CEJournal

That’s the headline on Curtis Brainard’s excellent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about the scant attention paid by the American press to recently uncovered problems with the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

[Update: Curtis has written a second piece criticizing the American news media for continuing to ignore the IPCC controversy. It is especially important for American journalists to "start paying attention to this story," he writes, not just to get to the bottom of what happened but also to help insure that good science is not thrown out with the bad.]

“Glaciergate” broke in the U.K. in December, with revelations that the IPCC incorrectly stated that all glaciers in the Himalayas would vanish by 2035 with continued warming. There were also the charges that Rajendra Pachauri used his position as the head of the IPCC to benefit himself financially. Then came criticisms that the IPCC incorrectly linked warming to monetary damages from natural disasters like hurricanes. (Full disclosure: My friend and colleague Roger Pielke, Jr. is in the middle of that dustup.)

As Brainard points out, along with Charlie Petit at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, these issues are making headlines in Europe. But aside from a handful of stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, AP and Bloomberg, there has been almost no coverage.

Meanwhile, outlets in the U.K., India, and Australia have been eating the American media’s lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis. Journalists in the U.S. should take immediate steps to redress that oversight.

[UPDATE: The Guardian and the Independent in the U.K. are reporting that Phil Jones, one of the climate scientists at the center of the hacked email controversy, is have to face new charges that he tried to hide problems with key climate data. (For excerpts of the story, go here.) Here in the U.S., though, there continues to be very little coverage in the news media.

I agree with Curtis Brainard that it’s time for American journalists to start following the story, wherever it leads.

Continue reading ““MIA on the IPCC”” →

The climate bats last…

As an international media storm continues to rage over allegations of fraud by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its director, Rahendra K. Pachauri, new research suggests that a warming world will bring drier conditions to the already drought-stricken American Southwest.

As part of the research, published last week in Nature Geosciences (sub req), scientists gleaned a new climate record from stalactites and stalagmites in a New Mexico cave. The record suggests that warming will “lead to increasingly arid conditions in southwestern North America in the future.”

Credit goes to my colleague John Fleck of the Albuquerque Tribune, one of the nation’s top science writers, for highlighting this new research in a story (sub req) and in a posting at Inkstain, his personal blog.

The researchers say warming temperatures tended to nudge the jet stream over North America to the north, as is depicted in the map above. (The map also depicts shifts in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where trade winds originating in the Southern and Northern Hemispheres converge.)

It’s the jet stream that typically steers winter precipitation into the American Southwest. So with a northward shift, winter snows bypassed the American Southwest, resulting in dryer conditions.

Continue reading “Stalactites foretell an increasingly dry Southwest” →

The climate bats last — again

Yesterday, climate skeptics feasted on new research by Susan Solomon and colleagues showing that changes in water vapor in the stratosphere have had an unexpected effect on global warming. Although Solomon was careful to point out that nothing in her paper changes the long-term reality of global warming from human emissions of greenhouse gases, some skeptics were quick to claim otherwise.

On the same day, however, they ignored new research showing that the summer melt season for Arctic sea ice has gotten significantly longer, as the images above, depicting changes between 1979 and 2007, reveal. (The graphics are from the NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day.)

So once again, the climate bats last.

Continue reading “Arctic melt season is getting longer” →

As chattering climate partisans focus on new examples of scientists shooting themselves in the foot, the climate itself is going about its business, consistent with what would be expected in a warming world.

The latest climate-change political dustup, seized on by skeptics, was prompted by the statement from a Canadian scientist that its time for a house-cleaning and a changed approach at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Quoted in the Windsor Star, a Canadian newspaper, Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, says “the IPCC needs a fundamental shift.”

The group is too big and unwieldy, Weaver argues, and it has become influenced by political advocacy. He calls for a change in approach, and possibly a change in leadership.

At the same time, climate skeptics don’t bother to quote what Weaver has to say about climate change itself. Here’s a relevant excerpt from the Star’s article:

Continue reading “The climate bats last” →

Late last week, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies made it official: January 2000 through December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. This confirms a National Climatic Data Center’s projection back in November, based on incomplete data. (I wrote about that here, just as the Copenhagen climate talks were getting underway.) Now, NASA’s Earth Observatory has released the new image above depicting how temperatures around the globe departed from the 1951 to 1980 mean during this past decade.

Almost all of the Earth was warmer, with the Arctic experiencing the greatest increases in temperature. As the map graphically illustrates, only a very small portion of the globe experiencing cooling. (Note: Gray areas depict locations where temperatures were not recorded.)

As the deep chill eases, what lessons do the Yankees and Red Sox hold for the debate over global warming? (For the answer, make sure to read to the end.)

The weather now seems to be returning to some semblance of normal, with temperatures on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic no longer considerably warmer than those in Minnesota. And Florida looks like it is once again a reasonable winter get-away spot, as conditions have gone from freezing to balmy.

Even the Arctic Oscillation pattern that swept super-frigid air across most of the United States in December seems to be dropping away quite rapidly. So it will be interesting to see how this winter continues to develop. Will the El Nino conditions that continue to grip the tropical Pacific hang on to influence the weather at least through the spring? (The National Climatic Data Center thinks so.)

Now, James Hansen and his colleagues at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies have confirmed in a report that this past year was tied as the second-warmest since global instrumental record-keeping began 130 years ago, as illustrated in the graph at the top. The global mean temperature in 2009 was 0.57 degrees C (1 degree F) warmer than the 1951-1980 mean.

Given all these developments, I wonder what will happen to the “global cooling” meme in popular discourse about climate change. If we really are past the anomalously cold temperatures of December, will the claims of global cooling continue to be heard? My guess: probably.

And so the people who claim that the Earth is currently gripped in an epochal cooling trend will somehow have to explain away the continuing reality of long-term warming. Over the short term, temperatures can swing up and down, and quite dramatically. To emphasize those swings, I took the GISS graph and added arrows to point out the relatively steep drops in average temperature between 1970 and 2000, as seen in the following graph. Each drop is larger than the estimated 95 percent confidence range, which is illustrated by the green bars. (I do not claim that this is a scientific analysis; it is simply an illustration emphasizing the natural climatic variability in the temperature record.)

Continue reading “Whither global cooling?” →

I shouldn’t have been surprised when I first saw this graph charting newspaper coverage of climate change in 40 newspapers worldwide. But the unprecedented nature of the sudden spike seen in December did give me a start.

Max Boykoff, now my colleague here at the University of Colorado, and Maria Mansfield of Exeter University in the U.K., have been updating this graph monthly since 2004. It captures all articles in the newspapers that mention either “climate change” or “global warming somewhere in the text.”

I was curious about Max’s reaction to the spike in coverage. Here’s a short Q&A based on some questions I sent to him by email:

Q: What was your reaction when you first saw the chart?

A: In these 50 newspapers, relative to the amount of coverage there had been in in them previous months, I was surprised to see such a dramatic spike for December. PEJ has been noting increased attention in new/social media for climate change over the last few months, but not picking up on as much an increase in attention (relative to other issues) in traditional media.

Continue reading “Striking spike in global warming coverage” →

Keith Kloor has a terrific post at his blog Collide-a-Scape. Here’s how it starts:

At what point will climate change advocates wake up to the fact that they are chasing their tails?  At what point will the various camps reassess the dominant assumptions that inform their positions . . .

And here’s how it ends:

My point is, we are are a reactive species. Yes, we ought to start paying more attention to our lifestyle habits if we want to lick the climate change problem. But we won’t make much progress on that end until we figure out how to overcome the limitations imposed by our evolutionary brain.

Now, for all the insightful stuff in between, go read it!

The horror in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake is undeniable. But it is by no means the worst seismic devastation that nature can dish out. A far more devastating quake — one that could possibly kill millions of people — is not only probable but possibly inevitable in one of the most densely populated regions of the world.

Continue reading “Asia’s inevitable great quake could be much worse than Haiti’s” →

The Center for Climate Change Communication has just announced the nominees for “Climate Change Communicator of the Year,” and I’m honored and humbled to be one of the people on a list that includes some very distinguished and worthy people.

The winner of the award will actually be chosen through a voting process on the Web. For a list of the nominees, the nominating letters submitted for each one, and a link to the online ballot, please go to this link: http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/

Here are the nominees for the individual award, along with direct links that will take you to information about each one:

Continue reading “Vote for “Climate Change Communicator of the Year”” →

As you may have heard, there’s been yet another global cooling eruption in the blogosphere and on Fox News following publication of two startling stories in the U.K.’s Daily Mail, one yesterday, and another one on Sunday.

The claim is that the cold temperatures gripping parts of the Northern Hemisphere are “the start of a worldwide trend towards colder weather that seriously challenges global warming theories, eminent scientists claimed yesterday,” as one of the stories put it.

Too bad the main scientist quoted in the stories, Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, actually made no such claim. So it’s looking more and more like Latif has simply been a victim of  yellow journalism.

Others have documented just how thoroughly Latif has been misquoted and his work misrepresented, including a story by David Adam in the Guardian yesterday. So I’d like to focus here on the journalistic lessons that might be learned from this episode.

Even for the most responsible and hard-working journalist, there are many opportunities for misunderstanding during interviews with scientists, especially on a subject as complex as this one is. That’s why I tell my students always to go to the primary scientific literature. If the writers for the Daily Mail had done that — and if they were actually honest — they would not have written what they did.

The stories in the Daily Mail cite a paper by Latif and his colleagues (subscription required) published in Nature in 2008. But what the researchers say in the paper has little resemblance to what was reported in the articles. In the actual study, Latif took into account observations of sea surface temperature to hindcast past climate using a computer model. With this technique, they were able to improve the skill of those hindcasts compared to those made with incomplete knowledge of the state of the ocean. And their main conclusion was that this technique may yield better multidecadal predictions.

They also said this:

“Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.”

There’s nothing in the paper about global cooling for 30 years. In fact, their model shows temperatures shooting upward quite steeply after a plateau, catching up by 2030 to projections of warming made by models that do not use their technique.

It looks like Mojib Latif is has has simply gotten ground up in the maw of climate politics.

Arctic air is sweeping south and enveloping an increasing portion of the lower 48 states. On Monday, the low in International Falls, Minnesota, plunged to negative 37 degrees, the coldest since 1911. Not even Miami is immune, with a low of 36 degrees forecast for early Wednesday morning.

So it should come as no surprise that some talking heads on television are using the weather as an excuse to cast doubt on human-caused global warming. Here’s what Steve Doocy, co-anchor of Fox & Friends, had to say this morning:

For all you folks reading this in International Falls: If you’re getting tired of the Arctic conditions, you might consider a trip to — well, the Arctic! To scenic Cape Dyer on Canada’s Baffin Island, to be more precise, where the temperature as I write this at 6:30 p.m. MST on Tuesday is a relatively balmy 14 degrees.

This dichotomy — frigid conditions down here and *relatively* warm conditions up there is actually no fluke. The monthly update from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, published today, shows that the Arctic Ocean, eastern Siberia, and northwestern North America were all warmer than normal during December. And some areas — most particularly the Baffin Island area — were up to 7 degrees Celsius (13 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than usual:

What’s going on? As I pointed out in yesterday’s post, a natural climatic phenomenon called the Arctic Oscillation took hold very strongly in December and seems to be continuing into January. So what we’re seeing, despite what Steve Doocy has to say, is good, old fashioned natural variation, not the undoing of anthropogenic global warming. And as I pointed out yesterday, a fairly strong El Niño has settled in, promising warmer than normal temperatures for much of the globe in months to come.

Continue reading “Feeling cold? Consider Baffin Island for a (relatively) balmy get-away” →

I hope everyone had a very happy holidays. I went on a bit of a break for a little over a week. But I’m back now.

And here where I live in Niwot, Colorado, another in a string of Arctic cold fronts is predicted to sweep through on Thursday, with temperatures forecast to plunge under 10 degrees during the day, and below zero during the night.

Andrew Revkin posted an interesting article to DotEarth explaining the frigid weather that has gripped parts of the nation this winter. It focuses on a phenomenon called the Arctic Oscillation, which is an “unusual pattern of atmospheric high and low pressure over and around the Arctic that has contributed to the recent snow and cold from Alabama to Washington, to East Anglia, England (and rain and warmth along the west coast of Greenland),” Revkin writes. And right now, the AO is “nearly off the chart,” as he put it, contributing to the chill.

Interestingly, though, Arctic sea ice concentrations continue to be much lower than average:

The graph above, from Cryosphere Today, published by the Polar Research Group at the University of Illinois, shows that Arctic sea ice finished out 2009 about 800,000 square kilometers below the 1979-2008 mean. That’s an area roughly equal to the combined area of California and Montana. The National Snow and Ice Data Center has not yet released it’s December wrap-up, but their daily Arctic sea ice image update suggests that December’s extent will come close to the unusually low extent of December 2008:

Continue reading “Arctic sea ice doesn’t care about the temperature where you live” →

It is becoming clearer that the Copenhagen talks failed because of China’s intransigence. Here’s an eyewitness account from Mark Lynas, a freelance writer but also an adviser in Copenhagen to the government of the Maldives, a position that gave him access to the negotiations with China:

The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful “deal” so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world’s poor once again.

[UPDATE: The Energy Collective blog has an excellent compendium of Chinese reactions to the accusations that have been leveled at their country. They range from " . . . why on earth should China commit itself to reducing emissions? Or do white people have the right to emit twice or four times as much carbon dioxide as yellow people?," to "This government of ours is used to the empty rhetoric of big government and to seeking to maximize interests, being unwilling to take on responsibility, corrupt habits formed over the years."]

What’s China’s interest in wrecking the talks and pawning off the blame onto Obama?

This does not mean China is not serious about global warming. It is strong in both the wind and solar industries. But China’s growth, and growing global political and economic dominance, is based largely on cheap coal. China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to.

I wonder, though, whether Lynas is correct that China is serious about global warming.

Continue reading “China’s plan?: Burn coal to make renewables for us” →

Click on the video above and it will take you on a simulated journey from the high peaks of the Himalayas out into space, past the outer edge of our solar system, beyond our Milky Way galaxy, through the mapped portions of our universe, beyond the quasars, the most distant astronomical objects we know about, and all the way  to our cosmic horizon in space in time. Light from this distant horizon has taken 13.7 billion years to reach us here on Earth, and it represents literally the afterglow of the Big Bang itself. Then the video plunges back through space and time, all the way back to the home planet.

It’s a remarkable journey, and I hope you’ll take it. But what is its significance, and why talk about it on a blog dedicated to environmental issues?

A number of years ago I wrote a book called  ”Origins: the quest for our cosmic roots,” which explored the origin and evolution of the universe from before the Big Bang to the origin of life.  This video, from the American Museum of Natural History, reminded me of the long journey I took in researching and writing the book, which included conversations with some of the world’s leading astronomers and cosmologists. Their work contributes to the knowledge reflected in this video. And yet at the end of many of the interviews I conducted with them, they often did not want to conclude with the scientific implications of what they were learning. They wanted to talk about philosophical and environmental implications.

As we near Christmas and the end of the year, I thought I would share a little of what they had to say — and what I learned. So here goes . . .

Continue reading “What cosmology teaches us about the environment” →