Mann: Ice Has No Agenda

Here's a NOAA graphic that's been floating around. It's interesting how a little attention to design makes it somehow more attractive. It really doesn't take long to get the gist. Maybe the colors will help people remember it, though. Call it the Quaternary CO2 Hockey Stick or the orange on navy blue curve.

A site called Universe Today uses it to introduce a recent lecture by Mike Mann. I personally think neither well nor badly of Mann; there has been so much noise around the poor fellow that it's pretty much impossible to make a fair judgment without meeting him. But unless you are already caught in the ideological circus, you ought to admit he makes some excellent points which seem true to the scientific rather than the ideological approach to climate change.

“We have to make it clear that the ice sheets are not Republicans or Democrats – they don’t have a political agenda as they disappear,” said Michael Mann, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University, who has been at the recent forefront of climate research. “Certain facts cannot be denied. We have to find a way to steer the conversation to a good faith debate about what we do about the problem, not this bad faith debate about the reality of it.”

So why the bad faith debate? Indeed, why the politicization of the non-political parts of the question?

“If you can politicize something in today’s political environment,” Mann continued, “you can immediately get half the population on your side. Unfortunately the forces of anti-science — those who deny the science — have been very effective in politicizing the framing.”

Yet many people suggest that Mann is at the core of an ideological push to politicize. Who is right? Well, if you have a few years to devote to the problem full time and a scientific bent, you can figure it out for yourself.

Probably, you don't. So you can look to scientific authorities like the National Academy of Sciences, The Royal Society, the AAAS, the AGU, the American Meteorological Society, etc. They pretty much unanimously defer to the IPCC.

Or you can start with the presumption that IPCC is broken. Well, it's been proven not to be flawless: all it took was one unequivocal error about Himalayan glaciers to do that, but I don't think anybody's been proposing it as gospel except as a straw man argument.

You can suggest that an anti-industrial ideology (rather than a scientifically based whole-systems view that comes naturally to someone studying climate) is behind a skewed interpretation of the evidence. You can construct imaginary histories of a vast conspiracy using the methodologies of paranoid movements through history. But you can't account for the support of IPCC from the national academies of all the countries with a substantial research culture without positing that all of science has been dishonest. This is essentially Greg Craven's approach, which I highly recommend to anyone who doesn't have the time to work through the science for themselves.

There's no doubt that we could do a better job of exposition. As someone who has been taught in engineering schools, I found the climate science curriculum even within the universities to be poorly organized and unsatisfactory.(I think it's gotten a bit better since then, and I'm very much looking forward to the release of Ray Pierrehumbert's textbook next month.) I think neither engineers nor scientists understand how much better engineering textbooks are compared to science textbooks. So that we do an even worse job at outreach to the scientifically educated segment of the public is not surprising. But I don't write it off. It's a real and important issue.

On the other hand, the opposition thinks we are swimming in money. We simply don't have the resources to do this. The market for atmospheric and oceanic science textbooks is small. The talent base is stretched thin. And the tradition of exposition is not great.

So admittedly, the whole chain of reasoning is more obscure than one would like. I am trying to do my part to help on this front. But the facts are still the facts, and you really need to start with a very suspicious and hostile point of view to imagine that the key concepts are imaginary. Yet, many people do.

This is the context for Mann's conclusion:

Mann asked for journalists’ help in the future.

“No doubt we are in for a period of months or even years where climate science is likely to be subject to the sort of politically motivated inquisition that we haven’t seen, frankly, since the 1950’s,” he said. “It is necessary and important for the scientific community to do the best it I can to defend itself from this oncoming attack, and frankly, we are entirely reliant on the willingness of the mainstream media to serve in its role as the critical and independent arbiter and not just report the two sides of the so-called debate, but to actually establish what is fact and what is fiction. The scientists will not be successful against the attack that is coming unless the media is serving its role.”

Emphasis added. I will add this. If journalism does not do its job journalism must be replaced.

The Future

Here's my decennial prediction of the future, per Keith's inquiry. By 2030:

1) New sources of fossil fuels and the defeat of carbon pricing in any form will put the economy more or less "back on track" to its overheated consume-at-any-price every-Christmas-bigger-than-the-last frenzy. Canada and Texas will thrive. Possibly this will happen in time to rescue Obama, since enough people vote their wallet to make US elections completely predictable and not about anything.

2) Congress will have its climate science theater but probably won't press the point, the Republicans having "won" the game for the foreseeable future. This will actually work to the Democrats' advantage ion the short run. A modest gesture in the direction of the Breakthrough Institute's massive investment in energy will prop up the economy a bit and salve people's consciences a bit, and will largely vanish without a trace into the vast money pit of DOE.

3) The relative position of the US with respect to the rest of the world will continue to decline slowly. The holders of American currency seem to have the discipline to let the air out very slowly. In America this will be perceived as substantial inflation. A low interest mortgage will be like free money.

4) There will never be high speed rail in Texas along the I-35 corridor. Never ever ever. We will have a hispanic Democrat governor, but we will never get in a passenger locomotive again anywhere in Texas. There still will be no sidewalks, either.

5) The suggestion that anybody has any spare wealth or attention to care about the future will be treated with cynicism here and overseas; neither biodiversity nor the future climate will matter much. Sustainability will be a complete joke every day until the day it's not a joking matter anymore.

6) The west and southwest US will continue to dry out but this won't be of much concern outside agriculture. Snow cover will continue to retreat, but nobody in America besides ski resorts will care much. Occasional bizarre seasons leading to crop failures will become more common, causing failures of low-capital operations. This will concentrate agriculture production in agribusinesses (except for high-value-add boutique farms for the wealthy and high end restaurants, a much smaller market).

7) There will be no such thing as wild caught seafood.

8) The influence of the university will decline sharply and perhaps vanish altogether outside the hard sciences and engineering. Even there, the universities as we know them will lose control of undergraduate education.

9) As climate deterioration continues, the initial impact will fall, unfortunately but inevitably, largely on less-developed subtropical regions. This year's events in Pakistan will be marked as the harbinger. This will greatly exacerbate the already absurd tensions between the Islamic world and everybody else. The west will not be able to motivate any useful intervention. Low-grade guerilla war will persist. We will find ourselves turning into Israelis.

10) There will be demands for geoengineering, which will keep the field of physical climatology afloat, even though somehow we will end up vaguely blamed for all the problems. However, the geopolitical constraints that made carbon pricing treaties impossible will continue to apply, and implementation will prove politically impossible.

11) Carbon concentrations will not only continue to rise, the rise will continue to accelerate. Still, the problems probably won't seriously hit the fan for a generation.

12) Nature conservation will be a hobby for the wealthy. National Parks will be priced out of most people's budgets. Most remnants of nature will be replaced by landscaping or blight. It will be recognized that once climate change kicks in in earnest, wildlife preservation will essentially be abandoned.

13) Most people will live even more frantic, distracted, entertained, worried lives with even further declining capacity for aesthetic, spiritual or intellectual development. The capacity to devote spare attention to deal with collective problems will continue to decline. Civilization will continue to be replaced by commerce. When real problems arise, we will not have the capacity to deal with them. Collapse may be abrupt, but probably can be put off a good while.

Curry Cannot Back Down

Judith Curry cannot easily take my advice and let her half-baked innovations about reasoning under uncertainty alone:

NG34A-03
308 (Moscone South)
Dec 15 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

[note from mt -the above is to say, the annual Fall AGU meeting in SF]

Climate Surprises, Catastrophes and Fat Tails (Invited)
J. A. Curry

Low-probability, high-consequence events provide particular challenges
to developing robust policies to reduce vulnerability to climate
variability and change. Forced and unforced climate variability may
produce surprises that are abrupt or discontinuous, and extreme events
such as landfalling major hurricanes, floods, extreme heat waves and
droughts can have catastrophic impacts. Inadequacies of the IPCC
scenario simulations for conceptualizing surprises and catastrophes
arise from inadequate consideration of natural climate variability,
model inadequacies, and consideration of a range of scenarios of
natural and anthropogenic forcing that is much too narrow. Hence pdfs
constructed from climate model simulations have the potential to
seriously mislead, and a broader framework is needed to imagine future
abrupt climate change and extreme events. A method for evaluating the
possibility of future events is described that integrates the concepts
evidence support logic, modal falsification and possibility theory.

h/t James. She's got to say something then, whether she blogs about it between now and then or not. So she'd better get baking.

Are Invasive Species a Threat?

Ronald Bailey writes an article in Reason. Not a promising source, I admit.

The article is sort of species libertarianism. It suggests that the global mixing around of species is not reducing local biodiversity. The "nothing but kudzu" (Great Lakes version: "nothing but purple loosestrife") fear is dismissed. While the article only manages some dubious spin re introduced animal species, it explicitly claims that introduced plants are on the whole, harmless. "There is no evidence that even a single long term resident species has been driven to extinction, or even extirpated within a single U.S. state, because of competition from an introduced plant species,” Bailey claims.

Well, tell it to the folks at Lake Caddo, is one easy answer. Species don't go extinct easily, but that doesn't mean landscapes can't be ruined.

On the other hand, much of what Bailey says makes intuitive sense to me. The species are all going to get swapped around anyway. There's only so much we can do to protect unique isolated island ecologies. Beyind that, why even try to keep species out? Why I wonder why we don't just stand back and let the species fight it all out. Once climate change kicks in in earnest it's going to be all invasive species, sometimes deliberately introduced. It will be that or nothing, I guess.

I am not making a claim here. I'm asking a question. I asked this question back in the sci.environment days "Hawaii sure doesn't look biologically impoverished" was my politically incorrect utterance. Of course, a fellow (named Alan McGowan) was so horrified at this question that he considered me an agent of the rapacious corporate sector, which people who hate me nowadays may find a headscratcher.

But I never got good answers to these things, and I'm sure, among my readers, there are as good answers as they get.

What, after all, does "ecological services" mean and why can't exotic species provide them?

It's likely I'm terribly ignorant to ask these questions, and I'm not sure I believe Bailey, but, like many intelligent people coming into climate change, I haven't seen an answer I find satsifying.

So where's the IPCC of wildlife ecology?

Update: Received in email:

Please accept my apologies for emailing you directly, but I was trying
to comment on your blog posting regarding the Ron Bailey article, but
Blogger failed me three times.

I am thus emailing you what I wrote, in case you find it of interest
(and also because I hate to have put in the time for nought,
particularly when I should have been working!).

Many thanks, M

Alright, a little bit on plants.

First, if this is the guy I am thinking of, I am a bit dubious based
on what I have heard him say in the past (although I haven't read the
article yet). I remember a talk at my alma mater back in 2004 or so,
given by a chap who works for the Cato Institute and writes for
Reason. I think it might well have been Bailey. Anyway, I remember
asking him a question along the lines of: "what about humans depending
on ecosystems and biodiversity for various services?" (His talk, if I
remember correctly, was about conservation being a nice personal ethic
to have, but it is basically just another belief system). Anyway, to
answer me, he said, 'just look at New York, several million people
live there and they're just fine, and NY doesn't have much in the way
of biodiversity or ecosystem services.' (given the long interval since
then, I paraphrase). He moved on then to the next questioner, but I
remain gobsmacked that he suggested that New Yorkers can survive using
just the resources in their immediate environs, as if their drinking
supply doesn't come from well-forested catchments in the Catskills,
and their food from farmland all over the planet, etc.

Anyway, I say all that because it might give some indication that his
perspectives on ecological matters are rather simplistic. If it's the
same guy.

On to plants. First, I am not going to give you a documented
extinction, although I have heard that alien plants have caused the
extinction of several plants in South Africa's fynbos biome. If I had
more time I would try hunt down a few references.

Even if it hasn't yet, it is likely only a matter of time in the
aforementioned biome. Fynbos is one of the most endemic-rich biomes on
the planet. There are some species there that are known from only a
handful of very small localities, and there is an enormous invasive
plant problem there. Australian Acacias (such as cyclops, longifolia),
Pinus radiata, and Hakea sericea are a few of them, and they are rife.
Not only do they threaten to over-run the habitat of such isolated
endemics, but they also dramatically alter fire regimes, which in turn
plays havoc with the reproduction of numerous native species that
themselves depend on certain fire regimes for recruitment (this gets
very complicated, and is made messier by the problem of alien ants
(argentine ant) replacing native ants, which affects seed dispersal of
many species that makes the seed less able to survive fires).

So, there is that very real problem. Since many invasions are fairly
young (within the past 50 - 200 years, many of the ones I am familiar
coincide with introductions that occurred during the British empire in
the mid to late 1800s), they are just getting rolling. Just because
there isn't an abundance of documented extinctions doesn't mean they
aren't coming. Saying that an absence of extinctions means that aliens
plants won't cause them is kind of like saying that human population
growth is no worries because Ehrlich's prediction was wrong (which
ignores the fact that we are still expecting another 2-3 billion folks
to arrive in the next few decades).

Last point. Besides extinctions, alien plants cause other ecological
havoc. I return to South Africa, where they take their water resources
very seriously. They have an entire program aimed at removing alien
plants from watercourses (Australian acacias, again, plus Eucalypts)
because they tend to invade down watercourses and such up heaps of
runoff. Some calculations suggest that removing aliens might even
save them from having to build new dams to satisfy growing water
supply.

Etc. Anyway, I have certainly gone over my little of forebearance.
Hope this makes some sense.

Lyndon Estes

another:

Like Lyndon I also experience trouble with blogger that precludes me commenting on your site. I thought I'd send you a couple of links to paint a broader picture on the European perspective. Firstly I think you should visit the GB Non-Native Species Secretariat at the link below - they have lots of information that pertains to your question "Are Invasive Species a Threat?"

https://secure.fera.defra.gov.uk/nonnativespecies/home/index.cfm

A colleague of mine Helmut van Emden always maintains that you don't know how threatening an invasive species is until it has been present for seven years. That is the rough amount of time it takes for the local parasitoids and other potential natural enemies take to adapt to a novel species.

You may also want to get in touch with one of the authors of this paper:

How well do we understand the impacts of alien species on ecosystem services? A pan-European, cross-taxa assessment.
Montserrat Vilà et al 2010 Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment Volume 8, Issue 3

http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/080083

The paper is paywalled but below is some text I culled from a now-defunct Science Daily article about it:

"Invasive species can disrupt natural and human-made ecosystems, throwing food webs out of balance and damaging the services they provide to people. Now scientists have begun to put a price tag on this damage. In a study published the week of April 20 in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment e-view, ecologists have listed the invasive species that cause the most harm to environment and cost the most money to control.

...

Vilà and her colleagues produced a list of the top 10 invasive species in Europe by assessing which species had the most impacts in the most categories. Among the top invaders were Canada geese, zebra mussels, brook trout, the Bermuda buttercup and coypu, also known as nutria. Terrestrial vertebrates produced the widest range of impacts, often showing effects in all of the ecosystem service categories.

"Many terrestrial vertebrates are top predators, and their introduction causes cascading effects in the food web," Vilà says.

By contrast, terrestrial invertebrates such as insects and spiders had the narrowest range of effects, but wreaked the most financial havoc. Vilà points out that terrestrial invertebrates cause the most damage to crops and forests, sectors in which there are well-established methods to quantify the costs of food and lumber production. The authors estimate annual crop losses in the United Kingdom due to alien arthropods at €2.8 billion (about $3.7 billion); other studies say that the cost of eradicating the 30 most common weeds could be more than €150 million ($197 million).

The authors also describe the alien species generating the highest reported financial investment, including costs of monitoring, controlling and eradicating the invader, along with environmental education programs. Among the most expensive invaders were water hyacinth (€3.4 /$4.5 million), coypu (€2.8/$3.7 million) and a marine alga (€8.2/$10.9 million)."

Kind regards,
Chris S.

By the way, Blogger actively sucks. Do not start serious blogs here.

Speak no Evil

It's hard to stop thinking about all the oddities coming from Judith Curry. I think one could easily fill a blog just cataloguing them.

Astonishingly, after all that she has said in the last few months, whe writes a piece today asking "how we can end the war with skeptics", where the collective pronoun includes herself not among skeptics but among mainstream scientists. Isn't that peculiar?

I believe the US signed treaties with indigenous tribes in the 19th century using this methodology, appointing non-representative tribesmen of their own choosing to represent the tribes.

I don't want to turn this into a blog about Curry's hasty generalizations, sweeping self-contradictions and peculiar attempts at misdirection. Somebody might want to start one. "Fish-In-A-Barrel.blogspot.com" perhaps? But I can't resist addressing her cure:

Well, lets try this. In 2010, lets assume that there are very very few climate scientists left that regard the IPCC as dogma. What might this look like?

• no petitions signed by members of the IPCC or national academy members
• Nature and Science not writing op-eds that decry “deniers”
• no climate scientists writing op-eds that decry the “deniers”
• no climate scientists talking about “consensus” as an argument against disagreement (argumentum ad populam, h/t Nullius in Verba)
• IPCC scientists debating skeptics about the science
• climate scientists stop talking about cap and trade and UNFCCC policies because the science demands that we do this
• no more professional society statements supporting the IPCC

Let’s wipe out dogma from climate science. I look forward to the “insiders” who don’t like my use of the word dogma convincing me that this no longer exists!

Wow. So that's release from dogma, huh?

This has nothing to do with keeping politics out of science. All of these points (except perhaps the "debate with skeptics" one, as if there were no such debate now!) are about keeping science out of politics. This certainly would be the healthiest thing for science qua science.

But we are in the pay of the larger society, I would think, for reasons other than our own entertainment. If there are issues which the larger society is not properly accounting for by any reasonable estimation of what the society actually wants, it is surely the larger extra-scientific but ethical responsibility of the scientific community to make those issues socially salient. If organized opposition to that communication arises, it becomes an ethical responsibility to overcome that opposition.

Here scientists find ourselves far beyond our expertise or intellectual interests. This is part of the reason that it goes badly. (Also, the prospect we are selling, really large risks in the fairly distant future, is not a very attractive one.)

Does the science "demand" large up-front costs in exchange for avoiding large, far-off risks? No, of course not. That's a category error. But it's a perfectly ordinary short cut in speech. What is meant is that "in the light of the ethical frameworks held by most people in most cultures, the scientific evidence implies an ethical responsibility." A mouthful. "The science demands" is close enough for most purposes.

Dr. Curry claims to be in the scientific mainstream of the climatological sciences, but seems quite unconcerned by the scientific evidence that only near-term action can blunt very large risks in the future. In this, I would say she is an outlier.

The rest of us see it this way: Until the nature and extent of the risk is understood by the political process, the decisions taken by that process are not only contingent and reversible, but in fact need to be reversed.

To say that scientists participating in professional associations should actually avoid taking extraordinary action to communicate implies a social structure wherein those actions are carried out by some other agency. In fact, IPCC was designed to be that agency. If IPCC is constrained from providing that function (by being maximally impotent and defenseless) somebody else has to step up. In fact, we see that IPCC is inadequate, so various scientists as individuals and organizations have been stepping up. But Curry wants that to stop as well.

It seems as if this keeping science out of policy (known as the "end to dogma") is designed above all to create an ignorant policy. It might produce a more comfortable environment for science. Would this work in practice? I don't know as the genie can go back in the bottle. But it would essentially guarantee bad policy and ever-increasing risk, not only on the climate front but on several others as well.

What scientists should or shouldn't do is not an interesting or useful question. The question is this:

If we scientists shouldn't communicate the risks, who should?

A take on Curry

I just came across this. I think it's wasted as a Google Reader annotation, so I thought to pass it along.

The largest problem with Curry imho. is that she is on the way of marginalizing herself. It is a fair point that scientists should try to understand the views of some of the "citizen scientists" - but by not addressing (and even to some extent adding to) the noise to signal ratio, she isn't helping.

If you are going to criticise something, then make sure that you have the facts right - if you generalize, then make certain that you state out front that it is a generalization - and don't make the mistake of giving examples that are easily shown not to match the generalized points.

With regards to the SPM (summary for policy makers): Uncertainties should be stated up front - but only to the same summary level as the general text. Otherwise we end up with a "teach the controversy" unbalanced approach.

- Kim Dabelstein Petersen

Good questions

A recent meeting at Purdue asked the following very reasonable questions:

• Have scientists become ‘too political’ in their advocacy of particular climate change mitigation and adaptation policies? Do the benefits of engaging in political advocacy outweigh the risks of losing their credibility as scientists?
• What role has the media, including the blogosphere and the Internet, played in this growing contradiction? How has the media shaped the way that climate science is debated, disputed, and created? Is there a ‘better’ way for climate scientists to work with the media?
• Moving forward, is there a better role for climate scientists in political and policy debates, and if so, what would it look like?

They assembled a panel that seems as if it had been assembled by Bizarro-Tobis. "Three people me least want to hear from on these questions: Pielke Jr., Revkin and Curry. Hope they can all come!"

But they're good questions.

Silver linings

OK, maybe I am a teensy bit political. So here are a couple of snippets of hope among the gloom.

My part of the hopelessly gerrymandered Texas landscape is still represented by the estimable Lloyd Doggett.

"At least we can say we put a little spoonful of sugar in that bitter brew," Doggett said to cheers.

Hispanic backlash against racist ad in Nevada re-elects Democrat Reid.

Of the 39 Democrats who voted against Health Care Reform, only 12 are going to be returning in the next Congress.

In Joe Romm's words, "in only two Senate races did a candidate’s position on global warming become a major issue. In those two Senate races, the candidate that stood with the Senate’s top global warming denier and embraced denial of basic scientific reality lost".

California! Jerry Brown!

A climate blogger holds statewide office!

On the other hand, Feingold was defeated! The smartest and most decent person in Washington, summarily fired! Wisconsin! What's got into you? Are you insane?

Update: More surprisingly bad news. Boucher is out.

Last Word

Toles

Curry's Hallowe'en Piece

Well, I don't think she'll be able to save the Italian Flag stuff. But she does keep a man guessing.

I have read Judith Curry's Hallowe'en post Decision Making Under Uncertainty Part I . The criticism I can offer here, that the Obersteiner and Weitzmann critiques are rather less inclined to catastrophic outcomes and probably biased to the relatively near future, is of a very different sort than my critiques of the Italian flag, or others' critiques of other seemingly baldly elementary errors. And the statement

The net result of such a feedback loop is an overconfident assessment of the importance of greenhouse gases in future climate change.

while slyly implying an overstatement of said importance, is at least relatively unobjectionable in its literal content. We could, after all, be overconfidently underestimating greenhouse gas sensitivity as well. Now I'm reasonably convinced by James and Jules that we have the thing well bracketed, while much of the community thinks the low side is better constrained than the high side. Presumably Curry's audience does not want to hear this sort of thing.

Once she gets off trespassing directly on James' turf without mentioning James (surely a faux pas among climate bloggers) and starts talking about the near term future of modeling, she seems to be channeling me.

If we assume that CO2 sensitivity dominates any conceivable combination of natural (forced and unforced) variability, what do the simulations actually say about 21st century climate? Well, the sensitivity range for the IPCC calculations are essentially in the same range (1.5-4.5C) that was estimated in the 1979 Charney report. And the calculations show that the warming proceeds until about 2060 in a manner that is independent of the emissions scenario.

So exactly what have we learnt about possible 21st century climate from the AR4 relative to the TAR (and even relative to the 1979 Charney report) that refines our ability to set an optimal emissions target? I suspect that we are probably at the point of diminishing returns from learning much more in the next few years (e.g. AR5) from additional simulations by the large climate models of the current structural form.

Yup.

The big new push in the climate modeling enterprise is for Earth Systems Models. These models are beginning to include biogeochemistry (including a carbon cycle) and ecosystem interactions. Some are proposing to incorporate human dimensions, including economics models and energy consumption models. Such models would could in principle generate their own scenarios of CO2, and so reduce the scenario uncertainty that is believed to become significant towards the end of the 21st century.

There is also a push for higher resolution global models to provide regional information, particularly on water resources. There is currently no evidence that global models can provide useful simulations on regional scales, particularly of precipitation.

Another push is for credible predictions on a time scale of decades (out 20 years in advance). This necessitates getting the natural variability correct: both the external forcing, and the decadal scale ocean oscillations. I don’t expect the models to do much of use in this regard in the short term, but a focus on the natural variability component is certainly needed.

So it seems like we are gearing up for much more model development in terms of higher resolution and adding additional complexity. Yes, we will learn more about the climate models and possibly something new about how the climate system works. But it is not clear that any of this will provide useful information for decision makers on a time scale of less than 10 years to support decision making on stabilization targets, beyond the information presented in the AR4.

Yup.

In fact I'd say that 10 years is extremely optimistic given current methodologies.

Further climate modeling has relatively little foreseeable policy relevance. We have done as much as we can in terms of policy advice. It's far better than some claim, and yet limited in what it can reliably achieve in future. We know the scope and scale of the damage we are doing, but we don't know the details, and probably won't until they come to pass. It's one thing to predict a falling vase will shatter, another to predict where the pieces will end up. Policy makers want regional predictions, and the models are not likely converge regionally. After the fact, somebody can always find a study saying "See! Just like we said!" and ignore the contradictory study.

At Curry's conclusion,

The strategy (primarily model based) has provided some increased understanding and a scenario with about 3C sensitivity that is unlikely to budge much with the current modeling framework. A great deal of uncertainty exists, and emissions target policies based on such uncertain model simulations are not robust policies.

she refers to a formal definition of robustness given earlier in the piece as [a property of] "a strategy that formally considers uncertainty, whereby decision makers seek to reduce the range of possible scenarios over which the strategy performs poor".

I don't know as it's fair to suggest that strict emissions targets are not robust in that sense, though. Essentially, one can always squeeze more toothpaste out of the tube; one cannot easily put it back. That being the case, one could argue that the most stringent emissions scenarios that are consistent with economic well-being would be the most robust in this sense.

So, on careful reading, I find several points of emphasis to disagree with, which seem to be preparing to lay the groundwork for a somewhat skewed risk assessment. We'll see. To my surprise, I also find an extensive section with which I am entirely in agreement.

The main point, though, is that it is hard to imagine that this was written by the same person who has made so many elementary errors in the recent past. What we see here is a tolerable amount of counterspin, surely no worse than some of the spin out there by other mainstream scientists.

If Dr. Curry proceeds at this level of cogency, maybe she can start a meaningful conversation after all. I'd advise her to let the dreadfully posed flag business drop. I won't pursue it if she doesn't. And I'd advise her to take comparable care in future. This isn't some veiled threat, it's simply an assertion that people are on the lookout for elementary errors now, and that Curry will be called out on them.

This piece is, mysteriously, far less disappointing than several recent ones. While there are points with which I disagree it doesn't seem remotely as amateurish as recent ones have. I genuinely hope it represents the sort of thing we can expect in future.