The Australian and Postmodern Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything you know is wrong

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

Probably not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So am I guilty of confirmation bias?

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

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

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

Forget Climate Change: A Fossil Fuel Future’s a Fantasy

on Jenkins in his article “The warmaholics’ fantasy” (The Australian 06/01/2009) ends by asking this: “The real question is in acknowledging the end of fossil fuels within the next 200 years or so: how do we spend our research time and dollars?”

Unfortunately, Jenkins has made the common error of not factoring in growth in demand. The latest annual figures available from BP’s authoritative Statistical Review of World Energy 2008 show that energy use grew 2.4% from 2006 to 2007. If we use this number as escalation against 200 years at current usage, we actually only have 75 years of fossil fuels left. Allow a more aggressive growth rate of 5% to factor in industrialisation of currently less developed countries, and fossil fuels will be gone in 50 years.

I’ve graphed the trend with 200 years’ worth of fossil fuel as the starting point to make it easy to see how the various growth rates pan out. As you can see, constant use takes us to zero after 200 years (off the scale of the graph). As you should be able to see from the graph, when constant demand would have used less than 40% of all carbon fuels, 2.4% growth will have used them all up. 5% growth would hit zero when only about 25% of reserves would have been consumed at fixed demand.

While it’s conceivable that 200 years is an under-estimate, any excess on that amount would include fuels from increasingly inaccessible and environmentally fragile sources. In fact, even to reach that level would require exploiting resources like tar sands and oil shale that are not only environmentally problematic but also expensive to process. What’s more, coal and oil are complex mixes of chemicals that have many uses; it’s silly to burn valuable, irreplaceable chemicals.

Long before we reach an era of real shortage, markets will be subject to massive swings as speculators ride fears of shortage – as we saw recently with oil prices. As demand from developing countries increases, we can expect prices to escalate for the simple reason that supply is unlikely to keep up with demand. We’ve already mined out much of the coal that’s really easy to dig up (Britain had massive reserves in the nineteenth century), and oil is increasingly being sought in expensive locations like the deep sea and Arctic.

Even without disputing Jenkins on climate change (I can’t see how he advances the debate with ad hominem attacks – and am pleased to see he has subsequently apologised for this in a letter in The Australian), there is a clear case for exploring alternative energy now, and doing so aggressively.

It’s clear that we will need to find alternatives to fossil fuels and sooner than most think. Will this necessarily result in massive pain? Luckily, Cambridge physics professor David MacKay has already provided a good start at understanding the problem in a new book, Sustainable Energy — without the hot air (not yet published in Australia; you can download a free copy from his web site). To cut to the chase, he calculates that Britain will battle to achieve a sustainable-energy economy because it has too high a population density and not enough sun. Much of Europe likewise will have to look to sunny low-population countries like Libya to import solar electricity. Australia gets little coverage in the book since the focus is on solutions for the UK. MacKay has reduced his calculations to simple examples that can easily be reworked for other parts of the world, or different solution mixes. Comparing us with the UK and its need to import solar electricity from Libya for example illustrates that we really do not have much of a problem here. Our population density is less than Libya’s, and we have plenty of sunshine.

What of the problems often raised about intermittency of wind and solar power? There are many creative solutions out there of which MacKay provides a good sampling. He reminds us that electricity providers have to be geared to handle massive changes in demand; much of the same techniques can be used to manage changes in supply. For example, electric cars, while charging overnight, could be equipped with smart meters that draw power when it’s cheap, and put some back when it’s expensive. Heavy users whose usage is not time-dependent could be scheduled to draw power when it’s plentiful. And of course existing techniques for load management such as pumped storage (sending water uphill when electricity is plentiful; using a downhill flow later to drive a generator) can be scaled up.

There’s too much detail in the book to cover in a short article like this. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in energy alternatives read it. Since he has neatly compartmentalised his solutions, it is relatively easy if you disagree with one to pull it out and replace it by another option. I’ve seen many attempts at covering small parts of the problem. Only a comprehensive approach such as this is really any good. Not only that, MacKay has a fine sense of humour.

I propose we stop worrying about who is right and wrong in the climate change debate (see other articles on this site for some answers to Jenkins’s points), and move as fast as we can to sustainable energy. To do so requires some hard political will, not wishy-washy strategies like charging for pollution permits then giving most of the money back to the big polluters. If we get this right, we will be insulated from damaging swings in energy commodity prices. Should the worst predictions of climate change turn out to be true, we will be well on the way towards a clean energy economy. If not, we will be a bit ahead of where we need to be when fossil fuels start to run out and become really expensive. All three ways, we win.

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Also published at Online Opinion.

Australia’s shameful response to climate change

When Kevin Rudd announced a 5% target for emissions reductions for 2020, you could almost hear John Howard laughing from the political grave. It's small comfort to me that in discussing climate matters since then, a Labor supporter called Rudd “Howard” by mistake. Freudian?

The science the government has in front of it says you have to reduce emissions by 25% by 2020 to save the Great Barrier Reef. Of course Australia cannot achieve this on its own because it accounts for a relatively small fraction of worldwide emissions – even if you account for its role as the world’s biggest exporter of coal (about a third of worldwide exports).

Another thing not widely talked about is that carbon emissions accumulate. Around half are absorbed by the environment; the rest dissipates very slowly over centuries. That means that if we have not achieved a target by 2020 that stops CO₂ accumulating to 550 parts per million or more, we can’t just turn off the tap and expect the atmospheric CO₂ level to drop.

How soon will the rest of the world regard carbon emissions as a serious, urgent problem? That Europe has committed to a 20% cut by 2020 is some indication.

Why should Europe care more? Partially, it’s because Europe has a stronger tradition than English-speaking countries of taking science seriously. But another factor is Europe’s proximity to the Arctic. A growing number of scientists is predicting an ice-free Arctic summer by 2015. It was a big enough shock when it was reported in 2007 that the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by 2030.

So in a sense the self-styled sceptics are right. The science has enough uncertainties that we have to be cautious about accepting predictions without a wide allowance for error. The problem is, the majority of cases that are breaking out of the modelled predictions are on the worse rather than the better side. How is this possible? With the vast bulk of “sceptics” accusing scientists who predict anything remotely bad of being “alarmist”, the natural tendency of scientists to avoid alarming claims without overwhelming evidence is accentuated. So work predicting rapid ice cap loss for example is not getting the attention it should. Another example: concerns about the possibility of the urban heat island effect (UHI) skewing the temperature trend has resulted in NASA compensating for this effect. While it is true that a temperature sensor put next to an isolated hot spot would be bad for once-off measurement, if that hot spot is not constantly being hotter, it would not add a trend to the stats.

NASA eliminates local anomalies by a process called homogenizing, where temperatures of each station are in effect corrected for excessive variation beyond others in similar terrain.

Let’s look at how over-estimating the effect of UHI could have on the temperature trend. If NASA weights down temperatures from urban area, they could be underestimating the general increase in temperatures, because some of these areas could naturally be heating faster than their surroundings.

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