Climate Progress

RealClimate has just eviscerated Roger Pielke, Sr. in an important post, “More bubkes.”  I am going to excerpt it at length because:

1. It thoroughly debunks some now-standard denier talking points on sea level rise, ocean heat content, and Arctic sea ice that the Pielkes, WattsUpWithThat, Inhofe, George Will and others have been pushing.
2. It has some excellent figures, including ones from the recent major peer-reviewed synthesis report of climate science since the 2007 IPCC report (which I wrote about here).
3. Pielke Sr. accused me of “a failure to understand the physics of global warming and cooling” in a post (here) about ocean heat content (which was gleefully reprinted by the anti-scientific website WattsUpWithThat), even though, as RealClimate definitively shows, it is Pielke who either fails to understand the science or chooses to willfully misrepresent it.

In my post “Breaking: NOAA puts out ‘El Niño Watch,’ so record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record,” I had noted that Pielke Sr. loves to cherry-pick climate data over short time spans to make misleading scientific claims about climate.  Climate, of course, is about long-term trends.

The basis for Pielke’s claim I don’t understand the science of climate:  “There are peer reviewed analyses that document that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003….  Even the last few years of the Levitus et al 2009 paper shows this lack of warming (see).”  And then he links to his discussion of that paper and puts up this figure:

What serious climate scientist would look at that data and have the nerve to tell the public it documents that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003.  If you wanted to play this game — and game is a kind word for this willful attempt to mislead the public — you could much more truthfully say “upper ocean warming has soared since 2002.”  But both statements are beside the point.

How could any serious climate scientist possibly look at such noisy data, which is full of short-term gyrations and brief, multi-year periods of little obvious warming — but an unmistakable upward trend for decades — and have the audacity to pick the year right after a staggeringly rapid increase in upper ocean warming as the basis of his public pronouncements on this issue?  And Pielke Sr. has the chutzpah to say my writing exhibits “a failure to understand the physics of global warming and cooling.”  Doctor — heal thyself.  It’s sad, really, since, unlike his son, he is actually a “climatologist.”

Pielke Sr. tries the same crap on the climate scientists of RealClimate — and their devastating must-read response should end forever any notion that Roger Pielke, Sr. is a credible source on climate science:

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Many of the top climate scientists in the world issued a major synthesis report reviewing the scientific literature since the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).  They found “greenhouse gas emissions and many aspects of the climate are changing near the upper boundary of the IPCC range of projections.”  In short, actual observations show things are much worse than the IPPC found.  Duh! and Duh! and Duh! Media coverage level — bupkis!  Technorati links to report released June 18 — 6.

One EPA economist,  Alan Carlin, cuts and pastes some disinformation from a denier blog post in order to (falsely) assert that the EPA’s endangerment finding is flawed because

• “In the rapidly evolving field of climate change, by grounding its TSD Technical Support Documents in the IPCC AR4 the EPA is largely relying on scientific findings that are, by early 2009, largely 3 years or more out of date.”
• “Important developments” since the IPCC cast doubt on its conclusions.

Media coverage level of this crap, whose entire conclusion was vitiated by the earlier synthesis by real scientists — Michael Jackson [adjusted for subject area]!  Technorati links to “report” posted by deniers on June 25 — 61.

THE MEDIA PREFERS FABRICATED DRAMA TO GENUINE FACTS

When a government agency doesn’t incorporate plagiarized disinformation into their work product, is that suppression — or your tax dollars working the way they’re supposed to, with decisions based on sound science?   Deniers like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Roger Pielke, Jr. say it’s the former, and they have spun some of the more gullible members of the status quo media, like CBS, who reported Friday:

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

Well, this “report” was actually first just “proposed comments” and then actual “Comments on the Draft Technical Support Documents for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air.”

I worked in a federal agency for five years.  Lots of internal people provide comments on draft documents.  Some of it’s good, some of it’s irrelevant, and some is outright disinformation — typically the latter is from holdovers from a previous administration.  In this case, it actually looks like the comments were

1. Unadulterated and long-debunked disinformation
2. From someone unqualified on the subject they are writing
3. Cut and paste from a blog without attribution
4. Delivered too late and not actually germane

Such comments should not be incorporated into an official government document — certainly not without a serious inquiry first.  They might, however, be the basis of an advserse employment action, as the euphemism goes.

You can read a thorough debunking of these “comments” at the RealClimate Post, “Bubkes.”  A brilliant piece by Deep Climate showed that this so-called “suppressed report” is

largely lifted from an attack on the EPA published last November in climate science disinformation specialist Pat Michaels’ World Climate Report [WCR]. And all this came without any attribution of the large swathes of copied material to WCR or the original author (presumably either Michaels or sidekick Chip Knappenberger).

I won’t repeat the entire Deep Climate analysis, but let me quote from the central thesis of the WCR November 19, 2008 post:  Why the EPA should find against “Endangerment”:

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I interviewed by email Dr. Mark Serreze, recently named director of The National Snow and Ice Data Center.  Partly I wanted him to explain his “death spiral” metaphor for Arctic ice (see NSIDC: Arctic melt passes the point of no return, “We hate to say we told you so, but we did”).

And partly I wanted his reaction to the blog, WattsUpWithThat, the quintessential victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS), who called his appointment “Bad News.”

But first, let’s look at where the Arctic sea ice extent stands as of June 3 [click for update]:

Note:  The satellites only measure ice area.  Since Arctic ice has been thinning sharply in the past two years, we might be at record low volume for early June — see North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: “It’s like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely.”

NSIDC reported Wednesday, the “Melt season gains momentum“:

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ENSO Alert System Status: El Niño Watch

Synopsis: Conditions are favorable for a transition from ENSO-neutral to El Niño conditions during June − August 2009.

So begins the monthly El Niño/Southern oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion issued by the Climate Prediction Center of NOAA’s National Weather Service.  This is a significant change from their recent predictions of ENSO-neutral conditions for the rest of the year (see “La Niña conditions end“).  You can read the basics about ENSO here.

Figure 3:  Area-averaged upper-ocean heat content anomalies (°C) in the equatorial Pacific (5°N-5°S, 180º-100ºW).

I’ll go through the report in some detail since this is potentially a very big deal for the climate debate.  After all, the La Niña conditions over the past 18 months helped temporarily mute the strong human-caused warming signal, allowing the global warming deniers to push their nonsensical global cooling meme with the help of the status quo media (see “Media enable denier spin 1: A (sort of) cold January doesn’t mean climate stopped warming“).

Remember that back in January, NASA had predicted:

Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.

ENSO doesn’t change the overall warming trend, but it is a short-term modulation, what NASA labels the largest contributor to the “natural dynamical variability” of the climate system.  How are El Niño and La Niña defined? (more…)

Hurricane season officially begins tomorrow.  So I’m updating one more 2008 post on the science.  Last September, Nature published a major analysis that supports my 2-parter (Why global warming means killer storms worse than Katrina and Gustav, Part 1 and Part 2).  As Nature explained:

… scientists have come up with the firmest evidence so far that global warming will significantly increase the intensity of the most extreme storms worldwide.

The maximum wind speeds of the strongest tropical cyclones have increased significantly since 1981, according to research published in Nature this week. And the upward trend, thought to be driven by rising ocean temperatures, is unlikely to stop at any time soon.

The team statistically analysed satellite-derived data of cyclone wind speeds. Although there was hardly any increase in the average number or intensity of all storms, the team found a significant shift in distribution towards stronger storms that wreak the greatest havoc. This meant that, overall, there were more storms with a maximum wind speed exceeding 210 kilometres per hour (category 4 and 5 storms on the Saffir–Simpson scale)….

“It’ll be pretty hard now for anyone to claim that cyclone activity has not increased,” says Judith Curry, an atmospheric researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who was not involved in the study….

“People should now stop saying ‘who cares, storm activity is just a few per cent up’,” says Curry. “It’s the strongest storms that matter most.”

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It’s the ice thickness, stupid.

The Arctic ice cover, which has endured for at least 100,000 years, will be all but gone within a decade according to a volume-based projection by a leading British scientist, the BBC reports.  At the same time, “a gruelling 73-day” survey of sea-ice thickness found “the average thickness of the sea ice was 1.774 m” [5.8 feet].

One surveyor said the data “seems to suggest it was almost all first-year ice.”  And that confirms what the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported in April:

The view of the Arctic from above tells you only ice area, not volume.  So even as the climate science deniers (temporarily) crow about the latest two-dimensional data, those who think three-dimensionally know that the Arctic is a cracking eggshell (see NSIDC: Arctic melt passes the point of no return, “We hate to say we told you so, but we did.”).

Peter Wadhams, head of the polar ocean physics group at the University of Cambridge, “believes the ice, which has been a permanent feature for at least 100,000 years, is now so thin that almost all of it will disappear in about a decade“:

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”Chacaltaya has disappeared. It no longer exists,” said Dr. Edson Ramirez, head of an international team of scientists that has studied the glacier since 1991.

Like the Wicked Witch of the West, the world is melting — and fast.

The University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service reported earlier this year, “The new data continues the global trend in accelerated ice loss over the past few decades.” The rate of ice loss is twice as fast as a decade ago.  “The main thing that we can do to stop this is reduce greenhouse gases” said Michael Zemp, a researcher at the University of Zurich’s Department of Geography.

This is all sadly consistent with other recent research (see Another climate impact comes faster than predicted: Himalayan glaciers “decapitated” and AGU 2008: Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003 and links below).

And this country isn’t being spared — see “Another climate impact coming faster than predicted: Glacier National Park to go glacier-free a decade early.”

But the story of the week, from the Miami Herald, is Chacaltaya, which means ”cold road” — and like our Glacier National Park, it is gonna need a new name [maybe "not-so-cold cul-de-sac"]:

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Obama is keeping his promise to restore science to its rightful place with sharply increased funding for research and development, which started with the stimulus package.  As Greenwire reports in “Obama promises record U.S. research spending” (subs. req’d):

In his first major science address since taking office, President Obama promised today to increase U.S. public and private spending to historic highs for science research and development.

“I’m here today to set this goal: We will devote more than 3 percent of our GDP to research and development,” Obama said during a speech at the National Academy of Sciences.

He added, “We will not just meet, but we will exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race…”

Specifically, the White House said the stimulus bill provided $21.5 billion for research and development and the fiscal 2010 budget proposal includes $150 billion over 10 years for renewable energy research as well as $75 billion to make permanent the research and experimentation tax credit.

In another set of stirring remarks — well, stirring if you’re a scientist or care about science (full text here, plus story on teleprompter “mutiny” that got almost as much attention in the MSM as the gist of his remarks) — Obama again said energy and climate were the top priorities: (more…)

[JR:  I have added the "(small)" here, since it will become increasingly clear that the impacts of global warming on our current emissions path are so catastrophic that they trump all other concerns and we must pay any price, bear any burden to stop them.]

Are green energy industries about to ruin the environment and undermine national security? Are they engaged in the ecological equivalent of mountaintop removal? Are they the new Big Oil, making us dangerously dependent on imported strategic resources?

Those questions are implied in “Clean Energy’s Dirty Little Secret”, a provocative article in the current issue of The Atlantic. Author Lisa Margonelli points out that wind turbines, hybrid cars and some other green technologies carry “their own hefty environmental price tag”, including the use of rare-earth minerals extracted from open-pit mines or imported from places like China.

I’ve encountered similar concerns among members of the U.S. intelligence community: In the pursuit of green energy, will we trade our dependence on one imported strategic resource – oil – for dependence on other imported strategic resources?

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A reader points out that the front page of MSN today has an impressive story on climate impacts, “Climate Catastrophe? Here’s What the U.S. Could Look Like in 2100.”  Those impacts should be motivation enough for action as is, but in fact the story would be a much more accurate portrayal of the latest science with just the tiniest of changes:  replace “in 2100″ with “post-2050.” MSN asserts with unusual bluntness:

… you wonder, “Is climate disaster already upon us?”

Scientists say the answer is “yes.” We are now experiencing the effects of human-caused climate change and, even if we drastically alter our polluting behavior today, we’ll continue to see changes over the next two to three decades. This change is irreversible, and researchers predict it may be worse than the depressing situation Al Gore foretold in An Inconvenient Truth.

Precisely.  Here is the region-by-region warning “if we don’t act now”:

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