Courtesy of Marginal Revolution.
Archive for the 'Climate Science' Category
Mother Jones has an interesting short interview with the climatologist father of one of our favorite science and technology policy researchers, Roger Pielke Jr. I don’t know why they label Pielke Sr. as “controversial” unless it is because he does not hew strictly to the political stance of “An Inconvenient Truth”. He is a serious scientist, not a polemicist — as Roger Jr. summarized:
…Of the media my father concludes the interview with the following claim:
But whenever I look at the data, I see a much more complicated picture than what you typically hear about.
That is a good summary of the difference between the title of the interview and the substance itself. But that is nothing new in the climate arena where everything is oversimplified and politically dichotomized. Even so, kudos to Mother Jones for presenting one scientist’s nuanced views that don’t sit comfortably in the conventional framing.
It should be possible to counteract the global warming associated with a doubling of carbon dioxide levels by enhancing the reflectivity of low-lying clouds above the oceans, according to researchers in the US and UK. John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, US, and colleagues say that this can be done using a worldwide fleet of autonomous ships spraying salt water into the air.
Clouds are a key component of the Earth’s climate system. They can both heat the planet by trapping the longer-wavelength radiation given off from the Earth’s surface and cool it by reflecting incoming shorter wavelength radiation back into space. The greater weight of the second mechanism means that, on balance, clouds have a cooling effect.
I really liked this
…I don’t have a lot of faith in the exact predictive powers of climate models, or for that matter economic models, but uncertainty about outcomes should make us worry more not less. Uncertainty usually has two tails, not just one.
by Tyler Cowen in the closing of his reply to a reader request “You’ve spent a lot of time studying economic models. You probably have an opinion about their overall reliability.”
Roger Pielke offers the Prometheus arena for a debate between and around economist Gary Yohe and Bjorn Lomborg. If you have any interest in assessing the range of policy options, you must allocate some time to read through the comments. And if you haven’t already done so, to read the subject Copenhagen Consensus 2008 Challenge Paper “Global Warming” by Yohe, Tol, and Blanford.
E.g., comment #19 by George Tobin — who seems to agree with my first reaction to reading Yohe’s editorial — that Yohe needed to attack Lomborg, lest he be seen as an “ally”
1) I think in some circles it is obligatory to respond negatively when cited favorably by Bjorn Lomborg. Notwithstanding specific differences regarding the characterization of his economic projections Dr. Yohe probably had to prevent the damaging perception that he might be a tacit ally of one of the world’s most dreaded non-alarmists.
E.g., comment #27 by Richard Tol [a co-author of the subject paper]. I don’t like the Copenhagen Consensus ranking of “government R&D only” at 14th position as the most efficient policy. Richard explains so clearly why a revenue-neutral carbon tax will generate better results than R&D subsidies:
…As to my disagreement with Chris Green, this is about facts, not values. (As far I can tell, Chris and I agree on many value issues.) Green proposes a large scale applied research programme funded by the government. Previous attempts to do that have failed — indeed, the proponents of this approach frequently quote the Manhattan and Apollo projects as their biggest successes. As this experience suggests that the Green proposal would be expensive and ineffective, I would rather not repeat it for climate. This type of research has to be done by companies, not by national laboratories, and companies respond better to taxes than to R&D subsidies.
Chris Green is the author of the challenge paper that was picked by the Copenhagen Consensus panel as #14, whereas the Yohe, Tol, Blanford policy was ranked #29 by the panel.
E.g., comment #28 by TokyoTom — who nails a key source of confusion and controversy
1. It seems to me that Tol and Yohe have a point that Lomborg has confused his readers as to what Yohe and Tol concluded, but fail to focus on the point of confusion - only Roger seems to have caught the drift, but doesn’t identify any responsibility for Lomborg in it.
Lomborg first mentions Yohe as “one of the lead economists of the IPCC” who “For the Copenhagen Consensus … did a survey”. But in concluding what climate policy should be, Lomborg completely ignores the strong recommendation of Yohe and Tol (for a policy that focusses on mitigation, with R&D investments to be primarily market driven and some limited government-funded efforts to aid adaptation in developing countries) for “the best climate solution from the top economists from the Copenhagen Consensus”, without making any effort to clearly distinguish Yohe/Tol from those who voted on the CC ranking.
…But none of these conclusions can be derived from the Yohe/Tol work, and since Lomborg first refers to them, it is a puzzle that he did not do a better job of distinguishing their conclusions from those of the CC voting panel of economists.
FWIW, TokyoTom is a reliable contributor of insights, setting a good example of critical thinking for the rest of us.
EARTH—Former vice president Al Gore—who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save—launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world.
“I tried to warn them, but the Elders of this planet would not listen,” said Gore, who in 2000 was nearly banished to a featureless realm of nonexistence for promoting his unpopular message. “They called me foolish and laughed at my predictions. Yet even now, the Midwest is flooded, the ice caps are melting, and the cities are rocked with tremors, just as I foretold. Fools! Why didn’t they heed me before it was too late?”
Al Gore—or, as he is known in his own language, Gore-Al—placed his son, Kal-Al, gently in the one-passenger rocket ship, his brow furrowed by the great weight he carried in preserving the sole survivor of humanity’s hubristic folly.
Australian scientists have come up with a unique way to combat climate change: eat kangaroos and save the world.
A study claims that farming and consuming more kangaroos instead of cattle and sheep will reduce carbon gas emissions.
According to the scientific journal Conservation Letters, the Australian icon produces far less methane than sheep and cattle. Methane is one of the worst causes of greenhouse gas and in Australia alone sheep and cattle produce 11 per cent of the nation’s total emissions.
Kangaroos, on the other hand, produce relatively small amounts of the gas because they are not ruminants; as with wallabies, the microorganisms in their stomachs differ from those found in sheep and cattle.
…“Currently, farmers have few options to reduce the contribution that livestock make to greenhouse gas production,” Dr Wilson said. “However, low-emission kangaroo meat will provide an option to avoid emissions . . . and have a positive global impact.”
Don’t laugh, this is serious science.
On an issue as high politicized as climate change, where bloggers and others are paying close attention, the inclusion of a doctored image, the cribbing of an old, misleading figure, and the inclusion of an editor’s personal views in the guise of a science assessment is remarkable, even in a draft for public comment. Even if the excuse is plain old sloppiness, the report is a big fat black eye for the world’s leading climate science program.
Read on to discover the who is behind this sloppy report on climate change.
In 2003 Dan Sarewitz and I wrote an article titled “Wanted: Scientific Leadership on Climate” (PDF). In that article we made the following brash assertion:
What happens when the scientific community’s responsibility to society conflicts with its professional self interest? In the case of research related to climate change the answer is clear: Self interest trumps responsibility.
Our argument was that the scientific community sought to take care of its own interests first while “the needs and capabilities of decisionmakers who must deal with climate change have played little part in guiding research priorities.”
If you need any evidence that little has changed in the five years since we wrote that article, have a look at this story by Andy Revkin in today’s New York Times. The article discusses the termination of the Center for Capacity Building at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation’s largest government-supported atmospheric (and related) sciences research lab.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research, an important hub for work on the causes and consequences of climate change, has shut down a program focused on strengthening poor countries’ ability to forecast and withstand droughts, floods and other climate-related hazards.
The move, which center officials say resulted from the shrinking of federal science budgets, is being denounced by many experts on environmental risk, who say such research is more crucial than ever in a world with rising populations exposed to climate threats.
In e-mail exchanges, these experts said the eliminated program, the Center for Capacity Building, was unique in its blend of research and training in struggling countries.
The Center for Capacity Building (still online at ccb.ucar.edu) was created in 2004. It built on decades of work by its director, Michael Glantz, a political scientist who has focused on the societal effects of natural climate extremes and any shifts related to accumulating greenhouse gases.
More from Roger Pielke. This is a surprising move by NCAR — cutting one of the few credible research programs on adaptation.
And according to this later post from Roger this is not a simple response to budget cutting. There have NOT been cuts in real federal funding for science - budgets have been more or less flat in real terms. Click on the thumbnail at left for the a chart of the R&D funding.
We’re collecting a few basic links to the climate record. Contributions of superior data and interpretations would be much appreciated. The Lisiecki and Raymo graphic above has a complex derivation, summarized briefly here — don’t mistake it for anything analogous to familiar contemporary temperature records.
The sudden onset of glaciation can be appreciated from the recent 450kyear reconstructions of Antarctic temperature
Moving from the recent climate history shown in the two graphics above, here is a 65 million year reconstruction:
Continuing our interest in sudden climate shifts, here are a couple of short papers that look interesting. First is Sudden climate transitions during the Quaternary, which is in preparation by Jonathan Adams (1), Mark Maslin (2) and Ellen Thomas (3). The authors caution:
Article in press in Progress in Physical Geography This represents an earlier version of our text. Some changes have been made since we stopped modifying this web version: e.g. we have added a discussion of the role of volcanic aerosols in sudden climate changes…evidence suggests the rapid cooling at the end of the Eemian interglacial was due to a big explosive volcanic event. Other ‘volcanic’ cooling events occured during the Holocene.Excerpts from the Abstract and Introduction:
The time span of the past few million years has been punctuated by many rapid climate transitions, most of them on time scales of centuries to decades or even less. The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11,500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades. The speed of this change is probably representative of similar but less well-studied climate transitions during the last few hundred thousand years. These include sudden cold events (Heinrich events/stadials), warm events (Interstadials) and the beginning and ending of long warm phases, such as the Eemian interglacial. Detailed analysis of terrestrial and marine records of climate change will, however, be necessary before we can say confidently on what timescale these events occurred; they almost certainly did not take longer than a few centuries.Various mechanisms, involving changes in ocean circulation, changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or haze particles, and changes in snow and ice cover, have been invoked to explain these sudden regional and global transitions. We do not know whether such changes could occur in the near future as a result of human effects on climate. Phenomena such as the Younger Dryas and Heinrich events might only occur in a ‘glacial’ world with much larger ice sheets and more extensive sea ice cover. However, a major sudden cold event did probably occur under global climate conditions similar to those of the present, during the Eemian interglacial, around 122,000 years ago. Less intensive, but significant rapid climate changes also occurred during the present (Holocene) interglacial, with cold and dry phases occurring on a 1500-year cycle, and with climate transitions on a decade-to-century timescale. In the past few centuries, smaller transitions (such as the ending of the Little Ice Age at about 1650 AD) probably occurred over only a few decades at most. All the evidence indicates that most long-term climate change occurs in sudden jumps rather than incremental changes.
Introduction
Until a few decades ago it was generally thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes occurred gradually over a timescale of many centuries or millennia, scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. The tendency of climate to change relatively suddenly has been one of the most suprising outcomes of the study of earth history, specifically the last 150,000 years (e.g., Taylor et al., 1993). Some and possibly most large climate changes (involving, for example, a regional change in mean annual temperature of several degrees celsius) occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, and perhaps even just a few years. The decadal-timescale transitions would presumably have been quite noticeable to humans living at such times, and may have created difficulties or opportunities (e.g., the possibility of crossing exposed land bridges, before sea level could rise). Hodell et al. (1995) and Curtis et al. (1996), for instance, document the effects of climate change on the collapse of the Classic period of Mayan civilization and Thompson (1989) describes the influence of alternating wet and dry periods on the rise and fall of coastal and highland cultures of Ecuador and Peru. The beginning of crop agriculture in the Middle East corresponds very closely in time with a sudden warming event which marks the beginning of the Holocene (Wright 1993). Even the burial in ice of the prehistoric mummified corpse of the famous ‘Iceman’ (e.g., Bahn and Everett, 1993) at the upper edge of an alpine glacier coincided with the initiation of a cold period (’Neoglaciation’) after the Holocene climate optimum (Baroni and Orombelli, 1996). On longer timescales, evolution of modern humans has been linked to climatic changes in Africa (e.g., de Menocal, 1995). But the full implications of these sudden changes for biogeography and for the evolution of human cultures and biology have barely begun to be considered; there has simply not been time for the message to be absorbed by biogeographers, archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists, and this review is intended to help the process along.Sudden stepwise instability is also a disturbing scenario to be borne in mind when considering the effects that humans might have on the climate system through adding greenhouse gases. Judging by what we see from the past, conditions might gradually be building up to a ‘break point’ at which a dramatic change in the climate system will occur over just a decade or two, as a result of a seemingly innocuous trigger. It is the evidence for dramatic past changes on the timescale of centuries to decades which will be the subject of this review.
More background from the Quaternary Environments Network (QEN)* can be found in A quick background to the last ice age where we learn of more evidence for sudden jumps in climate.
Latest Comments
RSS