BraveNewClimate

Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and most other long-lived greenhouse gases (i.e., barring short-lived water vapour), are considered ‘trace gases’ because their concentration in the atmosphere is so low. For instance, at a current level of 389 parts per million, CO₂ represents just 0.0389% of the air, by volume. Tiny isn’t it? How could such a small amount of gas possibly be important?

This issue is often raised by media commentators like Alan Jones, Howard Sattler, Gary Hardgrave and others, when arguing that fossil fuel emissions are irrelevant for climate change. For instance, check out the Media Watch ABC TV story (11 minute video and transcript) called “Balancing a hot debate“.

I’ve seen lots of analogies drawn, in an attempt to explain the importance of trace greenhouse gases. One common one is to point out that a tiny amount of cynanide, if ingested, will kill you. Sometimes a little of a substance can have a big impact.  But actually, there’s a better way to get people to understand, and that’s to follow one of the guiding principles of this blog: “Show me the numbers!“.

In response to a recent post by John Cook on George Pell, religion and climate change, commenter Glenn Tamblyn pointed out an interesting fact: Every cubic metre of air contains roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of CO₂. In scientific notation, this is 10²² — a rather large number.

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The Conversation is a recently established website set up to provide an independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the Australian university and research sector. Over the last few weeks, a group of climate scientists and academics from other relevant disciplines, have been running a series at The Conversation on ‘climate change scepticism’. I’ve been involved with a group, lead by Steve Lewandowsky from UWA and Megan Clement from The Conversation, that initiated and organised the concept for this series, and the result has been some terrific articles published by folks like Karl Braganza (BoM), James Risbey (CSIRO), Ian Enting (Univ Melb) and many others. You can browse the full listing of 13 articles here.

I was a co-signatory of the lead article, Climate change is real: an open letter from the scientific community, and also the concluding piece. I reproduce the latter, below (for the original posting at The Conversation, click here).

The false, the confused and the mendacious: how the media gets it wrong on climate change

The Conversation wraps up Clearing up the Climate Debate with a statement from our authors: the debate is over. Let’s get on with it.

Over the past two weeks The Conservation has highlighted the consensus of experts that climate change caused by humans is both real and poses a serious risk for the future.

We have also revealed the deep flaws in the conduct of so-called climate “sceptics” who largely operate outside the scientific context.

But to what extent is the “science settled”? Is there any possibility that the experts are wrong and the deniers are right?

Certainty in science

If you ask a scientist whether something is “settled” beyond any doubt, they will almost always reply “no”.

Nothing is 100% certain in science.

So how certain is climate science? Is there a 50% chance that the experts are wrong and that the climate within our lifetimes will be just fine? Or is there a 10% chance that the experts are wrong? Or 1%, or only 0.0001%?

The answer to these questions is vital because if the experts are right, then we must act to avert a major risk.

Dropping your phone

Suppose that you lose your grip on your phone. Experience tells us that the phone will fall to the ground.

You drop a phone, it falls down.

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I was recently invited to provide a response to an opinion article on climate change that was offered to “The Punch” website. The lead article can be read here: It’s just too hard to understand climate change. My response, reproduced below (original here), should be read with this context in mind.

It seems that many of the commenters on The Punch website thought I was being patronising or pontificating. Maybe I was, but how else to answer such a “it’s all too hard” complaint? As one of the others commenters noted: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride”, i.e. just wanting for simple answers and consistent outcomes won’t make them so. Anyway, see what you think…

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Dylan Malloch laments that understanding climate change is difficult, with the forecasts sometimes appearing to be contradictory or having a bit both ways, and therefore seeming all rather confusing! It’s easy to sympathise with him. Unfortunately, this is the nature of science.

Let’s consider another example. Newton’s laws of physics work just fine for the everyday world, but if we tried to use them in the timing system of our global positioning satellites, the resulting drift error would be about 10 kilometres every day.

So, the engineers at GPS mission control need to use Einstein’s relativistic theories to make sure your iPhone tells you precisely where you are, whenever you want to know. Similarly, neither Newton’s or Einstein’s equations allow scientists to properly predict the subatomic interactions within the electronics of satellites or iPhones. For that, you need to reference the weird world of quantum mechanics.

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Yes, I’m still on vacation. But I couldn’t resist a quick response to this comment (and the subsequent debate):

BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Phil Jones: Yes, but only just.

Here is the global temperature data from 1995 to 2010, for NASA GISS and Hadley CRU. The plot comes from the Wood for Trees website. A linear trend is fitted to each series.

Both trends are clearly upwards.

Phil Jones was referring to the CRU data, so let’s start with that. If you fit a linear least-squares regression (or a generalised linear model with a gaussian distribution and identity link function, using maximum likelihood), you get the follow results (from Program R):

glm(formula = as.formula(mod.vec[2]), family =
                       gaussian(link = "identity"),
    data = dat.2009)

Deviance Residuals:
      Min         1Q     Median         3Q        Max
-0.175952  -0.040652   0.001190   0.051519   0.192276  

Coefficients:
              Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -21.412933  11.079377  -1.933   0.0754 .
Year          0.010886   0.005534   1.967   0.0709 .
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 

(Dispersion parameter for gaussian family taken to be 0.008575483)

    Null deviance: 0.14466  on 14  degrees of freedom
Residual deviance: 0.11148  on 13  degrees of freedom
AIC: -24.961

Two particularly relevant things to note here. First, the Year estimate is 0.010886. This means that the regression slope is +0.011 degrees C per year (or 0.11 C/decade or 1.1 C/century). The second is that the “Pr” or p-value is 0.0709, which, according to the codes, is “not significant” at Fisher’s alpha = 0.05.

What does this mean? Well, in essence it says that if there was NO trend in the data (and it met the other assumptions of this test), you would expect to observe a slope at least that large in 7.1% or replicated samples. That is, if you could replay the temperature series on Earth, or replicate Earths, say 1,000 times, you would, by chance, see that trend or larger in 71 of them. According to classical ‘frequentist’ statistical convention (which is rather silly, IMHO), that’s not significant. However, if you only observed this is 50 of 1,000 replicate Earths, that WOULD be significant.

Crazy stuff, eh? Yeah, many people agree.

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How do you dig down to the core of a person’s beliefs? Can you really hope to influence ‘the unpersuadables’ (a term recently coined by George Monbiot)? Is it worth arguing science and empirical evidence with ‘non-greenhouse theorists’ (you know, the really way-out-there kooks, who won’t even acknowledge that CO2 traps and re-emits infrared radiation)? Should we bother talking up nuclear engineering triumphs like ‘passive safety’ and ‘total actinide burning’ with anti-nuke zealots (you know, the ones who just know that atomic energy is bad)?

I’ve argued elsewhere that, in the greater (global) scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter that such ideologically straight-jacketed people exist. They always will. Rather, Hansen (and others on this blog) have argued that powerful vested interests — principally those with a major stake in fossil fuels forever — are far more dangerous. I’d have to agree, especially in the way they are so easily able to use the climate change/nuclear ‘antis’ as their pawns — usually, but not always, inadvertent – to slow the transition to real alternatives to coal, gas and oil (I rank them in that order of danger). But overcoming the influence of these powerful interests will need a lot of political currency, and that can only come by influencing enough sensible but weakly informed sections of society to advocate for the sort of pragmatic action that is in their own best, long-term interest.

Okay, so is there a way to get through to these people — or, perhaps more pertinently, to get others to see through them? Yes, I know of at least one method — I’ve tried it many times, and it works. I call it ‘the gentle art of interrogation’ (although I’m hardly the first to use this term).

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‘Solar variability does not explain late-20th-century warming’, says the title of a short paper published earlier this year by Philip Duffy, Ben Santer and Tom Wigley in Physics Today. The reason I bring up the topic of the sun and climate now is that an Australian Senator, Stephen Fielding of the Family First party, has recently been concerned that the solar variability could be a cause of recent warming, as the vote for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme comes before the Upper House. Apparently, he got this information from the American Heartland Institute. Well, let me put the good Senator’s concerns to rest.

This topic was dealt with in some detail on BraveNewClimate last year, in the post ‘What if the sun got stuck?‘. There is also an excellent coverage of this issue here, here and here. As Graeme Pearman said in the ABC story linked above, it’s an old debate. Pearman:

“Senator Fielding might have just learnt about it, but in fact the science community has been aware of it for many years. The changes of output of the sun are well and truly documented. We’ve been observing this for over a hundred years. We understand that there was probably some warming earlier last century, due to changes of emissions from the sun, but no evidence that the recent warming is due to that. And therefore there’s no anticipation that that will be a major factor through this century.”

The Duffy et al. 2009 paper (download the PDF here) was written in response to an Opinion Piece published in Physics Today in March 2008, by Nicola Scafetta and Bruce West, entitled: “Is climate sensitive to solar variability?” (download here). I strongly recommend that you read the Duffy et al. paper in full (it’s only 2 information-packed pages long), but the conclusion really does say it all:

In summary, the hypothesis of Scafetta and West — that solar variability is the dominant climate influence during the late 20th century — is a non-solution to a non-problem. There is no problem because the history of global temperatures during the 20th century is adequately explained by known phenomena: greenhouse gases, volcanic eruptions, aerosols, and, yes, to a small degree, solar variability. That conventional explanation is simple, self-consistent, and relies on well established physics. The Scafetta and West hypothesis is a non-solution because it is inconsistent with a range of observations and invokes new an unproven physics. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof; Scafetta and West have failed to provide it.

It’s always been amazing to me that some people go to such lengths to try to explain most of the warming over the last 150 years by reference to the sun, rather than ascribing it to an increase in greenhouse gases (GHG). Both, obviously, can change the climate; no argument there. But what about the principle of parsimony, folks? This argument distorts it to the extreme.

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In a recent post, I directed BraveNewClimate readers to a couple of excellent information websites, which are designed explicitly to answer/rebutt all of the common ‘arguments’ (for want of a better word) that are recycled by climate change pseudo-sceptics. Those two websites, Global Warming Debate and Skeptical Science, along with other excellent anti-denial sites like Deltoid and Greenfyre’s (which deal with the day-to-day lunacy that crops up in the newspapers and blogosphere), serve this ongoing need very well. But they do require one to take the time to read a lot of stuff, and let’s face it, there is such a morass of reading material thrust at us each and every day, that it can be easy to ‘switch off’.

As a way of adding diversity to your climate and energy education, I’ve already pointed to some useful multimedia sources for understanding more about fast reactor nuclear power. This post is to alert you to a similar non-textual resource which tackles the recycled pseudo-sceptical arguments head-on. It’s called ‘Climate Denial Crock of the Week‘, produced by Peter Sinclair (aka ‘greenman3610′).

This is an expanding series of ‘documentary’ videos posted on YouTube, underpinned by excellent production values, and narrated with a dash of humour to keep the material interesting. Each weekly ‘smashing of the crockery’ lasts about 5 to 10 minutes, so it’s not a huge time committment to follow this, week in, week out. It’s definitely worth the bandwidth — Sinclair manages to pack a whole lot of useful and accurate information into each video. All in all, it’s a really superb resource and I applaud his ongoing effort.

So far, the following 16 episodes have been posted (listed below in so particular order — you can watch them in any sequence) — the blurbs after the title are by the producer:

Solar Schmolar — A favorite hobby horse of Climate Denialists is that there is some kind of invisible, undetectable influence from the sun that is responsible for the unequivocal warming of the last century. Let’s put that crock under a microscope and see where the cracks are.

Ice Area and Volume –Denialists continually try to confuse the issue of northern polar ice caps. Here are the facts from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Party like it’s 1998 – One of the enduring classics of denialism, “Global warming stopped in 1998″, is of course, nonsense. Here’s why.

It’s Cold. So there’s no Climate Change – ”I looked outside, and it was snowing, therefore, there is no climate change.” If that’s what passes for rational thought in your social group, you owe it to yourself to watch this edition of Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

The Scoop on Southern Polar Ice — Don’t back down from the watercooler wars. Climate Denial Crock of the Week shoots down the brainless, Rush Limbaugh factoids of global climate denial. Keep coming back each week for more real science on climate change, and send me your suggestions for climate crocks to crush.

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Simple messages, which make headlines and create doubt amongst the laity, are an easy sell in the pseudo-sceptical world of climate science contrarianism. Many sound (kind of) plausible, and so gain an undue amount of traction among the general public and non-science decision-makers.  Ian Plimer’s recent book capitalises on these themes to full advantage, and, as Tim Lambert has patiently detailed over the past year or so, some media outlets such as The Australian also give such unscientific messages an extended and unbalanced run.

One that never seems to go away is that ‘1998 was the hottest year and every year since has been cooler‘ meme, or similar such variants. This little gem preys upon most people’s lack of appreciation of statistical inference, just like the ‘climate models didn’t predict recent variability‘ exploit a lack of understanding of the difference between a mean model output and any single realisation of a stochastic model run. Another one that’s come up quite a bit recently — including a number of editorials and reports in The Oz (I’m quoted in one of them) — is the claim that Antarctica (and worldwide) ice extent is growing. It’s a great one for climate contrarianism, because it immediately raises people’s suspicion levels — ‘How can the Earth be warming if the ice is growing?‘. You get the picture. Doubt is their product.

Now it would be nice to give people a simple explanation to these — ideally, some analogy that is easily visualised in the mind. Alas, the scientific explanations for these will always be, by necessity, somewhat technical and therefore easily glazed over by 95% of readers. Recently, the Australian Science Media Centre asked some scientists for an explanation, in simple terms, as to why ice in Antarctica might be growing. You can find their answers here. Ian Allison gave the most technically comprehensive and scientifically satisfactory reply, but I don’t imagine it meant much to most folks. I had a stab at a simpler explanation, which I reproduce below, but I also struggled, I think, to really make it clear.

Question: With confusion in the media this week over whether ice is decreasing or increasing in the Antarctic, here experts clarify the apparent anomaly.

Answer: This is a common source of confusion among climate change sceptics. As the world warms, the atmosphere’s ability to hold water vapour increases. Think of how humid it is in the tropics, and how dry the Arctic air is. The largest desert on Earth is the continent of Antarctica — it receives very little annual precipitation. In a warming world, more water vapour allows for more snowfall in Antarctica, which accumulates particularly in East Antarctica where the temperature never rises above freezing point. So, ice accumulates on that side of the continent. In the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica, this extra accumulation of snow is more than offset by summer surface melt.

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The self-proclaimed climate change sceptics (a.k.a. contrarians, non-greenhouse theorists, etc.) are, in the greater scheme of things, really nothing more than a  silly diversion. Spending too much time on them only results in a bruised head from excessive banging against recycled walls.

But as I’ve pointed out in a few recent posts, it is my firm belief that these climate cranks are not the real problem — not by a long shot. The biggest obstacle blocking meaningful action on climate change and securing a zero-carbon energy supply are those ‘well meaning’ people who on the one hand acknowledge the science of global warming and related problems of human impacts on Earth systems (often expressing their profound concern for the danger posed by worsening global change), yet on the other hand act in ways that indicate they understand or care nothing about its implications — or else they have constructed a form of self-delusion that ends up spawning the most damaging form of denial of all.

Whilst on my Xmas/New Year break, a family member showed me an interesting newspaper clipping that has further provoked my thinking about what causes this pervasive ‘denying while believing’ phenomenon. And the piece wasn’t about climate change — at least that was not its focus.

No, it was about the biggest news of 2008. As most of you would have already surmised, this was not global warming, environmental degradation or even the energy, water or food crises. Each of these got their fair share of attention, from time to time, but in the 2008 wash-up, all were swept away with the tide of media, political and societal interest (perhaps alarm or anxiety are better terms) surrounding the great global financial meltdown.

That’s what this newspaper article was about. It was called ‘Blame perversity for the meltdown‘, written by Fairfax columnist Leon Gettler (who has also written persuasively about global warming in other Op Eds). Please do read the original. But I think I can also illustrate nicely here how what Leon says about they psychology of managerial self-reward is equally applicable to our current bind in facing up to the climate crisis. The similarity of the two problems is, to me, quite striking. So let me paraphrase (with only a few key words/phrases changed, indicated in red, and some added hyperlinks):

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THE market failure surrounding climate change has been blamed on greed, fraud and deceit; but the question is, why have they become so entrenched?

What’s been at play is the little-explored area of organisational perversity, collusion and turning a blind eye. In her book, The Perverse Organisation and Its Deadly Sins, RMIT academic Susan Long argues that organisations and corporations can create perverse systems, of which there are several forms.

First, there is the state of primary narcissism, where certain interests are pursued at the expense of the general good, and others are turned into objects to serve certain ends.

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Well, if you’ve been reading the BraveNewClimate blog regularly, then I’m sure you’ve certainly heard quite enough of my opinions on climate science and its policy implications this year! My thanks to all regular and occasional BNC readers for taking an interest in staying up-to-date with the latest issues on global warming — and perhaps even more importantly, in creating an online community here with your constructive and (almost always!) useful commentaries. I really do appreciate the feedback and discussion I get here — it is a major motivating factor in me doing the blog.

But as we approach Christmas 2008, I thought it an appropriate time to hear from some other scientists working on climate change.  So here is a selected collection of quotes that I thought most aptly described the mainstream science view on the deadly seriousness of the climate crisis:

“The current situation of the world in relation to the climate problem is that we’re in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog, and the fog is the scientific uncertainty about the details that prevent us from knowing exactly where the cliff is. The climate change sceptics are telling us that the fog is a consolation and that we shouldn’t worry because we’re uncertain about the details, but of course any sane person driving a car toward a cliff in the fog and knowing that the brakes are bad, that it takes the car a long time to stop, will start putting on the brakes, trying to slow the car, without knowing exactly where the cliff is but just in the hope that by putting on the brakes we’ll be in time to keep from going over the cliff. You don’t have to be sure that you can still avoid going over the cliff to put on the brakes, you want to do it in any case. And that’s what the world should be doing with respect to the emissions of greenhouse gases that are causing this climate problem. There’s a chance we’ll go over the cliff anyway but prudence requires that we try to stop the car.“

John Holdren (President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard, and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center — John is President Obama’s new science advisor), Feb 2007

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“The faster and deeper we cut our greenhouse gas emissions in the next 10 years, the better our chances of averting a tipping point…

We must close that gap (between the science and the policy-makers) and begin to move our energy systems in a fundamentally different direction within about a decade, or we will have pushed the planet past a tipping point beyond which it will be impossible to avoid far-ranging undesirable consequences.“

James Hansen (Head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies)

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“The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming… and now as a sign of climate change, the canary has died.”

Dr Jay Zwally, glaciologist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Dec 2007

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