I don’t tend to read other blogs much, despite contributing to RealClimate. And I’m especially uninterested in spending time reading blogs full of ad hominem attacks. But a handful of colleagues apparently do read this stuff, and have encouraged me to take a look at the latest commentaries on our Antarctic temperature story. Since I happen to be teaching about principal component analysis to my graduate students this week, I thought it would be worthwhile to put up a pedagogical post on the subject. (If you don’t know what principal component analysis (PCA) is, take a look at our earlier post, Dummy’s Guide to the Hockey Stick Controversy).
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There was a paper in Science last week that has gotten quite a bit of press. It reports further evidence in support of the idea that the Younger Dryas — a distinct period towards the end of the last ice age when the deglaciation in the Northern Hemisphere was interrupted for a period of about 1300 years — was caused by a barrage of comets hitting North America.

When the first papers on this came out last year, we expressed skepticism. We remain skeptical and our reasons remain unchanged. But we think it is worth saying a bit more on this, because the reporting on this issue has largely ignored just how big an idea this is, and therefore how much more work would need to be done before it could be taken very seriously.
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What makes science different from politics?

That’s not the start of a joke, but it is a good jumping off point for a discussion of the latest publication on paleo-reconstructions of the last couple of millennia. As has been relatively widely reported, Mike Mann and colleagues (including Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes) have a new paper out in PNAS with an update of their previous work. And this is where the question posed above comes in: the difference is that with time scientists can actually make progress on problems, they don’t just get stuck in an endless back and forth of the same talking points.

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A few weeks ago I was at a meeting in Cambridge that discussed how (or whether) paleo-climate information can reduce the known uncertainties in future climate simulations.

The uncertainties in the impacts of rising greenhouse gases on multiple systems are significant: the potential impact on ENSO or the overturning circulation in the North Atlantic, probable feedbacks on atmospheric composition (CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, aerosols), the predictability of decadal climate change, global climate sensitivity itself, and perhaps most importantly, what will happen to ice sheets and regional rainfall in a warming climate.

The reason why paleo-climate information may be key in these cases is because all of these climate components have changed in the past. If we can understand why and how those changes occurred then, that might inform our projections of changes in the future. Unfortunately, the simplest use of the record - just going back to a point that had similar conditions to what we expect for the future - doesn’t work very well because there are no good analogs for the perturbations we are making. The world has never before seen such a rapid rise in greenhouse gases with the present-day configuration of the continents and with large amounts of polar ice. So more sophisticated approaches must be developed and this meeting was devoted to examining them.

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What is the long term sensitivity to increasing CO₂? What, indeed, does long term sensitivity even mean? Jim Hansen and some colleagues (not including me) have a preprint available that claims that it is around 6ºC based on paleo-climate evidence. Since that is significantly larger than the ’standard’ climate sensitivity we’ve often talked about, it’s worth looking at in more detail.

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“during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness… and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.”

This quote from Procopius of Caesarea is matched by other sources from around the world pointing to something - often described as a ‘dry fog’ - and accompanied by a cold summer, crop failures and a host of other problems. There’s been a TV special, books and much newsprint speculating on its cause - volcanoes, comets and other catastrophes have been suggested. But this week there comes a new paper in GRL (Larsen et al, 2008) which may provide a definitive answer….

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Most of us who are involved in research related to climate change have been asked at one time or another to participate in public debates against skeptics of one sort or another. Some of us have even been cajoled into accepting. In the pre-YouTube days, I did one against the then-head of the American Petroleum institute at the U. of Chicago law school. Gavin did an infamous one against Crichton and company. People are always demanding that Al Gore debate somebody or other. Both Dave Archer and I have been asked to debate Dennis Avery (of “Unstoppable Global Warming” fame) on TV or radio more than once — and declined. It’s a no win situation. If you accept you give the appearance that these skeptics have something to say that’s actually worth debating about — and give their bogus ideas more publicity. If you decline there are all sorts of squawks that “X won’t debate!” or implications that scientists have declared “the debate” (whatever that is supposed to mean) prematurely closed when in fact it is “just beginning.”

Scientists tend to react badly to demands like this in part because the word “debate” is a rather poor description of the way disagreements get hashed out in science. John Ziman has a good discussion of the extent to which scientific questions are ‘debatable’ here (pdf). In a lawyerly debate, it is fair game for each side to pick and choose whatever argument has the most persuasive force with the audience, jury or judge, without any obligation to consider the force of counter-arguments except insofar as they affect one’s defense against the opponent. Science, in contrast, is a deliberative, cooperative, yet still competitive enterprise, where each side is duty bound to fairly consider all arguments and data that bear on the matter at hand. This is not to say that scientific disputes are necessarily dispassionate or orderly. Indeed, I’ve seen near-fistfights break out over things like the Snowball Earth and the interpretation of Neoproterozoic carbon isotope excursions.

The repeated challenges to debate are probably meant to imply that scientists — and their supporters, including Al Gore — are fixed in their ideas, unreceptive to the new and challenging, and unwilling to defend their ideas in public. This picture is hard to square with how scientists actually behave among themselves. It is not that scientists don’t debate, dispute, disagree about matters related to climate. All those things happen, but not on the subjects that skeptics like Inhofe or Fred Singer or Dennis Avery would like to debate (like whether global warming is mainly caused by CO2 or solar variability, or whether the IPCC warming forecasts represent a credible threat.). Those sorts of things are indeed considered settled science by serious climate scientists. Then, too, scientists are justifiably wary of being drawn into staged debates on such diffuse, ill-defined and largely meaningless topics as whether global warming counts as a “crisis.” In the war of the sound bites, the people who feel free to lie and distort can always win. David Mamet made this point eloquently in Bambi vs. Godzilla. A debate like that is not any kind of debate in the sense understood by scientists.

In fact scientists are probing theories and conceptions all the time, trying to break them. The best way to become famous is to overturn established wisdom, so scientists look hard all the time for opportunities to do this. The problem of Hothouse climate states like the Cretaceous and Eocene is a case in point.

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Many people hold the mistaken belief that reconstructions of past climate are the sole evidence for current and future climate change. They are not. However, they are very interesting and useful for all sorts of reasons: for modellers to test out theories of climate change, for geographers, archaeologists and historians to examine the impact of climate on past civilizations and ecosystems, and for everyone to get a sense of what climate is capable of doing, how fast it does it and why.

As a small part of that enterprise, the climate of the medieval period has received a very high (and sometimes disproportionate) profile in the public discourse - due in no small part to the mistaken notion that it is an important factor for the attribution of current climate change. Its existence as a period of generally warmer temperatures (at least in the Northern hemisphere) than the centuries that followed is generally accepted. But the timing, magnitude and spatial extent are much more uncertain. All previous multiproxy reconstructions indicate a Northern Hemisphere mean temperature less than current levels, though possibly on a par with the mid- 20th century. But there are only a few tenths of a degree in it, and so the description that it is likely to have been warmer now (rather than virtually certain) is used to express the level of uncertainty.

A confounding factor in discussions of this period is the unfortunate tendency of some authors to label any warm peak prior to the 15th Century as the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ in their record. This leads to vastly different periods being similarly labelled, often giving a misleading impression of coherence. For instance, in a recent paper it was defined as 1200-1425 CE well outside the ’standard’ definition of 800-1200 CE espoused by Lamb.

Since a new ‘reconstruction’ of the last 2000 years from Craig Loehle is currently doing the rounds, we thought it might be timely to set out what the actual issues are in making such reconstructions (as opposed to the ones that are more often discussed), and how progress is being made despite the pitfalls.
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Does climate sensitivity depend on the cause of the change?
Can a response to a forcing wait and then bounce up after a period of inertness?
Does the existence of an 11-year time-scale prove the existence of solar forcing?
Why does the amplitude of the secular response drop when a long-term trend is added?
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The Younger Dryas is so called because it corresponds, in the pollen record from Europe, to the latest (i.e. youngest) appearance of the Dryas octopetala pollen, an alpine flower in regions that are now far from alpine. It marks a clear period towards the end of the last ice age when the warming trend of the deglaciation in Europe particularly was interrupted for a period of about 1300 years before it got going again. There were clear glacier advances during this time and the moraines can be seen very clearly all around Europe and Scandinavia.

The clues to what caused this remarkable, if temporary, turnaround have always lain in assessing its spatial extent, the exact timing and correspondence with other events. Two recent papers have shed some welcome and potentially controversial light on the subject.

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