The Irony, It Burns …
By Willis Eschenbach | Watts Up With That? | June 3, 2010
Anthony commented yesterday on the question of atolls and sea level rise here, and I had previously written on the subject in my post “Floating Islands“. However, Anthony referenced a paper which was incorrectly linked by New Scientist. So I thought I’d provide some more information on the actual study, entitled “The dynamic response of reef islands to sea level rise: evidence from multi-decadal analysis of island change in the central pacific”, by Arthur Webb and Paul Kench.
One of the ironies of the new paper involves the atoll of Amatuku in the island nation of Tuvalu. Amatuku became the first poster child of “drowning atolls” due to an article in the July/August 2003 issue of Sierra Magazine, the magazine of the Sierra Club. The article was entitled “High Tide in Tuvalu”, with the sub-title “In the tropical Pacific, climate change threatens to create a real-life Atlantis.” Here’s a recent photo of “Atlantis”:
Figure 1. Photo taken in the South Pacific nation of Tuvalu (8°S, 179°E), showing Amatuku Atoll and the abandoned causeway. PHOTO SOURCE
In the Sierra Magazine article the author described the terrifying effects of “global warming” on Amatuku Atoll, site of the Tuvalu Maritime Training Institute:
To explain global warming in stark detail, all Tito Tapungao has to do is show a visitor around the grounds of his school. Dressed in his sailor’s pressed whites, the chief executive officer of the Tuvalu Maritime Training Institute points out a small brick cabin built by missionaries in 1903. Now, a century later, annual high tides rise halfway up the bedposts.
YIKES! Be very afraid. So what is the irony in the new study?
Well, I’ll get to that. But first, a bit of history. The Sierra Magazine article was what impelled me to write my 2004 paper (Word Doc) on Tuvalu. I read that article, and my urban legend detector started ringing like crazy. Consider: the missionaries’ cabin was likely built a metre or so above high tide. Add another half metre for the floor, and a half metre to get “halfway up the bedposts” … no way, I thought, that the sea level has risen two metres in Tuvalu.
Upon further investigation, I found out that the answer was already known, because geologists had studied (pdf) the area. They found the changes in the shape of Amatuku Atoll were a result of changing currents from major alterations made in the reef during World War Two. A channel was cut from the lagoon to Amatuku, and a causeway was constructed between Amatuku and nearby Malitefale Atoll. Fill to make the causeway came from “borrow pits”, holes dug in the reef flats to provide coral rubble for the construction. And some decades after the war, further borrow pits were dug to provide building materials for the Maritime Institute. The swimmers in the Fig. 1 are swimming in one of the old borrow pits. Here’s an aerial view of the changes:
Figure 2. Amatuku and Malitefale Atolls, Tuvalu, South Pacific. Amatuku is less than a kilometre long.
As you can see, the changes in the reef structure were quite extensive. All of these alterations in the reef changed the currents around the two atolls. And of course, as a result, the shape of the atolls changed. This change in shape is to be expected – after all, atolls are just piles of sand and rubble in the middle of a wild ocean. One of the results was the erosion (not from CO2, not from warming, not from sea level rise, but erosion from man-made changes in the reef) of the corner of the atoll where the missionaries’ cabin was located.
Over the years since I published my paper, I’ve taken a lot of heat for my claims. I’ve gotten plenty of irate emails from folks in Tuvalu and around the world, emails castigating me for suggesting that the rising sea levels won’t drown the atolls, emails impugning my ancestry, emails saying we’d soon see thousands of “climate refugees” from Tuvalu, emails proposing that I perform anatomically implausible acts of sexual auto-congress, and mostly emails saying that I was clearly wrong, that it was patently obvious that rising sea levels would inevitably drown the atolls, duh, so there.
OK, enough history. I got a pre-publication copy of the current paper under discussion from one of my secret underground (underwater?) sources, my thanks to WS. The abstract of the paper says (emphasis mine):
Abstract
Low-lying atoll islands are widely perceived to erode in response to measured and future sea level rise. Using historical aerial photography and satellite images this study presents the first quantitative analysis of physical changes in 27 atoll islands in the central Pacific over a 19 to 61 year period. This period of analysis corresponds with instrumental records that show a rate of sea level rise of 2.0 mm.y-1 in the Pacific.
Results show that 86% of islands remained stable (43%) or increased in area (43%) over the timeframe of analysis. Largest decadal rates of increase in island area range between 0.1 to 5.6 hectares. Only 14% of study islands exhibited a net reduction in island area. Despite small net changes in area, islands exhibited larger gross changes. This was expressed as changes in the planform configuration and position of islands on reef platforms. Modes of island change included: ocean shoreline displacement toward the lagoon; lagoon shoreline progradation; and, extension of the ends of elongate islands. Collectively these adjustments represent net lagoonward migration of islands in 65% of cases.
Results contradict existing paradigms of island response and have significant implications for the consideration of island stability under ongoing sea level rise in the central Pacific. First, islands are geomorphologically persistent features on atoll reef platforms and can increase in island area despite sea level change. Second; islands are dynamic landforms that undergo a range of physical adjustments in responses to changing boundary conditions, of which sea level is just one factor. Third, erosion of island shorelines must be reconsidered in the context of physical adjustments of the entire island shoreline as erosion may be balanced by progradation on other sectors of shorelines. Results indicate that the style and magnitude of geomorphic change will vary between islands. Therefore, Island nations must place a high priority on resolving the precise styles and rates of change that will occur over the next century and reconsider the implications for adaption.
Ahhh, vindication is sweet. The authors agreed totally with what I had written in 2004. Rising sea levels don’t destroy atolls, and their shape is always changing. Exactly what I had taken so much heat for saying.
In addition to the Abstract, the Conclusions of the paper are quite interesting. Here are some extracts (emphasis mine):
Conclusions
The future persistence of low-lying reef islands has been the subject of considerable international concern and scientific debate. Current rates of sea level rise are widely believed to have destabilised islands promoting widespread erosion and threatening the existence of atoll nations. This study presents analysis of the physical change in 27 atoll islands located in the central Pacific Ocean over the past 20 to 60 years, a period over which instrumental records indicate an increase in sea level of the order of 2.0 mm y-1.
The results show that island area has remained largely stable or increased over the timeframe of analysis. Forty-three percent of islands increased in area by more than 3% with the largest increases of 30% on Betio (Tarawa atoll) and 28.3% on Funamanu (Funafuti atoll [the main atoll in Tuvalu – w.]). There is no evidence of large scale reduction in island area despite the upward trend in sea level. Consequently, islands have predominantly been persistent or expanded in area on atoll rims for the past 20 to 60 years.
… Results of this study contradict widespread perceptions that all reef islands are eroding in response to recent sea level rise. Importantly, the results suggest that reef islands are geomorphically resilient landforms that thus far have predominantly remained static or grown in area over the last 20 – 60 years. Given this positive trend, reef islands may not disappear from atoll rims and other coral reefs in the near-future as speculated. However, islands will undergo continued geomorphic change. Based on the evidence presented in this study it can be expected that the pace of geomorphic change may increase with future accelerated sea level rise. Results do not suggest that erosion will not occur. Indeed, as found in 15% of the islands in this study, erosion may occur on some islands. Rather, island erosion should be considered as one of a spectrum of geomorphic changes that have been highlighted in this study and which also include: lagoon shoreline progradation; island migration on reef platforms; island expansion and island extension. The specific mode and magnitude of geomorphic change is likely to vary between islands. Therefore, island nations must better understand the pace and diversity of island morphological change and consider the implications of island persistence and morphodynamics for future adaptation.
Couldn’t say it better myself … and oh, yeah, what about the irony?
Well, Amatuku, the poster child of disappearing atolls, the threatened “real-life Atlantis”, home of the disappearing missionaries’ cabin, happened to be one of the atolls considered in the study. The authors found that despite the loss of the missionaries’ cabin, Amatuku increased in area by about 5% over the nineteen year period during which it was studied … ah, the irony, it burns.
Rebel scientists force Royal Society to accept climate change scepticism
By Ben Webster |Timesonline | May 29, 2010
Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.
The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.
The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect — there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.”
The admission that the society needs to conduct the review is a blow to attempts by the UN to reach a global deal on cutting emissions. The Royal Society is viewed as one of the leading authorities on the topic and it nominated the panel that investigated and endorsed the climate science of the University of East Anglia.
Sir Alan Rudge, a society Fellow and former member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee, is one of the leaders of the rebellion who gathered signatures on a petition sent to Lord Rees, the society president.
He told The Times that the society had adopted an “unnecessarily alarmist position” on climate change.
Sir Alan, 72, an electrical engineer, is a member of the advisory council of the climate sceptic think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
He said: “I think the Royal Society should be more neutral and welcome credible contributions from both sceptics and alarmists alike. There is a lot of science to be done before we can be certain about climate change and before we impose upon ourselves the huge economic burden of cutting emissions.”
He refused to name the other signatories but admitted that few of them had worked directly in climate science and many were retired.
“One of the reasons people like myself are willing to put our heads above the parapet is that our careers are not at risk from being labelled a denier or flat-Earther because we say the science is not settled. The bullying of people into silence has unfortunately been effective.”
Only a fraction of the society’s 1,300 Fellows were approached and a third of those declined to sign the petition.
The rebels are concerned by a document entitled Climate Change Controversies, published by the society in 2007. The document attempts to refute what it describes as the misleading arguments employed by sceptics.
The document, which the society has used to influence media coverage of climate change, concludes: “The science clearly points to the need for nations to take urgent steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, as much and as fast as possible, to reduce the more severe aspects of climate change.”
Lord Rees admitted that there were differing views among Fellows but said that the new guide would be “based on expert views backed up by sound scientific evidence”.
Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at LSE, urged the other signatories to come forward. “If these scientists have doubts about the science on climate change, they should come out and speak about it.”
He said that the petition would fuel public doubt about climate change and that it was important to know how many of the signatories had professional knowledge of the topic.
Global Floating Ice In “Constant Retreat”???
By Willis Eschenbach | May 28, 2010
I don’t know what to make of this one. I was wandering the web when I came across a Reuters article about a scientific study called “Global Floating Ice In “Constant Retreat”: Study“.
The Reuters article opens with this arresting text (emphasis mine):
LONDON
Wed Apr 28, 2010 1:38pm EDT
(Reuters) – The world’s floating ice is in “constant retreat,” showing an instability which will increase global sea levels, according to a report published in Geophysical Research Letters on Wednesday.
Floating ice had disappeared at a steady rate over the past 10 years, according to the first measurement of its kind.
“Hello,” sez I, “how can the sea ice be in constant retreat?” I knew from my previous research that the global ice was not in any kind of retreat at all.
I was also suspicious because of the next part of the quote:
“It’s a large number,” said Professor Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds, lead author of the paper, estimating the net loss of floating sea ice and ice shelves in the last decade at 7,420 cubic kilometers.
I went off to find the actual paper, and discovered a curious thing.
So what did I discover … and why is their quote suspicious?
Let me start with why their quote is suspicious. It is their claim that the earth has lost 7,420 cubic kilometres of ice. As I have mentioned elsewhere, when I see numbers I automatically do an “order of magnitude” calculation in my head to see if they are reasonable or not.
I knew from my previous research that there is about twenty million square kilometres (km^2) of floating ice on the planet. I also knew that much of it out towards the edges is only a metre or two thick.
So if the ice averaged say 1.5 metres thick out at the edges where the loss happens, a seven thousand cubic kilometer loss would mean a total loss of ice area of about five million km^2, or a quarter of the area of the world’s floating ice. I think someone would have noticed that before now …
Of course, that made me wonder if the problem was in the study, or in the Reuters quote. However, that same number (7,420 cubic kilometres lost) appeared in no less than 81 other online publications. So I went haring off to find the article.
One of publications reporting the story, NewScientist, 5 May, 2010, gave the “doi:” for the article. The DOI is the “Digital Object Identifier”, and it should link directly to the article, which was supposed to have been published by Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) on Wednesday, April 28th … but the curious thing I discovered was that the DOI didn’t work.
Someone had commented on that, saying “The DOI doesn’t work.” This was replied to by someone called Marshall, from newscientist.com, who said:
Hi Eric, it’s because the article hasn’t been published on GRL’s website yet. The DOI is taken directly from our press copy of the paper, so once the article is published it should work.
OK, fair enough … although the original Reuters article was allegedly published on April 28, and today is May 28, and the DOI still isn’t working. So I went to the GRL web site to see what I could find.
I first did a search for any articles by “Shepherd” in “GRL” for “2010″, and I got this:
Figure 2. Ooooops …
Thinking it might have been misfiled, I searched through all of the May articles for anything by Shepherd. Nil. I looked through the May articles for anything regarding “ice”. Nada. I repeated both searches for April. Once again, zip. Niente. Nothing.
I thought “Well, maybe it appeared in another journal”. So I took a look on Google, but I found nothing. Google did find 32,500 instances of “ice in constant retreat”, of which 7,550 also contained “GRL”.
Google also revealed that the report of the study has been picked up by ABC News, NewsDaily, Yahoo News, New Scientist, Arab News, and ScienceDaily. It was featured on Joe Romm’s global warming blog “ClimateProgress”. It has been referred to in blogs and news reports from India, Australia, Russia, and China. It shows up on TweetMeme, Huffington Post, and Facebook. Even Scientific American has an article on it.
So at this point, it has gone round and round the world. It has been illustrated with all kinds of pictures of melting ice, and of global ice extent, and (inevitably) of polar bears. It has been discussed and debated and dissected around the web.
And with all of that publicity, with all those news reports, with all that discussion and debate … as near as I can determine, despite Reuters saying it was published a month ago, the study has never been published anywhere.
Not only that, but nobody seems to have noticed that the study has never been published.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Scientific American must have noticed, because they quietly removed the page where they had published the report … but it is still in Google’s cache.
One last thing. In all of that, in the frenzy to get out tomorrow’s news today, in the rush to report the latest scientific rumour, people seem to have forgotten to ask … how is the global sea ice actually doing?
Glad you asked. Here’s today’s information, from Cryosphere Today:
Figure 3. Daily global sea ice anomaly (red line) compared to 1979-2008 average. Link contains full sized image.
As you can see, as of today, the global sea ice is exactly on the line representing the 1979-2008 average. So over the last ten years, instead of a loss of 7,420 cubic kilometres, the loss has been … somewhere around zero. Go figure.
Tony Blair hired by US billionaire Vinod Khosla for climate change advice
The Telegraph | May 25, 2010
Tony Blair has been hired as an adviser on climate change by Californian billionaire Vinod Khosla, the latest in a string of jobs the former prime minister has taken.
The agreement will see Tony Blair Associates give strategic advice to Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in companies pursuing green technologies. Mr Khosla, who made his fortune as co-founder of computing giant Sun Microsystems, is hoping that Mr Blair’s decade on the global stage helps unlock doors for the companies that California-based Khosla Ventures invests in.
The former prime minister, briefly enlisted last month by Gordon Brown to help Labour’s flagging election campaign, will lend his name to projects, make introductions and deliver advice. Khosla Ventures has already raised more than $1bn from investors to bet on a range of technologies from solar power to biofuels.
Mr Khosla said that “with Tony’s advice and influence’ we will create opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators to devise practical solutions that can solve today’s most pressing problems.”
It wasn’t disclosed how much Mr Blair will be paid for the advice he gives to Khosla. He already has a £2m lobbying post with JP Morgan Chase and a £500,000 job with Zurich Financial.
Mr Blair also charges tens of thousands of pounds for public speaking, received a £4.5m advance for his memoirs and set up Tony Blair Associates to advise foreign countries including Kuwait. In total, he is estimated to have earned at least £15 million since leaving office two and a half years ago.
Mr Blair said that he believes “entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and beyond will have a tremendous impact on our environmental future.”
Climate alarmism in Britain: “…the poll figures are going through the floor.”
Excerpts from the New York Times:
Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL | May 25, 2010
LONDON — Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?
Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.
A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.
And London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery — not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned.
“Before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this climate change problem is just dreadful,’ ” said Jillian Leddra, 50, a musician who was shopping in London on a recent lunch hour. “But now I have my doubts, and I’m wondering if it’s been overhyped.”
Perhaps sensing that climate is now a political nonstarter, David Cameron, Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, was “strangely muted” on the issue in a recent pre-election debate, as The Daily Telegraph put it, though it had previously been one of his passions.
And a poll in January of the personal priorities of 141 Conservative Party candidates deemed capable of victory in the recent election found that “reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” was the least important of the 19 issues presented to them.
…
“Legitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem,” Ben Stewart, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said at the meeting of environmentalists here. “This is happening in the context of overwhelming scientific agreement that climate change is real and a threat. But the poll figures are going through the floor.”
The lack of fervor about climate change is also true of the United States, where action on climate and emissions reduction is still very much a work in progress, and concern about global warming was never as strong as in Europe. A March Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 percent a year ago… Read the complete story here
On Being the Wrong Size
By Willis Eschenbach | May 23, 2010
This topic is a particular peeve of mine, so I hope I will be forgiven if I wax wroth.
There is a most marvelous piece of technology called the GRACE satellites, which stands for the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. It is composed of two satellites flying in formation. Measuring the distance between the two satellites to the nearest micron (a hundredth of the width of a hair) allows us to calculate the weight of things on the earth very accurately.
One of the things that the GRACE satellites have allowed us to calculate is the ice loss from the Greenland Ice Cap. There is a new article about the Greenland results called Weighing Greenland.
Figure 1. The two GRACE satellites flying in tandem, and constantly measuring the distance between them.
So, what’s not to like about the article?
Well, the article opens by saying:
Scott Luthcke weighs Greenland — every 10 days. And the island has been losing weight, an average of 183 gigatons (or 200 cubic kilometers) — in ice — annually during the past six years. That’s one third the volume of water in Lake Erie every year. Greenland’s shrinking ice sheet offers some of the most powerful evidence of global warming.
Now, that sounds pretty scary, it’s losing a third of the volume of Lake Erie every year. Can’t have that.
But what does that volume, a third of Lake Erie, really mean? We could also say that it’s 80 million Olympic swimming pools, or 400 times the volume of Sydney Harbor, or about the same volume as the known world oil reserves. Or we could say the ice loss is 550 times the weight of all humans on the Earth, or the weight of 31,000 Great Pyramids … but we’re getting no closer to understanding what that ice loss means.
To understand what it means, there is only one thing to which we should compare the ice loss, and that is the ice volume of the Greenland Ice Cap itself. So how many cubic kilometres of ice are sitting up there on Greenland?
My favorite reference for these kinds of questions is the Physics Factbook, because rather than give just one number, they give a variety of answers from different authors. In this case I went to the page on Polar Ice Caps. It gives the following answers:
Spaulding & Markowitz, Heath Earth Science. Heath, 1994: 195. says less than 5.1 million cubic kilometres (often written as “km^3″).
“Greenland.” World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago: World Book, 1999: 325 says 2.8 million km^3.
Satellite Image Atlas of Glaciers of the World. US Geological Survey (USGS) says 2.6 million km^3.
Schultz, Gwen. Ice Age Lost. 1974. 232, 75. also says 2.6 million km^3.
Denmark/Greenland. Greenland Tourism. Danish Tourist Board says less than 5.5 million km^3.
Which of these should we choose? Well, the two larger figures both say “less than”, so they are upper limits. The Physics Factbook says “From my research, I have found different values for the volume of the polar ice caps. … For Greenland, it is approximately 3,000,000 km^3.” Of course, we would have to say that there is an error in that figure, likely on the order of ± 0.4 million km^3 or so.
So now we have something to which we can compare our one-third of Lake Erie or 400 Sidney Harbors or 550 times the weight of the global population. And when we do so, we find that the annual loss is around 200 km^3 lost annually out of some 3,000,000 km^3 total. This means that Greenland is losing about 0.007% of its total mass every year … seven thousandths of one percent lost annually, be still, my beating heart …
And if that terrifying rate of loss continues unabated, of course, it will all be gone in a mere 15,000 years.
That’s my pet peeve, that numbers are being presented in the most frightening way possible. The loss of 200 km^3 of ice per year is not “some of the most powerful evidence of global warming”, that’s hyperbole. It is a trivial change in a huge block of ice.
And what about the errors in the measurements? We know that the error in the Greenland Ice Cap is on the order of 0.4 million km^3. How about the error in the GRACE measurements? This reference indicates that there is about a ± 10% error in the GRACE Greenland estimates. How does that affect our numbers?
Well, if we take the small estimate of ice cap volume, and the large estimate of loss, we get 220 km^3 lost annually / 2,600,000 km^3 total. This is an annual loss of 0.008%, and a time to total loss of 12,000 years.
Going the other way, we get 180 km^3 lost annually / 3,400,000 km^3 total. This is an annual loss of 0.005%, and a time to total loss of 19,000 years.
It is always important to include the errors in the calculation, to see if they make a significant difference in the result. In this case they happen to not make much difference, but each case is different.
That’s what angrifies my blood mightily, meaningless numbers with no errors presented for maximum shock value. Looking at the real measure, we find that Greenland is losing around 0.005% — 0.008% of its ice annually, and if that rate continues, since this is May 23rd, 2010, the Greenland Ice Cap will disappear entirely somewhere between the year 14010 and the year 21010 … on May 23rd …
So the next time you read something that breathlessly says …
“If this activity in northwest Greenland continues and really accelerates some of the major glaciers in the area — like the Humboldt Glacier and the Peterman Glacier — Greenland’s total ice loss could easily be increased by an additional 50 to 100 cubic kilometers (12 to 24 cubic miles) within a few years”
… you can say “Well, if it does increase by the larger estimate of 100 cubic km per year, and that’s a big if since the scientists are just guessing, that would increase the loss from 0.007% per year to around 0.010% per year, meaning that the Greenland Ice Cap would only last until May 23rd, 12010.”
Finally, the original article that got my blood boiling finishes as follows:
The good news for Luthcke is that a separate team using an entirely different method has come up with measurements of Greenland’s melting ice that, he says, are almost identical to his GRACE data. The bad news, of course, is that both sets of measurements make it all the more certain that Greenland’s ice is melting faster than anyone expected.
Oh, please, spare me. As the article points out, we’ve only been measuring Greenland ice using the GRACE satellites for six years now. How could anyone have “expected” anything? What, were they expecting a loss of 0.003% or something? And how is a Greenland ice loss of seven thousandths of one percent per year “bad news”? Grrrr …
I’ll stop here, as I can feel my blood pressure rising again. And as this is a family blog, I don’t want to revert to being the un-reformed cowboy I was in my youth, because if I did I’d start needlessly but imaginatively and loudly speculating on the ancestry, personal habits, and sexual malpractices of the author of said article … instead, I’m going to go drink a Corona beer and reflect on the strange vagaries of human beings, who always seem to want to read “bad news”.
Crisis in New Zealand climatology
The warming that wasn’t
By Barry Brill | Quadrant Online | May 15, 2010
The official archivist of New Zealand’s climate records, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), offers top billing to its 147-year-old national mean temperature series (the “NIWA Seven-station Series” or NSS). This series shows that New Zealand experienced a twentieth-century warming trend of 0.92°C.
The official temperature record is wrong. The instrumental raw data correctly show that New Zealand average temperatures have remained remarkably steady at 12.6°C +/- 0.5°C for a century and a half. NIWA’s doctoring of that data is indefensible.
The NSS is the outcome of a subjective data series produced by a single Government scientist, whose work has never been peer-reviewed or subjected to proper quality checking. It was smuggled into the official archive without any formal process. It is undocumented and sans metadata, and it could not be defended in any court of law. Yet the full line-up of NIWA climate scientists has gone to extraordinary lengths to support this falsified warming and to fiercely attack its critics.
For nearly 15 years, the 20th-century warming trend of 0.92°C derived from the NSS has been at the centre of NIWA official advice to all tiers of New Zealand Government – Central, Regional and Local. It informs the NIWA climate model. It is used in sworn expert testimony in Environment Court hearings. Its dramatic graph graces the front page of NIWA’s printed brochures and its website.
Internationally, the NSS 0.92°C trend is a foundation stone for the Australia-New Zealand Chapter in the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessment Reports. In 1994, it was submitted to HadleyCRUT, so as to influence the vast expanses of the South Pacific in the calculation of globally-averaged temperatures.
The Minister of Research Science and Technology, the Hon Dr Wayne Mapp, has finally become alarmed at the murky provenance of the NSS. The Government has directed and funded a 6-month project to produce a new national temperature record, with published data and transparent processes. The replacement record is to be the subject of a scientific paper, which is to be peer-reviewed by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
Hon Rodney Hide, a climate sceptic who is a Minister in the current Government and leader of the junior coalition partner, the ACT Party, has called upon his ministerial colleagues to formally repudiate the NSS and to withdraw all publications and formal papers which are based on the spurious warming trend of 0.92°C. The Government has not yet responded to this challenge.
New Zealand is a small country, with a strong tradition of open Government, and is not an easy place to keep secrets. The acceptance of the NSS for so long offers evidence of the dictum: “you can fool all of the people some of the time..” But if that can happen in New Zealand, how much greater is the probability that similar shenanigans could be happening in larger, more complex, jurisdictions?
BACKGROUND
The New Zealand Meteorological Service, with its forebears, has been measuring and recording our weather since 1861. In 1992, it published a booklet containing a detailed history of all its weather stations, along with 140 years of climate data. In that year, NIWA came into being and has now published most of the Met Service data online.
In 2007, the then Prime Minister announced her party’s intention that New Zealand should lead the world in fighting climate change, and aim to be the world’s first carbon-neutral country by 2025.
Earlier in 2007, NIWA produced a web page, followed by a printed brochure, with a graph showing that New Zealand had already warmed by an amount far in excess of global averages. The web page claimed a temperature increase of 1.1C during the 144 years of Met Service records, and a 0.92°C trend during the 20th century.
These are remarkable claims. They came out of the blue and do not accord with any written histories, or the personal impressions of our older generations. They don’t square with “hottest day” records held in provinces and city archives. They were not accompanied by big changes in rainfall or winds or sea levels. In these claims, NIWA is a very lonely orphan.
Read the entire substantial essay here at Quadrant Online
Stunning pictures of Al Gore’s new $9 million mansion that the media totally ignored
By Noel Sheppard – NewsBusters.org – 05/03/2010
Nobel Laureate Al Gore purchased a $9 million mansion in the luxurious hills of Montecito, California, recently, and with the exception of the Los Angeles Times and Fox News, America’s media couldn’t care less.
You think it might be because the Gore-loving press wouldn’t want people to consider the possibility that all of his global warming hysteria was really about lining his wallet and not saving the planet?
Formulate a response to that question as you look at what all that money the former Vice President is making off of spreading this myth can buy [1]):
Sweet, wouldn’t you say? (Readers are encouraged to view more pictures of this fabulous estate here [2].)
Certainly not bad for a guy who supposedly [3] was worth between one and two million dollars in 2000.
Were the “Always Fascinated by the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” press interested?
Heck no.
According to LexisNexis, apart from the Los Angeles Times that broke [4] this story last Wednesday, and Fox News’s Sean Hannity who spoke about this on consecutive nights last week, America’s media were totally mum.
Why might that be?
You think Gore’s adoring press don’t want folks to know how much money he’s making off this scam?
Before you answer THAT question, consider what the Nobel Laureate told [4] Congress last year as the House was deliberating cap-and-trade legislation:
AL GORE: Every penny that I have made, I have put right into a non-profit deal, Alliance For Climate Protection, to spread awareness of why we have to take on this challenge. And Congresswomen, if your, if, if you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you do not know me.
Now, imagine for a moment there were actually journalists still in America and not advocates pretending to be journalists.
A former Vice President who last year told a House committee he was putting all of his earnings into a non-profit company to “spread awareness of why we have to take on” global warming a year later buys a $9 million mansion with six fireplaces, five bedrooms, and nine bathrooms for him and his wife.
Don’t you think SOMEBODY should have reported it other than Fox News, the LA Times, and conservative bloggers?
Where’d the money come from? Was this purchased by his non-profit corporation, and if so, how does he get away with that?
Did he sell some of his Google or Apple stock?
And how about some questions about how green the house is? Are there solar panels and windmills to power this facility? If not, what are their plans?
Forgetting all of that, if the Clintons, Bushes, or Cheneys bought such a place, do you think the media would cover it, at least as a human interest story?
For over three years, Gore’s adoring press have followed virtually every move he’s made since becoming the voice of global warming.
He buys a STUNNING villa as the unemployment rate stands at almost 10 percent and Americans are struggling to regain their footing after 2008’s financial crisis, and the media are suddenly disinterested in him?
On exactly which planet, be it cooling or warming, does THAT make any sense?
More reading concerning Gore’s investments:
- Media Ignore Al Gore’s Financial Ties To Global Warming [4]
- Al Gore Getting Rich Selling Global Warming Hysteria With Media’s Help [4]
- Gore Admits Financial ‘Stake’ In Advancing Global Warming Hysteria [4]
- Investment Group Puts Millions In Green Companies Gore Has Stake In [4]
Links:
[1] http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/05/exclusive-estimate-carbon-footprint-of.html
[2] http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/05/exclusive-estimate-carbon-footprint-of.html
[3] http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-gore.html
[4] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/28/home/la-hm-hotprop-gore-20100428
Related video
That Pesky Freedom of Information Act
January 6, 2009: email 1231257056
Ben Santer writes to many:
I am forwarding an email I received this morning from a Mr. Geoff Smith.
The email concerns the climate model data used in our recently-published International Journal of Climatology (IJoC) paper. Mr. Smith has requested that I provide him with these climate model data sets. This request has been made to Dr. Anna Palmisano at Department Of Energy (DOE) Headquarters and to Dr. George Miller, the Director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
Another request for data. One would think that, by now, Santer has his data in order.
I have spent the last two months of my scientific career dealing with multiple requests for these model data sets under the United States Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). I have been able to do little or no productive research during this time. This is of deep concern to me.
Santer still seems unable to comprehend that proper documentation and archiving of data is a crucial part of his job.
He seems unwilling to learn from his last dressing-down:
I would like a clear ruling from DOE lawyers—ideally from both the National Nuclear Security Administration and DOE Office of Science branches—on the legality of such data requests. They are troubling, for a number of reasons.
1. In my considered opinion, a very dangerous precedent is set if any derived quantity that we have calculated from primary data is subject to FOIA requests. At LLNL’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), we have devoted years of effort to the calculation of derived quantities from climate model output. … The intellectual investment in such calculations is substantial.
Santer wants “exclusive rights” to the publicly-funded data. Even if he had managed to secure such a lucrative arrangement, he should not have publicly published papers based on the data.
2. Mr. Smith asserts that “there is no valid intellectual property justification for withholding this data”. I believe this argument is incorrect. The data used in our IJoC paper—and the other examples of derived data sets mentioned above—are integral components of both PCMDI’s ongoing research, and of proposals we have submitted to funding agencies (DOE, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration).
So, this is about money.
Can any competitor simply request such data sets via the United States FOIA, before we have completed full scientific analysis of these data sets?
Santer’s characterization of independent researchers as “competitors” is disturbing. Climate scientists should not seek to profit from their research—particularly not when their public pronouncements on the issue are used to lobby for political policy changes.
3. There is a real danger that such FOIA requests could (and are already) being used as a tool for harassing scientists rather than for valid scientific discovery. Mr. McIntyre’s FOIA requests to the DOE and the NOAA are but the latest in a series of such requests. In the past, Mr. McIntyre has targeted scientists at Penn State University, the United Kingdom’s Climatic Research Unit, and the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville. Now he is focusing his attention on me. The common denominator is that Mr. McIntyre’s attention is directed towards studies claiming to show evidence of large-scale surface warming, and/or a prominent human “fingerprint” in that warming. These serial FOIA requests interfere with our ability to do our job.
That would sound like a reasonable set of studies for McIntyre to target. Again, Santer misunderstands that “doing his job” properly in the first place would have obviated the need to clean up his mess at this late date.
As many of you may know, I have decided to publicly release the data that were the subject of Mr. McIntyre’s FOIA request … These data sets have been through internal review and release procedures, and will be published shortly on PCDMI’s website, together with a technical document which describes how they were calculated. I agreed to this publication process primarily because I want to spend the next few years of my career doing research. I have no desire to be “taken out” as scientist, and to be involved in years of litigation.
Santer brought upon himself the years of prosecution now facing him.
If Mr. McIntyre’s past performance is a guide to the future, further FOIA requests will follow. I would like to know that I have the full support of LLNL management and the United States Department of Energy in dealing with these unwarranted and intrusive requests.
I do not intend to reply to Mr. Smith’s email.
Santer has learnt nothing.
Stephen Schneider:
I had a similar experience—but not FOIA since we at Climatic Change are a private institution—with Stephen McIntyre demanding that I have the Mann and coworkers cohort publish all their computer programs for papers published in Climatic Change. I put the question to the editorial board who debated it for weeks. The vast majority opinion was that scientists should give enough information on their data sources and methods so others who are scientifically capable can do their own brand of replication work, but that this does not extend to personal computer programs with all their undocumented parts, etc. It would be an odious requirement to have scientists document every line of code so outsiders could then just apply them instantly. Not only is this an intellectual property issue, but it would dramatically reduce our productivity since we are not in the business of producing software products for general consumption and have no resources to do so. The National Science Foundation, which funded the studies I published, concurred—so that ended that issue with Climatic Change at the time a few years ago.
This is a startling admission on the part of Schneider: that computer programs throughout climate science are so shoddily written and poorly documented—or even completely undocumented—that they do not even reach the minimal standards required of high school students. His allegation that his funding agency, the National Science Foundation, supported this stance is, no doubt, under investigation by that agency.
This continuing pattern of harassment, as Ben rightly puts it in my opinion, in the name of due diligence is in my view an attempt to create a fishing expedition to find minor glitches or unexplained bits of computer programs—which exist in nearly all our kinds of complex work—and then assert that the entire result is thus suspect.
Again, this demonstrates a hopelessly amateurish attitude to computer programming. Glitches could indeed render the entire result false: that is why good documentation, verification, and replication are vital parts of science.
Our best way to deal with this issue of replication is to have multiple independent author teams, with their own programs and data sets, publishing independent work on the same topics—like has been done on the “hockey stick”. That is how credible scientific replication should proceed.
It is ironic that Schneider quotes the discredited “hockey stick” in support of his suggestion—which is one possible arm of a validation and verification process, but most certainly not a comprehensive blueprint.
Let the lawyers figure this out, but be sure that, like Ben is doing now, you disclose the maximum reasonable amount of information so that competent scientists can do replication work, but short of publishing undocumented personalized programs etc. The end of the email Ben attached shows their intent—to discredit papers so they have no “evidentiary value in public policy”—what you resort to when you can’t win the intellectual battle scientifically at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the National Academy of Sciences.
The most disturbing aspect of this commentary is that Schneider completely understands the enormous public policy ramifications of this research—yet still expresses such remarkably naive sentiments. He still thinks enormous public policy decisions should be based on the results from undocumented and unchecked personal computer programs.
Good luck with this, and expect more of it as we get closer to international climate policy actions. We are witnessing the “contrarian Battle of the Bulge” now, and expect that all weapons will be used.
PS Please do not copy or forward this email.
The need for confidentiality is becoming more apparent to the co-conspirators. Do they sense a dissenter or a whistle-blower in the ranks?
January 30, 2009: email 1233326033
Geoff Smith writes to Ben Santer:
Dear Dr. Santer,
I’m pleased to see that the requested data is now available on line. Thank you for your efforts to make these materials available.
My “dog in this fight” is good science and replicability. I note the following references:
The American Physical Society on line statement reads (in part):
“The success and credibility of science are anchored in the willingness of scientists to:
1. Expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others. This requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials.
2. Abandon or modify previously accepted conclusions when confronted with more complete or reliable experimental or observational evidence.”
Also I note the National Academy of Sciences booklet “On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Research” (2nd edition) states “After publication, scientists expect that data and other research materials will be shared with qualified colleagues upon request. Indeed, a number of federal agencies, journals, and professional societies have established policies requiring the sharing of research materials. Sometimes these materials are too voluminous, unwieldy, or costly to share freely and quickly. But in those fields in which sharing is possible, a scientist who is unwilling to share research materials with qualified colleagues runs the risk of not being trusted or respected. In a profession where so much depends on interpersonal interactions, the professional isolation that can follow a loss of trust can damage a scientist’s work.” I know that the 3rd edition is expected soon, but I cannot imagine this position will be weakened. Indeed, with electronic storage of data increasing dramatically, I expect that most of the exceptions are likely to be dropped.
I understand that science is considered by some to be a “blood sport” and that there are serious rivalries and disputes. Nevertheless, the principles above are vital to the continuation of good science, wherever the results may lead.
Again, I thank you for making the data available, and I wish you success in your future research.
Kind regards,
Geoff Smith
I couldn’t express it better myself.
Ben Santer’s reply:
Dear Mr. Smith,
Please do not lecture me on “good science and replicability”. Mr. McIntyre had access to all of the primary model and observational data necessary to replicate our results. Full replication of our results would have required Mr. McIntyre to invest time and effort. He was unwilling to do that.
Santer is still laboring under the misunderstanding that his research remains “private”.
Mr. McIntyre could easily have examined the appropriateness of the Douglass and coworkers statistical test and our statistical test with randomly-generated data (as we did in our paper). Mr. McIntyre chose not to do that.
Santer’s arrogance and narrow-mindedness extend to dictating that McIntyre must do only as Santer and his coworkers did. It does not seem to occur to him that the principles of statistics are not the exclusive domain of his small group of colleagues.
He preferred to portray himself as a victim of evil Government-funded scientists. A good conspiracy theory always sells well.
Ironic, given that Tom Wigley has described themselves in precisely those terms.
Mr. Smith, you chose to take the extreme step of writing to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department Of Energy management to complain about my “unresponsiveness” and my failure to provide data to Mr. McIntyre.
Let us see if Santer has decided to become more “responsive”.
Your email to George Miller and Anna Palmisano was highly critical of my behavior in this matter. Your criticism was entirely unjustified, and damaging to my professional reputation. I therefore see no point in establishing a dialogue with you. Please do not communicate with me in the future. I do not give you permission to distribute this email or post it on Mr. McIntyre’s blog.
Sadly, he has not.
Now where have we seen the phrase “Please do not communicate with me in the future” before? In his reply to Steve McIntyre on November 10, 2008. There’s not much chance of “the open exchange of data, procedures and materials” with Ben Santer.
February 2, 2009: email 1233586975
Geoff Smith writes to Phil Jones, trying to clarify the situation:
Dear Prof. Jones,
(provides reference to the paper in question)
As you are a co-author of the referenced paper, you may be interested to know of developments (in case you have not heard already).
You will be aware that intermediate data … had been requested from the first author, Dr. Santer. A refusal has been posted online, but in the mean time the data is now available at (link).
Perhaps you had this data already, but other co-authors have reportedly claimed (earlier) they did not have the data. A typical reported response to a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request was, “I have examined my files and have no data from climate models used in the paper referred to, and no correspondence regarding said data.”
No one disputes Dr. Santer’s claim that the “primary model data” is publicly available, but there is a strong case to be made that intermediate results, e.g., collation of such data and the relevant computer programs should be made available in studies such as this one, since there is an important possibility of errors in trying to replicate such a collation. The archiving of such intermediate results is required for econometrics journals, among others.
It is further reported online that the posting of the data was not pursuant to an FOIA order, but posted voluntarily (although likely at the request of the funding agency, the Department of Energy, Office of Science). I hope other scientists will take this type of voluntary action. You may have heard that Professor Hardaker, the Chief Executive Officer of the Royal Meteorological Society, which publishes the International Journal of Climatology, has confirmed that the issue of data archiving will be on the agenda for the next meeting of the Society’s Scientific Publishing Committee. There is a need for journals as well as funding agencies, and publishing scientists themselves, to establish and enforce good data and computer program archiving policies. A more precise definition of “recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings” is probably overdue.
I hope the Hadley Centre will take a lead in this issue. From time to time I’ll look at the progress on archiving, but in the mean time, no reply is necessary.
Kind regards,
Geoff Smith
Jones writes to Ben Santer:
Is this the Smith who has emailed? …
I’m not on a Royal Meteorological Society committee at the moment, but I could try and contact Paul Hardaker if you think it might be useful. I possibly need to explain what is “raw” and what is “intermediate”.
I wasn’t going to give this guy Smith the satisfaction of a reply!
Instead of improving their data and computer program archiving standards, Jones is only interested in influencing the committee that will revise the minimum requirements.
Santer replies:
Yes, this is the same Geoff Smith who wrote to me. Do you know who he is? From his comments about the Royal Meteorological Society, he seems to be a Briton.
…
I think it would be useful to raise these issues with Paul Hardaker.
Agreement has been reached that the best way forward is to influence the Royal Meteorological Society.
Arctic Sea Ice Milestone
April 29, 2010 | Anthony Watts
Today… the NANSEN is reporting that both Arctic Sea Ice area and extent are above the normal line. Usually we don’t see both in this mode. Here’s area:
And here is extent:
By itself, this is just a small thing, but it is just one more indication that there’s some improvement in the Arctic Ice situation again, and the indications are that we’ll have another summer extent that is higher than the previous year, for the third year in a row.
Of course our friends will argue that extent and area don’t matter now, that only volume and ice quality (the rotten ice meme) matters.
Interestingly, if you go back to the press releases on the record minimum extent in 2007 at NSIDC here:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2007.html
And search the entire set of release for the word “volume”, you won’t find it used anywhere that year. The volume worry is a more recent talking point that first appeared in October 2008 when it became apparent that extent wasn’t continuing to decline. They couldn’t tout another record low extent, so volume became the next big thing:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/
Arctic sea ice minimum press release
Please see the NSIDC press release, “Arctic Sea Ice Down to Second-Lowest Extent; Likely Record-Low Volume” for a detailed analysis of this year’s Arctic sea ice minimum and a synopsis of the 2008 melt season.
With nature still not cooperating with “death spiral predictions”, what will be the press release ice meme this year? Color? Texture? Cracks per square kilometer? It will be interesting to watch.
Research: Global warming dirt-carbon peril models are wrong
By Lewis Page • 27th April 2010
The world may not be doomed after all, according to top American dirt scientists. Soil-dwelling microbes, expected in climate models to go into CO2-spewing “overdrive” as the world warms, refused to do so in experiments.
According to a statement released this week by the US National Science Foundation, which funded the research:
Conventional scientific wisdom holds that even a few degrees of human-caused climate warming will shift fungi and bacteria that consume soil-based carbon into overdrive, and that their growth will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
This conventional wisdom now appears to be wrong, as research conducted by University of California ecologist Steve Allison has shown that in fact the carbon-eating microbes’ planet-busting activities are reduced, not increased, by warmth.
Allison developed a new climate model based on experimental results showing what happened in soils which had been warmed up artificially in greenhouses over a period of several years. There is an initial increase in microbial emissions, which has been the basis for existing models, but after a while the microbes “overheat” and their numbers – and CO2 output – plunge.
“When we developed a model based on the actual biology of soil microbes, we found that soil carbon may not be lost to the atmosphere as the climate warms,” Allison says. “Conventional ecosystem models that didn’t include enzymes did not make the same predictions.”
The flow of carbon in and out of the Earth’s soils is thought to be one of the biggest factors in the amount of greenhouse effect experienced by the planet, so the new results could have a major effect on climate forecasts and related government policies. Allison cautions that more research is needed, but seems confident that the microbe menace is not as severe as had been thought.
“We need to develop more models to include microbe diversity,” he says. “But the general principle that’s important in our model is the decline of carbon dioxide production after an initial increase.”
Allison and his colleagues’ research appears online this week in Nature Geoscience. ®
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Iran UN ambassador calls for destruction of all nuclear weapons
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo
Press TV – March 29, 2017
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo has called for the total eradication of nuclear weapons.
Khoshroo reiterated Iran’s call during a UN conference aimed at creating a nuclear weapons ban treaty in New York on Tuesday.
“Iran, as a victim of chemical weapons, strongly feels the danger posed by the existence of weapons of mass destruction and is determined to engage actively in international diplomatic efforts to save humanity from the menace of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Khoshroo stressed that Iran is committed to its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, which include negotiations based on effective nuclear disarmament measures.
He added that several countries continue to ignore international calls and treaties for nuclear disarmament and even continue to increase their nuclear stockpiles. “They do not have political determination to abandon doctrines of nuclear deterrence and nuclear terror,” he went on to say.
Iran’s UN ambassador noted that boycotting the talks by many countries, including the US, shows that the world’s nuclear powers are by no means committed to the eradication of nuclear arms. Britain and France were also among the some 40 countries that did not join the talks.
“We note that prohibition of nuclear weapons must be accompanied by the elimination of such weapons. There can be no doubt that without complete abolition of nuclear weapons, there will be no absolute guarantee against the danger of nuclear war and the use of such weapons,” Khoshroo added.
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