Sea level rise commitment could already be very high

There's a new paper out in Science this week, which compares the current state of the world with that of the last interglacial period (LIG), when sea levels were much higher than now. The paper is by Jeremy S. Hoffman, Peter U. Clark, Andrew C. Parnell, and Feng He.  Their findings suggest that we could already be committed to around a six to nine metre rise in sea level. (That's about 20 to 30 feet higher for the metric deficient.) From the introduction to the paper:

The last interglaciation [LIG, 129 to 116 thousand years ago (ka)] was one of the warmest periods during the last 800,000 years (1), with an associated sea-level rise of 6 to 9 m above present levels (2). As such, the LIG provides an important target for validating global climate models used for climate-change projections (3, 4), as well as for understanding the sea-level response to a warm climate. 

The perversity of deniers - and the "pause" that never was with Tom Peterson

Below is a TedX talk from Dr Tom Peterson on "What is Science: How it Differs from Art, Law and Quackery":

Tom quoted Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard geologist, from the video (which provided the title for this article):

Science does not deal in certainty, so "fact" can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree it would be perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.

What follows is copied from a comment posted here at HotWhopper, from Tom Peterson of NOAA, co-author of the new paper in Science, and President of the WMO Commission for Climatology. The email exchange is about a subject of much recent discussion - the new Science paper, which I described here (with lots of links at the bottom for further reading).

Tom has subsequently confirmed the email exchange and kindly gave me permission to repost his comment as a blog article. Apart from remarking on Anthony's conspiracy ideation, there's not really anything more I need add. The exchange speaks for itself - and speaks volumes.

Email exchange between Anthony Watts and Tom Peterson

Dear Sou et al.,

I thought you might find an email exchange I had yesterday with Anthony Watts interesting. 16 hours ago I received this email from Anthony Watts:

Stormy Weather - and a recycled storm at WUWT

We've been getting quite a few fierce storms lately in my part of the world. The other day I drove through one of the worst wind/rain combos I've experienced in quite some time, although severe storms have been occurring more often here in the past few months.

Right now as I write this, there's a large and tumultuous storm over Melbourne. This is from the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) - archived here. It's heading west to east (left to right):

A short pause: Bob Tisdale thinks climate models are weather forecasts of the Northern Hemisphere

There's a new paper out in Science mag, which is another one looking at the so-called hiatus. This time it's from a different angle. The researchers, Byron A. Steinman, Michael E. Mann and Sonya K. Miller, were exploring climate models and observations in relation to natural variation. They studied surface temperature variations in the northern hemisphere over the past 150 years.

A temporary respite before more heat kicks in

The abstract sums up the research. The study suggests the supposed pause is merely a coincidence of two features of natural oceanic fluctuations - a peak in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and a strongly negative-trending Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation (PMO). That it is the combined effect of these (in other words, natural variability) that partly offset the ongoing greenhouse warming.

The paper suggests that it may not be long before we get a lot hotter.

It's (not) volcanoes: WUWT ponders the implications of newly discovered old seamounts

Gravity gradient model, Mid-Atlantic Ridge; green dots are earthquakes of at least magnitude 5.5
Credit: David Sandwell, SIO

There is a new paper in Science this week about the latest ocean topographic mapping effort. A team of researchers led by David T. Sandwell "combined new radar altimeter measurements from satellites CryoSat-2 and Jason-1 with existing data to construct a global marine gravity model that is two times more accurate than previous models." As the editor's summary stated:

Detailed topographic maps are available for only a small fraction of the ocean floor, severely limited by the number of ship crossings. Global maps constructed using satellite-derived gravity data, in contrast, are limited in the size of features they can resolve. Sandwell et al. present a new marine gravity model that greatly improves this resolution (see the Perspective by Hwang and Chang). They identify several previously unknown tectonic features, including extinct spreading ridges in the Gulf of Mexico and numerous uncharted seamounts.  

North Atlantic Ocean gravity gradient model showing plate tectonic history of rifting continents.
Credit: David Sandwell, SIO

The paper indicated that this research will help improve the estimates of sea-floor depth in the 80% of the oceans having no depth soundings, and will greatly help scientists add to knowledge of ocean tectonic processes.

Brittle stars and deep-sea corals cover
a known seamount in the western Pacific Ocean.
Credit: NOAA

If you are interested in the subject, you can learn more about the work at the NSF website and read the paper at Science (subs required).

The press release was also published at ScienceDaily.com.

The Hwang and Chang perspective mentioned in the editor's summary can be read here, though you might need a subscription to Science.

It's (not) undersea volcanoes

Whenever the topic of volcanoes under the ocean comes up, you're bound to get deniers claiming global warming is caused by undersea volcanoes. Or something along those lines. (The under-sea volcanoes notion isn't that uncommon, but it is pretty silly. It doesn't make the top 176 denier memes at SkepticalScience.com.)

A moment's reflection would stop this denier meme in its tracks. Deniers are not good at reflection.

A shift in ice ages long ago

Today I came across an interesting article about ocean currents and ice ages, which was published in the early edition of Science on Thursday.

The paper is by Leopoldo Pena and Steven Goldstein and it's about what happened a very long time ago. Around 900,000 years ago, glaciations shifted from happening about once every 41,000 years to only once every 100,000 years. What the scientists describe was a major disruption to the thermohaline circulation between 950,000 years ago and 860,000 years ago. They say that the slowing, or perhaps cessation of deep ocean currents drew down a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere and stabilised the glacials at every 100,000 years.

From ScienceDaily.com:

In a new study in the journal Science, researchers found that the deep ocean currents that move heat around the globe stalled or even stopped, possibly due to expanding ice cover in the north. The slowing currents increased carbon dioxide storage in the ocean, leaving less in the atmosphere, which kept temperatures cold and kicked the climate system into a new phase of colder but less frequent ice ages, they hypothesize.

"The oceans started storing more carbon dioxide for a longer period of time," said Leopoldo Pena, the study's lead author, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "Our evidence shows that the oceans played a major role in slowing the pace of ice ages and making them more severe."

The researchers reconstructed the past strength of earth's system of deep-ocean currents by sampling deep-sea sediments off the coast of South Africa, where powerful currents originating in the North Atlantic Ocean pass on their way to Antarctica. How vigorously those currents moved in the past can be inferred by how much North Atlantic water made it that far, as measured by isotope ratios of the element neodymium bearing the signature of North Atlantic seawater. Like a tape recorder, the shells of ancient plankton incorporate this seawater signal through time, allowing scientists to approximate when the currents grew stronger and weaker off South Africa.

They confirmed that over the last 1.2 million years, the conveyor-like currents strengthened during warm periods and weakened during ice ages, as previously thought. But they also discovered that at about 950,000 years ago, ocean circulation weakened significantly and stayed weak for 100,000 years; during that period the planet skipped an interglacial -- the warm interval between ice-ages--and when the system recovered it entered a new phase of longer, 100,000-year ice age cycles. After this turning point, the deep ocean currents remain weak during ice ages, and the ice ages themselves become colder, they find.

"Our discovery of such a major breakdown in the ocean circulation system was a big surprise," said study coauthor Steven Goldstein, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty. "It allowed the ice sheets to grow when they should have melted, triggering the first 100,000-year cycle."

You can read the rest at ScienceDaily.com or, if you have a subscription, read the paper at Science.

---

Leopoldo D. Pena and Steven L. Goldstein. Thermohaline circulation crisis and impacts during the mid-Pleistocene transition. Science, 26 June 2014 DOI: 10.1126/science.1249770

The desire to not look stupid is pretty strong...

Noticed at WUWT today (archived here):

I urge others to follow my lead: when ridiculous claims are made in the media, challenge them with supportable facts. You may not get an acknowledgment, but the desire to not look stupid is pretty strong, and will have an effect.

His article was about a big blooper by the Governor of California, talking about LAX being flooded by rising seas, though it's apparently more than 30 metres (100 feet) above sea level. Anthony got up at half past five in the morning to send a missive off to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times to tell him what a duffer he and the Governor were.

This was the second article by Anthony on the subject. In his first article (archived here), Anthony had some big bloopers of his own. So I'll do as he urged and follow his lead and challenge what he wrote with supportable facts.

Anthony's ridiculous claim

Anthony made the ridiculous claim that Suzanne Goldenberg was wrong when she wrote that "The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet could eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise". He reckons she meant four feet, not four metres. Anthony was wrong! Suzanne Goldenberg was right.

Challenging Anthony Watts with supportable facts

Anthony copied a quote from a NASA article about the recent paper by Eric Rignot (which I wrote about earlier):

The Amundsen Sea region is only a fraction of the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which if melted completely would raise global sea level by about 16 feet (5 meters).

He followed this up with:

Here is where I think Brown went wrong:

He listened to the Guardian’s Susanne Goldenberg, who conflated 4 feet to 4 METERS (13 feet), which would affect SFO airport, but not LAX.

...And the error is still in her story, a day later. 

This is what Suzanne Goldenberg wrote in the Guardian:

The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet could eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise

Obviously it's Anthony who is wrong.  And this even with him copying Suzanne's comment and highlighting it in yellow. I've remarked before (and Anthony confirmed it) that he doesn't read what he writes about on his blog. In this case he didn't bother reading two pieces of information he selected himself, from different sources.

The melting of western Antarctica would cause a very large rise in sea level. In a 2009 paper in Science, Jerry X. Mitrovica,1 Natalya Gomez,1 Peter U. Clark have estimated the melting of western Antarctica would result in a sea level rise of five metres  - and effectively much more in some parts of the world (and less in others). In another paper in Science in the same year, Jonathan L. Bamber and colleagues estimated a rapid collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheets at 3.3 metres, but 25% higher in some regions, specifically the along the Pacific and Atlantic seaboard of the United States. So that would make it about a four metre rise in those regions. (The latter calculation allows for the fact that not all the ice would go into the sea in a "rapid collapse", among other things.)

Anthony's four foot rise is only 1.2 metres. This is the expected rise in sea level just from the ice sheets of the Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE). As explained in Rignot14:

The ASE is a dominant contributor to the mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet at present, with losses driven almost entirely by increases in flow speed (Mouginot et al., 2014). This sector is of global signi cance since it contains enough ice to raise global sea level by 1.2 m (e.g. Rignot, 2008).

Will Anthony change his article so as to not look stupid? I doubt it. No-one else picked him up on his ridiculous claim about the volume of ice in western Antarctica.

From the WUWT comments

ZombieSymmetry says:

May 13, 2014 at 6:56 pm
There isn’t even that much water on the planet, is there? I mean, if all ice, everywhere melted, how high would the sea level go?

NASA says it would rise 75 metres, which is 246 feet. That would put LAX under 45 metres of water (nearly 150 feet of water).


Col Mosby says:

May 13, 2014 at 7:55 pm
Now, irregardless of your beliefs about climate, does anyone out there actually believe we
will still be filling our vehicles with gasoline a hundred years from now? Or burning coal or natural gas to make electricity? These people that predict well into the future always assume things won’t change much in the next hundred years (we’ll be on the iPad CLMXXV by then). That’s the most idiotic assumption I’ve ever heard. Nobody believes that. Not even the alarmists, which is quite illogical considering their beliefs. That’s the strongest argument I can think of for not doing anything.

Steven Mosher is rambling and says:

May 13, 2014 at 10:16 pm
It is 200 ,years worst case and then 1mm would be added per year. So its ,200 ,years until the onset of a ,1mm rise per year. Best case 1000 years until the onset

tty says:

May 14, 2014 at 1:15 am
“There isn’t even that much water on the planet, is there? I mean, if all ice, everywhere melted, how high would the sea level go?”

About 70-80 meters (250 feet). But that won’t happen. Neither the Ellsworth mountains (4900 meters), the Transantarctic mountains (4500 meters), the Executive Committee Range (4300 meters) nor Fimbulheimen (3100 meters) are going to become ice-free until Antarctica moves away from the pole or the sun turns into red giant, whichever comes first.
The Ellsworth and Executive Comittee ranges are in West Antarctica by the way. 

markstoval is a fake sceptic, he doesn't compute that Anthony gets so much wrong and says:

May 15, 2014 at 12:41 am
It is nice to win one once in a while. I am glad that Anthony forced this retraction. (misspoke indeed)

The problem is that the mainstream media is all on-board with alarmist scaremongering and we are fighting people who “buy ink by the barrel” (need an updated saying there I guess). How do we get the facts out while the alarmists spread lies, misinformation, and delusions through a compliant mainstream media? 

Why not finish with a comment by Leo Geiger, who says:

May 15, 2014 at 3:52 am
when ridiculous claims are made in the media, challenge them with supportable facts

Absolutely. Same thing applies to ridiculous claims made in blogs.

---

E. Rignot, J. Mouginot, M. Morlighem, H. Seroussi, B. Scheuchl. "Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011".. Geophysical Research Letters, 2014; DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060140

Bamber, Jonathan L., Riccardo EM Riva, Bert LA Vermeersen, and Anne M. LeBrocq. "Reassessment of the potential sea-level rise from a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet." Science 324, no. 5929 (2009): 901-903. DOI: 10.1126/science.1169335 

Mitrovica, Jerry X., Natalya Gomez, and Peter U. Clark. "The sea-level fingerprint of West Antarctic collapse." Science 323, no. 5915 (2009): 753-753. DOI: 10.1126/science.1166510

Are US winters cooling or warming? It is all so very confusing at WUWT....

It wasn't that long ago that WUWT-ers were being warned that the world is heading for an ice age.  The "ice age cometh-ers" to varying degrees include:

• David "funny sunny" Archibald
• Tony "central England" Brown
• Ed "ice age cometh" Hoskins
• Denier Don Easterbrook

The one thing you can say about those WUWT contributors is that they are prepared to make a prediction, even though their predictions are laughable.  Most of the people at WUWT just scoff at science but aren't prepared to stick their neck out.  I've yet to see Anthony Watts make any prediction.  Wondering Willis once made a guess that the world is about to get cooler.  Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale, when pinned down, doesn't want to make any predictions.  He's too busy keeping track of bits of the ocean in the hope that some bits haven't warmed as much lately (so that he can put up a chart of a patch of sea and say that global warming isn't happening, or it's not happening in that bit of the globe).

It was freezing cold in the USA this winter, but it's not unusual?

Over the past few months, there have been a myriad of WUWT articles about just how cold it was this winter in the USA.  If there was a WUWT article about the record hot Californian winter, I must have missed it. Which is odd, since that's where Anthony Watts, the blog owner, hails from. Here are just some of the articles about how cold it was in the USA this past winter:

• Over 2000 cold and snow records set in the USA this past week - 13 December 2013
• New record low set in the coldest city in the continental USA – much of the country headed for a deep freeze - 2 January 2014
• USA cold weather records outnumber warm records 6 to 1 - 8 January 2014
• NOAA: US Cold records outnumber warm records 66 to 1 in the last 7 days - 8 March 2014
• Satellite Animation Shows Massive Eastern U.S. Cool Down - 13 March 2014
• Coldest U.S. winter in a century - 26 March 2014
• It’s official – Chicago experienced the coldest four months ever on record - 1 April 2014
• NASA on ‘the big chill’ this winter: ‘In some places temperatures were 40°F colder than average’ - 7 April 2014
• and more in the same vein.

However in an apparent about-face, today the headlines at WUWT are (archived here):

Holdren Is Wrong – Cold Winters Are Not Getting More Common

Paul Homewood, who wrote the article even put up a chart to prove that US winters aren't getting any colder.  In fact looking at the chart, since the 1980s winters in the USA have become a whole lot warmer:

Source: NOAA via WUWT

Paul injects a bit of reality at WUWT and writes:

Clearly, on a national basis, recent winters have not been unusually cold. In the last 10 years, only three winters have been colder than the 1901-2000 mean. Moreover, no winters in recent years have come anywhere near to being as cold as some of the winters in the 1970’s, for instance, or earlier.

Paul goes on to look to see how much of the USA had extreme winters.  Using his method, he confirmed that the 1970s was the last decade notable for cold extremes across the largest portion of contiguous USA.  He wrote that it's clear that much less of the country was affected by cold compared to the twentieth century:

It is abundantly clear that much less of the country has been affected by extreme cold this winter, and indeed other recent ones, when compared with the 20thC. There is also no trend towards cold winters becoming more common.

Then Paul remembers who he's writing for.  So he figures he'd better cover himself for the global warming deniers and say that mild winters aren't "taking over" either, writing:

What is also interesting is that there does not seem to be much of a trend towards milder winters taking over. Only the winter of 2011/12 stands out in this respect, and there have been plenty of similar years previously.

Yet if you look at the first chart he posted (above), it's pretty obvious even to the naked eye that in the last few decades, the average winter time temperature is much warmer than it was in the past. Even looking at his own charts of extremes, he should have recognised that there is a lot more red area than blue area in recent decades.  Here are the two charts Paul put up, showing extremes in minimum and extremes in maximum temperatures for winter, with my animations (click to enlarge):

Adapted from source: WUWT

So is it warming, cooling or doing neither? Anthony's readers must sometimes be scratching their head wondering whether to believe what they read at WUWT or whether to believe what they read at WUWT.

John Holdren and Jennifer Francis' Polar Vortex

John Holdren's statement, which Paul Homewood was countering, was from a video in which he discusses the polar vortex.

Paul quotes the following bits of text.  He doesn't link directly to where he got the quotes.  The first bit of text is from the above video (at 0:32), which Paul doesn't repost, and the second paragraph is taken from a White House web page :

“A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues….

We also know that this week’s cold spell is of a type there’s reason to believe may become more frequent in a world that’s getting warmer, on average, because of greenhouse-gas pollution.”

 The video is short, so I'll copy the text here so you can read John Holdren's quote in context:

If you've been hearing that extreme cold spells like the one that we're having in the United States now disprove global warming, don't believe it. The fact is that no single weather episode can either prove or disprove global climate change.

Climate is the pattern of weather that we observe geographically and over the seasons, and it's described in terms of averages, variations, and probabilities. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues. And the reason is this: in the warming world that we're experiencing, the far north, the Arctic, is warming roughly twice as rapidly as the mid-latitudes, such as the United States. That means that the temperature difference between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes is shrinking, and that temperature difference is what drives what is called the circumpolar vortex, which is the great counterclockwise-swirling mass of cold air that hovers over the Arctic. As the temperature difference between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes declines, the polar vortex weakens, and it becomes wavier. The waviness means that there can be increased, larger excursions of cold air southward -- that is, into the mid-latitudes -- and, in the other phase of the wave, increased excursions of relatively warmer mid-latitude air into the far north. 

Computer models tell us that there are many different factors influencing these patterns. And, as in all science, there will be continuing debate about exactly what is happening. But I believe the odds are that we can expect, as a result of global warming, to see more of this pattern of extreme cold in the mid-latitudes and some extreme warm in the far north.

Essentially, what John Holdren is describing is the hypothesis put forward by Jennifer Francis and Stephen Vavrus in a paper in GRL in 2012.  As John Holdren says, "there will be continuing debate about exactly what is happening".  Indeed the Francis hypothesis is the subject of ongoing debate.  Some scientists, such as Kevin Trenberth, disagree quite strongly. Others are more circumspect and are entertaining the idea that the hypothesis has merit.

Coincidentally, there is an article in the current issue of Science about this very topic, titled "Into the Maelstrom" and written by Eli Kintisch.  If you can get hold of a copy it's worth a read (at least I found it very interesting and informative).  Eli Kintisch says that Jennifer Francis has modified part of her hypothesis in the light of a paper by Elizabeth Barnes, backing off from the notion that "a curvier jet stream is leading to more atmospheric "blocking"". Here's an excerpt of the Science article:

The most vociferous critiques, however, have come from researchers who study atmospheric dynamics, or the many mechanisms that jostle and shape air masses. Given the Arctic's relatively puny influence over the planet's atmospheric energy flows, the notion that it can alter the jet stream "is just plain wrong," says dynamicist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. The more likely culprit, he says, is natural variability driven by the tropics, where Earth gets its largest input of solar energy.

Such variability, Trenberth says, could explain the jet stream's giant curvy shape this past January, which brought record chill to the southeastern United States, warm temperatures to Alaska, and made "polar vortex" a household term. At the time, a massive amount of so-called latent heat was accumulating in the tropical Pacific, Trenberth notes, in an incipient El Niño event. Parcels of warm air from the tropics may have forced the jet stream northward in one place, causing it to meander southward farther east. "It may not be that Arctic amplification is causing a wavier jet stream, it may be that a wavier jet stream is causing Arctic amplification," he says.

"I understand that people would be skeptical," Francis says. "It's a new paradigm." But she counsels patience. She notes that evidence of Arctic amplification itself has emerged from the statistical noise only in the last 15 or so years, so it may take time for the changes to the jet stream to become statistically significant. And she believes the modeling experiments that fail to simulate a more meandering jet stream are biased, because they don't include sufficiently robust Arctic amplification.

Such arguments have persuaded some colleagues to at least wait and see. Oceanographer James Overland of NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington, for example, says, "I find the tropical explanation for the recent behavior of the jet stream no less implausible than the Arctic one." And he suspects that, as data accumulate, the dynamicists will come to gain a greater appreciation for the Arctic's role.

Paul Homewood's Strawman

I think it's worth pointing out that Paul Homewood's article is one big strawman.  He is trying to refute something that John Holdren didn't say.

Paul is arguing that because the winters on average or over much of the USA aren't the coldest compared to the entire record of winters then John Holdren is wrong.  But John Holdren was talking about cold spells not average winter temperatures.  He was talking about periods when parts of the USA may experience extremely cold weather.  Also, in my view the winter extremes need to be considered in comparison with a rising global surface temperature.  What this would mean is that cold extremes would be getting warmer over time, as global surface temperatures rise.  Yet there can still be extreme cold across parts of the USA, just not as extreme as the coldest in the instrumental record.  Perhaps in several decades from now, an extreme cold spell will be as warm as a current mild winter in the USA, yet it may still be caused by a "wavy" polar vortex.  (A mild winter may well be as warm as a mild spring or even a mild summer in the future.)

From the WUWT comments

Let's see how the WUWT-ers reacted to Paul arguing that US winters aren't getting colder and writing that "There has been nothing unusual or unprecedented about this winter."  They are all over the place.  Some of them are saying winters are warmer. Others are arguing winters are colder. Many of them seem to think the USA is the whole globe. For example: more soylent green! says:

April 18, 2014 at 12:50 pm
“As global warming continues?” Do you think Holdren means “when (or if) global warming continues” because it ain’t warmed in nearly 2 decades.
A technical question — If global warming causes colder winters, at what point does global warming become global cooling? Or does it all just average out? If it all just averages out, does that mean the earth doesn’t have a fever anymore?

phlogiston is trying to work it all out and says:

April 18, 2014 at 1:38 pm
So let me get this straight:
The scientific adviser to the POTUS
is saying that
global warming
is causing colder winters

TonyG isn't giving up easily and says:

April 18, 2014 at 10:53 am
Over a year ago, I saw a program on NGC that suggested AGW could cause another ice age. I guess cold winters would be much more common with glaciation.

pokerguy is deeply depressed and says:

April 18, 2014 at 11:23 am
There was a time when I believed that people in highly positions….at least in a democracy….could not just make things up without paying a price. Now the scales have fallen from my eyes. You can say anything you want for the most part and get away with it. Holdren has been making ridiculous claims without being exposed as a serial liar in the MSM for a long time. Ditto Obama. I don’t think it was more than a year ago when the President of the U.S. simply made up his own facts about global warming by asserting that the globe was heating up even faster than the experts had predicted….which of course is utterly false. In fact there’s arguably been no warming at all for over 17 years.

Deeply, deeply depressing. 

Magma picks up an inconsistency and says:

April 18, 2014 at 11:39 am
Holdren says “cold spells”. Homewood shows Dec-Feb averages.
There is a difference. 

Richard Day likes question marks and says:

April 18, 2014 at 11:48 am
So extreme cold is the result of global warming?
Is there ANYTHING global warming can’t do?????? 

herkimer isn't the only one who says it's been cooling since 1998 (now that year rings a bell) (excerpt):

April 18, 2014 at 11:58 am
Winters in Contiguous US have been getting cooler for 17 winters or since 1998 , but certainly not for the reasons that Holdren states. This recent decline in US winter temperatures is similar to the cooler US winter cycles of 1895-1920 and again 1954-1979 and is due to ocean cycles. 

Rud Istvan gets everything topsy turvey and says:

April 18, 2014 at 12:20 pm
Holden even recently lied to Congress about previous testimony on US drought by Roger Pielke Jr. When Pielke asked for a retraction and apology, he got a six page White House memo citing one paper. Apparently they cannot read either, because that paper (by Trenberth) also supported the Pielke testimony. Which was simply thatnitmisnot possible to make a connection between drought and climate change, per the IPCC SREX and other papers. It is possible to make regional US connections with PDO and AMO.

Why did Holdren try to trash Pielke’s testimony? Because Obama is using the California problem to pump for his climate agenda. Just when you think they cannot stoop lower, they do.

No, Rud, that's not why John Holdren had a go at Roger Pielke Jr's testimony.  This is.


Rob is seeing warmer winters and says:

April 18, 2014 at 2:48 pm
Winters have gotten much less severe
here along the Gulf Coast since the terrible cold decades of the 1980′s and 1960′s.
Holdren’s “speculation” is NOT Science. Not even close.

HenryP says, I'm not sure what:

April 18, 2014 at 3:19 pm
@DirkH
As we are cooling from the top, the higher latitudes get drier and the lower latitudes get wetter.
That is physics.
Locally, at some places, due to the drier conditions, it can get hotter,
paradoxically
perhaps 

Bart says:

April 18, 2014 at 6:52 pm
Seems I recall that last year’s warmer-than-usual winter was supposed to be the harbinger of things to come.

bushbunny is firmly in the global cooling camp and disagrees with Paul Homewood (but doesn't come right out and say so):

April 18, 2014 at 8:08 pm
Of course the government would announce this nonsense to uphold their beliefs, and not face the fact Northern America and Canada would suffer most from extra cold winters. I hope that you don’t experience any more extra cold winters for your health mainly and productivity. Your government should take measures now not to rely on the global warming scare but global cooling that will prove a lot more expensive in the long run to adapt to. 

---

Eli Kintisch, "Into the Maelstrom", Science 18 April 2014: Vol. 344 no. 6181 pp. 250-253 DOI: 10.1126/science.344.6181.250

Francis, Jennifer A., and Stephen J. Vavrus. "Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid‐latitudes." Geophysical Research Letters 39.6 (2012). doi:10.1029/2012GL051000,

Barnes, Elizabeth A. "Revisiting the evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in midlatitudes." Geophysical Research Letters 40.17 (2013): 4734-4739. doi:10.1002/grl.50880

Greenland has been (partly) white for a very long time, when will it turn green again?

Today Anthony Watts has an article about Greenland (archived here).  He copied a press release about how scientists have evidence that the ice sheet in Greenland could be 2.7 million years old. This could be something of a surprise, because recent thinking was that the ice sheet may have almost disappeared in MIS 11, about 400,000 years ago (eg Alley et al 2010).

I found out that the paper was published yesterday in Science Express. From sciencedaily.com:

The new discovery indicates that even during the warmest periods since the ice sheet formed, the center of Greenland remained stable; "it's likely that it did not fully melt at any time," Vermont's Bierman said. This allowed a tundra landscape to be locked away, unmodified, under ice through millions of years of global warming and cooling.

"The traditional knowledge about glaciers is that they are very powerful agents of erosion and can effectively strip a landscape clean," said study co-author Lee Corbett, a UVM graduate student who prepared the silty ice samples for analysis. Instead, "we demonstrate that the Greenland Ice Sheet is not acting as an agent of erosion; in fact, at it's center, it has performed incredibly little erosion since its inception almost three million years ago."...

The scientists examined the lowest 13 m of the GISP2 core, which had not been examined closely.  GISP2 is in central Greenland.

Source: North Greenland Ice Core Project (2004) 

That lowermost section of the core had a lot of sediment in it. The team used measurements of measurements of atmospherically produced (meteoric) ¹⁰Be, carbon and nitrogen in the sediment to figure out things like where the sediment came from and how old it was.  What they discovered was that below the silty ice in the lowest 13 m of the core was 48 cm of diamict lying over granite. The ice at the summit is frozen to the bed and, through modeling, the scientists estimate it's been in place for "at least the last several glacial cycles".

¹⁰Be comes from the atmosphere (produced by cosmic rays) and precipitates or falls down to the surface and sticks to the soil.  It has been used to date soils and to estimate the rate of erosion.  Measurements of this, plus organic carbon and total nitrogen allow a picture to be built up of the history of the ice sheet and the underlying surface.  From sciencedaily.com:

...The researchers expected to only find soil eroded from glacier-scoured bedrock in the sediment at the bottom of the ice core. “So we thought we were going looking for a needle in haystack,” Bierman said. They planned to work diligently to find vanishingly small amounts of the beryllium—since the landscape under the ice sheet would have not been exposed to the sky. “It turned out that we found an elephant in a haystack,” he said; the silt had very high concentrations of the isotope when the team measured it on a particle accelerator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“On a global basis, we only find these sorts of beryllium concentrations in soils that have developed over hundreds of thousands to millions of years,” said Joseph Graly, who analyzed the beryllium data while at the University of Vermont.

Without going into too much detail, what I gather is there was too much ¹⁰Be in the soil for anything but a very long period of exposure to the atmosphere. Longer than would have been possible if the soil had been exposed in more recent interglacials. They concluded that "the data are most consistent with soil formation prior to the existence of the present GIS".  And given that it's still there intact, they concluded that the ice sheet has been very stable at the base and has been there for the best part of the past 2.7 million years. Before that, it was likely tundra. In fact the ¹⁰Be under the Greenland ice sheet was found to at levels very similar to the permafrost tundra in Alaska today.

This of course has implications for what will happen as we heat up the planet.  From ScienceDaily.com again:

Many geologists are seeking a long-term view of the history of the Greenland Ice Sheet, including how it moves and has shaped the landscape beneath it -- with an eye toward better understanding its future behavior. It's 656,000 square miles of ice, containing enough water, if fully melted, to raise global sea levels twenty-three feet -- "yet we have very little information about what is happening at the bed with regards to erosion and landscape formation," said Corbett.

What is clear, however, from an abundance of worldwide indicators, is that global temperatures are on a path to be "far warmer than the warmest interglacials in millions of years," said Bierman. "There is a 2.7-million-year-old soil sitting under Greenland. The ice sheet on top of it has not disappeared in the time in which humans became a species. But if we keep on our current trajectory, the ice sheet will not survive. And once you clear it off, it's really hard to put it back on."

This puts the final nail in the coffin for last year's WUWT article about how Greenland ice sheet was only 650 years old.  That article had a not-so-brief appearance at WUWT before Anthony finally responded to the guffaws (even from deniers) and took it down.

From the WUWT comments

It doesn't suit the crowd, some of whom want to argue about Eric the Red and the vikings. Lee says:

April 17, 2014 at 8:10 pm
Least we forget that the Vikings grew crops on Greenland 1000 years ago where permafrost exists today.

mickgreenhough says:

April 17, 2014 at 11:07 pm
In 982 Eric the Red sailed west from Iceland and found a ‘green land’ He started a settlement there which grew to 4-5000 people and 150 farms. It lasted some 400years until the ‘Little Ice age’ of the Middle Ages saw the return of ice to Greenland. [redacted link]

Colorado Wellington says:

April 17, 2014 at 11:16 pm
“Greenland really was green! However, it was millions of years ago,” said Rood …
Expanding on the authors’ pop commentary we must conclude that Erik the Red knew this and decided to wait it out.

Stephen Singer says:

April 17, 2014 at 5:46 pm
I’d suggest that it’s more likely humankind and other species are likely to disappear before the Greenland ice sheet does. One needs to remember that the earths continents are tectonic plates in very slow motion. Anybody think they know where the current continents are going to be in say 1-100 million years from now and what species will still exist. Your guess on that question maybe more accurate than current prognostications about what a few 100 parts per million increase in CO2 will do to all earths species.

Mike Bromley the Kurd says:

April 17, 2014 at 5:53 pm
“[it] will have a fundamental influence on how fast and high global sea levels rise from human-caused climate change.”

I beg your pardon? Talk about an agenda-powered presupposition, in bold face. That slithered by the reviewers like sub-glacial slime mold.

George Turner raises an interesting possibility and says:

April 17, 2014 at 5:53 pmThis raises the interesting possibility of finding fairly fresh remains of long extinct species, either in Greenland or Antarctica.

William McClenney says (excerpt):

April 17, 2014 at 5:58 pm
Two of the main problems with some of the central Greenland cores, in particular GISP and GISP2 are described in: http://epic.awi.de/10226/1/Nor2004a.pdf

“The two deep ice cores drilled at the beginning of the 1990s in central Greenland (GRIP1–3 and GISP24,5, respectively 3,027m and 3,053m long) have played a key role in documenting rapid climate changes during the last glacial period. However, it quickly became clear that the bottom 10% of at least one (and most probably both) of these ice cores4,6–9 was disturbed owing to ice folding close to the bedrock. The Central Greenland ice core records are fully reliable climate archives back to 105,000 years before present (105 kyr BP), but the disturbances mean that no reliableNorthern Hemisphere ice core record of the previous interglacial (the Eemian climatic period) was known to exist in the Northern Hemisphere.”

The first problem being that ~10% of the bottom core is folded.

The second problem is that no ice dated older than 105,000 years has been described in the literature to my knowledge, which is what makes this somewhat dubious.

It is exceptionally difficult to age date ice, particularly if it has been disturbed. It normally requires layer counting, registration with known tephras (volcanic ash layers) etc. etc. So I will be interested to see how they dated this ice to some 25 TIMES older than the oldest known ice (at least known to me). 

If William had read the paper or the press release or Anthony's article, he'd have seen that the scientists weren't dating ice, they were dating the soil and sediment at the bottom of the ice.


spangled drongo says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:05 pm
What’s our current trajectory? Warming or cooling?

Then there are the conspiracy theorists like DirkH, who says:

April 18, 2014 at 2:37 am
The money quote at the end. Scientists prostituting themselves for the globalist cause. Well, they always wanted to become the benevolent technocrat dictators of the entire world anyway.
They’re all giddy for dictatorship.

James Martin says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:26 pm
What bothers me in reading this is how any climate scientist – or any layperson with an IQ over 90 – not come to realize the true magnitude of global climate variability, and from this see that the amount of increase in the latter part of the last century was nothing new or out of the norm? The spin is so apparent as to be nauseating – and to suggest we are headed for being warmer than any previous interglacial? Really?? Why not post some numbers from prior interglacials and let’s compare, rather than make some comment that some would take as truth because some “expert” said it is so.

Rick K says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:30 pm
What is clear, however, from an abundance of worldwide indicators, is that global temperatures are on a path to be “far warmer than the warmest interglacials in millions of years,” said Bierman.

THAT… is a lie.

Mark 543 says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:33 pm
Even at high end warming estimates it would take hundreds of years to melt the Greenland ice sheet. The problem for future generations is that they will never have stable coastlines.

Eve says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:47 pm
They gave ti add the last bit to get their paper published. Even though they know that this planet has done nothing but cool through it’s life.

SIGINT EX says:

April 17, 2014 at 7:53 pm
For more than three decades, Science and the American Association of Science have been allied to fraud and malfeasance, unethical behavior and lack of morality.
Yet again, “Science” stands up to be beheaded yet again.
A sad epitaph.

Science is moving way too quickly and far beyond the comprehension of asybot who says (and I sympathise):

April 18, 2014 at 12:32 am
I am getting tired of the time frames used in some of these models papers and reports, 2 million years here, 4 million years there. I have lived and farmed on my property for a little over 25 years in some places the land has “settled” 6 to 10 feet (ok, 2-3 mtrs) without a 2 mile icecap. Add to that that in a news item today the “Keppler” scientists have found an earth like “Rockey” planet 500 light years away in a solar system where it is called “Kepler186-F” .

Sorry but can some one help me here ? How can we see a “rockey” planet the size of earth 500 light years away? (We can barely see ice movements in the arctic from a 100 miles up!) In a solar system that has a red dwarf star (less bright than our sun). Can some one put that in physical perspective .

This is a grain of sand and then compare it to what Keppler 186f would look like from our point of view. I know the answers are going to include ” the permutations of the orbits of the other planets etc etc I do not believe for one second the scientists coming to these conclusions are much different than Mann etc . The conclusions they give are almost, if not impossible, to contest they have all the funding to keep on keep on going on. The Keppler project is important but do they have any template to hold up, ( gee maybe I am getting way to skeptical.) to compare their findings of today with? 

---

Paul R. Bierman, Lee B. Corbett, Joseph A. Graly, Thomas A. Neumann, Andrea Lini, Benjamin T. Crosby, Dylan H. Rood. Preservation of a Preglacial Landscape Under the Center of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Science, 2014 DOI: 10.1126/science.1249047

Alley, R.B., et al., History of the Greenland Ice Sheet: Paleoclimatic insights, Quaternary Science Reviews (2010), doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.02.007

Threats and promises - computer models, conflict and cheap solar

Seems a bit of a waste for the content of HotWhopper to focus solely on what deniers want to highlight or scoff at.  Here are a few things that caught my attention in the past few days and weeks.

A Promise: Computer models

Scott K Johnson has written an article at ArsTechnica on computer models.  It's a behind-the-scenes look and I like the way it's written for a broader audience. A tiny taste with two excerpts (my bold italics):

Climate models are, at heart, giant bundles of equations—mathematical representations of everything we’ve learned about the climate system. Equations for the physics of absorbing energy from the Sun’s radiation. Equations for atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Equations for chemical cycles. Equations for the growth of vegetation. Some of these equations are simple physical laws, but some are empirical approximations of processes that occur at a scale too small to be simulated directly....

...Steve Easterbrook, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, has been studying climate models for several years. “I'd done a lot of research in the past studying the development of commercial and open source software systems, including four years with NASA studying the verification and validation processes used on their spacecraft flight control software,” he told Ars.

When Easterbrook started looking into the processes followed by climate modeling groups, he was surprised by what he found. “I expected to see a messy process, dominated by quick fixes and muddling through, as that's the typical practice in much small-scale scientific software. What I found instead was a community that takes very seriously the importance of rigorous testing, and which is already using most of the tools a modern software development company would use (version control, automated testing, bug tracking systems, a planned release cycle, etc.).”

Read the full article at ArsTechnica here.

If you get the taste for exploring computer models, go to Isaac Held's blog.  There was also an interesting technical discussion at William Connolley's place, Stoat, a few weeks ago.

A Threat: Climate change leads to conflict - a striking convergence of results

Seems logical, but is there any evidence?  There's a new paper in Science (paywalled) that explores the evidence through an analysis of 60 quantitative studies.  You can download the paper here. Here is the abstract:

A rapidly growing body of research examines whether human conflict can be affected by climatic changes. Drawing from archaeology, criminology, economics, geography, history, political science, and psychology, we assemble and analyze the 60 most rigorous quantitative studies and document, for the first time, a striking convergence of results. We find strong causal evidence linking climatic events to human conflict across a range of spatial and temporal scales and across all major regions of the world.

The magnitude of climate’s influence is substantial: for each one standard deviation (1σ) change in climate toward warmer temperatures or more extreme rainfall, median estimates indicate that the frequency of interpersonal violence rises 4% and the frequency of intergroup conflict rises 14%. Because locations throughout the inhabited world are expected to warm 2σ to 4σ by 2050, amplified rates of human conflict could represent a large and critical impact of anthropogenic climate change.

The last paragraph suggests that we learn more about the underlying causes so as to minimise conflict as global warming kicks in.  Will we?  In fifty years' time there will still be deniers expecting an ice age "any day now", arguing that "the world hasn't warmed since 2062".  At some stage the rest of us will decide to ignore them completely.

Numerous competing theories have been proposed to explain the linkages between the climate and human conflict, but none have been convincingly rejected, and all appear to be consistent with at least some existing results. It seems likely that climatic changes influence conflict through multiple pathways that may differ between contexts, and innovative research to identify these mechanisms is a top research priority. Achieving this research objective holds great promise, as the policies and institutions necessary for conflict resolution can be built only if we understand why conflicts arise. The success of such institutions will be increasingly important in the coming decades, as changes in climatic conditions amplify the risk of human conflicts.

Hsiang, Solomon M., Marshall Burke, and Edward Miguel. "Quantifying the influence of climate on human conflict." Science (2013): DOI: 10.1126/science.1235367.

A Promise: Advances in solar technology - making it cheaper and more efficient

And in Nature this week, there's a paper describing a new solar technology (paywalled).  According to Science News, this could lead to much cheaper solar cells "possibly for as little as $0.15 per watt, or one-quarter the price of thin-film silicon devices".

The work was described in Science News (excerpts):

A solar cell converts sunlight into electricity. A typical cell contains layers of materials known as semiconductors—most often silicon. When a particle of light, or photon, strikes an atom in one of these semiconductors, it knocks free a negative electron that can scoot through the material and leaves behind a positively charged "hole" that can also move about. The electrons and holes travel in opposite directions, through layers of semiconductors with different properties, to create a flow of current...

So far, improving the efficiency of solar technology has used very expensive semiconductors such as gallium arsenide.  Recently scientists have been experimenting with perovskites, which can be tuned to absorb sunlight.  Perovskites are "compounds such as calcium titanium oxide in which the atoms arrange themselves in a particular mix of cube and diamond shapes".  There have been some twists and turns - with promising results (my bold):

...Last year saw a breakthrough for perovskite cells, however, when physicist Henry Snaith at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and colleagues discovered that the devices actually worked better if they replaced the semiconducting bubbles with an insulating scaffold. The perovskite, as it turned out, was a pretty good semiconductor, and could shift electrons efficiently by itself.

Now, Snaith and colleagues have delivered another surprise: The bubblelike nanostructure is completely irrelevant. The Oxford team has demonstrated that perovskite cells are just as efficient if they are constructed in the same flat design, and using the same method—known as vapor deposition—as cheap thin-film silicon cells. “Having started with a complicated nanostructure, we’ve reduced it to a thin film,” Snaith says. “It’s amusing, I agree!”

What's more, the simple layered cell converts more than 15% of sunlight to electricity—equal to the record for perovskite cells, set just 2 months ago for a nanostructured device—as the researchers report today in Nature. Had physicists known perovskite was a good semiconductor, they probably would have started off with a regular, thin-film cell, Snaith says.

Perovskite cells now have a greater chance of hitting the mainstream market—possibly for as little as $0.15 per watt, or one-quarter the price of thin-film silicon devices, Snaith says.

Mingzhen Liu, Michael B. Johnston & Henry J. Snaith,  Efficient planar heterojunction perovskite solar cells by vapour deposition, Nature (2013) DOI: 10.1038/nature12509

Climate extremes, carbon cycle and more, while the illiterati at WUWT scream in protest at the onslaught of knowledge!

Climate extremes and the carbon cycle

Anthony Watts has copied and pasted a press release about a new paper in Nature, which discusses how extremes of weather can have an impact on the carbon cycle.  He called it "Vicious carbon cycles".  I saw this paper myself and thought it looked an interesting, if concerning, area of research.  It's by Reichstein et al and called: Climate extremes and the carbon cycle, Nature 500, 287–295 (15 August 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12350.

This diagram illustrates how extreme weather can affect the carbon cycle (from the Nature paper).  Click the image for a larger view:

Figure 2: Overview of how carbon flows may be triggered, or greatly altered, by extreme events.  Emphasis is on the potential contrast between the concurrent and delayed signal in the atmosphere. The arrows pointing upward represent additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The arrows pointing downward indicate that carbon dioxide is removed more slowly from the atmosphere. Orange arrows stand for short-term and purple arrows for long-term effects. 

What the paper is suggesting  is that there is more evidence that indicates that climate extremes, like droughts and storms can cause terrestrial carbon to decline, which offsets to some extent the expected increase through plants' response to the higher atmospheric CO2. (C3 plants grow faster with higher CO2, all else being equal).  The paper sets out a way to help improve the understanding of these interactions.  There are a number of news articles about it if you want to read more.

The carbon cycle and the biosphere - up north in the boreal forests

I intended to keep this short, but the above paper reminded me of another recent paper, this time in Science.  It's by Graven et al and is called Enhanced Seasonal Exchange of CO2 by Northern Ecosystems Since 1960, Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1239207.  So far it's just in ScienceExpress, but should show up in the main journal soon-ish.

What this one is exploring is the reason for the extra bounce in the seasonal CO2 levels as time goes by, in some parts of the northern hemisphere.  In particular, they found that looking at CO2 levels at three to six kilometres up in the air in the region north of 45 degrees latitude, the seasonal amplitude of CO2 levels has shot up by 50% since the 1950s.  This contrasts with the seasonal amplitude of CO2 at 10° to 45°N, which has expanded by less than 25%.  They figure that it's got to do with changes in the boreal forests up north and signals a major shift in the carbon cycle.

They discount the effect of wildfire, oceans and fossil fuels.  After discussing their reasons, the authors state:

We are led to conclude that ecological changes in boreal and temperate forests are driving additional increases in the summertime uptake of carbon. This inference from atmospheric data is qualitatively consistent with expanding evidence for significant changes occurring in these ecosystems. Forest inventories show increased stand area and biomass (27, 29). Other ground-based studies show that evergreen shrubs and trees are migrating northward in response to warming (43–45), and fire, logging and other disturbances (46, 47) are shifting the age composition toward younger, early successional forests that experience shorter, more intense periods of seasonal carbon uptake (25, 48). Satellite observations generally show trends toward increased greenness in northern ecosystems (4), although many areas of the boreal forest show browning trends in recent decades (49, 50). The atmospheric evidence helps to quantify the aggregate effect of these, and other, types of ecological changes over the past 50 years. 

While the animation below is more about CO2 closer to the ground, you can see the difference between the northern and southern hemispheres in regard to seasonal fluctuations of CO2 (as featured on the NOAA website).  Use the bar at the bottom to skip through if you don't have the full three and a half minutes to be mesmerised by the whole video.

The carbon cycle and the biosphere

What interests me in these two papers is the fact that they are getting more into the detail of changes that are happening to the world.  Looking more specifically at changes in the biosphere and changes to the carbon cycle, not just the atmosphere and oceans, and considering how they affect the entire system.  I think in the next few years there will be a lot studies like these ones being published.

The WUWT Illiterati Society

Anyway, here are some comments from WUWT in response to the top paper.  The commenters have nothing but disdain for anyone who adds to the world's knowledge.  You think this is an enlightened era?  Well, it wouldn't be if the WUWT crowd had their way.  I'm amazed they made the effort to learn how to read and write given they have so much contempt for learning.

Here's a sample - two out of only six comments so far.  That's one in three commenters have declared their allegiance to the Illiterati Society:



FrankK says:
August 15, 2013 at 10:17 pm  A further example of the ever-increasing number of passengers on the global climate gravy train sucking the growing teat of “further research required” requests.

SMCG says:
August 15, 2013 at 9:45 pm  One day someone will write a paper that doesn’t say wtte “the demand for further research remains very high”


Now I've finished this there are more comments pouring in on WUWT.  I haven't done a count to see if the one in three illiterati still holds true.  However, I'll leave you with a comment without which no WUWT article would be complete - an ice age cometh!


Richard111 says:
August 15, 2013 at 11:26 pm  Whatever. None of this will stop the coming ice age.

Policy postscript - where Judith Curry is wrong

I wrote my take on scientists and policy and so did a number of other people - such as William Connolley at Stoat, James Annan, Victor Venema, Wotts and Judith Curry. They all bring different perspectives.  I'm not going to labour the point but I will address something that Curry wrote.

Judith Curry quoted some paragraphs from my earlier piece, which is fine.  But then she misused or misunderstood my meaning and wrote this:

Finally, I would like to pick up on the issue raised by hotwhopper, about scientists being gradually drawn into the policy role, and taking time to fully form their ideas.  This introduces the ‘age’ issue into the science-policy process, something that was alluded to in the Tamsin’s twitosphere discussion.  Being effective at the science-policy interface requires experience and perspective that only comes with seniority.

In doing so, Judith turned what I was writing into the opposite.  My point wasn't about age, it was about experience.  It takes experience to develop the maturity to contribute effectively to policy.  I was certainly not arguing that only old people are good at policy.  There are lots of old people who are useless at policy and many young people who have a real talent for it.  I was making the point that experience is important, and wrote that scientists can get that experience along the way - quoting myself:

For example, they may be tapped on the shoulder to sit on a committee or two.  They may be invited to take a short term assignment in a research advisory role or a management role.

Judith Curry is arguing that people shouldn't be given that experience.  She took the opportunity to have another shot at Michael Mann and Ben Santer, writing:

Leadership roles in the IPCC (as lead or coordinating lead authors) requires experience and perspective at the science-policy interface.  Assigning lead authors before the ink is dry on their PhD thesis (e.g. Mann) or as a coordinating lead author within 5 years of a Ph.D. (e.g. Santer)  seems extremely ill-advised to me.  

That's in flat out contradiction of the point I was making.  But first, let's consider each of these scientists and their early contributions to the IPCC reports:

Dr Ben Santer was a contributing author to Section 8 of the 1990 IPCC report, one of 35 contributing authors plus there were two lead authors to that section.  He was one of 65 contributing authors to Chapter 5 in SAR (1995 WGI) and one of four lead authors of Chapter 8 in that same report.

Ben Santer would have been 32 when the IPCC was formed in 1988. He already had his PhD at that time, having been awarded it in 1987.  In the year SAR came out in 1995, he turned forty years of age.  Dr Santer has won numerous awards for his work and is not an example of someone who was "too young" to contribute to science (as if anyone is too young to contribute to science anyway).

Dr Michael Mann was one of eight lead authors to Chapter 2. Observed Climate Variability and Change in WGI of the third Assessment report released in 2001.  These eight worked under two coordinating lead authors for that chapter.  He was also one of 56 contributing authors to Chapter 7. Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks and one of 63 contributing authors to Chapter 8. Model Evaluation in TAR.  Both of these chapters also had a number of lead authors and coordinating lead authors.

Dr Mann was awarded two Masters degrees in 1991 and a third in 1993, and a PhD in 1998.  In the year of publication of TAR in 2001, he was already 36 years old.  Hardly a youngster.

Seems to me that Judith misfires three times there.  First she implies that Santer and Mann were too green, when both had published extensively in the subject areas in which they contributed to the IPCC reports.  Secondly that she regards the Working Group I reports as policy, when in fact they are scientific reports.  Thirdly, contrary to what Judith wrote, getting experience like that gained as an IPCC author can be a useful way to get some of the experience I was referring to in my earlier article.

I say that with some provisos.  While experience gained in helping to coordinate the input into IPCC reports may help scientists gain some experience in regard to science policy, unless they are involved directly in discussions with NGOs and governments on the final content of the reports, they may not have a chance to learn all that much.  (I am aware that Dr Santer got a heap of such experience from his involvement over the years!)

Creating opportunities for promising young scientists

Still, it's the sort of opportunity that can lead to more direct involvement in policy making and I'm all for giving promising young scientists such an opportunity.  That's precisely the sort of opportunity I was referring to when writing my earlier article and discussing the pathways available to scientists who are interested in learning about policy development.  Maybe not always directly, but it can expose them to more direct opportunities.

Okay, I'll bite...should scientists be "neutral"?

PS For a related follow up go here.


Young Tamsin Edwards has written an article that's apparently been generating a bit of discussion.  Tamsin is a climate scientist who works at the University of Bristol in the UK.  She lists her area of interest as being uncertainty in earth system models.  Her doctorate was in quite a different field - particle physics (bosons).  As far as I can make out she switched to earth systems modelling because of a personal interest in the broader environment.

I haven't ever paid her much attention.  I follow her on Twitter IIRC, but don't see too many of her tweets, partly because we are in different time zones but also because I follow many (too many?) people so her tweets probably pass me by.  I believe she comments on denier websites like Bishop Hill.  The main denier site that I keep an eye on is WUWT and, rarely, Judith Curry's blog and I almost never bother with other fringe anti-science or half-anti-science blogs (aka "lukewarmers").  This article of Tamsin's appeared on WUWT as well as on Judith Curry's blog, which is how I caught it.

Not knowing much about Tamsin's work won't stop me from voicing some comments on the article in question.  What she seems to be arguing is that climate scientists ought to stop short of suggestions that could be seen as policy responses to science.  After a bit of an intro about people suggesting to her that she speak publicly about her political beliefs (sic) and her disagreeing, she writes:

I believe advocacy by climate scientists has damaged trust in the science. We risk our credibility, our reputation for objectivity, if we are not absolutely neutral. At the very least, it leaves us open to criticism. I find much climate scepticism is driven by a belief that environmental activism has influenced how scientists gather and interpret evidence. So I’ve found my hardline approach successful in taking the politics and therefore – pun intended – the heat out of climate science discussions. They call me an “honest broker”, asking for “more Dr. Edwards and fewer zealous advocates”. Crucially, they say this even though my scientific views are absolutely mainstream.

But it’s not just about improving trust. In this highly politicised arena, climate scientists have a moral obligation to strive for impartiality. We have a platform we must not abuse. For a start, we rarely have the necessary expertise. I absolutely disagree with Gavin that we likely know far more about the issues involved in making policy choices than [our] audience.

Even scientists that are experts – such as those studying the interactions between climate, economy, and politics, with “integrated assessment models” – cannot speak for us because political decisions necessarily depend on values. There are many ways to try to minimise climate change (with mitigation or geoengineering) or its impacts (adaptation) and, given a pot of money, we must decide what we most want to protect. How do we weigh up economic growth against ecosystem change? Should we prioritise the lives and lifestyles of people today or in the future? Try to limit changes in temperature or rainfall? These questions cannot be answered with scientific evidence alone. To me, then, it is simple: scientists misuse their authority if they publicise their preferred policy options.

She's wrong of course.  Not that I'm suggesting she should speak out about her political "beliefs".  That's her own personal choice.  And she's pretty young and while it looks to me as if she'll probably travel that path eventually, it's not a bad idea for her to get a feel for the broader world beyond science before sticking her neck out too far.

Where she's wrong is in telling other scientists what they "should" do.  She's mentioning people who are recognised widely and way beyond the scientific world as having expertise in science, but also as leaders.  She mentioned Gavin Schmidt, for example.  He's in a totally different world to Tamsin, who is young and just starting out.  Her bio page lists her as a "research associate".  She's got quite a way to go before policy makers turn to her for advice.

Why is she wrong?

Although it may be true (or not) that she doesn't have the knowledge or experience, it doesn't follow that other scientists don't have it.

People who develop policy don't have answers, they have questions first and foremost.  They weave answers from others into solutions.  Their expertise is rarely at the technical level.  It's in policy formulation itself.  Policy developers and advisers turn to the technical experts for advice.  Those technical experts will work in science, economics, finance, human services and other arenas.  There are no sharp lines dividing technical experts from each other or dividing the technical experts from the policy developers and advisers.  Some scientists will end up in policy development roles.  They won't suddenly jump from working in a laboratory to working in the west wing or a Minister's office or on the executive floor.  They will be drawn into the role gradually.  For example, they may be tapped on the shoulder to sit on a committee or two.  They may be invited to take a short term assignment in a research advisory role or a management role.

In the same way, these people who will help shape the future will not suddenly find their ideas fully formed as they venture into these roles.  It doesn't happen like that - or if it does it's rare and I'd say it's not a good thing when it does, being more likely some ideological driver rather than new skills learnt or a gradual appreciation of the subtleties of policy development and the myriad implications of broad-ranging policy alternatives.

Tamsin's also wrong in her comment about values.  Values arguably influence everything we do.  One cannot balk at taking a position because one is scared of the impact on the lives of others.  Tamsin's choosing to write her blog would, I presume, be influenced by her value set.  And almost certainly her opinion that scientists should be passive and neutral is strongly driven by her values.  And if scientists decided to go along with it, would have huge ramifications for the lives of people.  (Doing nothing often has as big an impact as doing something.)

I see nothing essentially wrong with Tamsin sticking to science and avoiding any comment about her personal opinions on areas beyond what she regards as acceptable boundaries for her.  But she's wrong on another count.  She writes:

I believe advocacy by climate scientists has damaged trust in the science. We risk our credibility, our reputation for objectivity, if we are not absolutely neutral. At the very least, it leaves us open to criticism. 

It's not advocacy by climate scientists that has damaged trust in the science.  It's advocacy by the opponents of science that has done what damage has been done.  Too often I come across people willing to cop the blame for wrongs that are not of their making.  Not all people are fools and the people who count are rarely fools.  They can tell the difference between a scientific opinion and a personal opinion. A policy developer who can't tell the difference shouldn't be in the job.  Scientists are human beings.  Some will choose to be activists, some will choose to be communicators.  Some will choose to work quietly on their research and avoid the limelight altogether.  As for worrying about being "open to criticism" - if one lived their life by that tenet one would never get up in the morning.

Tamsin has arguably already chosen to go beyond the science by taking on the added role of science communicator.  She is probably quite good at it too.  It's not a great leap to move from the role of engagement with the public to the role of advising on scientific policy.  And then it's not a great leap to move to a broader role of policy development.  I'll be surprised if Tamsin doesn't develop her career in this way.  Where she stops will be up to her and to some extent limited by the opportunities that come her way and those she chooses to accept.  Even this blog article of hers has taken her into the policy arena, even though she might not recognise that it does.  She is touting a policy for scientists (ie to stay out of policy) and promoting her policy widely in the public arena.  I believe her article was published in The Guardian, which takes her influence way beyond the laboratory and the computer room.

As an aside, Judith Curry is lauding Tamsin's approach and pretending that she herself isn't a policy advocate.  Laughable. Need I say more?  I think my readers are sadly all too familiar with Curry and her policy positions.  Many of us don't agree with her but it's wrong to argue she shouldn't contribute to policy.

Tamsin quotes Roger Pielke Jr - an economist.  He does not hesitate to make his opinion on certain policy actions very clear from time to time.  Again, we might or might not agree with Roger but in fact we need these differing views.  The best policies emerge after a wide spectrum of options have been considered, pulled apart, put back together and the process repeated till the main options and implications are worked through and the wrinkles are ironed out of the final product.

You'll excuse my jumping around I hope.  This isn't the best, most well presented essay.  It's a bit of a ramble.  It's just a blog remember.  And I rarely deviate from it being a snark blog.  But policy development is an area I have experience in.  Not only that, but this experience includes the interface between science and policy, so I'm not just spouting ideas off the top of my head.

What I would like to emphasise is that the best policy development people I've worked with have a knack for it - they can deal with ambiguity, they are mentally strong and mature, and they are prepared to have to make Sophie's choices on occasion.  Most have had at least one mentor along the way.  All have been thrust into unfamiliar territory more than once and have shown they can rise to the occasion.

By now you'll probably be saying that I'm talking about something different to what Tamsin was referring to.  You may be thinking that Tamsin was talking about political activism.  I don't read it that way.  Nor do I think you can distinguish easily between types of influence - whether that influence is in a board room or on the street or in a television studio or at a senate committee hearing or chained to a tree in a forest at risk of logging.  People who have a talent or impetus to help shape the future may find themselves in any or all of those environments.

The point I'm getting to is that sound policy is an art and a science.  It takes maturity and most of all experience.  If one doesn't allow oneself to get that experience one will never gain the maturity required to have a positive influence on the world.

I'll reiterate - some people will find themselves in a role where they influence policy.  Some won't or will choose to avoid it.  Just as not every scientist has the skills or desire to communicate directly with the public, not every scientist will have the attributes or motivation required to influence or develop policy.  However to insist that scientists avoid policy because they are scientists is wrong-headed.  That's not the way the world works and neither should it be.  The world needs brilliant minds in policy just as it needs brilliant minds in science.  And some people can and should do both very well.

One more thought.  If anyone knows about climate and the impact of climate change it's climate scientists.  If climate scientists don't think climate change warrants getting out of their lab coats and telling the world what it means and suggesting ways to deal with it, then why would anyone else be concerned?

Finally - I'm not advocating that any or all scientists should become activists or move into policy roles.  All I'm saying is that it's wrong-headed to suggest that scientists should not do that.  The world would be a much poorer place without the influence of scientists.

Sermon is over, may peace be with you and all that :)


PS For a related follow up go here.