Speedkill

It’s not like I had a high opinion of Alexander Cockburn before, but yikes:

The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind’s sinful contribution. Devoid of any sustaining scientific basis, carbon trafficking is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed, just like the old indulgences, though at least the latter produced beautiful monuments. By the sixteenth century, long after the world had sailed safely through the end of the first millennium, Pope Leo X financed the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica by offering a “plenary” indulgence, guaranteed to release a soul from purgatory.

Activists who want to do something about global warming are the new Medieval church. Got it.

Jeff Environment, Silliness

Here, courtesy of some silly college kid.

Can you beat attacking MySpace and encouraging people to take better care of the environment? I think not.

Jeff Environment

As I mentioned before, Dr. Tim Flannery, author of The Weather-Makers came to MSU to give a lecture tonight. Flannery is an ecologist from Australia.

The night began with Mike Phillips, my state rep, telling us what the Montana legislature is doing to combat climate change. He told us about the formation of the Montana climate caucus and the Montana Climate Solution Act, which will be presented to the natural resources committee this Friday. Phillips’s speech then took a partisan turn. Prefacing his comments with the claim that he’s not a particularly partisan legislator, he attacked the state Republican party for “not getting it” and hindering legislative action on climate change. He mentioned Krayton Kearns as the Republicans’ “go-to guy on science” and that Kearns believes the whole thing is a giant scam. He concluded by saying that the Republicans will not get it regarding climate change unless we vote against them and that if we want things done about climate change, we must elect Democrats and re-elected Governor Schweitzer. The charitable interpretation of that is frustration at the Republican party and the uncharitable interpretation is a rather brazen attempt at what he said he wasn’t doing in his preface to those remarks. I’m inclined to be charitable, though I noticed that the crowd seemed uncomfortable with his comments and I would have preferred remarks advocating pressure on Republicans.

After that, Geoff Gamble, the president of MSU, spoke for a bit and then Flannery took the podium. His lecture focused more on what the effects of global warming will be and what we can do curb it than the science behind how we know the Earth is warming. I have no complaints there, but I doubt it convinced any skeptics in the audience. Flannery did an admirable job of laying out what effect climate change will have on our planet and the emerging technologies to stop it. He painted a “worst case” scenario of environmental stress on human beings causing increased socio-political strife. It was definitely more restrained than some of the doomsday, “all humans will die,” scenarios you occasionally hear from hyper-ventilating environmentalists. Questions followed, but nothing particularly noteworthy. I was too shy to jump up and ask my question, which was about his omission of nuclear power from the list of possible solutions to the problem.

All in all, it was a worthwhile lecture. Phillips’s comments make for more interesting blogging, but Flannery’s talk was definitely more educational and interesting.

Jeff Environment, Montana, Science

Jay points out an anti-global warming post by a new Montana legislator. It’s not impressive. You can get the article here, which is probably the best way to go. The full site appears to have been designed in 1996, or by a team of 9 year olds. Seriously, frames, blinking text, and animated flag gifs are pure evil.

Anyway, onto the article. It’s mostly nonsensical conspiracy theorist rambling, as Jay so ably points out, so I won’t concern myself with that. This is what I want to discuss:

Carbon dioxide emission as a cause of global climate warming is the biggest hoax of the last 30 years. In 1975 the number one slot was held by those who proclaimed that the earth was entering the next ice age because economic growth was producing pollutants that were eating a hole in the ozone layer and letting the earth’s heat escape into space.

First off, this is simply a dumb reason not to believe in a scientific hypothesis. Scientific hypotheses are overturned constantly. Pick any scientific theory or hypothesis and some contradictory was probably advocated by scientists in the past. That’s sort of what happens with science. We gain more knowledge, progress is made, we know more about the world. So it’s simply ridiculous on its face.

Secondly, it’s simply wrong. Actually, it’s at best disingenuous and at worst completely false. There were some who promoted the idea that global cooling was imminent, due to the hole in the ozone layer. They were in the media, primarily (e.g. this Newsweek article). The scientific community didn’t approach anything more than there would be an ice age in the next 20,000 years; for example:

Future climate. Having presented evidence that major changes in past climate were associated with variations in the geometry of the earth’s orbit, we should be able to predict the trend of future climate. Such forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends – and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted.

The NAS in 1975 said they simply didn’t know:

…we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate…

Of course, the report also said there was a finite probability of a imminent (within 100 years) significant global cooling. That, of course, tells us very little, especially considering the NAS’s assessment of the state of knowledge of the climate science community. It’s possible, but they weren’t in a position to say more than that. We are now and the evidence says that global warming is caused by humans.

The bottom line is that this is a climate skeptic myth. There’s plenty of information in the links above, including discussions of most scientific papers brought up by the purveyors of this tripe. There were alarmist media articles about global cooling then. There are alarmist media articles about global warming now. The difference is that the science backs up global warming now and it didn’t back up global cooling, according to the consensus of the day.

Jeff Environment, Science

The first estimates say 2006 was the warmest year on record for the U.S.

Jeff Environment

I think I have officially two posts on this blog about global warming and I don’t feel like talking about religion or politics, so I figured this was useful to discuss.

One of the better points I see climate change deniers as having is the claim that our climate goes through warming and cooling cycles, so today’s global warming is completely natural and there’s nothing we can do about it. At least, it’s an interesting claim to me.

Supporting that argument is the claim that we produce little CO2 in comparison to natural sources. I’ve also heard in several places that volcanoes produce far more greenhouse gases than human beings do. That seems to be clearly wrong, according to the USGS, who say humans win 150 times over. However, the kernel of truth seems to be that humans produce little compared to the overall amount of CO2 produced by nature. But not so fast:

The Earth has a natural CO2 cycle that moves massive amounts of CO2 into and out of the atmosphere. The oceans and land vegetation release and absorb over 200 billion metric tons of carbon into and out of the atmosphere each year. When the cycle is balanced, atmospheric levels of CO2 remain relatively stable. Human activities are now adding about 7 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year,which is only about 3–4% of the amount exchanged naturally. But that’s enough to knock the system out of balance, surpassing nature’s ability to take our CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere. The oceans and land vegetation are absorbing about half of our emissions; the other half remains airborne for 100 years or longer. This is what is causing the rapid buildup of CO2, a buildup that dwarfs natural fluctuations.

So, while we may not produce that much compared to natural causes, we put out enough to knock the balance out of whack. That still doesn’t answer the question I have. What exactly does that CO2 do in the atmosphere. According to one scientist,

“CO2 and climate are like two people handcuffed to each other,” he said. “Where one goes, the other must follow. Leadership may change, or they may march in step, but they are never far from each other. Our current CO2 levels appear to be far out of balance with climate when viewed through these results, reinforcing the idea that we have significant modern warming to go.”

The IPCC says it’s “virtually certain” that CO2 will be the main factor driving climate changes in this centure.

But don’t CO2 levels lag behind global temperature increases? Seems like a cause and effect problem. Well, maybe not:

The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.

The 4200 years of warming make up about 5/6 of the total warming. So CO2 could have caused the last 5/6 of the warming, but could not have caused the first 1/6 of the warming.

It comes as no surprise that other factors besides CO2 affect climate. Changes in the amount of summer sunshine, due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun that happen every 21,000 years, have long been known to affect the comings and goings of ice ages. Atlantic ocean circulation slowdowns are thought to warm Antarctica, also.

From studying all the available data (not just ice cores), the probable sequence of events at a termination goes something like this. Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties. This leads to even further CO2 release. So CO2 during ice ages should be thought of as a “feedback”, much like the feedback that results from putting a microphone too near to a loudspeaker.

Sadly, my ability to understand a lot of this ends at trying to evaluate how much CO2 affects global temperatures. The IPCC concluded that, outside of the early 20th century, natural causes can’t explain the warming, but greenhouse gases do. Specifically, it’s inconsistent with natural variability:

While these estimates vary substantially, on the annual to decadal time-scale they are similar, and in some cases larger, than obtained from observations. Estimates from models and observations are uncertain on the multi-decadal and longer time-scales required for detection. Nonetheless, conclusions on the detection of an anthropogenic signal are insensitive to the model used to estimate internal variability. Recent observed changes cannot be accounted for as pure internal variability even if the amplitude of simulated internal variations is increased by a factor of two or more. It is therefore unlikely (bordering on very unlikely) that natural internal variability alone can explain the changes in global climate over the 20th century

Which is where I started, I think.

Part of the problem with all this is that the science is amazingly complicated. When we have entities and groups on either side of the debate who aren’t entirely trustworthy (the fossil fuel industry and environmentalists, if you didn’t know) firing back and forth over on the subject it’s occasionally difficult to deal with. Eventually the distrust of the group that isn’t on our “side” takes over. That’s how I see it, at least. Still, I think a good faith effort to evaluate the scientific groups and their conclusions leads to clear cut support for global warming as a significant human caused problem.

Jeff Environment, Science

I went and saw that this weekend. It’s one of those movies you really can’t say you enjoyed, but it was worth seeing.

Before seeing it I was of the opinion that we are politcally incapable of mounting any serious effort to stop global warming. After seeing Gore’s chart on the effects of certain steps in the film, I’m more optimistic. A few fairly small steps can have a pretty solid effect.

Gore did a pretty good job representing the science as I understand it, though a few things set off alarm bells for me. One of those things was a graph showing an increase in damages estimated by insurance companies (or something like that). It seems pretty difficult to control for inflation and the increases in development that occur year by year. On a lighter note, he used the boiling frog story: put a frog in boiling water it jumps out, but in cold water gradually warmed it boils to death. You guys do know that’s an urban legend, right?

Jeff Environment, Science

Jon Chait on the CEI’s Carbon Dioxide is great stuff ad:

The oil companies’–sorry, I mean the institute’s–approach to this challenge is to make people think fondly of carbon dioxide. It turns out to be a deeply misunderstood molecule. “We breathe it out,” a narrator explains in one ad. “Plants breathe it in.” We see an image of a young girl in pigtails blowing on a dandelion. The ad proceeds to explain that all this good stuff faces some sinister, amorphous peril. “Now, some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed. What will our lives be like then?” Plants will suffocate for lack of carbon dioxide! Little girls blowing on dandelions will be thrown into prison!

Can anybody actually believe this?

I can see why the ads would identify the enemy as “politicians” (rather than scientists). But what motive would these politicians have to attack a harmless little molecule? Do they hate plants? Are they in the pocket of the dandelion lobby?

The ads don’t say. The concept is so unpersuasive, even on its own terms, I can’t believe that Americans are stupid enough to fall for it. People may be dumb, but if they were that dumb, the world would be a different place. There would be thousands of technicians on call to help us operate our flush toilets. Emergency rooms would be filled with people who attempted to clean out their earwax with steak knives.

Jeff Environment

As Wulfgar has noted, there’s a letter in the paper today attacking Rehberg’s recent op-ed about reforms of the ESA. For whatever reason (putting off homework, I suspect), I was curious about this claim:

By way of illustration he cites the Klamath River diversion battle of 2001. He claims that the closing of the headgate was to protect the Klamath River sucker, but in reality this was only one of several species which were aided by the diversion. You might be more familiar with another one: the Coho salmon. Mr. Rehberg claims that the decision to divert water was “junk science” and backs it up with quotes from a NAS report on the decision. The problem is that these quotes are from a preliminary report. The final report found that the biologists made the best decision given the available evidence. Two years later a similar situation held and the decision was made not to release water into the Klamath. The result was a fish kill of 200,000-plus individuals in the lower Klamath River.

Here’s what Rehberg says:

Ask the more than 1,200 farmers in Oregon’s Klamath River Basin who watched their entire life savings evaporate with a 2001 ruling that essentially diverted their water to streams occupied by the shortnose sucker fish. Overnight, nearly 200,000 acres of farmland became worthless from forfeited irrigation rights when a few federal officials acted on scientific conjecture under the authority given to them by the ESA.

After months of review, real scientists at the prestigious National Academy of Sciences found the ruling had “no sound scientific basis” and that “despite theoretical speculations, there is no basis in evidence” to support the actions taken against the farmers.

Sully, the letter writer, claims Rehberg is quoting from an interim report. This doesn’t appear to be correct. A search on the NAS’s website gives us two reports: this one, marked “interim” and this one, from last year. From page 6 of the 2004 report comes this quote:

Thus, despite theoretical speculations, there is no basis in evidence for optimism that manipulation of water levels has the potential to moderate mass mortality of suckers in Upper Klamath Lake.

The salmon question is a little more hazy. It seems like the NAS is only evaluating the water diversion issue with regards to the two sucker species, which would imply that that particular decision was justified only on the basis of those two species and not the salmon. Calling Rehberg stupid or dishonest on this point seems over the top.

However, Sully isn’t incorrect on the larger point. From page 10:

The listing agencies have been criticized for using pseudoscientific reasoning (“junk science”) in justifying their requirements for the protection of species in the upper Klamath basin. The committee disagrees with this criticism. The ESA allows the agencies to use a wide array of information sources in protecting listed species. The agencies can be expected, when information is scarce, to extend their recommendations beyond rigorously tested hypotheses and into professional judgment as a means of minimizing risk to the species.

In other words, they made a mistake. They go on to say that they’ve mostly corrected it. Is Rehberg wrong in his criticism? Maybe. I would say yes, but I don’t think he’s being dishonest here.

Sully gets another thing wrong:

Two years later a similar situation held and the decision was made not to release water into the Klamath. The result was a fish kill of 200,000-plus individuals in the lower Klamath River.

This is what that NAS report (page 9) says about that:

The California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG), through an analysis of environmental conditions over 5 yr of low flow within the last 15 yr, showed that neither the flows nor the temperatures that occurred in the second half of September 2002 were unprecedented. A study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) supports this conclusion. Thus, no obvious explanation of the fish kill based on unique flow or temperature conditions is possible.

CDFG has proposed that the shape of the channel in the lowermost reaches of the Klamath main stem changed in 1997-1998 under the influence of high flows, which caused fish entering the river to be unable to proceed upstream under low-flow conditions. An alternate hypothesis is that an unusual combination of temperature, flow, and migration conditions occurred in 2002, possibly in association with weather than prevented the river from showing nocturnal cooling to an extent that would usually be expected.
…
It is unclear what the effect of specific amounts of additional flow drawn from controllable upstream sources…would have been.

There also seems to be a discrepancy in the number of fish killed. Sully says 200,000 (as does this) and the NAS report says 33,000. I think that’s because the NAS is only counting Chinook salmon, but I’m not sure.

So, what do we conclude from this? Rehberg doesn’t seem to be misleading or dishonest on this particular issue. I think a case can be made that his interpretation that it’s a negative for the ESA is wrong. For what it’s worth, the NAS report has a section on improving the implementation of the ESA as it stands. Rehberg would probably do better to read that and give us an argument as to why what the NAS recommends is not enough and how TESRA actually does fix the problem.

Jeff Environment, Montana

I noticed a letter in the paper the other day proclaiming that Katrina and other recent hurricanes in Florida were due to global warming. However, I also remember seeing an article over at Ectophensis proclaiming the opposite:

Subject: G4) Are we getting stronger and more frequent hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical cyclones in the last several years?

Globally, no. However, for the Atlantic basin we have seen an increase in the number of strong hurricanes since 1995. As can be seen in section E9, we have had a record 33 hurricanes in the four years of 1995 to 1999 (accurate records for the Atlantic are thought to begin around 1944). The extreme impacts from Hurricanes Marilyn (1995), Opal (1995), Fran (1996), Georges (1998) and Mitch (1998) in the United States and throughout the Caribbean attest to the high amounts of Atlantic hurricane activity lately.

As discussed in the previous section, it is highly unlikely that global warming has (or will) contribute to a drastic change in the number or intensity of hurricanes. We have not observed a long-term increase in the intensity or frequency of Atlantic hurricanes. Actually, 1991-1994 marked the four quietest years on record (back to the mid-1940s) with just less than 4 hurricanes per year. Instead of seeing a long-term trend up or down, we do see a quasi-cyclic multi-decade regime that alternates between active and quiet phases for major Atlantic hurricanes on the scale of 25-40 years each (Gray 1990; Landsea 1993; Landsea et al. 1996). The quiet decades of the 1970s to the early 1990s for major Atlantic hurricanes were likely due to changes in the Atlantic Ocean sea surface temperature structure with cooler than usual waters in the North Atlantic. The reverse situation of a warm North Atlantic was present during the active late-1920s through the 1960s (Gray et al. 1997). It is quite possible that the extreme activity since 1995 marks the start of another active period that may last a total of 25-40 years. More research is needed to better understand these hurricane “cycles”.

Interesting. So I went over to RealClimate to see what they say and they just happen to have a post about just that at the top of the page. After pointing out that we really can’t attribute one hurricane to global warming or a natural cycle, there’s some evidence to suggest that, while global warming isn’t causing more hurricanes (contrary to the letter in the Chronicle), it may be causing more intense hurricanes:

The key connection is that between sea surface temperatures (we abbreviate this as SST) and the power of hurricanes. Without going into technical details about the dynamics and thermodynamics involved in tropical storms and hurricanes (an excellent discussion of this can be found here), the basic connection between the two is actually fairly simple: warm water, and the instability in the lower atmosphere that is created by it, is the energy source of hurricanes. This is why they only arise in the tropics and during the season when SSTs are highest (June to November in the tropical North Atlantic).

…

But what about the past? What do the observations of the last century actually show? Some past studies (e.g. Goldenberg et al, 2001) assert that there is no evidence of any long-term increase in statistical measures of tropical Atlantic hurricane activity, despite the ongoing global warming. These studies, however, have focused on the frequency of all tropical storms and hurricanes (lumping the weak ones in with the strong ones) rather than a measure of changes in the intensity of the storms. As we have discussed elsewhere on this site, statistical measures that focus on trends in the strongest category storms, maximum hurricane winds, and changes in minimum central pressures, suggest a systematic increase in the intensities of those storms that form. This finding is consistent with the model simulations.

A recent study in Nature by Emanuel (2005) examined, for the first time, a statistical measure of the power dissipation associated with past hurricane activity (i.e., the “Power Dissipation Index” or “PDI”–Fig. 2). Emanuel found a close correlation between increases in this measure of hurricane activity (which is likely a better measure of the destructive potential of the storms than previously used measures) and rising tropical North Atlantic SST, consistent with basic theoretical expectations. As tropical SSTs have increased in past decades, so has the intrinsic destructive potential of hurricanes.

There’s a nice graph illustrating the point over there as well. So, what’s the verdict from RealClimate? It’s a bit of both:

Thus, we can conclude that both a natural cycle (the AMO) and anthropogenic forcing could have made roughly equally large contributions to the warming of the tropical Atlantic over the past decades, with an exact attribution impossible so far. The observed warming is likely the result of a combined effect: data strongly suggest that the AMO has been in a warming phase for the past two or three decades, and we also know that at the same time anthropogenic global warming is ongoing.

Finally, then, we come back to Katrina. This storm was a weak (category 1) hurricane when crossing Florida, and only gained force later over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. So the question to ask here is: why is the Gulf of Mexico so hot at present – how much of this could be attributed to global warming, and how much to natural variability? More detailed analysis of the SST changes in the relevant regions, and comparisons with model predictions, will probably shed more light on this question in the future. At present, however, the available scientific evidence suggests that it would be premature to assert that the recent anomalous behavior can be attributed entirely to a natural cycle.

In a sense then, we don’t really know. It’s probably not a good idea to go around claiming Katrina is evidence that we need to work on reducing human induced climate change, but a greater proportion of Katrina-like hurricanes among all hurricanes is certainly something we can expect in the future.

Jeff Environment, Science