One more reason to leave the age of fossil fools behind.
Month: November 2015
Lamar Smith: The Last Witch Hunt
Apparently eager to ride the coattails of Vin Diesel’s new movie, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) seems intent on taking up the mantle of Witch Hunter by harassing the scientists at NOAA. These scientists published a study that joined a growing body of research debunking the supposed “pause” in warming, a trope regularly trotted out by deniers looking to argue against climate action.
In his capacity as Chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Smith has demanded a number of documents from NOAA and threatened them with prosecution if they don’t comply. He’s asking for the data and methods related to the study itself, which doesn’t sound too unreasonable at first. But when you learn that this information is already public, it seems odd that he would want to waste his and the scientists’ time demanding information that anyone with an internet connection can freely access.
Another odd factor is that NOAA scientists already took time out of their busy schedules of doing actual science to personally explain the study to Smith. But all this wasn’t enough for him, so he is also demanding all the scientists’ study-related email correspondence. Smith is spending all this time, energy, and taxpayer money to chase these scientists around because he is a conspiracy theorist, and has publicly espoused the belief that scientists are deliberately manipulating the temperature record to manufacture the climate crisis. This unusual position might be related to the massive quantities of oil and gas industry funding that he receives—in 2014; Smith got more money from fossil fuels than he did from any other industry.
For those that have been entrenched in the climate issue for some years, this will sound familiar. In fact, it’s almost identical to a situation faced by Dr. Michael Mann, in which a politician in a position of power took issue with science that disproved a pet climate denial myth. As a result, this politician, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, retaliated by going on what the Washington Post editorial board described as a “Climate Change Witch Hunt.”
So let’s hope that, like in Dr. Mann’s case, the politician abusing his power isn’t humored with compliance. Because if the emails are released, we might have to live through another fake scandal. In fact, in a column in the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins Jr. more or less admits that this is the denial industry’s strategy in his latest piece, in which he “just asks the question” if this is “The Next Climate Scandal?”
Remembering ClimateGate
This month marks the 6th anniversary of the tragically overblown nothing-burger known as “climategate”, still a thing on the minds of climate deniers, pretty much dead to everyone else. I’m reminded of the whole affair by Exxon’s current position that their 40 year record of accurate climate research has been quoted “out of context” by journalists, who have compared the company’s internal science to its public statements, and its funding of openly climate denying organizations – the very definition of irony.
Now, on the verge of yet another international attempt to rein in the rise in greenhouse emissions, the most high profile current science denial initiative is another attempt to replicate the climategate model, with the US House Science Committee’s move to access personal email communications from government scientists.
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy (also known as “Climategate”)[2][3] began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker,[4][5] copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.
The story was first broken by climate change critics[6] with columnist James Delingpole popularising the term “Climategate” to describe the controversy.[7] Those denying the significance of human caused climate change argued that the emails showed global warming was a scientific conspiracy, that scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics.[8][9] The CRU rejected this, saying the emails had been taken out of context and merely reflected an honest exchange of ideas.[10][11]
PBS on #ExxonKnew
Description:
Oil giant Exxon Mobil was recently subpoenaed by New York’s attorney general in an investigation of whether the company has intentionally downplayed the risks of climate change. Judy Woodruff hears from Eric Schneiderman, attorney general of New York, and Kenneth Cohen, vice president of Public & Government Affairs for the Exxon Mobil Corporation.
Cohen’s play is to pretend that Exxon, in it’s wisdom, has always taken climate change seriously, and is only interested in trying to head off ineffective policy responses to this very real problem.
Cohen’s statement that investigators have taken Exxon scientists statements “out of context” suggests he suffers from an irony deficiency.
So how will they separate themselves from the climate denying individuals and organizations they have funded? Cohen says outfits like the American Enterprise Institute, and ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) will have to speak for themselves, – as if they were out there free-forming and making things up with Exxon’s money for 30 years.
Ken Cohen in Exxon Mobil Perspectives:
here’s just one problem with that statement: Claiming we stopped our research and suppressed the results is the central point to ICN’s exhausting series about ExxonMobil’s supposed perfidy. It’s the central point that has been repeated in other stories and op-eds, notably from high-profile activists Bill McKibben and Naomi Oreskes.
Ms. Banjeera and her colleagues first claimed that Exxon stopped its research in its very first report on September 16, when they wrote (emphasis mine):
Toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide research. In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial.
So What’s Up With Antarctica, Anyhow?
Jonathan Bamber is a Professor of Physical Geography at University of Bristol. Here he explains the recent confusing accounts of new research on Antarctic Melting.
Jonathan Bamber in Real Climate:
There have been quite few big media stories related to Antarctica recently, including a paper on the irreversible collapse of the marine portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and a NASA-funded study that finds, contrary to numerous previous results, that the Antarctic ice sheet as a whole has been gaining mass between 1992 and 2008. This most recent study received a lot of media attention because it runs counter to what was said in the last IPCC Report. Certain parts of the media hailed this as another sign that the impacts of climate change had somehow been exaggerated a risk that the lead author Jay Zwally was concerned about before the research was published.
So what did Zwally and his colleagues do, what did they find, and why does it contradict a plethora of previous studies that suggest Antarctica has been losing mass over the same time period?
Zwally and his team measured the changing height of the ice covering Antarctica using two types of instruments — a radar altimeter and a laser altimeter — on two different satellites. The radar provided elevation changes for 1992-2003 and the laser from 2003-2008. They compared the trends in height from the two instruments over a flat part of East Antarctica that covers subglacial Lake Vostok, finding a very good match between the trend for ‘92-’03 and the one for ’03-‘08. So far, so good (though note that they couldn’t compare the two instruments directly because they do not overlap in time.)
Using measurements of elevation change to estimate changes in mass requires knowing the density of the snow. This is the difficult part and one of the key reasons that Zwally’s numbers are so different from previous estimates. The density of snow at the surface of Antarctica is about 1/3 lower than that of solid ice. Most scientists working with similar data sets agree that over the last ~25 years the surface of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) has been going up very slightly (at about 1-3 cm a year). Previous studies employing altimetry over the EAIS have assumed that the change in elevation is due to a recent increase in snowfall and used a density of snow. They have done this primarily because the interior of the EAIS is moving very slowly and will react very slowly to changes in climate. But there is no evidence for an increase in snowfall from ice cores in East Antarctica and if anything, regional climate models suggest the opposite has been happening over at least the last decade. Zwally and his team argue that instead, mass is actually accumulating in spite of no increase in snowfall. How can this be? The answer is that the ice sheet is still adjusting to the ~doubling snowfall that took place at the end of the last glacial period, between about 18,000 and 12,000 years ago. Because the accumulation rates and temperature in East Antarctica are so low, the ice sheet has a response time to changes in climate of many millennia. So the ice sheet may still be growing even though there has been no increase in accumulation for more than 10 millennia. The difference here is crucial: if the increasing height of 1-3 cm a year is owing to recent increases in snowfall, then we should use the density of snow in the calculation. One cm of snow over the entire East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) would increase its mass by around 35 Gt (35 billion metric tons). But if the increase in height simply reflects continuing adjustment since the last glacial period, then — Zwally et al. argue — we should be using the density of ice. That would mean an 1 cm increase in height would reflect an increase in mass of ~92 Gt.
Richard Alley: Why Climate Scientists Aren’t Conspiring to Fool you
Climate denial is at root, a conspiracy theory, one that presumes that every major scientific group on the planet is part of a giant over-arching scheme to bring on the AntiChrist. Or something.
Penn State’s Richard Alley reminds us why that’s utter nonsense, and why the scientific method tends to root out error, much as a well tuned market will root out inefficiency.
New Video: Drought, Climate, Security, and Syria
Last month I touched on the impacts of climate extremes on vulnerable populations. This new video expands on that. Not many of the commenters you hear talking about climate impacts on the Middle East, and the current refugee crisis, trace climate pressures much past the past decade’s drought in Syria.
Here, Kerry Emanuel of MIT pulls at more threads, the Russian heat wave of 2010, and the subsequent food pressure that flared in riots just before the “Arab Spring” revolts broke out across North Africa. History teaches us that circumstances outside politics, religion, and oil, can also have an impact on events.
Pakistan could in a decade become the world’s third-ranked nuclear power, behind the United States and Russia, but ahead of China, France and Britain. Its arsenal is growing faster than any other country’s, and it has become even more lethal in recent years with the addition of small tactical nuclear weapons that can hit India and longer-range nuclear missiles that can reach farther.
These are unsettling truths. The fact that Pakistan is also home to a slew of extremist groups, some of which are backed by a paranoid security establishment obsessed with India, only adds to the dangers it presents for South Asia and, indeed, the entire world.
Persuading Pakistan to rein in its nuclear weapons program should be an international priority. The major world powers spent two years negotiating an agreement to restrain the nuclear ambitions of Iran, which doesn’t have a single nuclear weapon. Yet there has been no comparable investment of effort in Pakistan, which, along with India, has so far refused to consider any limits at all.
The Obama administration has begun to address this complicated issue with greater urgency and imagination, even though the odds of success seem small. The recent meeting at the White House on Oct. 22 between President Obama and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan appears to have gone nowhere. Yet it would be wrong not to keep trying, especially at a time of heightened tensions between Pakistan and India over Kashmir and terrorism.
What’s new about the administration’s approach is that instead of treating the situation as essentially hopeless, it is now casting about for the elements of a possible deal in which each side would get something it wants. For the West, that means restraint by Pakistan and greater compliance with international rules for halting the spread of nuclear technology. For Pakistan, that means some acceptance in the family of nuclear powers and access to technology.
Continue reading “New Video: Drought, Climate, Security, and Syria”
Mississippi Parking Lot Collapse a Climate Indicator?
Inadequate infrastructure plus climate enhanced rains = massive failure.
Buck Roberts, Meridian’s public safety director, told the newspaper that the collapse isn’t technically a sinkhole because it didn’t result from an underground aquifer drying up. He’s calling it an accident.
WTOK said the city on the state border with Alabama, which has a population of about 40,000, has received 3 inches of rain this weekend and nearly 10 in the last two weeks. The restaurant opened earlier this week.
Colbert on Climate, Keystone, and Coital Frequency
Here There be Dragons: The One Degree Threshold
Big milestone about to be crossed. Uncharted territory.
Global temperatures are set to rise more than one degree above pre-industrial levels according to the UK’s Met Office.
Figures from January to September this year are already 1.02C above the average between 1850 and 1900.
If temperatures remain as predicted, 2015 will be the first year to breach this key threshold.
The world would then be half way towards 2C, the gateway to dangerous warming.
The new data is certain to add urgency to political negotiations in Paris later this month aimed at securing a new global climate treaty.
For researchers, confusion about the true level of temperatures in the 1750s, when the industrial revolution began and fossil fuels became widely used, means that an accurate assessment of the amount the world has warmed since then is very difficult.
Here James Hansen discusses the mythical 2 degree threshold. In reality, with just a one degree warming, civillization is already headed for very expensive and challenging upheavals.
Scientists say that the one degree mark will be broken in 2015 because of a combination of carbon emissions and the impact of the El Nino weather phenomenon. Continue reading “Here There be Dragons: The One Degree Threshold”