



A few special invited 90-minute talks take place in especially huge rooms, and these are often the highlight of the formal events. I especially enjoyed Richard Alley's talk this year. It was standing room only in this enormous hall. (Fortunately the fire marshalls did not catch on so I caught the whole thing.)



In the evening, if you are so inclined, the oddity of San Francisco is at your disposal. (*)



Most attendees will group up in fours, fives and sixes and look for quiet hotel bars to talk shop, though.

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Note, if you click on pictures marked with an asterisk (*) you can see a higher resolution version. Those of you who enjoy my photos are invited to peruse my photoblog at peculiarmo.blogspot.com .

Richard Alley Talk

Back when I was in Chicago I got to hear many conversations about paleoclimate, a field that is phenomenally rich (literally, there are lots of phenomena to explain) and increasingly data rich, but for all the things to explain and all the data to bring to bear, it struck me that conversations that didn't involve CO2 greenhouse forcing as a crucial mechanism, on time scales from millenia to eons, were few and far between.

Faced with this every day, and faced with an internet burbling about "no such thing" or "trivial effect" every night was an ongoing frustration. At one point I recall asserting that CO2 is crucial in explaining the 100 Ka glacial cycle, but when challenged I had a hard time finding something in the literature that made the claim explicitly.

I've discussed this sort of thing recently with both Steve Easterbrook and Paul Baer. It's implicit knowledge. By the time you are sufficiently enmeshed in paleoclimate to publish a paper, you already know that CO2 is the dominant control on paleoclimatic variation. There is nothing to be gained from publishing a result that is common knowledge. But sometimes a result gets into the lore of a field without making it into the literature at all. In this case, it's a sort of generalization that every paleoclimatologist makes, that nobody else has any way of finding out, and that is important!

So I was thrilled to see that Richard Alley was going to make this important point in detail in an hour-long plenary talk at AGU this year, entitled "The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth's Climate History".

Alley made a truly excellent presentation, in a huge room, standing room only. Since I was standing myself, and carrying some stuff, I couldn't really take good notes. Fortunately Dave Petley has an excellent summary (once you get past the rock talks at the beginning of his entry, anyway).

I hope the AGU follows through on making the video permanently available. It's time there was something for people to refer to on this matter. And it's another interesting case about the distinction between the literature and the knowledge of a field. Interestingly, Alley's time slot was up against another important event, which Dr Rabett has blogged, and he too has some things to say about the literature as a consequence, in his case about things that do get in that shouldn't.

Update via Anna Haynes: Richard Alley's talk is now viewable here (which you can get to from the "videos" page)

30th Anniversary of "Global Warming"

An excellent session chaired by Tony Busalacchi and Ray Pierrehumbert (thanks to Rodrigo Caballero for tuning me in) on the 30th anniversary of the first NAS report on climate change, chaired by Jule Charney in 1979 with some of the all time great minds in meteorology (Charney, Bolin, Smagorinsky) and oceanography (Wunsch, Stommel) participating.

I'll have more to say about this session later. The most important point, though, is that despite all the press about "global cooling scares" in the 1970s, by 1979 the NAS was capable of getting the whole picture right, in the complete absence of any observable recent warming.

The relatively brief report, "Carbon Dioxide and Climate, A Scientific Assessment", is available online, and genuine skeptics are invited to compare the best scientific opinion of the 1970s not only with current consensus thinking but also with the observed climate trajectory.

My Nisbet Gripe, Cont'd

I have no objection to the idea of framing messages effectively. Until this week, I had no idea why some people were complaining so bitterly about Nisbet.

But Nisbet is in the strange headspace of politics, where science is just a piece of furniture on the landscape of politics. What's more, it's a black box which emits certain very simple results. And when he describes the box, he gets it hopelessly wrong, and uses the bizarre and broken frames of the worst elements of the press.

The problem isn't the concept of framing. The problem is that the guy who has done the best job of staking out "framing" as his personal territory has about the most toxic set of frames out there for our issues. There is no getting rid of writing to your audience, but the word "framing" itself isn't all that valuable. If it belongs to Nisbet I don't want it.

One thing I've learned recently is that while in many ways I behave like a journalist, I simply have almost no interest in "news" any more than I am interested in "sports". Events in sports fall clearly into the space of "don't matter". In fifty years nobody will remember who won the superbowl this season. In politics, they will remember Obama's name, but little of what he said or did.

As long as we play on the battlefield of week-to-week politics and don't actually look into the science box, we lose the war of words. Yes, the right is disposed against us and the left toward us, pretty much for arbitrary cultural reasons. But the opposition is free to twist the facts and we aren't. So they pick off people as they start to pay attention and the mythology of massive corruption in climate science gets further elaborated.

If we don't play the long game, if we don't try to revive critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, if we don't go beyond assertion and into explanation, we are playing on the opposition's turf.

Nisbet may have done a good job of describing the opposition's turf, but that is all he knows. He, specifically, is an example of a person lacking a scientific education remotely commensurate with his capacities and interests. His approach embodies the substitution of politics for knowledge.

The long game is our home turf, and we have to stop listening to people who miss that point completely. The absurdly short time scales and shallow symbolic allegiances and frantic half-crazed yuppie obsessions du jour of the beltway and the press are the problem, not the solution.

Carbon Sequestration Validation

So much for keeping a low profile at Fall AGU.

Oh well, as my putative scientific career finally evaporates altogether, I suppose it's good to have a mission. I'm going back to my self-defeating old habit of always being most interested in the things I know least about. This is pretty self-defeating scientifically, but maybe now that Revkin is semi-retired I can find a niche for myself as a science reporter. So consider me your man on the scene.

My favorite of the talks I attended today was by Sally Benson of Stanford, an invited talk on verifying carbon sequestration.

As another carbon sequestration speaker said, "it's all about the credits": energy interests aren't especially interested in carbon sequestration unless and until we put a price on carbon, but once we do so, they'll be very interested in it. Of course, this is a famously scrupulous and fastidious industrial sector, so we can presume they won't cut corners and just pump carbon randomly into pipes in the ground whether it will stay there or not. But just in case, perhaps it would be best if we could somehow discriminate actual sequestration from random pipes into the depths.

Sarcasm aside, there's little doubt that a significant amount of CO2 can be hidden underground. There's every evidence of serious people doing serious experiments to demonstrate all the pieces. And in the end, some form of sequestration is necessary to reverse carbon concentrations; whether it's what is now being called CCS or not, some way of taking carbon out of circulation in massive quantities is already the legacy of our generation, and likely of a generation or two to come.

It's the case that vast ancient deposits of methane remianed underground for millions of years. So gas can stay underground. It's also the case that we can pipe gas underground; the oil industry already does this to increase extraction. It makes sense, when you pull a resource fluid out, to pump its waste product into the same hole. (It's not really a hole. It's gaps in a granular medium. There never was an ocean of oil under that gusher.) But just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy.

A leakage rate of 1% a year is as good as worthless. Even 0.1 % leaves only 37% of the gas underground after a millenium; you really have to get to 0.01% before the project starts doing substantial good (90% after a millenium) and a good goal is a leakage rate of 0.001% (99% after a millenium, 90% after 10,000 years).

And it's easy to get it wrong. Put too much gas underground (thereby avoiding building an expensive new facility) and you start inducing cracking in the cap rock (before I got to Texas, "cap rock" was not even in my vocabulary!) and your leakage rate starts to skyrocket.

Now in field tests, you can drill holes to check your theories, but in an actual deployment, I figure you can't be drilling too many holes to get samples. (I'm not actually sure about this, but my intuition rebels against making a swiss cheese out of your cap rock to make sure it is intact.) Anyway, Dr Benson's talk was about how to determine if you were getting the sequestration to work. The idea is that a regulator could refund you carbon points if you were successfully burying your carbon.

OK, so now there are two ways to proceed. You could try to measure the inventory, or you could try to measure the leakage. Both are problematic. You measure the inventory using seismic inversion; essentially sonar. The trouble with the sonar methods is twofold. First of all, it's messy: a lot of people make a career of having enough intuition to look at these things and find good places to explore or drill for this or that (usually that). Also, some CO2 dissolves or reacts. Even if your sonar were absolutely perfected you could easily lose 10 to 20% of your inventory. That is far too much uncertainty to be of use here.

The other approach is to look for leakage at the surface with arrays of sensitive CO2 detectors or isotopic measurements, to find sources of fossil carbon-based CO2 which is C-14 depleted. A source as "small" as 100 tons/year can be detected. Compare this to the rates of sequestration at a commercial site, on the order of 50 megatons of carbon inventory.

So that's sensitive enough. Are we done?

No, because the test is expensive and tightly focused in space, while the artificial reservoir is as large as 100 square kilometers. You have to kn ow eher to put the sensors. Here, though, is where seismic imaging does work. It can tell you something about the structure of the subsurface and give you good candidate locations to look for leaks.

Are we happy yet? Benson thinks so.

I have some doubts, myself. (The following is not part of Benson's talk but speculation of my own.)

The time scales are at issue. How long between springing a leak and detecting it? It seems like it could easily be decades before the leak erupts to the surface: very fast by geological standards but very slow by commercial ones.

Commercially, as a carbon combustion business, I want to be rewarded for my good deeds (really, non-penalized for my non-bad deeds) immediately. But as a government, I don;t want to credit you with the sequestered carbon until it doesn't leak. Most businesses will not take a thousand year lead time on their investments. So the problem, ultimately, isn't technical. It's the same old social problem. We don't know how to think on long enough time scales to make incentives for effective carbon sequestration work. Or so it looks to me. Did I miss something?

Data access & collaboration in weather/climate

First session at AGU:

Next generation distributed data access diagnostics and collaborations for climate and weather models

Sort of an ironic session, with everyone presenting the need for srandardization in the field but everyone proposing different and mutually incompatible standards. Everyone ignored ESMF, interesting in itself. By far the nicest and most convincing presentation from where I sat was Reagan Moore's irods (irods.diceresearch.org).

The irony: the collaboration groups all ignore each other! There's an essay here about how science has learned the wrong lesson from commerce. Competition itself is neither necessary nor sufficient...

Farewell to Framing

I came to AGU a day early for this?

Matt Nisbet, Max Boykoff and the euphoniously named Gwendolyn Blue formed a panel on public communication of science. I enjoyed it on the whole; Ms. Blue's presentation in particular was delightful, but the more I think about the whole thing the more convinced I am that it missed the mark altogether.

Now this blog came on the scene pretty much simultaneous with the famous Nisbet and Mooney Nature item which discussed the necessity for "framing" science in a way that would be palatable to the target audience. I'm a sort of cultural chameleon myself, so I'm perhaps more aware than other scientists of when scientific arrogance is more likely to piss people off than to attract them. I thought avoiding P Z Myers confrontationalism was all this framing business was about.

I remain a Chris Mooney fan, but having seen Nisbet in action, I now see that the person who has staked out "framing science" as his personal territory pretty much doesn't get science.

To be sure, I'm not sure there were any scientists in the audience. Simon Donner said he'd show up, but I didn't see him. And much as I appreciate Steve Easterbrook, not to mention yours truly, both of whom were evident in the audience, we really aren't your core AGU audience either. Melanie Fitzpatrick of the Union of Concerned Scientists was there, but you can't really call her a practicing scientist either. Other identified participants were mostly political or educational types, too.

I didn't really see any major league researchers there, so the whole episode was sort of ironically moot to begin with. That turned out to be a good thing. As you will see, I don't recommend real scientists expend many synapses on this gang.

Boykoff kicked it off, and managed to go 18 minutes before mentioning the CRU email hacking, which I appreciated, and he did encourage participation by scientists, but he pretty much fell right into the "global warming, yes or no" frame and followed polls.

He also bought into the idea that the blogosphere was totally obsessed with the CRU business. He dismissed my point that article counts don't tell you much on the web, and that Google search metrics didn't show a lot of interest in the business among the real world. He shrugged and said I should trust him to compare "apples to apples". Yeah, dude, but those are really teeny tiny apples on one side, you know?

Nisbett was also all about "global warming, yes or no", so much that he seemed to think "communicating science" was all about communicating "global warming, yes". He yammered about Al Gore incessantly. He mentioned the CRU business within seconds, and had called it "climategate". He kept referring to AGU as "environmental scientists"!

This is the guy who wants to tell us about "framing"?

The worst of it was all the spin he was advocating had nothing whatsoever to do with science. We should talk about energy. About security. We should take a tip from congress who renamed "Cap and Trade" to "America's Clean Energy and Security". We should talk about the birds and the fishes. Well fine. What you need a geophysicist for in that case escapes me entirely.

It emerged that the panelists were confident that the public does not care about science, and that you should feed them symbols instead because they will ignore rational argument. To those who object that this is exactly what Al Gore did in his movie, they amend their position to state that you should feed them symbols and not be Mr Gore, but that otherwise what Gore does is perfect.

People in the audience had trouble absorbing all of this. The advice to scientists, then, is to dress up like scientists and deliver PR just like the PR office tells them to.

Ms Blue softened the blow a little bit. She wrapped it up with an interesting story of consensus building among a nonexpert population, with consensus facilitators and scientific documents but no scientific authorities in the room. Most of the subgroups ended up supporting a fairly strong negotiating position in Copenhagen (30% reductions by 2020 or such) but they were playing by the rules, which meant to treat the science as true. Apparently one table had a convinced denialist who had brought his own briefing book; it wasn't stated but I imagine his table didn't have as good a time as they were playing more by real world rules. It was an interesting experiment but it completely begged the question of which briefing book people are using, didn't it?

In the end, the social scientists presented an audience of educators, reporters and activists with the message that physical scientists should give up any hope of influencing how people actually weigh evidence. People simply aren't interested in scientific process. Scientists are weird and should accept that; democracy works purely on superficial and symbolic processes.

This isn't what I read from serious skeptics, who are livid about getting symbolism when they ask substantive questions. The small group of relevant scientists are telling the truth when they say "we really don't have time to discuss everything in detail, even with people who aren't adamant about distrusting us; we have work to do". The vicious circle of hostility and suspicion feeds on the opacity of science, not the excess of "information".

The social scientists, big on frames, totally shared the frame of the denialists that climate science is about "global warming", and presumed that AGU is about climate science. Of course, if that were true, we wouldn't be very busy at all. We'd have answered the question "global warming, yes or no" in the affirmative already. So all we need to do now is to just sell our idea like soap. After all the other guys are doing that. If we don't come up with better branding and clever promotional programs, is it any wonder we're losing market share?

Well, if this is framing, you can keep it, thanks.

CO2 in Earth's History

I have never found a useful overview of how paleo people look at CO2 and not for lack of trying.

So I'm happy to see that Richard Alley is giving a plenary talk on this very subject at AGU Tuesday afternoon 1:40 PM Pacific time..

Title is "The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth's Climate History".

It will be webcast. Google AGU webcast and you should find it.

Email from Bolivia

Not someone in Bolivia. I got an email from Bolivia itself. Someone claiming to represent the "Plurinational State of Bolivia" sends the following:

PRESS RELEASE

Bolivia responds to US on climate debt: "If you break it, you buy it."

In response to the US chief negotiator Todd Stern's rejection of paying it's climate debt - the principle of polluter pays -- Pablo Solon, Bolivia's ambassador to the United Nations said the following:

"Admitting responsibility for the climate crisis without taking necessary actions to address it is like someone burning your house and then refusing to pay for it. Even if the fire was not started on purpose, the industrialised countries, through their inaction, have continued to add fuel to the fire. As a result they have used up two thirds of the atmospheric space, depriving us of the necessary space for our development and provoking a climate crisis of huge proportions.

"It is entirely unjustifiable that countries like Bolivia are now forced to pay for the crisis. This creates a huge draw on our limited resources to protect our people from a crisis created by the rich and their over-consumption.

"In Bolivia we are facing a crisis we had no role in causing. Our glaciers dwindle, droughts become ever more common, and water supplies are drying up. Who should address this? To us it seems only right that the polluter should pay, and not the poor."

"We are not assigning guilt, merely responsibility. As they say in the US, if you break it, you buy it."

Background: Todd Stern in a press conference on 10 December said: "We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere up there that are there now. But the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations - I just categorically reject that."

As usual, I violate journalistic protocol by failing to mangle the press release and then pass it along as my own work. If a press release is interesting, I think the press just ought to print it.

It certainly seems plausible that this is the position of Bolivia, though I have no way of determining whether I'm being spoofed.

This time I'm going to comment, though.

In this case I agree with neither the claimed position of Bolivia nor that of the US.

The US should not have to take responsibility for past emissions in the sense of reparations before the date it became clear that these were problematic. Nations should be held culpable only for those emissions which exceed those which reasonably might have been expected after the problem became internationally recognized. Fortunately, we have a date and an emissions scenario.

The fractional culpability of each nation could well be argued to be the ratio between the excess of their emissions over those negotiated at the Kyoto protocol to the total of historical emissions. In the case of the most "developed" nations this quantity will not be insignificant, but it will be much less than our total emissions.

Slashdot discussion

The WSJ via Slashdot:

The real fallout of climategate may have nothing to do with the credibility of climate change. Daniel Henninger thinks it's a bigger problem for the scientific community as a whole and he calls out the real problem as seen through the eyes of a lay person in an opinion piece for the WSJ. Henninger muses 'I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them,' and carries on that vein in saying, 'This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies.' While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals, he explains that the attacks against scientists in these leaked e-mails for proposing opposite views will recall the reader to the persecution of Galileo. And in doing so will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of ALL sciences without fully seeing proof of it but assuming that infighting exists in them all. Is this a serious risk? Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics?"

The WSJ article is breathless and overstated. The claim that science itself is just politics by other means, often made in the past by the left, is no more true than ever when spewed from the right. Still, the fact that there is some fallout to the credibility of science is real. That political activists are happy to throw away the baby with the bathwater is not news to us, but their recent success in the matter isn;t something we can dismiss lightly.

A Slashdot response which I liked very much:

People concerned about the policy proposals currently being put forward have focused way too much energy on questioning the scientific findings of current and recent warming. It's so unnecessary because scientists understand, and will readily admit, that there is much greater uncertainty when the models are run forward to predict future decades.

The models can be tuned and validated against historical data, then different forcings backed out to assign relative significance. This is where you get statements like (paraphrasing) "70% of recent warming has been due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, with 90% confidence." Some estimate of confidence is possible because of the validation against historical empirical data and climate reconstructions. Independent lines of inquiry can reinforce each others' findings. This is solid science, and where the "climategate" PR stunt falls down. The e-mails provide good fodder for insinuation, but no answer to the quantitative agreement seen in independent lines of study.

But when we run the models forward, there is not yet any empirical confirmation. Distinct models, using distinct data sets, can be seen to agree to some degree--but how much of that reflects reality, and how much reflects common assumptions? Every forward-looking run must assume some set of future values for human activity and natural processes, including ones that are parameterized (like cloud formation) that might advance beyond currently validated bounds. The uncertainty grows when the models are asked to bring their predictions down to local conditions--the distinction between predicting global average climate, and predicting long-term local weather. Will Kansas get hotter or colder, wetter or drier? There is quite a bit of uncertainty in such predictions--again, as working scientists clearly understand.

Layering on the biological response to these uncertain predictions creates even more uncertain predictions. One recent study at Woods Hole seemed to indicate that some animals might respond to ocean acidification by growing thicker shells. I'm not taking that one study as gospel, but it is worth considering that we do not fully understand biological systems and how they will respond to changing climate conditions.

Finally we get to the societal and economic layer, which sits, at least partially, atop uncertain biological predictions. Global warming may causes shifts in where certain crops can be grown--these changes will exact a cost on human society. Will they also confer a benefit? It's not scientific heresy to think that changes to climate can produce benefits as well as costs--although perhaps not to the same subset of the population. We may have to invest substantially in new areas and ways of farming, in new transportation routes. It's not inconceivable that the end result could be greater efficiencies and healthier produce. And of course there is also substantial error (to say the least) in multi-decade economic models.

The greatest threat is probably sea level rise. Wealthy nations might make the decision to invest in mitigation, rather than prevention. It is possible to raise or move cities, and to build barriers to keep out the sea. Such decisions are policy, but must be informed by the best scientific understanding we have--but that understanding must include understanding of uncertainty.

But instead what we see is a concentrated dose of PR and ignorance, attempting to raise doubts about scientifc conclusions about climate change that are well-supported (like whether human emissions can change the climate). You see people trying to simultaneously point out problematic sitings of temperature stations, and demonize working scientists for adjusting temperature data to minimize the error due to such siting. You see people repeatedly gesturing toward the sun, when numerous direct measurements indicate flat or declining insolation over the recent decades. They come off looking stupid, and smart people dismiss them.

It's a shame because lost in the battle over some of the science, is a full discussion of scientific uncertainty and policy options. There is no reason that full understanding of the current state of climate science must automatically lead to a certain bill or treaty. Somewhere in there is the difference between science and policy, between scientists and politicians. I think the politics will get the best result if the science is well understood. That means pushing back against ignorance like "climategate," but it also means pushing back against activists who oversell the certainty of future predictions, or hide certain policy options.