Climate & Climate Change

The US Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works continues to hear testimonials on climate change and related issues.

Earlier this week Lord Nigel Lawson from Britian’s House of Lords told the Americans what he thought:

“I am grateful for your invitation to testify before you today. I am aware that you have been provided with the Report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs on The Economics of Climate Change in advance of these proceedings, so I intend simply to summarise our key findings and to provide some commentary of my own.

By way of background, the Economic Affairs Committee is one of the four permanent investigative committees of the House of Lords, and fulfils one of the major roles of our second chamber as a forum of independent expertise and review of all UK government activity. It is composed of members of all three main political parties. Its climate change report, which was agreed unanimously, was published on 6 July 2005, just ahead of the G8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland.

In summary, the Committee concluded that:

1. The Government should give the UK Treasury a more extensive role, both in examining the costs and benefits of climate change policy and presenting them to the public, and also in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC);

2. There are concerns about the objectivity of the IPCC process, and the influence of political considerations in its findings;

3. There are significant doubts about the IPCC’s scenarios, in particular the high emissions scenarios, and the Government should press it to change its approach;

4. Positive aspects of global warming have been played down in the IPCC reports: the IPCC needs to reflect in a more balanced way the costs and benefits of climate change;

5. The Government should press the IPCC for better estimates of the monetary costs of global warming damage and for explicit monetary comparisons between the costs of measures to control warming and their benefits;

6. A more balanced approach to the relative merits of adaptation and mitigation is needed, with far more attention paid to adaptation measures;

7. UK energy and climate change policy appears to be based on dubious assumptions about the roles of renewable energy and energy efficiency, and the costs to the UK of achieving its objectives have been poorly documented, and the Government, with much stronger Treasury involvement, should review and substantiate the cost estimates involved and convey them in transparent form to the public;

8. Current UK nuclear power capacity should be retained;

9. International negotiations on climate change reduction will prove ineffective because of the preoccupation with setting emissions targets. The Kyoto Protocol makes little difference to rates of warming, and has a na

While planet earth has warmed only 0.6C on average over the last 150 or so years, warming in the artic has been more significant.

Clifford Kauss et al have written in the New York Times about new opportunities in the Artic as the ice melts:

It seems harsh to say that bad news for polar bears is good for Pat Broe. Mr. Broe, a Denver entrepreneur, is no more to blame than anyone else for a meltdown at the top of the world that threatens Arctic mammals and ancient traditions and lends credibility to dark-visions of global warming.

Still, the newest study of the Arctic ice cap – finding that it faded this summer to its smallest size ever recorded – is beginning to make Mr. Broe look like a visionary for buying this derelict Hudson Bay port from the Canadian government in 1997. Especially at the price he paid: about $7.

By Mr. Broe’s calculations, Churchill could bring in as much as $100 million a year as a port on Arctic shipping lanes shorter by thousands of miles than routes to the south, and traffic would only increase as the retreat of ice in the region clears the way for a longer shipping season.

Keep reading here …

There is a new long article at BBC Online about variations in warming, melting, and thickening across Antartica and Arctica.

There is also info on glaciers, I was impressed by this graph:

The graph was accompanied by the following text:

“The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), supported by the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), collates records from across the globe and issues regular bulletins of area and volume changes.

Two years ago, they concluded that 30 major glaciers – assessed as being a representative global sample – had thinned by an average 6m between 1980 and 2001.

“It will have a major impact,” says Professor Hambrey, “mainly through reductions in the fresh water supply.

Will iconic mountains like the Matterhorn become ice-free?
“Cities like La Paz in Bolivia and Lima in Peru rely heavily on glacial meltwater from the high Andes brought down into dry arid areas.

“Switzerland, by contrast, uses meltwater for hydroelectric power generation. If the glaciers disappear, their generating capacity will be very much reduced.”

I received a note from a reader of this web-log who was a bit cranky with my post advertising the current review by Warwick Hughes, see post and thread here.

The really relevant piece of information from the long email was perhaps this graph:

View image (about 80 kbs).

Comment included:

The temperature trend maps on the BoM’s website alone attest to the fact that UHI [Urban Heat Islands] have nothing to do with the warming as greatest warming has occurred in areas with the lowest population densities (the subtropical arid zones – which just so happen to be those which are predicted to warm most rapidly under global warming).

Anyway, if the above isn’t enough, Sea Surface Temperature information has been added to the BoM’s website at http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/cli_chg/trendmaps.cgi . You will see that there is little to no difference to the rate of warming of land and over the oceans.

Michael Crichton’s recent address to the US Senate on the integrity of science and problems with global warming research in particular the IPCC process is worth a read.

It is interesting to ponder how Crichton became so concerned about the integrity of science and bothered to write a novel that is so damning of current climate research.

The usual accusations leveled against skeptics including that you are just saying that because you are paid by Exxon Mobil don’t quite stack up.

It is also interesting to note that Crichton started out in medical research and went on to be such a prolific and successful novelist and film maker. His novels include The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Timeline and Prey. He is also the creator of the television series ER.

I started reading his take on environmentalism some years ago and always remember his observation that “environmentalism has become the religon of choice for urban atheists” – quote from memory and may not be exact.

My first post on Crichton and his new book State of Fear is here.

Following is his testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on September 28, 2005:

Thank you Mr. Chairman, and members of the Committee. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss the important subject of politicization of research. In that regard, what I would like to emphasize to the committee today is the importance of independent verification to science.

In essence, science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid-and merits universal acceptance-only if it can be independently verified. The impersonal rigor of the method means it is utterly apolitical. A truth in science is verifiable whether you are black or white, male or female, old or young. It’s verifiable whether you like the results of a study, or you don’t.

Thus, when adhered to, the scientific method can transcend politics. And the converse may also be true: when politics takes precedent over content, it is often because the primacy of independent verification has been overwhelmed by competing interests.

Verification may take several forms. I come from medicine, where the gold standard is the randomized double-blind study, which has been the paradigm of medical research since the 1940s.

In that vein, let me tell you a story. It’s 1991, I am flying home from Germany, sitting next to a man who is almost in tears, he is so upset. He’s a physician involved in an FDA study of a new drug. It’s a double-blind study involving four separate teams—one plans the study, another administers the drug to patients, a third assess the effect on patients, and a fourth analyzes results. The teams do not know each other, and are prohibited from personal contact of any sort, on peril of contaminating the results. This man had been sitting in the Frankfurt airport, innocently chatting with another man, when they discovered to their mutual horror they are on two different teams studying the same drug. They were required to report their encounter to the FDA. And my companion was now waiting to see if the FDA would declare their multi-year, multi-million-dollar study invalid because of this contact.

For a person with a medical background, accustomed to this degree of rigor in research, the protocols of climate science appear considerably more relaxed. A striking feature of climate science is that it’s permissible for raw data to be “touched,” or modified, by many hands. Gaps in temperature and proxy records are filled in. Suspect values are deleted because a scientist deems them erroneous. A researcher may elect to use parts of existing records, ignoring other parts. But the fact that the data has been modified in so many ways inevitably raises the question of whether the results of a given study are wholly or partially caused by the modifications themselves.

In saying this, I am not casting aspersions on the motives or fair-mindedness of climate scientists. Rather, what is at issue is whether the methodology of climate science is sufficiently rigorous to yield a reliable result. At the very least we should want the reassurance of independent verification by another lab, in which they make their own decisions about how to handle the data, and yet arrive at a similar result.

Because any study where a single team plans the research, carries it out, supervises the analysis, and writes their own final report, carries a very high risk of undetected bias. That risk, for example, would automatically preclude the validity of the results of a similarly structured study that tested the efficacy of a drug.

By the same token, any verification of the study by investigators with whom the researcher had a professional relationship-people with whom, for example, he had published papers in the past, would not be accepted. That’s peer review by pals, and it’s unavoidably biased. Yet these issues are central to the now-familiar story of the “Hockeystick graph” and the debate surrounding it.

To summarize it briefly: in 1998-99 the American climate researcher Michael Mann and his co-workers published an estimate of global temperatures from the year 1000 to 1980. Mann’s results appeared to show a spike in recent temperatures that was unprecedented in the last thousand years. His alarming report formed the centerpiece of the U.N.’s Third Assessment Report, in 2001.

Mann’s work was immediately criticized because it didn’t show the well-known Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures were warmer than they are today, or the Little Ice Age that began around 1500, when the climate was colder than today. But real fireworks began when two Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, attempted to replicate Mann’s study. They found grave errors in the work, which they detailed in 2003: calculation errors, data used twice, data filled in, and a computer program that generated a hockeystick out of any data fed to it-even random data. Mann’s work has since been dismissed by scientists around the world who subscribe to global warning.

Why did the UN accept Mann’s report so uncritically? Why didn’t they catch the errors? Because the IPCC doesn’t do independent verification. And perhaps because Mann himself was in charge of the section of the report that included his work.

The hockeystick controversy drags on. But I would direct the Committee’s attention to three aspects of this story. First, six years passed between Mann’s publication and the first detailed accounts of errors in his work. This is simply too long for policymakers to wait for validated results.

Second, the flaws in Mann’s work were not caught by climate scientists, but rather by outsiders-in this case, an economist and a mathematician. They had to go to great lengths to obtain data from Mann’s team, which obstructed them at every turn. When the Canadians sought help from the NSF, they were told that Mann was under no obligation to provide his data to other researchers for independent verification.

Third, this kind of stonewalling is not unique. The Canadians are now attempting to replicate other climate studies and are getting the same runaround from other researchers. One prominent scientist told them: “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”

Even further, some scientists complain the task of archiving is so time-consuming as to prevent them from getting any work done. But this is nonsense.

The first research paper I worked on was back in the 1960s, when all data were on stacks of paper. When we received a request for data from another lab, I had to stand at a Xerox machine, copying one page a minute, for several hours. Back then, it was appropriate to ask another lab who they were and why they wanted the data. Because their request meant a lot of work.

But today we can burn data to a CD, or post it at an ftp site for downloading. Archiving data is so easy it should have become standard practice a decade ago. Government grants should require a “replication package” as part of funding. Posting the package online should be a prerequisite to journal publication. And there’s really no reason to exclude anyone from reviewing the data.

Of course, replication takes time. Policymakers need sound answers to the questions they ask. A faster way to get them might be to give research grants for important projects to three independent teams simultaneously. A provision of the grant would be that at the end of the study period, all three papers would be published together, with each group commenting on the findings of the other. I believe this would be the fastest way to get verified answers to important questions.

But if independent verification is the heart of science, what should policymakers do with research that is unverifiable? For example, the UN Third Assessment Report defines general circulation climate models as unverifiable. If that’s true, are their predictions of any use to policymakers?

I would argue they are not. Senator Boxer has said we need more science fact. I agree-but a prediction is never a fact. In any case, if policymakers decide to weight their decisions in favor of verified research, that will provoke an effort by climate scientists to demonstrate their concerns using objectively verifiable research. I think we will all be better for it.

In closing, I want to state emphatically that nothing in my remarks should be taken to imply that we can ignore our environment, or that we should not take climate change seriously. On the contrary, we must dramatically improve our record on environmental management. That’s why a focused effort on climate science, aimed at securing sound, independently verified answers to policy questions, is so important now.

I would remind the committee that in the end, it is the proper function of government to set standards for the integrity of information it uses to make policy. Those who argue government should refrain from mandating quality standards for scientific research-including some professional organizations-are merely self-serving. In an information society, public safety depends on the integrity of public information. And only government can perform that task.

Thank you very much.

I saw the Michael Moore movie Fahrenheit 9/11 when it first came out in Australia as part of an ‘invited audience’ with some other local ABC listeners and a few celebrities.

I found the movie entertaining and amusing but assumed it to be about as historically reliable as that TV series I used to enjoy watching when I was a kid called F-Troop.

It was clear, however, from the discussion that followed the showing, as well as from the ‘ooing and ahhing’ during the movie, that most of the audience was enthralled, enraged and believed what they had just seen to be an historically correct insight into the US led invasion of Iraq… and they loved it.

Others were outraged by Moore’s film with this commentator describing it as: To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.

I thought of Michael Moore’s film as I started reading Michael Crichton’s book A State of Fear some months later.

Both men, Moore evidently from the left of politics and Crichton from the right, are clearly troubled by the issues of the invasion of Iraq and global warming propaganda, respectively. Both want to communicate their interpretation of events and politics to the general public.

Moore wrote and filmed a polemic which I understand was a huge success at the box office. It was thought the film would influence US politics to the extent that it would result in Bush’s defeat at the last election. It failed on at least this score.

Crichton wrote, and I imagine may one day film, State of Fear as a techno-thriller and criticism of the ‘global warming industry’ including environmental groups and rich philanthropists. Crichton portraits the skeptics as earnest, brave and knowledgeable. I thought the book was a great read. It was entertaining but I never doubted that the hero and skeptic Kenner would triumph so it was not as ‘gripping’ and ‘suspense filled’ a read for me as advertised on the backcover.

I was intrigued by Crichton’s reference to published scientific papers as footnotes to support discussion between his ‘oh so brave’ imaginary character Kenner and the various ‘believers’ that Kenner attempts to convert along the way.

I started checking some of the footnotes, particularly when there was a web address, and was fascinated to see information on NOAA and other sites come up. I thought the technique novel and perhaps the sign of a potential whole new style of writing.

A couple of days ago, a reader of this web-log who sometimes goes by the name of ‘Fletcher Christian’, alerted me to the invitation from the US Senate to Michael Crichton to brief Senators on global warming/climate change issues.

Fletcher and others are apparently outraged that a science fiction writer is being taken seriously by politicians.

Fletcher also emailed me a link to piece by James Hansen (from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies) in which Hansen makes various claims against State of Fear ending with the comment that he can’t understand how Crichton concluded that his prediction in 1988 was in error by 300%.

I reckon what Crichton did is fairly obvious –

On page 245, Crichton’s hero Kenner – who is enroute to LA from the Antarctica where he had, if I remember correctly just foiled the plans of eco-terrorist to blow-up a glacier – explains to the ill-informed Evans how:

“The arrival of global warming was announced dramatically by a prominent climatologist, James Hansen, in 1988. He gave testimony before a joint House and Senate Committee … during a blistering heat wave. It was a setup from the beginning. …”

Kenner goes on to state that Hansen predicted temperatures would increase 0.35 degrees Celsius over the next 10 years but that he got it wrong because the increase was only 0.11 degrees.

I understand from Hansen’s explanation here that Crichton relied on a second hand interpretation of his 1988 testimony that focused on only one of his three predictions – scenario A.

So Crichton took the worst case scenario and wrote it into his ‘techno-thriller’. In the novel, Kenner does not explain in his discussion with Evans that there was a scenario B and scenario C – with the scenario B prediction turning out to be pretty close to the observed.

Crichton was selective. In ignoring scenarios B and C he misrepresented Hansen’s work.

But it beats me why Hanson titled his article ‘Michael Cricthon’s “Scientific Method”‘. Crichton prefaces his book “This is a work of fiction. … However, references to real people, institutions, and organisations that are documented in footnotes are accurate. Footnotes are real.”

Spin, and more spin from the best scientists and best science fiction writers. Who said that the issue was settled?