Climate Change and the Integrity of Science 1046
blau tips news of an open letter from 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates, decrying the "recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular." The letter lays out the basics of the scientific method, and explains how certainly highly-regarded theories — such as the big bang, evolution, and Earth's origin — are commonly accepted due to the strength of the evidence supporting them, though "fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong." It goes on to "call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them." According to the Guardian, the letter "originated with a number of NAS members who were frustrated at the misinformation being spread by climate deniers and the assaults on scientists by some policy-makers who hope to delay or avoid making policy decisions and are hiding behind the recent controversy around emails and minor errors in the IPCC."
Science always predicts the future (Score:5, Informative)
*ALL* science is about predicting the future. If you have a theory that cannot make predictions, then it's not a scientific theory, it's not right, it's not even wrong [wikipedia.org].
Re:Almost Godwin... (Score:4, Informative)
climate deniers
Wow, is that what they're called?
A skeptic is someone who is dubious of a claim, but is willing to be persuaded by sufficient evidence. A denier is someone who will never be persuaded by any amount of evidence. There's precious little skepticism with regards to climate change these days, because the evidence is sufficient to convince those who were initially skeptical, but there's a hell of a lot of denial. If people who still refuse to accept the evidence don't want to be called "deniers," then you're welcome to come up with a different word -- but you can't have "skeptic," because that word already means something different.
And you can take your Godwin and stuff it. Godwin's Law is invoked when someone brings Hitler or the Holocaust into the conversation where they don't belong. So far, the only people doing that in this conversation are the climate change deniers. You don't get to, er, deny other people the use of the word "denier" just because it's often used with the word "Holocaust" in front of it. The verb "to deny" is a perfectly good English word going back to the 1300s, and it can be used in reference to many, many things that have nothing to do with the period from 1933 to 1945. In this particular case, the label fits: deal with it.
Re:Here's a quote (Score:4, Informative)
In the academic arena ripping each others ideas to shreds is standard fare. No one is suggesting Lomborg committed fraud or going after him personally. People are suggesting he is wrong. Given that many of his more outlandish claims appear in paperback rather than in peer reviewed literature this is better than he deserves.
Re:No mention (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but somebody has been lying to you. The raw, unadjusted data is owned by various national meteorological services, and it has not been destroyed. Some of it is available for a fee, but quite a bit is available freely. You can find it here [realclimate.org]
Certainly. Such a comparison may be seen here [wordpress.com]
Re:hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Over 10% in such a short period of time? That's pretty impressive. Of course, virtually every major scientific society in the world [skepticalscience.com] has previously come out in support of climate science and concerns about global warming
Re:No mention (Score:5, Informative)
It then goes on to talk about the recent "americans are bombarded with cancer" report:
(Agreement with or refutation of the specifics of the case being made are left as an exercise to the reader.)
YOU are not the peer review process. (Score:2, Informative)
You're just some "loudmouth" on the internet.
What they're talking about isn't simply answering Joe Bob Everyman's questions in a public shouting match.
They're talking about getting papers published in peer-reviewed, that actually meet the criteria for publication in journals that are even the least bit contrary to the "party line" that you're spouting.
Because of this sleazy, nasty territoriality, the process of putting data out there for peer review (even if the opinions expressed in there aren't popular or even possibly correct) has become something of a sham.
The point of the peer review process is that others can take the data put forth, run their own tests and corroborate or invalidate the results and provide their OWN data on why they did the former or latter.
Re:Almost Godwin... (Score:3, Informative)
Mostly because the medieval warming period seems to have only occurred in the northern hemisphere. There are indications that it did not occur in the southern hemisphere. I haven't seen any good studies that show that it was a global phenomenon. As such it's not as important to the global climate.
However, let's say that it did exist globally. Even studies that favor the idea of a global medieval warming period show that current temperatures are warmer than those during the medieval warming period. Additionally, it took over 100 years (~200 years according to Watts) for the medieval warm up while the current warming trend surpassed that in less than 50 years (with a huge jump in the 90s).
Re:So convince me, then (Score:4, Informative)
Alright.... let me start with your corollaries.
The temperature of the earth is warming over time.
Correct. Specifically, the global average is going up over at least annual periods, and generally decadal periods.
The amount of this warming is unprecedented.
Incorrect. How warm it has been in the past is irrelevant to whether the earth is getting warmer right now. That's only a data collection issue, not a theory issue.
The warming will continue past the point where the earth's feedback mechanisms can correct it.
Not quite. The concern is that the warming will continue past the point where short-term feedback mechanisms can correct it - things like seasonal rainfalls, ocean currents, etc. Politicians specifically are only marginally interested in whether there's a 50000 year cycle that can correct the current temperature increase.
The warming will cause catastrophic impacts to life on earth, particularly humans.
Define catastrophic. Was Katrina catastrophic? Seems like it was. And yet, not much actually happened. Is general population migration catastrophic? Is the wholesale change of a populations way of life catastrophic? To some, it is. Generally, it is to the people affected by it.
The warming is caused by human activity, if not entirely, then mostly.
Sort of. I'd put it as "human activity has a significant impact on warming".
Right now, I'm looking at two largely correct corollaries, one irrelevant one, one that depends on where you are located, and one that is somewhat misleading. There's plenty of evidence for corollary one, models that predict the third one, regions that demonstrate the impact of localized changes in precipitation for the fourth one, and plenty of evidence for the fifth one.
Now to your questions.
What is the optimum temperature (or range) of the Earth?
The question is wrong, because as is it has no answer. The earth has no optimum temperature (unless you count the one that allows for rock to stabilize and not become an ionized plasma). What you want to know is what the optimum temperature range is for human habitation. As you can see by the current population distribution, it is quite wide, which could lead to the assumption that the optimum temperature range for human habitation is just as wide. That's incorrect. If you drop an Inuit into the Brazilian jungle, a Massai into the Midwest, or a Midwestern farmer into the Alps, they will die very quickly. See for example the pilgrims who first arrived in North America: they nearly died from starvation, even though the temperatures weren't that much different from what they were used to.
As a result, the answer to that question is: exactly the one that you have right now around you. Civilizations have adapted to work in their current environment. Change that only a bit, and the impact on the people can be devastating.
When has it been at that temperature in the past?
See above for why this question doesn't give you a useful answer.
Has it ever been outside that temperature in the past?
Most decidedly. However, you don't want to go through the change again.
How, specifically, do we know this?
Historical records of both temperatures (inferred and directly recorded), and of historical records that chronicle the result of dramatic temperature changes.
In particular, how does one define the temperature of the Earth, and how does then measure that?
It's a good question. In general, it is understood to be the yearly average of multiple points across the globe, preferably along all latitudes and longitudes. But yes, temperature measurements are difficult, and it requires a lot of work to make sure that datasets from one source can be used for comparison with other data sets.
Re:Integrety (Score:2, Informative)
The data is available. Read Nature or other journals.
Re:Like the Flat Earth Society (Score:3, Informative)
Remember, back in the 70s, the climate scientists were telling us all that we were going to go into a massive ice age at any minute.
Wrong. [ametsoc.org] The rest of your comment is pretty much as spectacularly wrong as the tidbit I quoted.
Re:Like the Flat Earth Society (Score:3, Informative)
Actually they weren't [skepticalscience.com]. It is illustrative of the level of propaganda being generated by those who hope to discredit climate science either on ideological or financial grounds that this long-debunked urban myth continues to be repeated and believed.
This too is a falsehood [skepticalscience.com]. But like the first it continues to be repeated. This is the hallmark of crank pseudoscience, whether it be creationism or AGW denial: no false argument ever dies, no matter how conclusively it has been debunked.
Re:No mention (Score:2, Informative)
I see that you are mixing up two different situations. One situation was that some climate scientists felt that a particular journal had an editor that was accepting papers that they felt were not good enough to be published. So, they threatened to boycot the journal. No publications were rejected because of their actions, they simply took their business elsewhere.
The other issue had to do with the process of authoring one of the sections of the IPCC publication. The IPCC publication has many authors, and there are always going to be disputes about what to include and what not to include. Their objections were over-ruled and those items were included.
Sounds like business as usual for science, and cooler heads prevailed.
Re:It won't work (Score:4, Informative)
There is no such thing as AGWs. "Global Warming" has now become "Climate Change".
It did, for the same reason why Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging became simply Magnetic Resonance Imaging: the gullibility of a common man.
Apparently, there are still too many idiots unable to comprehend the concept of averaging temperatures across the globe, so as soon as they see one place that didn't warm up for one year, they get confused by the "warming" bit in "global warming", and decry it all as a conspiracy theory by a socialist world government.
Still, it's just a name change for the sake of PR. Global average temperature keeps going up [wikipedia.org] - the planet is warming.
Re:It won't work (Score:4, Informative)
And you can than the previous administration for that. On Frank Luntz's recommendation [wikipedia.org], they started using the phrase "Climate Change" instead of "Global Warming" to make it sound less frightening.
Re:Integrety (Score:5, Informative)
You want some AGW data? Here's [realclimate.org] an aggregate of a bunch of different universities' measurements. I look forward to your analysis of it.
Oh, do you want Michael Mann's (the hockey stick guy) data specifically? Here's the data behind one of his most recent papers. Note that he's included his Matlab code.
The whole "show us the data" thing was kind of an issue before, but now there's just no excuse. I bet you still don't know what to do with it, even now that you have it. I sure don't.
Re:No mention (Score:3, Informative)
What I find amazing about climategate is that in 10yrs worth of emails the propogandists could only find a handfull of quotes to take out of context and twist to suit their agenda. Similarly in 20yrs worth of IPCC reports the only genuine error found so far is the himalayan date which despite the scrutiny of an army of psuedo-skeptics was actually found by IPCC scientists. If the psuedo-skeptics could claim similar standards of self-skeptcisim half as good as that then the "psuedo" part could be dropped and I could call them scientists.
Re:Integrety (Score:3, Informative)
You work with what you have. The temperature records they are working with have been collected over the past 150 years or so by hundreds of different entities around the world without any consideration of some of the things they're being used for now. It'd be great if we could go back and redo the observations but we can't. Of course the more recent the observations the better confidence we have in them especially since the 1950s.
Lots of raw data is available at the National Climate Data Center [noaa.gov]. Interestingly processing that raw data without making adjustments for the vagaries of the data collection process produces substantially the same answer as the processed data does.
Re:It won't work (Score:3, Informative)
There may be rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The question, however, is what can be attributed as the source, what is the cause and what are the consequences of that CO2 rising?
BTW, in terms of the algorithms being used and looking for the "hidden data"..... you had better believe I've gone looking for it, and yes I've had some climatologists at a loss for explaining why some numbers have been changed on the electronic versions of the data which are simply missing from the hand-written records of earlier time periods.... particularly when the data was computerized at a much later date. I'm not necessarily saying that the warming trends are completely fabricated, but there has been tampering of the climate data for some time, a sort of "thumb on the scale" that has been distorting the data for political purposes rather than working with it as a science.
As somebody who was involved with inputting at least some of the raw climate data that is currently being used, I will assert as a fact and expert witness to that effect if called upon to testify that some of the climate data has been falsified. Not all of it, but enough to at least throw off some climate models as using invalid or even false data and making a mockery of those who think they have the whole world wide average temperature down to a fraction of a degree. The algorithms being used to manipulate that data have not been published either, as the data was "sanitized" and asserted to be the original source data when in fact it wasn't
Re:No mention (Score:4, Informative)
I think the specific thing you are referring to is the publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper in Climate Research in 2003. It was a paper that should not have been published without major revisions. Among the criticisms [wikipedia.org] of the paper they used precipitation proxies where they should have used temperature proxies and they took regional temperature changes as global changes. Half of the editorial staff resigned when the publisher wouldn't allow the chief editor to print a rebuttal of the paper. Even the publisher eventually admitted it should not have been published without revision. Like the editorial staff Phil Jones questioned why anyone would want to have their name associated with a journal that would publish such junk. Maybe that's why the journal went downhill.
The majority of sources cited in AR4 were peer reviewed (12900/18500 according to one {skeptic} source). The IPCC AR4 report has 3 sections.
Working Group I is about the physical science basis of climate change. I believe you'll find that nearly everything cited in the WG1 section is peer reviewed and anything that wasn't probably could have been.
WG II is about the impacts and our vulnerability to climate change. There are more non-peer reviewed references in this section but I'd be surprised if the peer reviewed cites didn't outnumber them still.
WG III is about mitigation, what we can do about it. By its very nature it has some political aspects to it and cited many government, NGO, and business sources as well as peer reviewed papers. This is where you will find most of the non-peer reviewed cites in the AR4 report.
Finally, a paper is not necessarily worthless just because it is not peer reviewed. I think you have to examine it on a case by case basis to determine its worth.
Re:always the loudest wins. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes we can.
You mean:
I.E. if you cherry-pick the data to include only the years 1995 to 2009 you can't be 95% sure that the warming is a trend. Of course if you include the years before 1995 you can be 95% sure.
Re:always the loudest wins. (Score:3, Informative)
Although there is no generally accepted definition of the MWP in the litrature the IPCC glossary defines the MWP as - "An interval between AD 1000 and 1300 in which some Northern Hemisphere regions were warmer than during the Little Ice Age that followed."
For a much more detailed answer to your question Section 4.2 [columbia.edu] of a Jones/Mann paper published in Geophysical review gives a well referenced rundown as to why the MWP and LIA are no longer considered global anomolies. The six graphs in fig 4 (unfortunately split in half by a block of text) gives a nice visual representation of the available proxy records for various regions. Section 4.2 also sheds a bit of light as to why Jones expressed his contempt for the Soon and Baliunas paper in the climategate emails.
I don't expect you to wade through the whole paper, nor do I claim the expertise to verify it all myself but IMHO it is an excellent litratrature review that highlights the various pros and cons of climate reconstructions for the past couple of millenia.
Re:always the loudest wins. (Score:2, Informative)
Jones/Mann has serious credibility issues and anything they published is unlikely to sway most skeptics. Jones would might have been persecuted for violation of the British Freedom of Information laws had the statute of limitations (6 months!) not run out, and Mann is under criminal investigation by Virginia for defrauding the taxpayers [washingtonpost.com] mostly for receiving public grants to produce the work you cited!
Re:always the loudest wins. (Score:3, Informative)
The problem that the parent post was highlighting is that in the tropics warm mosit air rises, as it does so the moisture falls out. However the air is now moving in a convection current that dumps huge amounts of dry air onto the subtropics (thus creating the current deserts in those areas). As the temprature increases the tropical convection currents become stronger and dump more dry air thus extending the reach of the desert zone further toward the poles. If this was to occur over geologic time scales, (as it has done in the distant past), our agriculture could easily adapt. However since it's expected to happen over human time scales, (wich has not been seen in the geologic record), all bets on the required rapid adaptation of agriculture are at best wishfull thinking.
Like any other Aussie will tell you from first hand experience, modern agriculture is ill equiped to adapt to the sudden onset of a "permenant drought". Current practices push agricultural production to it limits, the slight climate change we have seen here in SE Oz over the past 15yrs is the proverbial straw that breaks the farmers back and has halved our grain harvest for 12 of those 15yrs. Fortunately this year is shaping up to be the 4th "normal" year of rainfall out of the past 16.