Climate Progress

The previous post debunked an article that argued scientists have seriously overestimated climate change. Now let’s look at the evidence they are seriously underestimating climate change.

To do that, the fatal flaw with the IPCC’s over-reliance on the poorly named “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS) must be understood. Recall that the ECS is the “equilibrium change in global mean surface temperature following a doubling of the atmospheric (equivalent) CO2 concentration,” which the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report concluded was 2 to 4.5°C.

You might think that the ECS tells you how much the planet’s temperature will rise if humans emit enough CO2 to double its atmospheric concentration. But it doesn’t. It is just a theoretical construct. It tells you only how much the planet’s temperature will rise if CO2 concentrations double and then are magically frozen.

That’s because the ECS omits key carbon cycle feedbacks that a rise in the planet’s temperature will likely trigger. For instance, a doubling of CO2 to 550 ppm will lead to the melting of the permafrost and the release of huge amounts of carbon currently frozen it it. These amplifying (or positive) feedbacks are the main subject of this post.

The ECS includes only “fast feedbacks” which NASA’s James Hansen defines as follows:

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Yes, Dole announced last week a plan to “produce and market ‘carbon neutral’ bananas and pineapples.” Their effort is “aimed at establishing a carbon neutral product supply chain for bananas and pineapples, from their production in Costa Rica to the markets in North America and Europe.”

The deal is with the National Forestry Financing Fund and Costa Rica’s Ministry of Environment and Energy, so I guess we are talking tree offsets here. Well, Costa Rica is probably better than most countries at delivering real, additional benefits — and the trees will be tropical. The P.R. even has a quote from the Minister, noting that the country aims “to become the first carbon neutral country in the world by 2021.”

I guess Dole really wants to sell you bananas that are really green.

Having grown up far from coasts, hurricanes paralyze me.

Almost as if they have the intention to destroy, they conjure force, take aim and begin a rampage. We watch satellite images of one storm unleash a trail of multiple, major disasters (if it falls on land) with a power it sustains for days. (I’m used to tornadoes — they last hours.)

Such is the case with Hurricane Dean right now, as news coverage briefs us on where the hurricane has been — the Caribbean, the Yucatan Peninsula — and where it’s going — the Mexican Gulf.

Next week, the Center for American Progress is coming out with a report entitled Forecast: Storm Warning. There will be an event on Monday [details to come] to mark its release with experts from the field, including Peter J. Webster from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Mayor Richard T. Crotty of Orange County, FL. While the report’s focus is on how to prepare our communities for hurricanes, it briefly reviews the latest science.

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A study by Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) has the denyers and doubters delighted.

“Overturning the ‘Consensus’ in One Fell Swoop” gloats Planet Gore, which says the study “concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes” and so we “should expect about a 0.6^oC additional increase in temperature between now and 2070″ [0.1^oC per decade] if CO2 concentrations hit 550 parts per million, double preindustrial levels.

Is this possible? Aren’t we already warming up 0.2^oC per decade — a rate that is expected to rise? Has future global warming been wildly overestimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) consensus?

Or, as I argue in my book, has future global warming been underestimated by the IPCC. This is perhaps the central issue in the climate change debate, so this will be a long post. To cut to the chase, it is not possible for one study to overturn the consensus, and in any case this inadequately researched, overly simplistic, and mistake-riddled study certainly doesn’t.

Climate sensitivity expert James Annan points out key mistakes that rip the guts out of Schwartz’s analysis. That is strike one. Now I’ll offer my 2 cents worth.

I have always considered it ironic that the Denyers — who don’t believe the consensus, which is based on hundreds of studies that they obviously reject out of hand — are so enamored of the very few studies that suggest the consensus overestimates climate change (while ignoring the great many studies that suggest an underestimate). Even more ironic, let me quote from the end of the Schwartz paper, which is painfully aware how dubious its main conclusion is:

Finally, as the present analysis rests on a simple single-compartment energy balance model, the question must inevitably arise whether the rather obdurate climate system might be amenable to determination of its key properties through empirical analysis based on such a simple model. In response to that question it might have to be said that it remains to be seen. In this context it is hoped that the present study might stimulate further work along these lines with more complex models…. Ultimately of course the climate models are essential to provide much more refined projections of climate change than would be available from the global mean quantities that result from an analysis of the present sort.

Yes, the Denyers routinely attack the IPCC consensus for using elaborate computer models that they claim are still far too simplistic to model the real climate — claiming those models omit key variables and negative feedbacks that would reduce future climate change. But now they would have us embrace a self-acknowledged “simple model” — one far more simplistic than the climate models the Denyers repeatedly denounce as too simplistic. That’s chutzpah.

There is both a simple reason and a more complicated reason why I firmly believe that IPCC scientists are underestimating future climate change (and hence that Schwartz is very wrong). First, the simple reason — Scientists have underestimated current climate change:

• “The recent [Arctic] sea-ice retreat is larger than in any of the (19) IPCC [climate] models” — and that was a Norwegian expert in 2005. The retreat has accelerated in the past two years.
• The ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.” That was Penn State climatologist Richard Alley in March 2006. In 2001, the IPCC thought that neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.
• The temperature rise from 1990 to 2005 — 0.33°C — was “near the top end of the range” of IPCC climate model predictions.
• Sea-level rise from 1993 and 2006 — 3.3 millimetres per year as measured by satellites — was higher than the IPCC climate models predicted.
• The subtropics are expanding faster than the models project.
• Since 2000, carbon dioxide emissions have grown faster than any IPCC model had projected.

So what are the chances that the IPCC has overestimated the climate sensitivity by a factor of three as Schwartz’s overly simple model would have us believe — that the rate of warming in the next several decades will be under half that of the rate of the past 16 years? Zilch. Does Schwartz mention any of these data points? Not one. Shame on the JGR editors for letting this go by. Strike two.

Now on to the more complicated reason I am convinced scientists are underestimating future climate change.

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I am on a panel this Monday the 27th moderated by ABC’s Stossel. The Independent Women’s Forum Policy Summit, “Energy Today, Energy Tomorrow” takes place at 9:30 AM at GWU’s Jack Morton Auditorium, 805 21st Street, N.W. in DC.

It looks like I’ll be sort of debating Sandy Liddy Bourne of the Heartland Institute, which has received nearly $800,00 from ExxonMobil since 1998. You are all no doubt as shocked as I am that G. Gordon Liddy’s daughter is a Denyer.

Come if you can. They are also going to try to get this on C-SPAN, and I think there will be at least one live blogger.

A decade ago I was on 20/20 interviewed by Stossel. I’ll be amazed if he remembers. I can’t find any reference to it online, which is just as well — it didn’t go well. I’ll blog more on this when it is over.

News Flash (as it were):

Hundreds of people posed naked on Switzerland’s shrinking Aletsch glacier today for US photographer Spencer Tunick as part of a Greenpeace campaign to raise awareness of global warming.

Now that is all the nudes that’s fit to print.

On a more serious note: “Switzerland has about 1800 glaciers and almost all of them are losing ground.” Everyone needs to do their part to raise awareness, even if it is a visibly small part.

Climate Progress is happy to introduce Bill Becker as the first of several new guest bloggers. Bill is Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, an initiative to help the next President of the United States take decisive action on global warming within his or her first 100 days in office. You can read his full bio here. Bill is not only one of the most knowledgeable people on sustainable development, he helped launch one of the first green communities — Soldiers Grove, WI. And he’s also a former newspaper editor — making him uniquely qualified to blog on energy and climate issues. Welcome, Bill!

My PC has been a blog-free zone. Until now.

Joe Romm asked me to become a contributor to Climate Progress and, after some hesitation, I agreed. I hesitated because my time, energy, and mental capacity are dominated these days by an effort to create a climate action plan for the next President of the United States.

But Joe is one of my former bosses at the U.S. Department of Energy, where he amazed us all by becoming one of the all-time champions of the Washington Post’s weekly humor contest. He did that in his spare time, when he wasn’t creating one of the U.S.’s first comprehensive plans to combat global warming. I admire Joe a lot — his writing and his intellect and his mix of passion and science — so I agreed.

I expect to take advantage of Climate Progress to obtain your help with the presidential plan, sometimes by inciting a blog-riot, other times by gentler means of soliciting your reactions. I will start by telling you the assumptions upon which we’re basing our approach to climate action.

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Popular Science has published a terrific article, “Konrad Steffen: The Global Warming Prophet,” about one of the world’s leading climatologists. Steffen has spent “18 consecutive springs on the Greenland ice cap, personally building and installing the weather stations that help the world’s scientists understand what’s happening up there.” The article notes:

Water from the melting ice sheet is gushing into the North Atlantic much faster than scientists had previously thought possible. The upshot of the news out of Swiss Camp is that sea levels may rise much higher and much sooner than even the most pessimistic climate forecasts predicted.

What is going on in Greenland? Steffen explains what he and NASA glaciologist Jay Zwally figured out from their study of fissures in the ice sheet (called moulins — see figures above and below):

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I have argued previously that the landmark Stern Report got the big picture right — strong action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is economically justified, since the cost of action (i.e. mitigation), perhaps 1% of GDP, is far less than the cost of inaction (i.e. climate change impacts), which Stern estimates as at least 5% of GDP and possibly as high as 20%.

In particular, I (and others) argued Stern’s much-criticized choice of a low discount rate, 1.4%, was in fact justified — see here and here for a good discussion.

Now perhaps the most mainstream economic policy think tank in the country — Resources for the Future (RFF) — has written a major report, “An Even Sterner Review,” with two key conclusions. First, “we find no strong objections to the discounting assumptions adopted in the Stern Review.” Second,

[T]he conclusions reached in the review can be justified on other grounds than by using a low discount rate. We argue that nonmarket damages from climate change are probably underestimated and that future scarcities that will be induced by the changing composition of the economy and climate change should lead to rising relative prices for certain goods and services, raising the estimated damage of climate change and counteracting the effect of discounting.

What does RFF mean by “rising relative prices”?

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Unstoppable government agents with a talent for killing all seem to have the initials J.B. But do they care about global warming? Jack does.

Fox TV has announced that the seventh season of 24, which starts in 2008, “will incorporate environmentally-friendly messages into episodes.” I’m thinking Bauer will torture the bad guys with electricity from wind power or run over someone in a Prius.

Also “executives have taken several steps toward reducing carbon emissions on the set with the goal of a fully ‘carbon-neutral’ season finale.” Yes, I suppose that means Fox will be buying offsets (hopefully not trees). What other steps will they be taking?

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