Economics of climate: Step back from ideology

What is economics, in essence?

It is an optimization problem. You choose your measure of interest and make it as good as possible.

From there, opinions vary. What is your measure of interest? Some say growth – the rising tides raise all boats crew (they have never had a leaky boat). Others say equity – inequality they say is not an acceptable price for growth. Sustainability is another measure: it is all very well to pursue maximum growth, minizing inequality, maximizing access to quality health and education or whatever other goal you seek if, in the long run, everything falls apart.

The optimization problem and the hazard of local maxima.
Assume your score of interest is good if it is big. At points
A and B, getting better takes you to a place that is not the best
because you have to first pass through a point where things

look worse

 

There are two difficulties with simplistic markets-vs-socialism comparisons. First, not everything is an economic good. A social good may not have a monetary value and also may not be promoted by pure economic growth. Another problem is that a market is good at finding local maxima, and disadvantages players willing to endure short-term pain to reach a more optimum point.

Markets favour local optimization

Check out the picture.

Assume you are in an industry where players have achieved efficiencies that put them at point A or B. If they are under competition pressure, their best strategy is to move to the “local maximum” because moving in that direction makes them more competitive. If they attempt to move to the point marked “best?” they first have to move through a stage of getting worse.

This is in very generic terms – to make it concrete, if a totally new way of operating is proposed that is way more efficient than traditional practice but it takes a big investment to implement, anyone adopting the new concept goes through a period where they incur extra costs in making this investment. They therefore move away from the local maximum and head down the “worse” slope. Then, once the new investment starts to pay off, they need to make improvements to get ahead of the competition who is still playing in the “local maximum” space.

Social vs. Economic Foods

Some things either do not have a monetary value or are too important to leave to the possibility that the markets will fix them. One example is health. Up to a point, you can trade being healthy for having more money but debilitating or life-threatening conditions are things you would rather fix the best way possible that worry about the cheapest option. More broadly, a healthy population benefits society. Essential work is not left undone because someone is sick, etc. Much the same can be said for education. Though being educated confers personal advantage, society as a whole benefits from a more educated population.

Can markets alone optimize social goods? No. Because access to resources does not neccessarily correlate with ability. The stupidly rich can benefit from education even if they have very little potential. If the extremely poor get ill, they cannot be expected to work extra time while still sick to pay medical bills.

A borderline case is negative externalities, costs that do not fall on a producer but that cost society. These are economic costs but are not well-suited to the market model as the cost can be passed on to society. Examples include pollution and depletion of natural resources.

Climate Change

Where does climate change fit into all of this?

First, the cost is a negative externality, something that the markets demonstrably do not handle as they have not fixed the problem. Second, it is a social cost as it damages the poor disproportionately and generally will damage those not responsible for the problem. Third, it illustrates the problem of local optimization neatly. While it is increasingly plausible that renewable energy in the long run will cost less than fossil fuels – particularly when cheap sources deplete – in the short term the “worse” cost scenario has to be covered somehow, otherwise renewables cannot build to the sort of scale needed.

Some fundamentalist libertarians argue that climate science is flawed because it requires a large-scale government intervention. I argue the opposite. Their economic philosophy is flawed because it cannot remedy a situation like this. So instead of allowing someone else to fix the problem, they deny.

Ideology and counter-ideology of climate change

Climate science is not fundamentally about ideology – science stands or falls by evidence.

Nonetheless, when a scientific finding has economic ramifications, ideology kicks in. Logically, ideology should only apply to remedying the identified problem, not to evaluating the science. For example, if you are an absolutist free marketeer, you would look to the markets to solve the problem. If you are a hard-core socialist, you will expect the government to fix the problem. If you are a pragmatist, you will be happy with any mix of private sector and government initiatives – whatever works best.

The problem arises when you have a scientific finding that reveals a problem that cannot be fixed by either the markets or government alone. Then, the ideologue is driven to attacking the science.

As one example, in the Soviet Union and satellite states, the dominant ideology was that all people are fundamentally equal, there are no hereditary differences and that the state was the only agency for ensuring that such an equal society functioned. That some were in Orwell’s words more equal than others, we will leave aside. Outcomes of this ideology dominating science included:

• Trofim Lysenko’s anti-Mendelian pseudo-science whereby biology was perverted to suit the dominant ideology; dissent from his theories was outlawed in 1948, and his dominance of Soviet agricultural research set that country back a long way
• conductive education – a Hungarian theory that disability caused by brain damage can be overcome by training. Again this fitted the Soviet-era ideology that all inequality is induced, but has no basis in evidence; the movement persists to this day, offering false hope to families of the disabled

The Soviet Union is at one end of the scale; at the other is extreme market ideologues who attack science whenever fixing a problem it reveals appears to be impossible without state intervention. While some of these ideologues are fundamentalist libertarians who genuinely believe all government interference in the economy is bad, there is a good deal of inconsistency among such campaigners. The big threat is almost always government interference in unbridled profit-seeking. Very few take umbrage at government interventions that favour business – especially big business.

Aside from this inconsistency, the big flaw in libertarian thinking is a total focus on big government. Generalize this concept:

any organization big enough to overwhelm the individual is a threat to liberty

Then we see that we need to be wary of any organization that becomes too big.
Examples of organized opposition to government interventions arising from inconvenient science include tobacco, the ozone hole and climate change. The argument is almost always the same: the science is flawed because it cannot give an exact answer, personal attacks on the scientists, claims that contrarian science is suppressed.

None of these claims stand up to scrutiny.

No science modelling the real world is 100% accurate – once a risk is clear enough to be worth avoiding, you quantify the costs of various avoidance strategies against the risk, and develop a suitable strategy. Yet  the argument in these cases is almost always that the science must be 100% right – 90% is not good enough. In fact, even it the science only has a 1% chance of being right, if the catastrophe predicted is big enough, it is prudent to take action.

No one goes into science to get rich – not if they have any sense anyway. Research grants aren’t money in your pocket. They pay for things like graduate students, making more work for you.

In some fields of science, it is true that public alarm at the outcome can fuel more funding. Knowing what cancer is would alarm anyone. In cancer research, funding generated out of that sort of alarm not only fuels research into the cause but into the cure.

In many other fields of science that produce alarming findings, responding to those findings does not aid those making the discovery at all. If the tobacco industry slowed down promotion of its product as harmful effects became known, research on harmful effects would taper off as fewer people smoked. Research on causes of the ozone hole and climate change intensified as a result of industry push-back.

It is particularly obnoxious in ozone hole and climate science research to argue that scientists are producing alarming results just to get more research money. In both cases, had industry accepted early indications of cause for alarm and responded appropriately, the place to prioritize research funding would be to mitigation. In the case of the ozone hole, mitigation required finding alternatives to CFCs. In the case of climate change, rather than pinning predictions down more precisely, the logical place to direct research funding is towards clean energy.

So, what’s to be done?

First, we need to challenge the libertarian presumption that government is the source of all evil. Transnational corporations have a reach that exceeds that of most governments, and are not particularly accountable. If their shareholding is diffuse, there is no single point where pressure can be applied to correct faults.

It is also not true that the market is the single best mechanism to deal with every problem.

First, not all goals are economic.

Second, the market is highly distorted by the influence of very large corporations; not only can they use monopolistic practices to stifle competition, but they can buy off politics and create a regulatory environment that favours them over smaller competitors.

Third, some economic factors fall outside pricing controlled by the market. Negative externalities – costs to parties outside a transaction, like pollution, which is a cost to society as a whole – cannot be regulated purely by the market.

Finally, a purist socialist approach to everything has been tried in various forms, and hasn’t worked – so let us not kid ourselves that we can go back there to deal with an even harder problem.

We can ultimately only solve large-scale societal and muli-societal problems like climate change, universal access to health care and equitable access to basic services if we stop being bound by ideology and judge each issue on its merits.

So, going back to climate change: we need to remove ideological blinkers when considering the evidence. If the evidence says we should act, there is even more reason to remove ideological blinkers, because he best solution to a hard problem requires working on it from all angles.

The Real Significance of the Obama Win

As the 2012 election fades into history, let's take stock.

The Obama campaign made two major mistakes: failing to tout the president's successes in the early stage of the campaign when Romney wasn't advertising, instead focusing on defining Romney negatively, and failing to prepare adequately for the first debate. The first failure meant the second failure left the president with a very weak message: Romney is a flake, but I'm not very convincing in making that case. It also allowed the Republicans to run riot with defining him negatively. According to some of the propaganda, he's a fundamentalist Islamist Europe-loving Marxist. If you can believe all of that simultaneously, you have a very weird head. Or you're a tea party Republican. (Did I say "or"?)

That takes me to the real significance of the campaign.

Obama won despite these very significant mistakes in a year when the economy has been doing poorly. Had he defined himself positively, taking credit for health insurance reform (emphasizing it's essentially the same model as Romney's in Massachusetts), stopping the Bush-era slide, saving Detroit and putting an end to expensive and damaging foreign wars, he should have won easily. So why did Romney still contrive to lose? Part of if was an astonishing succession of mistakes, including:

• having aligned himself with the tea party in the primaries, he compounded the mistake by choosing a running mate notable only for being the poster child of that side of politics (without e.g. the sort of state-wide profile that could deliver his home state... did Romney really think he needed to pander so comprehensively to one niche of voters who would never vote Obama?)
• letting Clint Eastwood do an unscripted monologue at his nominating Convention, shifting the news coverage from the candidates
• being caught on camera dissing 47% of the electorate (incorrectly claiming that non-taxpayers are all Obama supporters: retirees for example disproportionately vote Republican)
• taking positions to win over the tea party, then reversing himself when those turned out to be unpopular, yet failing to repudiate in no uncertain terms weird views of Republican senate candidates on rape and abortion
• an advertising campaign in Ohio that earned the ire of auto executives for inaccurately claiming that Jeep production was to be moved to China
• a failure to offer a clear economic alternative: I'm a businessman and I know best is not exactly compelling
• tying himself in a knot in the foreign policy debate over what was or wasn't said about the death of the ambassador in Libya
• a chaotic attempt at converting a rally to a hurricane relief event
• a last-minute dash to win over Pennsylvania, when the vote in Ohio, Virginia and Florida was much closer (the only rational explanation I can think of for this was an attempt at diverting Obama resources from tighter races, but it didn't work)

But the real issue is demographics. The Reagan winning coalition changed the Republican Party. It used to perform poorly in the South, yet no Democrat has won Texas since Carter's 1976 victory. Hubert Humphrey won Texas in 1968, the year of Nixon's first win: a hardly imaginable outcome today (see map: contrast it with the 2012 map at the top of the page). Reagan's combination of fundamentalist Christian "values", low taxes on the rich, spending wildly on the military and simultaneously pandering to plutocrats and the racist white poor can't win any more because it appeals to a dwindling constituency of ageing white males. CNN's exit polls show the demographic that splits most sharply Republican (61%) is whites aged 45 and above. As age drops, the skew narrows with 18-25-year-old white voters voting Republican 51%. CNN doesn't break out white males by age as category, but white males as a whole vote Republican 62% vs. white women 56%. Contrast this with other demographics: 93% African-Americans voted Democratic, as did over 70% of Hispanics and Asians.

Aside from demographics, there are other interesting breakdowns. Let's look at one, ideology:

• liberal (25% of voters) voted Democrat overwhelmingly (86%)
• moderates (41% of voters) voted Democrat by a significant margin (56%)
• only 35% of voters identify as "conservative" and the Republicans win 82% of those

The last set of figures illustrates the Republican's dilemma. Having embraced the tea party, they are setting themselves up to be unattractive to all but 35% of the electorate. Conservatives may outnumber liberals, but the tea party brand of conservative is unattractive to anyone who thinks of themselves as "moderate".

As long as tea party activists retain their enthusiasm for voting in primaries that gives them a disproportionate say in choice of candidates, the Republicans will battle to nominate electable candidates. About the best they can do is find one who is willing to say different things to different audiences. And that worked, didn't it?

What about finding another Reagan, someone who can seem friendly, fun and caring, while promoting these positions that, objectively, most voters see as completely wacko? There's little chance of that. They've been trying since and not found anyone. And anyway, it's a hard act to follow. If you've done it once, the other side sees through it and attacks you on substance.

Finally, a word on polls. Various right-wing pollsters claimed that the mainstream polls were all wrong, and created their own. The narrative was that the polls were "skewed" so they "unskewed" them. This is all very reminiscent of attacks on climate science. Real-world data is noisy, and any proper analysis of it should eliminate sources of bias, like artificial warming in urban areas, and artifacts like moving the location of a weather station. Properly done, these measures produce reliable data. The anti-science position is it's all just data massaging, and they can do it just as well to produce the result they want. With electoral polling, we've seen how well that works. Good scientific analysis requires honest unbiased processing of data. That applies as much to polling as it does to climate science.

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BONUS: Here's another view of the demographic time bomb facing the Republicans.

Basics of Greenhouse Spectra

I am not an expert on climate science but every now and then I run into something that most people don’t understand and try to add to public understanding. A common question is the interaction between different greenhouse gases. Why does water (H₂O) vapour, present in much higher concentrations, not dominate any changes in the greenhouse effect? Why is methane (CH₄) said to be a much more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO₂) molecule for molecule?

There are two major issues I address here: water vapour is not present in equal measure throughout the atmosphere, and greenhouse gases vary in the wavelengths of infrared they absorb preferentially, and hence complement each other to some extent, rather than competing for the same photons.

Water vapour is present in the atmosphere at highly variable concentrations, up to 4% at sea level (40,000 parts per million by volume, ppmv), compared with CH₄, currently at about 1.8ppmv, as compared with CO₂ at 387 ppmv (methane and CO₂ numbers from NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory). Water vapour content of the atmosphere varies considerably because the capacity of the atmosphere for holding water vapour is temperature-limited. The average over the whole atmosphere is 0.4% (4,000 ppmv), but over 99% of this is in the lower atmosphere (troposphere).

Some of the answer to the CO₂ vs. H₂O issue is that CO₂ is a well-mixed gas, meaning its concentration is not temperature-dependent and given time turbulence will mix any addition equally into the atmosphere, so CO₂ additions contribute to the greenhouse effect throughout the atmosphere. H₂O additions on the other hand are limited both by the fact that the addition can precipitate out rapidly and H₂O is limited in the volume of atmosphere it can populate. But that is not the whole picture.

Look at these three pictures, lifted from Principles of Planetary Climate by Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, from which I also derive the following explanation:

The most important thing to observe in these pictures is that the peaks are in different places. This is important because the peaks represent parts of the spectrum in which each of the three greenhouse gases prefer to absorb. We cannot do an accurate calculation of the difference between each gas based on these pictures, because each data point is averaged over 50cm^-1 and therefore represents a range (hence graphing five curves for each, representing the minimum, 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile and maximum absorption coefficients for the interval graphed at each point). Nonetheless, it’s clear that at the peak near 600cm^-1, CO₂ is a much stronger absorber than H₂O. Wavenumbers in “cm^-1” are common in spectroscopy, and are simply 1/wavelength in cm.

You may be wondering why methane has no peak significantly higher than the other gases if it’s so much stronger a greenhouse gas. The reason lies in the sharp drop in effectiveness of absorbing as all molecules capable of absorbing a photon near a peak in the graph have absorbed a photon, meaning any more such photons can pass straight through. Because of methane’s relatively low concentration, it is still absorbing near a peak. If all else were equal, methane would actually absorb less per increase in concentration than CO₂ because its peak is not as close to the peak of outgoing infrared (which is close for a planet of the Earth’s average temperature to the 600cm^-1 peak in the  CO₂ curve). Notice how the scale on the vertical axis is logarithmic. The approximately straight edges of the decline from the peaks in all the graphs are the reason that increases in greenhouse gas concentrations have a logarithmic relationship to temperature increase.

There’s a lot more to it than that. The graphs I illustrate here are for 10% of the Earth’s atmospheric pressure, because they are the only ones I could find on comparable axes. However, full atmospheric pressure does not change the shape of the curves in a big way. Also, if you remember your high school physics, you may wonder why we have relatively continuous graphs, since quantum physics says a molecule can only occupy specific energy states, implying that the graph should be disjoint data points. When a photon encounters a molecule at the same time as that molecule exchanges potential energy with another molecule, the difference in energy between the photon and an allowed state of the molecule can be made up (or reduced) by an exchange of kinetic energy. This is called collision or pressure broadening.

The overall factors that go into determining the greenhouse effect and in general the overall climate of a planet are very complex; you really need to read a book like Principles of Planetary Climate. But be warned: it’s heavy going if you aren’t comfortable with calculus.

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Further Reading

If a text book is too much for you, here are some lecture notes on The Climate System from Columbia University. The syllabus link provides pointers to content.

Sad Truth About Australia

When I moved to Australia from South Africa in 2002, I too had been conned by the Australian marketing machine. Of course there's the genuine stuff: the Anzac legend, Gallipoli, exploits in the world wars, and so on. But there’s also the latter-day myth: the bronzed Aussie crocodile wrestler, the nation that can take on any sporting code you can imagine and many you can’t and win, the nation that punches above its weight in wars. It’s that later bit that turns out just to be so much marketing spin.

The harsh reality is that the modern Australia is a nation of crybaby wieners.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

Australia is pretty low on the list of refugee destinations. Countries that really do it tough host millions of refugees (some of the worst as a consequence of bungled wars Australia took part in: Iraq, Afghanistan), and tens of thousands of boat people arrive on the Mediterranean shores of Europe every year. A few thousand people arrive by leaky boat at most in a bad year, and politicians of all stripes are falling over themselves to score points by thinking up new ways of being cruel to people who’ve lost everything. Never mind that seeking asylum is not illegal and Australia is a signatory to a convention that makes it explicitly illegal to punish asylum seekers.

The biggest wiener of all is leader of the federal parliamentary opposition, Tony Abbot, who portrays himself as tough, but he is constantly whining. Tony, here's a hint. Looking buff in a speedo doesn't make you tough. Taking on hard issues fearlessly does.

That takes me to another of Abbott’s can’t do issues, climate change.

Aussie politicians are constantly pushing the line that no problem is too easy, that we can’t rush out and be the first, that we can only punch below our weight. What was that again? Weren’t we supposed to punch above our weight? And in any case, this is all bolstered by a campaign of cowardly lies. The claim that Australia would be a world leader in carbon taxes for example is at least 20 years out of date, and about 15 countries have already put such a tax in place or have plans to do so by the end of 2011.

If it was only Tony Abbott, it wouldn’t be a problem, but the rest of his “Liberal” Party is just about as bad, except a small minority who are largely ignored by the media. And the ruling Labor Party is even more terrified of these issues: they bend to the wind whenever it emanates from Abbott’s rear end.

And far from the physicality portrayed in the movies and on TV, Australia a few years back reportedly overtook the US as the most obese country in the world (to be fair, WHO stats show that neither country is really the fattest in the world, but the numbers are scary nonetheless ... a newspaper got the facts wrong: who would have guessed?).

So there you have it. Australia today is not a nation of all-conquering warlike athletic crocodile hunters. It’s a nation of obese slugs who use their cars to move from the food court to the adjacent supermarket, that punches below its weight and is terrified of taking on hard issues.

I’m moving back to South Africa where the problems are tough but so are the people.

A bit strong?

I wrote this on the back of several days of back to back whining on talkback radio about asylum seekers, and letters in The Australian invoking the Anzac legend as a reason to be cruel to people who are desperate because they’ve fled danger only to be treated worse than criminals (who are entitled to an expeditious trial, not indefinite detention). The Australia of the Anzac legend, the real one, not the version of the whiners, is still there. I saw it in the Brisbane floods when so many people pitched in to help without prompting. There are genuine politicians here who have principles. It’s the constructed national psyche of the Hanson-Howard era that I find objectionable. There are plenty of real people who don’t share that view of Australianness. I just wish the mass media would give them the air time they give the whiners.

Easter Island Earth

Examine this picture closely. It is the scariest picture you will see in a long time. It is from the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2010. The IEA is the energy policy research agency of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which represents the interests of the major developed market economies. Apparently.

So what’s so scary about this picture? The growing light blue wedge representing “Crude oil: fields yet to be found” is real cause for concern. Eliminate that growing wedge, and we do not have much more than five years before overall supply starts to decline.

The IEA argues that this is not a problem because any shortfall in supply will crank up prices, making it feasible to spend more on extraction – in effect squeezing more out of depleted fields. The problem with this prediction is that over the last three years while oil prices have hit new records and subsequently stayed well above the long-term historical inflation-corrected average of about US$30 per barrel, the IEA has downgraded their estimates of future supply with every annual Outlook. Another argument is that “unconventional” oil like tar sands will fill the gap but there again, the IEA’s forward estimates do not cover the shortfall.

How big a deal is that growing blue wedge? Oil fields have historically taken over 30 years to move from discovery to production and while this can theoretically be sped up significantly, the light grey wedge in the graph representing known oil fields that are not yet in production represents a massive investment in opening up new capacity. Even if the IEA’s phantom “yet to be discovered” oil fields actually exist explaining exactly how these will be brought on line almost instantaneously over a period of such massive activity in bringing known new oil fields on-line requires an extremely active imagination.

The factor missing so far from the picture is growth in demand, which has stalled over the last two years because of a worldwide economic crisis. Add in a return to growth and we will very soon hit the point were supply cannot keep up with demand. The market for oil largely exhibits inelastic demand – price changes have a limited effect on demand, because many uses either have no alternative, or require a change to a new technology to switch to an alternative. We can cut luxuries like overseas holidays and an unnecessary drive on the weekend, but farmers can’t switch to harvesting by hand on a large farm, nor can those who live in areas without public transport leave the car at home and take the bus or train to work.

In the long run, if prices remain high, the market will start to favour alternatives like public transport and renewable energy. The big risk with waiting for that market signal is worldwide economic collapse if the supply crisis happens rapidly, for the same reason that the demand is inelastic: we cannot switch instantly to alternatives that do not exist, even if the price signal favours them. Did the rapid rise of the oil price to $147 in July 2008 instantly convert every petrol engined car to electric, with all the problems of batteries solved? Clearly not, but that rapid price spike – terminated by a global financial crisis – is an indicator of what to expect.

How could we have allowed such a threat to develop? Did we have any basis to predict such a problem? Did we learn anything from 2008?

Incredibly, we have known that we would run into exactly this scenario since Shell Oil geophysicist M. King Hubbert in 1956 predicted the peak in USA and worldwide oil output as occurring respectively in 1970 and 2000. Historical records of US oil production show that his prediction for the USA was astonishingly accurate; that should have set off alarm bells in corridors of power around the world. Instead, a growing number of industry insiders have split with the official industry and government line, creating a worldwide network of peak oil researchers, and “official” organisations like the IEA have vigorously denied there’s a problem.

Why would anyone deny such a problem? The motive of the industry is clear, and is the same as their reason for undermining the political consensus on climate change. The rational response – call it Plan A – to both peak oil and climate change is a gradual transition over decades from fossil fuels. Such a slow transition would result in a gradual diminution of fossil fuels sales and profits. On the other hand an abrupt transition arising from depletion of fossil fuels results in a massive profits windfall for the industry, when shortage of supply runs into inelastic demand. As the industry well knows, a massive price increase can stimulate development of alternatives, as happened in the 1970s, but those alternatives take time to develop, and the industry has worked hard at avoiding massive price rises for this reason. As former Saudi Oil Minister Sheikh Yamani put it in 1973: “The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.” The fact that the industry has not tried to pull prices back from current high levels by increasing supply is a further warning sign that we are fast approaching a major crisis of supply.

What is not clear is why a research arm of the OECD should deny the problem. They are supposed to be working for governments who ultimately represent us. One claim I have heard is that governments fear spiking panic in the markets; Plan A, begun a decade or two back, would not be a recipe for panic. The Plan B we are rapidly heading for, a war-like economy of rationing and massive government interventions to prevent chaos – certainly does have the potential to cause panic. The only explanations I can see for the failure of governments to act are corruption by fossil fuel interests, and a fear of moving out of the political comfort zone of addressing the electoral cycle, and nothing longer-term than that.

Haven’t we heard this sort of prediction of doom before, going back to Malthus’s rather obvious observation in 1798 that exponential growth in demand has to hit limits of finite supply? The biggest factor in putting off a Malthusian day of reckoning is the mechanisation of agriculture, which relies heavily on oil. Take oil out of the picture, and I am awaiting a rational explanation as to how we could feed a human population of nearly 7-billion, set to peak at over 9-billion in 2050.

On a slightly different subject, the first European explorers to arrive at Easter Island were astonished to find large stone statues and no trace of a civilisation that could have made them and no trace of the large trees necessary to build infrastructure to create and move such statues. One theory of what happened is that the islanders harvested all their trees, leaving them incapable of not only building more statues, but building ocean-going craft that would have allowed them to escape their fate, once their unsustainable consumption caused their food supply to collapse. Consequently population of the island plummeted, amid a decline into cannibalism.

What relevance does Easter Island have to peak oil? Building renewable energy infrastructure takes energy. Until such time as renewables have reached critical mass, we will need fossil fuels to build that new technology. Wait too long, and we will not have the energy reserves to accomplish this task. The IEA’s 2010 projection suggests we do not have much time.

Will peak oil save us from climate change? The growing wedge of “unconventional” oil is a big worry: converting fuels like tar sands into oil-equivalent fuels is highly energy-intensive and if this sector has to grow faster than the IEA projects, we will hasten rather than slow the onset of serious climactic effects. There is also plenty of coal which, again, can be converted to liquid fuels at a high cost in added emissions. Leaving conversion to renewable energies so late increases the pressures to maximise use of these extremely dirty forms of energy.

To those climate change deniers who take comfort in the fact that they will only be proved wrong after their lifetimes and who hate their grandchildren: this one will happen soon. A planet-wide Easter Island collapse will not be a great time to be alive, and we are fast running out of time to avert just such a catastrophe. A Plan B world will include not only the risk of massive agricultural and industrial collapse but the marginalization into suburban slums of everyone who cannot afford to live near public transport or urban centres.

We have very little time left to act; the closer we can get to pulling back from a Plan B scenario to a Plan A scenario the better.

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This article has also appeared at Online Opinion; there are comments there that may also be of interest.

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.

Why the Right is Wrong

The Tea Party is not a new phenomenon. In Australia, we had Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, and it was pretty much the same thing. A general angst was verbalised in populist right wing terms, and swept up a lot of people who didn’t really agree with the sort of extremism that goes with this sort of viewpoint  – and a good number who thought if you prefaced a racist view point with “I’m not a racist but” it was somehow OK.

This sort of rabid populism is usually founded on well-placed fears and concerns, but turns on soft targets: the most disadvantaged sectors of society who can’t fight back. In Australia, it’s asylum seekers. In Europe, it’s immigrants. In the US, it’s loopy theories about who Barack Obama really is.

None of this of course targets the real cause of whatever crisis justifies the underlying fears. In Australia, asylum seekers are a tiny fraction of migrants, and real illegal immigrants like backpackers working without permission are a much bigger factor in “stealing” jobs from low-paid workers. Globalisation, and Australia’s insistence on lifting trade barriers no other developed country lifts, is an even bigger factor. Australia for example has the least protected agriculture outside a country managed by the IMF. In the US, much of the current economic crisis was caused by aggressive deregulation of banking under previous popular presidents, including Regan and Clinton (the latter more a creature of the right than his backers admit).

This kind of emotional populist politics is very easy of course. You find your victims, you point them at someone powerless and let rip with sound bites. It’s tough stuff to combat. When I saw Obama trying to explain that “Yes we can” means “Yes we can but not instantly” it was painful to watch – yet he was right. The damage of decades of economically loopy policies cannot be undone overnight.

Worse still, now the Republicans have a hold on Congress and are running scared of their own extremist right – those that aren’t in that category themselves – they will have the momentum to stop other critical reforms, like cutting dependence on fossil fuels. Visit this site every now and then and check the trend of the oil price in the sidebar if you want comfort in delusion. I just wonder when the right wing think tanks like the Heartland Institute and miscellaneous fossil fuel interests that fund them and some of the uglier right wing politics are going to find that running off a cliff isn’t the best choice, even if it’s your cliff.

But meanwhile politics of the populist right protects the real villains from exposure – and makes innocent victims suffer.

Not The Greens Ad

This Australian federal election has been characterised by an even higher than usual amount of mudslinging. Let’s look at three examples: Liberal attacks on the government’s broadband plan, Labor attacks on Tony Abbott’s attitude to labour relations, and the attack by both sides on asylum seekers who, when I last checked, were not one of the parties running for office.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott appears to think it sufficient to attack the government’s broadband plan on the basis of not trusting Labor to get it right, rather than any attack on the specifics. Much of the Liberal opposition attack on Labor is on the theme of alleged bungles in office, especially around spending their stimulus package. There were serious errors, but there is a big difference between a considered multi-year plan and emergency stimulus spending to stave off a major recession.

On the other side, Labor harps on Tony Abbott’s history of supporting the Howard government’s unpopular “Work Choices” labour relations package. While there is good reason to suspect that Abbott would bring those measures back if he could, it’s not an unreasonable line from him that he would not do so without going to another election.

On the issue of asylum seekers, both sides of politics have gone to the gutter, labelling asylum seekers as a “border protection” problem. Excuse me. These miserable people are not an invading army. In fact many are heading here because we invaded their country. Fully a third of refugees on the UN’s books are from two countries: Iraq and Afghanistan. We invaded Afghanistan for the reasonably justified cause of stopping further atrocities like 9/11. But we didn’t finish the job. We left Afghanistan with an unpopular, incompetent government that could only survive with foreign military support, and launched a war on Iraq, a country that has never been shown to have any kind of link to Al Qaeda or 9/11. We bungled that one too, resulting in a civil war and ongoing violence. These two conflicts alone have resulted in about 5-million refugees.

In any case, whatever the source, asylum seekers – anyone who asks for recognition as a refugee, and who is at risk if they return home – are entitled to seek refuge in Australia. We have signed international conventions that oblige us to take them. Here’s a surprising fact: the vast majority of boat arrivals (up to 97%, depending when you count) have their refugee status approved and end up staying in Australia. But they are a tiny fraction of total asylum seekers. Far more arrive by plane, with legitimate passports and visas. But most of those who arrive “legally” end up having their applications for asylum denied. Let’s summarise this:

• boat people – tiny fraction of all asylum seekers, almost all legitimate: demonised
• plane arrivals – most asylum seekers, very few legitimate: not a political issue

Add to that around 50,000 real illegal immigrants – backpackers and the like who overstay visas – and you should realise that the whole attack on boat people is a con.

When Tony Abbott and Julie Gillard talk about stopping the boats, and Tony Abbott talks about sending back people without proper passports, they are talking drivel. Luckily for them, the people most affected are a tiny constituency who can’t swing an election.

So going back to the examples, we have once each of an attack from either side that lacks substance, and an attack by both sides on an innocent third party (not in the sense of a political “party”).

By this stage in an election, with so much heavy-weight advertising by the major parties with so much investment put into focus groups and polling, the Greens poll numbers start to sag. Not this time. Instead, the Greens numbers are holding up remarkably well. The latest (at time of writing) Roy Morgan poll on senate voting intentions shows the Greens vote holding up well enough to double their senate representation from 5 to 10 senators. Yet the Greens have had little or no TV advertising, certainly none I’ve seen.

Could it be that the major parties have reduced TV advertising to an echo chamber of negativity, that has voters so turned off that they don’t pay attention any more?

Meanwhile on the ABC’s Gruen Nation on Wednesday night 11 August 2010, one of the ad agencies asked to pitch for alternative messages came up with this:



That’s certainly a positive message, even if the ABC won’t allow the agency to sell it to the Greens. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. This way, anyone who likes it can embed it in their own web page, because it’s not a political ad, it’s just an example of the TV advertiser’s craft.

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Further reading
There are many sources of information on asylum seekers and refugees, including the UNHCR. For a quick summary, try GetUp’s fact sheet – but I urge you to research the issue yourself.

Big IPCC Error

Here’s an IPCC error we don’t hear reported too often. This picture from the 2009 Copenhagen Diagnosis illustrates how far out the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report was in predicting reduction in Arctic sea ice extent. The black line is a combined (ensemble) figure of a range of simulations, and the dashed lines represent the highest and lowest values of the simulations. The red line is the measured sea ice extent.

Since 2007, when sea ice extent reached an all-time minimum (in recorded history), many climate deniers have made a big thing of how sea ice extent has “recovered”. Since this graph was made, sea ice extent has fluctuated a bit, without hitting the 2007 low again, but still well below simulations reported by the IPCC.

The other thing climate deniers have done is attack the IPCC wildly whenever a trivial error has been spotted. Guys, this is a big one. I’m waiting for you all to get excited.

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.

It’s the environment, stupid

No matter how much The Australian may try to spin the palace coup against Kevin Rudd as arising from his mishandling of a proposed tax on mines, the big swing against Labor in the polls has consistently been towards the Greens.

I’m not sure in what universe The Australian lives, but in this one, people do not desert a ruling party for the Greens out of empathy with embattled miners, at risk of losing some of their massive profits to the public purse.

In 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville hung a sign in his campaign headquarters:

The economy, stupid

Given that Labor campaigned in the 2007 election on taking climate change seriously and has achieved almost nothing, with an emissions trading scheme proposal weaker than the Howard administration’s, that has gone on the back burner, maybe they need a reminder:

The environment, stupid

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.

Fool me twice

As the cacophony of voices attacking climate science grows, I have to wonder: where are the journalists? Have they forgotten their job description? In any other field, if such an obvious, misinformed lobby arose, would they rate any attention?

Well, maybe.

During organized tobacco’s war on science, many newspapers reported propaganda created by paid tobacco lobbyists as a legitimate alternative to mainstream science. Other industries took up the same strategy: producers of CFCs who paid ozone hole deniers, and asbestos vendors who refused to acknowledge guilt in killing their own workers in the most horrific way in the cause of making a quick buck. In South Africa, according to a Harvard study, over 300,000 people died unnecessarily because the Mbeki government chose to believe pseudo-science when reality did not suit the president’s politics.

Fit to the Pattern

In all these cases, the tactics were remarkably similar. A small group, mostly with no scientific credentials in the area, supported by an even smaller group with some relevant scientific background, claimed that they represented an alternative viewpoint that had to be aired, and increasingly stridently portrayed the mainstream as dishonest, excluding alternative theories and even a religion. In each case, if you scratched below the surface, the strident accusations had no merit.

Is climate science any different? Not in principle, but in degree. The number of actual paid lobbyists is quite small, and the tactics have been narrow (as ably documented by John Mashey): discredit a small number of key scientists, tarring the rest as in on the plot, and cause general doubt among the public who are unaccustomed to evaluating scientific evidence. From there, rely on the gullibility of journalists and a ready constituency of conspiracy theorists and absolutist free marketeers who abhor any form of government intervention, and then rely on the viral properties of the Internet to spread the message far and wide. All this is a clever refinement on previous business-sponsored anti-science campaigns that didn’t have the Internet as a tool to spread disinformation on the cheap (AIDS denial was the first anti-science campaign I know of that did this, and it went pretty far without the benefit of an industrial sponsor). The biggest difference though is that mishandling climate change has the potential to cause disaster on an unprecedented scale. The ozone hole has made it inconvenient to live in countries like Australia, where sun-lovers court cancer if they don’t apply enough sun screen. Asbestos kills in horrible ways, but the number of victims is limited to those who are directly exposed. Tobacco too kills in horrible ways, if in much larger numbers than asbestos. AIDS is a terrible affliction to treat as a political problem that can be wished away. But climate change is a threat that carries risks for the entire biosphere. Not only that, if we wait too long before switching to an alternative energy economy, the economic effects of a sudden worldwide shift to new forms of energy could be devastating.

The Risks

Clearly, the lowest-risk approach to climate change is gradual emissions reduction, and a slow transition to a new energy economy, a process that has enough benefits to be worth exploring long before we were sure of the science. Had we started this in the late 1980s when the evidence started to become clear, we would be well on the way today towards a clean energy economy. So why the massive resistance? As with CFCs, tobacco, asbestos and HIV, there are political and economic constituencies who are threatened by change.

The big risk to humanity is not just from the dangers in failing to slow climate change and to re-gear economies for low emissions. It is also from discrediting science. Science is not a matter of opinion: a theory stands or falls by how well it fits the evidence, including how well its predictions stand up to measurement. By attempting to turn climate science, and indeed any science that offends a particular special interest, into a matter for debate where the evidence counts for less than personal preference, we risk reverting from a society of reason to a society of superstition. So there are big issues at stake, and the fact that so much of the discourse on this subject has swung away from reason to personal attack, and insisting that the facts bend to opinion rather than that the science be evaluated for what it is, is cause for serious concern.

The Real Failure

Why have they been allowed to get away with it? George Monbiot, in his book Heat, exposed the link between the anti-science of tobacco and climate change (more links in my discussion of his book). It does not take brilliant investigative journalism, following on from that, to realise that the attack on climate science is a massive con designed to buy the fossil fuel industry time, at the expense of the rest of humanity, who stand to pay a huge price if action is taken too late.

This is not the first time this tactic has been used, yet the anti-science movement gets away with it again and again. Tobacco. HIV. Asbestos. CFCs. And now climate science. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me five times, I’m a journalist.

Call to Action

So what can you do? Join my campaign or any other that you feel comfortable supporting to oppose demonizing science. Write letters to the media, making it clear you do not support turning science into a matter of opinion. Sign my pro-science petition, and consider joining my LinkedIn pro-science group to share ideas.

Replies to questions about climate science

One Terry today at The Australian asked some questions. Unfortunately the paper is a lousy forum to conduct a conversation because it updates slowly and is patchy in posting comments. Also, Terry, the answers to your questions are readily available. It’s not my fault if Australia’s only national daily doesn’t report science much above the level of superstition and rumour. I would offer my humblest grovelling apologies if it were my fault. For that, you must go to Mr Murdoch.

Tom Clark, Philip Machanick, Sancho, et al

Why not settle the discussion and show us sceptics the proof for the following:
1. That current anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the major cause of global warming. Bear in mind that the physics shows that the amount of warming from CO2 decreases as the concentration increases. Thus there has to be a huge forcing, what is it?
2. That the minimal warming from anthropogenic CO2 causes climate change. Please detail which elements of the climate (storms, drought, heat, floods, tornadoes, etc.) are changing, and the proof that the major cause is anthropogenic CO2.
3. The earth has been warmer in its recent past (Roman and Medieval periods), and these warm periods were very beneficial to mankind. Thus if (and it’s a big if) anthropogenic CO2 has any real influence on the global temperature, why should we be concerned about living in temperatures that existed, to the benefit of mankind, in the past 2000 years?

When you answer, bear in mind that computer predictions are not science.
Also the recent (30 years) global temperature readings are badly compromised, not least from the fact that the original 6000 measuring sites have been reduced to 1500, and it wasn’t the warmest locations that were removed.

Just this once, I’ll do your homework for you. But listen up: you can find all this stuff yourself. The trick is to use Google Scholar, rather than regular Google, which turns up masses of dross. Unfortunately a good fraction of the research literature is paywalled, but NASA makes all theirs public so I will use them disproportionately so you can check my sources. I include a few paywalled papers where the important detail is in the free to view abstract.

1. Scientists have known since the 19th century that the relationship between CO₂ concentration and warming is logarithmic. Please don’t parade this fact as evidence of the ignorance of scientists, but rather as evidence of your ignorance of the mainstream. Forcing per doubling of CO₂ is 4W/m² [Hansen et al. 2005]. To put this into context, a 2% increase in solar irradiance adds about 4W/m² [Hansen et al. 2008]. A 24 W/m² increase in solar irradiance only over summer, accompanied by a 4-day increase in the duration of summer, caused by a change in axial tilt [Huybers 2006], is enough to tip the earth out of an ice age, so 4W/m² is a big change – especially as it’s not limited to one season and a limited part of the planet. The maximum variance in solar irradiance since satellite records began is 0.36%, less if you smooth the data to take into account that the biggest variations are very short-term (graph below from TSI Composite Database plot of data 1978-1999). There is no known theory of climate that can use solar variability and other natural influences to reproduce temperature variation since the 1950s. We can only reproduce the trend by models that include natural influences and anthropogenic warming.

2. No serious climate scientist is claiming that the current level of warming is resulting in major increases in storms etc. Yet. There are however measurable effects like loss of Greenland and Antarctic ice mass [Velicogna 2009 – see figures from this paper below] – and many others like glacier retreat, change in species range, and accelerated rates of extinction. You can find plenty of evidence for these if you look. If you want catastrophic effects before you accept firm evidence of climate change, you’re crazy. Predictable effects such as shrinking glaciers are enough for me, especially as many of these metrics are happening faster than predicted.

Antarctic Ice Loss (blue data points: unfiltered)	Greenland Ice Loss (blue data points: unfiltered)

3. The evidence of warming in the Medieval Warm Period is patchy and unreliable, and recent evidence suggests the warming was not as fast as that at present [Loso et al. 2007]. A conspiracy-theoretic site styling itself “CO2 science” has an extensive archive of papers purporting to support a globally warmer period in medieval times. I examined the papers they claimed had the highest-quality evidence, and found the temperature peaks varied by as much as 600 years in different locations around the world. That is not a globally warm period. I haven’t seen the evidence that Europe was warmer in Roman times than it is now; there certainly is unlikely to be solid evidence of warming on a worldwide scale for the simple reason that the resolution of our methods of measuring temperature is poor that far back in time. In any case, “warmer” is a relative term. Our current temperatures are on the back of greenhouse warming that hasn’t concluded. Even if we do not add more CO₂ to the atmosphere, we have another 0.5°C of warming or so due from slower feedbacks. The Roman world and Medieval Europe may have benefited from local warming from a sub-optimal climate for agriculture to a better climate for agriculture. Warming today is unlikely to have that effect: much of the world’s rice crop for example is grown at close to its temperature limits for high yields, a concern for food production in China [Tao et al. 2006].

On your other comments, if computer predictions aren’t science, we are going to have to stop doing biology and most other branches of modern science. Computer models are no different than mathematical models, except they can process a lot of information fast. Like mathematical models, they can be wrong. This is why scientists check on each other, and build their own models from scratch, rather than rely on a popular model to be correct.

The claim that measurements are compromised by reduction in climate stations is rubbish, especially the claim that the removed sites were from cooler areas. Temperature measurements are not in absolute readings, but anomalies, deviations from a baseline. The baseline for each weather station is based on typical measurements for that type of station. The number used from each station in the overall temperature calculation is not its temperature but its difference from the baseline. This method was introduced for several reasons, one of which is to avoid exactly the sort of problem to which you allude. NASA documents their approach in detail and provides all the computer programs and data. Check it yourself.

 I have a question for you now:

If climate science really is junk, why is it necessary to oppose it with vaudeville acts, personal attacks, stealing email and clear and obvious lies?

And if you agree with me is that science is about supporting theories with evidence, not personal attack and harassing scientists with whom you disagree, sign my petition.

References

[Hansen et al. 2005] Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, R. Ruedy, L. Nazarenko, A. Lacis, G.A. Schmidt, G. Russell, I. Aleinov, M. Bauer, SS. Bauer, N. Bell, B. Cairns, V. Canuto, M. Chandler, Y. Cheng, A. Del Genio, G. Faluvegi, E. Fleming, A. Friend, T. Hall, C. Jackman, M. Kelley, N. Kiang, D. Koch, J. Lean, J. Lerner, K. Lo, S. Menon, R. Miller, P. Minnis, T. Novakov, V. Oinas, Ja. Perlwitz, Ju. Perlwitz, D. Rind, A. Romanou, D. Shindell, P. Stone, S. Sun, N. Tausnev, D. Thresher, B. Wielicki, T. Wong, M. Yao, and S. Zhang 2005. Efficacy of climate forcings. J. Geophys. Res. 110, D18104, doi:10.1029/2005JD005776
[Hansen et al. 2008] Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, P. Kharecha, D. Beerling, R. Berner, V. Masson-Delmotte, M. Pagani, M. Raymo, D.L. Royer, and J.C. Zachos, 2008: Target atmospheric CO₂: Where should humanity aim? Open Atmos. Sci. J., 2, 217-231, doi:10.2174/1874282300802010217
[Huybers 2006] Peter Huybers. Early Pleistocene Glacial Cycles and the Integrated Summer Insolation Forcing, Science 313 (5786), 508, 28 July. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1125249]
 [Loso et al. 2007] MG Loso, RS Anderson, SP Anderson, PJ Reimer, P J. Sediments Exposed by Drainage of a Collapsing Glacier-Dammed Lake Show That Contemporary Summer Temperatures and Glacier Retreat Exceed the Medieval Warm Period in Southern Alaska, Eos Trans. AGU, 88(52), Fall Meet. Suppl., Abstract PP44A-01
[Tao et al. 2006] Fulu Tao, Masayuki Yokozawa, Yinlong Xu, Yousay Hayashi, Zhao Zhang, Climate changes and trends in phenology and yields of field crops in China, 1981-2000, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, Volume 138, Issues 1-4, 29 August, Pages 82-92, ISSN 0168-1923, DOI: 10.1016/j.agrformet.2006.03.014
[Velicogna 2009] I Velicogna. Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L19503, doi:10.1029/2009GL040222

Time to Defend Science

I have set up a petition so those who object to the traducing of climate science can make their voices heard. I hope even opponents of the mainstream position will sign, because the issue is not whether the science is correct or not, but whether science should be tested by weighing evidence against theories, or by personal attack on scientists.

Even The Guardian, a paper that usually breaks from the herd and attempts to report matters like this accurately, has jumped on the bandwagon of attacking climate scientists personally. In this article, reprinted in the internationally distributed Guardian Weekly with the title Research red in tooth and claw journalist Fred Pearce makes numerous errors. I was particularly annoyed at this reprinting of the article, since the weekly paper has more time to review content for errors. Here is what I've written to the editor:

Fred Pearce's long article "Research red in tooth and claw" is riddled with errors and misinterpretations. First, he identifies a paper by Lars Kamel as the one referred to in stolen CRU emails because "It is the only one published on that topic in the journal that year" then goes on to explain how the paper was never published. Either it was published, or it wasn't. Second, he goes on at great length about how CRU's temperature analysis has not been recreated by anyone else, and cannot be because of lack of access to the data. While I have problems with the whole concept of lack of access to data, this is denialist spin. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has independently constructed a temperature record using mostly the same data sources, and all of its data is public, and there are other independent temperature records against which CRU's can be tested. Pearce's understanding of peer review is also confused. There is nothing improper in asking other academics for inputs into reviewing a paper, and this happens very widely. Nowhere does Pearce present evidence that confidences were breached.

As Pearce could easily have discovered had he done the job he's evidently being paid to do, despite Jones's threat to keep junk papers out of the IPCC, they are in fact cited as references. The "MM" paper referred to is unlikely to be the McKitrich and Michaels paper on urban heat islands because this was published in 2007, 3 years after email Pearce quotes. The paper concerned is more likely to be that by McIntyre and McKitrick of 2003 (also rubbish), which is in fact cited in IPCC reports.

In one of Pearce's most serious blunders, he fails to report the fact that half of the editorial board of Climate Research including the newly-appointed editor in chief resigned over the journal's lapse in standards at the hands of De Freitas.

Pearce says the fact that Jones was new to the IPCC process was no excuse for errors of judgement. How new is Pearce to journalism?

PS: has Rupert Murdoch bought The Guardian?

There is a deep problem here when a usually trusted news source starts behaving in this way. Science is traditionally conducted through the research literature for a good reason. Unqualified people can easily make mistakes when assessing a complex field. The hard thing is translating research into policy. Human society does not on the whole do that very well, and I am not proposing alternatives here. What I do however object to in the strongest terms is traducing science as a whole and vicious often ill-informed personal attacks on scientists.

If you agree, sign the petition.