The Day it Rained Forever

I'm working on a new novel with the working title, The Day it Rained Forever. Here in Queensland, it is starting to feel a bit like that.

While the floods here are not causing the devastation the recent Pakistan floods caused, because the population is lower and we have good early warning systems, you nonetheless have to start wondering why one in hundred year events are happening so often.

While it’s wrong to label one event as evidence of climate change because climate is a long-term average of weather, one of the predictions of climate theory is that as the energy in the system increases (what is happening now), the hydrological cycle intensifies. That means bigger swings between drought and deluge, and more intense droughts and floods.

If you look at the history of flooding where I live in Brisbane, it looks as if things have actually improved since the big flood of 1893:

However, we need to take into account the completion of the Wivenhoe Dam in 1984, which has had a significant effect in mitigating flooding. We should have had a major flood in 1999, as you can see from the fact that Wivenhoe peaked at about 135%; the sudden drop-off arises from the excess being let out. The way a flood mitigation dam works is 100% is the normal water storage capacity and anything over 100% is the excess that would have gone into a flood. As soon as the possibility of flooding reduces, this excess has to be released. In a tidal river like the Brisbane, water can be released to coincide with low tide. Obviously there is a limit to this: if the dam approaches its true 100% (possibly 200%), there is no option but to release water even if the timing is not ideal.

Here is the overall history of the dam as far back as the official SEQ Water web site goes:

Note the peak in 1999, when the dam first performed its flood mitigation duties. The current peak doesn’t look too dramatic but let’s take a closer look:

Observe the spikes to the right of the curve, all over the 100% line. These are all occasions when the sluices were opened. Let’s see exactly how many spikes there have been to date:

Four so far, and no end to the rains in sight. Contrast that with only one occasion in the past when the dam sluices had to be opened since it was constructed. The latest peak is nearly 150%, much higher than the 1999 peak of 135%, illustrating that you need to look at the numbers rather than eyeball a graph.

Going back to 1893, the pattern then was a series of floods, with one big one that dominated the rest. We won’t see that pattern again in Brisbane because of the role of Wivenhoe, but without the dam, the current flood would be at least as bad as that of 1974, possibly at the 1893 level. Clearly, these “once in a century” events are happening more often than that.

None of this of course is evidence of climate change. It is however a warning. The level of climate change we have seen so far has added about 0.8°C to the pre-industrial global average. James Hansen, in Storms of My Grandchildren, predicts things become hairy with more than another 1°C of warming. He bases this number mainly on the threat of rapid disintegration of ice sheets. However, we should not expect that level of warming to occur without further intensification of the hydrological cycle. Flooding on this scale should happen more often. Exactly how much more often, and how much the variation between wet and dry will intensify, are open questions. Do we do the experiment? People with water above their roofs or even lapping at their floorboards may well say no. I certainly do.

Update: 10:30 am, 11 January 2011

I’ve just heard on ABC local radio, Wivenhoe is at 173% of capacity, despite all the major releases. Further releases that won’t cause flooding are no longer an option.

Update: 8:40 am, 16 January 2011

Since my last update, Wivenhoe was heading to 200%. The dam spills over the top of the wall at 225%, and is not designed to withstand that kind of spillage, so the gates had to be opened to the extent of flooding significant parts of the city. The peak level was 191% on the night of Tuesday 11 January 2011 (though this does not show up on the official dam web site because of the time of day at which the measurement is taken).

Now the flood waters have receded, the flood level was a bit below that of 1974, despite twice the rainfall in Wivenhoe’s catchment, so the dam has had some useful effect. I don’t know how the rainfall over the city itself differed, but that carried on for a long time if not very intensively. At very least that would have contributed to the flood by saturating the ground.

My own home was above the flood level, but homes only a few blocks away were inundated, despite being quite far from the river. Despite being several metres above flood level, the ground was so saturated that a little water seeped up through cracks in my garage floor (the garage is cut into the ground). This is a trivial problem compared with what others have endured, but illustrates how saturated the ground was when the Wivenhoe gates were opened fully.

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To help

• If you would like to contribute financially to helping out with flood victims, I recommend doing so via the state government web site.
• If you are in Brisbane and want to help, the best thing to do is to walk to your nearest flood site (with waterproof boots, strong gloves and any equipment you can carry).
• The city council is bussing volunteers around, but their strategy of mustering volunteers at sites far from the rail network means you may be stuck in traffic for a long time getting in, going to your work site, and getting home again. If you aren’t in a location where you can help, look into the council volunteer scheme.
• Volunteering Qld is also helping out but are currently overwhelmed with offers, so feel free to register with them to help out in the longer term but don’t expect to be used immediately.

The Heart and Soul Election

If this Australian federal election is the election where the Liberals lost their mind, it’s also the election where the Labor Party lost its soul.

The ALP last election stood for an evidence-based approach on climate change. Ross Garnaut was tasked with summarising the best science, and producing an economic response. The plan was that the government would go with what he recommended. If anyone spotted the flaw in the plan – the then opposition was committing to a course of action where they had not sold the detail politically – this was lost in the “it’s time” mood that swept John Howard into the dustbin of history.

Now that we know the best science, and have an economic basis on which to proceed, what’s Labor’s position? The logical progression from the Rudd campaign would be to win political support in the form of a renewed mandate to implement the Garnaut recommendations. Instead, Julia Gillard plans to set up something that is an odd mixture of focus group and jury, a Citizen’s Assembly to decide where to go next. This is rank cowardice. It only puts off the hard decisions, and leave us exactly where we were before the Garnaut Report, except this time we are allowing public opinion to shape policy, instead of expert advice.

In a situation where expert advice points in a direction that will require some hard adjustments, you do not need some sort of populist leading from behind strategy that procrastinates decision-making. Political leaders need to do the hard yards of selling the tough steps that we have to take. They also need to cut through the dishonest propaganda of lobbyists who see their agenda as more important than the overall welfare of humanity.

Add to this Labor’s abject surrender on defending refugees against unfair attack (including straight-out lies), and Labor’s craven cave-in to the big mining houses over the mining tax, and you have to wonder what Labor stands for.

And the Liberals? They elected Tony Abbott as their leader. If you don’t get why this is crazy, read this. No wonder all the polls are showing a big swing to the Greens.

The clean energy imperative

I’m increasingly convinced that the reason for so much opposition to climate change science is not because of some flaw in the science but because there’s fear of the collapse of industrial society if we stop using fossil fuels. This is not an irrational fear but it leads to irrational behaviour like attacking scientists personally, and pay good money to attend vaudeville shows where deniers reassure audiences with rubbish.

The best response is to study clean energy alternatives.

I recently gave a talk at a Transition Towns meeting in Kenmore, Qld. I’ve published a PDF of the slides at scribd, and will add commentary here as time permits. Meanwhile the Kenmore TT people have posted a TED talk on how to roll out the electric car. Interesting.

The warmest year?

Since the whole brouhaha over stolen climate scientists’ emails broke last year, a clear emphasis of the science obfuscation lobby has been trying to con the public into believing the data is all flawed, and there’s nothing to worry about. One of the fall-backs in the attack on the mainstream has been the claim that satellite data hasn’t been showing as strong an increase as the data sets based on surface measurements. While NASA does their measurement independently from the UK Hadley Climactic Research Centre (CRU), the conspiracy-theoretic view is that they are all in it together.

Well, how is the satellite record looking lately? I moseyed over to the AMSU-A temperatures site maintained by Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville (a favourite of the denialosphere for his consistently lower warming trend) and Danny Braswell of NASA and did the following, which you can repeat to update the results:

1. click Draw graph
   
2. click all the checkboxes and click Redraw
   

This is my result:

 The orange line that stops in April is the daily temperatures for this year. Observe that since 10 January, every day has had the highest temperature for that date in the satellite record going back to 1998. This particular data only starts partway through 1998 so we don’t have the complete picture back to the last record or near-record year (depending whose data you look at; some put 2005 slightly higher than 1998) but if this trend continues, 2010 will easily set a new record for satellite temperatures. Is this because we’re in a super-monster El Niño? Not if you look at the SOI (most recent values at time of writing from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology):

The thing to note here is that a negative SOI value puts us in El Niño (higher than average temperatures) while a positive value indicates La Niña (lower than average temperatures). Also, there is a lag of about a year between SOI peaks and global temperature peaks. The El Niño in 2004-2005 with a peak early in 2005 resulted in 2005 being an unusually warm year. Do we see a similar pattern for the last 12 months? No. Although we have been in an El Niño phase since the second half of 2009, that effect has been nowhere near strong enough to account for a new record in temperatures, certainly not as early as January 2010.

Could the SOI be amplified by a rising solar cycle? Sunspot numbers are trending up but we are still pretty close to the solar minimum:

If you’d prefer to look at total solar irradiance (TSI) as measured by satellites, rather than sunspots, go to PMOD, where you’ll see the energy inputs from the sun are not on a steep upwards trend and should be significantly lower than in 2004-2005:

You have to line this data up with SOI to get a good idea of what is causing short term blips in global temperatures: El Niño does not in general coincide with the peak of the solar cycle. At some point this will happen, resulting a really hot year. But leave this aside, since it won’t happen soon. What we have now, early 2010, is a temperature trend tracking above all recorded temperatures since 1998 (or more properly 1999, since we don’t have 1998 temperatures in the first half of the year in the AMSU-A data set) and we can’t pin that effect on El Niño or on the sun.

What next? Is someone already planning to steal Spencer’s emails?

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Update

I’ve plotted the mean daily temperature anomaly versus 2005 (each day minus the same day in 2005) for the year to 25 April. The trend (linear regression) over this period is 6°C per century – making up for lost time from previous slower warming by satellite measurements? Oh, and the correlation coefficient of 0.79 is highly significant even with this small sample size. Enjoy (or not, if you don’t want warming to be real). For missing data (a small fraction of the total), I took the average of the two nearest days that did have data.

And here's the AMSU-A big picture for 25 April 2010:

and an update on the SOI picture:

SOI is not the whole picture for predicting the effect of ENSO on temperature; a more comprehensive model clearly shows 2010 should be a cooling phase, not a warming phase.

Still lots of time in the year …

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Yet Another Update

If you go to the site now, it says Channel 4 failed in 2008. That’s what happens in science: a weird result is more likely to be a consequence of instrument failure than anything else. The major data sets do show 2010 as one of the warmer years though not by a significant margin (despite the other data indicating it should have been a cool year, including the solar cycle starting to exit an unusually deep low and a strong La Niña).

What I find particularly odd about all this is this note (dates in US format, so this is in March)

03/06/2008/1200UTC:NOAA-16 AMSU-A channel 4 has gone bad.  As a result, NOAA-16 ATOVS sounding files are no longer being produced by NESDIS, thus they are no longer in the "atovs" dumps in the GDAS and CDAS networks and they (temperature retrievals) are no longer available for assimilation by the CDAS.  The "atovs" dumps now contain only NOAA-15 ATOVS soundings and only these temperature retrievals (cloudy only) are assimilated by the CDAS.  In addition, the failed channel 4 data has resulted in no NOAA-16 AMSU-A data being assimilated by the NAM/NDAS or GFS/GDAS GSI (even though these files are still being produced by NESDIS and NOAA-16 AMSU-A data continue to be dumped in the "1bamua" files in the CDAS, GDAS, GFS, NDAS and NAM networks).

It seems someone knew nearly 2 years before the weird 2010 data went live that there was something wrong with the data. Curiously, we didn’t see wild accusations flung around the blogosphere about this one. I leave it to the reader to explain.

Dealing with climate change

We have no option but to deal with climate change.

Either we deal with it or it will deal with us.

There is no serious challenge to the science behind climate change. The whole basis for the denial movement is not attacking the science, but attacking the scientists. Look for a real scientific paper attacking the science. There is a very small number of these, all of which have been debunked. Most other material is on blogs and the opinion papers of the mass media, replete with the language of personal attack. Climate scientists are "alarmists", "warmists", "catastrophists", and any other number of made-up appellations.

As with the tobacco and HIV denial movements, personal attack does not prevent the ultimate harm that denial of the facts causes.

Unlike tobacco and HIV, we are not talking about something that will ruin the lives of a few million people if not dealt with expeditiously. Rapid climate change is causing a rapid acceleration of extinction rates. The rapid depletion of the Himalayan glaciers threatens the food supply of a half a billion people: melt water from these glaciers feed major river systems of both India and China. And reduced agricultural output is likely to be worst in poorer countries.

Talk therefore of whether an emissions trading scheme should be contemplated in the absence of any serious alternative is crazy. The Australian government's scheme falls far short of any reasonable solution, but their main opposition is opposing it without offering an alternative.

Given that, how will climate change deal with Australia?

There are two possibilities: Australia's inability to face up to the problem could be a worldwide phenomenon, in which case we face a period of growing environmental disaster: death of the Great Barrier Reef, collapse of food supply in India and China, famine in Africa. If on the other hand the rest of the world gets its act together, Australia as the world's biggest coal exporter and the country with the highest per capita CO₂ emissions will be left high and dry, and as uncompetitive as a country that did not foresee the trend away from horse-based transport a century ago.

Climate of Fraud Part 3

Another round of letters in The Australian, another round of debunking.

Let's focus this time on the comments, since I had a letter published.

First, Greig, a regular contributor:

Philip Machanick in the past you have vehemently argued that it is CO2, and not the sun, which is the major driver of observed global warming. And now, year after year, global temperatures stubbornly refuse to climb in correlation with CO2, and so you revert to using the sun to explain. Like Dr Kevin Trenberth you are wedded to an opinion which you want the data to fit, and like him you saying “there should be even more warming . . . the data are surely wrong.”

Greig, CO₂ drives the trend for the simple reason that there is no trend in natural factors, whereas atmospheric CO₂ is increasing exponentially. The science says there's a logarithmic relationship between climate sensitivity and CO₂ levels, implying we should over the long term see a linear increase in temperatures if the basic science is correct. The purpose of detailed models is to narrow the range of uncertainty, not to predict the basic effect. We are currently at a solar low, but the multi-decadal trend in solar insolation is flat. Same for ENSO. We had a big El Niño in 1998 and more recently a La Niña. The net effect of these things is zero, but pick a time when they are all pointing up or all pointing down, and you get a short-term high or low. Trenberth's comments were in a private email, a musing with colleagues, who pointed him to evidence that he was wrong. Much as I am loath to use stolen material, since it's out there and being misused, here is one of the responses by a colleague to Dr Trenberth:

I look at this in two ways. The first is to look at the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic trend relative to the pdf for unforced variability. The second is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations from the observed data.

Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The second method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.

Next, Ian 11:39am (you will have to page through the online comments to find all of these):

Philip Machanick Did the models predict that the global temperature increase would lessen over the last 10 years?. That these years are the hottest 10 since whenever really isn’t a valid argument despite those such as v who claim it is. Fact is that the increase over the decade has been less than predicted. Now why is that? [snip] And incidentally Professor Latif who is a climate scientist, has made and is still making comments that suggest the world is not about to turn into a heat ravaged dust bowl just yet

No, the models do not make predictions for as short a period as 10 years. But see above about removing known effects like ENSO. See also here how solar output does not correlate with temperature as it should if there were no interfering artificial effect, and another very clear illustration here of how temperature and solar output have diverged. Also, I illustrate that you can add a strong artificial upward trend to a temperature record that is essentially flat and still find a 10-year period with a strong downward trend.

You are wrong in your interpretation of Latif's comments, as I've indicated before on this site and in more detail elsewhere.

Philip (not me) 2:27pm:

Gosh all these people ignoring the hacked emails and documents showing what nasty little con artists the CRU are. In ignoring them they are behaving just like ahh… I don’t know maybe like holocaust deniers.

Or maybe they don't agree with the principle of stealing private communications? How about challenging the deniers to reveal all their emails for public scrutiny? That would make for interesting reading. Things colleagues say between each other are often unguarded, said without thought as to correctness or unintended consequences. Why should we all take exquisite care in every private conversation that we don't ever say anything we don't really mean, in case someone is eavesdropping? What kind of world would that be?

de Brere 01:27pm

Philip Machanick. Spot on, you do validate a theory by testing its predictions against observations. However, the prediction-observation link needs to be 100% accurate once other factors are taken into account. Otherwise the other unknown or unaccounted factors may themselves be the source of the observed variation, and not the theorised cause; in this case, GHGs. In that respect, all the tens, hundreds of billions invested in the “science” of AGW in the last two decades has spectacularly failed to come up with models that provide even moderately accurate prediction (or explanation) of observed climate change; far less of the individual weather events that go to make CC up.

De Brere, I've covered your misconceptions about how science works earlier. For your benefit I'll summarise again briefly here. Science in the real world is never 100% exact. Handling errors and uncertainties is a standard part of applied science. If you want exact answers, do pure mathematics. As for these astronomical numbers for the cost of climate research, what are your sources? I found a comparison of current US military and climate change-related funding and:

1. excluding the recovery package, US military spending outranks climate spending 90:1
   
2. even within climate spending, much more is spent on energy that on climate science
   

And finally, climate science is not about predicting tomorrow's weather. ENSO and the solar cycle are not fully understood, and have a bigger short-term impact than increasing CO₂. However, if you keep increasing greenhouse gases long enough, you create a trend that breaks out of short-term variation. Where's your evidence that that is not happening? How do you explain that contrary to the strong downward pull of natural factors the last 10 years or so, the temperature trend is still slightly up?

Having dealt with comments about my letter and comments, I'll let Stephen Morgan 05:47pm have the last word:

Okay - so apparently these hacked emails are SO important that they change the case. So, can somebody tell me what they say. Only not just the ones that apparently give reasonable cause to doubt a few scientists, but every single one of these thousands of emails?

If you think the emails matter, then you will obviously review ALL of them, understand the context of ALL of them, be able to balance the views presented by ALL of them, and be able to come up with a reasonable theory that is supported by the contents of ALL of them.

To do otherwise is selective, prejudicial, and inevitably driven by a desire to support or discredit a specific cause rather than to seek any reasonable explaination.

It’s called denialism for a reason - it is the methodology of those who seek to deny rather than to discover, to obfuscate rather than to explain.

AGW IS widely accepted because it IS widely understood by those who support it. It is popular because it is far more reliable and consistent than any other option.

Is it proven - NO! Is it undeniable - NO! Just do as I asked - come up with something positive that offers an alternative, not just continued hackneyed attempts to sink a battleship with a pin-prick!

Well, quite.

Climate of Fraud Part 2

Here’s a pair of letters that appeared in The Australian. First, one from me:

MARC Hendrickx (Letters, 17-18/10) alleges that Pen Hadow “had to be rescued in the Arctic in 2003 due to the extreme cold and excessive ice”. Hadow in fact had always planned to be airlifted off once he arrived at the Pole, and the only issue was that he started his solo walk from Canada to the North Pole late in the season, when a pick up was risky because the ice was breaking up.

If it’s impossible to support an argument without resorting to fabrication or ad hominem attack, you don’t have a case. Every global warming denial theory falls apart when examined against the evidence, so the denial cult has given up arguing the facts.

Here’s one they won’t like. Despite the fact that we are in the deepest solar minimum—the period of least solar activity in the solar cycle of the sun—in almost a century, temperatures remain close to record highs. Had the “it’s all the sun” crew been right, we should have seen temperatures close to 100-year lows over the past few years.

As for the actual state of the Arctic, Hadow is not the only authority who has Arctic summer sea ice disappearing in the next 20 to 30 years. Several papers and reports have backed this conclusion. I’ve been working in science for nearly 30 years, and I have yet to encounter a situation where wishful thinking overturns a theory, especially when that wishful thinking runs counter to well-established physics (as is the theory of greenhouse gas warming).

If there are genuine climate-change sceptics who have alternative theories that explain the facts better than the mainstream theory, let’s hear them by all means. That’s how science works. But if the accepted theory is right, we are running out of time fast. The alternative theories have all failed any reasonable scientific test, while the mainstream has held up pretty well against the most concerted political attack on any scientific theory since the Inquisition stopped burning scientists at the stake. It’s time to move on and start addressing the real problems.

Philip Machanick

Then, a day later, a response:

USING dubious observations to bolster a preferred hypothesis is not how science works. Philip Machanick (Letters, 20/10) is on thin ice when he suggests that the human-caused global warming scenario is the only plausible explanation for our recent climate history. There is a plethora of contradictory data.

Reconstructions of the solar intensity record for recent centuries, referred to by Machanick, are speculative. Prior to 1978 there were no direct observations from outside the atmosphere and estimates of changing intensity have been made from proxies, such as sun spot numbers. As reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, even the successive satellites have calibration uncertainty. It is therefore a matter of dispute as to whether or not we are in the deepest solar minimum in almost a century, as Machanick claims.

If melting of Arctic sea ice is to be taken as the canary in the coal mine for human-caused global warming, then there are relevant reputable data extending over hundreds of thousands of years from which to draw comfort. Oxygen isotope ratios from Greenland ice cores and pollen analysis from sea-bed sediment cores off southern Greenland independently show a consistent pattern.

Over the past half-million years the Arctic has oscillated through glacial cycles, each of about 100,000-year duration, and we are currently in a relatively warm interglacial phase. During each of the previous interglacials the Arctic was warmer than at present. The pollen and isotope records also suggest that the Arctic was warmer during the current interglacial between 4000 and 8000 years ago, when the carbon dioxide concentration was much less than now, and well before industrialisation.

William Kininmonth

Kininmoth is accusing me of gross misconceptions about how science works (note the bits I’ve highlighted). Heavy. I should return my PhD, and stop working as a researcher. Or, maybe I should do what a researcher does, and re-examine the evidence – starting from the pronouncements of Kininmoth himself. My original letter did not come out of nowhere: I was attempting to demonstrate how the data the denialists use directly contradicts the evidence. Well, here’s another Kininmonthian contribution from December 2008:

THE attempt by Professor Marvin Geller to discredit scientists who do not follow the climate alarmist agenda only highlights the inconsistencies of his case ("Professor sheds light for climate sceptics”, 4/12).

The evidence of solar influences on climate is well documented, especially the relationships established over many centuries of observations, that link sunspot numbers and cosmic ray activity to global temperature.

The lack of a creditable explanation for the relationships should be reason for more research, not dismissal of the mechanisms.

It is wrong to claim that the past few decades of warming cannot be explained without including human influences.

The error of his statement is obvious from his own explanation for the temperature peak of 1998 as a massive El Nino event. The El Nino is a temporary reduction of upwelling in the surface layer of the tropical Pacific Ocean that decreases the entrainment of cold subsurface water; the warmer tropical waters provide additional energy to warm the planet during an El Nino event.

Research by Michael McPhaden and Dongxiao Zhang, published in the journal Nature in 2002, identified a major and sustained reduction in Pacific Ocean upwelling and warmer ocean surface temperatures that became established in 1976.

This was at the beginning of the most recent global warming episode that the alarmists mistakenly attribute to human-caused carbon dioxide.

Interactions between the ocean and atmosphere, the two fluids that regulate Earth’s climate, are now widely recognised as contributing to climate variability on a range of timescales.

William Kininmonth

Note again my highlighting.

What was that again, about “Using dubious observations to bolster a preferred hypothesis”? Is that not a vaguely similar methodological flaw to changing your degree of support for the validity of a data set when it no longer supports your “preferred hypothesis”?

I could also dispute other points he makes, but this to me is sufficient. If you want to accuse others of unscientific practice, make sure your own approach is beyond reproach.

Update

The WCC3 conference has downloads of speakers’ slides, and a voice recording. Latif’s talk (about a third of the way into the audio) is especially interesting since it has been so widely misreported. In particular, he addresses the need to get better resolution and accuracy for decadal predictions; this has somehow been interpreted as his saying that it will get cooler over the next two decades. If you want to get the best out of his talk, download Latif’s slides and follow them while listening to his part of the audio. I’ve posted a longer article elsewhere on how Latif has been misinterpreted.

Science in the Real World

One of the Big Lies in the campaign to confuse the public about climate science is that true science proceeds from exact information applied to an exact formula, producing an exact result. Because results reported by climate models are inexact, the Lie goes, the theory must therefore be flawed. Members of the public without scientific experience can be excused for getting this wrong; experienced scientists who propagate such views should hang their heads in shame. Real science is nothing like this. Exact results only apply in artificially constructed situations (and even then, you need to allow for errors in measurement). The real world is noisy: instruments have errors, multiple sources of information interact in ways that can’t always be disentangled with precision, and precise calculations on a real-world scale may be impractical. Just as with any other branch of science, the theory of anthropogenic greenhouse gas-driven warming is based on a precise formula: increases in CO₂ result in increases in temperature logarithmic in the increase in CO₂. As with many other physical theories (including gravitation, thermodynamics and electromagnetism), this theory is testable in the lab under idealistic conditions. As with any other theory, real-world application involves dealing with noisy data and interactions with other aspects of the total system.

A few days ago, in online comments to a letter of mine in The Australian, someone made the claim that climate science can’t be any good because it is inexact:

Philip. With all due respect, if anyone, it is you who are confused; at least about what science is, and in that, you are certainly not alone. Science is not based on correlation but on causation, and an understanding that if A causes B, then A and B move in absolute lockstep according to a precise mathematical law; like Newton’s F=ma. It is not F~ma. Where there is the most minute variation, science says that there is a causal factor for that variation, and a further law to absolutely and completely describe that variation; eg via Einstein’s E=mc*c. Note too that this does not change the original law; it still applies, but it introduces and accounts for another factor which can affect a factor of the original law. It is also worth noting that this new law actually predicted variations from Newton’s laws that were so minute they had not yet been measured. With both together then, everything remains exact. That is true science.

Contrast that to the greenhouse “science” laws (based on correlation) to which you refer. They predict that for a doubling of CO2, there will be between a 1.5 and 4.5C T rise. To in any way equate that to true science is just wrong; for comparison, it would be like having Newton’s law saying ma<F<3ma. Einstein’s Law would then have to be something like E=ms*s (s=speed of a snail crawling over sand) to account for that sort of variation. A hydrogen bomb would then not create enough energy to lift your hat, and the sun would be so weak that earth T would be about -273K, even when the variation in gravitational force brought our orbit within a few million k of the sun!

I know this sounds silly, but I use it to emphasise that real science is exact and absolute, because there is no correlation in it; only causation. That is what climate science needs to be before it can be taken seriously outside of political and religious circles; based on causation, not correlation.

First, greenhouse gas theory is not based on correlation. It is based on radiative physics. The logarithmic relationship between increasing CO₂ levels and increased temperature was discovered by Arrhenius and demonstrated in the lab in 1897. The radiative physics needed to calculate the effect accurately was discovered early in the twentieth century. There is therefore as exact a measure of the effect of increasing CO₂ as any of Newton’s Laws. What makes things more complicated is the fact that we are dealing with a real-world application, where exact measurement is not possible, and there are many other confounding factors to take into account in making exact predictions.

Rather that go into all this again, I will illustrate just how far from reality the commenter’s view of how “exact” science is in another area. Newton’s law of gravitation is about as exact a formula as you could want. While general relativity corrects it, if we are doing something as mundane as designing a bridge or navigating a space probe, Newton’s law is so close to accurate that we can assume it is exact. In principle, navigating a space probe is not terribly hard. The most efficient way of doing it is to burn a rocket until the probe achieves escape velocity, while making sure it points in the right direction, then leave it to drift. To make things simple, let’s assume we only want to navigate accurately past any one location, and anything else on the way is a bonus (except a collision, but let’s ignore that to keep things simple).

We have a formula for gravitation (thanks to Newton) that says we can calculate the force on any two bodies in space as a constant times the two objects’ masses over the square of the distance between them:

G is a constant, M₁ and M₂ are the masses of the two bodies, and r² is the square of the distance between their centres of mass.

For our navigation problem therefore, things look very straightforward – until we get to the detail. We don’t just want to know the forces that apply to the space probe at an instant but how its motion is affected over its entire journey. To make things harder, the space probe isn’t the only thing moving. The entire solar system is in motion under the influence of gravitational forces of everything else in the solar system (and other more distant objects, but the inverse squared law makes that an insignificant correction). In theory we could set up a bunch of differential equations to solve exactly but there is a practical problem with doing this for so many different bodies. There are over a million asteroids for a start and even without them, the differential equations would not be practical to solve. So in practice what you need to do is to approximate the parameters at a given time, calculate where everything will be at some later time (soon enough not to loose too much accuracy, but not so soon that the amount of calculation is prohibitive), and keep applying these steps until you arrive at the time when you need to know where your probe will be.

Let’s just look at how difficult this is for one body in space. Assume we have a series of measurements of where this body is, culminating in the positions I’ve labelled here as A and B, measured at times t_A and t_B – with the aim of working out where it will be at a future time, t_C:

So how do we work out where the body will be at time t_C? Based on previous measurements, we estimate the speed and acceleration of the body as it passes through position B, and apply Newton’s formula to adjust its acceleration, resulting in calculating that the body will be at position C. Unfortunately because our previous measurements were not 100% accurate, the actual position the body ends up in at time t_C is position D, a little out from our calculation.

How could this happen? The previous measurements of where the body was hadn’t taken into account gravitational forces fully. At some point, you don’t know where every body is going to move next, and have to make some approximations before you can start exact calculations. Why? Because to calculate the effect of applying a force to an object you need to know three things at the time immediately before you apply the force:

1. its position
   
2. its speed (velocity)
   
3. its acceleration
   

Applying the force alters the body’s acceleration and (assuming no other forces are involved), if you know all four quantities precisely (force, acceleration, velocity, position) you can calculate where it will go next precisely (until the parameters change). However if there is any error in any of the parameters to the calculation (including the force, which for gravitation relies on having the positions and masses of all other objects right), the answer will not be exactly right – despite the use of an exact formula.

Worse still, because time t_C is in the future, between time t_B and time t_C, everything else has moved, making any calculation based on the gravitational effects of the positions of everything else at time t_B inaccurate. Point C should be marked as a circle representing the uncertainty in the calculation, or a fuzzy blob if you want to represent the fact that the most likely location is at point C with diminishing probability of the position being at a location further out from point C.

Even assuming you can arrive at a tight enough approximation to the position, velocity and acceleration of all objects in the solar system to sufficient accuracy at a given time, you need to recalculate all the parameters for successive time intervals, applying the gravitational force each time to get fresh parameters. This is where things get really hairy. We have around a dozen objects big enough to call planets or large moons and over a million asteroids. Even with a large-scale computer to recompute the position in space of each object along with its new velocity and acceleration, we would have to do trillions of calculations just work out where everything has moved, even if we only do this once. Why? Because for each body, we must calculate the effect of every other body. If there were exactly 1-million such bodies, that would mean almost a million times a million applications of Netwon’s formula. This is clearly impractical, especially if we have to repeat the calculations many times to get an accurate projection of the probe’s trajectory.

Fortunately, there’s a better way. If a group of bodies is far enough away, treating them as a single body with a position based on their centre of mass is a reasonably accurate approximation to their contribution to the gravity computation [Barnes and Hut 1986]. This picture illustrates the basic concept (in two dimensions to make the picture easier to understand):

Depending on the sensitivity parameters of the calculation, it may be possible when calculating the forces at A to proceed as if there were a single body at each of locations C and E. The body at D on the other hand may be too close to C to allow this approximation.

The upshot of all this is that although we can in theory calculate gravitational forces extremely precisely, in the real world, any practical calculation has to contain errors. We can limit those errors by taking more measurements, taking more precise measurements, and reducing the approximations in the calculations at the cost of slower computation. Our space probe can be placed to within some reasonably accurate window of its intended destination, but it had better have a little fuel on board for course corrections.

Back now to climate models.

The situation is really not so different. The relationship between CO₂ increases and temperature increases can be measured accurately in the lab, but effects on the real world require approximations because measurement is inexact, we have fewer data points than we’d like and accurate computation would take too long. But as long as we have a handle on the scale of the errors, we can work these into the computation, and produce an answer with a central value and a calculation of how much the actual answer could vary from that central value. This is not some strange new principle invented by climate scientists. Any science of the real world is necessarily inexact, for similar reasons to those that apply to the gravitation computation. As with any other area of science that requires complex accounting for the real world, an answer may be inexact, but not so inexact as to be useless for policy makers [Knutti 2008].

So what of the “correlation is not causation” mantra, which so often accompanies objections to climate science? Simulating the whole earth’s climate is not done using correlations. To claim this is ignorant or dishonest. The simulations are based on laws of physics and measured data (with the sort of simplification, handling of noisy data and approximation needed to do any real-world science) to predict a trend. Comparing that predicted trend against actual measures certainly can be done using correlation, but that is not the only test of the theory – nor should it be. In any case, if you have a mechanism and then look for a correlation, that correlation can hardly be said to lack causation. To claim blindly that correlation is not causation (as opposed to the more reasonable position that you should be cautious to claim causation if correlation is your sole evidence) is more or less to say that whenever you find a correlation, you must dismiss the possibility that there is a causal connection, which is clearly absurd.

---

References

[Barnes and Hut 1986] J.E. Barnes and P. Hut. A hierarchical O(N Log N) force calculation algorithm. Nature, 324(4):446-449, December 1986
[Knutti 2008] Reto Knutti. Should we believe model predictions of future climate change? Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 366(1885):4647–4664, 28 December 2008 [PDF]

Climate of Fraud

I saw Bob Carter, a leading opponent of climate science, on SBS TV (semi-commercial government-owned channel in Australia) news tonight (13 August 2009). Shortly afterwards, the view switched to a slide carrying the claim that the IPCC’s models “predict monotonic warming, and they are wrong”. Here is the slide, captured from the online edition of the news (about 1:18 in from the start):

This is a blatant lie.

I reproduce here a graph from the IPCC’s 2007 report [Randall et al. 2007]:



A “monotonic increase” means that temperatures can only increase over time, with a possibility that they may stay level at times. Examine the graph. The yellow area represents results from 58 simulations. The black line is the actual temperature record and the red line the average of the simulations. What you can observe is that the yellow lines and their average, the yellow line, do not either increase or at least fail to drop over the entire period of the simulation.

Indeed it would be bizarre if any reasonable approximation to the real climate showed a monotonic temperature increase, unless that increase was so extreme as to overwhelm all natural variation, and no serious climate scientist is making any such claim. It is widely known that the two major short-term influences on temperature are the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the solar cycle. This is why climatologists define the climate as the long-term average. It is a shift in the long-term average that is a concern, not whether temperatures increase every year.

Why is the Carter crew claiming that the theory demands this? Because they want to knock the theory down, and have no evidence to the contrary, so they have no option but to lie.

That he is trundling this stuff out along with cronies from the right wing US Heartland Institute at a time when there is political activity around climate change is no surprise. That they cannot do better is. Professional science obfuscators – including Heartland – confused the public for years around the link between tobacco and cancer without resorting such obvious falsehoods.

[Randall et al. 2007] Randall, D.A., R.A. Wood, S. Bony, R. Colman, T. Fichefet, J. Fyfe, V. Kattsov, A. Pitman, J. Shukla, J. Srinivasan, R.J. Stouffer, A. Sumi and K.E. Taylor, 2007: Climate Models and Their Evaluation. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M.Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Monty Python Climate Change Phrasebook?

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has set up a blog, with the first topic for discussion climate change. One Malcolm has taken up the opportunity to post copious volumes of alleged “facts” that purport to show that the PM has failed to exercise “due diligence”. The blog bizarrely prevents posting of internet links of any sort making it hard to point directly at factual content to debunk this stuff.

I am guessing here at the specific book “Malcolm” has used as source material but I won't name it since he doesn't (he mentions the author's name, Plimer, but I don't have the book I’m thinking of in front of me so I will take it as Malcolm’s contribution; if anyone has the Plimer book, feel free to comment on the “Malcolm” interpretation).

This whole thing reminds me of the Monty Python Hungarian Phrasebook sketch, in which pranksters have published a phrasebook rendering commonly-used tourist questions from the original Hungarian into inappropriate English (e.g., “Can you direct me to the railway station?” in Hungarian is translated to “Please fondle my buttocks.”).

Let’s look at some of “Malcolm’s” quotes from his phrasebook (approximate page numbers from the PM’s blog; they shift around as responses go up):

• [p 85] The warmest year in modern times was 1934. The next three warmest were 1931, 1938 and 1939. All before humanity’s latest industrialisation with higher CO2 production. Other warm years: 1998, 1921, 2006, 1999 and 1953. Uh, no. The Hadley data set HadCRUT3 shows that 1998 was 0.7° warmer than 1934. The source of “Malcolm’s” error is NASA’s correction of their US data set, that has been misrepresented around the blogosphere as a significant change in worldwide trends. No data set that anyone takes seriously does not show significant warming over the twentieth century.
  
• [p 81] Other likely climate drivers in the solar system include variations in: solar system centre-of-gravity; sun’s centre of gravity; Earth's orbit and distance from sun; Earth’s axis tilt and precession; moon’s orbit; sun spot cycles and solar irradiance or energy output; ...........
  The IPCC’s mandate prevents considering these and other natural climate drivers. Why? The IPCC is not a scientific organisation, it’s political. Rubbish. Read the IPCC's report Understanding and Attributing Climate Change, easily found by searching for attribution of climate change, and you will find this claim is completely false.
  
• [p 89] Krakatoa’s 1883 volcanic explosion dwarfs humanity’s CO2. Nature rapidly absorbed Krakatoa’s sudden, huge CO2 into oceans and biomass, quickly rebalancing Earth’s atmosphere. False. Krakatau in 1883 is estimated to have produced 9.1x10¹¹ moles of CO₂. One mole of CO₂ is 44g so this amount of CO₂ is about 40-million tonnes. The latest figure I can find for total human carbon emissions is 8,230-million tonnes of carbon in 2006, or about 29-billion tonnes of CO₂. So in one year, total anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are more than 700 times the amount Krakatau vented in 1883.
  

That’s all I have time for. Be assured, there is a lot more where these came from.

What about the volcanoes?

The Ian Plimer saga continues, with yet more articles in The Australian featuring his half-truths and attempts at politicizing climate science in the cause of selling his book.

Let’s just look at one more small sampling:

Some 85 per cent of volcanoes are unseen and unmeasured yet these heat the oceans and add monstrous amounts of CO2 to the oceans. Why have these been ignored? Why have there been five significant ice ages when CO2 was higher than now? Why were warmings in Minoan, Roman and medieval times natural, yet a smaller warming at the end of the 20th century was due to human activities? If climate changed at the end of the Little Ice Age (c.1850), is it unusual for warming to follow?

Computer models using the past 150 years of measurements have been used to predict climate for the next few centuries. Why have these models not been run backwards to validate known climate changes?

I would bet the farm that by running these models backwards, El Nino events and volcanoes such as Krakatoa (1883, 535), Rabaul (536) and Tambora (1815) could not be validated.

Let’s take his assertions one at a time.

• 85 per cent of volcanoes are unseen and unmeasured – so what? If this effect is not changing it is not part of any increase in atmospheric CO₂. There are massive fluxes in CO₂ between the atmosphere and the rest of the environment all the time. These fluxes at a period of stable climate are in balance. By adding an additional flux, we are pushing the climate to a new equilibrium state.
  
• Why have there been five significant ice ages when CO₂ was higher than now? – possibly because the other factors driving the climate at the time were different? How about checking paleoclimate research to investigate this question? The effect of a given level of CO₂ or other greenhouse gases on the climate has to be measured against other influences. No one claims CO₂ is the only influence on climate – except psueudo-sceptics like Plimer.
  
• Why were warmings in Minoan, Roman and medieval times natural, yet a smaller warming at the end of the 20th century was due to human activities? – the claim that these earlier warmings were greater than current warming is controversial but leave that aside because it’s irrelevant. What is relevant is whether something different is causing the warming now and whether that different thing is an ongoing effect that could result in a higher, dangerous level of warming. The other warmings were clearly not caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions because industry did not exist at those times on a scale that could have caused them. Any natural causes such as increased solar activity does not apply today. Continued CO₂ emissions will not stop of their own accord. This argument only makes sense (assuming he is right about the scale of previous warmings and that is doubtful) if Plimer is able to argue that CO₂-based warming will somehow be limited.
  
• If climate changed at the end of the Little Ice Age (c.1850), is it unusual for warming to follow? – so what? No one is arguing that there is no natural climate variation.
  
• Why have these models not been run backwards to validate known climate changes? They have. To assert otherwise is ignorant or dishonest.
  
• I would bet the farm that by running these models backwards, El Nino events and volcanoes such as (1883, 535), Rabaul (536) and Tambora (1815) could not be validated – what is he asking here? Does he want climate models to predict when volcanoes will happen and how large they are? It has been millions of years since a volcano big enough to cause more than a minor climate shift has happened. Krakatoa had an affect that is still measurable today but not so big as to cause problems with the general trend of climate models.
  

Overall, the points he raises are insubstantial and have no real bearing on the problem of anthropogenic climate change. If he has evidence to overturn this judgment, he should publish in the academic literature. Otherwise his claims are vacuous, just so much hot air.

The Australian and Postmodern Science

Saturday 18 April 2009 represented a new high or low point (depending on your perspective, which turns out to be significant) in The Australian’s project to develop a new postmodern science, in which “objective truth” depends totally on the observer, and deconstruction replaces evidence-based evaluation.

First, there was an article “Revealed: Antarctic ice growing, not shrinking”, which selectively quotes Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison to create the impression that there is no warming in the Antarctic. In fact one of the major investigations in which the AAD is involved is into sea ice thickness, which they propose could be a more significant indicator of future ice loss than ice extent (the ice can thin for many years before it disappears, as happened with Arctic sea ice). The same author had another article, “Change is a cold certainty”, which despite spinning the position as the Antarctic is not warming, was reasonably balanced when you got to the detail.

Then, there were two opinion pieces about a new book, The climate of disastrous consensus, by geologist Ian Plimer. I will focus on the article that deals more directly with the content of the book, rather than the opinion piece by Christopher Pearson (there’s just so much one person with a day job can do). Here are some quotes from the article, which quotes the book directly, so I assume it is not misrepresented:

• CO₂ is not a pollutant but a necessity of life. For a start, it is food for plants. "Global warming and a high CO₂ content bring prosperity and lengthen your life ... without CO₂ there would be no complex life on Earth" – a silly statement. You can say the same about water, but not only can you drown in the stuff, but you can actually die from drinking too much water. Extra CO₂ makes plants grow faster, but not without limit, and there’s no guarantee that the plants of human interest will gain the most. What’s more, other effects of climate change like change in temperature and rainfall patterns are more significant to agriculture.
  
• While an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide theoretically may contribute to temperature rise, Plimer says there is no evidence to show this and plenty of proof, if you choose to look for it, to the contrary – the evidence for this is very strong and is based on science that’s been known since the 19th century. To assert this in a newspaper article without providing Plimer’s evidence makes him look a fool.
  
• To reduce climate change to the single variable of carbon emissions abandons "all we know about planet Earth, the sun and the cosmos", Plimer says, and that is a leap of faith no self-respecting scientist should take – unmitigated drivel. No serious climate scientist models the entire system based on one variable. To see how absurd this claim is, you only need to do a google search on two keywords: “IPCC attribution”. I've included a graph typical of the approaches used (note the multiple influences included).
  
• When he peers back in time, there were periods when atmospheric CO₂ was much higher than it is now yet produced no disastrous shift in the climate – perhaps he’d care to point out what fraction of life on the planet dates from that era. More than 90% of species from eras when CO₂ was substantially higher than it is today are extinct. Four out of five mass extinction events are associated with rapid climate change.
  

The article goes on to an interview. Here are a few excerpts:

• He reviewed five computer predictions of climate made in 2000, underpinning IPCC findings, and found there was no relationship between predicted future temperature and actual measured temperature even during a short period – why would he expect the models and measurement to line up over a short period? To make such a supposition is to misunderstand the nature of climate science. There are very big day-to-day fluctuations in weather. Over a month, averages smooth these fluctuations out. Over a year, more so. Climate is about stepping back and looking at the long-term average. The current trend is for warming at a rate of 2°C per century, an average of 0.02°C per year. This small a change is not discernible over natural variation unless you look at a long enough stretch – which is why climate is generally looked at as an average over 30 years.
  
• There was alarm in the 1970s that the decreasing temperature was heralding another ice age, he says – this is standard propaganda from his side of politics. A 2008 paper has found that contrary to this often-repeated claim, papers published from 1965 to 1979 on climate change totalled 7 predicting cooling, 44 predicting warming and 20 that were neutral. That’s what we mean about “evidence” in the mainstream scientific community. We don’t take things as given because people we like are saying them: we check the facts.
  
• The ice caps are geologically unusual; people were growing barley and wheat in Greenland 1000 years ago. – Are we supposed to infer from that that Greenland’s ice cap is less than 1,000 years old? I can only suspect that the journalist has things garbled here. Plimer can’t be that ignorant. Ice core studies of Greenland go back over 100,000 years. It is very likely that Greenland and much of Europe was warmer 1,000 years ago, but there is no evidence that this warmth extended worldwide. If you check the temperature records of any location, there is a good chance you will find an unusually warm period. Do all such periods around the world line up at the same period? No, not over the last 1500 years, the era when the “Medieval Warm Period” and Little Ice Age occurred in Europe. Some places were warmer 1,500 years ago, others 1,000 years ago.

To accuse others of ignoring evidence creates an onus on you to examine evidence with extra care. Repeating often-debunked talking points does not qualify. Possibly The Australian has been very selective in its reading and picked out its favourite talking points. If they have misrepresented Plimer’s book, I hope to see a rebuttal from him. Failing which, I’m not going to read the book. I am from the old school of science, where the evidence is based on measurement, not on your political preconceptions.

Call me old fashioned, but I, unlike The Australian, don’t see a role for post-modernism in science. The old model of examining the evidence, developing hypotheses, testing them against new evidence until they look solid, then promoting them to theories works for me – as it has done for the creation of a robust industrial society. What a pity the same intellectual rigour does not apply to other areas of society – like running a newspaper.

Everything you know is wrong

Have you ever woken up, stretched, and before you had time to stop yourself, suddenly realised that everything you know is wrong?

Probably not.

Most people never have that happen to them, even if they really are wrong about everything.

I lived in South Africa during the apartheid years, and you’d think that no White South Africans supported the system to hear people talk now – but believe me, as an opponent of the system, I didn’t get much support. At some stage a lot of people must have changed their opinions, some without missing a beat or changing their perception of facts they had available for years.

If their views today are correct, they must have applied a very different filter to reality in the past.

This mysterious ability to interpret events in the light of a preconception, with an unshaken belief that any new facts that contradict that belief can’t be correct, has a name. It’s called confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to discount facts that don’t fit your preconception.

Let’s look at another example, one of my favourite examples: climate change.

I am going to look at just one aspect of this by now stale debate: the argument that it was much warmer than today during Mediaeval times. There’s an extensive bunch of web pages devoted to this cause, collecting a mass of evidence showing that talk of it being unusually warm today is some sort of conspiracy. The trouble is, they didn’t bother to line up all the dates and average the temperatures world-wide, which is what you look for if you are looking for global climate change. If it was unusually warm in one spot 1000 years ago, unusually warm somewhere else 500 years ago, unusually warm in yet another spot 1500 years ago, you don’t have a global warm period. Yes, there is evidence that parts of the world were warmer then. No one disputes that. But if you look at isolated temperature records, you can find all sorts of apparent anomalies. Layer those over a preconception, and you have a “theory” – but not one you can call science.

If you are already convinced of the case, the mass of evidence papers over the cracks pretty well. But I am a sceptic. I want to analyze any theory put to me for flaws, and a mass of evidence that’s not tied together properly does not make a case. The fact that no one has put that evidence together and yet the authors of the site in question claim they do already have a case should convince no one but those who want to be convinced irrespective of the facts.

So am I guilty of confirmation bias?

Nothing would please me more than to discover that the whole global warming thing was a hoax. We know from experience of other clashes between industry interests and campaigns for the common good that industry wins – or at least can resist for decades (tobacco, asbestos, the ozone hole).

If the mainstream opinion of climate science is correct (or even too optimistic, as some argue), we are in deep, deep trouble, because there is no way we will be able to take sufficient action in time to avoid significant ill effects. So I am really keen – despite having run for the Greens a couple of times – to find flaws in the theory. The problem is, every attempt I’ve seen to do so is heavily larded with confirmation bias. We see use of language like “alarmist” that’s designed to appeal to those already convinced: to me a sure sign of lack of confidence in the argument (why appeal to the emotions if your logic is sound?). We see harping on points that have been debunked. We see doubtful statistical methodology, attempts at interpreting data without any scientific method (naturally while claiming to be “real science” – this is the language of propagandists, not scientists), we see nitpicking insignificant points that do nothing to overturn the basics of the science.

In short, I’m waiting to be convinced. I would be really happy to wake up one day to discover that everything I know about climate change is wrong. What about the people pushing the contrary case? Are they open to being wrong? Or has it become something of a religion to them? One thing you can bet on: if we see catastrophic consequences of failure to act, the people who today are working so hard at inactivism will be very, very quiet.

Nothing Like the Sun?

A popular affectation among climate inactivists is to insist that all climate change is driven by the sun. Let's look first at figures for total solar irradiance or TSI, a value giving the energy from the sun incident on the earth. This number has been available from satellite data since 1978. It has been estimated in the past by indirect means ("proxies") but let's stick with the modern data the accuracy of which is easier to determine. Also, there is a long-term record of suns spots but in the period when satellite TSI data is available, they are also an approximation – so let's stay with the more accurate data.

How does that data compare with the temperature trend over the same period? The HadCRUT3 data from the UK's Hadley centre is one of several that are widely used. This one is sufficient to illustrate the point. Look at the two graphs closely, and what do you see? Probably not that much: they look pretty different.

In both graphs, the points joined by the broken line are the actual measurements, averaged over each year, and the points joined by the unbroken line are the 5-year mean, which smooths out short-term irregularities. I also use these 5-year means (for each year, found by averaging the two years before and after plus the current year) for comparing the two trends, to eliminate short-term variations.

Note also the trend lines. In each, the number before the "x" is effectively the trend per year. The "R²" value is a measure of how well the trend line represents the main graph (in this case, the 5-year mean). An R² near 1 means there is a strong relationship; near 0 means the trend line is a poor approximation to the original data. Note that the temperature trend is going up at 1.83 degrees per century, with R² = 0.92, a very strong relationship, well outside chance. The sun trend, on the other hand, is -0.74 degrees per century, a slow downward trend, with R² = 0.0143. If you plotted a series of random numbers, you would get a "trend" about this strong.

In other words, the temperature trend is strongly up; the sun is down, but not convincingly.

So the trend lines are different; how come some people then are saying that the sun is the best explanation of climate variation? Let's look at another measure: correlation. Correlation tells you how well two different data sets track each other. A strong positive correlation, near 1, tells you they are following the same trend. A strong negative correlation, near -1 tells you they are heading the opposite way. Anything closer to 0 tells you they are (relatively, depending how close to 0) unrelated.

Let's look then at the correlation of the temperature trend for the given years with the TSI data. It comes out as 0.37 – a reasonably strong positive correlation. What is interesting though is to look at the correlation since 1990, when the warming trend has strengthened. The correlation is -0.11 – negative but no longer a strong relationship. Look at the correlation for the period 1978-1989, and it's 0.17. Positive, but not very strong.

How could this have happened?

Answer: the sun does indeed drive climate, but something superimposed on that trend from 1990-2007 disguises that relationship. In other words, a good explanation of what's going on is that the sun is responsible for the irregular dips and peaks in the temperature graph, but when you try to make the sun explain an upward trend, it doesn't work anymore.

For some reason, at this point, I'm reminded of a line from one of Shakespeare's sonnets:

My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun

Australian (Anti-)Environment Foundation

In a recent article, I explored the link between organized tobacco's obfuscation of science, and the climate denial industry, based on facts reported by George Monbiot.

Today, The Australian features a letter from one Max Rheese of the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF), in effect claiming that global warming is a hoax.

I'm tired of arguing how global warming didn't end in 1998. Instead of going over that territory yet again, I decided to mosey over to the AEF's web site to see exactly what kind of organization they are. After all, with "environment" in their name, one would expect that they would at least occasionally run up against industry, even if they are coming at the matter from the right.

Nope.

Here is a list of articles from their web site, with a brief commentary on each; you should of course check the originals:

• Are environmentalists on the road to Damascus? On Line Opinion, 2 April 2008 – "it is now accepted by the head of the IPCC that whether global temperatures are benchmarked from 1998 or 2002, they have plateaued or fallen". True or false? The "facts" on which this is based are from an article by Christopher Pearson in The Australian which wait for it: quotes Jennifer Marohasy, another member of AEF as a source.
  
• The Greens: illogical and treacherous, On Line Opinion, 12 May 2008 – the main thrust of the article is conveyed by this sentence: "The greens tell us that ethanol from maize, wheat or sugar, and biodiesel from palm oil is somehow more environmentally friendly than oil from oil wells." What's the reality? Do a search on "biofuels site:greens.org.au" and you will find, as you should expect from an evidence-based approach, an evolving position in which the Greens are moving away from supporting biofuels wholeheartedly to conditional support, taking into account what we now know of the risks of displacing food crops and replacing rain forest with palm oil plantations. Illogical and treacherous? What do you call attacking the Greens for a position that's way out of date?
  
• Fighting for Red River Gums, The Land, 8 November 2007 – you fight for trees, it seems, by opposing increasing their protection through enlarging national parks. That wasn't so obvious. Under attack: Victorian Environmental Advisory Council (VEAC).
  
• Red Gum Lock-up is not the Solution, The Age, 15 October 2007 – this time, it's the Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA) which is under fire for wanting to enlarge national parks.
  
• Global warming zealots are stifling scientific debate, The Age, 12 July 2007 – ahead of the screening in Australia of The Great Global Warming Swindle, we are told that "If the conclusion that humans are changing climate by carbon dioxide emissions requires the omission of validated astronomical, palaeontologic and geological evidence, then the popular view of humans causing climate change is not science. We are seeing a revival of a form of zealous Western politics intertwined with poor theology, poor economics and poor logic." The Swindle movie relied on quotes out of context, manipulated data and a focus on the views of a discredited minority position. That, it seems, is perfectly sound.
  
• The Great Great Barrier Reef Swindle, On Line Opinion, 19 July 2007 – the Great Barrier Reef will not only survive global warming but thrive. I suppose it takes a Marine Physicist to understand ecosystems properly. All those biologists clearly are ignorant, and corals around the world alleged to be dying of coral bleaching are probably actually dying back because global warming's too slow.
  
• Climate recantation: IPCC models don't predict and are unscientific, Courier Mail June 28 2007 – This article quotes a few statements by an IPCC lead author, on a blog run by Nature in which he clarifies some aspects of what the IPCC reports. None of this is a mystery and is well known to scientists who read the research and IPCC reports. A few quotes are taken out of context and made to seem as if they destroy the entire basis of climate science. Read the original blog entry and decide for yourself. An example: "In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all." This is no big deal. The IPCC (more accurately, the scientists whose work the IPCC summarizes) can't predict future greenhouse gas emissions because those are a factor of too many unknowns (economic growth, future technology, climate change mitigation policy). This is a problem with predicting future climate because emissions are an input to the model. So instead of predicting, they model a range of scenarios (low to high emissions, varying a number of inputs like population growth, carbon intensity of economic development and economic growth). Since they do not know how the economic and political side will play out, they can't say what the probability is of a given set of inputs. That the inputs are hard to predict doesn't mean you can't reasonably accurately model a scenario on the basis of "what if the emissions followed the following trend". If you don't understand why that is not predicting but is nonetheless useful, try again. If you still don't get it, see if they have a vacancy at the AEF. Or maybe The Australian. If desperate, try the Courier-Mail.
  
• High price for load of hot air - climate change hysteria is costing us billions, Courier Mail June 18 2007 – more climate change denial.
  
• GM: debate the science not the values, On Line Opinion, 4 June 2007 – "Anti GM groups have argued that the introduction of GM technology will have adverse effects on the environment without providing any evidence to substantiate their claims." I haven't done a comprehensive literature review on the subject but such evidence definitely exists. I am not making a value judgment on the quality of that evidence, just noting that the statement that there is no such evidence is manifestly false.
  
• GM Canola or Nothing Soon, The Land, 26 April 2007 – pro-GM propaganda without any science, or consideration of environmental issues.
  
• Green hypocrisy and environmental vandalism, On Line Opinion, March 2007 – opposition to legislation controlling land clearing (they may or may not have a point on this specific issue, but the irony here is that much of the legislation banning land clearing arose out of the Howard government's sleight of hand on Kyoto, where they had changes in land clearing in Australia scored as greenhouse gas reduction).
  
• Integrity in the public debate - whose view? On Line Opinion, January 2007 – Two sentences sum it up: "Indeed the AEF has much stronger links with forestry and farming groups than it has with IPA." And: "AEF’s values, which are on the website for all to see, demand debate based on science and evidence not ideology." Consider their list of articles as evidence of a kind ...
  
• An alternative perspective on land clearing, On Line Opinion, December 2006 – an earlier version of the "land clearing is good" article.
  
• Fired-up forests have more impact than the loggers, The Age, November 2006 – logging is not so bad because major fires can be more destructive. Maybe, but this is a rather relativistic argument, isn't it? If you clearcut an old-growth forest, it's hard to see how a fire could be more destructive.
  
• Integrity in the Public Debate - Whose View?" - Not Published by The Age, 2006 – This is a new one on me: you don't normally cite the place that didn't publish you. Good on The Age. In any case they managed to publish this later at On Line Opinion. Crybabies.
  
• First Conference for New Environment Group, Border Watch, Mt Gambier, South Australia and The Daily Mercury, Mackay, Queensland, September 2006 – PR for AEF, nothing of real substance.
  
• Not easy being green but we'll prosper, Herald-Sun, August 2006 – Two sentences again: "The green lobby has demanded and been given the mantle of environmental guardians and as a result have become rich and influential beyond their due." And: "Many of its members are pro-biotechnology, pro-nuclear power, pro-modern farming, pro-economic growth, pro-business and pro-environment." Guys, why did you pick industries that have no financial clout to back you when the traditional greenies have gone where the money is: the poor and the marginalized. Don't spend too much time wallowing in self-pity. You may drown.
  
• Green group wants practical policies, The Land, August 2006 – One sentence: "A couple of years ago some farmers, foresters, fishers, university professors and others, got together in Ballarat to start a new environment group, the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) – an environment group that believes in taking an evidence-based approach to issues." Guys, where's your evidence? Everything since this article has been bluster. Not a single paper listed on your site has appeared in an academic conference or journal, not even a third-rate one.
  
• No More Excuses, The Courier Mail, August 2006 – proposal to get on with water alternatives, recycling, desalination. Other than that the article says nothing about environmental impacts (e.g. the arguments against desalination) at least it actually is about alternatives. Not just a beat-up on environmentalists.
  
• Facts Catch the Loudmouths on the Hop, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 2005 – in favour of Kangaroo culls and eliminating feral invaders like cats. A fair start: whether you agree with culling or not, he knows what he's talking about.
  

There we have it. The vast majority of the articles (pretty much everything after the earliest two) are beat-ups on real environmental organizations, propaganda for climate change inactivism and defense of industry positions.

Despite the claim of being "evidence-based" there is no serious research behind any of the articles; taking words of others out of context is fair game, as is perpetuating myths like it stopped warming in 1998, and presenting opinion as fact.

After all this, that the AEF is accused of being a front for a conservative think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) should come as no surprise. Their denial of this claim is not very convincing (see "Integrity in the public debate - whose view?" above). Sadly, Australia's national daily is unable to see this for what it is, and allows these people free publicity without warning the public.

As for global warming being a hoax: methinks it's the AEF that's the hoax.

No wonder so many people are still buying large cars and SUVs; what a pity for them that the only signal they are getting that they are doing the wrong thing is that they can't afford to refuel...