Climate Reporting in Physics World
The February 2007 issue of PhysicsWorld contains several articles relevant to climate research, with a main feature article on climate modelling written by Adam Scaife, Chris Folland, and John Mitchell, and a profile on Richard Lindzen as well as an article on geoengineering in the 'News & Analyses' section. The magazine also contains an article ('Living in the greenhouse') under 'Lateral Thoughts' that brings up a bunch of tentative analogies to a wide range of topics completely unrelated to the greenhouse effect in a technical sense, and an editorial comment 'Hot topic', arguing that it would be wrong of PhysicsWorld to ignore those outside the mainstream. To be more precise, the editorial comment devotes a few lines justifying the profile on Lindzen and the report on geoengineering, with a reference to a Feynman quote: "There is no harm in doubt and scepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made". Wise words! Nevertheless, I cannot resist making some reflections.
One thought that immediately struck me was: has PhysicsWorld tried to make a 'balanced report', or does the issue of doubt and scepticism by itself merit the profile article? Is the scepticism or doubt really genuine (doubt is the product)? To be fair, the article does bring up objections against some of Lindzen's arguments (citing Gavin). However, I'd like to see a more consistent and critical article, as Lindzen's arguments - at least the way they are echoed in PhysicsWorld - are in my opinion inconsistent.
Here is one example: Take Lindzen's controversial claim that the good comparison between modelled and historical temperature evolution is an exercise in "curve fitting". Written between the lines is the assumption that the climate models are driven with forcings based on historical GHG emissions. Later in the article Lindzen argues that the climate models used by the IPCC are far too sensitive to changes in the concentrations of atmospheric CO2. To me, these two statements say opposite things - and are thus in violation with each other. Because, either the models give a good description of the historic evolution or they don't, given past GHGs, aerosol emissions and natural forcings (surely, Lindzen must have known about these simulations).
So, why didn't the magazine ask critical questions about these conflicting views, or at least comment on what appears to be faulty logic? Or, perhaps Lindzen bases his claim on other aspects of model evaluation? Lindzen argues that the effect of CO2 on the temperature is small because the effect of additional CO2 molecule decreases as the concentration increases, but at the same time, Lindzen also seems to forget - just for a moment - all the feedbacks which can enhance the warming. Gavin confounds him with an objection on a different point - that Lindzen has not taken the delay response properly into account, for instance due to the ocean thermal inertia. In the next paragraph, however, Lindzen maintains that climate models do not replicate the feedback mechanisms in the climate system, and later on refers to his hypothesis, the 'infrared iris effect', which more or less has been buried by the scientific community.
Gavin makes this point in the article (also see an argument for why it is wrong), but a final thought that dawned on me was that Lindzen is probably no better at calculating the feedback effects in his head than the climate models.
23 février 2007 at 2:58 AM
Hi chaps
contriversial should be controversial but…
I was wondering if you could also break up your text into smaller paragraphs a la the BBC website. The solid mass of writing reminds me of the adverts Kim Il Sung used to put in Brit newspapers!
Keep up the good work.
[Response: sorry. Typos fixed and text spaced out. Thanks. -gavin]
23 février 2007 at 3:02 AM
“Opinions differ on shape of earth.”
Sigh.
23 février 2007 at 5:00 AM
This is why we have realclimate because it is manned (er womaned) by experts in the field of modelling climate and knowing about climate work by others and the research literature that paints a very accurate picture of what is going on in this field. Physics World on the other hand it not necessarily in that position and seeks experts to fill their pages with material that is of interest to their readers even if it is not necessarily correct.
This also brings up the question of science and the knowledge required to be called an expert. Climate is complex and earth science even more so so that even if the climate modelling guys get it right no one truely knows all of the implications of a warming atmosphere and oceans on earths other systems such as flora and fauna, forests, desert, glaciers and the ice worlds of the arctic and antartic for instance.
Quite worrying really.
23 février 2007 at 5:02 AM
www.physicsweb.org is physics worlds web site and a good recent article on climate modelling can be found here:
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/20/2/3/1
23 février 2007 at 9:38 AM
I’m unclear about references to “global warming” and “climate change”. This article, like many, refers to the prediction that “the Earth will warm” and that this is stated as a range of possibilities of temperature increase by 2100 etc. The consequence will be climate change and models give predictions as to what the impact will be.
But what is meant by “the Earth will warm” and the predicted increase in temperatures? Surely it is not suggested that the whole body of the Earth itself will on average increase in temperature by this much. So do these increases refer to surface air temperature or to an amalgamation of air, ocean and land temperatures?
Is one of the reasons for the anticipated increase in storms related to the Geosphere warming more quickly than the Ocean? Do models take into account the impact on the Geosphere of increased desertification and deforestation for example?
I appreciate that we become accustomed to using shorthand to make points succinctly but sometimes it is worth testing if the shorthand is not causing lack of understanding.
23 février 2007 at 9:42 AM
“Lindzen maintains that climate models do not replicate the feedback mechanisms in the climate system…”
Seems to me this cuts both ways. The models may be underrepresenting the positive feedbacks (which it seems to me are even more difficult to quantify — bec many are BIG unknowns).
Also, I’ve figured out that as the evidence for AGW piles up, the contrarians may actually amplify their denial.
I’m thinking of psychological anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace’s “mazeway disintegration” idea. Mazeway is like culture at the individual level, the individual’s world view, values, knowledge, map of the world (of the maze & how to get to the goals & rewards). Wallace says this mazeway is loved, whereas the rewards are merely enjoyed; people do not want to give up their precious, beloved mazeway…not easily, at least.
Now if, say, a disaster happens–like a flood, hurricane, war, or social disorder due to extreme environmental changes–and the maze is destroyed or greatly damaged (in our GW case, harmed somewhat now, but greatly threatened), people may go through “mazeway disintegration,” and just spiral down, refusing to let go of the old mazeway. But many will go through a “mazeway resynthesis,” and develop a new mazeway more fitting the new conditions, take charge, and make something good of it. This is a rather sudden change, like a conversion experience or a light-bulb flashing insight into something better - more simple/eloquent. A gestalt-changing moment. This is at the heart of revitalization movements, in which people make a better culture and society for themselves. At least one person has this mazeway resynthesis, & others get it, and follow.
But there are those on the side who never recover, but are stuck in mazeway disintegration.
23 février 2007 at 11:30 AM
The entire climate and weather science fields depend largely on accuracy of data, and also a reasonable understanding of it, simply to be capable of telling past and future events. Lindzen would do himself good only if he can predict something accurately, that would certainly help his credibility, instead, he derides his colleagues, way more than casting doubt, but rather mocking the science he presides over at a prestigious institute. Its my understanding that he probably said several years ago, that it will be colder this year, now he says it will be colder in 5 years, and so the antagonist waits for cold air to vindicate his aspersions. It is hardly an academic stance. I rather like the idea that many like Lindzen can formulate theories, but only a few actually work, it is rather the right attitude to take, to mine the field of theories, and apply those who are successful, those capable of success are not enough publicized, while Lindzen types wrecking havoc and confusion get way too much attention.
23 février 2007 at 11:34 AM
That fits right in with a comment I got this morning, and since he cited climate scientists purporting, ala Crichton, that they don’t really know anything, I’m posting it here for comment.
“By the way, there are extremely few scientists whose knowledge is sufficiently broad so as to encompass all the fields that are involved in this debate.”
He says:
1 No one can predict the future. If people say they can, be very skeptical.
2 If the computer models being used to predict global warming are correct, they should be correct for the next ten years, not just the next one hundred years. All the predictions of the last ten years have been wrong.
3 Global Warming is now a political phenomenon. Documents like the most recent UN report are being published with little or no connection to scientific data. The latest UN report came out prior to the publication of scientific research that is supposed to underpin the policy report’s conclusions. The UN said they would change the scientific report to match the conclusions of the policy document if there were any inconsistencies!
4 Conclusions emanating from the scientific community include largely subjective assumptions that essentially make many assertions nothing more than informed opinion, not science. Further, due to intimidation and other factors, the actual scientific process is being corrupted and breaking down.
5 If you actually press most scientists doing global warming research, they will eventually tell you that they don’t know what is causing global warming. Before we spend $55 Trillion, we better find someone who has some solid evidence of man’s impact on the environment, particularly in the face of more pressing needs, like disease and hunger (ed - he indirectly mentioned this, which, because it isn’t designed to benefit internationalist organizations, has received very little attention).
6 Al Gore is a catastrophist. One example is his contention that sea levels will rise 20 -40 feet in the next one hundred years. This assertion can be compared the UN report which measures changes in ocean levels in centimeters.
7 Global warming is an hysteria that is not about science anymore. Rather, it is a belief system. Crichton wonders whether the world is moving beyond a period where science has driven human development and back to a period where religion and faith are the key drivers in decision making.”
[Response:I can predict that it will be warmer in 6 months (it’s February now) than now in Oslo - I’m making a prediction about the future - Crichton, be sceptical! It’s like saying that if my predictions are correct, I should be able to predict the Oslo temperature in 15 days. There is something called the chaos effect, which inhibits the success of predicting 15 days ahead (This very fundamental principle, by the way, was uncovered by computer models ;-). ). The year-to-year and decade-to-decade variations are affected by chaotic fluctuations (e.g. El Ninos, Pacific Decadal Oscillation,..), as well as volcanic erruptions. But the level about which the fluctuations center is affected systematically by external forcings (e.g. the seasonal cycle). Global warming is primarily a scientific issue, and the claims cannot documented because they are false. #5 is also as far as I know a false statement, and is itself a prediction of the future. I’m sceptical;-) (I have greater faith in my prediction 6 months ahead than his prediction sometime far in the future…). The notion of global warming is based on exactly science - but it’s easy for non-scientists to make counter-claims when they are not required to document their claims. -rasmus]
23 février 2007 at 1:04 PM
How many times does an expert have to be wrong before journalists stop calling him? And why was there nothing about Lindzen’s paid advocacy for the energy companies?
23 février 2007 at 2:03 PM
“No one can predict the future,” but it’s really great how far science has advanced from the days of astrology.
I sincerely hope this is the catastrophe (probably one of the greatest humans have ever faced) that we avert (at least the worst of it), bec of the good information and knowledge science is now providing us. All preceding generations were at the mercy of their ignorance.
I also have an intuitive grasp of how it’s easier to predict long term than short-term, so the fact that we don’t get next year right, or even next week’s weather right, doesn’t make a good argument for me against longer term climate science predictions. And I’m not even a scientist, it just sounds right. Like the coin-flips I was talking about last night on our probability chapter…..in the long run over hundreds of flips you’d expect to get 50% heads & 50% tails (assuming the coin isn’t loaded), though short-run (6 flips) it may not be 50/50.
23 février 2007 at 2:53 PM
Re: #8
1. No one can predict the future? Not with 100% accuracy, but that doesn’t mean we can’t know something. Ever make plans based on weather forecasts? And while I don’t know with 100% certainty, I’m fairly confident that the sun will rise tomorrow. We can and do make intelligent decisions about the future near- and long-term based on predictions about the future.
2. The models do a good job even over the last 10 years. The year-to-year variability is not somehting they can do, but they variability and trends - which is what we’re really concerned - are very reasonable.
3. The report is based on published scientific research. To say otherwise is simply wrong. The document is FOR policymakers, not BY policymakers. While policymakers played a role in the summary, so did scientists. And it was all science in the actual full report. The full report was approved. Any changes made to it in the future will be minor.
4. There is no basis for this statement - the conclusion are based on the evidence, they are not subjective.
5. Have you actually pressed scientists doing climate research? I’ve not heard any say that they don’t know what is causing global warming. Scientist are very confident about what is causing warming.
6. I’d have to watch the movie again, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t say 20-40 feet SLR in the next 100 years, rather that unless we reduce GHG emissions in the next 100 years we’ll be committed to at least that SLR eventually (due to the warming that will be inevitable with the high CO2 levels that will remain in the atmosphere). This is a reasonable statement and supported by the evidence.
7. When you rely on Crichton, you really are getting desperate.
23 février 2007 at 2:55 PM
How long do we have to wait before the planet is squandered to CO2?
Whilst the politicians play their games and posture our children die in in a slow infero of CO2 polluted skies. Here in England the daffodils are all ready out and the other day I saw a butterfly, presuambly overheating in nature’s cocoon trying a last desperate gasp to escape the effects of overheating brought on by our love of 4×4s. Last year we had drought brought on by AGW and this year floods as a demostration by of nature’s anger at our squalid ways. Our children will never forgive us for letting our beautiful blue planet slowly bake in its foul atmoshphere and evaporate the oceans turning us into the hell of an overheated planet consumed by greed where the lead on our coffins melts and trickles over our long dead bones.
23 février 2007 at 3:13 PM
Not from the movie:
Former Vice President Al Gore
New York University School of Law
September 18, 2006
“… the previous twelve months saw 32 glacial earthquakes on Greenland between 4.6 and 5.1 on the Richter scale - a disturbing sign that a massive destabilization may now be underway deep within the second largest accumulation of ice on the planet, enough ice to raise sea level 20 feet worldwide if it broke up and slipped into the sea.”
http://www.nyu.edu/community/gore.html
23 février 2007 at 3:26 PM
Re #8: “1 No one can predict the future. If people say they can, be very skeptical.”
Now that depends on what you’re predicting, and what degree of accuracy you want. If I throw a rock into the air, I can do a pretty damned good prediction that it will come down
I could (with a little study) likewise make really accurate predictions of say solar & lunar eclipses for the next few thousand years. And if I look out the window, I can make a pretty accurate weather forecast for the next few hours.
“2 If the computer models being used to predict global warming are correct, they should be correct for the next ten years, not just the next one hundred years. All the predictions of the last ten years have been wrong.”
Putting aside the fact that AFAIK those predictions have in fact been pretty good, there’s a certain element of randomness in the system. It’s like gambling: play for an hour, there’s a reasonable chance that you might wind up ahead. Play for a week, and your chance is close to zero, while the chance that the house will lose money overall is as near zero as makes no difference.
The same sort of thing applies to climate models: for any particular date & time, they may or may not be right. But what we’re interested is the average over the whole earth for a number of years, and they seem pretty good at that.
23 février 2007 at 3:45 PM
“All the predictions of the last ten years have been wrong.”
Sez who? Seriously, where do you find support for that claim?
Sure, it’s literally true, but do you understand that, or are you asking for a mathematical “proof”?
If you’re talking models, ‘close counts’ — horseshoes, hand grenades, climatology.
Wikiquote:
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. Box, George E. P.;
23 février 2007 at 4:07 PM
RE #11, “1. No one can predict the future? Not with 100% accuracy, but that doesn’t mean we can’t know something. Ever make plans based on weather forecasts?”
Yes, and even if it says 50% chance of rain I take an umbrella. So why should we NOT go ahead and save money while reducing our GHGs? That makes even better sense than taking an umbrella (which is extra weight and clumbsy) with a 50% chance of rain? Esp since the climate forecast is extremely bad (much worse than a bit of rain), and the certainty level is higher than 50%.
23 février 2007 at 4:31 PM
The response to #8:
Whoa, whoa, whoa - the “chaos effect” was not uncovered BY computer models, it was found to be a characteristic OF the computer models used by Lorenz to simulate weather and its discovery by Lorenz pointed up the difficulty of simulating such phenomena and the inadequacy of models for it.
Rather than support your position, this undermines it.
23 février 2007 at 4:44 PM
Re: 17, Uh, no, the chaotic behavior is in the phenomena, so the models must reflect that behavior precisely to be adequate. There is nothing particularly novel, chaos is found in many dynamic systems and we model them all the time. To contend that somehow the fact that the models exhibit chaotic behavior is an indictment of them is either ignorant or disingenuous.
The way you handle chaos is to conduct a range of simulations over the phase space of parameters and report on robust trends and possibly the extremes. Or do you refuse to fly in an airplane as well?
23 février 2007 at 4:47 PM
One aspect of Lindzen’s Iris Hypothesis that has always struck me as odd is this: If there is really a strong negative feedback in the climate system due to clouds, how could there have been those large temperature swings we know happened during the Ice Ages? Wouldn’t the negative feedback also have worked to keep the Earth relatively warm, instead of allowing those massive ice sheets to grow (and decay), as seen in the paleo record? Does anyone out there know whether Lindzen has produced a mechanism which included his Adaptive Iris feedback that would include the changes which are known to have occured during Ice Ages?
23 février 2007 at 5:26 PM
thankyou fatboy for comment 12…
while politicians posture and scientists squabble, every human being who still loves nature (and therefore observes it - which is basic science is it not?) every one who loves nature knows that something, if not everything, is badly wrong, with the weather, with the seasons, with the health & well-being of native eco-systems. Every farmer, every gardener can tell you.
We don’t need precise measurments to quantify these changes, we don’t need alarmist media to inform us of what we know… We know that climate change is happening - it is not a political or scientific conspiracy.
As to the causes… down here among the grass-roots, local observation shows me a cause that I can see with my own eyes - common sense tells me that relentlessly stripping the land of it’s native vegetation & soil (which keeps the land cool) and replacing it with the black-roof black-tarmac solar storage radiators of galloping “development”, whilst simultaneously rapidly increasing technological devices & activities which generate heat in themselves (microwaves, infra-sound, actual heat), as well as insulating greenhouse gases… well it is just intuitively obvious why we are heating up…
It is also intuitively obvious what we must do to mitigate it. Stop “development” Start re-vegetating. Stop consuming mindlessly. No-one is talking about back to the Stone Age.
Just stop MINDLESS consumption.
Like, I for one example, can live happily without Christmas Crackers. For 47 years I have consumed crackers at Christmass. A mindless, unquestioned traditional habit… Giving up Christmas crackers isn’t a huge trauma, so I shall never buy them again.
I suspect that all of our lives are full of similar mindless, unquestioned, traditional consumer habits…
All of us, politicians, scientists, people… we must take serious stock of our lives & change them ourselves. Cutting out the trivial, the useless, the vain, the pointless, the self-indulgent, etc. etc.
We have to give up the idea that we can all have everything we want as our whims dictate… If a little sobriety entered in to our deliberations, we can free up a lot of time, energy and money - which we can then use towards making further changes in our lives. We ARE an intelligent species. Fairly soon I believe we will begin to behave like one…
23 février 2007 at 5:42 PM
Re 9
A responsible jounalist would never publish investment advice from an analyst being paid by a company that figures in the advice. So why do journalist publish advice about AGW from people like Pat Michaels and Richard Lindzen without at least disclosing their financial interests? Because it stirs the pot, sells papers or magazines and, unlike in the investment world, is only unethical, not illegal.
23 février 2007 at 5:56 PM
A tad off topic, but there is a nice plug for realclimate in Bill McKibben’s upcoming review of the AR4 in the New York Review of Books.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19981
23 février 2007 at 6:05 PM
Richard Lindzen, Dennis Hartmann (U. of Wash.) and Ben Santer (LLNL) participated in a global warming forum at the University of Minnesota in 2002. I attended the forum with the manager for the National Weather Service (NWS) North Central River Forecast Center (NCRFC).
It was clear to me that Ben Santer and Dennis Hartmann had serious concerns about global warming. Hartmann talked about global warming feed-backs while Santer showed that the height of the tropopause had increased with global warming. There was no question in my mind that Dennis Hartmann and Ben Santer were being honest in their presentations.
There was little or no question in my mind that Lindzen was not being honest about global warming. Richard Lindzen didn’t seem concerned at all about global warming. He used most of his time making fun using slides of cartoons on global warming.
I thought Hartmann and Santer were convincing in there presentations in showing the audience that everyone should take global warming very seriously. The manager of NWS NCRFC informed me later that he thought otherwise.
23 février 2007 at 6:39 PM
I’m curious to know how good we can expect the models to become. As the models improve and the amount and quality of ambient climate data increases, will it become possible to predict regional climates a year ahead, or will this alway remain a pipe-dream due to chaos in the system?
If farmers can predict in advance whether or not it is worth the expense of putting in a crop, then it will make a huge difference to their capacity to adapt to climate change. Similarly, water authorities and other planners will be able to be much better at planning ahead (for example by more precisely targeting water restrictions).
If the models can become useful in this way to people planning their lives in the shorter term, I think that much less credence will be given to those arguing that they are useless and not to be trusted.
23 février 2007 at 6:46 PM
I’m not sure your example of “inconsistent” viewpoints is a good one, even if to you, his two points “say opposite things”. In fact, there’s no inconsistency at all: it’s quite easy to imagine a situation where the models match historical temperature trends quite well but are too sensitive to one input factor for future predictions.
A simple example would be if CO2 concentration was historically correlated with another forcing. In that situation, there would be a wide range of sensitivities to those two forcings that together would match history, but the moment the forcings diverge you could find that you have vastly overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to one of them.
23 février 2007 at 6:56 PM
As I recall Ben Santer was also slimed by the PR folks, publicly and persistently enough to make clear to any other scientist what she or he might go through for speaking up.
I think Feynman was right for his time about doubt and skepticism, but as of a decade ago, near as I can tell, the real frontier for figuring out new things is (gasp) data mining. Yes, _that_ stuff.
While all climatology data put togther might not compare to anything the NSA, or WalMart, or the credit bureaus have compiled, I do wonder. I keep recalling Dr. Wegman, dragged out before that Republican committee, saying carefully several times that he had only given a narrow opinion on one part of one question he was asked to address, and then at the end saying what he really worried about was the oceans.
And I thought, hmmm. Star Wars. Navy. Likely knows a few things others don’t.
I looked at his website and found he has a rather dry sense of humor, and isn’t unwilling to poke fun at himself.
And I read this paper I quote from below from that site, and wondered — and still wonder — if the issues he describes have been wrung out by others already, around the modeling of climate. Because if not, he might well be asked now that things have simmered down, what expertise he could apply. Because apparently nobody did ask, before.
And you know, he was right — the big surprise this year is the oceans, in several ways. Hmmmm.
From one of his articles on his site:
“… Because the data may not conform to the assumptions of the confirmatory analysis, inferences made with invalid model assumptions are subject to (potentially gross) errors.
“The idea then is to explore the data to verify that the model assumptions actually hold for the data in hand. It is a very short leap of logic to use exploratory techniques to discover unanticipated structure in the data. With the rise of powerful personal computing, this more aggressive form of EDA has come into vogue. EDA is no longer used to simply verify underlying model assumptions, but also to uncover unanticipated structure in the data.
“Within the last decade, computer scientists operating in the framework of databases and information systems have similarly come to the conclusion that a more powerful form of data analysis could be used to exploit data residing in databases. That work has been formulated as knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) and data mining. A landmark book in this area is (Fayyad et al., 1996). The convergence of EDA from the statistical community and KDD from the computer science community has given rise to a rich if somewhat tense collaboration widely recognized as data mining.
“There are many definitions of data mining. The one we prefer was given in (Wegman, 2003). Data mining is an extension of exploratory data analysis and has basically the same goals, the discovery of unknown and unanticipated structure in the data. The chief distinction lies in the size and dimensionality of the data sets involved. Data mining, in general, deals with much more massive data sets for which highly interactive analysis is not fully feasible.”
— end snippet —
Why did I think of it? Read today that US citizens are now routinely being denied entry to Canada based on 30-year-old misdemeanors that simply weren’t found before on routine checks — data mining. And along with that the warning that many other countries are about to start using the same US data, to refuse entry to any US citizen on our government’s records for any minor, and I do mean minor, offense.
Well, maybe there’s something to this approach for finding patterns. It’d be interesting to apply the methods to public datasets like climate and see.
23 février 2007 at 6:57 PM
Re #18:
“To contend that somehow the fact that the models exhibit chaotic behavior is an indictment of them is either ignorant or disingenuous.”
Uh, neither - the point is that since the models exhibit chaotic behavior, they possess “extreme sensitivity to initial conditions” and care should be taken with them.
“The way you handle chaos is to conduct a range of simulations over the phase space of parameters and report on robust trends and possibly the extremes.”
Such Monte Carlo-type simulations come with their own uncertainties…and this assumes the model accurately describes the phenomenon being studied, a debatable point. Otherwise, the conclusions pertain to the model and not the phenomenon of interest.
Here’s the coup: “the chaotic behavior is in the phenomena, so the models must reflect that behavior precisely to be adequate”
Exactly! And if the models don’t reflect the behavior precisely (which they assuredly do not), what then?
So, since the models used to predict the chaotic system are themselves chaotic, even if they perfectly describe the phenomenon being studied (they don’t)…shouldn’t we issue our predictions a little less assuredly?
“Or do you refuse to fly in an airplane as well?”
Gratuitous and insulting - not the way to make a scientific point. Unfortunately, we see this too often.
23 février 2007 at 7:01 PM
Re #24: Excellent point. I believe Prof. Lindzen has made the point many times that the inadequate climate models have been “overfit” so that they match historical trends, but at the expense of predicting present and future ones.
23 février 2007 at 7:02 PM
Re #19: There are also little question such as why it wouldn’t have operated to keep the climate from getting warmer at various points in the past prior to the Pleistocene, in particular the PETM. One could hand-wave about e.g. tectonic changes, but since the iris effect is basically supposed to be an inherent feature of the ITCZ (which is in turn a basic feature of atmospheric circulation), that seems a little tough. One could also argue that the iris effect can be overcome by external forcings, but in that case it would seem to be a fundamental problem that Milankovitch forcing is weak.
What kept the iris effect alive in the climate science community for so long is that it was (and I think may still be) not implausible as a minor effect. That Lindzen kept speaking of it as a major effect was (and is) irresponsible. This is a little bit like the GCR business in that nobody denies the plausibiity of the physical effect (which is actually rather more tangible in the case of GCRs), but Svensmark and others get far ahead of the science when they assume that the effect on climate must be substantial.
23 février 2007 at 7:08 PM
Heres the monthly temperature profile of the South Pole from 1957 to 2006.
Why is there not any slowing of the rate of cooling during the Antartic night, nor any accelerated increase in heating in the spring/summer?
Given the fact that there is very little water vapor present, increases in CO2 should have a greater %GHG effect here, compared with the rest of the Earth.
In the 1950’s, when CO2 was lower than now, the majority of IR reflected from the atmosphere whould have come from CO2, so why is there no effect of increased CO2 on the South poles cooling and warming?
IS this not the most obvious site to measure CO2 sensitivity?
23 février 2007 at 7:40 PM
Nature actually is quite fine. However, there is this freakish unnatural presence encroaching in on it. This anomaly of nature is taking what is gentle and dynamic at the same time and perversly moving in on it and morphing it into the freakish as well. Science will save us in all this as we have harnessed the energy of the universe and packaged it quite nicely ready to use on a moments notice. The cricket and butterfly on the blooming daisies will nary notice the commotion around them, just another tick in natures cycle. Nature will do quite nicely without us.
23 février 2007 at 8:14 PM
RE #22: That New York Review of Books AR4 Review makes good use of the term ‘Procrastination Penalty’ which they identify as being coined on RC (see #219 here).
We need succinct ways of representing the urgency of the situation that the general public can understand and appreciate. A measure of the Procrastination Penalty would fit that need very well I think. The Melbourne Age recently announced that it would include a graphic depicting Australia’s weekly greenhouse gas output. They seem to have dropped it, possibly because the numbers are too dodgy, but more likely because they are relatively meaningless to the reader. By contrast a small graphic showing the current Melbourne Dam capacity as a percentage is permanently on the front page (34.6% today). It’s meaningful, is of immediate concern to every one, and people use it to great goad each other about water wastage.
May I suggest that one of you climate model wizards use one of the models to come up with a measure of the procrastination penalty (PP). RC could then post it at the top of the website from where newspapers and the like could access it. It might work something like this:
> Calculate the predicted global mean temperature for 2100 under the following scenarios:
1) If greenhouse gases had remained at pre-industrial revolution levels.
2A) If since the signing of Kyoto we had not allowed our emissions to increase.
2B) If we were to halt the rise in emission rates now.
3A) If at the signing of Kyoto we had halved our emissions within (say) twenty years.
3B) If we were to halve them within twenty years of now.
* The current value of the PP is then the difference between 2A and 2B or between 3A and 3B, depending
on how ambitious we want to be. 1 is a reference point.
This could be depicted as a simple graphic. And the numbers would change day by day, so it would act as a ticking clock (the model would have to be run enough times to be able to plot a regression line from which the daily PPs would be taken). As the models improve, the series would be able to be re-calculated more accurately. So now and again there would be a hiccup in the numbers, but that would then be an opportunity to present the public with the latest update on advances in climate modeling.
Eventually, when the climate models are sophisticated enough, regional rainfall PPs could be calculated. That would really get people thinking.
23 février 2007 at 8:16 PM
Thanks Rasmus. The guy responded thusly:
“I’ll buy into global warming when:
1. Any warming which is happening is a function of something other than the historical cyclicality in the earth’s climate;
2. If 1 is demonstrated, that human beings are causing such warming;
3. If 1 and two are demonstrated, that such warming’s costs outweigh its benefits (longer growing seasons etc.); and
4. That we have the capability to do something about it that makes sense from a cost perspective.
If all four of those things can be demonstrated? Then I’ll begin being concerned. I’m still waiting for number 1.
And a model which could at least fit the past climactic changes would be a step in the right direction towards credibility.”
This is not an argument, which is what I told him. Deniers think if they just say it, that makes it true. It’s straight from the Junk Man et al. i.e. It hasn’t been proven.
23 février 2007 at 8:40 PM
It is invariably the politically energized who effuse certitude and bury evidence that they might be wrong–even if what they are certain of is only that the other side is wrong… or overconfident in their claims.
This poses a problem for those who practice real science, who systematically test their claims, whose methodology dictates that plausible alternative theories be dealt with seriously. The political vultures exploit anything that might look like doubt to the general public, turning it to rhetorical advantage, and when real scientists mount a defense, that too is turned against them–evidence of their hubris, their over confidence, their refusal to consider the alternatives.
Was it Bertrand Russell who said that you cannot refute with reason ideas that were not themselves the product of reason? The problem here, is that you can’t effectively use science to refute attacks that are driven by extra-scientific motives, and meant to serve extra-scientific ends. On the one hand, in reading exchanges like this, is is transparent which comments come from shills, and which from those with a genuine commitment to science–on the other hand, describing and defining the difference in a way that would be convincing to irresponsible journalists or the casual public, is maddeningly difficult.
There is something almost automatic in the thought processes employed by the propagandists (and that’s what they are, whatever their conscious intent), that lets them shift their argument and evidence at will, and keeps them always just out of reach of decisive exposure.
Blogs like Realclimate, Cosmicvariance, to name only my personal favorites, give me hope in the long, long battle against entrenched ignorance.
Keep up the good work!
There are many out here, not scientists… who can indeed, tell the difference.
Jacob Russell
24 février 2007 at 12:55 AM
One issue that Lindzen brings up is that temperature excursions can happen naturally due to ‘internal variability’ (from the profile): “Indeed, he believes that the claimed anthropogenic heating “signal” is obscured by the “noise” of the uncertainty in the temperature measurements and, more importantly, the internal variation of the climate.”
However, Lindzen’s most recent hypothesis was titled â��Does the Earth Have an Adaptive Infrared Iris?â��. This idea is that the Earth had a natural feedback system that acts to stabilize the climate, which operates in the Indo-Pacific tropics. This idea was very speculative and hasn’t found any supporting data. Nevertheless, it is used as an unquestioned talking point by sites such National Policy Analysis (Google #336 Lindzen - also try #334 Idso, #328 Kyoto, etc.)
Summing these ideas up, Lindzen seems to believe that the Earth’s climate behaves like a marble rolling around at the bottom of a bowl - it may oscillate about due to external forcings and internal variability, but it will never jump out of the bowl. He is apparently so enamored of this concept that he can’t accept any contrary evidence, no matter how robust - the term is “idee fixe”. What he seems to be ignoring are changes in ocean circulation and in ice sheet dynamics.
The more rational interpretation is that the climate is sensitive to a wide variety of forcings, and can indeed adopt different ’states’ (the equivalent of the marble hopping out of one bowl and into another) - and changes in ocean circulation due to anthropogenic global warming may very well result in an entirely new climate regime. See for example http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2006/Aug06/dieoff.html
Apparently, similar conditions are appearing off Africa and South America: Observer UK Feb 18 2007 “Ocean ‘dead zones’ spell disaster as wind patterns change”
24 février 2007 at 6:38 AM
Richard Lindzen is a atmospheric physicist and professor of meterology at MIT and contributed to chapter 4 of the 2nd IPCC report and hence that probably makes him well qualified to comment on matters of climate science.
He also believes that the warming is real it is just that it is not necessarily down to greenhouse gases as to the reason. In addition to this he also seems to be playing devils advocate in the main by attempting to pick holes in the scientific consensus, which may have been ideal back in 1995 or even 2000 but not now surely. The debate is over and unfortunately for the human race greenhouse gases have won and are to blame.
Could it now be RC that because of the vitriol surrounding AGW that climate scientists have actually downplayed the danger it poses and in fact the earth is in fact warming faster than predicted and CO2 emissions are rising faster than predicted?
Could it be that warming is going to be worse than first thought, after all science is a conservative discipline and you cannnot make bold claims and get away with it?
24 février 2007 at 7:10 AM
@30. It was predicted by the IPCC in the 2001 report that the Antarctic would warm the slowest, due to the buffer effect of the Southern Ocean. It is also predicted to catch up eventually.
24 février 2007 at 9:38 AM
While I certainly do think that global warming is a dangerous reality, I do not see any contradiction between the two assertions you mention. In fact, I see them as complementary statements.
1. “Curve fitting”: Making the model fit the facts. It may well be that the correspondence between the historic record and the model are indeed forcedâ??and would not be predictable of the future.
2. “Too sensitive”: I.e., that the forced correspondence is a result of relying too heavily on green house gases, resulting in “curve fitting.” By “sensitive” I think he means “relying too heavily,” but I may be wrong.
These are not contradictory statements. The real problem for Lindzen is to show that the correspondence is forced. His saying so does not make it so. In short, he is obliged to give a detailed analysis of the models used. That analysis must probe the inner workings of each model.
What the editors of Science should have done was to include a real critique of the lead article, not some half-baked, summary of Lindzen. Let Lindzen counter the article on modeling in detail. Let’s see if he has a case. I doubt it.
24 février 2007 at 9:41 AM
One fallacy often displayed by supposed skeptics is that when they criticize the models or claim that there might be unknown factors they always (So far as I’ve seen.) claim that these mistakes or unknowns would go towards mitigating warming. If they were honest skeptics of the models wouldn’t they concede that it’s just as likely that the models could be conservative? That in fact things could turn out worse than the predictions? Look at the seismic disturbances in Greenland as the ice melts. As more ice melts couldn’t these disturbances grow worse and then help the ice break up and flow into the ocean more rapidly, thus raising ocean levels more than predicted and faster than we think will happen? But the people who claim to skeptical of the modeling never look at it in that direction.
24 février 2007 at 10:20 AM
#26, this data mining thing sort of reminds me of (is it called?) data mining the Bible, where they look for hidden messages & predictions by reading all the letters of words, and such every whichway possible….until they find that the Bible predicted 9/11 to the tee. Only with the aid of computers is this possible. So now all the contrarians have to do is feed in their desired end-result and have the computer jump through its myriad of hoops and spit out proof against AGW. And there’s nothing like fancy numbers and computers to impress the public.
24 février 2007 at 10:35 AM
Re: #36: …
There’s been One US government scientist has been successful in presenting bold claims and predictions outside the US:
http://www.northernlife.ca/News/LocalNews/2007/02-22-07-weber.asp?NLStory=02-22-07-weber
24 février 2007 at 10:41 AM
Re #33, #3 “that such warming’s costs outweigh its benefits (longer growing seasons”
Okay, so we might have longer growing seasons,* but what if the heat mid-summer kills the crops, then such a longer growing season is not a benefit. There is a fallacy of quantitative “goods” v. qualitative requirements, similar to how all is reduced to money in economics, while what we need to sustain our lives is a balanced diet and many other things that are qualitatively distinct, but may not be around later, due to GW. What good is money, then, to dead persons?
* Even longer growing seasons may be doubtful in some areas in a GW-world, bec of wild temp swings that may result in later spring or earlier fall frosts, even with warming coming earlier & staying later in the year.
24 février 2007 at 11:14 AM
Re 36. Sorry, Lindzen does not merit the name skeptic or even devil’s advocate. He is merely a scientist of medium talent who has found that he can remain in the media spotlight by voicing contrarian views and capitalizing on the tendency of ignorant reportert to look for “balance”.
The thing is that what he is doing is unethical. He is distorting the evidence and presenting purely speculative hypotheses with no identified mechanisms as if they were valid theories to an audience incapable of separating the wheat from the chaff. I’m sorry, to simply say that “It’s all natural” is no more informative than a fundamentalist saying “GODDIDIT”. I find it hard to believe that Lindzen is unintelligent enough not to understand all this. I would propose the label “media whore” for Lindzen.
[Response: In fairness to Lindzen, I don’t think its fair to characterize him as a scientist of “medium talent”. He has made fundamental contributions to atmospheric science and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, an achievement that should not be taken lightly. It is fair, on the other hand, to criticize Lindzen for the remarkably poor track record of the various negative feedback hypotheses he has proposed (e.g. those involving upper tropospheric water vapor, and the so-called “Iris hypothesis”) which have not stood up to scrutiny. It is also appropriate to criticize Lindzen for the numerous misleading and/or simply incorrect public statements he has made about climate science and climate scientists, a number of which are discussed elsewhere on this site. -mike]
[Response: I second Mike’s take on this. It’s not a matter of lack of talent. It’s rather that talent is no guarantee of being right. In fact, if somebody comes to a subject with a preconception of what the answer should be, a prodigious talent like Lindzen’s can be deployed to make it easier to fool oneself, rather than in an effort to dig out the truth. Why Lindzen has been driven for so long by the belief that CO2 can’t change climate is a matter for speculation. I doubt he could answer that himself. -raypierre]
24 février 2007 at 12:19 PM
Re #41
Having heard and read Hansen numerous times on this issue, the article has probably misquoted him (”could” vs. “would”) and/or Hansen was referring to a long term consequence (subsequent centuries) following the 3-deg temperature rise by 2100. The sea level rise won’t stop at year 2100. Hansen has at other times indicated the potential for massive and rapid ice sheet disintegration to occur over centuries (plural) vs. millenniums.
24 février 2007 at 1:19 PM
>40, 26 Lynn, I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss that new field of statistics because it reminds you of some bogus Bible study method. Right now it seems much of the work done using data mining is proprietary corporate work — I’d bet it’s being applied to petroleum searches, or the Higgs Boson search, for example, they have huge databases.
Making public use of that sort of tool — on climate, or epidemiology, or nutrition — will happen where scientists can fund the cost of computation, and access to databases. Opportunities will keep going up as old data is brought online.
If some Bible school wants to put the whole of the Bible, or of stratigraphy on a computer and look for Braille or Morse Code in the intervals between the pixels — what the heck.
The homeland security use (digging up decades-old adolescent misdemeanors no one remembered, and making that searchable so US citizens get put on other countries’ do-not-admit lists) is Orwellian stuff. Wanta know if governments are doing _that_ even-handedly? Heck, I bet they’d let Bill Gates into Canada, eh?) We’d need the tool, to find out how it’s being used.
I think there’s a real danger of having the modelers and the data miners _not_ all working with all the known information, using all the angles possible. I’m just curious to know how data mining methods can be applied, given the information in the databases the modelers are using. Maybe it’s done routinely.
(Maybe someone’s already writing “How to Lie with Data Mining” — has it already been a Dilbert cartoon?)
Dr. Lindzen doesn’t seem to be an industry tool; he’s still speaking in public about his hypotheses that others have tested and not found supported. But — scientists do that; life’s short, careers are long, and what’s known changes faster than those of us who think we know something can keep up.
If there’s any possible ‘Maxwell’s daemon’ for departing longwave infrared photons, someone should invent it if it we can’t find it operating naturally, eh? Lindzen did the same thing Lovelock did — imagined a form of feedback; Lovelock imagined plankton creating clouds and, lo, found the mechanism. Lindzen hasn’t. So it goes.
24 février 2007 at 1:46 PM
Dear 37#
@30. It was predicted by the IPCC in the 2001 report that the Antarctic would warm the slowest, due to the buffer effect of the Southern Ocean. It is also predicted to catch up eventually.”
I never asked about the absolute temperature, I asked abouts RATES.
Now can someone answer this question;
Why as the rate of cooling/heating of the South Pole shown no change dispite the elevation of CO2 since the mid-1950’s?
According to the models, CO2 absorbes IR and this is then horizontally to water molecules, allowing the same CO2 molecule to rapidly recapture another photon. This leads to a positive feedback cycle where increased CO2 increases the temperature, leading to a higher water vapor concentration, increasing the IR absorbtion of both water and CO2.
The Antarctic should be an idea place to measure the changes in CO2 induced warming. If the hypothesis that CO2 is a major greehouse gas is correct, then the increase in the CO2 levels should have by now made the rate that the nightime temperature falls decline, and the rate at which they increase, rise. As it is there is no such trend in the temperature record.
[Response: Antarctic Cooling, global warming. -mike]
24 février 2007 at 2:00 PM
re #44. My interpretation of what Hansen said (#41) is that an 80 ft rise in sea level will lead to (occur sometime after) a 3 Deg C global temperature increase is first reached (in year 2100). The length of time for ’sometime after’ is not indicated. I don’t think it would take centuries beyond 2100 for that to happen and I’m unsure what Hansen’s thinks on that.
My point in #41 was there is at least one US government scientist who has presented his bold claims but he had to do so outside of the US.
24 février 2007 at 5:06 PM
re#41, #44, #47
Hansen’s comments also relate to the RC article on Ocean heat content, Aug 2006. The oceans have the largest heat capacity of any climate system component and thus their response to greenhouse gas forcing and to ice sheet melting will have fundamental effects on the climate.
The thermohaline circulation is a function of the current arrangement of continental landmasses (imagine how different the climate would be if all the land was in the equatorial tropics, with open oceans at both poles), but is also dependent on a cold polar climate. Wikipedia has two articles on the topic: the THC and shutdown of the THC. This issue was also discussed at RC: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=159
Lindzen, by the way, spent most of his recent Larry King appearance attacking Bill Nye for claiming that the Gulf Stream would weaken due to global warming. The Gulf stream is a western boundary current, driven more by Coriolis and pressure gradient effects… so Lindzen was right about something. However, Lindzen has been wrong about many other things, and the real problems are that he doesn’t acknowledge these errors (the Iris effect, claiming that there was too much horizontal transport in climate models, etc.), and that he has been given a media megaphone for no good reason.
Regardless, the idea that a shutdown of the THC would lead to cooling of Britain and Europe now seems discardable (though it was the main theme of that unfortunate movie, Day After Tomorrow). What seems to be happening is rather a slowdown of deep water formation - which occurs when sea ice and evaporation increasine the salitinity of cold oxygen-rich surface water, causing it to sink in the North Atlantic and flow down the bottom of the Atlantic, where it meets up with colder and denser Antarctic Bottom Water, formed off ice shelf regions such as Weddell and Ross seas. A slowdown of deep water formation, in other words, doesn’t necessarily lead to reduced rates of heat transport to Northern Europe, since radiative forcing continues to increase.
What long-term effects will a weakened THC have on the ocean basin?. Will we see reduced ventilation of the oceans? Will low-oxygen conditions become far more widespread in the future? Will changes in wind patterns lead to changes in upwelling regimes, at the other end of the ocean circulation system? There is little monitoring of the deep ocean basins with respect to temperature and oxygen content. There are two issues at play; once is human input of fertilizers and waste to the ocean (agricultural runoff, pig farms, etc.) and the other is global-warming induced changes in ocean circulation. A good collection of links to THC issues is at http://www.bigelow.org/COSEE-OS/thermohaline.htm
24 février 2007 at 5:24 PM
Re #45: As a scientist who has had to tease out a small signal from a particle physics database (albeit a tiny one by today’s standards), I have to echo the caveats about datamining. The statistical problems associated with too much data are very different and in some ways harder to resolve than those associated with a paucity of data. Questions of how errors are distributed, of systematic errors and other traps can lead to seemingly reasonable but very wrong conclusions–as some efforts by DHS with airline passengers have shown. The only thing worse than an Orwellian datamining effort is an unreliable Orwellian datamining effort.
Re my previous comment (#43), my intent was not to denigrate Lindzen’s scientific talent or contributions, and I apologize if it came across that way. My intent was to point out that Lindzen’s many contributions did not bring him even a fraction of the media coverage–and adulation in some sectors–he’s received for being a contrarian. My beef with Lindzen is that he insists on doing science by press–and an ignorant press at that. That is contrary to the scientific method.
24 février 2007 at 7:20 PM
The contrarians are very loud and get alot of attention in the media. One of the things they regularly complain about is that the scientific community is censoring them.
I wonder if the editors of Physics World were uncritical of Richard Lindzen’s claims because they did not want to appear to be repressing an unpopular opinion of climate science. Maybe they did not want to add fuel to the claims of censorship. Although these claims of censorship are false, they are not always seen as false by the general public.
24 février 2007 at 7:22 PM
I downloaded Hansen’s slides (35) presentation.
Slide 15 shows:
http://www.2010imperative.com/downloads/GreenBuildings.pdf
I think that in order for equilibrium to occur in sea level additional thaw and ocean water heat expansion would be needed beyond 2100. However if average global temperature increases to 3 Deg C by year 2100 it seems likely that the average global temperature will continue to increase for centuries and thousands of years beyond 2100 which will increase sea level rise as the warming continues, indefinitely.
24 février 2007 at 8:00 PM
Re: Sea level rise
One of the reasons sea level rise will continue for so long is that it takes a long time (a thousand years or so) for increased temperature to propagate to deep ocean waters. So, the thermal expansion of sea water will continue long after 2100, even if temperature stabilizes at that time. The IPCC TAR has some interesting graphs in that regard.
25 février 2007 at 1:34 AM
re #25 A simple example would be if CO2 concentration was historically correlated with another forcing. In that situation, there would be a wide range of sensitivities to those two forcings that together would match history, but the moment the forcings diverge you could find that you have vastly overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to one of them.
I made this point regarding CH4 & CO2. What is the possibility that we’ve way overestimated Earth’s climate sensitivity to CO2, but way underestimated it for CH4? I bet that we will only find out when humans manage to reduce CH4 concentrations while CO2 keeps going up.
[Response: The possibility is so close to zero as to make little difference. For the most part, radiative forcing is radiative forcing, and the fact that CO2 blocks different parts of the infrared than CH4 has almost no consequence for the climate. The vertical profile of the radiative cooling is slightly different, but since the tropospheric convection mixes around the heat anyway, it makes little difference. –raypierre]
25 février 2007 at 4:57 AM
Re: response to #53For the most part, radiative forcing is radiative forcing
And climate sensitivity is climate sensitivity, I suppose. From a cynical perspective, this looks a little too convenient. Most of the uncertainty from a climatological perspective is “loaded” in the climate sensitivity, making all the radiative forcing calculations only accountable to the models, while only the climate sensitivity is accountable to actual measured temperatures. It seems to be an unwritten assumption that the climate sensitivity is unknown but the same for all calculated forcings. Conversely it is another assumption that the calculated properties of a substance override other things that happen in the real world that we don’t know about, that would affect its forcing.
25 février 2007 at 6:50 AM
Over the past year Lindzen has claimed many times (on radio, in talks and in writing) that global warming has stopped in 1998. This is because 1998 was a warm outlier due to a strong El Nino event in that year - and Lindzen shows a diagram of global temperature starting in 1998 to support his claim. This argument is obviously ludicrous - if he started his graph in 1999 (a year that was cooler than the long-term trend line), he might just as well claim that warming has accelerated since 1999. As a physicist I would have thought that the people at Physics World, even if they don’t know much about climate, should be able to recognise this as a dishonest and desperate argument. A look at the longer time series rather than a cherry-picked short snippet of it would suffice (shown e.g. in our recent Science paper). To me, anyone who uses this kind of argument has said his farewell to serious discussion.
25 février 2007 at 7:09 AM
Re #43
There are some aspects of the original Lindzen et al. Bulletin of the AMS (BAMS) adaptive iris paper that were technically or logically/ethically problematic to a naive engineer/mathematician, not-a-climate-scientist.
A technical puzzle that I have never seen properly treated in the original BAMS paper or the subsequent Lindzen et al. papers or their rebuttals of other papers: Lindzen et al. discarded from their analysis a substantial chunk of Indian Ocean data that was included in the Japanese satellite data they used.
A more serious technical problem: Once the Australian land mass was masked out and the Indian Ocean data was discarded, the balance of their data was not symmetric with respect to the equator and was analyzed using the full 17 month time period of the Japanese data. This raises the question of whether there is seasonality in the data. Several months after the BAMS paper, I was able to get the raw data for the Lindzen et al. magical mystery function A(T) from the nice people at the UDub (Univ. of Washington, for you outlanders) Atmospheric Sciences department, who were in the middle of slicing and dicing the BAMS paper. A naive approach to assessing the seasonality question is to look at 12 month windows into the data. When I did that, somewhere between 25% to 45% (depending on which 12 month window) of the purported “negative feedback effect” disappeared.
Logical/ethical questions:
1) The BAMS paper was filled with language that properly reflected the speculative nature of the proposed negative feedback mechanism (this language was perhaps required by the peer reviewers). Subsequent comments by Lindzen and the denialist amplification machine have lacked those linguistic qualifiers.
2) Lindzen purports to believe that the observed warming is primarily a reflection of internal dynamics of the climate system and the BAMS paper claims that their asserted “negative feedback effect” might be applicable to all of the tropics and that climate codes will need to be modified to account for it. Lindzen bases these assertions on a 17 month data set from which he and his co-authors have discarded, without explanation, a substantial chunk of the open ocean data and which appears to be significantly impacted by seasonality. To make such extravagent scientific claims using what is really a 12-month data set is a bit like claiming that the 1998 El Nin~o is all we need to know about climate history.
Best regards.
25 février 2007 at 8:19 AM
Re 54 and preceding argument. Marco, a hypothesis by itself does not constitute science, and you have zero evidence–and indeed, zero physics–upon which to base your hypothesis. On the other hand, the models show CO2 works very well in explaining the observed trends. So, on the one hand we have a well validated scientific theory with verified mechanisms that reproduces the trends and on the other hand…
Re 55. The thing is that Lindzen is too intelligent NOT to realize that this is a swindle, which makes him worse than a contrarian, and even worse than a anti-science hysteric (e.g. Crichton). It is hard to characterize this as anything short of scientific fraud served up to an uneducated public. As far as Physics World goes, I’m afraid that they, too, have succumbed to economics and the “Fair and Balanced” model of Journalism. I would bet that the decision to emphasize the “Controversy” was made by managers who have no science background. I’m just disappointed that the scientists went along with it.
25 février 2007 at 8:36 AM
Re #55: “A look at the longer time series rather than a cherry-picked short snippet of it would suffice …”
What principles should guide a climatologist in deciding what time-frame to look at? Is a decision to look at the last 9 years or 30 years or 100 years an arbitrary decision, or should it depend on principles on which all reasonable and informed individuals can agree?
I am a layman. I have only begun looking into the global warming hypothesis. I am trying to sort out the nomenclature — all new to me — and the reasons climatologists make the decisions they make. Maybe someday I can get to the point where I can understand — and evaluate — the decisions of climatologists. Your answer to my question above may help.
25 février 2007 at 9:25 AM
Re: #55
Ironically, if you look at the HADCRU data, even starting with 1998 the trend determined by linear regression is still positive, not negative. Of course the trend is not statistically significant — but it puts the lie to the claim that there has been global cooling since 1998.
Re: #58
The most applicable principle in deciding what data to study is: use it all. Analyses of global and hemispheric average surface temperature generally begin in the late 1800s because that’s all we’ve got.
If (and only if) you then find that there are moments in time at which the behavior changed, then it’s valid to isolate different time frames. For example, around 1975 global average temperature started increasing dramatically, and has been doing so since; I refer to that time period as the “modern global warming era.” But I don’t choose that turning point because it makes my case look good, but because study of the entire data set clearly indicates that it’s a turning point in the actual behavior of the system.
It’s also valid to study arbitrary time slices (say, every 30-year period or every 10-year period), so long as the slices are chosen without regard to any desired result, and the strictest statistical tests are applied to evaluate the significance of the results.
25 février 2007 at 9:44 AM
RE #53 “find out when humans manage to reduce CH4 concentrations while CO2 keeps going up.”
What makes you think CH4 concentrations will go down if humans manage to reduce their CH4 emissions (which is a no-brainer — just convert it into energy + CO2, & don’t eat spoiled food, and cut out meat)? Haven’t you been reading about how CH4 from permafrost & ocean clathrates are posed to be released if the world continues warming? Aside from the fact that CH4 is now only a small part of the GHGs (admittedly with a much bigger bang), and that it has not been increasing, does not guarantee it won’t increase in the future, based on the principles that when exposed to enough heat ice melts, and melting ice that contains methane releases it.
I wasn’t able to get onto the ColdCase entry to respond to a contribution, so here it is: I was able to get the Scheffer, Brovkin, Cox article ( http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl0617.html ). They say positive feedbacks have NOT been adequately factored into the models, and actual warming due to human emissions may be 15 to 78% higher than previous estimates. AND they are only talking about CO2 positive feedback (not based on models, but on data from ice cores of the “Little Ice Age”). They are NOT EVEN ACCOUNTING FOR METHANE!!!! I guess that may add another whopping chunk on the higher estimate side.
So this uncertainty cuts both ways, and my guts tell me (which is as good an indicator as any other used by those of us yapping around the fringes of science) that GW is much more likely to be worse than scientists are telling us, than better.
RE #54 “Most of the uncertainty from a climatological perspective is “loaded” in the climate sensitivity”
My stat prof used to tell us, “We live in a stochastic world.”
Or, “Some call uncertainty #@*#%, but others call it life.”
25 février 2007 at 10:09 AM
Re#58, my understanding is that they look at all the available data, but that temperature taking has only been around for the whole world for only ?100 years or so (and some of this has to be adjusted, bec it was taken at diff times of day or in sunlight, etc).
They also rely on “proxies,” which I just taught about in my Crim Justice Methods/Stats course — if you don’t have the data for some locations or timeframes, you find something else that very well fits or correlates with the data that you do have in other locations or timeframes, then use this proxy in areas or timeframes where the actual data is unavailable.
I’m not a climate scientist, but that’s how I understand it — they use whatever data they can, and do a pretty amazing job with it.
Then with all the actual data that they have, & knowing basic atmospheric and molecular physics properties, they create models to explain the actual data. Once these models are able to replicate the actual data and proxies, they shoot them forward into the future, using both low & high end climate “sensitivities” to give a range of possibilities they are fairly certain about (I think 95% certain is the usual standard).
“Cherry-picking” or “selection bias” is used by people who want to get a particular result, so they choose only the data that fits their hypothesis; this is the opposite of the honest scientific process.
25 février 2007 at 11:29 AM
Re #58: The stronger the signal (how fast the warming is occurring) and the weaker the noise (the year to year variations), then the shorter the time span should be.
In the case of global warming, I would pick about a 30 year time frame, though the exact length is indeed arbitrary. A longer time frame will be more accurate, but it will also be less timely.
In addition, a best fit linear approximation is better then just using the start and end values, since you’re actually using all the data instead of just two values and it’s much less prone to cherry picking.
25 février 2007 at 12:46 PM
The AGU release says the Sheffer paper won’t be published ’til May. Looks intriguing:
“… the authors focused especially on relatively recent climatic anomaly known as the ‘Little Ice Age.’ …. the atmospheric carbon level dropped during the Little Ice Age. The authors used this information to estimate how sensitive the carbon dioxide concentration is to temperature, which allowed them to calculate how much the climate-carbon dioxide feedbacks will affect future global warming.
“As Marten Scheffer explains, ‘Although there are still significant uncertainties, our simple data-based approach is consistent with the latest climate-carbon cycle models, …. estimates of future warming that ignore these effects may have to be raised by about 50 percent. We have, in fact, been conservative on several points. For instance, we do not account for the greenhouse effect of methane, which is also known to increase in warm periods.’”
[Response: This sort of thing has been done before. Experiments using coupled climate-carbon cycle models such as Gerber et al (2003) [Gerber, S., Joos, F., Bruegger, P.P., Stocker, T.F., Mann, M.E., Sitch, S., Constraining Temperature Variations over the last Millennium by Comparing Simulated and Observed Atmospheric CO2, Climate Dynamics, 20, 281-299, 2003] suggest that the hemispheric-mean cooling of the LIA indicated by the reconstructions featured in the IPCC TAR are consistent with pre-industrial CO2 variations, and that significant greater hemispheric-mean temperature variations would actually be inconsistent the CO2 record of the past millennium. –mike]
25 février 2007 at 12:49 PM
#53 My naive understanding.
The radiative forcing for CO2 can be calculated from the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The climate sensitivity calculation is an attempt to figure out how the calculated energy will impact temperatures and other climate phenomena. Like rainfall.
Without a way to discount the calculated energy (like Lindzen’s “iris effect”), there’s no reason to unlink the two. The energy added to the budget won’t simply go away as we look at other vectors. It has to be accounted for.
25 février 2007 at 1:14 PM
Watch out for fundamentalist reasoning. “either the models give a good description of the historic evolution or they don’t”, reminds me of conversations with religious fundamentalists, “either the Bible is the word of God, or it isn’t”.
One can consider the models valuable tools without considering matching the 20th century climate a thorough validation. In fact, we know from numerous diagnostic studies, that the match the models achieve with the 20th century climate is “achieved” INCORRECTLY. If the models are either correct or they are not, we know what the answer is. The errors found in the models individually and as ensembles are larger than the net energy imbalance of less than 0.8W/m^2 we are trying to measure. So lets stay away from the fundamentalist thinking.
Given that CO2 trends correlate so well with the 20th century temperature increase, it was natural for Lindzen to suspect that the “match” with the 20th century was achieved, despite the models errors, by means of an increased sensitivity to CO2. With so much of the climate models parameterized, the “corrections” to match global energy balance and albedo, are likely to be at different altitudes and lattitudes, than the model errors they are correcting. In the complex, non-linear climate system, the burden is on the climate modelers to show that these documented errors are not significant. We are not talking a butterfly effect here, the documented model errors are as much as two to four orders of magnitude larger than the accuracy needed to attribute the origin of the global energy imbalance for individual models, and more than two orders of magnitude for the AR4 meta-ensemble as a whole.
In addition to overcoming the documented errors, to substantiate claims that the models are good enough for projection and attribution, the modelers also have to do more than handwave about the limited resolution of the models. The low resolution necessarily leaves out potentially significant climatic responses such as a change in frequency and intensity of hurricanes, which while perhaps a consequence of global warming (some evidence for intensity if not frequency), may also be a negative feedback mechanism.
Are the models better than Lindzen’s thinking? I think a more important question is are the models better than their currently documented errors? For the models to resolve the relative attribution of the recent warming among internal climate modes, solar forcing and various anthropogenic forcings, they would have to be better than their current errors, perhaps to withing 0.1W/m^2 globally and annually averaged. The modelers have yet to produce scientific evidence that they are, yet there is a “scientific” consensus expressing confidence in their projections. Is that science or some kind of religious fundamentalism?
25 février 2007 at 1:22 PM
#19, That is exactly what Lindzen stands for , a theory that does not work, and the point aply raised, iris effect preventing ice ages???, is why this theory is nonsense. So is there anything else we should be not impressed with Lindzen? Aside from his mixing of climate and weather siences to confuse the lay, unlike Hansen and others who make credible predictions on solid theories, contrarians don’t have to brag on something they may be right about, they just have to cast doubt without really understanding the theories that work. They are just fooling themselves, in the process of using the press, a whole lot of others who adhere to the persons title rather than the idea.
25 février 2007 at 1:26 PM
Physics World’s interview with Lindzen might have benefitted from more feedback from MIT- Kerry Emanuel is uniquely placed when it comes to commenting on the strengths and weaknesses of Richard’s point of view, and no stranger to the hazards of
Armed Cant In The Climate Wars :
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/02/is_a_conservati.html
25 février 2007 at 2:45 PM
re: 67
Who are the liberals whose armed cant is so pernicious in the climate wars? And what are they saying?
25 février 2007 at 4:54 PM
I think it’s noble enough to argue that politics won’t work until both sides agree on the same physics.
When I try I get reminded I’m naive.
I don’t think our politics has matured to the point that the science is even considered by most politicians.
Look at what happened with the attempt to control ozone-depleting chemicals: it’s been gamed badly.
Gaming the rules is an old trick — like a business checking grain or fruit and making sure that just below the allowable limit of crap is always there, and adding some in or speeding up the production line if the product is cleaner than it has to be, or like setting up electric deregulation for fast profits rather than for actual physical coordination of the electric network.
These are people who have no respect for the public health and physics:
” … Michael Wara of Stanford Law Schoolâ��s Programme for Energy and Sustainable Development calculates, HCFC-22 producers in China, India and Brazil are making up to twice as much money from burning HFC-23 than from selling the refrigerant. The CDM is thus giving them an incentive to produce even more HCFC-22 â�� if only for the sake of disposing of the useless by-product. Accordingly, the price of HCFC-22 is falling. The CDM is thus, in effect, subsidising the air-conditioner industry as well. Moreover, the CDM provides an incentive to make the refrigerant in a wasteful manner. After all, the revenue from emissions certificates depends on how much waste is burnt.
“…. Wara has calculated that the average for refrigerant producers involved in CDM schemes is 2.99 percent. Obviously, producers are meticulously aiming for the maximum waste amount allowed. In this context, Wara finds it maddening that the value of the emissions certificates generated in HFC-23 incinerators today exceeds the costs of avoiding HFC-23 several times….”
http://www.inwent.org/E+Z/content/archive-eng/02-2007/tribune_art2.html
No one’s found a way to write an agreement or law to include respect for physics and chemistry. If they had added such a requirement, this kind of profit from “perverse incentives” wouldn’t be routine.
“As Asia Keeps Cool, Scientists Worry About the Ozone Layer
…
“…. air-conditioners â�� along with most window units currently sold in the United States â�� use a refrigerant called HCFC-22, which damages the ozone.
“The emissions of things like HCFC-22: we had thought they were sufficiently in control, that we didnâ��t have to worry about them,â�� said Joe Farman, the British geophysicist who discovered the ozone hole.
” … The fastest-growing offending gas that scientists say can be better managed is HCFC-22. ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/business/23cool.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin
I expect you’ll find “liberals” as used above would include anyone who wanted to tell the market to ban CFCs to protect the ozone.
That’d include people who were, how would you say, “prematurely anti-HCFC-22″ — those people who long ago argued for an earlier and more effective phaseout of the chlorofluorocarbons that was won by those who made the economic case for slower response.
Result now? stratospheric ozone depletion persisted long enough that it’s now at risk of becoming much worse, as the stratosphere cools — as predicted — due to fossil carbon burning. The stratosphere drops below that once rare temperature where high clouds form a substrate for catalysis, and ozone loss speeds up. Well, duh. I know that was a concern when the first ozone science was raised.
And at the time, the argument amounted to: ‘there’s so little risk the stratosphere could become colder, we needn’t hurry to phase out CFCs’ and ’surely by 2005 everyone will be smarter and richer so it’ll be cheaper to handle the problem later than fix it now’ — a familiar stance.
25 février 2007 at 5:19 PM
Quaternary Research 58: 149-159.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:Ox4G5pRH4SAJ:faculty.eas.ualberta.ca/wolfe/eprints/Kaplan%2520et%2520al%2520QR%25202002.pdf+author:%22Kaplan%22+intitle:%22Holocene+Environmental+Variability+in+Southern+Greenland+…%22+
It would seem that the climate in the Arctic, in the words of the authors, is recently unstable.
25 février 2007 at 7:55 PM
Talking about Lindzen, does anyone know if he sent the bottle of Lagavulin to Bill Nye?
25 février 2007 at 9:56 PM
Re: 66 and other comments on iris effect in interglacial-glacial transitions:
That’s a good point, that obviously the Earth’s climate cannot be so stable as to prevent ice ages. However - I’m not trying to put life back into the iris effect, but just generally speaking - the feedbacks themselves can be temperature dependent - ie I would imagine that the response to a doubling of CO2 would be reduced if one starts with no ice - and at the surface, I’m thinking warming per unit forcing would decrease with increasing temperature, as evaporative cooling becomes more powerful (of course that goes to warm some part of the troposphere by condensation).
—-
Re: 27 - I think what 18 meant was that the overall pattern of chaotic behavior should be simulated by a good model - this is climate - it is distinctly different from weather. One way of thinking of it is - that butterfly which can completely change the specific weather beyond two-weeks’ time - it is never noticed because while the specific weather is altered, the weather patterns still seem familiar. Most extratropical storms still move from west to east, the wind changes in a typical way after the passage of a front, every seventh wave is still larger than the others, etc. There will be deviations from the average, but these may fit into a pattern on a short time scale. Deviations from that pattern may still fit into another pattern (ie going from the ‘cycle’ of passages of pressure systems, fronts, and waves, development, movement, and decay of transient atmospheric eddies, to the jet stream index cycle, QBO, oceanic eddies (I’m not sure where to put them in this list, actually), ENSO, PDO, AO, NAO, AMO… is there a master list of _O’s I could look at?)
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Re: response to 53
As I understand it, in a one-dimensional radiative-convective equilibrium model, the tropospheric temperatures, down to the surface, are essentially determined by tropopause radiative forcing (in this sense radiative forcing includes the effects of feedbacks). But the rate of convection to any level must then be controlled by the radiative heating profile.
I’m curious about how dynamics respond to changes in radiative heating profiles in three dimensions, so -
What do the radiative heating profiles look like in different environments (different temperature profiles, cloud and humidity profiles, over different surface albedos, different sun angles), such as those of typical environments, for example, at various points around an extratropical cyclone at various stages of development, at various parts of the Hadley circulation, at the poles, etc.) - and how would they respond to changes in CO2 or other greenhouse gasses. see radiative heating profiles would help in understanding how three dimensional convection would change, and on that note, are there any good books or websites to explore such radiative - dynamic connections?(I was thinking of this when trying to explain how radiative transfer works over at http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=liveblog_james_hansen_can_we_still_avoid&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
- my relevant comments start on Nov 25 and go up to Jan 19; I tried to make use of Collins et al.: http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2006/wdc0602.pdf ; I was going to go from radiative heating profiles to dynamics and then realized I couldn’t do very much - anyway I’d be curious to know what an expert thinks of my attempt to explain atmospheric radiation.)
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I was having a discussion with someone who posted information about cloud uncertainty from this website: http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V8/N46/C1.jsp
Because of the source, I was at first tempted to ignore it, but it refers to a study by Zhang et al. - I found the abstract here:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004JD005021.shtml
I only had access to the abstract. I’m not quite sure what to conclude - ie what are the SW and LW forcing errors from the cloud errors, and would the cloud errors remain proportional among different CO2 level model outputs - etc. - ie there’s error, but what does it mean in terms of climate sensitivity to greenhouse gas forcing?
—-
I’ve read that the next ice age, without AGW, may start 50,000 years from now, or later by some tens(?) of thousands of years with AGW.
I’m curious - how much certainty, or what range of error, is currently considered appropriate for this prediction.
Also, what defines the beginning of an ice age in such a prediction - is it the occurence of any significant permanent snow/ice cover outside of Greenland, Antarctica, and mountain glaciers?
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What is the current best guess for how rapidly Greenland, West Antarctic, and if it ever comes to it, East Antarctic ice sheets would melt in any given emissions scenario?
25 février 2007 at 10:28 PM
Re - response to 46
So if it is true (is it?) that diurnal temperature ranges around the rim of Antarctica (because this would be the equivalent of seasonal near the center) have not shrunk, - aside from short term variability and regional variations in response to climate change, could it be due to loss of stratospheric ozone?
25 février 2007 at 11:24 PM
RE#70, that’s an interesting paper, but even more interesting is how it is interpreted by Sherwood Idso’s CO2science.org : ” Based upon biogenic silica data plotted by the authors in their Figures 4 and 5 (Figure 5 reproduced below), from which relative temperature can be inferred, it is clear that the current warm period has not attained the warmth of Medieval times.”
The notion that CO2science.org is trying to promote is that since there was a warm period in Europe in ‘medieval times’, fluctuations in climate are common and what we are experiencing now is just the result of ‘internal variability’ - the same notion that Richard Lindzen trumpets in the PhysicsWorld profile. This argument has been around for decades now. However, the general view seems to be that these were largely regional events. It’s also worth noting that the authors only make claims about local climate, while CO2science immediately tries to tie it to the global situation. (The paper is a description of a single core from a single lake, as well).
This paper is and its ‘analysis’ is featured on this weeks issue of CO2science.org, which is probably why it showed up here as well. As http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=24 shows, CO2science is an Exxon-funded public relations operation masquerading as an independent scientific institution. Their position is that “there is no compelling reason to believe there will necessarily be any global warming as a result of the activities of man, especially those activities that result in CO2 emissions to the atmosphere” and they endlessly push the “benefits of increasing CO2 to the biosphere”.
26 février 2007 at 5:10 AM
Re: Ike #74,
“Regional” events such as the albedos of early or late northern snow melts can have impacts on the global energy budget larger than the net energy imbalance responsible for the recent warming. Regional events also help put anecdotal reports into perspective, and are evidence of internal climate variability on scales models do not yet do a good job reproducing.
26 février 2007 at 7:53 AM
[[A simple example would be if CO2 concentration was historically correlated with another forcing. ]]
Radiative forcing from atmospheric CO2 is not based on empirical correlations; it is based on radiation calculations. We’ve been studying CO2 absorption of infrared light since Tyndall first demonstrated it in 1859, and now have reliable data on tens of thousands of spectral lines. Aside from some minor questions about how CO2 is distributed with altitude, we can be fairly sure what the radiative forcing is and has been historically.
26 février 2007 at 7:56 AM
[[ I believe Prof. Lindzen has made the point many times that the inadequate climate models have been “overfit” so that they match historical trends, but at the expense of predicting present and future ones. ]]
Prof. Lindzen is wrong. The models have been doing steadily better in predicting present and future climate observations.
26 février 2007 at 8:08 AM
[[Now can someone answer this question;
Why as the rate of cooling/heating of the South Pole shown no change dispite the elevation of CO2 since the mid-1950’s?]]
Well, let’s think about that. I mentioned earlier (see above) the semi-isolation of Antarctica from world climate trends due to atmospheric events, and someone else pointed out that the southern ocean is probably a bigger factor. But let’s assume those didn’t exist. Antarctica is covered with what?
What would the first effect of heat on that substance be?
What happens to the temperature of a melting substance during a phase change? Where does the heat go?
26 février 2007 at 8:11 AM
[[However if average global temperature increases to 3 Deg C by year 2100 it seems likely that the average global temperature will continue to increase for centuries and thousands of years beyond 2100 ]]
I think by then the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will likely be decreasing, and the rise in heat won’t continue forever.
[[which will increase sea level rise as the warming continues, indefinitely. ]]
Eventually you run out of ice. There’s an upper limit to how high sea level can go.
26 février 2007 at 8:17 AM
[[Re #55: “A look at the longer time series rather than a cherry-picked short snippet of it would suffice …”
What principles should guide a climatologist in deciding what time-frame to look at? Is a decision to look at the last 9 years or 30 years or 100 years an arbitrary decision, or should it depend on principles on which all reasonable and informed individuals can agree?]]
You use as many data points as you can possibly gather. The larger your set, assuming no collection bias, the more reliable your answer. Lindzen is using a sample size of N = 8 (1998-2005). We have highly reliable temperature data available at least back to 1880 (N = 127).
26 février 2007 at 9:05 AM
Re: #179
Ice melt isn’t the only factor which increases sea level, there’s also the thermal expansion of water. That’s why sea level is projected to continue to rise, long after temperature has stabilized. See the IPCC TAR for graphs of projected sea level rise.
26 février 2007 at 9:50 AM
RE #68 (re 67) “Who are the liberals whose armed cant is so pernicious in the climate wars? And what are they saying?”
I think he means people like me who keep yapping about how we can save money by mitigating GW, which doesn’t sit well with those spendthrift conservatives. It seems the debate is becoming more and more between conservatives and environmentalists (like me), rather than conservatives and liberals, both of whom simply like to point scolding fingers at each other, and would not like to address global warming, because the finger points at ooneself. And that’s not fun! Unfortunately while there are a lot of liberals, there are very few environmentalists.
RE #78 and ice melting. On another blog an engineer wrote about the enormous amount of energy needed to melt ice: take a glass of water with ice cubes. It will stay fairly close to its original cool temp until all the ice is melted, since the energy is going into the mechanics of melting, rather than into heating. However, after the ice is all melted, the water will warm relatively quickly to room temp.
So there are 2 types of energy, heat and mechanical. Hurricanes (according to the engineer) turn heat energy into mechanical energy & do help to cool down the locale (Gaia has a temperature & goes into a writhing sweat, which helps cool her??). So in that respect Lindzen is perhaps correct, but the underlying disease of us emitting GHGs is not cured by this, so the warming continues, but every now and then Gaia has a hurricane or storm to try and cool herself, ever more violent (& I think science will find, ever more frequent) storms. But that doesn’t cause us to emit less GHGs, so the disease continues.
I still think it’s very weird that we got a downpouring of hailstones in Brownsville, Texas, during Hurricane Emily in the summer of 2005 (which our weatherman said he had never heard of before).
26 février 2007 at 12:39 PM
Re #82: “It seems the debate is becoming more and more between conservatives and environmentalists (like me), rather than conservatives and liberals…”
I think it’s incorrect to try to tie environmentalism (in any of its forms) to any part of the political spectrum. There are in fact a fair number of conservative environmentalists out there, and a lot more whose politics, like mine, fit in neither the liberal nor conservative pigeonholes.
It’s also a tactical mistake, because if you get AGW tied to any political viewpoint (as in fact some of the denialist camp tries to do), you generate a lot of political opposition that has nothing to do with fact. Consider for instance how much of the opposition to “An Inconvenient Truth” centers on Al Gore & his politics. Suppose the same movie had been made by someone like John McCain - you’d have the “AGW is just another liberal statist plot” replaced with “AGW is a conservative pro-business plot”. In either case, you have a political bloc who are going to see it as part of their hated opponents’ agenda, and so ignore any and all facts, and that’s a recipe for doing nothing.
26 février 2007 at 1:33 PM
Re #72: Pat — There have been several comments, one with a useful link, regarding the onset of the next ice age. These are, as I recall it, on the What causes ice ages? thread, down a few…