Bastrop, Texas

Original photos, March and April 2009

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A Recent Comment About Lost Pines

Andy S said...

I believe the loblolly pine forest is a good indicator of long-term climate trends. They and their long tap roots are sensitive to long term soil moisture levels. The lost pines of Bastrop are there because it's an island of sandy soil that is permissive so that more of the region's rainfall is available for tree growth versus becoming surface runoff. Likewise the east Texas pines indicate both sandy soils and greater and more dependable rainfall. There are islands of loblolly forest between Bastrop and Houston whereever sandy soil inclusions exist in what is largely a sea of heavy clays.

How old is the pine forest around Bastrop? I'd guess it's been there since before the end of the Pleistocene when rainfall was higher than today and temperatures were cooler. Probably the pines were continuous or nearly so between Austin and Houston. I'd also guess that it survived the Holocene optimal as I've heard from other biologists that there is significant genetic differences between the Bastrop pines and those of east Texas.

So if the Bastrop pine forest dies before we get rain, then I'd say the drought and high temperatures are unprecendented since at least the last interglacial and that this is no longer weather but climate change that is killing Texas.

August 5, 2011 6:48 PM

It's Not Your Father's Recession

I was contemplating pointing out how there really hasn't been an "ordinary" recession for thirty years in the US: how employment recovers has been much slower since the early 80s. I guess it was in the air, because I came across somebody else ("mikekr") making the same point (with convenient graphics).


mikekr's attempt at an explanation is this:

(1) Let’s consider a stereotypical manufacturing situation.

With 5 workers, you product 5 widgets in 8 hourswith 5 machines

If your demand is 10 widgets, then you need 10 workers and 10 machines to produce these in 8 hours.

Often these relationships are pretty clear to management.

In a service economy, things are less clear. A retail shop has certain minimum staffing (say, 1) but if business is slow there is 1 staffer, doing not much. You might cut hours, but that cuts business even more. Once business picks up, there may be excess capacity (less boring time for the 1 clerk), OR it may be a while before the shop owner figures the queues are too long and more help is needed.

Similarly in sales: commission salesmen may not really want more “help”. Having suffered through the recession, they’d like to have people lining up outside their offices.

Either way, there is a less clear relationship between the amount of revenue and the amount of labor.

(2) Let’s consider consumer credit. If you have savings, or home equity, then in bad times you can tap these. But if you were using these assets during the previous “boom”, you will find your credit restricted and so instead of there being assets/credit lines to tap, there’s both no home equity to tap and possibly restricted credit.

There is probably something to that, but that isn't the way I see it. The way I see it is that there is that post 1980, there really is no profit-driven demand for labor. The slow growth you see in employment is demand-driven. Unemployed people desperate for incomes jockeying for position, driving employment conditions gradually down, eventually finding some way back to the trough.

In short, every bit of that work, no matter what the economists' idea of "efficiency" is totally unnecessary. It is not driven by actual demand for goods and services, but by demand for employment. Because of how politics works, politicians are totally frantic to drive these numbers back up, and so help the process. But the process only makes matters worse in the long run.

Now everybody is being paid part-time wages for full-time work and half the work being done doesn't do anybody any good.

At least, I have trouble seeing it any other way. But admittedly I'm strange about this stuff.

Foley says the same thing twice

My classmate Jon Foley has an interesting presentation, and it's mostly true and important, so admittedly everything actually should be said at least twice.



So he does.

I wonder about the presentation. Which is more effective, the twelve minute talk with images or the four minute screed-toon without much evidence. Or both? Is it really better to present exactly the same thing twice?

Personally I'd have liked more evidence, and links to literature.

PS - Is the part about the 30% greenhouse footprint true?

Disinfographics

An interesting article at Bloomberg's on how insurance companies view climate change is, in my opinion, marred by this illustration of, well, sort of an equation from dreamland. Or possibly two. Hard telling.

Editor Apologizes for Spencer Paper, Resigns

BREAKING

Journal editor says Spencer paper arguing low climate sensitivity should not have passed peer review, resigns.

http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002/

Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science. Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims. Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell [1] that was recently published in Remote Sensing is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published.

After having become aware of the situation, and studying the various pro and contra arguments, I agree with the critics of the paper. Therefore, I would like to take the responsibility for this editorial decision and, as a result, step down as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Remote Sensing.

With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements, e.g., in a press release of The University of Alabama in Huntsville from 27 July 2011 [2], the main author’s personal homepage [3], the story “New NASA data blow gaping hole in global warming alarmism” published by Forbes [4], and the story “Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?” published by Fox News [5], to name just a few. Unfortunately, their campaign apparently was very successful as witnessed by the over 56,000 downloads of the full paper within only one month after its publication. But trying to refute all scientific insights into the global warming phenomenon just based on the comparison of one particular observational satellite data set with model predictions is strictly impossible. Aside from ignoring all the other observational data sets (such as the rapidly shrinking sea ice extent and changes in the flora and fauna) and contrasting theoretical studies, such a simple conclusion simply cannot be drawn considering the complexity of the involved models and satellite measurements.

This will presumably dominate the climate blogs for a while. Maybe the mainstream press will find it interesting.

Burden of Proof

One delayer tactic is to demand "proof" of "global warming" before advocating "hugely expensive actions". (*)

This comes down to "burden of proof" arguments. Much though we might wish people understood Bayesian reasoning better, it appears that people are primed to a sort of naive absolutism by the legal system:

I was mugged once some years ago and was called in for a line up. It was night, the mugger was wearing a hoodie and for most of the time during the mugging there was a street light behind him. When I went in to the line up, I said I was 90% sure it was number 5. The officer questioned my 90% saying "Are you sure you're just 90% sure? We know it's the guy". I stuck to my 90%. I simply wasn't 100% sure and explained why (night, hoodie, street light).

After doing the line up, I was taken into an office with a detective to make a statement. When I got to the 90% sure thing, the detective started to get pretty agitated.

So, he stops the tape recorder and starts grilling me about my insistence on not saying I was sure it was the mugger. He got really angry and then said, "Don't give me that bullshit! We know it's the guy. Just say it's him, damnit!". He turns the tape recorder on and again I say I was 90% sure. So, he gets visibly angry, turns off the tape recorder and storms out of the office telling me I can get the hell out of there.

Where did this idea of "scientific proof" even come from? Anyway, this expectation of waiting for "proof", convenient for the fossil fuel interests, seems tied into some logical absurdities in the legal system as well.

( * ) - though they never demand "proof" that the actions would be hugely expensive. They certainly would be hugely expensive to the fossil fuel interests, after all!

The Alleged Non-Limits to Growth

We presume as given that the energy consumption of the world must reach a finite limit, and consider whether the economy can maintain the imperative for growth. Prominent blogger Matt Yglesias comes up with some feeble handwaving that says it can. Yglesias is wrong.

Physics Prof Tom Murphy puts the endless growth conundrum through its paces and ends up in familiar places.

I'd like to quote this part. (If you don't fully understand it, go read it in context. In fact, go read it anyway. Murphy has had the patience and courage to work through several aspects fo the problem.)

The important result is that trying to maintain a growth economy in a world of tapering raw energy growth (perhaps accompanied by leveling population) and diminishing gains from efficiency improvements would require the “other” category of activity to eventually dominate the economy. This would mean that an increasingly small fraction of economic activity would depend heavily on energy, so that food production, manufacturing, transportation, etc. would be relegated to economic insignificance. Activities like selling and buying existing houses, financial transactions, innovations (including new ways to move money around), fashion, and psychotherapy will be effectively all that’s left. Consequently, the price of food, energy, and manufacturing would drop to negligible levels relative to the fluffy stuff. And is this realistic—that a vital resource at its physical limit gets arbitrarily cheap? Bizarre.

This scenario has many problems. For instance, if food production shrinks to 1% of our economy, while staying at a comparable absolute scale as it is today (we must eat, after all), then food is effectively very cheap relative to the paychecks that let us enjoy the fruits of the broader economy. This would mean that farmers’ wages would sink far lower than they are today relative to other members of society, so they could not enjoy the innovations and improvements the rest of us can pay for. Subsidies, donations, or any other mechanism to compensate farmers more handsomely would simply undercut the “other” economy, preventing it from swelling to arbitrary size—and thus limiting growth.

Another way to put it is that since we all must eat, and a certain, finite fraction of our population must be engaged in the production of food, the price of food cannot sink to arbitrarily low levels. The economy is rooted in a physical world that has historically been joined at the hip to energy use (through food production, manufacturing, transport of goods in the global economy). It is fantastical to think that an economy can unmoor itself from its physical underpinnings and become dominated by activities unrelated to energy, food, and manufacturing constraints.

I think we are already facing the problems of the real economy (especially food and water) becoming too small a fraction of the symbolic economy. I think Murphy is making the case that this can't possibly work.

How it will fail remains to be seen. An example would be some people starving while farmland is used to make gasoline.

Less obviously, emissions leading to massive climate change might thoroughly dominate over sustainability. That is, so much more "wealth" is tied up in energy than in the environment that we are willing to sacrifice the environment to such an extent that it will actually start to kill us.

Now consider the fact the speculative economy (banking and finance) is also many time larger than the symbolic economy. That is, banking and finance exchanges dominate symbolic exchanges (movies, real estate, fashion, personal computing gadgets) which in turn dominate over food and water. At some point, the decisions of the marketplace become stupid. The food goes away, driving the prices up, pulling the energy-intensive portion of the economy back into play.

What Murphy adds to the analysis is to close the loop. This is not just possible, somethinbg to worry about. On the presumption that the growth imperative can be maintained, it is inevitable, as the growth imperative keeps driving monetary value toward items disconnected from energy.

The real questions are first whether the time of the transition is already at hand, and second, whether we will have the social capacity to transition smoothly to non-growth, or whether disaster will force it upon us.

Endless growth supporting an endless debt-based economy cannot work.

Update: Again I remind everybody of the Ms Fnd n a Lbry

Update: Via Ron Broberg, this graphic from an article (in English) on der Spiegel

Spot the Outlier

Thanks to reader MM for pointing out John Nielsen-Gammon's latest posting at the Houston Chronicle site. It is very much worth a read if you are interested in climate or in Texas. (It happens that I am obsessed with both, as readers probably know.)

I'll steal just one of the stunning graphics as a teaser:

Climate change is now, folks, and this is what it looks like.

Will Texas revert to its normal, already quite variable, range? Well, yeah, probably. Will it ever be too wet again? I wouldn't be surprised. (Remind me to talk about why I believe that year over year climate variability is going to increase almost everywhere. I really don't think most people are thinking about this right. Take note of 2004 and 2007 over on the right side of the figure, for instance.)

But will there be another year like this next year? That's up to the tropical Pacific of all places. Another La Nina year (as some ENSO models predict) might just do us a lot of damage if it pans out the way this one did. Two years in a row like this one would cause permanent environmental damage to Texas. It's hard to imagine many unwatered trees left alive anywhere from El Paso to Texarkana if that happens.

And it's far from clear that the infrastructure would hold up either.

The Truth About the Truth About Greenhouse Gases

REVISED

I've been asked to comment on William Happer's "The Truth about Greenhouse Gases", and finding no competent discussion of it anywhere on the first three pages of hits have agreed to take it on.

To give you an idea of the tenor of the document, it starts off modestly, like this:

“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the
most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been
excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to
show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and
gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles
Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular
Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary
moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations
of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous
consequences for mankind and for the planet. This contemporary
“climate crusade” has much in common with the medieval crusades
Mackay describes, with true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry
governments, manipulators of various types, and even children’s
crusades.

Yes, Happer, who holds a named chair in physics at Princeton, is of the paranoiac school of skepticism, the one that would rather believe in a grand conspiracy than to consider for a minute the possible need for collective action on this matter.

After this blistering start, he takes some time to get warmed up. A few pages go on about how plants like CO2 and CO2 is necessary for life, so we shouldn't call it a pollutant until we start suffocating. This, before taking on the climate question, is plainly putting the cart before the horse, but it takes up a few pages. And by now we are convinced that the reason the fellow is not getting around to making a point is that he hasn't got one.

That is to say, William/Belette/Stoat's point is basically the right approach:

So the question is, how can Happer not be aware of this? He is not obliged to agree with the IPCC report, but he cannot but realise that it is the authoritative voice of the position he disagrees with; he is obliged to at least know what it says and (if he is being honest) he is obliged to report (and then, if he can, refute) its arguments. It is dishonest of him to substitute strawmen.

I summarize the case at greater length than William does:

• Most of the constituent gases of the atmosphere are transparent at the frequencies of the earth's thermal radiation.
• Most of the opacity in the infrared ("greenhouse effect") is due to carbon dioxide and water vapor, and clouds (liquid and solid water emulsions) which of course are also opaque to incoming radiation
• Human activity directly increases carbon dioxide, mostly due to fossil fuel consumption, but also through deforestation and chemical processes related to manufacture of cement. Human activity also affects the radiative properties of the atmosphere via a few other trace greenhouse gases, and via increases in aerosol dust.
• Finally, human interference in surface processes over land can have large regional effects.
• As these perturbations increase in rough proportion to economic activity, the carbon dioxide comes to dominate over time because of its long residency in atmosphere-upper-ocean-land system. Though exchanges among these reservoirs is large, that does not reduce the net amount of carbon in the atmosphere. To a first approximation, carbon is removed on the time scale of the deep overturning of the ocean, on the order of a thousand years.
• While of course the sun is by far the dominant energy source for the system, its variability is small (measured in energy) compared to the disruptions due to greenhouse gases and aerosols. Climate forcing is dominated by anthropogenic effects, of which warming is expected to increasingly dominate.
• Water vapor feedbacks are well characterized and are known to approximately double the temperature sensitivity of the system. Cloud feedbacks, which potentially might be ameliorating or exacerbating, remain poorly characterized.
• Various forms of evidence are in rough agreement that sensitivity is on the order of 2.5 degrees per doubling, but the uncertainty has proven stubborn. Probably this is correct within a multiplicative factor of 2, i.e., almost certainly between 1.25 C and 5 C per doubling.
• Simulation of the atmosphere (using GCMs) is a useful tool within science, but its results should not at present be considered as reliable projections of the future, even given emission scenarios. Simulations are tuned to the present day, be expected to understate risks and fail to represent unprecedented configurations of the climate system.
  
• Very little is known about the potential geochemical feedbacks which clearly exacerbated the glacial cycle in the geologically recent past. These could potentially greatly amplify the dangers without actually affecting the sensitivity as usually measured. It is expected and hoped that these feedbacks would take a long time on human scales to appear, but we may be committing future generations to deal with them.

I think all the above is uncontroversial. Happer addresses none of it. What does he come up with instead?

At the bottom of page four we come to the first mention of climate, and we are well into the fifth page before the famous physicist manages to construct the following argument:

The argument starts something like this. CO2 levels have increased from
about 270 ppm to 390 ppm over the past 150 years or so, and the earth
has warmed by about 0.8 C during that time. Therefore the warming is
due to CO2. But correlation is not causation. The local rooster crows every
morning at sunrise, but that does not mean the rooster caused the sun to
rise. The sun will still rise on Monday if you decide to have the rooster for
Sunday dinner.

There have been many warmings and coolings in the past when the CO2
levels did not change.

Yes, after five pages he leads with a version of the "dinosaurs had no SUVs, QED" argument!

What's more , he defends it with the "wine exported from Greenland" meme. I myself am responsible for tracking this one down to an archaeologust who showed that wine was imported into Greenland. A horse of a different color, you'll admit.

So by the time we reach page five we have four pages of waffling, a stunningly weak fallacy, and an incorrect anecdote raised in support of it. Hardly an auspicious start.

Bah. My bad. It was wine "exported from England". I jumped to a conclusion because the whole Greenlandic wine incident tickles me so. I have found lots of evidence, by the way, that wine was produced in the south of England in the middle ages for local consumption, but so far no evidence of any export. But that's a quibble.

But it's all in service of a ludicrous claim. Nobody has ever said that CO2 is the ONLY influence on global climate. This is a childish bit of misdirection, not befitting a scientist.

En passant, it's worth noticing, Happer manages this howler:

Yet there are strident calls for immediately stopping further increases in
CO2 levels and reducing the current level (with 1990 levels the arbitrary
benchmark).

There are no such strident calls. Everybody knows that CO2 will continue to rise for some considerable time. It is emission levels that form the arbitrary benchmark. Again, the whole reason that CO2 is the key to anthropogenic forcing is that concentrations are approximately cumulative, that the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere/upper-ocean/land-surface system is very long.

Then

another rationale for reducing CO2 is now promoted: to
stop the hypothetical increase of extreme climate events like hurricanes
or tornados. But dispassionate data show that the frequency of extreme
events has hardly changed and in some cases has decreased in the 150
years that it has taken CO2 levels to increase from 270 ppm to 390 ppm.

Hurricanes and tornados have very noisy statistics with components at interannual time scales. There is also contention about the theoretical expectations, particularly regarind hurricanes. It will be some considerable time before we have much confidence in what the trend is.

But do we have theoretical and modeling reasons to expect increased floods and increased droughts in the greenhouse-enhanced world, and here the record is strongly supportive of those expectations. Happer carefully tiptoes around this evidence.

But these records show that changes
in temperature preceded changes in CO2 levels, so that CO2 levels were
an effect of temperature changes. Much of this was probably due to
outgassing of CO2 from the warming oceans or the reverse on cooling.

That the effect goes one way does not preclude it from going the other way. That, in fact, is what "feedback" means. There remains much for the scientific community to learn about the glacial cycles of the geologically recent past. But we are certain that it cannot be explained without the greenhouse effect. The energetics do not add up otherwise. Accounting for the CO2 brings temperatures back into balanace.

During the “Younger Dryas” some 12,000 years ago,
the earth very dramatically cooled and warmed -- as much 10 C in fifty
years -- with no apparent change in CO2 levels, and with life -- including
our human ancestors -- surviving the rapid change in temperature just
fine.

Um. No. The 10C in fifty years was the temperature shift in Greenland. Most life was not affected by it.

Our present global
warming is not at all unusual by the standards of geological history,

No, though it is unusual in human history. But this is not the point. The anticipated rate of CO2 increases, especially in the absence of a globally supported mitigation policy, are unprecedented in geological history (with the possible exception of the disastrous K-T PETM transition which nearly wiped out all ocean life, probably in a burst of ocean acidification). And the rate and duration of the incipient CO2 spike lead to a strong expectation of a very large shift in temperature to be anticipated over the coming century.

The organization charged with producing scientific support for
the climate crusade, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), finally found a solution. They rewrote the climate history of the
past 1000 years with the celebrated “hockey stick” temperature record

This is tendentious nonsense. Research advanced. The graph in the 1990 report was a rough schematic.

[M & M] showed that the hockey stick was not supported by observational data.

They nitpicked. The millenial preindustrial data remains unexciting. The evidence for a global Medieval Warm Period remains marginal and roughly irrelevant. And its removal has negligible impact on any serious estimation of the prospects. It's really not in any way significant whether or not these events occurred. It would merely be incorrect to claim that they are in the global record, though to be sure regional changes did occur on this time scale.

One of the most consistent themes of the e-mails is the need to hide raw data from anyone outside the team. Why the obsession on withholding data? Because the hockey stick lost credibility when it was possible to see the raw, unmanipulated data on which it was based.

This, I am sorry to say, is not just vicious but quite wrong. The reticence is based on a distaste for cooperating with people who had shown themselves to be rude and malicious. There is a long story here with raw feelings on both sides, but one side of it starts with a desire to avoid what was perceived as unpleasant people and time-wasting interactions. But the general outlines of the hockey stick remain. Numerous independent procedural investigations have concluded that no data was altered or misrepresented, and numerous scientific investigations have confirmed the general outline of the result, albeit some with a bumpier "shaft" to the hockey stick, a perfectly ordinary point of research contention.

But finally we come to the central myth of post "Climateg*te" bunk:

Peer review in climate science means that the ”team” recommends publication of each other’s work, and tries to keep any off-message paper from being accepted for publication. Why this obsession with cleansing the “scientific” literature of any opposing views? Because it allows climate extremists to claim that they represent all of science and anyone who questions their message is at war with all of science, except for a few “flat-earthers”, “deniers,” or others scorned with carefully researched epithets, designed to discredit dissenting scientific opinion

This is simply begging the question. If there is in fact legitimate scientific argument that the consensus position is wrong, then it is wrong for people to keep these positions out of the literature. But if the so-called skeptic papers are garbage, scientific flat-earthism, it is the legitimate function of editors to keep them out of the literature and out of the literature review.

This can only be addressed by actually looking at the science, which Happer refuses to do. He simply repeats the usual political talking points, trying to justify doing so by his position and his reputation. But his reputation is as a physicist, not as a politician. He does himself and us no favors by repeating shabby talking points from the political press.


It goes on. Shabby attacks on the models:

John von Neumann once said, “With four
parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle
his trunk.” Climate models have dozens of parameters, not unlike the
epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy.

Yes, but with dozens of parameters, climate models simulate systems with millions of degrees of freedom at the implementation level, and at least thousands at the physical level. This can only be possible with an actual underlying physical model. It cannot be a coincidence.

No model predicted the lack of net warming of the
earth’s temperature that we have experienced over the past ten years

Well, we don't have a date on this publication, or I didn;t find one at least. For a brief moment in 2008-9 one could actually make this case without being blatantly dishonest, but of course even so it is just cherry-picking. In other words, it is at best a truth of a mendacious sort. As has been explained many times, there is unforced interannual variability which can mask the trend over relatively short time intervals. If Happer had any genuine interest in the material, he would know this. And indeed, a later paragraph shows that he does understand how this works, yet he repeats the flawed argument in the very next breath.

All of the proposed controls that would
have such a significant impact on the world’s economic future are based
on computer models that are so complex and chaotic that many runs
are needed before we can get an “average” answer. Yet the models
have failed the simple scientific test of prediction.

etc. etc.

The last several pages are reduced to conspiracy-mongering of the worst kind and make no pretense to engaging the science at all. As with Dyson, the points of actual substance are few, incoherent, and ill-informed. But at least Dyson manages an air of decency and humility. Happer is blazing with anger and contempt, without showing any signs of having listened to the people he is criticizing.

It's true that the intellectual style of earth science is different from that of pure physics. But it's not as if Happer were remotely as intellectually lazy as this empty attack would indicate. Politics seems able to override reason. This is a pile of political talking points, not any sort of engagement with the evidence. It's a shame.

Climate science could well do with competent criticism. It increasingly appears that serious concerns about the science must be impossible, because all the critiques are so spectacularly non-serious.

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pic: William Happer from his lab's website