If-Then Knots ---------------------->

Strawman

Redstate has a post up criticizing predictions of Venusian runaway warming.  True, some proponents of addressing the ways we are causing the present warming trend have probably predicted Venusian runaway.  It would not surprise me to find that there are folks that are ignorant of climatology on both sides of the political debate.  However, in the scientific debate the risk of Venusian runaway warming is assessed as minimal.  This does not mean that we are out of the woods as far as all bad effects from our impact on the climate goes, of course.  On thing that particularly concerns me is the fact that changes in seasonal patterns and rainfall patterns may upset agriculture, especially in regions already susceptible to famine.  It will not take Venusian runaway warming for us to have those kinds of impacts.  I was going to slam Redstate in this post, but this comment and fact that the post's author felt compelled to say "I am not a 100% skeptic of global warming - nor of the possibility of human influence" shows that even on a far-right site like Redstate their are folks that understand climatology well enough that outright denial is not the default position.

SciFri on SC Greenhouse Gas Case

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"Exactly as Predicted"

Recent work published in Science further confirms the consensus view that recent climate change is caused by humans.  Realclimate headlines "The Sky IS Falling" and emphasizes that the results disconfirm denialist claims that solar forcing can explain the recent trends.

Science is for socialists.

Math is for Marxists.
Reading is for radicals.

These are the slogans of the reactionary right.  Consider this.  When Al Gore mentioned the leadership he showed in Congress toward the public-private partnership that lead to the commercial web, he was mocked by Republicans.  Those who know how important evidence-based leadership is to America's technological strength and leasdership in the world, like Vint "father of the internet" Cerf, actually awarded Gore for his work.  Now for his work on alerting the public to the urgent need of addressing global warming Gore is receiving  awards again. 

Sadly, as more negtive effects of global warming become evident we can expect the far right to be more interested in the paranoid conspiracy theories of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Exxon) and fiction writer Michael Crichton than evidence-based leaders like Gore and or to actual climatologists.  Happily, no one takes wingnut conspiracy theories about global scientific hoaxes all that seriously.

Global Warming Affecting Agriculture

Global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gasses and by deforestation is already affecting agriculture.  Steps toward stabilization are discussed at realclimate and on NPR's Science Friday.

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Global Warming Tipping Point?

According to the worst of the worst case scenarios, we're too far gone to prevent disruption of human life because of our CO2 emmisions.  But I'm talking about a tipping point in the political opposition to climate science (personified by Sen James Inhofe, who the Reps made CHAIR of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and his paranoid conspiracy theories).  It seems that Pat Robertson doesn't need a weatherman to see which way the mercury's going.  When anti-science fundies admit we need to cut our emissions, a political tipping point has been crossed. 

Certainly, he's a little late to join the consesnsus and likely is trying to position the religious right to not be too damaged politically by the consequeces of their decades of anti-science activity.  His choice of the word "convert" is interesting; those of us who are evidence-based don't tie our identity so tightly around our beliefs that we have to undergo radical personal change just to believe an overwhelmingly supported scientific theory, but it's nice to have a "convert."  Now, let's apply that fine American "get'r'done" attitude to achieving dramatic reductions in our emissions.  Maybe it's not too late.

Biofuels the Answer?

SciamBlog is skeptical on Biofuels.  Of course, you get the agribiz lobby plus heartland populism behind it and all of a sudden it's a "solution" for energy independence.  It's not unlike how you get developing ANWR as a "solution" when there is nowhere near enough oil there to offset our foreign dependency just because of the oil lobby and Alaska jobs populism.

We need to get serious.  A real national energy plan will focus on conservation.  I don't care if you do it by CAFE or by carbon taxes, we need to start to limit free atmospheric disposal of CO2.  The "flexfuel" stuff coming out of Detroit right now is bullshit.  We need radically better fuel economy from cars, and we need public policy that gets us there: whether by making gas reflect its "true cost" or by mandatory economy standards (btw, I just sent a letter to Pelosi on her stupid pandering promise of "lower gas prices" in the "Six for 06" plan she's hawking--cheaper crack for addicts?).

Next, we need a combination of new domestic energy sources emphasizing scalable renewables like wind and solar, but including cleaner coal (with carbon sequestration enforced under new source review standards--do your job EPA) and nuclear.  We need to be environmentalists, but we also need to be pragmatic and prioritize.  That means cutting the anti-nuke dogma for greens.  It means we need to get America on board with a comprehensive plan that both addresses both energy independence and global warming; that may mean sacrificing conservation interests for development of domestic coal while demanding that carbon sequestration be included under new source review standards and sound mining practices.

We need to face some facts here.  (1) Our greenhouse emissions are much, much more costly than we can immediately perceive.  (2) Dependence on foreign energy sources is a national security issue.  (3) No matter what, we are entering an era of higher energy costs.  With sound public policy we can put modernity on sustainable footing and restore energy abundance after only a brief high-cost transition.  With poor planning we'll get stuck over a barrel with no alternatives to maintain the basis of the American economy.  Unfortunately, I'm not so sure that public policy is being guided by sound science: not with the Dems (judging from the ethanol pandering) and especially not with the anti-science Reps continuing to believe that owning a Hummer is an inalienable right and that climatology is a socialist plot.

Congressional Climate Change Deniers Attack AP and Gore

Attacking the media and scientists for reporting to Americans that their CO2 emmissions are changing the climate, the Republicans on the James Inhofe lead US Senate Committee on Environment and Public works issued a press release today citing the usual handful of climate skeptics/deniers.  Below, I quote then refute each claim made in the press release.  The blockquoted portions are from the "Majority Press Release" linked above. 

The AP also chose to ignore Gore’s reliance on the now-discredited “hockey stick” by Dr. Michael Mann, which claims that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere remained relatively stable over 900 years, then spiked upward in the 20th century, and that the 1990’s were the warmest decade in at least 1000 years. Last week’s National Academy of Sciences report dispelled Mann’s often cited claims by reaffirming the existence of both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. See Senator Inhofe’s statement on the broken “Hockey Stick.” (http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=257697 )

In fact, this goes explicitly against results just released by the National Academy of Science vindicating the "hockey stick" and the Mann study as "plausible."  The Republicans on the committee are now misrepresenting the outcome of the NAS report that they themselves commissioned.  Here is what the report concluded specifically: "The Research Council committee found the Mann team's conclusion that warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last thousand years to be plausible, but it had less confidence that the warming was unprecedented prior to 1600; fewer proxies -- in fewer locations -- provide temperatures for periods before then."  That hardly counts as "discreditting."

An even more detailed discussion of the "hockey stick" can be found on realclimate.org.  Of particular note is the fact that the Mann study is not the only peer-reviewed study showing exceptional warming trends.

Gore’s claim that global warming is causing the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro to disappear has also been debunked by scientific reports. For example, a 2004 study in the journal Nature makes clear that Kilimanjaro is experiencing less snowfall because there’s less moisture in the air due to deforestation around Kilimanjaro.

Every single tropical glacier on earth is receeding, including many that do not have changes in precipitation and humidity due to deforestation.  Kilimanjaro may be receeding because of both warmer temperatures and deforestation.  Here is a National Geographic article in which the authors of the study mentioned discuss how a variety of factors including global warming are causing the Kilimanjaro glaciers to disapear.  In that article, Dr. Stefan Hastenrath describes how these factors are combining with warmer temperatures to drive the disapearance: "The warming increases humidity, and as the air gets more moist, it hinders evaporation.  The energy saved from evaporation is instead spent on melting. That might seem like a good thing—to stop evaporation of the glaciers—but it's certainly not. Melting is eight times more energy-efficient than evaporation, so now, with global warming, the glaciers are disappearing eight times faster than before."

Bob Carter--"Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention.  The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

Carter loses credibility for grossly overstating his criticism.  There is room for further discussion of some of the points made in Gore's movie, but it is not grossly out of line with science in any respect.  If Gore is an "embarassment to science," then the following organizations are also "embarrasments to science" for endorsing the consensus view that more greenhouse gasses means more greenhouse effect:

A joint statement from the the following acaedmies of science:
* Academia Brasiliera de Ciências (Bazil)
* Royal Society of Canada
* Chinese Academy of Sciences
* Academié des Sciences (France)
* Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)
* Indian National Science Academy
* Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)
* Science Council of Japan
* Russian Academy of Sciences
* Royal Society (United Kingdom)
* National Academy of Sciences (United States of America)
* Australian Academy of Sciences
* Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts
* Caribbean Academy of Sciences
* Indonesian Academy of Sciences
* Royal Irish Academy
* Academy of Sciences Malaysia
* Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand
* Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Here are additional statements from American and Canadian professional scientific organizations:

* NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
* National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
* National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
* State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC)
* Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
* Royal Society of the United Kingdom (RS)
* American Geophysical Union (AGU)
* National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
* American Meteorological Society (AMS)
* Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)

(Hat tip to A Few Things Ill Considered.)

Richard Lindzen--“A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.”

I'm suspicious that Lindzen has not seen the film.  Gore is very careful to make the case that the present change is unprecedented in the past 600,000 years and that it is driven by human activity.  He doesn't ignore the fact that there are both positive and negative natural forcings.  Lindzen is the one ignoring (assiduously even) the fact that in addition to natural forcings there can also be anthro forcings, such as dumping billions of tons of excess greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

“…A study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.”

In his unpublished review of Oreskes meta-study, Peiser makes several seemingly intentional mistakes to get different results.  He presents himself as if he were trying to duplicate her results, but does not use her original search terms and (most notably) includes non-peer reviewed work.  Here is a more detailed response to Peiser.

Dr Roy Spencer--“…Temperature measurements in the arctic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930's...before most greenhouse gas emissions. Don't you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then were low, too?”

Dr. Tim Ball--"The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology"

Spencer and Ball contradict the findings of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment compiled by 300 researchers of the climate and ecology of the Arctic.  Spencer tries to refute the fact that the present warming is due to increasing the greenhouse effect by increasing greenhouse gasses by pointing out that it was also unusually warm in the Arctic in the 1930s.  This is the familiar fallacy of supposing that like effects always have same causes.  Ball's attempt is just kind of silly.  I don't recall Gore citing a specific study in the film, and as the ACIA shows there is not just one study showing the Arctic warming trend. 

The Reps on the US Senate Committee on the Environment and Piublic Works lead by Inhofe want it both ways; first they quote Spencer saying that the Arctic warming is precendented then they have Ball saying that the warming isn't even happening.  They need to get their story straight.  Here is what NASA (apparently and "embarassment to US science") said in a 2003 report on Arctic warming: "Experts have long regarded Earth's polar regions as early indicators for global climate change. But until the last few years, wide ranging, comprehensive research about overall polar conditions has been challenging to conduct. Now a more than twenty-year record of space based measurements has been analyzed by researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Based on their findings, evidence of a warming planet continues to grow."  Since 2003, more evidence of the warming Arctic has accumulated.  Indeed, April of 2006 was warmer than any May ever recorded.

It is time to act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and time for the anti-science Republicans to stop this stuff where they mine right-wing editorials on global warming for quotes from the mere handful of skeptics/deniers that are left.  It's no mistake that these same names (Lindzen, Ball, Spencer, etc.) turn up over and over again.  Out of thousands of climate scientists, these are the only ones left for the politically motivated deniers to turn to.  See Deltoid (especially for the graph provided on the Arctic data) and ThinkProgress for more.  Here's a great blog on Richard Lindzen.

Another Hit-Piece on "An Inconvenient Truth"

In an article written for the "Grassroot Institute," a conservative "thinktank," Michael R Fox quotes Dr Robert Balling's claim that Al Gore misleads his audience by referencing glacial recession on Mt Kilamanjaro.  Balling's article states:

2) Gore discusses glacial and snowpack retreats atop Mt. Kilimanjaro, implying that human induced global warming is to blame. But Gore fails to mention that the snows of Kilimanjaro have been retreating for more than 100 years, largely due to declining atmospheric moisture, not global warming. Gore does not acknowledge the two major articles on the subject published in 2004 in the International Journal of Climatology and the Journal of Geophysical Research showing that modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro was initiated by a reduction in precipitation at the end of the nineteenth century and not by local or global warming.

Perhaps Balling does not want to get caught red-handed in a bald faced lie, after the way the Competitive Enterprise Instute has humiliated itself and its funders, like Exxon Mobil, with their highly misleading advertisement.  In any case, having had to do some extra work because Fox did not provide authors or a title, I am presuming that Fox is referring to this paper discussing whether factors beyond global warming.  That article got alot of attention after it was cited in a "Greening Earth Society," which also receives funds from Exxon Mobil, newsletter as "debunking" anthropogenic global warming.  The article was titled, "Snow Fooling!: Mount Kilamanjaro's glacier retreat is not related to global warming."  That article's false interpretation that the study contradicts the view that global warming is causing Kilimanjaro's glacial retreat has now been widely circulated online amoung groups that demagogue climate scientists and environmentalists. However, Dr. Georg Kaser, the lead author of the study that was cited, contradicted the Exxon funded interpretation:

"We are entirely against the black-and-white picture that says it is either global warming or not global warming."

  This appears to be another case of global warming deniers misrepresenting scientific research.  Dr. Douglas R Hardy, another author on the Kilimanjaro study, has commented (my emphasis):

We have a mere 2.5 years of actual field measurements from Kilimanjaro glaciers, unlike many other regions, so our understanding of their relationship with climate and the volcano is just beginning to develop.  Using these preliminary findings to refute or even question global warming borders on the absurd.

The work of Kaser et al is advancing and refining the understanding of Kilimanjaro in particular.  None of the authors think their work is conclusive and none think that it contradicts in any way the global consensus reflected in the "Joint science academies’ statement: Global response to climate change" calling for action to reduce greenhouse emissions.  Furthermore, the balance of research on Kilimanjaro and on glaciers in the tropics in general suggest a strong role of global warming.  Dr. Lonnie G Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, who has collected data from ice cores that go much further back than 2.5 years has maintained that in the last 20 years climate change has played a major role in the glacial recession on Kilimanjaro.  Dr. Stefan Hastenrath has shown that on other tropical glaciers patterns of melting changed in 1962.  Prior to that, in areas of the mountain that were shaded the melting had not been occuring, but after 1962 melting occured even in the shaded regions, suggesting that climate change began playing a significant role in the 1960s.  Gore's movie is a documentary on global warming, not just Kilimanjaro.  He might have spent 2 or 3 hours giving an account of all research on Kilimanjaro including the preliminary and tentative research of Kaser et al on factors in addition to global warming, but the science as a whole supports the claim that the glaciers are melting because of glogal warming.  Dr Hastenrath describes how global warming is accelerating the melting of the glaciers (emphasis added):

"The warming increases humidity, and as the air gets more moist, it hinders evaporation.  The energy saved from evaporation is instead spent on melting. That might seem like a good thing—to stop evaporation of the glaciers—but it's certainly not. Melting is eight times more energy-efficient than evaporation, so now, with global warming, the glaciers are disappearing eight times faster than before."

Compared to the misinformation put out by the groups funded by Exxon, which according to the authors of the studies themselves in two cases now, grossly misrepresent the significance of the work that has been cited, Gore's movie helps close the gap between what science knows about global warming and what the public understands. 

Moral Failing of Gore's Film?

I have yet to see it, but I have some trouble with the standard whereby "An Inconvenient Truth" is evaluated here on Slate by Gregg Easterbrook.

The trouble with film activism is that it invites being picked apart.  Given time constraints and audience considerations, the movie will not be perfectly measured in every statement, nor will it be comprehensive on every possible issue that might be raised.  The easy way out for a review is to find a couple loose ends to knock the filmakers for leaving untied and build around that.  Is every statement as careful as possible?  Is enough time spent on solutions?

A critic using this approach, might be invited by the moralistic tone and message of the film to cast his criticism in moral terms.  But that misses a more fundamental moral and critical evaluation:

Given the restraints of the medium does the movie serve to inform or misinform compared to the baseline--ie, compared to the news media's complete failure to convey the character of the scientific consensus to the population?

Easterbrooks review offers some interesting questions for further discussion, like whether stopping global warming requires "deprivation"and what the c/b on that would be, but that's just it: those are questions for further discussion not shortcomings of the film.  The moral failure is for Eastbrook to set "An Inconvenient Truth" up for evaluation against his perfectly nuanced ideal film, rather thanevaluating it on its own terms, within the constraints of the medium, and against the status quo popular information sources on climate change.  This is a moral failure because his review and reviews like his (which are many) mute the impact of the film against the status quo, wherein the public is deliberately mislead.