Green Herring

Commenting on lists and name-calling

2010-06-28T13:38:00.000-04:00

Well, last week Marc Morano posted my email on his climatedepot website and his email blast, in the process of comparing me to the Stasi (secret police of the former East German one-party-rule Communist regime.) Over the past week I've had a stream of hostile emails in response.

Here I re-post an earlier reply I gave at Joe Romm's ever lively and thought-provoking site www.climateprogress.org:

As for web lists of statement signers: thanks Michael Tobis for saying it better than I ever could. Every list I compiled was from a statement already posted on the web. All the links are on my page of list sources
http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/ ~prall/ climate/ list_sources.html

As for Marc Morano’s attempt to Swiftboat this as “Stasi-esque”: what amazing gall! He’s famous for having built a long list of climate skeptics during his term with Sen. Inhofe. Hypocrite! Why wasn’t that list “Stasi-esque?” Just because he agreed with their “side”?
Nothing in our PNAS paper justifies comparisons to the Stasi. We don’t *say* anyone should persecute or blacklist signers of either type of statement, because of course we *don’t believe* that. (Hard to believe I’m even having to say this at all.) What we say is that the media should consider people’s qualifications and standing (oooh!)
The only other way to spin this into something sinister is to argue that someone evil *might use* the lists to persecute people regardless of our intentions. That seems to be the main theme at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog.

That objection of what someone might do with the list really falls down on the point Michael makes so well, that all the source lists I compiled were already on the web. Anyone who could misuse my list could just as well have found the same names on the original sources, or many of the same names plus many more on Morano’s list – and not all on his list by choice.

Morano publicized his list relentlessly, and listed many more names as skeptics than I have. Morano also tended to quotemine, leading to false positives where the person in question would protest their inclusion as unrepresentative of their actual views, yet Morano would refuse to take them off. He’d just point to the mined quote he had, ignoring anything the source might say about being taken out of context or trying to tell him what their actual views are.

If the fear is that someone biased against supporters of one “side” could focus their bias on people on a list, why was it okay for Morano to subject people to that risk with his list? Was Morano’s list “Stasi-esque” as well? If not, why not?

Thanks again to those offering supportive comments on the PNAS paper. Since Morano published my email and compared me to the Stasi, let’s just say I’ve had a stream of unfriendly responses. (Oddly, people keep sending me really weak arguments like “there is no greenhouse effect” or predicting global cooling.)

That's the end of my posting on climateprogress. Site host Joe Romm aptly commented:

[JR: Remember, Morano publicly stated how he believes climate scientists should be treated: “I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down,” he said. “They deserve to be publicly flogged.” He proudly linked to that interview on his blog.

]

Early reactions to Anderegg et al in PNAS

2010-06-22T18:13:00.002-04:00

I'm the second author on the article "Expert Credibility in Climate Change" just out yesterday at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract. It's been written up several places, and is quickly making the rounds on the web, attracting a lot of comment and critique. I'll try to address questions or challenges here as I get time.

Today I received email from an author in Germany who said he was on the Stasi's list under the G.D.R (a horrific world, one that we who've never been there can scarcely imagine.)

I wanted to address his concern about my online list. Here's what I wrote:

Dear Dr. _______,

I can't imagine what it must have been like to live in the shadow of the
Stasi. I would never want to see anything like that take place today. At
least now Germany is one country again and is a democracy, and I think a
good example of it as well. I admire the mixed-member proportional
system you have. Here in Canada we have winner-takes-all voting, and our
Green Party has never won a seat in Parliament despite polling over 11%
of the national vote. There is a group here promoting a change to such
an MMP system, though we are having trouble getting people to think
about this with so many other concerns on the agenda, especially the
economy.

As for seeing my listings as some kind of "blacklist" - I'm quite
disappointed that people are viewing it in that light; that was never my
intention. I've only listed those whose names were already on an
existing public declaration, available on the web, and I list people who
signed affirmative statements as well (may we never see a day where any
government would persecute members of either group for their opinions!)

I want the media to understand who has really researched climate and who
has not. Conversely, I certainly don't want to silence or exclude anyone
from civil policy debate; no one of us has all the answers on what
policies we should adopt to prepare for the future, and I do want to
hear from others on their views. The policy process must be democratic,
even though that can be painfully slow. In the U.S. there is a
distressingly strong role for corporate spending on political campaigns,
with no limits at all since their Supreme Court's recent "Citizens
United" case. Companies like Exxon can dominate the discourse, leaving
ordinary citizen's voices little heard. Here again I think most European
countries have far more rational approaches to campaign spending laws. I
see corporate spending power and P.R. tricks as a more immediate threat
to the common good than actual (state) censorship of free expression.
Currently our major democracies have fairly good laws against state
censorship, which courts defend actively.

I believe that rational public action to prepare for a future without
fossil fuels is one key to keeping prosperity and peace, and avoiding
the prospect of conflicts over scarce and declining non-renewable energy
sources. Again, Germany is far ahead of either Canada or the U.S. in
making those sensible preparations. The professor just down the hall
from me works on thin-film solar panels; the joint-venture company
developing his technologies opened their factory in Bischoswerda in the
former GDR thanks to strong support from the German government.

[ I see I mis-spelled "Bischofswerda" in the email. Oops. Here's their WP page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bischofswerda ]

Pesky scientists - so annoying!

2010-06-20T07:44:00.000-04:00

Scientists can be a real nuisance. They use big words, and act all smart and everything. Then they come around and tell us scary stuff like dangers we never even knew were there: radioactivity and cancer-causing chemicals and UV rays and nicotine. What a bunch of spoil-sports.

Plus, they are often very hard to pin down - we pick up some story (or rumour) about a new danger, and try as reporters to get their take on it, but as often as not, they can't even give a simple yes or no answer. It's all "likely" this and "probable" that, and "statistically significant" or "balance of the evidence" or whatever. Lots of "on the other hand" until you just don't have enough hands, or even fingers, to count the different angles they want to look at.

Now and then I think we'd almost rather not have those black and white answers that scientists hate to give. Take global warming, for example: if this is real, it's going to be quite a nuisance -- 'inconvenient,' so to speak. I mean, think about our lifestyle! It could cramp our ability to drive vehicles as big as some people's houses for personal security and -- let's face it -- ego gratification. I think a lot of us would just rather not know.

So now, we have to deal with scientists who keep coming out and saying 'yes, this is a real problem' - over and over again. They keep putting out declarations and open letters telling the world that our greenhouse gas emissions are already changing the climate, and forecasting that the problem has to get a lot worse if we keep on at the current rate. This is the problem with the IPCC - behind all the "very likelys" and "probables," they basically say the same thing: this is a real problem. This same theme keeps coming up in declarations signed by thousands of scientists - over 5000 of them, on eight statements issued since December 2009.

Okay, scientists, now you're just starting to scare us. You're also sounding uncharacteristically decisive. Those of us who aren't comfortable with your message may have to do something about this. Here are some of our options:

call your views "alarmist"
claim you are now too unified, so this must be 'group-think' and you're just bullying the numerous dissenters that we can't seem to find
find the handful of you who don't see the problem, and get them on TV a lot - a whole lot
take out full-page ads in the NYT saying you are wrong, signed by over 100 non-experts
get Rush Limbaugh to call you "socialists" and imply you want the UN to run everything
host a string of anti-conferences with lots of non-experts, to make you look less convincing
if all else fails, we can turn to Fox News!

Thousands of scientists worldwide push back against attacks on integrity of climate science

2010-05-09T23:32:00.001-04:00

I've been quite busy updating my list of scientists who've signed statements on climate change. There have been several new declarations in the months since the posting of the stolen CRU emails; some of these have drawn signers numbering in the thousands.

These lists reflect a truly broad and widespread response from scientists to the attacks from contrarian bloggers on the integrity of climate science in general, the IPCC, and on individual climate scientists.

To emphasize just how broad the response has been, I've compiled a list of the names of the signers of these eight statements, with notations on which statements each one signed:
Five thousand scientists worldwide defend climate science

Here is a list of these most recent statements, with links to original sources. (The initials are the tag I've used to tag signers who are also authors in my database of climate author publication stats; after each I note how many signers already have their climate publication and citation stats collected in my table of climate science authors.)

NAS10: May, 2010 statement from 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences defending the integrity of climate science, and condemning "McCarthy-like tactics" against climate scientists. Discussed at DeSmogBlog and at ClimateProgress. [23 are tallied in my stats table]
FR10: May, 2010 statement from over ~~400~~ 600 scientists in France rebutting outrageous attacks on climate science by Claude Allegre. [55 are tallied in my stats table]
NL10: May, 2010 statement from scientists in the Netherlands; 50 initial signers; now 196 Dutch and 96 foreign signers [13 are tallied in my stats table].
OLFS10: March, 2010 Open Letter from U.S. Scientists on the IPCC, 320 signers (list) [53 tallied in my stats table]
UCS10: March, 2010 US Scientists and Economists' Call to Action organised by the Union of Concerned Scientists. This builds on their similar 2008 statement, with over 2000 signatories. [178 tallied in my stats table]
CSW09: Dec., 2009 letter to US Congress from 25 climate scientists responding to the stolen email controversy, posted by Climate Science Watch [all 25 tallied in my stats table]
WWFC09: A Dec., 2009 open letter organized by the World Wildlife Fund--Canada to Canada's Parliament calling for action on climate, endorsed by 848 Canadian scientists. I've tagged over 60 already in my list.
UKsc09: Dec., 2009 Statement from the UK science community signed by 1700 U.K. scientists, from 67 universities and 55 other institutions, re-affirming the integrity of climate science and data sources, in response to the University of East Anglia email break-in, which begins:
We, members of the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities. The evidence and the science are deep and extensive. They come from decades of painstaking and meticulous research, by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity. That research has been subject to peer review and publication, providing traceability of the evidence and support for the scientific method.
This is perhaps the strongest and certainly the broadest response from scientists to the UEA email controversy. [I've tallied 108 signers in my author stats data.]

It's so not easy being green

2010-04-22T17:55:00.002-04:00

With apologies to Kermit The Frog... it's getting to where nothing is quite as green as it might seem.

I just got an appeal by email from the Western Canadian Wilderness Committee, a group I've supported for some years, about their opposition to a proposal for a large new hydroelectric dam in B.C. (that's British Columbia, for you outlanders.)

Now I know there are real ecological impact issues with any large hydro dam, and the submerged biomass decaying in low oxygen conditions emits methane - so such dams are not truly climate neutral. However, their letter brought up the kind of unexpected negative spin off that could make your head spin (off?) Here's their beef:

Over half the power from the new dam would be sold to natural gas extraction operations in the nearby Horn River Basin (drilling? or at least pumping, de-watering, purification and compression.) That new gas supply in turn would be piped east into neighbouring Alberta, where it will be snapped up by ... big dirty TAR SANDS operations. Oh, yuck.

So much for the green image of B.C. Hydro.

You just can't win. It is sooooo not easy being green.

Prof. Mike Mann speaks out

2010-02-19T23:37:00.004-05:00

Here's a great interview with Penn State U Professor Mike Mann by Randy Olsen, author of Don't Be Such a Scientist.
Randy gets right to the key points on the recent campaign of attacks on climate science and scientists. Also worth a read is Randy's "part 1" about the embarrassingly unprofessional CBS News (tv) segment that broadcast most of a libelous YouTube video attacking Prof. Mann as a scientific fraud who makes up data. They put a thin coating of "balance" over this, with a verbal mention of Prof. Mann's exhonoration over criticisms arising from the stolen UEA emails, but on screen they kept playing the scurrilous attack cartoon the whole time, complete with captioning.
I could go on and tell everyone to read Randy's book, and about how Prof. Mann's work stands up in spite of the harping about the hockey-stick graph, stolen emails and all. But it's late so I just wanted to get a quick post to link to the interview - check it out and see for yourself.

Confused about climate? There's an app for that!

2010-02-19T08:06:00.002-05:00

John Cook's excellent resource skepticalscience has taken an innovative twist: he's repackaged his quick comebacks to tired talking points from global warming skeptics or deniers into an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. (This may be a 'tipping point' for me to take the plunge on an iPod Touch that I've been 'i'-ing for a while.)
The great thing about this is that John's neatly organized material actually lends itself to just such a platform. Now, I am saying this without having bought that iPod Touch yet - but I've been quite impressed with his website. John boils down the essential issues and backs up his responses with links citing original peer-reviewed research.
John's new iPhone app is getting plenty of buzz in the media and online. Today it was picked up in the latest post on RealClimate (now that's the big time.)
Congrats, John!

Pat Robertson, Haiti and Wikipedia

2010-02-15T20:42:00.005-05:00

Today I heard an interview with a survivor of the horrific earthquake in Haiti last month, and it came up that some people in Haiti are blaming the earthquake on "the Americans." This is an intriguing twist, understandable perhaps from a people surrounded by a tradition which can impute malicious motives to almost any misfortune. It appears this claim may have originated with Hugo Chavez.

Coming from the rationalist culture that I do, it is hard for me to imagine inhabiting a mental world so utterly different. In my world, we know that earthquakes are caused by sudden slippage of huge tectonic plates sliding past each other. We know where the fault lines are, when the largest recorded quakes took place in the past, and how to detect a quake anywhere in the world as it is happening. But we have no capacity to either explain or predict any specific quake happening at a particular time. At most we can say a given region is 'due' or 'overdue.' In short, we don't know why this quake happened then and there, but we know it was simply a terrible natural occurrence. There is nobody to blame, aside from debating how Haiti came to be so poor that it has no building code and thus nearly all its buildings are unsuited to the high-risk earthquake zone they have the misfortune to occupy.

Then there are the people in our supposedly enlightened culture who continue to insist on imputing natural disasters to the moral blame game of divine retribution.
Right after the quake, America's most overexposed televangelist Pat Robertson opened his mouth to switch feet. He announced that God chose to send the earthquake to devastate Haiti because of some "pact with the devil" that Robertson claims the Haitian people made in the course of pursuing their independence from French colonial rule. Everyone else up to President Obama rushed to denounce this claim; CBN posted this charming non retraction.

Whoa. Where to begin? I decided to review this zany claim on the terms we would use in looking at some contentious edit on Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, anyone can contribute, but you are expected to cite Reliable Sources for whatever you put in. Your own first-hand accounts aren't eligible, and neither are unverifiable third party suggestions of the sort you might find on blogs or hear through the rumour mill.

Now, I'm having trouble picturing how Pat Robertson could back up his "pact with the devil" claim about Haiti. I doubt if Robertson is willing to argue that Satan has some kind of registry office where you can do a title search on all the souls the evil one has supposedly claimed under contract in return for hollow and fleeting fame, money or power in this life. I'm afraid whatever contracts may be out there binding souls are only written in some kind of invisible ink, legally binding beyond the grave and inaccessible to earthly investigators. So, not really suitable for attribution for the earthly Wikipedia.

This is of course just another sad example of smug and judgmental fundies choosing to blame the victim out of some twisted desire to make "sense" of everything bad that happens. Instead of having to reconcile that he can't explain why any given earthquake happens at a particular time and place, Robertson chooses to dump on the already suffering populace of Haiti by declaring them hereditary satanists, to blame for their own misfortunes due to some vicious rumour that Robertson is willing to propagate.

Here's someone who appears to have done some actual fact-checking on this subject, unlike Roberston: Michael Ireland on the Haiti 'pact with the devil' slur

If I could speak to Robertson, I'd warn him to think hard about the Ninth Commandment, "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour." Robertson has a higher responsibility as he commands the attention of an enormous audience through his own cable and radio broadcasting network, CBN. If repeating a vicious rumour imputing blame to someone you've never met, based only on a rumour, can be viewed as "bearing false witness" - I think it can - then Robertson has sinned, egregiously and publicly.

The people in Haiti who blame the USA for the earthquake are equally misguided about the absence of any link between geophysics and our ideas of right and wrong. However, I submit that we need not be too put out by the USA-earthquake suspicions harboured by some Haitians. They have experienced the ham-fisted interventions of successive U.S. administrations and a continuous stream of competing missionary groups. The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere even before the quake, Haiti deserves some slack for being succeptible to rumours and looking for someone to blame.

Pat Robertson - not so much.

[Update - 2010-02-17: I just found this article citing a rabbi who claims that gay sex caused the earthquake - and Katrina, and the 2004 tsumani. What a country - the freedom to practice your religion in the most insane way possible.]

Climate comeback

2010-02-15T10:38:00.003-05:00

Scientists and those who still believe in science are pushing back on many fronts against the recent wave of attacks against the IPCC.

UN climate panel's errors no excuse to put work on ice by UNEP head Achim Steiner ran in today's Toronto Star (and elsewhere I'm sure.) Steiner hits back directly at the absurd charges that have been flying about, launched by anti-science bloggers and parroted by the talking featherless bipeds on Fox and elsewhere:

One notion promulgated in recent weeks is that the IPCC is sensationalist: This is perhaps the most astonishing, if not risible claim of all. Indeed, the panel has more often been criticized for being far too conservative in its projections of, for example, the likely sea-level rise in the 21st century. Indeed, caution rather than sensation has been the panel's watchword throughout its existence. [...]

The fact is that the world would have to make a transition to a low-carbon, resource-efficient future even if there were no climate change. With the world's human population set to rise from 6 billion to 9 billion people in the next half-century, we need to improve management of our atmosphere, air, lands, soils and oceans anyway. Rather than undermine the IPCC's work, we should renew and redouble our efforts to support its mammoth task in assembling the science and knowledge

Toronto's own green energy guru Tyler Hamilton also takes on the overheated babble about the IPCC sinking and/or burning in his Clean Break column today:

In Canada, the Financial Post's resident libertarian Terence Corcoran wrote a column in late January with a headline that shouted "Climate agency going up in flames," while The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente wrote early in February that "the science scandals just keep on coming" and that the entire climate-change movement has been discredited. Columnist Rex Murphy, who has fittingly moved on to the National Post, is pretty much saying the same thing, only with bigger words.

Wishful thinking doesn't make it so.

Hamilton notices both Terrence Corcoran and Margaret Wente point for support to leading Canadian climatologist Andrew Weaver at UVic. One problem: Weaver doesn't agree with them at all. As Hamilton writes:

Here's what Weaver had to say when asked by the Star about the recent coverage. "It would be nice if they actually called me," he said.

He said his comments from an earlier CanWest News Service story have been cherry picked and twisted. "It's all utterly ridiculous. The way it's being spun is that there's this sinking ship and the rats are trying to leave."

But the true sinking ship is the Earth's climate system, he said. [...]

Weaver points out that the 2007 IPCC report was, in fact, conservative with its conclusions. At the time it didn't have access to more accurate satellite data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission.

The new GRACE data, said Weaver, "has revealed that Greenland has been melting rather dramatically. Also, not only is Antarctica melting, but West Antarctica is melting quite rapidly."

As Hamilton sums this up:

Is this alarmism? Sure it is, and so it should be. Do climate-change scientists sometimes get worried and show it? Sure they do. Do we really expect them to go about their scientific duties with Mr. Spock-like precision that's void of emotion and human imperfection?

So we've got a top Canadian climatologist telling us there's a serious problem, and then three highly visible non-scientists editorializing that the problem is just "alarmists" and trying to point to Weaver as being with them on that. Hmmm.

To see how top Canadian climatologists feel about climate change, check out my list of Canadian climate scientists where Dr. Weaver ranks #1 (by far) in number of climate-related journal papers. Note that the top ten all signed one or both CMOS letters supporting prompt action to cut greenhouse emissions, as did 37 of the top 50; the only skeptic in the top 50 by paper count is an economist.

Recent finds on the web - new Wiley review journal 'WIREs Climate Change'

2010-02-14T22:37:00.004-05:00

I saw Joe Romm's new project to post clear and simple overviews of the basics of climate science at climateprogress.org: Launching the Climate Science Project (with your help)

Seeing his appeal for suggestions, I chimed in with a few pointers off the top of my head. This got in as comment #28 of 50 posted in the first day.

As I commented on climateprogress, I first learned of the new e-journal "WIREs Climate Change" from Wiley Interscience, thanks to this Science Daily item). Here, I'll just restate my point that ScienceDaily does a great job covering climate science news (along with lots of other fields.)

So I went to add this new WIREs Climate Change title into my list of climate-related journals. While I was at it, I updated that list a bit, adding categories for the long list of unranked journals. I grouped several of them coarsely under "paleo", "glaciology and polar", "oceanography and ocean-atmosphere interactions", and "other" (sorry, 'others' - nothing personal!)

I've had a quick look at the premier issue of WIREs Climate Change (WCC for short?) and it looks promising. It's a review journal, meaning the articles can be longer (10-12 pg. in the print edition) and give more background/basics than a typical journal paper. This first issue is open access currently.

The articles by Judith Lean on "Cycles and trends in solar irradiance and climate" and David Parker on "Urban heat island effects on estimates of observed climate change" both look worth reading and perhaps recommending on the web.

I'm also looking forward to checking out some other titles from this issue including two on science communications.

Other useful-looking bits I found on the web today:
Terrain.org essay on Ocean acidification - a greater threat than climate change or overfishing?

The UK Royal Meteorological Society homepage has several interesting looking links, including one to the above-mentioned WIREs, but with a flashier animated gif link, thus:

Finally, I'm also intrigued by their link to a new resource for middle school teachers called Climate4classrooms This one has just a static gif for the link, but at least it's a preview:

Sadly the site itself appears to be 'broken' (saying 'Your database appears to be turned off' - should I make that, 'just not quite done yet'?) They do say it is just launching, so perhaps growing pains. Check them out if they do come online.
[Update 2010-03-05 - Climate4Classrooms is online and working now. Do check it out if you're involved in teaching or just want to see ways to present climate science at a level for kids.]

Climate Shifts blog on UEA, FOI and death threats

2010-02-10T17:29:00.002-05:00

I've found a really worthwhile climate-related blog from a dozen Australian scientists entitled Climate Shifts

They've got a good post this week entitled Phil Jones and ‘climategate’: “The leak was bad. Then came the death threats.”

I recommend it, and the rest of their blog.

Scientists pushing back against critics

2010-02-07T17:10:00.002-05:00

UK's chief scientific advisor backs climate scientists
(follow the link to listen to the 12 minute audio interview)

1 February 2010

In the wake of recent climate change controversies, including how fast the IPCC stated Himalayan glaciers would disappear, the Government's chief scientific advisor, Professor John Beddington, talks frankly to the Natural Environment Research Council about the issues.

He tells Sue Nelson why controversies don't undermine the science behind climate change, restates the case for urgent action and explains why communicating uncertainties is so difficult.

Jim Lippard on climate skeptics

2010-01-30T08:55:00.003-05:00

I've discovered another blogger who has been tracing the links between climate skeptics, right-wing think tanks, and oily funding sources.

His recent post Who are the climate change skeptics? digs into the names and qualifications of the NIPCC report authors, "expert" panels of various think tanks, Ian Plimer, and various others. I found his page because it links to my site, and I discovered he's made good use of my data on degree dates to illustrate that climate contrarians come from a significantly older demographic than either the IPCC or activist statement signers.

In the comment thread, one commenter named Kahegi (who is critical of climate skeptics and anti-evolutionists) raised an issue of the validity of keyword searches to identify either expertise or supporters of a particular theory:

"Kagehi said...
With respect, counting citations isn't always helpful. Some bozo did that a while back, claiming that "evolution" isn't part of *any* of the papers found at PubMed. His reasoning? If it had anything to do with evolution, they should be using the word specifically. In actual reality, if you search on a related term, which is actually used to convey *specific* information about the subject of what mutations are being looked at, any such word can generate tens of thousands of documents.

Word searches are bad ways to look for this sort of stuff. What you think the experts are using, and what they do, isn't necessarily the same thing. "

Jim Lippard responded:
"Kagehi: I agree that counting the publications containing "climate" has the problem you describe. But that's not the only measure discussed; I also look at overall citation counts. Again, that's at best a rough proxy for relevant credibility, since a scientist may have a high citation count in a non-climate science field."

I felt this conceded too much to Kagehi's original objection to keyword searching. Here's a copy of the comment I posted there on the usefulness of keyword searches on "climate" (two typos in my original are corrected in []s):

For the question of word searches in collecting publication stats, I think searches on "evolution" are not that comparable. I'll argue that while some articles relevant to climate science might fail to contain the word "climate," it's hard to see how someone could be actively publishing on climate change or climate science without using this word fairly regularly. Furthermore, the disparity in the stats between IPCC authors and skeptic signers on this metric is just so glaring that complaints about the imperfections of the metric seem moot.

So what [if] using the word "climate" captures only part of the climate science literature? Surely what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and any shortfall in coverage with this term is not going to favor one group or the other?

The median number of papers mention[ing] climate for the 619 IPCC AR4 wg1 authors is 93. The median among the 472 signers of any of the ten climate skeptic declarations that I've tabulated is ... two (2). It's astronomically implausible for that difference to be a mere artefact of the choice of search term.

Wishing away climate change

2010-01-30T07:31:00.002-05:00

Don't you just wish this whole climate change problem were a big misunderstanding? A joke, a trick, perhaps "a hoax"?

Plenty of people are out there willing to tell you just that - this whole issue is not actually real, the voicing calling for greenhouse emission cuts are all "alarmists", and scientists aren't actually sure we're in any trouble. They'll tell you scientists aren't unanimous; they'll claim the evidence is tainted, sexed-up by rogue alarmist conspirators devoid of integrity. All the claims that Earth is warming at an unnatural rate are down to someone cooking the data. All the forecasts of looming trouble from further warming were unnecessary: CO2 is just "plant food" and we'll all be better off with happier crops as we watch the CO2 level blow past 400, 450, 500, 550 ppm. Where will it end? Doesn't matter, no harm done. Oh, and ocean acidification from rising CO2 - that's another myth we can just ignore.

Can you imagine? Wouldn't that be so much easier? We could all just relax, head for the mall in our SUVs, and forget. The bookstore wouldn't need to have any books about Incovenient Truths, Chilling Stars, Weather Makers, Skeptical Environmentalists, or any of that. It would all be moot.

Maybe Richard Lindzen might turn out to be right, and temperatures should only be expected to rise very slightly as CO2 builds up -- but how sure can we be sure about that? What about the dozens of other experts all saying Lindzen's estimate is far too low? Can we be sure they've all over-reacted? Maybe they're all in cahoots together trying to scare us. Maybe all the reports that temperatures are still setting record highs have been faked. Fox News thinks that's what happened. Maybe next year it will all turn around and temperatures will start settling back down to the levels of the 1990s.

Maybe arctic sea ice will recover. George Will thinks it will. Maybe glaciers are all going to be fine, worldwide. Someone found a mistake about Himalayan glaciers in an IPCC report; maybe all the other glacier data, from every continent, is also a mistake -- or, another arm of the conspiracy!

Maybe all the reports of birds migrating and plants flowering earlier each year were a mistake, or perhaps even another branch of this huge conspiracy!

That's got to be it: all the bad news is just nasty corrupt scientists trying to scare us. The Canadian icebreaker expecting multi-year ice, and only finding floating fragments - maybe they faked the video, and all the data. The CBC film crew could have been in on it too.

I wonder if they faked the ice cores and lake-bed sediment records, too? What if they are faking the ocean acidification data, and the coral bleaching? It's amazing what you can do in LightWave and Maya these days.

Wow, it looks like almost every scientist, naturalist, and environmental journalist might be in on this vast eco-fascist conspiracy. They've got all the granting agencies and national science academies. It's everywhere! All the major science journals must be in on it too - except plucky little Energy & Environment, the last hold-out against the onslaught. Too bad nobody takes E&E seriously!

I wonder who's orchestrating all this massive deception? Who could get so many people from so many different countries, professions, areas of research and specialization? How would you manage all the different players, and ensure nobody ever let slip what they all really knew? A cover-up of such proportions would require a powerful secret army of enforcers and a mastermind to create and plant all the fake claims, the stories behind them and plans for how to keep the real data hidden.

Even Dan Brown could only dream of such a far-reaching empire of deceit.

Only one man could be this conniving, this cunning and ruthless. Only one man could marshall every journalist and videographer, every scholar and postdoc drilling in the mud or ice on every continent, every analyst, statistician and reviewer.

It can only be one man:

Al Gore!

Fool me five times...

2010-01-25T20:09:00.003-05:00

This line on www.realclimate.org made me LOL - and I resolved to spread it around.

Philip Machanick wrote, in reaction to the appalling state of science journalism in general, and coverage of climate issues in particular:

"The biggest puzzle is why professional journalists (with rare exceptions like Monbiot) fall for this [repeated vacuous climate denial claims] every time. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me five times, I’m a journalist."

The Wrong Foot? Media coverage of a new denialist talking point

2010-01-25T08:45:00.006-05:00

Here's another sad story of hasty journalism feeding the denial machine, with a belated twist of "balance."

A new attack on climate science is now echoing around the intertubes, thanks to CanWest writer Richard Foot. His Jan. 21 piece headlined 'Scientists using selective temperature data, skeptics say' simply regurgitates a scurrilous attack by Joseph D'Aleo (non-scientist, non-professor) and E. Michael Smith ('a computer programmer') posted on the website of the "Science and Public Policy Institute".

Foot openly admits "Both the authors, and the institute, are well-known in climate-change circles for their skepticism about the threat of global warming." Yet he makes virtually no effort to counter-balance their extreme ideological position. His whole article is just parroting their inflammatory attacks on science.

Two days later, Foot issued a much more sensible and balanced account of this flap, "Fewer temperature reports could mean warming underestimated: scientist" (Ottawa Citizen, Jan. 23) getting quotes from an Environment Canada spokesperson pointing out that fewer stations is just as likely to lead to an underestimate of warming, and finishing off with a forceful rejoinder from Gavin Schmidt calling D'Aleo's charges "appallingly defamatory and ignorant" (!) You go, Gavin! Being a wire service story, after it ran in the Citizen the story was picked up in many smaller papers across Canada and online news sites.

Here are links to the two original news stories at newspaper sites, followed by links to a Google query designed to find repetitions of each story anywhere online. As of 8:30 am Jan. 25th, hits are running A=325, B=36 (but A has a two-day head-start)

A) Scientists using selective temperature data, skeptics say

B) Fewer temperature reports could mean warming underestimated: scientist

A) google for 'just one thermometer' 'everything north of latitude 65 degrees'

B) google for 'appallingly defamatory and ignorant'

No points to Foot for starting off on the 'wrong foot' (Oooh, alternate title idea!) with a denial-only piece, then coming back two days later with the "balance."

Kudos to Gavin Schmidt for picking up on and strongly responding to this latest smear. Let's watch how the wire stories make their way around the web.

SEPP - tying up loose ends

2010-01-19T17:42:00.003-05:00

I've been updating my page on list sources, and while re-checking the name counts for various lists, I noticed I had only 46 of the 47 names on the oldest skeptic letter, the 1992 SEPP "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming."

Thanks to my handy name-comparing perl script, I was able to pin down which name I'd missed: Terrance J. Clark, USAF meteorologist.

The only work he has indexed on Google Scholas is his 1988 MSc thesis at Texas Tech on the Lubbock tornado in 1971. At least it's been cited by two others. Zero papers mentioning climate.

While I was checking, I also noticed a name that I'd had to correct from how they are entered in the SEPP petition to get a positive match online:

William E 'Reifenyder' is actually William E Reifsnyder (2nd 'e' should be an 's'), former Yale meteorology prof; PhD (1954), he died in 2006.

Tracking the Elusive Oregon Signer, part 2

2010-01-17T22:39:00.006-05:00

Okay, in part one, I reported on one of two listed California signers of the Oregon Petition whose names matched one I'd already collected by other means, but who had not signed any other skeptic letter or petition - leading me to dig deeper to make sure the match was legit.

The other name of a California OISM signer with a PhD that evidently matched a name already on my list was John A Ogren, PhD. The John A Ogren I had found already earned his PhD in Civil Engineering from Washington State in 1983 ("Elemental carbon in the atmosphere"). Since 1991 he's worked as a Physical Scientist with the NOAA ESRL in Boulder, CO, and since 1994 an affiliate faculty member at Colorado State in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. His area of interest is aerosols and clouds.

His CV lists 57 journal papers, 51 conference papers and reviews, 30 invited presentations, five grad students supervised, and ten scientific committee memberships. (The CV looks a little out of date, with papers listed only up to 1998 or so; however, Google Scholar shows hits right up to the present with the author still at NOAA/ESRL.)

This is the CV of an active, publishing scientist. This might even pass the Wikipedia "prof test" for notability (not every prof is supposed to warrant their own WP page...)

So: is this the John A Ogren who signed the Oregon Petition? Nothing in his CV jumps out at me as fitting the climate skeptic type. But the big problem is that his CV shows he only lived in California for his undergrad degree and his first job from 1975-77. He left the state in 1978 - twenty years before the first Oregon Petition drive in 1998 - to take up a postdoc at Washington State. After that his career led him to Sweden for eight years, until he arrived in Colorado in 1991. He's been at NOAA/ESRL in Boulder throughout the 90's and up to the present.

So when the Oregon Petition mailings went out, this John A. Ogren was not a California resident; he was in Colorado the whole time. Even if you suppose he somehow listed his "home state", he was born in New York (in Sept. 1952, so he's 57.)

So it looks to me that this is very likely a false positive, and that some other John A Ogren of California must have signed the Oregon Petition.

But who?

Well, a bunch of Google searches on variants of John A Ogren california eventually got me to this LookupAnyone.com directory of John Ogrens. Lo and behold, there is a John Allan Ogren, age 93, who has been listed in Guerneville, CA and Windsor, CA, and at some point also in Eugene, OR.

Clues! Windsor and Guerneville are right together, in Central Cal just outside of Santa Rosa. Eugene, OR is three hours by car from the OISM. The Calif/Oregon John A Ogren, now 93, would have been 81 in 1998 during the first OISM mailing. Might he have just mailed in the card? Or while in Oregon, might he have even associated with one of the seniors managing the Petition Project from the barn on Science and Medicine Road outside Cave Springs, OR?

In favor of this West coast JA Ogren is the actual California residence, and the age doesn't hurt either. However, there is no way to verify if this JA Ogren in Guerneville, CA had a PhD. Nothing turns up on line - unsurprising as he would have reached retirement age in 1981, so any publication output he may have had is basically locked away on paper.

Google Scholar does have digital records drawn from journal indices going back before the age of the internet. The Washington State/Sweden/Boulder JA Ogren began publishing around 1976, and using Advanced Search in Google Scholar with a date limit of 1976 or earlier brings up his earliest papers, matching what is in his CV.

So did the much older Oregon/California JA Ogren publish anything in the 60s or 70s? Here's a search to check: author:JA-Ogren with date range any time up to 1975. As you'll see, this returns a single item found as a citation in another work, reportedly from 1971. It's still the Washington/Sweden/Boulder guy, based on the title. I think it may be a typo/clerical error on the date, as the real match on those two authors with those title words was published in 2002 (quite the typo - no digits the same!?) Whatever went wrong with that citation, the search shows nobody named JA-Ogren published anything at all before 1976.

So the California John A Ogren, PhD, appears not to have had an academic or research career. We'll never know what he did for a living, unless someone wants to pay the $0.95 to LookupAnyone.com to reveal his phone number, and then bother a complete stranger who is 93 to ask if he remembers this Oregon Petition thing, and what did he do for a living.

I'm not that nosy, myself.

One last thought: If this person used their state abbreviation on the petition card, "CO" could be mistaken for "CA" depending on one's handwriting (cursive "a" is round, Art Robinson is getting on and maybe his eyesight is going, or his typing...) So maybe the NOAA/ERSL aerosols and clouds guy actually does have doubts about manmade global warming, and expressed these in a single petition signing some time between 1998 and the present, but wrote "CO" as his state, and that was mistaken for "CA". After all, clouds and aerosols are one of those 'lots of uncertainties still' topics so popular among climate change contrarians.

Well, he hasn't gone whole hog into the climate contrarian movement, based on his CV. He's never published in Energy & Environment. He never signed any of the other dozen climate skeptic letters I've incorporated in my big list. Nor does anyone named Ogren shows up in the quotemining collections maintained by Marc Morano first for Sen. Inhofe, then more recently out on his own. It's pretty hard to fit this UWA/Sweden/Boulder guy in as the signer - very speculative.

So which John A Ogren, PhD, of California (or CO??), do you think signed the Oregon Petition - the one who now lives in California, age 93, no web traces, or the one who is a widely cited climate scientist who only lived in California briefly and left twenty years before the petition, and has done nothing else to suggest he is a climate change contrarian?

It's anybody's guess.

Or we could bother the Boulder JA Ogren by email and ask if he was the signer...

Tracking the Elusive Oregon Signer

2010-01-17T21:29:00.004-05:00

I'm updating the notes and commentary on my climate scientists/petition signers list pages, including notes on one new skeptic letter, the "Copenhagen Climate Challenge", plus one one activist statement from 1700 UK scientists, re-affirming the integrity of climate science in response to the East Anglia email break-in. (More about those in another post.)

For now, I'm updating my rationale for not attempting to address the old, well-worn "Oregon Petition" or "Petition Project of the OISM." My page on Sources now includes over a dozen links to rebuttals or debunkings of the Oregon Petition.

Up to now I had only done a small random sampling of OISM signer names; much like other such efforts, I found very few active professors, journal article authors, or much of anything of note.

Tonight I decided to try a larger OISM sample, exercising a handy perl script I've written which can compare two lists of names, finding matches even where one instance is an exact substring match of the other, or has an initial and the other has either a full name starting with that initial, or omits the initial (works in either direction). It reports a match where file A has "Public, John Q" and file B has "Public, John Quincy", "Public, John", or "Public, JQ". It's something I'd been meaning to write for some time, and it's proving very helpful in semi-automating searches and comparisons, especially between lists of names from a petition, letter or statement, versus my existing list of names I've already gathered (2300 already traced for homepage and stats; 700+ still not done, just names or name + clue.)

So I looked at the petitionproject website, decided to try the list for one large state, and landed on California (lots of universities, plenty of liberal/left ideas in the air, although the state also has a strong conservative streak as well.) Anyway it was supposed to be pseudorandom, and to give a large enough sample for a meaningful test.

The petitionproject site has 3,766 names listed under California. I copied their list into a unix text file, did a bit of massaging to get one name per line, and then counted the listed degrees: 987 PhDs, 308 MDs, 32 DVM (veterinarians). I decided to start with just the PhDs. I ran my name-comparing script, checking OISM PhDs from California against my current list of names already in my web listings from other sources (other petitions, co-authors of someone in the list, found on a department website of someone I was adding, etc.)

The script matched up the following 14 names:
Baker, Don Robert
Berry, Edwin X
Chilingar, George V
Ellsaesser, Hugh W
Gruntman, Mike
Kunc, Joseph A
Lewis, William P
Maccabee, Howard D
Nierenberg, William A
Ogren, John A
Sharp, Gary Duane
Starr, Chauncey
Stevenson, Robert E
Whitten, Robert C

Don R Baker and William P Lewis were the only two not already tagged as signers of another skeptic declaration. The rest had also signed either the Leipzig Declaration, the 2009 APS letter, Manhattan Declaration, or in two cases, several other skeptic statements.

I haven't tracked down Don R Baker yet, but I wanted to blog about my tribulations trying to sort out William P Lewis and John A Ogren.

William P Lewis
There was already a William Lewis on my list, but on checking his homepage, I found his middle initial is M. He's a Fellow of the CIRES Center in Boulder, CO. I had his homepage but no stats for him yet - to do... Meanwhile, back to William P Lewis, PhD, OISM signer. Technically, he was a 'false positive' in my name-matching script, as I had not filled in William M Lewis' middle initial previously. No matter; let's make William P Lewis, PhD a blind draw for an online search for identity and credentials.

So I tried Google Scholar with author:wp-lewis and there were 79 hits, the tops ones from an engineer in Australia (scratch that one); a doctor from USC Medical School doing tropical medicine and parasitology, top cited works dating back to the 1960s. Hmm. Right state, not exactly climate-related, and MD != PhD, though he might have both. Wait! I found this article from Arch.Ophthalmol (1961) listing the lead author as William P Lewis, PhD - an exact match. Stuff about parasite infections. The most recent work that's clearly by the same author is from 1977. The same guy as the one publishing one paper in 1992 on TB and HIV, out of USC School of Medicine? Still around in 1998 or later to sign petitions? Who knows.

But has any WP Lewis published anything at all on climate change? Well, Google Scholar on author:wp-lewis climate returns three, one by someone else, an engineer, and two by the parasitologist; one mentions "amebic infections acquired in temperate climates". The other one is paywalled; the abstract doesn't mention climate; it's mainly about diagnostic tests for amebiasis. Hmm... climate expert?

Next I did a couple of google searches, and found there is one William P Lewis, P.Eng, working in Yuba City, California in wastewater treatment. He's even published a couple of articles that show up in Google Scholar, including one on how new aerators saved 1/3 of the power consumption for their treatment plant. Good on ya, WP. Three of his papers even mention the word "climate" (ties in with hydrology, affecting water services, I guess.)

So, are any of these William P Lewises the obvious candidate for OISM petition signer? Ummm... I'm not sure. One is a PhD in parasitology at UCLA, publishing up to 1977; one is an MD at USC med school, a single paper in 1992; was the WP Lewis, PhD who wrote on parasitology in the 60's this same doctor, or perhaps his father? (there's no 'II' or 'Jr') Or no relation?

The other one in Yuba City has a P.Eng. professional designation (implying perhaps an MSc or BSc in engineering - you can get a P.Eng without a PhD.)

None of them has published any research into climate science, but then we already knew the Oregon Petition was pretty "liberal", pardon the expression, on name inclusion.

So who signed the petition, exactly: the tropical medicine prof, the 1960s opthalmologist, or the wastewater treatment engineer - or someone else entirely, who has even less of a web presence?

This took me at least 20 minutes to research, not counting the time to write up this blog entry. By contrast, a match on a real climate scientist with a teaching job at a university can typically be traced and added to my list in under two minutes. That ease is what's made it possible for me to accumulate a couple of thousand completed listings; the legitimate experts simply show up quickly in a Google search for their name. Nearly everyone doing research at a university has a homepage on the university's website, and once they've published any peer-reviewed work at all, their name will show up in Google Scholar. There, a single article on a relevant topic may provide the author's full name (if they don't limit the printout to first initial(s) only, a vexatious and outdated convention) and institutional affiliation (at the time.)

It's not uncommon for a young scientist's career path to lead through various universities and research centres, often spanning the globe. It can require a bit more reading to see if it's the same person working at two different places at different times, but it can also be interesting to see a rising star get hired away by another school or lab halfway around the world (or be forced to settle for that, perhaps?)

I've still got John A. Ogren to cover - I'll split him off into another post.

Response to a comment

2009-12-15T23:27:00.006-05:00

I just wrote this in reply to a comment on an earlier thread, but it got fairly long and I thought it might as well get a post of its own.

John Ham commented on my "Happy Blog Action Day for Climate" post, in quotes below - my responses are after each quoted bit.

JH: "You don't really mean to compare Venus' atmosphere with that of Earth do you?!"
me: Same laws of physics - a useful data point on the scale.

JH: "Of course a doubling of CO2 is likely to raise average temperatures here on Earth on the order of 1 degree C (that's a bad thing?),"
me: That's a GOOD thing? That's the question. So read IPCC AR4 wg2, and Mark Lynas' book Six Degrees: our future on a hotter planet LC#: QC981.8 .G56 L983 2008; ISBN: 9781426202131 -- because it's not just 1C - see below...

JH: "...but all the rest is poorly understood feedbacks, despite what the climate modelers tell you."
me: Not *that* poorly understood -- there is a whole body of scientific literature on feedbacks and the effective climate sensitivity to an initial forcing. The net gain from the combined feedbacks has to be more than zero to account for paleo/historical data and recent satellite results. Royer 2007 in Nature is a good recent entry: Royer 2007
A handy summary of results of over 60 studies estimating the sensitivity factor is at Barton Paul Levenson's climate pages
A detailed book is Understanding Climate Change Feedbacks from the Panel on Climate Change Feedbacks, Climate Research Committees, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, National Research Council of the National Academies.
LC call # QC981.8 .C5 U485 2003
ISBN: 0309090725
Also readable online here (See box on p.19-20 for a good summary of feedbacks and gain in climate sensitivity.) Note: quite technical.

JH: "(They should get out more often so they stop confusing their models with reality.)"
me: They aren't *confusing* the models with reality - they test the models against data from the real world. The point of modeling is to improve our understanding of the behaviour of a complex system. They apply the laws of physics. They readily admit what their models do and don't cover, and what they can and can't replicate. I've been to guest lectures on campus by several top climatologists who refer to their modeling work, and it's clear to me they have their feet on the ground of hard data from the real world.

JH: "Or ocean acidification (a pretty scary term used to describe making the pH of the oceans slightly less alkaline than they currently are, if that were possible): a good look at ocean carbonate chemistry debunks that idea fairly quickly."
me: I've had a good look at ocean carbonate chemistry. There's a chapter on it in this nice 4-volume collection in our UofT science library:
Climate change : critical concepts in the environment
edited by Frank Chambers and Michael Ogle.
LC # QC981.8 .C5 C5144 2002
ISBN 041527656X
Note: quite technical

I also defer to the "alarmist" statement from 155 leading oceanographers in the 2009 Monaco Declaration.

JH: "Is this really how you propose to 'engage the denial'? "
me: Yes.

no decline to 'hide'

2009-12-08T03:48:00.002-05:00

The big kerfuffle over Professor Keith Briffa's remark in the stolen emails that he used a 'trick' to 'hide the decline' has set tongues wagging and 'threatens to derail Copenhagen.' I'm up at 3 am to post this because I'm so disgusted with how this is all unfolding.
Let's get a couple of things straight right at the start:
* The only place he says he 'hid' a 'decline' is in that specific graph
* The 'decline' is in a small number of tree-ring proxy indicators
* What he uses to 'hide' this is the 'real temps' - from tens of thousands of thermometers
* There is no decline to 'hide' in the 'real temps' over the past 50 years; these show a sharp increase
* The real temps are far, far more reliable data than the small number of tree ring proxies
* The proxies are indirect indicators, subject to confounding factors like wet vs. dry, recent air pollution and acid rain
* That problem with the tree rings has not been 'hidden' from the public; it is covered extensively by scientists as the 'divergence problem'
* That problem is a single, small wrinkle against an enormous, huge mass of other data showing warming, using direct measurement with thermometers at over 10,000 sites worldwide that show very clear and unprecedented warming in the last 50 years.
* When we want to look at the past 1000 years, we need to use the indirect proxy data from tree rings (and other proxies like corals, stalactites, boreholes, etc.)
* To compare these two types of data on one graph, the scientists found the best alignment in the period where they overlap (since about 1850)
* In the most recent 50 years, the tree ring series diverge from all the others, and this is the only thing that Prof. Briffa chose to 'hide' in combining the graphs.

To sum up, the 'real temps' for the past 50 years don't have any 'decline' to 'hide'; it's simply outrageous that the data thieves are free to spin a worldwide conspiracy from this one unfortunate combination of words in one email, as if 'trick' + 'hide' = 'everything in the IPCC is a fraud!'?

Now once again we're being treated to 'balance as bias' on CNN as Campbell Brown runs a week-long series 'Global Warming: Trick or Truth?' They're putting anti-science politicos from American Enterprise Institute up against top scientists as if they were comparable. Marc Morano, Stephen McIntrye and their ilk are getting national TV time for their scurrilous, slanderous insinuations that one spinnable email means we can just toss decades of research drawing on tens of thousands of data sources.

I looked on the CNN website and they allowed comments on 'Trick or Truth' but the comments are closed already. The real-time user comments that ran live at the bottom of the screen were really weak; I'll have to see if I can post something better as the show continues.

When I look at Marc Morano on national TV, all I can say is: the world is freakin' crazy. The one thing that looks hopeful right now is that the Copenhagen meetings actual sound like they have some momentum toward a deal, and that the Saudi delegation may be isolated in their oil-soaked protests that they want a total do-over of the past 20 years of climate research based on two phrases in the stolen CRU emails.

2009-11-17T12:27:00.003-05:00

Here's the text of an email I just sent to Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) on seeing him quoted as saying he is "cynical" about global warming science (I'm sure he meant to say "skeptical"...)

On his Senate website he posted concerns about Kerry-Boxer (full text available
here ) that ss. 705 and 707 would empower the President to direct the Federal government to use all existing powers to try to cut U.S. GHG emissions if global CO2-eq concentration reaches 450ppm. He claims this 'trigger' would go off "within months" of enactment. That didn't sound right to me, so I dug around a bit for forecasts. Here's what I came up with:

Dear Sen. Vitter,

On your website you state that the 450 ppm CO2-eq "trigger" would be reached "within months" of enactment. I don't agree. Current CO2-eq is 400 ppm, rising around 2.5 ppm / year. In projections that factor in emission reductions that countries have already committed to, the world should not reach 450ppm CO2-eq before 2037. Even projecting Business As Usual (ignoring all existing reduction commitments, as if everyone quit trying entirely) the world would not reach 450ppm CO2-eq until 2032. So while the trigger could indeed come into effect in some *decades*, I think "within months" greatly overstates the matter.
Data source (very detailed projections for several possible policy outcomes):
http://www.climateinteractive.com/state-of-the-global-deal/data-and-references/data-and-references

Yours Truly,
Jim Prall
U.S. citizen

Happy Blog Action Day for Climate

2009-10-15T12:50:00.011-04:00

I'm posting this as my little contribution to Blog Action Day 2009 on tackling climate change. Let me start off by saying I am indeed happy today; I'm happy to see people pitching in all across the web to contribute to this great campaign. I'm happy that there is still some chance the world may work together at Copenhagen. I'm particularly happy that there are just so many solutions to climate change waiting to be put into practice, as soon as we all agree to stop dithering and act.

I want to reflect on the recommendations at the conclusion of Kari Norgaard's excellent essay on the psychology of climate denial, which I blogged on recently. I'll use the concise and convenient summary of six points provided by Wellsharp's nice overview of Norgaard's recommendations:

Engage with denial openly – research shows fears are less paralyzing when faced openly.
If you're one of the many people still trying to argue that CO2 doesn't cause warming, that it's "plant food", etc. - it's time to let go and face reality. Look at the planet Venus: surface hot enough to melt lead, and the reason (worked out well before anybody began debating the greenhouse effect on earth) is the huge buildup of CO2 in Venus' atmosphere. Find a better account of why Venus is so hot, and then come back; I won't hold my breath. Otherwise, you need to recognize that you're grasping at straws. Besides, if greenhouse warming weren't bad enough, CO2 emissions are also acidifying the world's oceans - already, right now, it is measurable and it's got oceanographers really shaken. (See my recent posts on Acid Test and the Monaco Declaration.)

Many people have landed in climate "denial" by way of a conservative blog, talk radio, cable news, or editorials like those from George Will or the Washington Post. Look, whatever your views on their politics, those sources just aren't listening to the science. They're 'in denial'; you may feel, like them, that liberals are trying usher in world government, and using climate change "alarmism" to scare people into compliance. Well, we're not. I don't want world government, and neither do Obama nor the Democrats in Congress, nor any center or left party in Canada's Parliament, nor Elizabeth May. Passing laws like CAFE standards, cap-and-trade, or renewable portfolio standards may not be laissez-faire, but neither are they Socialism, nor stepping stones to rule by the U.N. They're just domestic policy, same as the old kinds of policy like depletion allowances for oil exploration, or loopholes in New Source Review for coal plants.

Contradict fear by providing honest information, open discussion (e.g. acknowledgement of the risks but also hopeful examples)
If we drag on the delay and make no effort to cut greenhouse emissions, we do indeed face serious consequences - for people, not just for polar bears. Drought and stresses on the food supply are probably the biggest and "scariest" impacts. Look at Australia now; consider that scientists project similar problems setting in around the world in more temperate climate as continental interiors heat up and dry out. Poor countries will be hit first and hardest, be we won't escape such impacts in the developed world either. So we won't be able to just retreat into a wealth bubble, even if the ethical problems of doing so didn't rule that out anyway. Indeed, poor countries are already experiencing negative impacts from climate change, as documented by CARE.

Okay, now: don't panic. We can in fact cut greenhouse emissions, substantially, without moving back to the stone age. Maybe Exxon won't be the biggest supplier of energy in the future, and they won't like that, but we can have hot water, comfortable houses, mobility, and electrons for the fridge, TV and internet from 100% renewable sources. More on this below. I already get all my electricity from renewables through Bullfrog Power and soon, Ontario will be providing much more green electricity to everyone province-wide thanks to the groundbreaking Green Energy and Green Economy Act. The future for renewables in Ontario is really looking up.

Contradict helplessness through providing opportunities for effective action, including opportunities that reduce isolation, build community, and create positive frames of reference. “people must be given not only information, but something to do.” (p.47)
Okay, you are on the internet. There's plenty you can do besides changing lightbulbs. Look up what legislation is being proposed where you live, and email your representatives to tell them what you think. You'll be surprised how easy it is, and they actually keep track of what their constituents bother to write in about. You can phone and leave your views with a staffer, as well.

Vote with your wallet - sign up for green electricity; insulate (lots of tax credits for doing this, lately); boycott products that are the most negative for the environment, and tell stores and manufacturers why you are making those choices (again, emailing is quick and easy.) I read that Wallmart is aiming to post the carbon footprint of every product on their shelf pricing displays - wow!

Next, tell your friends: tweet whatever you discover about greener or smoggier product choices; join Facebook groups for action to protect rainforests, healthy oceans, whatever catches your eye and heart. You don't need to chain yourself to a smokestack to be an activist on the internet.

Combat guilt by acknowledging the present and providing opportunities to engage in more responsible behavior.
Here we are, now. We've got big fossil fuel companies, coal-fired power plants, oil pipelines, and furnaces to run. When we started building all this, we didn't realize what it could do to the atmosphere and ultimately the climate. So let's not beat ourselves up over what our parents didn't know, nor over how right now, we need coal, oil and gas to be able to function. However, good news: there are alternatives - lots of them. We won't convert everything overnight, but in a generation, we could readily replace fossil fuels with renewable sources in most sectors where it counts. Houses can be far better insulated (saving money on whatever kind of energy you buy for heat and cooling - now that's cool!) Houses can get heat from geo-exchange systems (zero carbon if the power for circulating pumps is green electricity); hot water passive solar already works and is catching on worldwide, from China to Mexico to Canada (okay, we need backup heat for grey Februaries...).

For electric power, there's small hydro (only 3% of dams in the U.S. have electric generation - retrofit even a fraction of the rest, and get more power with no new dams); run-of-river hydroelectric also avoids dams; solar PV prices are plummeting, and the industry has been growing incredibly rapidly with multi-billion-dollar investments; concentrating solar thermal like Solar 1 can also work well, and can be equipped to provide dispatchable power or "baseload" by storing the heat carrier in insulated tanks for use on demand (one of Joe Romm's top picks for green energy); wind power - already cheaper than most other new generation sources, and beats coal handily if we only make coal pay the full ride for all its externalities (CO2, mercury, particulates, smog and acid precipitation, mining impacts - yuck!)

For cars, plug-in hybrids are an exciting prospect for cutting dependence on gasoline and making the most of the kind of green electricity I just enumerated. Have a look at the great news and commentary site www.evworld.com for the latest on electric, plug-in hybrid, and other green autos.

I could go on and on with this kind of great news; I'll save some for a future post, but for now, just stop worrying that if we agree to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this will somehow "cripple the economy." Instead, I foresee a great future for renewable and sustainable energy production from dozens of sources. Never again should we need to worry about "peak oil" or peak anything - we can produce more than enough for everyone if we deploy even half of the potential inexhaustable sources that are starting to prove themselves more and more ready for prime time.

Oh wait - did I mention LED lighting? Bio-char? Cellulosic and algal biofuels? Wave and tidal power? Electric rail for freight and passenger travel?

All that without even getting to controversial lower-carbon power such as nuclear or coal+carbon sequestration, either of which are still potential sources (though each likely to end up costing MORE than renewables - see www.climateprogress.org)

Confront and constrain the influence of the fossil fuel industry on policy debate (e.g. public information campaigns)
Good responses to this are easy to find now - we just need to get them out to the public and to policymakers, consistently. Just a few top picks:
www.exxonsecrets.org
www.desmogblog.com
www.davidsuzuki.org
www.greenpeace.org
Look on DesmogBlog for James Hoggan's new book Climate Cover-up and order your copy today. It's a powerful expose of the sorry spectacle of Big Oil and Coal laundering their dirty money through foundations and think tanks to fund mindless spin doctors and astroturf (i.e. fake grassroots) campaigns of deception. Hoggan caps off a series of such exposes that started with Ross Gelbspan's The Heat is On through Stauber & Rampton's Trust Us, We're Experts and Toxic Sludge is Good for You.

Develop other ways of appealing to national identity and national pride e.g. through emission reduction efforts
For the US: despite all the denial and delay under Bush 43, the U.S. economy has indeed achieved some measure of improvement in CO2 intensity of GDP. It will take a lot more than this to achieve absolute reductions, particularly if and when economic growth kicks back in. But the U.S. still leads in technical innovation and research.
For Canada: okay, we signed Kyoto and then punted, and the earliest we might see national carbon policy in effect is 2011. However, paradoxically, there is one jurisdiction in Canada that already has a carbon price in effect. Did you guess Alberta? No, really - check it out.
Both countries have been laggards in the global negotiating process, but the Obama administration has re-engaged and is working hard to bring in China. There could still be a productive agreement in Copenhagen this December. Contact your elected officials to urge them to make this happen.

Be positive! Don't sit around thinking "oooh, we're dooooomed." We're not doomed. We just need to pry political power from the oily hands of the fossil fools.

New NRDC video "Acid Test" on ocean acidification

2009-10-05T23:37:00.002-04:00

Well now that I know I can embed YouTube videos so easily (in Chrome, I right-click on the video where I found it, and choose "copy embed html" - then just paste that HTML into a new blog post...

Like this:

I found this at the NRDC site where they have background information about the project.

This dovetails well with the Monaco Declaration that I've been trying to publicize. Even if the greenhouse effect were not a problem (and it is), CO2 continues to change the chemistry of the entire world's oceans, posing a huge threat to marine life, from plankton to corals to reef fish and the whole aquatic food chain. This also threatens the food supply of mammals that depend on fish in their diet - seals, grizzly bears, about a billion people ...

2009-10-05T23:31:00.001-04:00

Let's see if I can embed a YouTube video...

Nice ad from the Sierra Club responding to the ongoing "clean coal" TV ad blitz.

Interesting articles on psychology of denial

2009-10-02T15:01:00.006-04:00

The term "climate denial" gets some people annoyed, as though they are being lumped in with Holocaust deniers. I think that's off the mark - that's hardly the only connotation of the term "denial." Let's set aside that issue, and consider the use of the term "denial" in psychology, as in being "in denial" about a problem. Lots of thoughts are unwelcome or uncomfortable, and everyone is prone to avoiding such discomfort by trying not to think about those things.

I find it useful to be able to talk about public reaction to news about global warming, or to calls for change to deal with it, in terms of psychological denial. "Let's just hope the scientists are all overreacting"; or, "let's just hope the scientists are going to invent some great new technology that will save us all, and save us having to make big changes"; or, "let's just deflect the unwelcome messages by reading websites that say it's all not true." I think that sums up a lot of what's going on these days, right?

Here's an eloquent posting summing up an academic paper on this topic: The Social Organization of Denial. I like the emphasis on the social nature of climate denial; it's a shared behaviour, rather than a personal foible that just happens to appear in large numbers of people independently.

Well Sharp is a blog I had not come across before, by New Zealanders David Parker and Barry Larsen. Worth a look.

Something we all can do now

2009-10-02T14:54:00.003-04:00

People say it's important to give your audience a sense of what they can do to be part of the solution, so that they don't leap from avoiding the troubling message about climate change directly to despair that nothing can be done.

So in the spirit of "at least we can do this now" I offer these tips for cutting the carbon footprint of our internet habit:

#1 Find or buy a couple of power bars that have an on/off switch. Set up one to control all your small device chargers: cellphone, PDA, laptop, Wiimote, whatever. It turns out those little "brick" transformers in chargers draw a small amount of power whenever plugged in to the wall, even when the battery-powered product is not connected(!) Clue: they stay warm all the time. If it's warm, it's functioning as a tiny baseboard heater. Save needing to plug and unplug the AC prongs by just flipping the switch on the power bar. During heating season it's less critical.
Set up another one at your computer, and plug into it all the computer peripherals you use only occasionally, including the power "brick" converters for small DC power supplies.
Leave the power bar switched off except when you need the devices. Both Macs and PCs can cope with having USB devices powered off and then turned on when needed.
If you have a router and DSL or cable modem, but you are the only user, consider if you can power these down when you're not online. They typically need no more time to sync up with your ISP than your PC needs to boot up, or come out of hiberate. (For wireless routers, this will be less appealing, but see if you can work out some plan - switching off while you're out of the house, while you sleep, etc.) Leave as little as possible powered on 24/7.

#2 Windows users: set up your PC to enable hibernation, using the Power options control panel. Then download and run this simple registry update, which tells windows to make visible the hidden Hibernate button in the Shut Down/Restart dialog box. Page explaining the registry change and link to download the .REG. Don't be alarmed by browser warnings about dangerous file type. I've tested this download, and it does what it says.

The hidden hibernate button can already be revealed by pressing "CTRL" while the box is showing, but why keep it secret? Out of sight is out of mind.
When you hibernate, Windows saves a snapshot of what's in memory, right down to what files and web pages you have open. It can then power down your PC completely. When you power up again, it does the usual BIOS 'POST', then when it starts from your hard drive, it sees the hibernate image and reloads that instead of booting windows from scratch. Loading is considerably faster, and you're back where you left off. (You'll still need to use "restart" to complete some Windows updates, security patches, etc. at times.)
I believe the appeal of this little tweak can help steer us all to take advantage of Hibernate, where we'd otherwise be tempted to leave the PC on for many hours ("I can't bear to watch it 'saving your settings' for 5 minutes, and then wait for Windows to boot when I want to get back online later") Also perfect for laptops - great for battery life. Hibernate is "off", while standby is "on but low power" and still drains your battery gradually.

You can set the Power Options control panel to hibernate your PC automatically after a chosen interval of inactivity, just as you've likely got already for screen saver and/or standby.
By itself this tweak won't save the world, but little steps in the right direction, taken by enough people on enough different fronts, can make a good start.

Blog Action Day '09 - Climate Change

2009-09-28T15:45:00.000-04:00

What is Blog Action Day? According to their site:

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

This year's topic: climate change. So I've signed up, as the 2132nd blogger to agree to take part so far, evidently.

On the other hand, they ask how many RSS readers I've got, and I had to fill in ZERO. Come on, people - somebody start following me here. I think a few people drop in now and then to read this, but I'm obviously not catching on how to do the self-promotion thing.

Carbon as garbage - a new way to frame CO2 buildup

2009-09-26T08:29:00.000-04:00

This week I met a great group of climate activists and had a few hours of really good, thought-provoking discussions. We talked over the challenges of communicating climate science, how few people really seem to grasp the seriousness of the climate crisis, and how hard it is for ordinary people to picture the relentless build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere. One concern that came up is that some people may mis-perceive CO2 as similar to "air pollution," where emissions impact on those immediately downwind, for a short time, and can be relieved almost immediately by stopping the emissions. Close down the factory, and local air quality improves right away.

CO2 is not like that. CO2 does not settle out of the air, as particulate ("smoke") pollution gradually does, nor is it washed from the air by rain showers, as particulates are. We need to think of CO2 as "dissolving" in the atmosphere the way salt dissolves in water, milk dissolves in coffee, or gin dissolves in tonic water: once it is mixed in, there is no practical way to get it back out again.

So here's my new analogy to help picture the true nature of the CO2 problem: cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a bit like getting people to recycle. The problem of recycling is that we throw away far too much stuff, and landfills keep filling up. Nobody wants a new landfill near their home, so our best plan is to adopt the "Three Rs"--reduce, reuse, and recycle. That means to buy less stuff, choose products with less packaging, don't use things once and toss them, and when we do have unwanted items, try to separate materials for recycling so they don't end up in the landfill.

As long as the economy keeps growing, people keep buying more new things, and companies keep adding ever bulkier packaging for protection in transit, and to deter shoplifting, our waste stream keeps expanding. The rate the dump fills up depends on how much we are throwing away each year. The more we recycle, the longer we have before the dump is full and must be closed, and a new one located (after much squabbling.) Around here, new landfill sites are simply not being accepted.

The movement to promote recycling has been a long slog. Some people get the message and take on their individual responsibility out of personal concern, but many people either don't understand or just can't be bothered to separate their trash. They keep tossing paper, cans and bottles careless in the garbage bin. At some point, cities find that the one way to influence most people to get serious about recycling is to impose a cost on garbage pickup. This is what Toronto has done over the past couple of years: they provide each house a large blue bin for recycling, and a smaller grey bin for garbage; they charge extra for bag tags for overflow trash, and give people a break if they accept a smaller grey bin. Businesses must pay per bag for trash pickup, as well. Here in Toronto there is a third stream: a smaller green bin, picked up every week, for wet organic garbage and food waste. By keeping the wet and smelly matter separate, both the recycling and the grey bin can stay dry and odour-free so they can be picked up on alternate weeks. Toronto's program isn't perfect--there are problems with plastic in the wet garbage, apartment buildings don't yet have full access to these programs--but we are at least moving in the right direction.

Residents have to take on a bit of extra work of separating food scraps, recyclables, and those stubborn remaining "other" items that can only go in the actual trash. The modest cost imposed on extra bags or on having a larger grey bin provide the incentive to go to this small extra effort. People are now doing their bit, and blue bins are brimming with material ready to go to recycling and thus staying out of landfill.

Now think of the atmosphere as our landscape. We have been using it as a CO2 dump, but since CO2 is invisible, there has been no "NIMBY" resistance to the dumping. There is no one point where the atmosphere is going to be "full" and CO2 can't be dumped any more; rather, the longer we go on adding CO2, the more it will keep building up and the greater the impact on climate and the greater the severity of every kind of impact and risk we incur.

In trying to picture what's happening with CO2, it's important to realize that CO2 is more like landfill garbage than like factory smoke: it doesn't "go away" as soon as we get around to stopping emissions. It has been piling up higher and higher in the "CO2 dump", and even when we all attain zero emission perfection, the pile will still be standing there, stinking things up by overdriving the greenhouse effect.

CO2 hangs around in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years before it will ever move on - by dissolving in the ocean, mainly. Even there it poses a further threat, since it becomes carbonic acid, lowering the pH of the ocean and harming sea life.

When we stop burning coal, the smoke will clear in a few days, but the CO2 left behind will just sit there in the air, going around and around the earth, year after year after year, trapping infrared heat and sending a bit extra back downward to heat things up here at the surface. The dump will just keep stinking. We can't cover it over and plant a golf course on top of the CO2 dump, either. We're going to be stuck with this for centuries.

Imposing a modest cost on throwing away trash has been effective in getting people to change their behaviour and adopt good recycling habits. Right now there is no cost at all for emitting CO2. It's free, so nobody goes to any trouble to emit less, except the idealistic few who understand the crisis and care deeply enough to change their habits. Like recycling, carbon reductions will only take hold across the board if there is a price signal. Once we show people they can save money by emitting less carbon, there are plenty of opportunities to make serious reductions. Since coal is very CO2-intensive for a given amount of power generated, an imposed carbon emission price - whether a carbon 'tax' or a tradeable 'permit' worth real money - will tip the scales away from coal and toward carbon-free power generation. There are plenty of alternatives waiting in the wings; wind power is already becoming competitive with most other forms of generation apart from existing, very dirty coal power.

When we finally make up our minds to begin to slow the buildup of CO2, we will need to stand tough against the dirty coal lobby, who have been tossing around terms like 'clean coal' rather casually. We certainly must not "grandfather" existing coal plants to be exempt from any carbon cost, as happened in the "New Source Review" shenanigans around power plant emission reductions. We don't yet know how feasible or affordable it is to capture the CO2 from a coal plant and bury it underground. People worry about what so much CO2 will do to groundwater and whether it may escape. One pilot plant in Germany set up to do this has not yet been able to overcome these concerns to get permission to begin pumping the CO2 underground, so it is still just dumping it into the air--carbon capture and spillage? Even when capturing the CO2 from coal, this does not in itself address the many other negatives of coal: sulphur, mercury, particulates, smog, and all the harm done by coal mining. It's really Orwellian to talk about coal as "clean."

So remember, CO2 is building up in our atmosphere's "airfill" just as every item we throw away ends up in a landfill, and whatever CO2 we emit is going to sit there for ages and ages. It won't blow 'away' or get washed out in the next rain the way smoke will. CO2 disperses and gets mixed evenly through the whole atmosphere. It continues to pump up the greenhouse effect even after it is spread out everywhere. Smoke can "disperse" and eventually we can see a blue sky again, but CO2 is not 'going away' even though we can't see it.

The whole atmosphere is one big airfill, and slowing our emissions will only slow the rate that the pile keeps growing. We don't have any easy way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere on the kind of scale we're now dumping it in. As long as we keep emitting, the pile is only going to keep growing. Planting trees or preserving rain forests will help a little, but can't absorb the kind of quantities we've dumped over the years. Some of the excess CO2 will gradually seep down from the air to the ocean, but that's actually driving a huge additional problem: acidification. It's a bit like leaching from a landfill into the ground water.

People weren't thrilled about having to pay for bag tags for excess garbage, but we've all adjusted to it and taken up using the blue bin. I also believe the world can cope with having a price on carbon emissions. It will not "destroy" the economy, it will simply channel it toward the many, many lower-carbon options we already have, as well as spurring the development and improvement of new ones.

To motivate the community to accept such a price signal, it would help for people to be able to picture that our one shared 'airfill' is getting dangerously full, and even though technically CO2 is odorless, the airfill is really getting damned stinky.

A busy week

2009-09-22T10:39:00.000-04:00

This week is Environment Week here at UofT, with lots of events around campus throughout the week. I'm hoping to get to a couple of them.

This week's UofT Bulletin has an interview with Prof. Danny Harvey on the value of wind farms in addressing climate change.

Danny will be appearing at two Environment Week events this week, on Wednesday evening and Thursday.

Meanwhile, my order arrived with two very new books I'm looking forward to reading:

Climate Cover-up by James Hoggan [2009: Greystone Books]

What's the Worst That Could Happen? by Greg Craven [2009: Perigee]

Plus I had only just started these excellent titles that I have checked out of our science library:

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheryl Kirshenbaum [2009]

Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity by Mike Hulme [2008]

Pleistocene Park - and a tank?

2009-09-13T21:27:00.001-04:00

I got a real belly laugh out of this true-life account of tundra scientist Sergei Zimov of the Russian Academy of Science station at Cherskii. It ranges over wooly mammoths, permafrost carbon stores, and ... a tank? Yes, indeed. Read for yourself:

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2008/sepoct/features/siberia.html

Here's another page about Zimov that casually mentioned the tank in the station's list of equiment, and got me curious, leading to the Stanford magazine article above...

http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/globalvoices/05essay.dtl

Here's the closest thing to a homepage for Zimov's project that I've found:

http://www.faculty.uaf.edu/fffsc/station.html

You just can't make this kind of stuff up. Truth really is stranger than fiction.

How many sponsors does one conference need?

2009-07-24T17:51:00.000-04:00

I just came across an interesting list in the great online encyclopedia SourceWatch.

This list counts FORTY TWO co-sponsors of the 2009 climate skeptics' conference in New York, in addition to the title sponsor and organizer, the Heartland Institute.

Some choice samples from the list:

"Americans for Prosperity"
"Asutralian Libertarian Society"
"Ayn Rand Institute"
...
"Carbon Sense Coalition"
"Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change"
"Climate Skeptics Party"
"Competitive Enterprise Institute"

and so on.

Forty two.

Fans of Douglas Adams will have their own reading of that number, but I digress...

Anyway, (A) why does one conference need that many co-sponsors? Did any real scientific conference ever drum up that many co-sponsors?

(B) Why is a "scientific" conference being co-sponsored by political parties, policy think tanks, libertarian and positivist groups (and no scrientific or academic bodies)?

Those are my questions for today.

The Great Climate "Skeptics" Swindle

2009-07-20T15:34:00.002-04:00

In my laboriously gathered list of climate scientists and people making claims about climate science, I've completed several milestones recently. I filled in the number of papers matching the word "climate" for the great majority of the list, including all 619 IPCC AR4 wg1 authors, all signers of the Cato ad, the 3 skeptics letters to Canadian PMs and to UN SG Ban Ki-Moon and all of the "scientist" signers of the Manhattan Declaration - basically nearly every skeptic I've had time to catalogue (though far from every name that Marc Morano has been accumulating - maybe he's just able to type faster than I can - but consider that this is his full-time job, while I've got both a day job and a life outside of work and the web - I spent last weekend adding insulation to my house.)

I've also started providing two versions of each listing: one sorted in descending order of number of citations (starting with the fourth-most-cited paper for each author, then sub-sorting on the #3 paper and the #2 paper as needed); the other version, new this month, is sorted on the number of papers mentioning "climate" by that author. I found this addresses the issue of people with long careers in some other field who begin making pronouncements on climatology without ever having published on climate themselves - such as phycists Antonio Zichichi and (particularly) Freeman Dyson. Both ranked in the top 100 when sorting on most citations to their entire published works - but these guys published very little academically actually talking about climate. Freeman Dyson has just 23 hits on "climate" in Google Scholar, versus over 435 in total, and a high-ranking 318 cites to his fourth-most-cited paper (which was nothing to do with the climate.) Zichichi? He's got six.

Sorted on matches for "climate," the list now gives more of an indication of which names are in fact climate scientists themselves. It also highlights just how far down the barrel the skeptic groups are digging to find names to fill out their open letters and political ads.

I've made separate pages for just the Cato ad signers, the "scientists" who signed the Manhattan Declaration, and one specific to Martin Durkin's overwrought documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle." In this page I list those who appeared in the film, plus the (larger) list of scientists who signed a letter of complaint to ~~BBC4~~ Channel 4 critiquing the film and asking that it not be promoted until some of the most glaring inaccuracies are somehow addressed. The outcome of the sort for this list is particularly striking: the complaint letter drew three of the ten most widely published authors on climate - Philip Jones, Stephan Harrison and Sir John T. Houghton - and of the 21 authors with over 100 papers mentioning "climate" in this subset, seventeen were signers of the complaint letter and just four appeared in the film: John Cristy (186 "climate" papers), Pat Michaels (149), Richard Lindzen (140), and Fred Singer (110). I also note where each author ranked in my overall listings. None of these four even made it into the top 200. Meanwhile the skeptics featured in the film include three names with zero hits on "climate" and another two with just one match.

A similar trend carries through to other new sub-tables I've set up, including the one limited to just Canadian authors. The median number of papers mentioning "climate" for this group is 39. Four Canadian contributors to AR4 wg1 fall below this median value, while around 30 meet or exceed that level; AR4 wg1 included five of Canada's ten authors with the most papers on "climate" (of those I've catalogued, anyway).

Only three of the top 50 Canadians by number of articles on "climate" have signed skeptic declarations or letters: Cornelius van Kooten, Jan Veizer and Ross McKitrick. Of these, only Veizer is a scientist; the other two both write on economics.

I'll leave for another post the particulars of my table of signers of the 2009 Cato Institute ad directed at President Obama's stance on climate.

The Latest Neologism

2009-07-20T15:18:00.001-04:00

Neologisms are newly-coined words that didn't exist until someone had the insight to boldly go where no man has gone before, word-wise. Here's one that turned up in an interview on one of the science podcasts I frequent, adding yet another compelling title to my painfully long list of 'must reads':

Flotsametrics

This one has the virtue of summing up nicely what is going on, without being too cutesy, and was evidently coined by the author who is an actual ... flotsametrician or whatever: Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D. oceanographer who built a network of volunteer beachcomers who gather data on ocean currents by reporting in what they find washed ashore on their local beaches. Ebbesmeyer shot to fame (at least among science nerds) when he discovered that a shipping container full of Nike sneakers had been washed overboard in the Pacific Ocean, broke open, and released its massive cargo of readily identifiable floating data points. As these began washing ashore, he was able to isolate a specific model that made up that shipment, and the dates and places of their arrivals on shorelines worldwide have proven a terrific source of new data on surface ocean currents. Not long after, the same thing happened again to a shipping container full of rubber duckies. As he likes to put it, he would never have been able to get permission to release such a collection of items on purpose.

So now I'm really trying to make time to get through the my stack of library books to clear the decks, since I've just GOT to get my hands on his book Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science.

(Okay, maybe 'revolutionized' is overselling it a bit - let's wait and see how the book plays out...) Ebbesmeyer is also a leading expert on oceanic gyres - the surface regions that act as "sinks" for floating rubbish such as plastic bags, lost fishing nets, refrigerators(!) etc., trapping them in slowing turning whirlpools of clutter that boggle the imagination with their scale (THREE times the size of Texas?!) and pose a real threat to marine life with their bright colors and chewy textures.

Ocean acidification

2009-05-07T16:35:00.000-04:00

I just came across yet another powerful appeal from scientists in response to rising CO2 levels - this one specifically on the problem of ocean acidification. As CO2 dissolves into seawater, it reacts to form carbonate and bicarbonate ions. Adding more CO2 changes the balance between these ions, and that lowers the pH of the water.

Seawater is naturally slightly alkali, but we have witnessed a drop in pH (lower pH = more acidic = less basic/alkali) of around 0.1 units of pH, from 8.2 to 8.1. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to affect marine organisms, and the effect is projected to worsen as CO2 emissions continue in the future.

Oceanographers have been reporting on this issue for some time now, and have expressed concern about the potential damage to marine ecosystems. The Monaco Declaration of January 30, 2009 was an attempt to highlight these serious concerns, bringing together some 155 oceanographers from 26 countries taking part in the ASLO Aquatic Sciences Conference.

The group have started an extensive website www.ocean-acidification.net with background information on the problem, news on current research and goals for future work.

I quickly checked the list of signatories against my list of climate scientists, and found 16 I'd already listed. Oceanography is an allied discipline to climate science, given the central role of the ocean in the carbon cycle. Oceanographers appreciate the ecosystem risks inherent in rapidly forced changes to ocean pH that come with spiking CO2 in the atmosphere.

Overall, marine life is one of the hidden victims of carbon pollution. The oceans are under assault on so many fronts, from runoff of pesticides, fertilizer and general contaminants, through overfishing, fish farms causing outbreaks of fish lice and releasing antibiotics, shrimp farming driving destruction of mangrove forests needed as nurseries by many marine species, massive buildup of non-biodegradable plastic garbage (shopping bags, lost fishing nets, etc.) that are ingested by seabirds, turtles and fish, plus now water temperature changes, sea level rise and acidification, all piled one on top of the other. There's a horrendous negative synergy compounding between all these separate ways we impact marine life. All this takes place out of sight of most of us, largely unreported and unnoticed.

Losses of both subsistence and commercial fisheries threaten economic disaster in coastal communities worldwide. It's time for us to wake up to what's happening below the waves. I urge everyone to read the Monaco Declaration and look through the www.ocean-acidification.net website. For more news on this topic, see Science Daily

Vast resources for learning

2009-05-07T15:11:00.000-04:00

If you really want to understand the current outlook of climate scientists, and not just hear the opinions of bloggers making claims about what the science shows, there are many, many online resources that get you directly to the primary sources.

Nearly every science journal has an online edition now; indeed, some are phasing out paper editions to save costs and lower their environmental impact. While most still restrict full-text access to subscribers only, at least for the latest few issues, many now grant open access to back issues past a set window such as one year, and virtually all give free access to article abstracts. Many also have supplementary web content beyond the formal articles, which may include editorials, less technical subject reviews, news briefs, commentary, etc. as well as source data too extensive to fit into print format.

I've made up a web page listing over sixty journals that address climate science and allied disciplines, such as oceanography, biogeochemistry, etc.

Many readers will find most of the research articles in the academic journals beyond their interest or understanding; they are, after all, intended for professionals within their field, and will come across as "inside baseball" loaded with statistics, equations, jargon and loads of assumed background, leaving most of us struggling to keep up. That's normal, and it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with us for not being insiders, nor with them for talking to one another at their own level. When looking through academic journals, look especially for "review articles" which aim to recap the highlights of the state-of-the-art on a particular topic; these can be a better entry point for non-specialists trying to get a start on an unfamiliar subject. But even these will often demand a good measure of "science literacy."

For the "rest of us" who have not studied these fields enough to follow the primary literature, is there still a way to follow what's happening? Indeed there are several. Science journalism is still alive and has much to offer to the interested lay person. While the financial pressures on tradional media - both print and broadcast - have put the squeeze on science journalism in mass media, there are still many good sources in "science news."

This would include magazines such as New Scientist and Scientific American which attempt to address a broader audience while still aiming for the standards of academic publication - editorial and peer review, citation, and publishing qualified rebuttals.

As well, some of the top journals have supplementary products addressing science news and current issues. The AAAS website supplements their lead journal Science with an extensive website sciencemag.org, a lively podcast of science headlines and features. The magazine website has headlines linking to journal article abtracts, which are free for public access; full text of articles requires subscription or online payment.

Similarly, the UK's Royal Society supplements their lead print journal Nature with a fine website, including an entire site devoted to climate change at Nature Reports Climate Change
So although both Science and Nature are subscriber-only, each has free public access to excellent supplementary material, including much of relevance to climate.

Another excellent source is ScienceDaily, a free science news site with clear, brief write-ups of current work in all areas of science. To see what they've covered on climate, glaciers, ocean acidification, or whatever, just use their search box.

So if you are unfamiliar with what has been going on in the process of climate science, or only hearing about it second or third hand from bloggers, do yourself a favour and get a look at some of the excellent primary material, as well as good journalism reporting directly on primary sources, that is available online.

Rep. Boehner on cows and CO2

2009-04-23T11:12:00.000-04:00

I just posted the following comment on Chris Mooney's excellent blog "The Intersection", at its new home on the Discover Magazine website. Here's the discussion thread that prompted this. See there for a video clip of George Stefanopoulos' interview with Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) (whose House homepage currently leads off with "Ohio’s coal industry employs about 3,000 people ... Coal and the Ohioans who depend on it are also quietly under attack, courtesy of the federal government" - because of the proposed CO2 cap-and-trade legislation, which he opposes.)

Chris wrote an editorial in response to Boehner's remarks, and in the blog entry he follows some of the response to his position. You might want to view the 2 minute clip and read the blog post as context for the following.

Here's what I posted on Chris' blog:

I’ll second the notion that Boehner’s red herring about CO2 not being a “carcinogen” is more revealing than his mentioning cows as a source of CO2. Technically, it’s true that cow “eructation” can include some CO2, but the video clip makes it clear Boehner was trying to deflect George’s question of whether climate change is a serious problem by tossing up the meme that CO2 is natural (yes) - implying that it can’t then be harmful (no!) - that’s the point of Mass. v. EPA and the new Finding of Risk: spiking GHG concentrations pose large environmental risks from drought, severe weather events, sea level rise and ocean acidification; these not based on any claim of toxicity of CO2, and Boehner ought to know that. He’s just playing a rhetorical card - one that I’m sure plays well for his base.

When it comes to cows, a key point missed in many of these superficial debates is that the US population of cattle is around 100 million - one cow per every three Americans - and we fatten them on subsidized ADM corn in CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations), not on grass. This is entirely unnatural for cattle; corn is much harder for cattle to digest than the grasses on which they are naturally adapted to ruminate. This causes them to “eructate” a lot more methane than cows grazed on grass. Here’s a recent article on cows and GHGs:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-greenhouse-hamburger
Fattening cattle on corn instead of grass also gives them acid indigestion, promoting growth of dangerous e-coli, requiring lots of antibiotics not needed for grass-fed cows, greatly increasing the risk of antibiotic resistant strains. Some of these really nasty e-coli find their way into our food supply, leading to food poisonings and mass recalls. This is documented in detail in the compelling bestseller _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_ by Michael Pollan - highly recommended reading!
But getting back to climate change, methane is indeed the #2 greenhouse gas (pardon the expression) after CO2. Concentrated feedlots can’t recycle the volumes of manure they yield, so it stews in manure “ponds” (devastating if they spill into waterways, as seen recently) where it ferments into yet more methane.
Rice farming, landfill garbage, and leaks from natural gas pipelines are other significant human sources of excess methane; wetlands and peat bogs are natural sources. Thawing of permafrost in the tundra is expected to add lots more methane as the climate warms (a big temperature-to-greenhouse-effect positive feedback.)
One methane molecule has some 21 times the greenhouse warming effect of one CO2 molecule; it takes around eight to ten years for methane in the atmosphere to oxidize into CO2 (adding yet one more CO2 molecule that will persist for on average 100 years).
Methane concentrations today are almost triple their pre-industrial levels. While those in denial about climate used to crow about a recent “plateau” in this very elevated level, there is recent evidence of levels starting to rise again, such as here:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=35856

Anyway, it’s clear that Boehner did not want to answer George’s persistent questions (props to George for focusing on the real issue). Boehner kept jumping ahead to “we shouldn’t act if China won’t” - which completely fails to answer the question about CO2!
I believe this illustrates the problem we are up against: many conservatives have already decided that capping CO2 will be too costly, will push jobs overseas, etc. From that point, they work backwards to choose talking points that cast doubt on the science

Tangent: actual scans of bird brains

2009-02-28T06:21:00.000-05:00

Well, I was checking to see where I'd posted or blogged using my birdbrainscan nickname, which I chose in hopes it would not be taken by anyone else anywhere. While I have never run into "name already taken" by someone else, today I did find one curious collision, with this catchy news story:

Brainy Birds Out-Thought Doomed Dinosaurs?

Hey, this one has everything for the bird-inclined paleo buff: the K-T mass extinction, working from tiny fossils to infer who survived and why, and of course, brainy birds. Plus there's a handy Scrabble(TM) word tossed in: "wulst"

Betcha didn't know that one.

Even better?

2009-02-09T22:07:00.000-05:00

This week I came across a study published this past September that gives a much clearer picture of the outlook of climate scientists on the whole.

A January, 2009 Paper in EOS 90:3 (20 Jan 09) by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman surveyed over 3,000 AGU members for their views on climate change.

The paper is linked on the EOS site but is subscriber-only: EOS Vol. 90 no. 3, 20 Jan.2009

Fortunately, this write-up at Scienceblogs is open-access.

Lesser mortals might see this as a threat to their own little personal slice of the pie, carved out of a winter's worth of evenings and weekends, but not I. No, I am noble and fair-minded, and I want credit to go where credit is due. These ~~BAStards~~ fine scholars got way better access that I've got.

I'll still hold forth my list as potentially useful: I show who is highly cited, link to their home page for everyone to see for themselves what each researcher is working on and what they've posted on their own sites. Also, my coverage of the now nearly a dozen public declarations and open letters goes beyond what has been done previously on the web. Much of the time, that has consisted of copying and pasting just the names without the context of who they are or how much weight they may carry within the field.

I hope my listing gives a glimpse into that issue that is of some use to others.

Added UCS 2008

2009-02-09T20:42:00.000-05:00

There is a powerful call for action on climate change put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists in May 2008, and endorsed by some 1728 American scientists and economists.

I've extracted the list of signers, and this weekend I compared it to my existing list. I was able to match up some 145 names already on my list who signed this declaration. I've added the tag "UCS08" in the Notes column beside names of signers. I also gathered homepage links and citation stats on any of these names that were still waiting in my 'no stats' queue.

With that done and the list sorted anew, I now find 181 of the top 500 have signed one of the 'activist' declarations versus just 21 signing any of the skeptics' statements. This is apart from having served as an IPCC contributing author.

Still to do: filter out economists from the remaining 1583 UCS08 names and post those names. The problem is they'll all fall in my 'no stats' queue, pushing that to far over 2/3 of the total size of the list. Ouch.

getting somewhere

2009-02-06T08:15:00.000-05:00

Well I've put a ridiculous amount of my spare time into the big list of climate scientists - and as one respondent pointed out, many non-scientists or non-specialists who have also chimed in on the topic. I've been publicizing more recently, and I'm starting to get some very nice feedback, including from several prominent names on the list. It's a surreal experience to look in my inbox and see a name I know from reading assignments in my climatology course.

Anyway, I feel the list I've put together so far does a reasonable job of illustrating who is getting cited widely, as well as who is signing which kind of climate declaration. I'm struck by just now many of these declarations there have been. This morning I got an email pointing out two more activist statements by Swiss scientists. Earlier this week I found the original list from the skeptics' Leipzig Declaration (1995) and I believe there may be something from the skeptics back to 1992, still waiting to be tracked down and collated.

I found some nice freeware for building interactive timelines for the web, and I've been meaning to try out one of these for a timeline of climate statements; I could show dates of the Toronto conference in 1988, the IPCC ARs in 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007; the US NAS assessments, and the statements from science academies worldwide; then all the open letters and declarations both activist and skeptical that I've been logging here. I could make a bar showing the long time span that the OISM list has been accumulating... this should be interesting, if I can just get to it.

Until last month, I had only known of one skeptics' letter to the Canadian PM (CA06) and the activist climate scientist response later that same month (CMOS130). Then I did more digging and found the earlier CA02 and CA03 letters. Considering just Canadians, the CMOS 130 outnumber the 21 Canadians on the CA06 letter by six to one - and as for the broader case, the Canadian skeptics are also skewed toward retirees, non-scientists or non-climate-scientists, and many have little or no standing as far as citations to peer-reviewed publication.

At one point I'd had in mind to take Canada as a more tractable subset of the world population of climate scientists and skeptics. I have no hope of filling out the list with every possible climate scientist around the world, but for Canada I've got a reasonable first cut already. I might still want to include this argument in my analysis: I may not have anywhere near complete coverage of the world, but I've got most of the Canadians listed and counted (a lot of the CMOS130 names are still not done though.) My separate page for Canada could be the place to focus on the CA02-03-06 letters and the CMOS letter.

Of course, skeptic spinmeisters could then claim that Canada is not a representative sub-sample of the world's scientists. I doubt I could talk them out of that viewpoint; maybe we really are all pinkos with our socialized medicine where you can't have your policy canceled for having used it, and our gun registry, and that pinko David Suzuki on our government-run CBC (the one station on my radio dial with no commercials - I'm spoiled now and have to clench my teeth through those yelling matches and jingles waiting for a traffic update on AM - Ahh-LAARRRM Forrrrrce!)

More new names

2009-02-01T00:08:00.003-05:00

I decided to track down the list of people profiled by the National Post's columnist Lawrence Solomon in his series "The Deniers" (which he also released in book form.)

I found the series headings listed on the site Urban Renaissance, though only the headline, date, and first sentence or so. The full text articles linked there are paywalled and I was not inclined to pay-per-view, so I just transcribed the headlines and the dates for reference. Fortunately, UofT has an electronic subscription to the Post, so I was able to view back issues by date, then locate the columns by their headlines. This allowed me to match up who was profiled on what date.
There were 37 people covered. Of these, at least five were so far from being climate skeptics that I felt they have to be bracketed out as objects of Solomon's tendency to get some quotes and then launch off on his own "unique" interpretation, generally consisting of savaging the IPCC.
I've added a notation "LSDeniers" in the notes column for all 37 names; I added to my list the half-dozen or so names I had not found previously and gathered their stats and homepages. Of these, a number are actually well-cited climate scientists who have no patience for Solomon's spin on their views. Nigel O. Weiss of Cambridge reacted so sharply to Solomon's write-up that he compelled the Post to issue a retraction. Poor Dr. Carl Wunsch has been subject to this treatment twice - once by Solomon then again by Martin Durkin in TGGWS.

This got me to catch up on gathering stats for a few very prominent "skeptics", notably Freeman Dyson, who now sits at #22, the highest-ranked author to have signed a skeptics' declaration (three in fact). Also economist William Nordhaus, profiled by Solomon and an outspoken critic of Nicholas Stern's report on climate impact and mitigation economics, now sits at #20. It's rather apples-to-oranges to rank citations for an economist against climate scientists, but oh well.

Update: 2009-11-21: I was interviewed on CBC Radio's The Current (archived here with link to mp3 podcast) in connection with their coverage of James Hoggan's new book Climate Cover-up, and Lawrence Solomon was on after me. Checking back to this post on his Deniers series, I found the Urban-Rennaissance site closed down and was apparently merged into that of Energy Probe, of which Lawrence Solomon is Executive Director. Here is a new, live link into their open access archive of The Deniers column series. Use the page number navigation buttons to move through the series. (Other columns by Solomon are also linked via these pages.) End update

Meanwhile, there's a new name at #1, David Tilman of UMinnesota, with an unsurpassed 1007 citations to his fourth-most-cited work. I looked him up on Scopus, and they give him an h-index score of 49.

Also, I re-checked some stats of names I'd added a long time ago, and a few showed up as severely undercounted - likely a case of my having left some added search term in rather than getting the stats on the "all" setting. Most noticeable here is Dr. James Hansen of NASA GISS, who had been languishing, implausibly, at #131. It turns out I had under-scored him quite badly - I missed several more highly cited papers. My excuse: there is another James E Hansen who is very widely cited in medical research, so it takes a bit of filtering to make sure I've got *this* James E Hansen's top four papers. I'm more confident I got the stats straight this time. Now he is at #7, which makes more sense knowing his prominence in the literature (as well as the media - though they can certainly also hype people with picayune credentials.)

I don't know if I'll bother to collect h-index rankings for everyone - just so much more clerical work. I've done a few names as a sampling process. No big inconsistencies between that and my home-rolled ranking method so far.

New names

2009-01-28T20:29:00.000-05:00

Apart from the vast backlog of unsorted names at the bottom of my list, a few new names have popped up that I've taken the time to look up, find home page and stats, and some interesting new names have popped to the top in my sort order.

The top two spots now are both recent additions:
new #1 name: Dr. Stuart Pimm of Duke Univ. in Durham, NC, with a striking 682 cites to his fourth-most-cited paper.
new #2 name: Dr. William Schlesinger of the Nicholas School and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY. I've heard Dr. Schlesinger's warm baritone voice on several of the excellent podcasts posted by the Nicholas Institute on their site and via iTunes U. Here's one sample and a listing of many.

I find podcasts of conferences and lectures via "iTune U" (as in university) a great source for some extra learning that fits in with commuting by subway and walking between home, office and the station. If they are giving a PowerPoint presentation and you've just got the audio, it can be frustrating not having the slides to watch - do your best to infer/imagine. Some conferences now also post the slides and/or a video.

Also new at #7 is President Obama's newly appointed head of NOAA, Dr. Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State U., with impressive citation stats which have vaulted her to the top female researcher on my list.

I have added a column in my Excel source file of all this to note which authors are women. I haven't thought through how to present that data point visually yet - my spreadsheet shows 172 women that I've noted so far, out of just over 1800 names in all - just under 10%. This reflects a broader gender imbalance in physics and math studies in general. With more time and more complete data gathered such as year of PhD, I might be able to look for any trends toward less imbalance in more recent graduates, but I don't have that yet.

I've also added President Obama's pick for science advisor and Director of the OSTP, John Holdren. Since his academic work is in science policy, the citation stats (landing him in the mid 400's of my list) are not really comparable with those working in 'hard' sciences, which tend toward higher numbers of shorter published works, versus fewer but much longer pieces in social science field such as policy analysis.

Calls for action, calls for inaction

2009-01-26T15:22:00.000-05:00

I've developed a new angle for my list of climate scientists that I believe opens up new insights into the list. I've tracked down ten public declarations or open letters to leaders regarding climate change - six 'skeptical' and four 'activist,' as I'll dub them. The 'activist' letters issue a strong call for prompt action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The 'skeptical' letters argue that GHG emission cuts will be economically devastating, and generally go on to question the very basis of the case for such reductions: the existence or strength of a greenhouse forcing effect of rising CO2 concentrations; the attribution of current temperature trends to human emissions; the validity of the historical temperature record itself; the significance of projected harmful impacts of rapid warming or sea level rise; and so on.

I've linked to websites of each of the ten documents. I've downloaded the list of signatories, worked these into tabular form and checked for duplicates. I've given each statement a short tag, which I've entered in the "notes" column beside each author's name who signed the document. I've colour-coded the notes cell in the table to show signers of the activists documents in green, with the 'skeptics' documents in grey. (I also count as activist the ten contributors to the website Realclimate; among the skeptics I also count those interviewed in the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.)

I've limited this to documents I believe were signed knowingly and where the signers' identities are clear from the document, and are specifically from scientists. This excludes the vast but untraceable list on the so-called "Oregon Petition" (much favoured by Sen. Inhofe) as well the list of skeptics maintained by Sen. Inhofe's staffer Marc Morano, which largely tracks the lists I've cited with various additions gathered by Morano, but has more than a few names of people who objected strongly on learning they had been listed.

A single exception is that (action advocate, Bali declaration supporter) Dr. Carl Wunsch of M.I.T. was included in The Great Global Warming Swindle unaware of the film's editorial stance, and promptly denounced how the film characterized his views and rejected its conclusions.

The colour-coded notes boxes makes it immediately visible how the top scientists are 'voting' on these appeals. Of the top 100 most cited authors in my list as of now, I find some 35 have signed activist appeals, but just two signed skeptics' appeals (plus one other name, Vincent Courtillot, who I recognize is a "climate skeptic" but who has not signed one of the listed statements) 35 to 3, i.e. over eleven to one in favor of activism over 'inactivism.'

The non-signers should not be considered undecided on these questions, just simply ones who did not happen to take part in any of these open letters. I would further argue that the IPCC Assessment Reports are themselves quite strong calls to action, progressively more urgent and unequivocal with each round. None of the 619 authors of AR4 wg1 signed any of the skeptics' open letters I've listed.

However, many skeptics or contrarians like to argue that the "consensus" within the IPCC is somehow tainted by "group think," excessive peer pressure or politicization of the review process (the objection given by Dr. Chris Landsea as leading to his resignation.) Without acceding to any of those portrayals, I've kept the IPCC participation as a separate column which I don't refer to in counting some authors as "activists." So names with a plain white background in the notes column can be seen as "non-signers" who have signed neither an activist nor a skeptical appeal, excluding IPCC reports.

Many IPCC authors fall under the 'non-signer' category, but none have signed any of the skeptics' appeals. Looking at the table of 619 contributing authors to IPCC AR4 wg1, the only names linked to strong 'skeptics' positions are Dr. Landsea, and Dr. John Christy of UAH, who appeared in the film The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Of the 63 'non-signers' among the top 100 most-cited, some 39 were AR4 wg1 contributing authors.

I would argue a large share of the non-signers would be more inclined to agree with the activists and not the skeptics, but that's another debate; it can be approached by looking at their published work, obviously, but that takes both effort and interpretive judgment.)

For now, let my data on the number of signatories of clearly activist or skeptical appeals stand on their own: of the top 500 most-cited authors on climate, 130 have signed appeals for prompt action (outside of the IPCC assessments themselves); twenty-two of the 500 have signed a skeptical statement. At this level, the outspoken activists outnumber the skeptics by six to one, and skeptics make up just 4.4% of authors.

I've added a petitions page with background on the public appeals from scientists, as well as some of the largest petitions on climate change from the general public.

Progress on my list of climate scientists

2009-01-14T20:35:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I've blogged on my quixotic project, and a lot has happened in the interim. In mid-December, I posted on some climate discussion sites including Realclimate and Deltoid, describing my list and providing a link. I've begun getting some very nice feedback - about a dozen responses so far - and the comments have been very positive. I may post some "dust jacket blurb" pull-quotes soon. (I'll anonymize any where the source does not want to be quoted by name.)

I've added some ancillary pages based on spillover from the data I've been harvesting: a list of over 60 journals that have published the authors I've catalogued. There are ones that cover climate science, paleoclimate, oceanography, biogeochemical cycles, and various allied subjects.

I also threw together a partial list of climate research centres at universities around the world. (I could do a similar one for the others that are either government run or that span several different universities - still To Do.) The one I've got for university centres is still far from complete; I first need to go through the domain names I extracted from all the author URLs to see how many more these might pick up. Today I pulled out stats on what countries these come from, based on the top-level domain suffix (probably still including multiples from the same university in several cases, though):
190 .edu (mainly U.S. universities)
43 .gov (U.S. gov't agencies)
45 .ac.uk U.K. universities
30 .de Germany
29 .ca Canada
23 .fr France
18 .au Australia
14 .jp Japan
13 .ch Switzerland
9 .it Italy
9 .nz New Zealand
and so on through AR AU BR CL CN DK ES EU FI HK IN IR IT MX NL NO RO RU SE to ZA.
Plus - extra bonus! - the first site I've ever visited that's set in the .AQ namespace - Antarctica! Twice, in fact: Australia's SIPEX and ASPECT. (The British Antarctic Survey falls under the .ac.uk domain, though they clearly could justify a .aq name if they wanted.)

As for my issue with sorting out authors with the same or very similar names, this is even turning into an issue within the list. I've now identified three pairs of similarly named climate scientists whom I confirmed are indeed different people:
Karl R Thomas director of NOAA's NCDC, not-the-same-guy-as the Austrian-born Karl Thomas lately at NCAR in Boulder

This Bin Wang of U. Hawaii not-the-same-guy-as this other Bin Wang of China -- both were IPCC AR4 wg1 delegates.

David C. Lowe of New Zealand's NIWA (no homepage found) not-the-same-guy-as David J. Lowe of Waikato U. -- also in New Zealand. At least these two have different middle initials, making it possible to tell them apart in Google Scholar.

This past week I went back to a topic I looked at in some depth a year ago: open letters to the Prime Minister of Canada opposing Kyoto and arguing that the science on climate needs to be gone back over (again?) before anyone makes any decisions. I found there were actually three such letters, in 2002, 2003, and 2006. I've charted who signed which one, how many were actually Canadians (no more than 1/3) and then I picked up the 2006 rebuttal letter from a much longer list of Canadian climate scientists. The latter seems to have arising out of a meeting of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS) and has 130 signatories - all Canadian and all well qualified - so I've dubbed this the "CMOS 130." I'll blog in more detail on the Canadian angle in a future post.

I'm working on this idea as a formulation of who is who in this list: a subset who are declared on the outspoken 'anti' side - signatories of the inactivist petitions, fellows of think tanks staunchly against the mainstream science, and the like; a separate subset who are vocal activists urging immediate cuts in carbon emissions; and the silent majority who just publish their research and in many cases contribute to the IPCC reports. The key point is that the IPCC reports draw on the full range of the published literature, which includes this whole spectrum; yet the IPCC ARs make it clear we really do have a problem. Thus the inactivists are reduced to attacking the IPCC itself - and with it, in effect, all the science literature it built upon. This is why Naomi Oreskes' paper caused them such consternation. They also have to keep trying to claim there are "silent skeptics" afraid to say what they think out of fear of persecution by "alarmist" bullies. Hmmm.

I launched into the creation of my site to put a face to the over 600 authors of IPCC AR4 wg1, most of whom toil above the fray of blog and counter-blog. A lot of them spend months at a time in the field - on survey ships, in the Arctic or Antartic, climbing and drilling on glaciers, operating LIDARs, sondes, hydrographs, and then months more back in the lab (and the classroom!) working through the data.

As I kept expanding from just AR4 wg1 to all their co-authors, departmental colleagues, and then other names that I came upon following those leads, a picture has begun to emerge of a broad and still growing field of interrelated research disciplines. I've got 1600 names and a long queue of sources I haven't even begun to examine yet. My list may top out at some point out of sheer exhaustion - of me rather than of the sources of more names of scientists.

Wish list

2008-12-12T07:02:00.000-05:00

It's getting close to Christmas, and for many this means time to make a wish list. Now, I'm not expecting anybody to go shopping for me for the kind of things I've been wishing for; they're too ambitious and far-reaching. OTOH, this wouldn't just be for me - it should benefit researchers everywhere, in the future.

Item #1 on my list is for e-Santa, or Google, or the open-source community, or scholars themselves, to pave the way for a better means to identify authors in scholarly publications. Right now, most journals still follow the tradition of showing just one or two initials and surname for each author. Generally this is supplemented with info on institutional affiliation, and lately with an email address as well. However, journal search engines such as Google Scholar only key on the name; while they do what they can with this limited info, it is really not adequate to find all and only works by a specific person. The worst problem is with very common surnames, whether Smith, Scott, Wang, or Ramesh. Authors who don't have or don't go by any middle initial make the odds that much worse.

The easy first step would be for all scholarly journals to change editorial policy and begin listing full first names for authors. Citation style sheets will need to be brought up to date to conform.

But ultimately there will still be duplicate full names. I guess I can't wish for civilization to reform to ensure every child born from now on is given a name unique throughout history (ha!), and then waiting for a generation or two to age out the current cohort of duplicate names - that's not going to help me in this lifetime.

So I'll settle for somebody coming up with a good strong proposal to assign unique identifying strings to each author who gets published, much as we now do for for publishers and books with ISBN and ISSN numbers, and for articles with DOI numbers.

I don't think it would be too difficult to design such a scheme. We'd need a central worldwide registrar to track the unique number strings, just as Arxiv.org does now for DOIs. We'd need a way to ensure that an ID continues to point to a person even as they move through their career (and between jobs and cities, as young scholars seem so prone to do). Other confounding variables this could help overcome include uneven use of one vs. two initials, people with non-alpha characters in their surname including spaces, hyphens and apostrophes (van der Waal, O'Brien, Levi-Strauss) and name surname changes after marriage (or divorce).

Obviously I'm not the first to notice this problem, so maybe there's hope for a movement to build around this kind of idea. Here's one existing proposal and here's another.

I hope they get their wish.

Happy holidays to everyone.

going public

2008-12-10T17:16:00.000-05:00

I've posted to a couple of sites with a link to the Faces of Climate Science project. I've already received one helpful suggestion: to clarify that the stats from Google Scholar are (very) approximate, and best viewed (as I try to do) as a relative measure of output and impact.

I also should put a bit more in explaining my choice to include the few, but veeeeery widely touted, academics who say or suggest that CO2 is nothing to worry about. I'm considering a visual tag to show which entries are "skeptics" - such as some kind of grey question mark icon. The point is to show how few and how far down they fall in context of the citation rankings.

I'm only including scholars with some publication record. I've tossed in Canada's own Tim Ball, though he left academia two decades ago; once the stats are all in (if I ever finish them!), he'll probably fall quite near the bottom for cites. I've got number for Sally Baliunas, who has plenty of journal ink on solar physics (though she strays from that when she editorializes on, e.g. water resources... oh well.)

I see there are some working academics of the skeptics camp that I haven't gotten into the list yet - Lindzen Sr., Pat Michaels, Douglass. I want to give these guys credit for putting their contrarian views in print for others to challenge. However much I may disagree with them, they've at at least stayed on the playing field. Their number is still small, unlike the vast padded lists tossed from the peanut gallery onto the field by the likes of Marc Morano.

Yes, that's my new metaphor: the OISM and the Inhofe 400 or 650 lists are like rolls of T.P. tossed onto the playing field of climate science, in hopes of delaying the game. If only we had ushers to eject the goons from the bleachers...

Home stretch

2008-12-08T00:19:00.000-05:00

I've been pouring many hours into building and tuning up my Faces of Climate Science pages. I keep tweaking the perl script to fiddle with the page layout. Today I hit on a great tip: the widely publicized "ALT" tag for HTML IMG entities is only intended for display if the picture is unavailable or the visitor cannot view images. Although MSIE will display the ALT text when the user hovers the mouse over the image, this is not what the official spec calls for; thus, Firefox does not follow Microsoft's lead.

I really wanted to be able to display the authors' names in this "tooltip" way in response to mouse-overs, but I was almost resigned to having to use scripting to get this effect in Firefox. Then today I found a tips page that explains a less-known but official "TITLE" tag, which is supported for both IMG and A entities (links).
I found that if I assign a TITLE= tag to each photo, then Firefox does indeed show that text on mouse-overs. It can be a long text; it will word-wrap if the box reaches about 4" wide. (I could not find a way to embed a line-break in this to control where the text will wrap... that would be handy).

So now, my photo montage page is a bit more useful as a 'book of faces' of the AR4 wg1 team, or of my growing but clearly incomplete longer list of climate scientists.

I've been focusing on the AR4 wg1 list, trying to ensure I've got photos and homepage links for all of them first (so far as these exist online). I've also followed my own links to check people's C.V. to pick up the year they got their PhD (or in rare cases where they don't have one, to note this and instead list their highest degree such as MSc. See my last post on Thomas R. Karl on that.

The other good news is a great document I found today from the Union of Concerned Scientists. It is an urgent appeal for action on greenhouse emission reduction, signed by some 1700 U.S. climate scientists. It breaks out the list by state, and gives institutional affiliations. It fills out the effort with some strong statements from individual signatories.

This should be a good counter to show to anyone still clinging to the sorry spectacle known as the Oregon Petition. Beside the UCS statement (or my photo montage and links to real experts' pages) their lint-filter of veterinarians and the deceased can't hold a candle.

meeting Gavin

2008-11-26T23:34:00.001-05:00

Gavin Schmidt of realclimate.org was a guest speaker at Univ. of Toronto yesterday. I went to his talk and got to meet him afterward. I described my possibly insane undertaking of the "faces of climate science" and he expressed interest. He picked out several faces from my faint b&w laser print of the top of the photo array. There was some question of why I include prominent 'skeptics' such as Sally Baliunas (I've got a plan in mind - to position the most often showcased skeptics in the sea of faces, in order of citation standings...)

Anyway it was very nice to get to meet Gavin in person. I'm still hard at work filling in my Excel collection of names, homepages and photo URLs. I plan to make a post to realclimate fairly soon inviting people there to check out my faces page (and the tabular text version) to get some feedback.

Tonight I worked on expanding first initials to full given names for a bit past the middle of the alphabet, then I checked on the stats and saw that I've hit 800 homepages and was at 699 photos (so I had to find a few more before turning in to get that nice round 700+).

One small detail to note - a blog entry will save this for posterity:

The original list of names of authors for IPCC AR4 wg I is online at:
http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/resources/0521705967/4834_AR4WG1_AnnexII.pdf

Eli Rabbett extracted the names, numbered them, added short bio info to the first 11, and posted the list on his Rabbett Run blog at:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/01/list-for-morano-like-john-hersey-eli.html

When I reached the name

KATZ, Robert
National Center for Atmospheric Research
USA

I ran into a wall. Even allowing that many NCAR scientists don't have a home page, there is just no trace online of any Robert Katz there. There is a Robert Katz
here who writes on interesting green themes related to population, but is not a climatologist.

I had already located Richard Katz of NCAR, homepage here, and I followed the link to his CV and searched for "IPCC", and sure enough, there near the bottom of page 2 it says:

2005 – 2007 Contributing Author, Chapter 11, WG I, IPCC 4th Assessment Report

The Annex II PDF file only lists "Robert" Katz, and no "Richard." Ah, ha!

So I claim this proves there is a CLERICAL ERROR in Annex II to AR4 WG I. Having thus documented my superior trivia dirt-digging skills, can I get one of those high-paying sinecure posts at a big denialist belief tank? Make me an offer, all you {Wholesome term} {Enterpise} Institutes!

Love,
BBS

Faces of Climate Science - the Why?

2008-11-23T10:59:00.000-05:00

With the onset of winter I have WTMTOMH (way too much time on my hands) and rather than burn it off playing Civ 4, Rise of Nations, or Sim City Societies, I thought I'd finally tackle a project I'd had in mind for some time: creating a website listing the names of all the experts called upon as authors in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC.

If you've already read my blog post below, or don't really care how or why I did this, here's a shortcut to my intro page for my List of Climate Scientists, with stats plus links to author's homepage. The intro page sets up what I'm doing, then links to some variant forms of my listing: one with just IPCC AR4 authors, another with a longer list of climatologists that I've collated. I've also created variants with only the photos. The intro page links to these, but with a caution that those pages link to several hundred photos, so they eat a lot of bandwidth and can take a long time to load (esp. the first visit when the photos are not in your browser cache).

Okay, why?

Well, last year I spent a fair bit of time working on Wikipedia, on a really wide scattering of topics that grabbed my interest, but always coming back to
List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming - a motley crew of varied qualifications or relevance to the scientific debate. As of today there are 42 names on the page.

This page has a checkered history of edit wars, interminable debates about what screen to use for inclusion and who meets the bar, etc. There are at least a half-dozen active editors who appear to be strong climate change 'skeptics' eager to include as many names as possible. They seem to engage in so-called 'quote mining' to find statements in support of their 'side.'

If you read over that page, the thing that I find striking is how scattered are the views of this list of people. Some think solar variation explains most recent change so well we can dump all our research about CO2; others--almost half--say the task of projecting future changes is too daunting for us to make any judgments at all - they are in effect 'agnostics,' often implying it is simply beyond human knowing to foresee what effects our atmospheric CO2 pulse may have.

Anyway, the kind of argument I often see on this topic frequently involves some kind of claim that the number of names on this list should count as evidence that the "science is not settled" and that there is an ongoing debate over whether humans actions have or could impact on climate in any detectable way.

That claim seems patently false to me. The number of scientists who still maintain that adding CO2 to the atmosphere does little to nothing to global temperatures is almost vanishingly small, in the context of the number of scientists qualified to speak as experts on this topic.

To demonstrate that, we can point to the authors of the four IPCC Assessment Reports. This report did not waver on that question; it very clearly states that adding CO2 is leading and will lead to rising temperatures (and sea levels.) There are a lot of authors credited in this report--a whole lot. The list in Annex B to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report names 619 authors in "Working Group I" -- the group responsible for summing up the scientific basis: the greenhouse effect, quantifying human-caused emissions of CO2, CH4, CF6, N2O, etc. and quantifying their radiative forcings; working out the other forcings such as sooty aerosols from coal and diesel, jet contrails, etc; and feedbacks, both positive and negative, that either amplify or dampen the initial forcings.

So I set about gathering all their names - getting the list proved quite simple as they are in the PDF file of Annex B, and indeed the climatologist who blogs under the nom-du-clavier "Eli Rabbett" has already extracted this list, numbered, and made a small start at annotating. His list is here.

I thought I would take things a few steps further. First, when I found that handy list I had already begun assembling a list by hand, picking the author names out of highly-cited papers on climate that I'd find via Google Scholar. This was labour-intensive but still rather interesting, and I've carried on tracing co-authors and departmental co-workers to find yet more names in this field.

Google Scholar can select all works by a specific author. There is an 'advanced' search' page with a box for this, but I found a quick way to enter this search condition is to type author:fm-surname (by observing what Google filled in as the URL once I'd run an 'advanced search').

Google returns the papers by that author sorted by how many times that work has been cited by others, with the most cited at the top. I started collecting just the number of cites for the top articles by each author as a simple indicator of that person's impact within the discipline.

I ended up gathering the number of citations for each author's top four listed papers. Why four? Because I could see that many on the first results page without scrolling, and it felt like a useful number.

I've settled on sorting the authors on the number of cites for their #4 most cited work (sub-sorting on #3 in case of ties). This is a totally arbitrary metric, but the results seem reasonably representative of the authors' standing. For all the ones I haven't gathered the stats on, I've just fallen back on alphabetical order.

Here's what I've got so far (the page is still a work-in-progress for me; I've only got up to letter K looking up home pages, and I've only done the citation stats for about a quarter of these names.)

Here is the intro page explaining the project, with links to the various formats.
The list in table form has name, year of Ph.D., country of birth (or residence), cite stats from Google Scholar, research area, and institutional affiliation. Each name links to the author's homepage.

The 'How'

I'd start with a name generally in the form "F.M. Surname", with just first and possibly middle initials. For some of the top names, I already knew what the initials stand for; otherwise, I'd have to follow the links to the journal paper in search of more clues. Many journals actually never give the full first or middle name of the authors, but they almost always add footnotes showing their institutional affiliations. A few journals now show the full name - much easier for me - but if not, I would next google for the surname plus the institution. Often this would lead straight to the author's academic homepage. If so, great; if not, keep hunting.

Some people - shocking! - don't actually have a homepage. Proving a negative is tough, so given the size of my self-defined challenge, I set a time limit on how long I'll search for a link for any given person. As a rule, anyone teaching at a university has at least some sort of locator page, with their address, phone number, and email. Most fill these in with statements of their research interest, academic history, and current group members. By contrast, some of the largest government-run research bodies such as the Hadley Centre and the U.S. nation research labs, and especially military labs, don't make this a practice. At best they may have a table of member names with contact info (phone and email); they simply don't create member home pages. The same holds for scientists at commercial service providers in the private sector, who from time to time get listed as co-authors on papers they helped on with such services as instrumentation, satellite communications, data assimilation and management, software delevopment, etc.

Fortunately, most experts at the civilian labs typically are cross-appointed at a nearby university also (Hadley->Reading/U.of East Anglia; NCAR->U.Colorado@Boulder, etc.) That usually gets me out of those blind alley.

The step of filling out the author's given names from just initials can take couple of minutes per person. Once armed with the full name and academic affiliation, it's usually a short search to get their home page. Finding the university or government lab, of course, gave me a new source of (full) names of all their research colleagues to add in. So the list just keeps growing - about to pass 1300, as of today.

Almost everyone in academia has a P.R. photo head shot online - if not on their homepage, then elsewhere on their institution's site or in an online brochure for a conference where they've spoken. So I started saving the URL of each author's photo as well.

This led me to create a second version of my project: the "Faces of Climate Science" all on a single page. Viewers with a slow link will probably want to skip this one. I've written a script to convert my tabular list into HTML, and I can tweak any design details such as the assigned image height to which all pictures get scaled:

Just photos with links to author's homepage.

I've been compiling the list for a couple of weeks now, filling up much of my spare time. I've found just under 1300 names, so almost 680 of my own that were not on the IPCC AR4 wg1 authors list.

I welcome any suggestions on how to improve these pages - alternate formats, ways to make them more readable/accessible/useful, whatever.

--
Jim Prall
Toronto, Canada

Virtual science conference

2008-05-02T20:48:00.000-04:00

Here's a delicious headline from the Science magazine website:

World of Warcraft virtual science conference will include a virtual field trip, and virtual swag for attendees including a shirt, 10 gold pieces, a telescope, and a virtual pet. The event is to run May 9-11.

Woo hoo!

Reviving "Mission to Planet Earth"

2008-04-08T00:09:00.000-04:00

Those of us who see unchecked climate change as a peril nearly unmatched in human history (only nuclear war would be in the same league) watch in horror as the United States continues to dither over whether to take the issue seriously, and then whether to take any action on it in this lifetime.

In that light, I've chimed in on Joe Romm's Climate Progress blog on the question of whether Bush's new push to resume human space travel and to land people on Mars is too much to bite off just now. While this is not itself an instance of my self-assigned topic of "climate change denial", I feel it fits here even so, as an implicit denial of the horrendous trade-offs it seems to impose.

The problem is that this very ambitious goal came at just the same time as NASA has been losing out on basic science (30% cut in their science budget in recent years; failure to launch the DISCOVR earth observation mission even with the device complete and ready to go, refusing offers from other nations to launch it for us.)

We simply can't afford to sacrifice earth observation (recently cut even from NASA's mission statement!) right now when there is such a pressing need for clear and accurate readings of the state of our own planet and the pace of current changes.

Here's a copy of the comment I posted on Climate Progress in response to a comment thread on whether the U.S. should be pushing for a manned mission to Mars right now:

My preference for unmanned over manned exploration predates the recent embarrassment of removing “Mission to Planet Earth” from NASA’s agenda. People may be great at improvising and observation, but we weigh a lot, require lots of extra mass for life support, and missions have to be designed to bring us home safely with low probability of failure. Weighed against the current generation of robotic observation platforms and instrumentation, we’re just not cost-effective.

Why do you say humans “have to” colonize space? It’s one thing to say we have to take every new opportunity that comes to us, due to our inventive large brain. But we don’t have a “destiny” that somehow compels us to make huge sacrifices of what we still have here on earth in a long-shot attempt to bring this new “manifest destiny” forward from an uncertain span in the future up to *right now*.

Space exploration aside for a moment, everyone here on earth needs a solution to two converging, very pressing issues: climate change, as well as our dependence on fossil feuls which will not last that much longer, and which may be at or near peak annual extraction already - we haven’t yet explained to ourselves how we can continue as technological, growth-oriented economies without increasing energy resource use.

There is enough coal and unconventional oil (e.g. tar sands) still left to create a serious risk of runaway CO2-climate feedbacks such as permafrost thawing leading to large methane releases. But both conventional oil and natural gas may be facing crises before many more years. Lots of turmoil and conflict should be foreseen arising from this.

If we need a new Apollo project, landing a man on Mars has to rank below a really serious, united effort by the whole country (and the whole world) to move promptly to renewable energy sources and far greater efficiency of energy consumption. This has to be done on a scale to replace the vast current volume of fossil fuels before we hit a new mega-energy-crisis AND before we pile too much GHG in the atmosphere to be able to avoid the worst foreseeable impacts (plus whatever unforseen ones could be far worse - what a gamble!)

To get that much change from the status quo, in so many areas of the economy, is a much bigger challenge than the Apollo moon mission, and needs bold national leadership (in every country at the same time!)

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) has used this idea of a “New Apollo Project” in reference to proposed legislation to begin moving toward energy independence and sustainability.

In a few decades, we’ll know if we’ve met these twin challenges or not. In that time frame, we may be able to return to the longer-term dream of sending humans beyond the moon. That target is just not the right place to be focusing at this critical crossroads for our own planet.

Open letter to Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy

2008-02-26T13:14:00.001-05:00

I've just emailed the following letter to Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, after reading on Ross Gelbspan's site The Heat is Online that Duke was supporting "Americans for Balanced Energy Choices", a pro-coal astroturf group. The ABEC website offers details of the fuel mix of each U.S. state's electricity supply. It paints an upbeat picture of how great it is having all that coal. If you prefer a more detached view of how coal is contributing to our carbon footprint, I prefer CARMA.

Dear Mr. Rogers,

I am disappointed to learn that your company, as a member of the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), is in fact playing both sides of the fence by also supporting Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC)[1]. It's pretty obvious that ABEC is an "Astroturf™" organization, and that in the real world, ordinary Americans are not rising up to demand more coal power plants. ABEC has been advertising heavily, including sponsoring presidential debates – at which no questions at all on global warming were posed. ABEC has also come out against even far distant targets for greenhouse gas reductions. If we can't even set targets for 2050, what hope is there of our getting started in any way in this decade to make any first steps?

Either climate change is a serious issue, or it is not. Please don't try to have it both ways. Does your corporation actually, really, honestly support a nationwide effort to begin to reverse our very high carbon emissions, or are you just saying that to appease the public? Pardon me for questioning the sincerity of your company's joining USCAP, which was a major step; I know you have personally spoken strongly for the need to act on climate change, and that impressed me. But by also supporting ABEC, it strikes me you are really undermining any positive perception your USCAP membership might offer.

Selling carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a solution today is so far just a smoke screen; CCS is at least 15 years away. None of your plants is using it today, and none of the plants you are proposing to add will have CCS – will they even be designed for CCS retrofit? I just don't buy the proposition that new, non-CCS coal plants somehow represent a "bridge" to a lower carbon future. Surely they just widen the gulf we are going to have to span with such a bridge?

I appreciate that Duke Energy is currently heavily reliant on coal. The environmental dilemma that poses for your business' future is best addressed in the forum of USCAP, to advocate a workable transition to lower carbon with fair treatment of impacted industries, not by buying time with ABEC to go on building new, non-CCS coal plants which will incur high carbon emission penalties once either cap-and-trade or carbon taxes become a reality. You and I both know this is just a matter of time.

I urge you to withdraw your company's support and funding from ABEC, whether directly or indirectly, and to reaffirm publicly your company's support for binding limits on carbon emissions. If we establish a level playing field with national policies together with international agreements, this truly will not disadvantage American businesses or consumers. Indeed, failing to act and prolonging our unsustainable present course bears a far greater financial risk, as attested by the Stern Report.

I further urge you to make the promise of CCS meaningful by setting a deadline in the not distant future for your company to build no new coal plants without CCS, and a much closer deadline to ensure currently conceived projects must incorporate designs suitable for retrofitting CCS at minimum cost. Let's not go through another spectacle like "New Source Review" evasion on CCS installation when it becomes available.
As for my own electricity supplier here in Canada, although Ontario is committed to closing our last coal plants by 2014, I didn't want to wait that long and I've recently signed up with a small alternative electricity supplier Bullfrog Power, who supply 100% carbon-free renewable energy from wind, small-scale hydro, and biomass http://www.bullfrogpower.com. I'm paying an extra 3.5c per kWh for this, but with efficient appliances and CF bulbs throughout our small 2-storey detached house we consume less than 12 kWh/day and I can afford the extra $15/mo. (We heat with natural gas, so that's a different problem for my carbon footprint; I see there are promising alternatives in pelletized switchgrass as recounted at http://www.reap-canada.com/ )

Thank you for your consideration of my feedback.

[1] http://www.americaspower.org/Who-We-Are/ABEC-Supporters

Yours Truly,

Jim Prall
Toronto, Canada

Me vs. the EPA

2008-02-22T13:55:00.000-05:00

I just posted to EPA deputy administrator Marcus Peacock's blog on the goofy EPA decision to block thirteen states from adopting California's proposed climate-driven regulation of CO2 emissions from cars. (Check out my zingy little poem at the end.)

And yes, I did hear about this through the Union of Concerned Scientists campaign, but I wrote my own message from scratch rather than adopt their boilerplate. I hope I can be more persuasive this way.

I wrote:

I appreciate your willingness to join the fray and communicate directly on this blog.

As an American citizen, I'm really discouraged at how slowly our federal government has been moving on the most serious issue of the century, the need to reduce our fossil fuel dependency. This is vital both to limit damage from global warming, and to begin to prepare for peak and decline of world oil production, which is surely coming if not here already.

As for blocking the states' effort to regulate CO2 emissions, I'm quite saddened by the spectacle of our Environmental "Protection" Agency standing in the way instead of providing any leadership. The federal government is still just starting with baby steps to begin taking these issues seriously.
Yes, we need a national, unified approach to cutting CO2 emissions and fossil fuel dependency. But that's really not here yet. In the interim, it's just not good to prevent thirteen states from doing as much as they are able to do as a start. There are states' rights grounds for that, as well.
Only when Washington finally steps up to the plate and imposes a price on carbon, either by capped credit auctions or a carbon tax, can we talk about harmonizing a national standard as good or better than California's.
Until we have that, I'm sad to say, "EPA, get out of the way."

The anti-legacy of Dubya and the neocons

2008-01-27T12:29:00.000-05:00

I just posted the following reply on Joe Romm's blog, under his entry on "Successful Failures: The Bush environmental and energy legacy." I realised I might as well reproduce it here (no copyright concern cribbing from myself, eh?)
I'm going to add a brief follow-up mentioning other authors like Chris Mooney, Stauber & Rampton, and Al Gore's new Assault on Reason (as noted in my previous blog entry); I'll post a vanity link back to this blog while I'm at it.

Another devastating account of Bush’s extreme anti-environment “legacy” is in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book Crimes Against Nature Amazon link. It’s a well-documented litany of Bush’s single-minded campaign to lift environmental restrictions in every imaginable area, including appointing anti-environment ideologues to head virtually every department, to evade action on any form of pollution anywhere, and to undermine every scientific expert speaking up for public health, clean air, clean water or for any action on global warming.I am simply appalled at this disgraceful history, which is a stain on the name “Republican.” Apart from hoping for a Democratic win in November, I feel the nation desperately needs to wake up to this pro-pollution, anti-earth, anti-life agenda which the neocon movement is poisoning the political system - and the nation itself. We need a total reform of the conservative tradition to recoup the values of actually conserving, and of respecting our fellow citizens’ rights to safety and property free from toxic assault by PAC-funding, spin-doctoring agribusiness, extractive and consumptive smokestack industry.The religious right needs to speak out against the unholy alliance of social conservatism with a hideous anti-human cynicism that blesses every want of corporate donors for free rein to pollute, despoil and contaminate for free. Foisting smog, mercury, benzene, and hormone disrupters on your neighbors is not a “family value.”Am I dreaming to hope for some better class of conservatives who will come forward to take over the leadership of the Republican party? Or are we forever left with a legacy of one party at war with nature?

Republican War on Science

2007-12-09T13:28:00.000-05:00

I've been busy catching up on my reading, while at the same time piling on new titles that I just have to get to soon. This plays into what I term "book guilt" -- the feeling that I really should have made time to read each of those titles that are on my stack that I really wanted to read. Well, that's the price of keeping current.

Recent finds: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush & His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country & Hijacking Our Democracy [2004: Harper Perennial, ISBN 978-0-06-074688-9](Amazon link) In the tradition of Reagan appointee James Watt to Secretary of the Interior, W has filled dozens of senior posts with anti-environment ideologues.

Stauber & Rampton Trust Us, We're Experts [2001] on paid 'experts' and Toxic Sludge is Good for You [1995] (Amazon link) on the role of high-powered P.R. firms in advancing corporate 'spin' against scientific evidence and warnings. The authors are also contributors to the Center for Media and Democracy website P.R. Watch which lists all their related books.

Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science [2006] (Amazon link) covering the sad tendency for right-wing legislators to cherry-pick the few skeptic shills like Fred Singer who will deny whatever problems science is currently pointing out, in hopes of delaying any response that might hurt their fossil-fuel industry backers.

On my to-read list for "soon" is Al Gore's new book The Assault on Reason [2007: ISBN 978-1594201226] (Amazon link) covering similar issues as Mooney, but of course with an insider's point of view. Gore faced many of the denialist legislators and "expert" witlesses oops, I mean witnesses, but could make little headway against closed minds and a wall of denial, distraction and obfuscation.

How do I know that, if I haven't gotten my hands on Gore's new book yet? Well, I did dig out my old copy of Ross Gelbspan's landmark 1998 book The Heat Is On which recounts many of the congressional hearing-but-not-listening events. There is Pat Michaels once again trying to spin the climate issue into a non-issue. Gore challenges him on specific science, Michaels retreats, changes the subject, equivocates... then the R's all vote to do nothing and cut funding for climate science. Yikes. Find a copy of this book, or see his companion website The Heat is Online. He has a newer book following on the same theme that I haven't read yet: Boiling Point (Amazon link), also available in Spanish on the heatisonline site.

What this tells me is that we've known since the mid-90's that Big Oil and Big Coal were spinning us to the limit, and that anyone who really wants to understand climate change has access to the real facts. Sadly, there are lots of people who just don't want this inconvenient truth to be true, and they have plenty of places to turn for comfort of like-minded pollyannas. A few of these are paid by Exxon or coal producers to be spokes-shills, and the rest are parrots all repeating the same meaningless bromides like "CO2 is only a fraction of a percent of the atmosphere" as if that decided the question of whether CO2 is an important greenhouse gas (hint: it still is.) These aren't science; I won't even call them "factoids", they're merely glib distractoids.

Evidently the distraction business is still going strong. Today I took another look at the CBC-TV (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) website for the Fifth Estate documentary "The Denial Machine" by Sheldon MacIntyre link. It's a good documentary covering links between today's climate skeptics and a P.R. firm that previously worked to promote doubt about the link between second-hand tobacco smoke and cancer.

The show was probably rebroadcast this fall, as the discussion board on this site is full of comments from this October. Sadly, at least half the comments still express doubts about the science behind this, and some are harshly critical of CBC for being lefty, alarmist, not being balanced, blah blah blah. This just makes me sad. The comments are all over the map - some seem very right-wing, while others are just muddled. Far too many of the comments contain points that appear to come straight from the climate skeptics' list of failed arguments. It makes me think the denial project has been all too effective.

It all fits with the names of two arch-denialist congresscritters: DeLay and Doolittle. That's pretty much the agenda of the denialists, and from the mid-90's to now in the U.S. and Canada that's where we've been stuck.

The one bright spot is that Australia voted last month to turf out anti-Kyoto PM John Howard, and the newly elected PM Kevin Rudd made ratifying Kyoto a key plank in his election campaign, which he fulfilled as one of his first acts in ofice.

With Australia gone, now the U.S. is completely isolated among industrial economies in remaining outside the Kyoto treaty. Canada, sadly, remains nominally a signatory but the Harper rightists have made it clear we are not even going to try to get close to our treaty obligations.

Yesterday I attended our local event as part of the worldwide "D8" rally for action on climate change. Ours was at Toronto's Dundas Square. The turnout was good despite a very chilly and windy day. I had a poster made of rigid pink insuation foam with the slogan "Pink is green" (think about it...) The TV news today said the Vancouver rally had a fairly poor turn-out.

Bird brains

2007-12-02T13:02:00.000-05:00

Okay, I realize I never posted why I chose the online identity "birdbrainscan" for myself. I often find myself curious about other people's choices of nicknames, so for people like me who think of things like that, here's where mine comes from.

It's obviously a "before-and-after" combination of "birdbrain" plus "brain scan". My wife is a keen fan of Wheel of Fortune, and I watch along. My favorite puzzle format of theirs is before-and-after, in which two common phrases, titles, etc. are joined with some amount of overlap, such as "Bleak House at Pooh Corner." There is a whole genre of puzzle where you have to link two words or phrases by creating a chain of before-and-afters. The TV game show Chain Reaction uses this game.

I don't have any personal links to brain imaging, other than finding it really kewl, and it starts with "brain" so it completes the puzzle. But as a keen birder I proudly accept the label of birdbrain for myself.

I am particularly smitten with the inspiring book Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays by Candace Savage, which recounts the remarkable intelligence of corvids, fitting into a broader literature on animal intelligence that I've enjoyed. I checked this book out of the library several years ago and I still recall vivid details of several stories. Ask me about the crow and the crosswalk (technically a zebra crossing, as this was in the U.K. but I like the alliteration.) Another very clever bird was the late, lamented Alex the African Grey parrot, trained by Irene Pepperberg to answer subtle questions about fridge magnets. News of Alex's passing this fall was met with an outpouring of public grief. Alex was truly amazing and Dr. Pepperberg has contributed greatly to our appreciation of the power of tiny but well-used brains.

I couldn't just use birdbrain as a nick since it is far too popular. So a before-and-after combo seemed just the ticket to make a term that had never shown up on the web previously. A google search now finds all sorts of message boards where I've used this nick dating back to 2003 at least.

How it all ends on YouTube

2007-12-02T12:29:00.000-05:00

I just stumbled upon a crazy series of videos on YouTube that have made a crazy amount of buzz:

How It All Ends

This has been viewed over 2.5 MILLION times so far. The author, wonderingmind42, AKA Greg Craven, (story) is a high school physics teacher with a flair for small, controlled tabletop explosions and a vast collection of funny hats. His video sums up the pros and cons of taking action on global warming in a way designed to bypass the idea that we can't act until scientists hand us 100% certainty. And all that in 9.5 minutes!

Well actually he has much more to say on the subject, which he has recorded and linked together with another video index and table of contents, under the revised title "How it all ends" (along with a re-cut of his original video to address some objections.) The expanded version runs to dozens of short clips, each addressing one slice of the pie. It's too bad streaming videos can't include clickable links to other videos - if anyone needed that feature, it's this guy. For now, just view his index to get titles of the additional pieces of his puzzle. [Update: thanks to tbolger for pointing out the clickable menu of these videos on the website manpollo.org.]

In fact, Greg is really plugged in to the state of the art in replying to "climate denial." He gives props to "How to talk to a climate skeptic" (holds up a poster saying to google that phrase ;-) I notice he didn't mention RealClimate in his main video (who knows what's in the hours of additional content - I just saw this today!) But his point is that we need to move beyond just bickering about specific tidbits of evidence and look at the big picture of risk management (a point not lost on the RealClimate scientists).

Here's a blog by another birder who also noticed the viral video by
Born Again Birdwatcher. (I'll say more about my online nickname "birdbrainscan" in a follow-up post.)

Denial in decline

2007-11-29T21:53:00.000-05:00

Glancing at the subheading I set up for this blog, I remembered my aim was to focus on climate change deniers. Lots of what I've read this fall (as covered in my last post) applies to this topic, particularly the two Stauber and Rampton titles. Another book I haven't yet checked out that applies directly here is Al Gore's new one The Assault on Reason, reviewed by The New York Times, Brent Budowsky of The Hill's Pundit Blog, and The Guardian.

Gee, I'll have to make time to read that one too. Will the must-reads never let me rest?

Anyway, I want to reflect a bit on the past year and the change in public reaction to climate change. This year saw the release of the IPCC's fourth assessment report ("AR4"), starting in February with working group I and just wrapping up this past week with the final summary of the synthesis report. Over that time, public attention to climate has certainly been building steadily, and the hold-out energy hog nations of the USA, Canada and Australia have begun to wake up to the crisis. This past weekend Australia voted out long-serving anti-Kyoto P.M. John Howard. The new Labour P.M.-elect Kevin Rudd has vowed to ratify Kyoto as soon as he takes office. This leaves the U.S. as the sole major emitter still outside the Kyoto treaty, while Canada stands as the only other G8 member pulling in the wrong direction, despite our earlier ratification.

Canada's policy responses to the threat of global warming have been pretty sorry. As Simpson, Jaccard and Rivers lay out in Hot Air (see previous post), Canada has done precious little of substance to begin slowing the growth of our GHG emissions. Stephen Harper called Kyoto "a socialist plot", and his first year in office saw Rona Ambrose earn Canada a black eye for obstruction and foot-dragging, as typified by the "Fossil of the Day" award from the Climate Action Network during last year's Nairobi conference. Ambrose stunned the delegates by using the occasion to attack our prior Liberal government for inaction on climate, and to boast that Harper's Tories were now leading the world in setting the most ambitious targets. This while Canada's current emissions continued to soar, with no actual legislation in place or on the table to stop that increase. All the Tories did for their first year was to cut existing programs, limited as they were, in an orgy of Liberal-bashing.

A year has passed since then, Ambrose was soon shuffled out of that post and replaced by John Baird. Baird has also taken up the mantle of boasting of how ambitious the Tory targets are (going to be?) But we still don't have any legislation to curb soaring GHG emissions. And this month, Harper drew renewed criticism of Canada's obstructionism on climate for his stand against binding targets at the Commonwealth Summit in Kampala. Then Harper's minions have the gall to claim Canada showed "leadership" on climate. Feh. "Advance to the rear!" does not count as leadership, guys. Here's a report warning Canada risks losing credibility internationally on climate if we don't get moving.

Maybe next year?

The one ray of hope is that the public appears increasingly impatient with government delaying tactics, hollow rhetoric and fig-leaf measures like rebates and feel-good ads. Canada needs to get down to brass tacks and impose a carbon tax. Cap and trade for Large Final Emitters or "LFEs", as proposed by the Tories, is second best. But what we simply can't afford is another decade of claiming we have "targets" for reductions, with no hard choices actually taking place to achieve them.

As for denialists, the are losing the battle in the public arena. Most have given up claiming that the climate isn't really warming (usually accompanied by "nobody ever claimed that...") Plenty of people still buy their lame arguments, but the media has all but abandoned the "equal time" sham of airing one real scientist beside one denialist shill. A strange exception was the recent CNN series "Planet in Peril" which paired stunning location photography and undercover work with well-stated summations by Sanjay Gupta, Anderson Cooper, and Jeff Corwin. The series covered a range of current environmental crises, including global warming. In the set-up, they said what all journalists are saying this year: the scientific debate is over, climate change is real. Yet jarringly, in the wrap-up to that segment, they gave equal time and billing to industry patsy Patrick Michaels right next to Real Climatologist James Hansen of NASA Goddard. The segment was otherwise powerful and may have gotten the message out to many Americans, although giving Michaels air-time merely let those in denial continue to grasp at the straw of "scientists still don't agree." Sigh.

Another really great information format I've hit on is podcasting. It turns out there are all sorts of great podcasts on climate science and politics, and on renewables and other solutions. A few of my favorites are Renewable Energy Access, NPR Climate Connections, Weekly Radio Spin, the Insider Podcast from Environmental Defence, and EarthBeat Radio. Podcasts help fill "in-between" time including commuting, making supper, ironing, exercising, etc. It's like having a custom radio station that only plays content I want to keep up on. I'm definitely more plugged in to current events in the fight against global warming thanks to these podcasts.

I've especially enjoyed hearing about the youth conference "Power Shift 2007" and the ongoing youth action movements arising from that.

Locally, there's lots of work going into organizing the Dec. 8 Rally for Kyoto. I don't know if anyone is doing this here, but a lot of cities are joining in Greenpeace's polar bear plunge to save the polar bears.

So come out out to the rally on Dec. 8th and drive the message home!

Catching up again

2007-11-29T21:04:00.000-05:00

Once again I've had so much going on I haven't made time to post to this blog for several months. Let's see if now with winter here I can settle back into this.

I've been to some interesting events this fall, notably the one-day conference at UofT entitled A Globally Integrated Climate Policy for Canada. This was an interesting change from the science-heavy events I've been attending previously. Several panels of three speakers each offered a wide range of viewpoints and much lively interchange. The lunchtime keynote by UofT Prof. Thomas Homer-Dixon painted a stark portrait of the dire outcomes we can foresee if GHG emissions continue rising. Prof. Mark Jaccard of SFU had interesting points about what kind of policy instruments are effective in reducing emissions, and which are less so--notably all the ones Canada has tried so far, including information campaigns and incentives for individual actions to improve home insulation. Incentives can tend to reward behaviour that would have occurred anyway, rather than generate additional action.

I was particularly interested to hear Jaccard as I'd been reading his previous book Sustainable Fossil Fuels. Despite the initial impression from the title that he must be a cornucopian who thinks peak oil is no threat, I found the book realistic and pertinent. He specifically notes that coal appears to be abundant enough to permit extensive coal-to-liquids as a cushion against foreseeable declines in conventional oil. Further on in the book he returns to the point that CO2 sequestration will be necessary to avoid dangerous climate change. I had to return the book to the library and I'm afraid I can't give a clear rendition of how he proposed that sequestration could work for liquid fuels (hydrogen from syngas would allow sequestration, but then doesn't deliver a normal liquid fuel. Sorry, but I'm just unclear on his position on this one. I'm not saying he was mixed up - this is me not remembering.)

I found Jaccard's contributions at the conference pertinent and well presented. I ended up buying a copy of Jaccard's new book, co-authored with Jeffrey Simpson and Nic Rivers, entitled Hot Air: meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge [McLelland & Stewart, 2007. ISBN 978-0-7710-8096-8] Chapter 1 is a short overview of why a warming climate is bad news (perhaps needed for Canadians who may glibly assume "oh, we'll have longer growing seasons"). Chapters 2 and 3 are entitled "Canada's Do-Nothing Strategy" and "More Wasted Years of Talk." I haven't gotten to the end yet, though it's already clear that the authors favour mandatory measures placing a real cost on carbon, whether a tax or a cap. There's lots more to say about cap-and-trade vs. carbon taxes, but I want to get on to some other items tonight. In sum: I like Jaccard's clarity and directness.

Other books I'm reading currently are two by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good for You [Common Courage Press, 1995. ISBN 1-56751-060-4] and Trust Us, We're Experts [Tarcher/Penguin, ISBN 1-58542-139-1]. Both cover corporate P.R. and spin, campaigns to obscure clear scientific warnings to the public, and the blight of paid "experts" who leave the public thinking that no risk is ever clear enough to warrant action or legislation.

I've also gone back to my unfinished reading Linda McQuaig's It's the Crude, Dude: war, big oil, and the fight for the plaent on the real motives behind the Bush administration's push for the invasion of Iraq. I can't finish this one still, as it just makes me crazy reading about Vice President Voldemort's scheming ways for very long.

It's not about Al's House

2007-07-16T01:27:00.001-04:00

I've been so busy lately I haven't posted to this blog for some time. I've read some excellent books recently, including Andrew Dessler's The Science and Politics of Global Warming (his blog) and Joseph Romm's Hell and High Water. (his blog) Each does a fine job of spelling out the reality of the climate crisis, pointing out the strong scientific concensus on the matter. Each in its own way then delves into what has gone wrong over the past decade in the political process in the USA. Their failure to come to grips with this crisis rests on a tragic history of disinformation, spin, and cheap debating tactics, playing on public reluctance to accept a truth that is truly inconvenient.

As I've followed the public debate over the past few years I've witnessed so many foul plays I don't know where to begin. So to start somewhere, I'll pick the uproar over the power bill for Al Gore's quite large family estate. Apparently it's many times higher than a typical family home. Well, that may take a bit of the shine off of Mr. Gore's public image as a green superhero; but what the heck does it have to do with the validity or otherwise of the science recounted in his film? I thought of this as a snippet of dialogue on an imagined evening newscast:

anchor: "Climate change: we've all heard about it and read about it. But is it true? Is CO2 really a greenhouse gas after all? For answers, Dan Dubious has gone right to the source - Al Gore."

Dan D.: "That's right Bob. We're here in Tennessee to look at Al Gore's electric bill. And it's a whopper. What a hypocrite. How can any of us ever believe anything he says from now on?"

anchor: "Wow, Dan, that's amazing. Well, I guess I can stop worrying about droughts and sea-level rise, now that I know the size of one house in the U.S. southland."

Dan D. "Okay, Bob. Glad I was able to set that straight for you."

I'm trying to make the fallacy really glaring, just so we can all agree it doesn't answer the question. The problem is, this tactic doesn't need to address the real question; it works because it distracts. In a sense, it might actually mean something if the question were "Should we follow Al Gore's advise on what to do about climate change?" For that question, at least, Mr. Gore's personal commitment to reducing his own emissions might even be relevant. But Al Gore is not a scientific authority; he's just reporting on what the scientists have found. Even if you hate Gore and everything he stands for, you really can't escape the question of global warming simply by dismissing Gore the messenger.

You have to answer the question: is CO2 a greenhouse gas, and is the huge increase in CO2 that humans have undeniably started going to change the climate substantially? Al Gore's power bill is not a relevant contribution in looking for that answer. The IPCC has of course reviewed all the good sources of information for answering this one. You can read their reports online if you want to know.

But I realize a lot of Americans (and others) are just hoping this very inconvenient idea will go away if we just avoid reading those reports for a little longer. We've avoided them for a decade already.

The sad thing is that the science of spin is so well developed, and no matter how much we may try to bring the USA back to the actual science, the denialist camp has a whole suite of clever debating tactics lined up like so many smoke grenades. There was the astounding move by Micheal Crichton to link global warming activism with ultra-rich ultra-liberals tooling around in private jets. Huh? My climatology prof cycles to work right through Toronto's snowy winter. (As for me I wimp out and switch to the subway once it gets below freezing.) But that's another story.

Where's your certainty?

2007-03-26T21:34:00.000-04:00

Another recurring theme from people who argue against the fact that humans are changing the climate is a big focus on uncertainty. They are critical of forecasts of future temperature increases from complex climate models run on massive computer arrays. The models require simplifying assumptions to be computable, and they argue these assumptions could be "rigged" to make the models artificially confirm global warming.

Yet somehow, each of the rival proposals that they latch onto are excused from this scrutiny. They talk about galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) or solar variations as though we had clear, indubitable data showing these are the "real reason" behind recent temperature trends. In fact, neither of these external forcings is at all well characterized; we are far from having any clear basis for projecting long term trends in either one.

Then there are economic forecasts. Critics of the Kyoto accord regularly project "catastrophic" economic harm if the CO₂ reduction targets are implemented. They are quite adamant about this; they seem certain of these projections. Yet the academic literature on this question tells a different story. The recent Stern Report is only the latest instance. Quite a while earlier there was Robert Repetto and Duncan Austin, The Costs of Climate Protection: A Guide for the Perplexed [World Resources Institute, 1997. 60 pages. ISBN 1-56973-222-1, 60 pages] link.

This document looks at projections made with several different economic models, and how much impact on GDP growth there could be if greenhouse gas reductions are implemented. They focus on seven key assumptions, and assess how strongly the outcome depends on each one. For each issue, they look at a "worst case" and "best case" assumption, and work through how much GDP growth would be impacted if all seven are for the worse, or if some or all are the better case. If all seven are in the negative--a "worst worst" case--the models project a significant hit to GDP, something like 7% less GDP growth over the time span needed to reach a 60% cut in emissions. That's not minor, but looked at in context, it is a reduction in foreseen economic growth (something on the order of a doubling of GDP over several decades.) If this takes 30 years, that's the difference between 2.1% per year and 1.9% per year of growth. The growth that would have taken 30 years might now require 33. Catastrophic?

But that's only the "worst worst" case; if even two of the seven factors turn out to the better, the projected impact shrinks to just a 2% hit to GDP over the whole interval. Then the annual growth is 2% vs. 2.1%.

If four of the seven factors turn out favorably, the impact is projected to be very near zero. Once five go favorably, mitigation turns out to be a net benefit to the economy! Some catastrophe.

Of course there are probably many serious studies proposing that greenhouse gas mitigation will be terribly costly to the economy. I won't try to claim that economists can give us a single, persuasive forecast of what's going to happen. There's plenty of room for debate over the economics. Repetto and Austin is already dated, but the Stern Report brings the issue up to the present with much the same import.

It's only the science that's so clearly worked out. We really can't say for sure what will develop economically over the next century. But some critics seem to want to have the reverse: the economics is settled, on the side of catastrophe if Kyoto is implemented; but the science is still cloudy. So we show forget the "Precautionary Principle" and keep stalling. They have everything backwards.

And thanks for all the fish...

2007-03-16T20:31:00.000-04:00

"Oh, no! Not again!" is the reaction of a bowl of petunias materialized as a side-effect of a passing spaceship powered by Infinite Improbability Drive in The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The petunias find themselves high above the planet, and thus doomed to a brief lifespan of plummeting. We're left puzzling over how many times the petunias may have been put through this brief and pointless plunge.

This could well be the motto for anyone running across a global warming denier as well. I'm constantly struck by how often the exact same seemingly obscure "objections" are raised by ordinary people - regular folk, outside the hothouse of academia, who don't seem like the type to sit about reading up on galactic cosmic rays or paleoclimatic reconstruction. The selection of odd topics just keeps repeating in a most suspicious way.

I'm attending a course on the physics of radiative processes in the atmosphere (okay, so I am enfolded in the hothouse of academia). Chatting before class this morning, our prof mentioned having given a talk on global warming to grade 5 class. The kids had viewed An Inconvenient Truth and were now quite concerned.

The odd part was that one of the parents attended the talk and make it clear he is a full-out climate change naysayer. He interjected with a few rather technical questions, then buttonholed our prof for half an hour afterward. Apparently one of his issues was galactic cosmic rays (GCRs).

I don't know what sources this guy was working from, but it's fairly easy to imagine. There is no shortage of partisan websites which exist to collect new ways to argue against the reality of global warming, or at least trying to avoid human responsibility for it. They tend to engage in scientific "cherry picking," jumping on any publication or media statement by any scientist that could be either used, or twisted, in their campaign of denial.The flavour of the month is GCRs. Before that it was changing solar output as expounded by, e.g. Russian solar physicist K.I. Abdusamatov.

If you want a detailed account of what these are all about, and why they don't in any way refute the reality of human-induced global warming, I'll recommend RealClimate as a great resource. For my part, I'll just point out that in any of these "alternate explanations" of recent temperature changes that I've checked out, none have even attempted addressed the basic point that we know CO2 traps heat, and we have a good idea how strongly it affects climate. There are facts of basic physics that form the basis for the theory of the greenhouse effect and the role of CO2 as well as methane and other human additions to the atmosphere like CFCs.

Now, I'd say it's simply undeniable that humans are the cause of CO2 concentrations having risen suddenly to levels unseen for a million years or more. It's also unreasonable to suggest that we are not headed for a doubling or more over pre-industrial levels, barring a major reduction effort. The physics of the greenhouse effect tell us that this much additional CO2 will inevitably force a hotter climate.

So if you want to argue that CO2 is not already warming the planet and that higher levels in the future won't lead to more warming, it's not enough to say "I've found another outside forcing factor." Mainstream scientists using basic physics and spectroscopic measurements have worked out a figure known as the "radiative forcing" for a doubling of CO2 concentrations. The typical denial argument skips over this issue, implying that the forcing factor is zero or near zero. There is almost never any justification for that departure from the scientific literature. Richard Lindzen takes this tack, though at least he allows a non-zero value--something like 0.25 W m^-2 versus the consensus value of about 3.75 W m^-2. Lindzen at least gets points for giving his own number, but most denialists simply dismiss all this physics out of hand. The latch on to some new proposed candidate like GCRs or solar variability as if these could simply erase the existence of the greenhouse effect.

The point is that we have a clear theoretical handle on how and why CO2 absorbs infrared radiation in the range of the spectrum where the earth and atmosphere radiate strongly. This comes from hard science with precise laboratory measurements, as well as lots of ground- and space-based observation. This area of hard science provides a basis for predicting how much more heat we will trap by a given rise in CO2.

Saying there are other external forcings as well (solar variation, GCRs) says nothing to change these facts. Yet the denial movement regularly trots out these red herrings as if they somehow showed there is no greenhouse effect. The correct response to a proposed new forcing is to treat it in context of all the other forcings that have been so well covered in the IPCC assessment reports (ARs). Solar variation barely shows up on the chart; GCRs are too new a theory to have been covered in existing ARs; we'll have to wait to see how the dust settles on this new proposal.

But please be clear that this is all we have so far: a new proposed external forcing factor, which if confirmed (far from a certainty), would just have to be superimposed on all the existing forcings we have already identified and quantified. A new forcing does not wipe away all the others. Each known forcing has been assigned an error bar reflecting the remaining uncertainties over their exact values. A few are still poorly understood, but the forcings for CO2, methane and CFCs are fairly tightly constrained (unless you ask Richard Lindzen).

Next month, expect the denialist websites to latch on to some new claim, raising whatever it is to the level of a sure thing, and suggesting once again that this one means we can forget all about any greenhouse effect.

The non-sequiturs just keep rolling.

Oh, no! Not again!

Does anyone still doubt whether humans are changing the climate? Well, unfortunately...

2007-03-01T21:42:00.000-05:00

Last month the IPCC released the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of their Fourth Assessment Report (AR4); the full report is due out this Spring. I was really struck by the change in tone of the media coverage in the wake of this document, coming on the heels of the Stern Report and the big audience response to Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth." Up until this past month, a lot of media coverage of global warming fell victim to a "he said, she said" format where global warming proponents and deniers were given "equal time" in the interest of supposed "fairness." But after the release of the AR4, across the board I kept seeing media headlines saying that the debate is "finally over." Mind you, the scientists knew this some time before the media caught on; but at least now they have taken note.

Strikingly, both the Bush White House and Canada's Kyoto-defeatist minority Conservative government both went on the record as conceding that humans are changing the climate. Even John Howard's Kyoto-rejecting administration in Australia has given up questioning the human role: "I am not as fanatical about it as others," he said. But, "the accumulated evidence is undeniable ... we do have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions." [International Herald Tribune, January 25, 2007] link

All this is quite new. These were the last three G8 leaders who were playing both sides of the fence on the science until recently. Harper in particular got slammed after his recent epiphany on climate science, as the Liberal party found a copy of a fundraising letter he sent out in 2002 calling Kyoto a "socialist plot" and touting "tentative and contradictory scientific evidence about climate trends." But the opinion polls showed a strong surge in public concern over global warming, so Harper had to give ground.

Once the AR4 SPM was released, the media flashed the "debate is over" headline, then spent a good ten days summing up the science. The Globe and Mail ran a two-page centre spread with a map of Canada's projected climate by 2099 - the map showed isotherm lines of mean temperate rise, with Toronto inside a +6C contour. Wow.

I take this to mean that the scientific "debate" in the mainstream media can now be framed as settled, instead of "he said, she said." Journalists are in effect giving themselves permission to point to the IPCC as the received wisdom, instead of having to bracket it with opposing views. This will certainly save them time.

Looking around the internet over the past few weeks, it is starting to look like a lot of the deniers have not yet received the memo that the debate is "over." Blogs and discussion groups continue to roll with back and forth over such profound topics as a debate on whether the scientists of the IPCC (and the NAS, AAAS, Britain's Royal Society, Swedish Royal Academy, ...) can or cannot be called a "consensus." If they can, deniers next say that science "does not operate by consensus" (so, what? Now we have too many scientists in favour? Oy vey!) Perhaps they also claim the missing scientists on side B of the "debate" have been driven underground by the other scientists not being nice to them.

If you try to work through the logic of the greenhouse effect with some of the deniers, they may throw stones at every step in the chain of reasoning. A lot of times the exact same very specific debating points will turn up over and over from different people in many different forums. There's a great "taxonomy of skepticism" on the wonderful blog A Few Things Ill Considered. I'm afraid I've seen almost all these objections tossed out more than once - each one refutable, but there is such a litany of them.

A lot of these points have been hammered repeatedly in the op-ed pages of conservative newspapers like Canada's National Post. So I guess it's no surprise that I also encounter the "man in the street" following virtually the same script as the online debating club crowd. Last week I spoke to someone I hadn't seen in some time. When I mentioned I was taking a university course on global warming, he started posing a series of questions that could have come straight from the Ill-Considered skeptic's checklist. He was very polite, and I gave my best short responses to them one by one. After the seventh or eighth "but what about" question, I had to stop myself from asking what editorial page he had been reading. The deniers have been quite effective in getting their program of doubt across to the public.

So it looks like so far, the message has not reached all the foot soldiers in the trenches that the climate denial army has been forced to surrender. Should we be dropping leaflets, perhaps?

Of course, the end of one debate, over the science, leads inevitably into the start of another, over the politics: what shall we do now? That's the right place to be in the discussion. But for the deniers, they have a Plan B response that may startle you. As the "scientists can't agree" objection gets worn away, a lot of opponents are quickly switching their tune to "it's too late to stop global warming." Whew - that was QUICK, eh? Last week you said it wasn't even happening, and now suddenly it got away from us? In two weeks?

I've read a string of pieces by opponents of Kyoto this week arguing that climate change is now inevitable, and mitigation (lowering our CO2 emissions) sufficiently is impossible, so we all need to brace ourselves and start planning for how to cope - so called "adaptation."

The flaw in this argument is that we can't afford to give up on the mitigation front; however poorly you feel about our prospects for keeping CO2 levels from soaring, it's absurd to say we should not even try, and just sit back and prepare for all the consequences. The impact of CO2 is not just linear - there are good reasons to be concerned that as levels rise, new and more serious consequences come to bear.

How I chose the title

2007-02-26T22:53:00.000-05:00

Every piece of writing needs a good title. It's the hook, to get grazing passers-by to stop and sample the writing. When I decided to start this blog I didn't have the title worked out yet.

Well this morning on the subway it hit me. What I'm up against is a lot of spin, smoke-screening and irrelevant arguments -- the sort of thing we call a "red herring." Their aim is to throw you off the trail (dried salt herrings, which can go reddish, are very smelly -- so I'm told.)

I want to counter all those red herrings with a good, solid environmental reality check. Something from the other side of the spectrum ... something green.

So there it is. I'm calling this "Green Herring." Of course I had to google the term to see if someone else had thought of it. Of course someone had: there's a vegetarian restaurant in Canberra that has the name already. Here's one online online review - they liked it. I'll have to look it up if we ever get to Canberra. We've got friends in Melbourne that we're overdue for another visit.

There was also an entry in a Matlab contest that used this title. I haven't run the code to see what it does, but it sounds like some pretty pictures may emerge...

Well that's it for how I chose the title.

About me

2007-02-25T23:33:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my blog. This is something I should have started a long time ago. I'll start with a brief tidbit about me as an intro.
At work I do computer support for university engineering researchers. One great thing about this job is access to lectures, seminars and courses on campus. I've been making the best of this opportunity to get up to date on topics in science such as genetics, as well as climate change and sustainable energy.
I'll have plenty to say on these topics as I get under way with this blog.