Check out this oped in the Tennessean by a petroleum geologist and energy consultant named Gerry Calhoun:
Are we worrying about the wrong type of climate change? Perhaps impending cold, rather than global warming, represents the real danger.
Yup–it’s that bad. Reading the oped, you’d think we hadn’t learned anything about the various causes of climate change–natural, anthropogenic, and how much each is contributing–during the last several decades.
Calhoun doesn’t even mention the conclusions of the IPCC on this score. But he says things like this:
So what can we expect — 1 degree hotter or 3 degrees colder? Climate models can be constructed to prove either outcome, a situation that should warn us about the predictive accuracy of models.
Rather than there identifying better or worse models–or wiser still, finding a consensus range for the best models–all models are to be tossed out, apparently.
It’s probably a fool’s errand to track and refute these sorts of things in local papers. But still, it’s a staggering reminder just how far we haven’t come in winning broader acceptance of modern climate science.
January 20th, 2011 at 11:44 am
Chris, I am of the opinion that this type of bs absolutely needs to have a response. However, the best responses are local. While there is a lot of good that will come from having the climate scientists operating as a rapid response team, we also need to have wide spread local responses. Locally, we can be making the case that “you can’t keep fooling us” or that “just because we are from Tennessee doesn’t mean we are dumb hicks. We all have a bs meter and that OpEd was BS.”
January 20th, 2011 at 11:45 am
I just want to say: I’m from Tennessee, and we aren’t all nitwits. Unfortunately, if you wanted to wage a full-scale battle on this kind of commentary, you would need an army of well-educated, well-written people dedicating their lives to it.
January 20th, 2011 at 11:50 am
I’m not aware of any climate models that fail to show warming. I think Mr. Calhoun is talking out of his hat. And it’s not like the coal and oil industry is too poor to create a model. My guess is that they’ve fooled around with it privately, but the mangling they have to do to get the outcome they want is so bad that they’ve never trotted it out. Yet more evidence against the denialists, as if more was needed.
January 20th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
“I’m not aware of any climate models that fail to show warming.”
Well, yes. They don’t talk about those. And I think the fact that you’re not aware of them could be significant, don’t you?
Actually, it’s pretty easy. All you have to do is use an ordinary climate model, set aerosol forcing to a small number (which is within the error bands), set cloud feedback strongly negative (which there is some empirical evidence to support, although it’s still controversial and far from proven) and use an existing model with a high and strongly autocorrelated variance (an areas that most models fall far short of reality in – the way I would suggest is to link in stronger internal forcing from clouds as hypothesised by Spencer and Braswell 2010) and Bob’s your uncle! You get red noise with long-term persistence and the trends are all stochastic.
But there’s no point, because the modellers would just say they already knew that, and you was just cherry picking settings within the range of uncertainty to get the output you wanted. Which would be true – because that’s exactly what the sceptics say about the modellers’ choices of settings. We don’t know what the feedback settings should be. That’s why the IPCC classifies its “Level of Scientific Understanding” of feedbacks as “Low”.
Actually, in some ways it’s easier to get a model that doesn’t show much warming than otherwise, when you have to fit the output to 20th century observations.
Allow me to explain. If you consider the raw greenhouse effect due to CO2, it’s a standard calculation to show that the surface warming is related logarithmically to the CO2 increase (at least for CO2 levels above about 20 ppm), and that each doubling of CO2 concentration results in 1.1C of surface warming. Other external drivers add or subtract to this CO2-only effect. The sum of all these drivers is then modified by feedbacks – where the temperature change drives weather changes that cause further temperature change – that can either magnify or attenuate the effect. It is these additional factors that are controversial – the better educated sceptics don’t dispute the pure CO2 greenhouse effect.
So let’s consider the observations we’re trying to explain. Over the 20th century, CO2 rose by about 40% (280ppm to 380ppm) which is about half a doubling. So we expect the pure CO2 greenhouse to contribute 0.55C to this, and in fact, this is about what we observe: something like 0.65 C, plus or minus quite a lot because the data is badly corrupted with huge gaps, errors, station moves, instrumentation changes, the urban heat island effect, and ‘adjustments’ applied by climate scientists. It would appear the other factors and feedbacks more or less cancel everything out.
But as I’m sure you’re aware, the IPCC is claiming a figure something like 3.5C for CO2 doubling – so how do they get there from 1.1 C? The answer is that they assume strong positive feedbacks, which more than triple the warming of CO2 alone. (i.e. more than half of the predicted warming is not due to the CO2 greenhouse effect at all, but to the feedbacks.) But this poses a major problem, because it would mean that we ought to have seen about three times the warming we actually observed during the 20th century. So to get the curve to fit, they assume (more or less) that the smoke from industrial pollution has a strong cooling effect, so this subtracts 2/3 of the CO2 warming before multiplying by 3. The two cancel. How do they calculate that 2/3rds to subtract? They work it out from how much cooling they need to get the models (with their strong feedbacks) to fit observations.
But if you assumed a different feedback factor, and fitted a different aerosol figure to make it fit observations, you’d get a very different result. The latest satellite data as processed by Spencer and Braswell indicates a negative feedback (i.e. it attenuates the raw effect to about 0.7 C/doubling) and a positive internal forcing from tropical low-level clouds to compensate. On that basis, doubling CO2 over the next century while reducing smoke emissions would lead to somewhere around 0.5 C warming from CO2 in total, plus or minus a much larger amount from clouds and other factors. It’s highly unlikely that we would be able to distinguish such a small rise from the background noise. It could even cool.
If you push everything to extremes, you can even get quite dramatic cooling. It’s happened naturally in the past with the Little Ice Age, and other similar episodes, so we know it’s possible.
But you’ll never get to hear about any of this, because “we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
Did that hope work out? Or were we sadly disappointed? Well, let’s see what the enquiry report said:
“The IPCC uncertainty guidance provides a good starting point for characterizing uncertainty in the assessment reports. However, the guidance was not consistently followed in the fourth assessment, leading to unnecessary errors. For example, authors reported high confidence in statements for which there is little evidence, such as the widely-quoted statement that agricultural yields in Africa might decline by up to 50 percent by 2020. Moreover, the guidance was often applied to statements that are so vague they cannot be falsified. In these cases the impression was often left, quite incorrectly, that a substantive finding was being presented.”
Mmmm…
January 20th, 2011 at 3:25 pm
Ok, I read the editorial cited above. Obviously, this is not our go-to guy on climate science.
But I see some glimmers of hope here. In the first place, Gerry Calhoun does admit to the idea that humans can change climate. He’d just like to think that this time, things are no different than his interpretation of previous examples, and the rest of us will cope somehow, since he wants to continue business as usual anyway The headline for this piece is “Whether the Climate is Warming or Cooling, We can Adopt”. I see an opening for a “Do we want to adopt the easy way or the hard way, and who gets to decide this?” sort of approach.
Secondly, a quick internet search uncovered the following report: http://www.cier.umd.edu/climateadaptation/Tennessee%20Economic%20Impacts%20of%20Climate%20Change%20Full%20Report.pdf
Remember that we do know the distinctions between weather and climate, and the difference between global and local. This report does say that it is likely that Tennessee will experience a temperature rise with global warming. But as the historical charts on page 2 demonstrate, this temperature rise is not predicted to be as unambiguous or as much in Tennessee as elsewhere. It lists forestry and agriculture as the most likely areas to be impacted by climate change, but then points out that small increases in temperature, in CO2 levels, and in precipitation might actually be a positive for forest and agricultural growth. But higher levels of precipitation and weather uncertainty may lead to more catastrophic weather events. River flooding is a concern in Tennessee. So is drought. And both tornadoes and hurricanes. Of course, Tennessee is in no danger in case of sea level rise (except perhaps in a need to accommodate displaced people from elsewhere). So the report goes on to point out that a significant portion of the economic impact on Tennessee might be due to the general global disruption. All in all, Tennessee does not seem to be one of the high impact locations.
So far, I see that there have been zero comments to this piece. Also, I note that the Tennessean seems to welcome non-Tennessee resident submissions to this “Tennessee Voices” section of their Opinion pages.
So perhaps a certain cracks science journalist that we know would be willing to give it a try? What should be said to people in the Nashville area, and statewide that would shake them out of their doubt or complacency regarding climate change and cause them to be supportive of the needs of the global community?
January 20th, 2011 at 3:33 pm
“crack science journalist”, not cracks (or cracked).
January 23rd, 2011 at 10:21 am
Has anyone tried comparing uncertainty in climate models to uncertainty in the outcome of investments?
Would you invest in a financial instrument with a 30% chance of gaining a little money and a 30% chance of losing a lot of money, with smaller negative outcomes making up the middle 40% of the distribution? I’m making up the numbers, but I’m guessing that’s the kind of investment we’re making by doing nothing about CO2.
January 23rd, 2011 at 5:20 pm
#7,
Good one! Now imagine –(and all of the following is totally hypothetical and nothing to do with any climate scientists to who it bears no resemblance!)– that most traders won’t publish their accounts, or allow them to be externally audited – saying things like: “why should I make the books available to you, when you’re only going to try to find something wrong with them?”
Imagine that one fund was found to have the Paris account labelled ‘Boston, Massachusetts’, several Indian accounts listed even though the division they were listed under had no Indian subsidiaries, has truncated some financial records decades before their actual end, has extended data in other accounts that had already been closed by repeating the last recorded transaction for up to five years so that it could meet the deadline for inclusion, had data from one account repeated exactly across half a dozen others, transcribed in error, and had summarised groups of accounts using a highly non-standard and undeclared weighting method that resulted in certain trends being emphasised more than using the standard method would.
Imagine that you saw a sort of ‘diary’ written by another trader, complaining about the chaotic mess the accounts for a particular fund were in, how half the account numbers were wrong, how essential files were missing, how use of undocumented software rendered output ‘meaningless’, complaining that they didn’t have time to fix it properly either.
Imagine when you asked about these, and other matters, they said that they had held an enquiry and no evidence of wrongdoing had been found. Imagine you heard that the head of the enquiry team had large investments backing the fund, and another team member had once been a long-time colleague of those criticised, even working in the same department. (Total coincidences, of course.) Imagine you found out afterwards that the evidence list submitted to the enquiry had been generated by those being enquired into.
Imagine they were telling you that it was 90% certain that disaster would follow if you didn’t invest all your money in their product immediately. Imagine this message came in an email from a senior government official of an international governmental organisation with offices in Nigeria. They urgently need your assistance to get these funds organised, and save various small island nations from financial collapse.
You would trust them, wouldn’t you?
Seriously, several people have compared the levels of auditing and due diligence required for even quite minor financial operations of a few hundred million dollars with the far more relaxed standards extant in academic climate science – and complained that much of what they have been found to have done would be actually illegal if you did it in a financial prospectus. But there are no such rules in Science, which is a rather more exploratory and experimental arena than accountancy. And nor should there be. Nevertheless, it’s probably not a good comparison for your side to make.