[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.

It does not matter that claims of a collapse of anthropogenic global are simply not supported by multiple streams of scientific evidence, from physics to paleoclimatology to modeling of the climate system. In the past week or so, I’ve been writing about what nature seems to be telling us about our changing planet (see here, here, here and here, among other places.). And I’m going to continue to do that in the days to come. But showing how the climate is actually changing does not obviate going wherever the full story leads. It is our duty as journalists to shed light and hold power to account.

Perhaps American news media aren’t keeping up with their colleagues overseas because there are so few environmental specialists left. About one out of five American journalists lost their jobs between 2001 and the start of last year, and environmental journalists have been particularly hard hit. I sincerely hope that is the explanation — and not fear of undermining policy action on global warming. That is certainly a legitimate private concern, but not a legitimate journalistic one. Our concern is the truth.

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.

Scientists have already documented a northward shift of the jet  stream in response to current global warming. And computer simulations of a warming climate have predicted that northward shifts of the world’s jet streams would occur. Now, the research by Asmerom and his colleagues documents that this has actually occurred in the past.

The findings are “particularly ominous for drought-sensitive regions, such as the western United States,” Asmerom and his colleagues write. And if future warming unfolds as it did at the end of the last interglacial period — suddenly and rapidly — the Southwestern United States could be pushed “into an even more arid phase, unseen since the early Holocene, or even go beyond this, into conditions not represented since 125,000 [years] ago.”

Meanwhile, the Southwestern United States remains in the grip of a drought that began in October of 1999. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Lake Mead in the lower Colorado River Basin stands at just 44 percent of capacity. And there’s very little hope of recovery in the short run. The flow of the Colorado River  from April through July is forecast at 6.0 million acre-feet, or just 76 percent of average.

Once again, nature is trying to tell us something. Are we simply too distracted by politics, ideology and good, old-fashioned scandal, to listen?

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.

Andy Revkin has an excellent post at DotEarth about the research on water vapor in the stratosphere. You can also check out NOAA’s press release.  So I won’t dwell on it here. Suffice it to say that the following, from the research paper in Science, is the core of the new findings:

[S]tratospheric water vapor very likely made substantial contributions to the flattening of the global warming trend since about 2000. Although earlier data are less complete, the observations also suggest that stratospheric water contributed to enhancing the warming observed during 1980–2000.

Among other things, skeptics are saying things like “scientists are abandoning global warming orthodoxy in an attempt to regain lost credibility.” I find it hard to believe that a meticulous scientist like Susan Solomon ever hewed to anything but a search for the truth. But we’ll just have to wait and see whether that alleged “orthodoxy” actually is “crumbling.” (A hyperventilating Marc Morano uses that word repeatedly at Climate Depot.)  For now, I’ll stick to what we know for sure — what’s actually happening to the climate.

From NASA’s Earth Observatory site:

. . . the average length of the continuous melt season in the Arctic increased by 6.4 days per decade between 1979 and 2007. In some places, however, the trends were far larger than the average, espcially around the lower-latitude edges of the ice pack.

Here’s what has happened to the overall length in the melt season:

The new water vapor paper shows that there is still much to learn about the climate system. And I suspect I’ll still be writing the same thing 10 years from now. But skeptics ignore, and much of the public does not understand, the fact that there can never be absolute certainty about something as complex as earth systems. So the best we can do is think of this issue in terms of risk assessment. And here is a good way to assess risk:

RISK = PROBABILITY X CONSEQUENCES

Even if you believe that the probability of, say, crossing some dangerous climatic thresholds is small, the large potential consequences mean that the assessment of risk is still pretty high. So we should be arguing about whether running those risks is warranted. Instead, we’re still locked in endless debate that has less to do with science than it is does with political values.

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:

Weaver says the vast majority of the science in the IPCC reports is valid, and that the glacier revelations —”one small thing,” in a 3,000 word document, as he calls it — shouldn’t be used to discredit other parts of the report.

“There is not a global conspiracy to drum up false evidence of global warming,” he says.

This new controversy comes in the wake of charges that the company of Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, pushed a false claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers to win lucrative research grants in the United States and Europe. And over the weekend, a story in the Times Online reported that the IPCC falsely tied global warming to an increase in the number and severity of extreme weather events such as hurricanes.

It may well be true that Weaver is right about the IPCC. But  glaciers around the world don’t seem to care whether or not some scientists have exaggerated the rate of melting. As first reported by Juliette Jowit in the Guardian, the World Glacier Monitoring Service says that glaciers worldwide are continuing to melt at a rapid rate, and that many will likely be gone by the middle of this century.

“The new data continues the global trend in strong ice loss over the past few decades,” the monitoring service reports.

Here in the American West, and particularly in the Southwest, we continue to experience the impact of climate change. There’s no way to say for sure whether continuing drought conditions, as illustrated below, are a result of human activities. But they are consistent with predictions and scientists’ physical understanding of how a warming climate could lead to longer-lasting and more intense drought.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the Upper Colorado River Basin has been experiencing a protracted, multi-year drought that began back in October of 1999. As the chart below shows, in all but two years since 2000, inflow into Lake Powell, the giant reservoir on the Colorado River, has been below average (and from 2000 to 2004 it was only half of average):

Meanwhile, up in the Arctic, sea ice also continues to ignore the climate wars. As I write this post, the extent of Arctic sea ice is tracking pretty much at record lows.

No doubt, the political debate over climate change will only intensify. Meanwhile, the natural world continues to try to tell us something.

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.)

Despite the repeated drops in temperature over 30 years, long-term warming is undeniable in this analysis. But to make that trend stand out even more from short-term climatic variability, Hansen and his colleagues produced the following graph, which charts global average temperature as a 5-year running mean and an 11-year running mean:

Now the many up-and-down squiggles are de-emphasized, drawing out the decade-by-decade rise in global temperature. Here’s the explanation from Hansen and his colleagues:

The 5‐year mean is sufficient to reduce the effect of the El Nino – La Nina cycles of tropical climate. The 11‐year mean minimizes the effect of solar variability – the brightness of the sun varies by a measurable amount over the sunspot cycle, which is typically of 10‐12 year duration.

The bottom line?

. . .  there is no global cooling trend. For the time being, until humanity brings its greenhouse gas emissions under control, we can expect each decade to be warmer than the preceding one. Weather fluctuations certainly exceed local temperature changes over the past half century. But the perceptive person should be able to see that climate is warming on decadal time scales.

Of course it’s possible that oceanic conditions or other sources of variability might produce a flattening in the warming trend on the decadal time scale. But that remains to be seen. And even Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, a scientist who received a lot of publicity recently for suggesting that this could happen, emphasizes that the long-term forecast is for warmer and warmer temperatures, thanks to our continuing emissions of greenhouse gases.

A good friend of mine who happens to remain skeptical of the human influence over climate, claims that scientists are “moving the goal posts” when they say that global warming will still be real even if temperatures remain flat or decline for 10 years. But I would like to invoke another sports metaphor: baseball. More specifically, the New York Yankees versus the Boston Red Sox. (Okay, those of you from Boston, please don’t get pissed off.)

Over the years, the Sox have certainly beat the Bombers many, many times. And they have even managed to pull off some extended winning streaks. But it is simply undeniable that over the long run, the Yankees have won more than the Red Sox have. (And do I need to mention World Series titles?) It’s certainly possible that going forward Boston might manage to buck the trend. But given the New York batting lineup and its pitching staff, the organization’s advantage in terms of resources, and the lessons of history, tell me this: Who are you going to bet on in the long run? Please don’t let emotion and team loyalty get in the way of a rational answer. You’re betting on a lot here — nothing less than the fate of Earth’s climate system.

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.

Q: Obviously, COP15 spurred this dramatic spike in coverage. But why did COP15 blow all the other upsurges out of the water?

A: This was a highly anticipated meeting, and the UEA CRU email hacking incident likely fed into the month’s numbers. There were news hooks aplenty not just for the shrinking environment/science journalist community, but also for those covering politics, business, society and so on. Also, the news hole during this time didn’t get swallowed up by other big issues…an example might be the tragedy in Haiti now. If this had happened December 12 rather than January 12, this likely would’ve looked much different.

Q: North American coverage lags behind that in Europe and Oceania. It makes sense that Europe would have more coverage, because interest is probably higher there, the conference was held there, and the ranks of European environmental journalists haven’t been savaged like they’ve been in the U.S. And Oceania’s bigger spike makes sense too, since island nations are expected to bear a disproportionate brunt of global warming from rising seas. But do you think there was less discourse overall in the United States than in those places? Or is it possible that more of our discussion happened on partisan television news channels and, even more so, in the blogosphere?

A: Part of the answer is embedded in your question here: I agree with your assessment of the factor of how it was held in Europe. But related to other contextual factors grabbing news attention like I mentioned above, I suspect the focus on the health care debate in Congress drew some attention from possible coverage…the heavy cuts in environment/science journalism in North America likely factors too.

Something important here to mention though is that Maria Mansfield and I had to make choices of which newspapers we incorporated, based partly on influence/circulation, and partly on our ability to get reliable access to their archives back to January 2004. That shaped our start date too. In so doing, we have 15 newspapers in the Asia/Middle East region, and 14 in Europe, but 9 in Oceania, 9 in North America and 3 in South America/Africa. So there is limited explanatory power in the absolute numbers compared across regions. Most useful is the ability here to get a sense of trends over time.

Q: What do you suppose this might mean for public opinion?

A: That’s a big and ongoing question. These numbers deal with amounts of coverage, not content. A given person can read/skim an article and interpret it or respond/resist the information in countless ways. It is a rocky and twisty ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ between the production of media representations and collective public opinion. But increased coverage in the public space certainly can keep it on the public and policy agenda.

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.

That region is the arc of densely populated territory south of the Himalayan mountain range. It includes some very large cities, including Islamabad, Delhi and Dhaka, and a host of other smaller towns and villages.

The risk arises for the same reason that the earthquake rocked Haiti, and the same reason that the densely populated San Francisco Bay region is at great risk from an earthquake along the Hayward fault: The Earth’s tectonic plates are in constant motion, and in some places, they do not slide smoothly past each other. They become locked for a time until enough strain builds up, causing a sudden rupture — and an earthquake.

Right now, plate movements are causing the subcontinent of India to ram into the underbelly of Asia. Like the hood of a car crumpled up in a collision with a larger SUV, the Indo-Asian tectonic collision has crumpled part of the Earth’s crust, raising up the Himalaya, Earth’s highest mountain range. This collision has been occurring over geologic time, meaning millions of years. Even so, India and Tibet are converging at a rate of about 20 millimeters, or just shy of an inch, each year, according to research by Roger Bilham and Peter Molnar, earth scientists here at the University of Colorado, and V. K. Gaur of the Indian Institute for Astrophysics,  published in the journal Science in 2001. (Subscription required.) That may seem like a tiny amount, but it adds up: India converges on Tibet at a rate of two meters per century.

The problem is that India doesn’t slip smoothly beneath the Tibetan Plateau in all places. Instead, India pushes and pushes against Tibet until the strain builds up enough for a massive rupture to occur — triggering a great earthquake. Such earthquakes occurred six times between 1800 and 1950, according to Bilham, Molnar and Gaur. But large portions of the arc of territory stretching along the Himalayan mountains did not rupture during this period.

From their Science paper:

Although the major earthquakes that have occurred along the Himalaya since 1800 differed in dimensions, there is no doubt that they destroyed vast regions along the front of the Himalaya. More important today, however, is that less than half of the Himalaya . . . has ruptured in that period.

In essence, this means that more than half of the Himalayan front is overdue for a great earthquake.

The researchers divided the Himalaya into 10 regions, with each one about 220 kilometers long. They found that in six of those regions, the land has the potential to shift suddenly by more than four meters in an earthquake. And in large areas, no great earthquake has occurred to relieve the strain since 1700, “suggesting that the slip potential may exceed 6 m in some places,” the researchers wrote.

Moreover, they could not rule out the possibility that some parts of the Himalaya have not ruptured to relieve the strain for up to 700 years. And that implies a shift in the landscape by as much as 10 meters.

To understand what that means, imagine a stretch of territory 100 or more miles wide suddenly shifting northward by about 30 feet. The resulting earthquake would almost certainly be much more devastating that the one that occurred in Haiti.

Devastation from an earthquake depends not only on its magnitude. It also depends, of course, on the density of population and the quality of construction. And this region of the world is home to millions of people, many of whom live and work in substandard structures.

From the paper in Science:

Today, about 50 million people are at risk from great Himalayan earthquakes, many of them in towns and villages in the Ganges plain. The capital cities of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Pakistan and several other cities with more than a million inhabitants are vulnerable to damage from some of these future earthquakes.

Based on what happened in the aftermath of the 2001 Bhuj earthquake in India, Bilham and Molnar estimated that a great Himalayan quake could kill 200,000 people. And possibly many, many more than that: “Such an estimate may be too low by an order of magnitude should a great earthquake occur near one of the megacities in the Ganges Plain.”

An order of magnitude higher than 200,000 yields a death toll in the millions.

Today, about 50 million people are at risk from great Himalayan earthquakes, many of them in towns and villages in the Ganges plain. The capital cities of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Pakistan and several other cities with more than a million inhabitants are vulnerable to damage from some of these future earthquakes.

So Haiti may well be just a prelude of what’s to come — a profoundly devastating mega-quake.

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:

• Rhett Butler, Founder and Editor, Mongabay.com, a conservation news web site with a focus on tropical forests. (Nominated by Erica Gies)
• Howard Frumkin, Director, National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Nominated by John Balbus)
• Jason Samenow, Environmental Scientist, Climate Change Division,U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (Nominated by Kevin Rosseel)
• Tom Yulsman, Co-Director of the Center for Environmental Journalism, University of Colorado School of Journalism & Mass Communication. (Nominated by Bud Ward)

And here are the organizational nominees:

• BBC World Service Trust, the BBC’s international development charity whose mission is to use the media to reduce poverty and promote human rights. (Nominated by Susanne Moser)
• Cool the Earth, a non-profit organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area, that offers a climate change awareness program to schools. (Nominated by Torri Estrada)

Take the time to check out the nominees, and vote for one of us. If you find CEJournal to be a useful addition to the discourse about climate science, climate policy, and climate journalism, please consider voting for me. Many thanks!