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.

Lazy Sunday Cuisine

A lazy wet Sunday: what’s for lunch?

I have some nice organic tomatoes from a farmer’s market, a little left over Regianno Parmesan and some supermarket spinach and ricotta tortellini (the fresh kind, not died). On a less lazy day, I’d crank up the pasta machine – but not today. For dessert I have about 200g of good fair trade dark cooking chocolate, and some milk and eggs in the fridge.

To get started, how about a nice sauce for the pasta? Let’s see what else I have and put it together (enough for two serves):

• a splash of olive oil
  
• a shredded clove of garlic
  
• bottled herbs (basil, parsley) – it’s raining, I’m not going to the garden this once
  
• a sprinkling of macadamia halves
  
• 4 smallish tomatoes
  
• a hint of red pepper seeds
  
• finely shredded Parmesan
  

The trick with a tomato-based sauce is to squeeze out the juice and seeds. This way you don’t have to cook it down so much and end up with a fresher taste. Start with heating the oil, toss in the garlic then the tomato, herbs and spices. Then the tomato has almost fallen apart, add in the macadamias.

At this point, you may want to add in a splash of good red wine: not too much, you’ll want to drink the rest.

Once the sauce is making good progress, cook the pasta. The brand I’m using (a local one, San Remo) is not half bad if you ignore the package directions to cook to death for 6 minutes. My rule for any filled pasta or gnocchi is (based on instructions from an Italian cook): “cook them until they give up” – when they float to the surface and turn upside down. This time, it’s about 2 minutes. The result: a good chewy texture, and a filling that still has plenty of taste. Australians (judging from the package instructions) share the South African and British taste for flavourless mush.

Toss the pasta in the sauce, add Parmesan and you’re ready to serve.

On to dessert. This needs a little planning ahead of time. I like to make meringues at the same time as I make ice cream because you can use the egg yolks for the ice cream. There are a few simple basics for making good meringues:

1. never use chilled eggs: let them warm to room temperature
   
2. use a copper mixing bowl: this seems to result in getting a stiffer texture much faster (I doubt very much a little copper is toxic: think of what they replaced lead with in water pipes)
   
3. cook at low heat (90°C or 190°F for the neoliths): you are drying the meringues more than cooking them
   

Here’s another interesting trick I discovered. I recently found brown caster sugar in a supermarket and bought it wondering why you’d want something like that. The answer is, you get extra crispy meringues that whip up easier. The colour is a pale gold rather than snowy white, but they taste great.

OK, so the ice cream. The basic idea is to make an egg custard, let it cool, chill it, add whipped cream then churn in an ice cream maker.

Here’s an example:

• 400 ml milk
  
• quarter cup of sugar (double this if not adding something sweetened)
  
• 3 egg yolks (reserve the whites)
  
• 200g good dark chocolate (fair trade please: if you are going to die of death by chocolate feel good about it)
  
• 200 ml good whipping cream
  

Shred the chocolate. I do this by slicking it finely: it shreds as you slice.

Whip up the egg yolks, gradually adding the sugar, until you have a light consistency.

Scald the milk in a microwave (2 minutes in mine; it needs to be just short of boiling). Add some of the milk into the egg mixture, mix well and whisk into the rest of the milk. Heat again in the microwave for 2-3 minutes, watching for the point where it starts to froth up. Stop and whisk vigorously as soon as this happens, and repeat until you have a thick custard. If you take it too far, you end up with sweet scrambled egg, so take care.

At this point, patience is called for, otherwise you might as well decant into mugs and serve as the world’s best hot chocolate. If you can resist, put the custard aside to cool off, then refrigerate it. Lunch is developing into an all-day affair.


While you have nothing else to do, work on the meringues:

• 3 egg whites
  
• 125 g sugar
  

Whip the egg whites to a froth, then gradually add the sugar. Whip until the mixture can hold its shape, then drop about half a tablespoonful at a time onto a nonstick baking sheet in a baking tray (I use the baking sheet as anti-crunch packing when I store the meringues, and reuse it a few times for future batches). Put in a cool oven (90°C) on the middle shelf for 3 hours, and leave in the oven after turning off the heat to continue drying.

Back to the ice cream. Once it’s thoroughly chilled, whip the cream fairly stiff, fold it in then put the mixture in an ice cream maker (mine is hand-churned). Work the machine the usual way. Although ice cream is one of the few things I eat from frozen, it’s best eaten fresh.

District 9

District 9 has been picking up pretty good reviews on the whole, but another whole layer has been missed by many reviewers who don’t understand the South African setting. I lived in South Africa until 2002, and have been a long-time follower of the local SF culture. I’ve been a member of the national SF club, SFSA, since the 1970s, and the fact that there is this sort of creative talent in South Africa is not so much a surprise as the fact that it’s resulted in a major movie with a big worldwide launch – without turning it into an American-centric story, where the kid saves the day (actually, there is a minor element of the kid saves the day, but it’s not as unbelievable as in the average movie where a human kid does this).



The movie starts with a mystery: it has no hint as to why the aliens arrived. All we know is that they have lost their ability to control most of their vastly superior technology (not quite all: a few of their weapons work but only in contact with alien DNA, and their space craft is able to remain in a fixed position for decades). There appears to be some linkage between their genetic make up and their ability to control their technology, but much of this is left a mystery.

By a combination of hand cam shots meant to represent an official record of events, news-like footage, surveillance camera-style footage and the occasional realistic scene, it’s hard not to become involved and have a real sense of an actual story unfolding, even though the earlier events are in the past.

Imagine humans in a like situation. A million humans in a colony ship arrive at a distant planet, and our technology breaks down. Aliens who are obviously less advanced than us “rescue” us from our disabled ship and treat us like dirt. How would we cope? How many of us would have the advanced scientific knowledge to fix our broken space craft? Think Star Trek episodes and beaming down to the nearest planet to find some broken part or find a missing chemical. Totally unlikely. What we saw in District 9 is a much more likely scenario for a space ship breaking down far from home. Possibly this is why (though the last Star Trek movie was passably good, give or take the odd plot hole you could drive the Enterprise through) my favourite SF movies tend to be spoofs like Mars Attacks! and Galaxy Quest.

The real genius of this movie is in its use of role reversals. The aliens have arrived in a disabled space craft under squalid conditions (Australians, think refugees in leaky boats). They are treated with utmost condescension, and things that are obviously not for their own good are done to “improve” conditions for them. Suddenly you are put in a position of seeing this all from their point of view. You need a good understanding of South Africa to get all the references but for a foreign audience it adds to the “alienness” feeling of the movie. To add to the subtle feeling that you are looking at things backwards, one of the aliens is called “Christopher Johnson” (typical of the way colonial overlords renamed the natives when they couldn’t pronounce the native-language name), a name less “alien” to a non-South African audience than Van der Merwe.

Let’s examine some of those South African references. First, the very title harks back to the dark years of apartheid. District 6 in Cape Town (in a different part of South Africa) was a ghetto for Coloured (mixed-race) South Africans, which, despite poverty, had a strong sense of community. The government decided to clear out the residents because having Coloured people too near the city centre was inconvenient. Clearing out District 6 was a big running sore in apartheid history; forced removals were bitterly opposed, and the cleared land was left largely undeveloped until the fall of apartheid, when rights of former residents to return were recognized. Forced removals, in general, were a key feature of the apartheid system. One study of the effects was called the Surplus People Project; a movie depicting the effects was titled Last Grave at Dimbaza.

Second, the attitude towards the aliens is consistent with current attitudes in South Africa to “illegal aliens” of the human kind. There have been riots over the presence of such foreigners from poorer parts of Africa, and the attitudes expressed in the movie are absolutely typical, and a sad rejection of the apartheid past, when the rest of Africa rallied to support of the anti-apartheid cause, and accepted South African refugees with open arms. The aliens are accused of all kinds of things like causing crime, when the only evidence we see of criminality is from Nigerian gangs and the MNU company that is desperately trying to make money out of the aliens by any means, not matter how unscrupulous. MNU is a bit of a composite, not reflective of a real company. Americans may relate it to private contractors in Iraq. South Africa does indeed have a large armaments company, government-owned Denel (a relic of the apartheid era) but it does not do the sort of private security work depicted in the movie – there are other South Africa companies that do that sort of thing – nor is it as big in the world market as the fictitious MNU.

Third, and this is where the subtleties really accumulate, the attitude of protagonist Wikus van der Merwe to the aliens is exactly the way apartheid officials treated Black South Africans in the darkest apartheid years. Telling one of the aliens not to use so many clicks is a direct reference to South African languages, several of which include click sounds (the San languages are almost entirely composed of clicks, and Xhosa and Zulu have a few click sounds). That Van der Merwe, who obviously gets on well with his Black colleagues, can get away with this treatment of the aliens with no sense of irony or objection from the Black members of the team shows how little the South Africans represented in the story learnt from their apartheid experience.

More sensitive viewers may dislike the violence (especially in the second half, which turns into frenetic action scenes) but it is integral to the story and not gratuitous. The dialogue also includes some of the more serious Zulu cursing I’ve heard in decades but that would go over the heads of most foreign audiences.

No doubt the computer game heritage of the movie gives it some of its mass market appeal, but this is a real classic, as much a game-changer (in the other sense) as the Matrix movies, and a whole lot more intelligent. That there are almost no American (or even UK English) accents in the dialogue, some African language dialogue without subtitling and that the protagonist has a name almost unpronounceable to non-South Africa English speakers are brave moves but add to the movie’s appeal as something different from the usual Hollywood dross.

A little help for the foreigners: “Wikus” is pronounced something like Vee-cuss. “Van der Merwe” is pronounced something like Fun-deh-meh-vuh.

Sequel? Very likely. With the box office this one is generating, the unexplained details and the potential for follow-up developments left open at the end, a sequel is almost 100% on. I hope it’s as good as the first. At last, after a long drought, an SF movie that’s better than a parody. It’s been a long wait.