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.

More Questions about Climate Science

I talk a lot here about climate science, but I have a growing realisation that the vast majority of those who get exercised about this issue don’t know enough science to read papers in academic journals, and certainly are not excited about the issues that really attract scientific controversy, like string theory (someone has gone so far as to write a book about that with the stinging title, Not Even Wrong).

The real issue is fear that a fundamental change in the energy economy will cause a massive collapse in living standards. This fear is justified, but if mainstream climate science is right, we will need to make that change sooner or later, and the longer we delay, the harder it will be to get this change right without economic chaos. This fear is leading to a campaign that is not attacking the science as much as the scientists, which is why I set up a pro-science petition.

In response to my petition, Tim Curtin sent me a list of questions, which I repeat here with his permission:

You say: (1) "Stealing emails...", You have no evidence any were stolen, either they were up for grabs on ftp, or an insider blew the whistle.

(2) "magnifying the significance of errors" - actually the errors are beyond magnification, eg tippexing Roman glory days and the MWP

(3) "and invoking conspiracy theory" - the emails are very strong evidence of a well-organised conspiracy to pervert the progress of science

(4) " is no substitute for reasoned evidence-based debate" - a non sequitur. Actually Jones and his CRU abetted by Mann & Co took every possible means to suppress evidence-based debate (e.g. by preventing access to the evidence)...

(5) "Yet in the field of climate science...no one has presented a credible alternative theory, the usual approach to overturning a scientific theory". Actually there is overwhelming evidence from multivariate regressions that radiative forcing from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere has no statistically significant impact on changes in mean max or min temperatures anywhere on earth once changes in surface solar radiation are taken into account. Watch this space, as not a single climate journal (eg Nature, Science, PNAS, JoC etc etc) will ever publish any paper on this, given that all their boards are controlled by friends of Jones et al (eg Schellenhuber, Rahmstorf, Schneider, Schmidt, Hansen, et al ad infinitum).

Let’s take this from the top.

An archive of emails from an institution appears on the Internet in various places. The authors of the emails have not given their permission for their private emails to be published. By any reasonable definition, that’s theft. It doesn’t matter who did it or how, or whether someone left the front door open. The police are investigating. The police generally only investigate crimes.

The “Roman glory days and the MWP”: The most obvious response is that human society is vastly different today, with huge cities and vast impoverished agricultural societies a few metres above sea level. In Roman or Medieval times, if the local climate became unsuited to human society, people could and did migrate. We don’t have that option today.

I’ve studied a number of temperature reconstructions. The further back you go, the bigger the uncertainties. I had a look at the papers flagged as containing the most reliable data on the medieval warm period on a contrarian web site (CO2 science) that collects material on this stuff. The earliest and latest peak were 600 years apart. While it is quite likely that the odd spot around the world was much warmer than it is today at some point in the past, that does not mean the global average was much higher. An increase in the global average is important because it has consequences like sea level rise, and pushing habitats uphill and away from the equator. If it was warmer during the MWP or Roman period than it is now, there would be evidence that sea level was higher at that time (at least very similar) whereas the only evidence I’ve seen (admittedly with very big error bars – but current sea level is outside those error bars) shows current sea level as the highest in 3,000 years.

Next: “emails are very strong evidence of a well-organised conspiracy”. I don’t agree. All we see is comment about how poor some other people’s work is (common backroom banter in science) and some conversations that are open to sinister interpretation but checking in the real world shows such sinister intent didn’t materialise. For example: talk of keeping certain work out of the IPCC did not lead to that work being excluded (it is in fact cited). Similarly for the “hide the decline” comment: it refers to the fact that tree ring reconstructions fail to match temperatures in the later half of the twentieth century, a problem Mike Mann describes in a paper in Nature – hardly concealment. This inconsistency between tree ring records and thermometer readings would be a problem for credibility of tree ring reconstructions if they were not cross-checked against many other measures. I don’t see the big conspiracy. I see scientists not watching every word in emails between colleagues. If that is a sinister conspiracy, you have a vivid imagination.

Then: “Mann & Co took every possible means to suppress evidence-based debate”. I agree they could have made a bigger effort to make everything public (e.g., CRU’s computer code) but this claim is an exaggeration. The data they did not make public is data that is not theirs to make public. The remedy for anyone wanting it is to go to the original source. In science, while maximum openness is useful and I fully support the concept, the best check on integrity of results is if they are independently reproduced from scratch, ideally with independently derived data. NASA provides full data sets and software for download. If I download everything and run the software exactly as NASA did in one of their papers, all I am doing is replicating their exact steps including their errors. Anyone who thinks the CRU temperature reconstruction flawed is welcome to start from scratch from publicly available data sources and show that they get an inconsistent result. This is how science normally proceeds. An astronomer reports a new star. Other astronomers use their own telescope to verify the find. They don’t demand a computer dump of the data generated from the original telescope.

Finally: “overwhelming evidence from multivariate regressions”: let’s see that evidence. You don’t have to publish in Nature to get your work out. There are many journals out there, and there is no evidence that those with a strong anti-AGW agenda cannot publish. Certainly, the likes of Richard Lindzen are able to publish, and what strikes me about the contrarian papers I’ve seen is that they are usually rather easy to debunk (even to the point of attracting a rebuttal in one case from a contrarian site). Are you suggesting there’s a bias where only the rubbish contrarian papers are published, and the good ones are not? That is implausible: it’s easy to publish a good paper (sound methodology, original results, defensible conclusions) as long as you are not fussy about where it’s published (a good journal, not necessarily top tier).

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Thanks for sending me the questions. I am happy to have discussion on this site. I do not snip comments, and only delete spam (but to cut spam, response to older articles are screened). I have absolutely no objection to attacking the science with better evidence, better theories, or both. This is how any scientist works. Attacking the scientists, not the science, is not constructive – hence my petition.

It further worries me that a large part of the lobby against climate science is attempting to reduce science to a matter of opinion. It is not. If a theory fits the evidence, it’s good. If it doesn’t, we need a better theory. If a new theory fits the evidence better, it replaces the old one. This methodology may be strange to those schooled in the arts or social sciences, but it’s a damn good one, and has taken us out of superstition to a worldwide technological society. Let’s not throw it away just because we are faced with a really hard problem if we accept the mainstream theory: the biggest change in the energy economy in over 100 years.

Addendum

To illustrate that the basics are really quite old, it's interesting to read this 1956 paper in American Scienist by Glilbert Plass (reprinted January-February 2010). Much of the detail has since been clarified and some of his errors fortuitously cancelled out so there has been real progress in the science since 1956 – as you would expect.

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