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My friend Hillary Rosner sent me this curiosity. Make sure to scan the entire cover.

Just in case anyone is wondering, I only read the articles…

Over at DotEarth, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times has has posted a commentary I wrote on why, after more than 30 years of climate science, and an equal amount of communication about what scientists are learning about our impact on the world, we still haven’t seen much substantive policy action. Below is the text as it appears at DotEarth. But please be sure to visit Andy’s blog to check out his comments, as well as the conversation among readers that it has engendered.

Here’s my commentary:

Continue reading “The causes of climate deadlock” →

A month or so ago, reporting on global warming seemed focused on the details of Climategate, the IPCC’s Himalayan glacier imbroglio, and wild winter weather. Now, reporting has shifted to a focus on the backlash against science and how scientists are struggling to cope with it.

As John M. Broder put it in his front-page article in yesterday’s New York Times:

. . . the volume of criticism and the depth of doubt have only grown, and many scientists now realize they are facing a crisis of public confidence and have to fight back. Tentatively and grudgingly, they are beginning to engage their critics, admit mistakes, open up their data and reshape the way they conduct their work.

One unstated assumption here is that if climate scientists can improve how they interact with the public, not only will some trust be restored but more forceful policy action will follow. But there’s another view, expressed cogently by Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, in this column published online yesterday in the journal Nature. I think every journalist who covers climate change should read it.

Here’s Sarewitz’s nutgraf:

The problem? Science has been called on to do something beyond its purview: not just improve people’s understanding of the world, but compel people to act in a particular way. For nearly twenty years, researchers, policy-makers and activists have claimed that climate science requires a global policy agenda of top-down, United-Nations-sponsored international agreements; targets and timetables for emissions reductions; and the creation of carbon markets. But this agenda was guaranteed to be politically divisive because it entails short-term political and economic costs in return for benefits that are long term and highly uncertain.

That last part crystallizes the issue: People are being asked to pay costs right now to prevent problems that most of them don’t yet experience — and at a time when people are confronting very real economic problems.

The crucial point here is that no amount of reform of the IPCC, or rooting out of bad science — or of scientists behaving badly — will begin to correct the flaws in the dominant approach to climate policy. Rehabilitation of climate policy is a matter not of getting the science right, but of getting the politics right.

Just what is the problem with the politics?

Continue reading “Daniel Sarewitz: Time to get climate politics right” →

The extent of Arctic sea ice in January was the fourth lowest on record, according to the monthly report of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, released today.

In the shorter run, high temperatures in the Kara and Barents seas running 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal helped keep the total Arctic sea ice extent below average. In the longer run, another factor was at play as well, according to the NSIDC:

Analysis of data from the last three decades shows that the summer Arctic sea ice melt season now lasts nearly a month longer than it did in the 1980s  . . . The larger expanses of open water absorb more solar energy, and before ice can form again, that heat must be released back to the atmosphere.

Here’s a graph charting the continuing long-term trend of declining Arctic sea ice:

Continue reading “Arctic sea ice extent in January fourth lowest on record” →

By seeking the “other side” to complex science, journalists sow confusion and amplify extreme claims

Recently, a news crew from a television station in Denver came to speak with Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

“They were interested in the role of El Niño in the cold weather we’ve been experiencing,” Trenberth said during a presentation today at NCAR to the CEJ’s environmental journalism fellows.

So far, so good. But then after the interview was over, the reporter said that his superiors back at the station wanted to know “who was going to do the other side,” according to Trenberth. “With that kind of mentality, I just don’t know where we’re going,” he said with more than a trace of exasperation in his voice.

Where we’re clearly going is further down the road of over-simplification, politics masquerading as science — and, as my colleague Maxwell Boykoff of the Center for Science & Technology Policy Research puts it, amplification of “extreme and tenuous claims.”

Continue reading “El Niño, climate change and the East Coast storms” →

It’s snowing here in Boulder. Again. The Northeast is getting pummeled with yet another blizzard. And a whopper of storm is barreling down on California, promising to bring three feet of snow to elevations above 7,000 feet.

So if you’re a bit weather weary and looking for a nice get-away, consider Nuuk on the west coast of Greenland (the second orange dot), where even at nearly 11 p.m. this evening it was a balmy 30 degrees with only light snow showers.

It’s a good bet that there will be another round of global warming jokes on the television news tonight. But what you probably won’t hear is that the Arctic Oscillation is still in an extremely negative phase — a pattern that brings cold weather to much of the United States while leaving parts of the Arctic positively toasty.

Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction

Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln stare out from Mt. Rushmore across the magnificent landscape of South Dakota. But I wonder what they would think about the not-so-magnificent resolution passed by the South Dakota House calling for “balanced teaching” of global warming in the state’s public schools.

Among other things, in their resolution the legislators imply that global warming is bunk because “the earth has been cooling for the last eight years.” Never mind the long-term warming trend. They also make the highly uncontroversial point that almost all of Greenland is covered in a thick blanket of ice. (Who knew?) But of course they fail to mention the other non-controversial point that Greenland has been experiencing some significant melting. And just to make sure we all know where they’re coming from, they extoll the virtues of carbon dioxide, which they refer to as “the gas of life.”

“If you’re going to teach science and there are two sides, you need to teach both, or it’s about politics,” said Republican state Rep. Don Kopp, quoted in the Rapid City Journal.

As if the highly politicized resolution this politician championed as part of an obvious exercise in political theater with no practical ramifications other than politics is actually has something to do with the sanctity of science and teaching.

The South Dakota Senate has now passed an amended version of the resolution, with much of the silliest material excised. It now goes back to the House. I guess we’ll have to await the outcome with bated breath.

In the meantime, here’s the version of the resolution that passed in the South Dakota House:

A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION, Calling for balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools of South Dakota.

WHEREAS, the earth has been cooling for the last eight years despite small increases in anthropogenic carbon dioxide; and

WHEREAS, there is no evidence of atmospheric warming in the troposphere where the majority of warming would be taking place; and

WHEREAS, historical climatological data shows without question the earth has gone through trends where the climate was much warmer than in our present age. The Climatic Optimum and Little Climatic Optimum are two examples. During the Little Climatic Optimum, Erik the Red settled Greenland where they farmed and raised dairy cattle. Today, ninety percent of Greenland is covered by massive ice sheets, in many places more than two miles thick; and

WHEREAS, the polar ice cap is subject to shifting warm water currents and the break-up of ice by high wind events. Many oceanographers believe this to be the major cause of meltingpolar ice, not atmospheric warming; and

WHEREAS, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life on earth. Many scientists refer to carbon dioxide as “the gas of life”; and

WHEREAS, more than 31,000 American scientists collectively signed a petition to President Obama stating: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, or methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide will produce many beneficial effects on the natural plant and animal environments of the earth”:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to global warming include the following:

(1)    That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;

(2)    That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative; and

(3)    That the debate on global warming has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints which have complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of global warming phenomena; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Legislature urges that all instruction on the theory of global warming be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.

Scientists say a link cannot yet be made definitively, but they predict an increase in hurricane intensity

The iconic image of a hurricane spewing from the smokestack on the cover for An Inconvenient Truth connects the rather abstract concept of global warming to something much more concrete: a natural disaster that can submerge an entire city and kill tens of thousands of thousands of people.

A new review published in Nature Geoscience (PDF) reaffirms that whatever connection may exist between hurricanes and global warming cannot yet be conclusively determined because of limitations with the scientific data. But the scientists also say that while the number of hurricanes may actually drop, the intensity may increase from 2% to 11% globally.

There are some good scientific reasons to theorize that warmer ocean temperatures could make hurricanes more intense. Warm oceanic surface water and moist warm air are fuel for hurricanes. But this has been the rub: The oceanic warming actually seen since 1970 theoretically should have added a few knots of extra wind speed to storms — and that has been just too small to accurately measure. So testing the predictions of theory has proved difficult and fraught with uncertainty.

Of course that hasn’t stopped climate partisans from using the science on climate and hurricanes to their own political ends. And I doubt that the new review paper by a team of distinguished researchers will change that political dynamic.

The team includes experts who have in the past sparred over the meaning of the science. But in this paper, they agree on this conclusion about whether global warming is already having an impact on hurricanes:

“. . . despite some suggestive observational studies, we cannot at this time conclusively identify anthropogenic signals in past tropical cyclone data. A substantial human influence on future tropical cyclone activity cannot be ruled out, however, and could arise from several mechanisms (including oceanic warming, sea-level rise and circulation changes). In the absence of a detectable change, we are dependent on a combination of observational, theoretical and modelling studies to assess future climate changes in tropical cyclone activity. These studies are growing progressively more credible, but still have many limitations, as discussed in this review.

Given those limitations, what do the researchers say we should expect in the future? Here’s a summary of the results, quoted from the paper:

Detection and attribution. It remains uncertain whether past changes in any tropical cyclone activity (frequency, intensity, rainfall, and so on) exceed the variability expected through natural causes, after accounting for changes over time in observing capabilities.

Tropical cyclone projections

Frequency. It is likely that the global frequency of tropical cyclones will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged owing to greenhouse warming. We have very low confidence in projected changes in individual basins. Current models project changes ranging from −6 to −34% globally, and up to ±50% or more in individual basins by the late twenty-first century.

Intensity. Some increase in the mean maximum wind speed of tropical cyclones is likely (+2 to +11% globally) with projected twenty-first-century warming, although increases may not occur in all tropical regions. The frequency of the most intense (rare/high-impact) storms will more likely than not increase by a substantially larger percentage in some basins.

Rainfall. Rainfall rates are likely to increase. The projected magnitude is on the order of +20% within 100 km of the tropical cyclone centre.

Genesis, tracks, duration and surge flooding. We have low confidence in projected changes in tropical cyclone genesis-location, tracks, duration and areas of impact. Existing model projections do not show dramatic large-scale changes in these features. The vulnerability of coastal regions to storm-surge flooding is expected to increase with future sea-level rise and coastal development, although this vulnerability will also depend on future storm characteristics.

Regardless of what kind of link there may be between hurricanes and global warming, one thing is undeniable: Our grand experiment with a key planetary life-support system continues pretty much unabated, posing significant risks for us and particularly our children.

Will Toor, a Boulder County Commissioner, responds to criticisms of efforts to cut carbon emissions

After my post to The Grange today, the blog of High Country News (and my cross-post here at CEJournal), Will Toor emailed me to respond to some of the points I made — but even more to to the Wall Street Journal article I cited. According to the Journal story, Boulder is having difficulty following through with its ambitious plans for encouraging energy efficiency upgrades in homes. And on a larger level, the Journal article said, the city is finding that reducing carbon emissions is more difficult than anticipated.

In his email message, Toor, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago and was mayor of the City of Boulder before being elected a Boulder County commissioner, argues that the WSJ article fails to give credit to all of the efforts being undertaken in Boulder to incentivize energy efficiency, make alternatives to automobile transport more attractive, and boost use of renewables. And he argues that some important context was left out of the story.

Here is the text of his message, in total. (He gave me permission to reprint it here.)

On Feb. 13 the Wall Street Journal ran a front page article criticizing the efforts of  communities in Boulder County, Colorado to increase energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions, and build a green economy.  The article included numerous cherry-picked negative quotes, but very little factual analysis on the impacts of these programs.

Continue reading “Rolling Boulder up the mountain—city and county are pushing hard” →

The climate bats last — once again

Once again, the Earth’s climate seems to be ignoring the claims of climate skeptics that globe isn’t warming. A report published today by the U.S. Geological Survey details the widespread extent of shrinking ice shelves in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula due to climate change.

“This could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide,” according to the USGS.

There are five major ice shelves in this region, and the ice lost since 1998 from just one — the Wilkins Ice Shelf — totals more than 4,000 square kilometers, according to the USGS. That’s an area larger than Rhode Island.

An ice shelf floats, so as it disappears it does not cause a rise in sea level. But it serves something like a cork in a bottle, holding back glaciers and ice streams flowing down from Antarctic ice sheets. When an ice shelf disappears, the flow of this ice into the sea can accelerate — and that contributes to sea level rise.

It is almost an article of faith among climate activists that only a lack of political will is preventing us from taming global warming. As Al Gore puts it in his book, Our Choice:

“It is now abundantly clear that we have at our fingertips all of the tools we need to solve the climate crisis. The only missing ingredient is collective will.”

If any place on the planet has the collective will to put those tools to use, it’s Boulder, Colorado — a city that is probably home to more people working on one aspect or another of climate change than any other place on Earth. But according to a recent article by Stephanie Simon in the Wall Street Journal, even liberal Boulder, that bastion of environmentalism, and the first place in the United States to actually enact a carbon tax, is struggling mightily to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

The city is no doubt learning from its mistakes and may well do better and better in coming years. But its experience so far, along with that of European nations, which have been working hard for years to reduce their emissions, should stand as a cautionary tale for those who buy Gore’s assertion. Breaking political logjams probably isn’t going to be good enough.
In 2002, the Boulder City Council passed a resolution committing the city to meeting the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. To get there, the city must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. If that sounds modest and doable, consider that this will require a reduction in emissions totaling 22 percent below 2007 levels.

To help reach the goal, Boulder voters passed the country’s first-ever carbon tax. According to the Wall Street Journal article, it now amounts to $21 annually for each resident. The proceeds are supporting a wide variety of programs promoting energy efficiency, renewable energy, low-emission vehicles, mass transit, biking and walking, and reductions in the amount of waste going to landfills.

In 2008, these efforts prevented emissions into the atmosphere of 81,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. [PDF] According to the city, this has succeeded in reversing the growth of Boulder’s greenhouse gas emissions. On the surface, that seems like no small achievement. But as the Wall Street Journal points out, overall Boulder’s emissions declined just 1 percent from 2006 through 2008. Moreover, at the end of 2008, the city’s emissions were 27 percent higher than they were in 1990 — “a worse showing than the U.S. as a whole, where emissions rose 15% during that period,” according to Journal.

Continue reading “Rolling Boulder up the mountain” →

If it felt cold and snowy in January, you must live in Europe, Russia or the United States east of the Rockies. Otherwise, you probably experienced warmer than normal temperatures, as this map of temperature anomalies for January from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies shows.

By my eye, these were the regions of the world that were warmer than the long-term average in January: Southern Asia, Africa, South America, Canada, half of Australia, the Arctic, and (perhaps ominously) Antarctica. (And that’s not saying anything about the world’s oceans.)

Of course, a single month’s temperature anomaly map like this cannot reveal a long-term climatic trend. It is just a snapshot — one data point. But string enough data points together over the course of years and decades, and you can see a distinct climatic trend — toward warming.

So the next time folks like Sean Hannity claim that harsh winter weather proves global warming is bunk, remember these things:

• Weather is not the same as climate. Weather happens over the course of days; climate over the course of years and decades. And one “snowpocalypse” weather event tells you very little about the overall climate trend.

• The weather where you live is also, by definition, local. So even if you’re experiencing unusually wintry conditions where you live, the long-term trend of global warming means that in many more places on the planet, temperatures are probably higher than normal. That was certainly the case in January.

You might also consider this: If we are currently in the midst of an epic global cooling trend, why are most of the world’s glaciers melting? And why is spring arriving earlier and winter later? But more about this in a future post…

Your's truly, in a class

Voting for the 2010 Climate Change Communicator of the Year awards from the Center for Climate Change Communication closes as midnight tonight (Monday, 2/15/10). So if you haven’t cast your ballot yet, consider doing so. I’m honored and humbled to be one of the nominees on a list that includes some very distinguished and worthy people.

For a list of the nominees, the nominating letters submitted for each one, and a link to the online ballot, please go here. Check out the nominees, and vote for one of us. If you find value in the independent, facts-based, no-sacred-cows approach I take here at CEJournal, please consider voting for me. There is no cash prize associated with this award. So if I’m lucky enough to be chosen, my hope is that it would help me extend the reach and influence of CEJournal.

If you’re interested, here are a few links to some of my other work:

But skeptics misuse this statement to claim there has been no warming

In an interview with the BBC, Phil Jones, the embattled director of the British Climatic Research Unit, said that an observed warming trend of 0.12 degrees C per decade between 1995 to 2009 was “not significant at the 95% significance level.” On the other hand, he said, it was quite close to being statistically significant.

Predictably, the deniosphere jumped all over this. For example, here was Marc Morano’s headline at Climate Depot:

The Jig is Up! Climategate U-turn as Phil Jones admits: There has been no warming since 1995.

Either Marc knows nothing about statistics, or he is deliberately twisting the facts — or both. Phil Jones simply did not say that there has been no warming since 1995.

A 95 percent significance level simply means there is actually a 5 percent chance of a particular finding occurring purely by chance. So here’s what Jones is saying, in essence: There is a very slightly greater than 5 percent chance that the measured warming of 0.12 degrees C per decade between 1995 and 2009 was a statistical fluke — in other words, not real.

Or flop it around: There is a slightly less than 95 percent chance that the observed warming actually happened.

By convention, 95 percent significance often is considered “good enough to be believed.” But this is purely arbitrary, and it does not mean that something with a 94 percent significance level is categorically untrue. If a doctor told you that there was a 94 percent chance that you would die of cancer unless you underwent a particular treatment, what would do? Would you say, “Well doc, if there was a 95 percent chance, I’d accept the treatment, but since it’s just a 94 percent chance, I’ll decline”?

Somehow, I doubt it. I think you’d probably take the treatment.

The problem with the temperature record between 1995 and 2009 probably is not that there has been no warming during that period. The problem, as Jones told the BBC, is this: “Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.”

You probably won’t hear that important statement from skeptics like Marc Morano, or from the news media for that matter. But it’s important, because it emphasizes a crucial fact: Climate change is best documented over the course of decades, not years. And over the course of decades, Jones told the BBC, the a chart Jones provided to the BBC at their request shows a clear trend: During four distinct periods since 1860, the climate warmed at a rate of approximately 0.163 degrees C per decade.  The global climate has warmed at a rate of approximately 0.163 degrees C per decade since 1860.

Here’s the chart:

I don’t know why the BBC asked only about these specific periods, and I also don’t know off the top of my head what the trend per decade was during the missing time in between 1880 and 1910, and 1940 and 1975. I will try to track those numbers down and post them when I can. (If any readers of CEJournal have the numbers, plus a reference to a reliable primary source, please leave a comment.)

Negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation is back — with a vengeance

Just as strange, temperatures in parts of Greenland are reaching 40 degrees — and in one spot even 50.  There’s also a 30 percent chance of rain — not snow — forecast for the southeastern part of the island. (To check the weather in various locations in Greenland, see this Weather Underground page.)

Sound familiar? That’s because the topsy turvy temperatures are a replay of what happened in December and January, with frigid temperatures gripping much of North American while parts of the Arctic warmed to a bizarre degree, and rain fell on the Greenland coast. Now, as then, the likely cause is a phenomenon known as the Arctic Oscillation. And here is the news: Just as in December and January, the AO index is now extremely low, a condition that usually brings abnormally warm temperatures to the Arctic and abnormally cold temperatures further south.

Here’s a diagram charting the AO index:

It reached record lows back in December and January, and it looks like it’s back down in that territory once again.

So as climate skeptics claim that the freak snowstorm spreading across the South proves that global warming is bunk, and climate activists parry that it’s actually evidence that global warming is happening, try to keep this in mind: Weather is different from climate. Weather happens over the course of days. Climate is measured in terms of decades.

Moreover, mother nature probably isn’t conforming to the simplistic arguments of partisans. Something quite unusual is certainly going on. And I suspect that aside from the observations of what’s happening to the AO index, we don’t know exactly what it is.