This month’s open thread… Expect pre-IPCC report discussion (SPM due on Sep 27, full report (pre-copy-editing) Sep 30th), analysis of this years Arctic ice cover minimum, and a host of the usual distractions.
Climate science from climate scientists...
Hank, “You’re taking something — attention — from the people who did the original work, by taking credit for the copy.”
You got that right, that blog post help to bring attention to a specific subject, the rest appears to be your common rumblings, or shall we say concerns. Your assertion that i take credit for other peoples work is a troll argument. In my opinion you should be banned from this blog.
It’s a plant food and a catastrophe.
CA, MO AND U ISOTOPES EVIDENCE OCEAN ACIDIFICATION AND DEOXYGENATION DURING THE LATE PERMIAN MASS EXTINCTION
Link
Freshwater influx has been linked to euxinia.
Link
Susan Anderson:
I agree, but neither should they be summarily accepted. What should we do when two old-timers relate conflicting anecdotes? If one says “Last summer was hotter than I can remember! Must be that global warming.” and another says “It’s freakin’ cold where I live! Where’s your global warming now, huh?”, which one should we believe? What if they’re both fooling themselves? The best policy is to say to both of them (or perhaps just to ourselves), “Maybe: let’s look at the data.” What if the data aren’t conclusive? All we can say then is “Maybe.”
Re- Comment by prokaryotes — 21 Sep 2013 @ 3:07 PM
Regarding the videos on your site I would expect a prominently displayed notice with the video that says something like -“This video is presented here with the kind permission of” whomever, so that the folks who actually made the videos will get credit for their hard work. You did get permission didn’t you?
Steve
New Antarctic ice core reveals secrets of climate change
Climatologists debated exactly how the north triggered the south, though most agreed that the global ocean conveyor belt played a role, but they agreed that “Antarctica took its signal from the north to get it going.” Fudge’s team agrees that warming kicked into high gear 18,000 years ago, but they found evidence of warming in West Antarctica beginning between 2,000 and 4,000 years before the northern “trigger.”
As ever, things are typically more linked than less. Systems are like that.
(Bold mine as replacement for quotes; italics original.)
I note a paper by Boyle et al. from February of this year (Canfield is on the author list …) noting the importance of the nitrogen cycle in euxinic episodes.
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2511
“If our arguments are correct, it would imply that global productivity occurred in the context of two distinct N-cycle states, fixation/euxinic and non-fixation/non-euxinic, between which an interchange occurred in time and/or space until the Neoproterozoic oxygenation event caused anoxic conditions to become a much more localized/transient phenomenon,permitting the sustainable build of a nitrate pool and making nitrogen fixation itself a more spatially contextual phenomenon.”
They make a testable prediction for anticorrelation of delta-N15 and euxinia, and point out the importance of deep ocean ammonium chemistry.
I like the approach, it is conceptually quite clean, relying on an energy hierarchy:
“We focus on the nutrient composition and mass balance of the upwelling zone, into which newly fixed organic carbon sinks from the photic zone, and is subsequently respired in a manner dictated by electron-acceptor availability, according to the hierarchy in free energy yield: O2 > NO3(-) > SO4(2-)”
I really have to dig out my huge geological periodic table with all the redox states. And I find I quite like sayin “anammox” out loud.
sidd
Steve Fish, why do you ask me rhetoric questions, which are OT and have no merit? Concern trolls should be banned.
Prokaryotes, to Hank Roberts:
Prok, you often have worthwhile things to say, but I’d vote you off the island before Hank. Sorry.
Killian #206, it is my guess that the sea-saw effects records from the past will probably not happen this time around, because of the unprecedented Earth energy imbalance.
With rapidly flowing rivers below Antarctic glaciers today and mass lose observed from GRACE it appears that the north and south will melt in the same period – not thousand years apart.
Remote Antarctic Trek Reveals A Glacier Melting From Below
false sense of security?
“Between about 1880 and 1890, temperatures cooled by about 0.4C. Between 1900 and 1910 temperatures cooled close to 0.3C. Between 1945 and 1950 temperatures cooled about 0.35C. Between 1962 and 1965 temperatures cooled about 0.3C. There are other examples, but these were decade-scale cooling of 0.3C to 0.4C.
The most recent period of similar relevance starts with the extremely hot year, 1998. Since 1998, through to 2012, the temperatures cooled by 0.03C. However you choose to view the figure you simply have to conclude that natural variability, aerosols and solar variability have caused global cooling in the past of a scale that dwarfs anything that has occurred in the last 15 years.
So, here is what I think we should be genuinely concerned about”
http://theconversation.com/is-global-warming-in-a-hiatus-18367
http://www.nps.edu/About/News/Remote-Antarctic-Research-Details-Ice-Melt-Below-Massive-Glacier.html
Posted September 12, 2013
Remote Antarctic Research Details Ice Melt Below Massive Glacier
NPS link is: http://www.nps.edu/About/Publications/PIGresearch2.html
Since I do not want to get involved in a little dispute higher up I have deliberately not followed it in detail.
There is a different but related issue. Should a scientific paper or book restrict its references to primary (i.e original) sources?
Answer. I think the answer is yes, especially for recent work, but not when it involves going back to the 19th century or when the sources may be hard to find in a typical science library. In that case there may even be some controversy about who thought of it first. For example any text book should be sufficient as a source for the Clausius Clapeyron equation, going to the original source each time would be absurd and might involve a decision about whether it should really be Carnot as suggested in Feynman’s Lectures on Physics.
But if it is a blog, or just a comment following a non-academic article,
there might be a problem with the original source, which might have too much in it for the impatient reader who is only prepared to click and spend 6 seconds. Perhaps the ideal solution in this case would be to provide two references?
Susan Anderson wrote: “I don’t think practical observation from daily life should be summarily dismissed.”
Mal Adapted replied: “I agree, but neither should they be summarily accepted … The best policy is … let’s look at the data.”
Practical observations from daily life should be verified, documented, collected and collated. Then you have some data to look at.
Mal Adapted wrote: “What should we do when two old-timers relate conflicting anecdotes? … What if they’re both fooling themselves?”
I think it’s not quite fair to equate “practical observation from daily life” with “anecdotes” from “old-timers”. There are plenty of people — gardeners and bird-watchers, for example — who keep accurate and reliable records of their “practical observations from daily life”.
And in any case, all you’ve got from your “two old-timers” is two data points. Get a few hundred “old-timers” to describe how different the seasons and weather are today from what they remember decades ago, and you may start to see a “signal” emerge from the “noise” of subjective recollection.
EcoEquity is a source for focus on both science and policy.
I’ve come to trust EcoEquity — after checking much of what’s written there. You can look this stuff up. They do it right — pointers and links and references.
EcoEquity’s main page is linked in the sidebar at RealClimate under Other Opinions.
The latest from EcoEquity is: You want the truth? Dangerous Climate Change is already here, and the scientists know it.
Question for climate scientists: where else is the NAME model mentioned? What’s published you’d recommend to read, and what’s the gossip?
PS re the Arctic, that’s mentioned at the start of the current RC thread on mismatches between models and observations:
“… sea ice loss rates being much too low in CMIP3…. seems to be very sensitive to model resolution and has improved in CMIP5 ….
deconvoluter #214, well there is the general discussion around research which is in part tax payer funded and the access to it. And then there are abstracts and things like citing, which includes references of sources and author names. There is nothing wrong with compiling abstracts or open access content or embedding videos.
On the bottom line, because climate change is the biggest challenge we face as a species, relevant science should be open to all. Basically to help fast pace the process of R&D and better understand uncertainties.
Thanks SecularAnimist, you made the point I was trying to make with a bit more detail and elegance. I came at all this (though my scientific education was incomplete it was not negligible) by starting to collect world weather information in a consistent fashion about 10 years ago, and noting a lot of anecdotal information from the types you mention. I had been aware of ecology and environmental issues for decades, but it looked to me as if it was getting serious and could not longer be left to the sidelines. I don’t think that’s an avenue of thought that should be discouraged, though one may suggest the observer be careful not to manufacture evidence, and to note the many interweavings of complexity. I’ve seen the two people with direct contradictory information situation, but I’ve also seen a massive accumulation of knowledge that goes beyond scientific studies.
Mal Adapted, thanks too, I’m with you on HR and Prok. I think the links to the site should be accompanied by a note about the original – maybe not a link, for simplicity’s sake, but something that acknowledges the appropriative nature of the aggregation. Aggregation is very useful and Prokaryotes works hard and provides a useful service. A parallel example might be the way I rely on EcoWatch’s newsletter. But Hank keeps drilling down to sources and facts, and that enriches RealClimate. People seem enamored of labeling others “trolls” and I wish they’d cut it out.
Back to science and observation, I had some trouble a couple years back with the term reductive, which I learned from my father who uses it in a way slightly different from the norm. I had to go back and check to make sure I heard him right, and to acknowledge that his is not the common definition. However, the point is that if you cannot analyze something scientifically, or narrow it down sufficiently, that does not mean it does not exist.
What Mal Adapted @209 wrote.
Re- Comment by Susan Anderson — 22 Sep 2013 @ 2:25 PM
You will have to excuse me but your statement about when – “you cannot analyze something scientifically, or narrow it down sufficiently, that does not mean it does not exist”- is very familiar to me in its various forms for presenting an idea that I think might be true, but also to promote homeopathy, chemtrails, autism caused by immunization, dowsing, fake moon landings, and the like. Your statement should be completed with “but it also does not mean that it does exist.“ How can we know which is the case?
Steve
Steve Fish @221.
Perhaps Susan Anderson’s statement would be better completed thus:-
“If you cannot analyze something scientifically or narrow it down sufficiently, that does not mean it does not exist; but if you can analyze it but won’t analyze it you are then likely into the territory of homeopathy, chemtrails, autism caused by immunization, dowsing & fake moon landings.”
Yes, I’m not a fan of pseudoscience, sorry if that was not clear. Steve Fish’s list includes a number of bad causes, and I also work diligently to present climate science when and where I can. The animus here appears to me to be misdirected. Lay people are capable of thought and must be respected if we are to make progress.
Re- Comment by MARodger — 23 Sep 2013 @ 8:55 AM
I like your addition to my comment a lot, but I don’t want to leave out situations for which there is, as yet, not enough data for a systematic analysis. This was even true of my extreme examples at their beginning.
Steve
“…if you cannot analyze something scientifically, or narrow it down sufficiently, that does not mean it does not exist.”
A statement I’m sympathetic to, although Steve Fish’s point is certainly well-taken. But it looks a little rabbit-holish in the context of RC, because it can be read in many ways–or perhaps I should say, ‘read into many different contexts.’ We could spend a lot of time entangling the different ways people read it, or we could continue talking about climate science.
Or maybe a bit of both–as such cases usually turn out.
Steve Fish wrote: “… also to promote homeopathy, chemtrails, autism caused by immunization, dowsing, fake moon landings, and the like.”
It doesn’t seem to me that any of those things would fall under Susan’s aphorism “If you cannot analyze something scientifically, or narrow it down sufficiently, that does not mean it does not exist.”
All of those things can certainly be “narrowed down sufficiently” to be “analyzed scientifically”. They are all well-defined objective (accessible to multiple observers) phenomena (or alleged phenomena), so there’s no reason why they should not be amenable to scientific analysis. And indeed homeopathy and the alleged connection between vaccines and autism have been extensively scientifically analyzed.
One area where science does seem to encounter difficulty is in studying subjective phenomena, which are by definition not accessible to multiple observers, and are also difficult to “narrow down sufficiently” for analysis.
And then there is the so-called “hard question” of the very existence of subjective experience itself.
Susan Anderson: not to pile on, as you and I have many of the same goals. But while lay people are surely capable of thought, but unless more come to accept the authority of Science over magical thinking, there’s no hope we’ll turn from our current course of folly.
I think I over-edited my last comment.
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-climate-change-uncertainty-20130923,0,791164.story
We need to do more than “drilling down” and checking facts.
Help readers find the process of science. Science isn’t single prominent studies — science is the process of reading and citing and extending work over time.
I said this earlier to Prokaryotes‘ defense of his approach.
The point is that copies are dead ends. They bump a site up higher in Google’s search engines because they contain words people search for. But they don’t help people find the science behind the words. Yes, Prokaryotes’ site is now usually on the first page Google returns when most any popular climate/warming question is typed into the search box. It’s not the best company to be found in, though.
Gavin reminds us all to use the DOI.
DOI gives a permanent link.
This is a problem for those interested in scientific work. Bit rot–web links go bad
Hank Roberts, could you for once point out valid issue you have with any particular content at my site, other than your issue with quoting abstracts, which amounts to the opposite of science communication.
As long you do not provide constructiveness we can not progress.
Does anyone know if the IPCC AR5 is addressing ESS? And btw it appears as if the RC search function is broken.
Is this graph released under CC-BY? If yes, could i find a CC-BY notice here somewhere?
Wind and Rain Belts to Shift North as Planet Warms: Redistribution of Rainfall Could Make Middle East, Western US and Amazonia Drier
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130923155540.htm
Well, the Middle East and the Western US are already becoming drier.
http://physicsandphysicists.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-really-is-different.html
I appear to have mauled the original. I still believe that it is possible to view the world from several different points of view without going astray and that climate in particular requires a broad view. Stephen Schneider had that kind of broad vision. I’m having trouble figuring out how to say more than that at the moment, but if I figure out a way to make it clearer what I’m getting at I will. If it weren’t important to get all sorts of people unable to appreciate scientific rigor, I’d just let it go.
Los Angeles Times front page story today, Monday
“Global warming ‘hiatus’ puts climate change scientists on the spot”
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-climate-change-uncertainty-20130923,0,791164.story
was disappointing on several levels. For example, it calls the storage of heat in the ocean over the last 15 years a ‘theory.’ It appears it might be easy for some readers of this piece to conclude that the quotes from the following 3 scientists suggest that AGW is still controversial within the established climate community.
Judith Curry, Georgia Tech
Francis Zwiers, U. of Victoria, CA
Roger Piekle, U. of CO
Is it more accurate to say these 3 scientists are actually working to fix flaws in current models ?
I think posting gobs of article titles and abstracts each linked to yet another website with article titles and abstracts before one actually gets to a DOI or link to journal is tiring on the reader. We can all use citation indices.
That said, I wouldn’t mind seeing a precis compiled every week, say, with “interesting” articles, with comment as to why the compiler thinks they are “interesting.” After all, it’s peoples’s thoughts and opinions that we read this site for.
Sorta like skepticalscience does. They put a list up and you can click thru to see the comment on the article.
If you must put up gobs of references then putting up a list of titles each linked to doi would be much less annoying for those among us who can’t use pagedown fast enuf or haven’t got a killfile.
Or at least a comment by each title telling why the poster thinks it is interesting.
Hey. tell me why you like that article, lets talk about it. This is Unforced Variations, after all.
sidd
#236–Well, Francis Zwiers is, I think:
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs/Climate%20change/Climate%20model%20results/over%20estimate.pdf
Note the attempts to consider (as Gavin recommended in the recent “mismatch” post) possible reasons for discrepancies between models and observations–unaccounted aerosol forcings, biases due to mis-estimated stratospheric water vapor, and so on.
I’d be a bit doubtful of Curry, based on her blog opinions, but she seems to have a lot of 3rd author citations in various studies, some of which involve modeling, over the past couple of years:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=judith+curry&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C11&as_ylo=2012
This one is on your point:
http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/gl1210/2012GL051644/2012gl051644-txts01.doc
(Although it’s descriptive rather than prescriptive, or even diagnostic, to judge by the abstract.)
Pielke doesn’t work in climate modeling at all. Actually, he’s not qualified for it: “Pielke earned a B.A. in mathematics (1990), a M.A. in public policy (1992), and a Ph.D. in political science, all from the University of Colorado at Boulder,” according to WIkipedia. He’s a policy guy, not a climate scientist–it’s pretty indicative that a recent research topic is the governance of sports organizations such as FIFA.
re Curry, Zwiers, and Pielke
Since the first and last are largely known quantities, I thought I’d look up Zwiers and found this:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/tag/francis-zwiers/
Doesn’t look to me like a valuable contribution to advancing understanding of climate science.
“Is it more accurate to say these 3 scientists are actually working to fix flaws in current models ?”
Hmm, maybe a cautionary tale about advocacy here. There’s ‘working’ and then there’s ‘twerking’. Without being able to read minds, it does appear that unsatisfied with just their day jobs, they’ve gotten hungry for notoriety as well.
Susan @ 239 – You might do better to examine Dr. Zwiers actual views and contributions rather than the denialators critique of him. Like here and here. Dr Zwiers is a climate modeler making a contribution.
Flxible:
re Zwiers, you are right. I owe him and this community an apology. Looks like an interesting guy and that group’s attempt to condemn him seems to have run up against his honesty and good intentions.
[Response: Francis is a top-rate scientist of the highest integrity. I strongly suspect that he has been misquoted and mischaracterized quite a bit lately. -mike]
Taking a moment to check the LATimes article, since I am deeply skeptical about Curry and Pielke, I found also Kosaka and Xie (and Patzert), which led me to this:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/seasonal-nino/
Thanks very much Flxible for getting me to slow down and question my assumptions. I should not subject this community to half-baked conclusions, but I’m glad I read the whole thing, and checked Tamino again. The universal problem of false balance rears its ugly head again, demonstrating all your points about looking before one leaps and sticking to the truth.
Susan, is
what you meant to say, or a typo?
This might be significant: Researchers Wary as DOE Bids to Build Sixth U.S. Climate Model, although the title is perhaps unfortunate.
> your issue with quoting abstracts,
> which amounts to the opposite of science communication.
What could this mean?
> As long you do not provide constructiveness
> we can not progress.
Use DOI.
What Does an ‘Energy Transition’ Look Like?
National Geographic blog
Daniel Kammen of University of California, Berkeley
September 24, 2013
“… a study of what it would take in western North America to expand the deployment of solar power from its current level of less than 1 percent of electricity to one third of total electricity supply by 2050….”
and following the pointer at National Geographic, the study is:
SunShot Solar Power Reduces Costs and Uncertainty in Future Low-Carbon Electricity Systems
Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (16), pp 9053–9060, July 19, 2013
DOI: 10.1021/es401898f
Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society
The abstract begins:
“The United States Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative has set cost-reduction targets of $1/watt for central-station solar technologies. We use SWITCH, a high-resolution electricity system planning model, to study the implications of achieving these targets for technology deployment and electricity costs in western North America, focusing on scenarios limiting carbon emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. We find that achieving the SunShot target for solar photovoltaics would allow this technology to provide more than a third of electric power in the region, displacing natural gas in the medium term and reducing the need for nuclear and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies, which face technological and cost uncertainties, by 2050. We demonstrate that a diverse portfolio of technological options can help integrate high levels of solar generation successfully and cost-effectively….”
@243 Mal Adapted
a terrible typo.
I meant get all sorts of people involved who are unable to fully appreciate the necessities of scientific rigor within the field.
For an example of the kind of trouble amateurs can cause, look no further. Mea culpa.
Cautionary:
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-comments
“… Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off.
It wasn’t a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is …”
I was wondering if Gwynne Dyer is a credible source talking about the consequences of Climate Change? I’ve seen his name and a few articles related to his book, “Climate Wars” where he talks about what the government is doing in regards to Climate Change etc. Dyer sounds pretty dire here but is this a little “over the top” prediction? In the video he says he’s talked to leading scientists and high ranking military personnel about Climate impacts and I suppose his book is based on that information. Thanks
http://climatestate.com/2013/05/14/gwynne-dyer-climate-wars-the-fight-for-survival-as-the-world-overheats/