Dan Moutal

This week: The US Senate surrender, denynig the undeniable, deniers turn on each other, more blacklist hypocrisy, where has all the phytoplankton gone?, happy 35th birthday global warming, and the skeptic debunk of the week. Download audio file (IC10.mp3) Irregular Climate is now accepting donations. Feedback is always appreciated. This is the last episode until [...]

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Part 1 Part 2 By Peter Sinclair Related Posts (auto generated and almost random):Study that underestimates sea level rise pulled, deniers cheer… huh?

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Did you hear? A denier has denied climate change! Shocking isn’t it? Well, no not really. In fact it is entirely predictable, and hardly worth a blog post. If only I had the skills of a professional spin doctor, then I could turn this into something news worthy. For example look how Marc Morano spun [...]

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When I first wrote about Laughlin’s essay What the Earth Knows, I focused entirely on the foolishness of equating the survival of the earth with the survival of human civilization, and that the phrase Save the Planet was never meant to be taken literally. But I missed Laughlin’s contradiction. Thankfully Friends of Gin and Tonic [...]

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It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas [...]

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It was absolutely hypocritical for deniers to call the Expert credibility in climate change paper published in PNAS a blacklist. Deniers have been making lists of scientists who reject the consensus for a long time. It is one of their main debating tricks. But when someone takes the trouble to analyse the expertise and prominence [...]

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This week: Some good news, and some sad news, IOP oh no!, it’s not about saving the planet, the skeptic debunk of the week and Ken Cuccinelli doesn’t know when to quit Download audio file (IC9.mp3) Irregular Climate is now accepting donations. Feedback is always appreciated. Subscribe in To irregular Climate:   Related Posts (auto [...]

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Jon Cook brings us a new visualization of the climate consensus. Imagine if you filled a room with a representative sample of 100 climatologists, how many would  agree with the basic scientific consensus that our GHG emissions are warming the planet? According to a recent study, and a survey conducted last year,  97 of them [...]

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I’ve been busy, and have fallen way behind in responding to comment (but don’t worry I did read all of them), but I have now caught up.  So if you recently left a comment and were wondering why I haven’t responded, please don’t take it personally. No related posts.

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It turns out that there are not enough mavericks in climate science to meet the media’s and blogosphere’s insatiable appetite for conflict. Thus into the arena steps a whole host of charlatans posing as climate scientists. These are a toxic brew of retired physicists, TV weather forecasters, political junkies, media hacks, and anyone else willing [...]

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This week: The US Senate surrender, denynig the undeniable, deniers turn on each other, more blacklist hypocrisy, where has all the phytoplankton gone?, happy 35th birthday global warming, and the skeptic debunk of the week.

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This week: The US Senate surrender, denynig the undeniable, deniers turn on each other, more blacklist hypocrisy, where has all the phytoplankton gone?, happy 35th birthday global warming, and the skeptic debunk of the week. Irregular Climate is now accepting donations. Feedback is always appreciated.

This week: Some good news, and some sad news, IOP oh no!, it’s not about saving the planet, the skeptic debunk of the week and Ken Cuccinelli doesn’t know when to quit

Irregular Climate is now accepting donations.
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This week: Some good news, and some sad news, IOP oh no!, it’s not about saving the planet, the skeptic debunk of the week and Ken Cuccinelli doesn’t know when to quit Irregular Climate is now accepting donations. Feedback is always appreciated.

This week: Journalismgate, Cuccinelli strikes back, Prawngate, and the skeptic debunk of the week!

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This week: Journalismgate, Cuccinelli strikes back, Prawngate, and the skeptic debunk of the week! Irregular Climate is now accepting donations. Feedback is always appreciated.

This week: An assessment of the assessment, The exoneration of Mann, The final nail in the climategate coffin, bad reporting, dishonesty and hate, and the skeptic debunk of the week!

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This week: An assessment of the assessment, The exoneration of Mann, The final nail in the climategate coffin, bad reporting, dishonesty and hate, and the skeptic debunk of the week! Irregular Climate is now accepting donations. Feedback is always appreciated.

This week: Money minds its own business, Oh No! It’s Monckton again!, Where do the deniers keep their skepticism?, My blacklist is longer than yours, Godwin’s law, Blacklist paper wrap up, The word is authority, but who has it (and where did they get it?), The skeptic debunk of the week

Irregular Climate is now accepting donations.
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This week: Money minds its own business, Oh No! It’s Monckton again!, Where do the deniers keep their skepticism?, My blacklist is longer than yours, Godwin’s law, Blacklist paper wrap up, The word is authority, but who has it (and where did they get it?), The skeptic debunk of the week Irregular Climate is now [...]

This week: EPA says CO2 reduction is cheap, Idiot politician of the week, Expert credibility on climate change, lying deniers, A 5 month old apology from the Sunday Times, lies polls and damned lying polls, the skeptic debunk of the week, whale poop and carbon dioxide.

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This week: EPA says CO2 reduction is cheap, Idiot politician of the week, Expert credibility on climate change, lying deniers, A 5 month old apology from the Sunday Times, lies polls and damned lying polls, the skeptic debunk of the week, whale poop and carbon dioxide. Irregular Climate is now accepting donations. Feedback is always appreciated.

This week: The Bonn talk-fest, Lindsey Graham’s flip-flop, Respect the EPA’s authority, Biodiversity at the UN, Lawyers don’t do science, and the skeptic debunk of the week

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This week: The Bonn talk-fest, Lindsey Graham’s flip-flop, Respect the EPA’s authority, Biodiversity at the UN, Lawyers don’t do science, and the skeptic debunk of the week Irregular Climate is now accepting donations. Comments on the new format (the music and co-host) are welcome.

This week: The great co-host experiment, Cuccinelli vs Mann, warming of the oceans, melting glaciers, shape-shifting islands, Lord Monckton is wrong, the idiot politician of the week, and grasping at 4th grade straws.

Irregular Climate is now accepting donations.
Comments on the new format (the music and co-host) are welcome.

This week: The great co-host experiment, Cuccinelli vs Mann, warming of the oceans, melting glaciers, shape-shifting islands, Lord Monckton is wrong, the idiot politician of the week, and grasping at 4th grade straws. Irregular Climate is now accepting donations. Comments on the new format (the music and co-host) are welcome.

This week: More skeptisim vs Denialism, Attribution, Denialism in the Chicago Tribune, The Skeptic debunk of the week

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This week: More skeptisim vs Denialism, Attribution, Denialism in the Chicago Tribune, The Skeptic debunk of the week Irregular Climate needs your help!

The first Episode of Irregular Climate has been released! Get it here.

This week: Skeptics vs Deniers, Malaria, Scientists fighting back, Greenland rising , dead deniers at SEPP and the denier facepalm of the week!

This is the first episode so expect glitches!

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The first Episode of Irregular Climate has been released! Get it here. This week: Skeptics vs Deniers, Malaria, Scientists fighting back, Greenland rising , dead deniers at SEPP and the denier facepalm of the week! This is the first episode so expect glitches! Irregular Climate needs your help! Show notes available here.

The Economist revisits the incarceration debate:

Using more recent data, Bert Useem of Purdue University and Anne Piehl of Rutgers University estimate that a 10% increase in the number of people behind bars would reduce crime by only 0.5%. In the states that currently lock up the most people, imprisoning more would actually increase crime, they believe. Some inmates emerge from prison as more accomplished criminals. And raising the incarceration rate means locking up people who are, on average, less dangerous than the ones already behind bars. A recent study found that, over the past 13 years, the proportion of new prisoners in Florida who had committed violent crimes fell by 28%, whereas those inside for “other” crimes shot up by 189%. These “other” crimes were non-violent ones involving neither drugs nor theft, such as driving with a suspended licence.

Yglesias advocates the Kleiman approach.

Prison - Crime - Rutgers University - Violent crime - Purdue University

That would be tough. She's written a diatribe in the NY Times on the Pepsico debacle, and it isn't just that she doesn't like many of the scienceblogs (including yours truly), but that she gets the facts wrong.

This was just bizarre.

I was nonplussed by the high dudgeon of the so-called SciBlings. The bloggers evidently write often enough for ad-free academic journals that they still fume about adjacencies, advertorial and infomercials. Most writers for "legacy" media like newspapers, magazines and TV see brush fires over business-editorial crossings as an occupational hazard. They don't quit anytime there's an ad that looks so much like an article it has to be marked "this is an advertisement."

Errm, many of the early departures in the wake of Pepsico were science journalist/bloggers — and the impression I got was that they were more concerned about the ethics of advertorials than the pure science bloggers. And the problem with the Pepsico blog was that it was an ad that looked much like an article but wasn't marked "this is an advertisement".

There is much in her rant that is clearly outrage that some of us (uh, yours truly again) have no sympathy for religious excuses, or indulge in "religion-baiting" as she calls it, but I'll pass over that — atheist-haters are dime-a-dozen, and it's not even particularly notable. But this final bit is absurd and discredits her completely: she lists some blogs she favors for her version of 'science'.

For science that's accessible but credible, steer clear of polarizing hatefests like atheist or eco-apocalypse blogs. Instead, check out scientificamerican.com, discovermagazine.com and Anthony Watts's blog, Watts Up With That?

The first two are fine, but seriously: the pretentious weatherman who jiggers the evidence and makes up stuff about climate to deny the facts? If only she would have also mentioned a creationist blog or two, it would have made my day.

Skip Heffernan's ignorant noise. David Dobbs has a more judicious reply.

Read the comments on this post...

CHARTS showing the warming of the Earth normally look like spaghetti thrown across the page. This chart, adapted from a compendious “State of the climate” report published by America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week, simplifies things by offering only decadal averages, and making clear the uncertainties by showing the 95% confidence ranges on those averages.

More daily charts

NEW WEBSITE
NEW WEBSITE
NEW WEBSITE
With phyloplankton levels crashing, threatening the entire marine food chain, maybe more marine creatures should follow this whales example with a spot of direct action

Obama must take a different tack, says economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, writing in the Guardian. The President has been pursuing a failed strategy of negotiating with senators and key industries to try to forge an agreement, making no headway in the back rooms of the White House and Congress. What he should have done, and still should do, is to present a coherent plan to the American people.

“He should propose a sound strategy over the next 20 years for reducing America’s dependence on fossil fuels, converting to electric vehicles, and expanding non-carbon energy sources such as solar and wind power. He could then present an estimated price tag for phasing in these changes over time, and demonstrate that the costs would be modest compared to the enormous benefits.”

The candidate of change has not presented real plans of action for change. Sachs charges that the administration is in the paralysing grip of special-interest groups. He’s not sure whether this is an intended outcome to secure large campaign donations or just the result of poor decision-making, or maybe a bit of both.

Sachs has several things to say leading up to his urging a presidential plan. He opens with a blunt statement. “All signs suggest that the planet is still hurtling headlong toward climatic disaster.” Yet we still fail to act.

He identifies three major challenges which make action difficult.  First, energy and agriculture (including deforestation to create new farmland) are the two principal sources of emissions, and they are two economic sectors which stand at the centre of the global economy and involve the whole world’s population. It’s no small matter to change those systems.

The second challenge is the complexity of the science, involving many thousands of scientists in all parts of the world. Uncertainties attend the precise magnitude, timing, and dangers of climate change. The general public has difficulty grappling with this complexity and uncertainty, especially as changes occur over a timetable of decades and centuries rather than months and years, and are intermixed with natural variations.

The third problem arises from a combination of the economic implications and the uncertainties of the science. It is the “brutal, destructive campaign” against climate science by powerful vested interests and ideologues, aimed at creating an atmosphere of ignorance and confusion. Major oil companies and other corporates have financed disreputable PR campaigns, exaggerating the uncertainties and absurdly charging that climate scientists are engaged in some kind of conspiracy to frighten the public.

Sachs attacks the Wall Street Journal’s aggressive editorial campaign against climate science, which has been running for decades:

“The individuals involved in this campaign are not only scientifically uninformed, but show absolutely no interest in becoming better informed. They have turned down repeated offers by climate scientists to meet and conduct serious discussions about the issues.”

There is a fourth over-arching problem — the unwillingness or inability of US politicians to formulate a sensible climate-change policy, despite America’s central role in global emissions. When Obama was elected he clearly wanted to move forward on this issue, but will not be able to do so on the path so far chosen.

Sachs’ comment seemed to me to say all the important things with clarity and precision. And he’s in no doubt about what is at stake. We are courting disaster.

“Nature doesn’t care about our political machinations. And nature is telling us that our current economic model is dangerous and self-defeating. Unless we find some real global leadership in the next few years, we will learn that lesson in the hardest ways possible.”

Sachs is no intellectual lightweight. His books The End of Poverty and Common Wealth have been widely read.  He has twice been named as one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2004 and 2005. The clear perception he displays of the central issues of climate change for the US must surely represent a substantial body of educated American opinion. Alas, not yet substantial enough. For the present the babble of denial and delay prevails.

More than 75 per cent of group surveyed do not believe it’s good policy to replace mandatory long-form census with a voluntary household survey

This is the final instalment in a series of posts documenting dubious scholarship and unattributed sources in the background chapter of the touchstone of climate contrarians known as the Wegman Report. That report has been touted as Exhibit A proving the “destruction” of Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph by self-styled climate auditor Steve McIntyre.

Previously, I found extensive passages bearing “striking similarity” to a classic text by the distinguished paleoclimatologist (and “hockey stick” co-author) Raymond Bradley in the background sections on tree rings and on ice cores. Subsequently, the background section on social networks was found to contain material apparently drawn without attribution from a variety of sources, including Wikipedia and several text books.

This time, I’m looking at section 2.2 (see Wegman Report PDF at p. 15), which gives the background of key statistical concepts, including Principal Component Analysis. Astonishingly, even this section appears to contain a significant amount of unattributed material from other sources, although quite a bit less than the other sections. Again, Wikipedia appears to be a key source, along with a couple of text books.

I’ll also introduce some refinements to the text analysis, based largely on John Mashey’s recent innovations. Those refinements allow a better characterization of the relationship between various passages in Wegman et al and their apparent antecedents, as well as permitting a quantitative analysis based on word counts.

Despite my relative success in adducing the antecedents for other background sections, for some time I avoided serious sustained sleuthing on section 2.2, which describes Principal Component Analysis and time series noise models. Surely this background section, at least, was well within the authors’ ambit of expertise and there would be no need to borrow liberally without attribution.

Still, like much of the report, there were no citations at all. So eventually, I did make the attempt, but my initial efforts yielded only one passage of “striking similarity” – the “colors of noise” passage also found in Wikipedia, as discussed in this comment back in April.

Recently, though, inspired by John Mashey’s research into other parts of the report, I tried again, this time searching for smaller blocks of text. In the end, no fewer than nine possible unattributed sources have been identified (see the list at the end of the full textual side-by-side comparison with identified possible antecedents). In general, there were even more slight changes and rearrangements of the various sources than seen in previously analyzed sections, making detection of those possible antecedents more difficult.

In fact, to evaluate just how “strikingly similar” some of the newly discovered passages were, refinement of the analysis techniques became necessary. Borrowing Mashey’s concept of “longest common sub-sequence”, I highlighted exactly identical text in cyan in both source and target text, while taking care to separate the blocks where the text was rearranged or separated by changed text.

Next, trivial changes were highlighted with yellow. These are slight changes of tense, number or voice (i.e. active to passive), as well as substitution of synonyms or similar sounding words. Finally, changes or additions that introduced issues were underlined; these issues might be a simple trivial error, a change in meaning or even the introduction of distortion or bias.

Now let’s look at some examples (each of these can be found in the side-by-side comparison or Cmp for short, on the page noted). I’ll start with the above-mentioned “colors of noise” passage.

Here is the first sentence from the Wikipedia article Colors of Noise (from April 12, 2006):

There are many forms of noise with various frequency characteristics that are classified by “color”.

The corresponding sentence in  Wegman et al (at p. 15, Cmp p. 2) is:

There are many types of noise with varying frequencies each classified by a color.

The errors introduced by the changes are perhaps not serious, but they do bespeak a possible lack of understanding by the responsible author. (“Varying frequencies” implies that each type of noise would have a single dominant distinguishing frequency, while the change from color in quotes to “a color” obfuscates the conceptual nature of the classification).

The changes in the next two sentences are mainly removal of text, shown with strikeout (so we’ll show the original Wikipedia version only):

The color names for these different types of sounds are derived from an analogy between the spectrum of frequencies of sound wave present in the sound (as shown in the blue diagrams) and the equivalent spectrum of light wave frequencies. That is, if the sound wave pattern of “blue noise“ were translated into light waves, the resulting light would be blue, and so on

Clearly, the above three sentences in Wegman et al, taken together, have a very convincing and striking similarity with the Wikipedia passage. Even the reference to “sounds” has been left as is, instead of the obvious change to a more general term , such as “signal”. All the same, the identical text has been broken up into no less than eight separate sub-blocks.

Things get even more interesting in our next example (Wegman p. 17, Cmp p. 4). Here is the passage from Wegman et al. describing “long memory” processes:

Random (or stochastic) processes whose autocorrelation function, decaying as a power law, sums to infinity are known as long range correlations or long range dependent processes. Because the decay is slow, as opposed to exponential decay, these processes are said to have long memory. Applications exhibiting long-range dependence include Ethernet traffic, financial time series, geophysical time series such as variation in temperature, and amplitude and frequency variation in EEG signals.

The apparent (but unattributed) antecedent is from the introduction to Processes with long-range correlations: theory and applications, edited by Govindan Rangarajan and Mingzhou Ding):

Processes with long range correlations (also called long range dependent processes) occur ubiquitously in nature. They are defined as random stochastic processes whose autocorrelation function, decaying as a power law in the lag variable for large lag values, sums to infinity. Because of this slow decay (as opposed to an exponential decay), these processes are also said to have long memory. … A partial list of problems involving long range dependence include: Anomalous diffusion, potential energy fluctuations in small atomic clusters, Ethernet traffic, geophysical time series such as variation in temperature and rainfall records, financial time series, electronic device noises in field effect and bipolar transistors, and amplitude and frequency variation in music, EEG signals etc. …

The similarity is obvious from the sheer amount of highlighted text. But the degree of rearrangement of text is staggering; so much so, that one assumes that the passage may have been edited a few times. This short passage contains no fewer than 18 rearranged separate blocks of identical text, some consisting of only a single word of two. For example, “Because of this slow decay” becomes “Because the decay is slow”, with all three common words – “because”, “decay” and “slow” – rearranged and separated by trivially changed words.

As before, a couple of surprising errors have been introduced. For one thing, the processes discussed are not themselves “long range correlations”; rather they are processes with long range correlations.

The next example (a Wikipedia article on Self-similarity) is included more for amusement than anything else.

A self-similar object is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself.. … Many objects in the real world, such as coastlines , are statistically self-similar: parts of them show the same statistical properties at many scales. Self-similarity is a typical property of fractals.

Wegman et al’s version is very similar, but not quite the same (Wegman et al, p. 17, Cmp p. 5):

An object with self-similarity is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself. For example, many coastlines in the real world are self-similar since parts of them show the same properties at many scales. Self-similarity is a common property of many fractals …

Our final example actually comes from the beginning of the section (Wegman et al, p. 15; PDF, p. 1).

Principal component analysis tries to reduce the dimensionality of this data set while also trying to explain the variation present as much as possible. To achieve this, the original set of variables is transformed into a new set of variables, called the principal components (PC) that are uncorrelated and arranged in the order of decreasing “explained variance.” It is hoped that the first several PCs explain most of the variation that was present in the many original variables.

Some readers might recognize the similar text from the Introduction of Ian Jolliffe’s classic Principal Component Analysis.

The central idea of principal component analysis (PCA) is to reduce the dimensionality of a data set consisting of a large number of interrelated variables, while retaining as much as possible of the variation present in the data set. This is achieved by transforming to a new set of variables, the principal components (PCs), which are uncorrelated and which are ordered so that the first few retain most of the variation present in all of the original variables. [p. 2] … but it is hoped, in general, that most of the variation in x will be accounted for by m PCs, where m << p.

At first glance, this example might be considered more of a paraphrased definition, and perhaps not as questionable as the other examples. On the other hand, consider the juxtaposition of the following identical key phrases, present in both versions:

• “Principal component analysis”
• “to reduce the dimensionality of”
• “the variation present”
• “a new set of variables”
• “as much as possible”
• “are uncorrelated”
• “it is hoped”

A Google search on this set of phrases returns only a handful of hits, including the Jolliffe text itself, Wegman et al and a smattering of others attributing the passage to Jolliffe. It seems implausible, then, that this passage was not directly inspired by Jolliffe. As such, it definitely should have been attributed and probably the original should have been block-quoted.

Of course, PCA is at the heart of the McIntyre critique of the work of Mann, Bradley and Hughes and therefore of Wegman et al. The short description above refers to the possibility that the first few principal components (PCs) might “account for” or “explain” most of the variation in the original larger data set. This implies that enough PCs must be retained to accomplish this. Normally at least enough PCs to account for most of the original data set’s variance should be retained, and typically other conditions (such as convergence upon retention of successive PCs) would be imposed.

[Update, July 31: In fact, the 2002 edition of Jolliffe's text (which remains the foremost refernce on PCA), contains a vastly expanded chapter on the topic of retention of PCs. It describes a number of rules, some "ad hoc" (but plausible and highly useful) and some statistically based. There's even a section on the retention rules used in atmospheric sciences in which Preisendorfer and Mobley's Principal Component Analysis in Meteorology and Oceanography figures prominently. Variations of "Preisendorfer's rule N" are discussed.]

Tellingly, Wegman et al never once discuss this crucial aspect of PCA, even though a thorough examination of the issue of PC retention criteria was  a key element in the most extensive peer-reviewed critique of McIntyre and McKitrick’s work, namely that found in  Wahl and Ammann’s Robustness of the Mann, Bradley, Hughes reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures (Climatic Change 2007).

But that is a discussion for another time. For now, I’ll conclude by presenting overall metrics that show some interesting contrasts between the various sections of chapter 2. These metrics  are based on word counts (WC).

The percentage of “strikingly similar” (SS) is simply based on the word count of passages with identified antecedents, relative to the overall word count. The next two columns show the percentage of combined identical and trivially changed text (ID+TC), and the percentage of identical text alone. The average identical text block length (BL) is calculated by ascertaining the total word count of identical text and dividing by the number of separate blocks of identical (ID) text in the target text. Thus it is an indicator of the amount of change and rearrangement that may have occurred.

Finally, the Src column shows the number of apparent antecedent sources and the Issues column shows the number of issues, both major (in bold) and minor (in normal typeface). As previously noted, these typically involve changes in meaning and errors.

Section	WC	SS	ID+TC	ID	BL	Src	Issues
2.1 Tree rings [Cmp]	703	67%	51%	38%	2.9	1	8, 3
2.1 Ice cores & corals [Cmp]	335	93%	90%	65%	4.8	1	0, 1
2.2 PCA and stats  [Cmp]	1200	32%	28%	26%	4.3	9	0, 4
2.3 Social networks [Cmp]	2351	87%	85%	76%	8.8	3	0, 8

As can be seen, all these metrics have also been generated for the previously analyzed background sections, along with links to the original discussions and updated colour-coded side-by-side comparisons.

The tree ring section is notable for the relatively large amount of added and changed material, both within and outside of the “strikingly similar” passages. This, along with the large number of major issues, could reflect the special attention paid to this section and the apparent introduction of key distortions that undermine the original source, Raymond Bradley’s classic Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary. (By the way, Chapter 10 is available once more online as a PDF at Keith Briffa’s web page).

In contrast, the section on ice cores and corals introduced many trivial changes, but with little change in meaning.

The social networks section (2.3) clearly has the most “strikingly similar” material. Moreover, the “striking similar” passages contain little new material, consisting almost entirely of identical or trivially changed text. The relatively large block size (almost 9 words) would appear to suggest that this section underwent less extensive editing, although numerous trivial changes are scattered throughout.

Finally, the PCA and noise model section discussed above clearly contains the least “strikingly similar” material. But the surprise here is that there is any at all. Not only that, but changes made by Wegman et al have apparently introduced errors. Moreover, the sheer number of apparent sources and relative brevity of the antecedent passages means that additional antecedents can not be ruled out.

Nevertheless, this likely brings to a close my examination of the unattributed sources in the background chapter of the Wegman report, now that I have covered each of the three sections from that perspective. But that does not mean we are done with the report as a whole, or even the background chapter – far from it.

Future posts will cover such topics as Wegman’s “trick to hide the deletion” of Wahl and Ammann’s critique of  McIntyre and McKitrick, as well as a discussion of the supposed “peer review” of the Wegman report, which Wegman claimed was “similar” to that of the National Research Council (which produced a competing report from a distinguished team led by Gerald North). I’ll also revisit the tree-ring section, but this time focusing on the serious issues raised by Wegman et al’s  changes and omissions, relative to Bradley’s original.

And, very soon now, John Mashey will present his exhaustive investigation of other aspects of “strange” scholarship in the Wegman Report, including a jaw-dropping analysis of the “Summaries of Important Papers” and a complete breakdown of all references and citations. So stay tuned; there’s plenty more on the way.

========================================

References:

1. Edward J. Wegman, David W. Scott and Yasmin H. Said; Ad Hoc Committee Report on the “Hockey Stick” Reconstruction A Report to Chairman Barton, House Committee on Energy and Commerce and to Chairman Whitfield, House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, 2006. [PDF]

2. Ian T. Jolliffe, Principal Component Analysis (Springer, 2nd ed. 2002)

3. Wikipedia article – Color of Noise (April 12, 2006 version) – Available online at: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colors_of_noise&oldid=48074859

4. Govindan Rangarajan, Mingzhou Ding (ed..), Processes with long-range correlations: theory and applications (Springer, 2003)

5. Wikipedia article – Self-similarity (Mar. 20, 2006 version) – Available online at: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Self-similarity&oldid=44580086

Detailed comparisons of Wegman Report section 2.2 to these apparent antecedents, as well as other Wikipedia articles, are found in:

A comparison of Ad Hoc Committee Report (Wegman, Scott, Said) section 2.2, p.15-17 and Various unattributed sources on statistics and noise models  [PDF]

Ken Green and his coauthor Hiwa Alaghebandian have gone out and collected data to support their proposition that science is "turning authoritarian". This is an admirable first step, but let's apply a bit of skepticism and see where it goes.

Here's the data:



Now, the first thing I note is that all the curves are pretty much the same shape just with different scaling. So perhaps the size of the data set grows over time.

Yet G & A proceed to claim that "Some of this may simply reflect the general growth of media output and the growth of new media, but if that were the case, we would expect all of the terms to have shown similar growth, which they do not." But, um, they do. Well, these guys don't look at charts and graphs all that much, perhaps they've never thought about what that might look like. But anyway, the way they eliminate "general growth" is, um, how to put this charitably, "exactly wrong".

Anyway, the next question, of course, is whether the language is being used in the way they suggest. Their own examples are far from convincing on this score.

The climate community is probably the biggest user of the authoritarian voice, with frequent pronouncements that “the science says we must limit atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to 350 parts per million,” or some dire outcome will eventuate. Friends of the Earth writes, “For example, science tells us we must reduce our global greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous climate change.” America’s climate change negotiator in Copenhagen is quoted by World Wildlife Fund as saying, “China must do significantly more if we are to have a chance to solve the problem and to arrive at an international agreement that achieves what science tells us we must.” Science as dictator—not a pretty sight.

If science wants to redeem itself and regain its place with the public’s affection, scientists need to come out every time some politician says, “The science says we must…” and reply, “Science only tells us what is. It does not, and can never tell us what we should or must do.

But the example "China must do significantly more if we are to have a chance to solve the problem" is not an instruction, it is a statement of fact: consequence X cannot be avoided without action Y. "For example, science tells us we must reduce our global greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous climate change" can at least be read that way. Are these authoritaruan statements? No, they are claims of fact. They don't tell you you must avoid consequence X; they tell you that if you want to avoid consequence X, then Y is required.

So let's look for ourselves. Those of us who don't have Lexis/Nexis kind of bucks are no longer at a great disadvantage; we can ask the Google/Oogle.

And the great Oogle Bird reveals two things. The first, not unexpected, is that there are plenty of other ways you can use the phrases:

"Science requires faith"

"Science requires interpretation"

"Science requires mathematics"

"Lithuanian law on science requires online access for publicly-funded research"

"Computer Science requires critical thinking skills"

"that if the law differs from what cognitive science tells us, we should change the law to conform to the “objective” truth of the human brain"

"The increase in global temperature is consistent with what science tells us we should expect"

"That's what all the science tells us we should expect"

"But Occam's razor (a standard paradigm in science) tells us we should pick the simplest model that is consistent with the data"

So phrase counts themselves don;t tell the whole stories.

But that was to be expected. What I did not expect was how very few hits Google had. On the exact phrase "science tells us we should" (using quote delimiters) Google had exactly 49 hits, perhaps a quarter of them referring to Green and Alaghebandian either directly or at one remove, (and another quarter absurdly off topic in one way or another). So we are looking at two dozen hits from google. I can't see how this is consistent with 1500 per year from Lexis,

Note that the curves are nearly monotonic: you might even suspect that these numbers are cumulative except for the declines in 2003 and 2006. I would like to see these results reproduced (not just replicated) before I would recommend putting much credence into them.

But what is this all about anyway? It's true enough that "science tells us we should" seems to be applied to environmental issues and climate issues in particular, in the rare cases it's used. And it's clear that this is usually expressed by a nonscientist. So the nonscientist may be respecting authority, but there is no sign of an exercise or assertion of power.

Why should there be? The question comes down to the purpose of expertise. Science itself, in the pure form, is and should be value neutral. Science-based advice cannot be. In other words, expertise is one thing, and expert advice is another thing. There can be expertise without expert advice, but there cannot be expert advice without expertise. Exactly what words the expert uses, or even exactly what words the person taking the advice uses, is hairsplitting.

Many of the ideas from our critics have a dreamlike, bizarre quality to them. Apparently, Phil Jones has been doing what he has been doing because that is how to become a modern Napoleon; you collate thermometers. Before you know it you will rule the world.

Right. A good theory, demonstrated beyond doubt by a clever Lexis search. That explains everything except the 99 degree temperature in Helsinki yesterday. That and why Google only got 49 hits on their most prominent phrase.

What it really means is that freedom is just another word for ignoring informed opinion when it suits you. I guess that's why they need those think tanks. If they weren't in a heavily armored vehicle they wouldn't last five minutes in fair combat. But give them some credit. They drew a graph. That's progress...

The NOAA State of the Climate 2009 report is an excellent summary of the many lines of evidence that global warming is happening. Acknowledging the fact that the planet is warming leads to the all important question - what's causing global warming? To answer this, here is a summary of the empirical evidence that answer this question. Many different observations find a distinct human fingerprint on climate change:

To get a closer look, click on the pic above to get a high-rez 1024x768 version (you're all welcome to use this graphic in your Powerpoint presentations). Or to dig even deeper, here's more info on each indicator (including links to the original data or peer-reviewed research):

1. Humans are currently emitting around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere (CDIAC). Of course, it could be coincidence that CO2 levels are rising so sharply at the same time so let's look at more evidence that we're responsible for the rise in CO2 levels.
   
2. When we measure the type of carbon accumulating in the atmosphere, we observe more of the type of carbon that comes from fossil fuels (Manning 2006).
3. This is corroborated by measurements of oxygen in the atmosphere. Oxygen levels are falling in line with the amount of carbon dioxide rising, just as you'd expect from fossil fuel burning which takes oxygen out of the air to create carbon dioxide (Manning 2006).
4. Further independent evidence that humans are raising CO2 levels comes from measurements of carbon found in coral records going back several centuries. These find a recent sharp rise in the type of carbon that comes from fossil fuels (Pelejero 2005).
5. So we know humans are raising CO2 levels. What's the effect? Satellites measure less heat escaping out to space, at the particular wavelengths that CO2 absorbs heat, thus finding "direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect". (Harries 2001, Griggs 2004, Chen 2007).
6. If less heat is escaping to space, where is it going? Back to the Earth's surface. Surface measurements confirm this, observing more downward infrared radiation (Philipona 2004, Wang 2009). A closer look at the downward radiation finds more heat returning at CO2 wavelengths, leading to the conclusion that "this experimental data should effectively end the argument by skeptics that no experimental evidence exists for the connection between greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere and global warming." (Evans 2006).
7. If an increased greenhouse effect is causing global warming, we should see certain patterns in the warming. For example, the planet should warm faster at night than during the day. This is indeed being observed (Braganza 2004, Alexander 2006).
8. Another distinctive pattern of greenhouse warming is cooling in the upper atmosphere, otherwise known as the stratosphere. This is exactly what's happening (Jones 2003).
   
9. With the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) warming and the upper atmosphere (the stratophere) cooling, another consequence is the boundary between the troposphere and stratophere, otherwise known as the tropopause, should rise as a consequence of greenhouse warming. This has been observed (Santer 2003).
   
10. An even higher layer of the atmosphere, the ionosphere, is expected to cool and contract in response to greenhouse warming. This has been observed by satellites (Laštovi?ka 2006).
    

Science isn't a house of cards, ready to topple if you remove one line of evidence. Instead, it's like a jigsaw puzzle. As the body of evidence builds, we get a clearer picture of what's driving our climate. We now have many lines of evidence all pointing to a single, consistent answer - the main driver of global warming is rising carbon dioxide levels from our fossil fuel burning.

EPA determined in December 2009 that climate change caused by emissions of greenhouse gases threatens the public’s health and the environment. Since then, EPA received ten petitions challenging this determination. On July 29, 2010, EPA denied these petitions.

The petitions to reconsider EPA’s “Endangerment Finding” claimed that climate science can’t be trusted, and asserted a conspiracy that calls into question the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. After months of serious consideration of the petitions and of the state of climate change science, EPA found no evidence to support these claims.

The scientific evidence supporting EPA’s finding is robust, voluminous, and compelling. Climate change is happening now, and humans are contributing to it. Multiple lines of evidence show a global warming trend over the past 100 years. Beyond this, melting ice in the Arctic, melting glaciers around the world, increasing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, altered precipitation patterns, and shifting patterns of ecosystems and wildlife habitats all confirm that our climate is changing.

That’s the EPA today in its “Denial of Petitions for Reconsideration of the Endangerment.”  See, there can be science-based denial after all!  Nick Sundt has a good post on this, reprinted below:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today (29 July 2010) denied petitions challenging the scientific basis of its finding in December 2009  that greenhouse gases (GHGs) endanger the health and welfare of Americans.  The EPA said the science was strong when it issued its finding late last year, and that it has “been reinforced by recent additional major science assessments and individual studies.”  The agency announced its decision just a day after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released State of the Climate in 2009 , adding to the growing mountain of evidence that climate change is underway (see In “State of the Climate” Report, Scientists from All Continents Confirm that Climate Change is Underway ).

“The EPA’s response to the petitions is the strongest and most detailed rebuttal by the U.S. Government of specific arguments levied against climate change science – and scientists – since late 2009. We applaud the administration for taking on the denialists head on and clearly conveying the urgency of acting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and preparing ourselves immediately for the disruptive and potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change,” said Keya Chatterjee, acting Director of WWF’s Climate Change Program.

Immediately after the EPA issued its Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (its “Endangerment Finding”) on 7 December (see U.S. EPA: Greenhouse Gases “Threaten the Public Health and Welfare of the American People,” 7 Dec 2009), climate change denialists filed petitions requesting that EPA reconsider its finding.  The EPA received petitions from the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, Commonwealth of Virginia (see our posting,  Virginia Researchers and Planners Warn of Climate Change Impacts on Coastal Areas, As Attorney General Challenges the Science, 23 Feb 2010), Competitive Enterprise Institute, Ohio Coal Association, Pacific Legal Foundation, Peabody Energy Company, Southeastern Legal Foundation, State of Texas, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and one private citizen.

According to the EPA, the petitioners “argued that the science underlying EPA’s determination is flawed or that the review process has been corrupted.”  The agency formally announced today that it found “that the evidence provided does not support these claims.”

Here are a few highlights of the decision, as summarized in a fact sheet [PDF] issued by EPA today.  References to the CRU are to the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom:

• “Petitioners questioned the reliability of the global temperature record and the finding that observed recent warming is unusual and based on increasing levels of greenhouse gases. However, three global temperature records—including CRU’s—indicate increasing temperatures, and there are other lines of evidence, such as rising sea levels, linking recent global warming to human activities. Petitioners’ criticisms of the CRU record are unfounded and speculative. “
• “Petitioners asserted that warming has slowed or stopped over the last decade, contrary to scientists’ expectations, and in spite of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In reality, the last decade was warmer than the previous decade, and warming has not stopped. Climate change is a long-term phenomenon, unlike day-to-day variations in weather. Thus, climate change trends should be discussed over the long term, as opposed to on a year-by-year or even a decade-by-decade basis.”
• “Petitioners claim that new studies not previously considered contradict key conclusions in the Endangerment Finding. EPA examined each of these new studies and documented that they neither undermine the key scientific findings nor change the scientific basis for the Endangerment Finding.”
• “Petitioners claimed that recently found and alleged errors in IPCC’s [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Fourth Assessment Report undermine IPCC’s credibility, and by extension, EPA’s use of the report as a reference document. EPA has carefully reviewed each of the alleged errors. Collectively, they are minor and have no bearing on the Endangerment Finding, are not relied on by EPA to support the Finding, or are actually not errors. The very few factual errors in a document the size of IPCC’s 3,000-page Fourth Assessment Report do not substantiate petitioners’ claim that IPCC science, as a whole, is not credible.“
• “Petitioners asserted that the IPCC has a policy agenda and is not an objective scientific body. EPA finds that this assertion is not backed up by credible evidence. The Agency has carefully examined the extensive process used by IPCC as well as the U.S. government’s approach to approving IPCC documents, and found that they are well grounded and based on science rather than policy considerations.“
• “Petitioners claimed that the scientific assessments of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the National Academy of Sciences are not separate and independent assessments from IPCC. This is not correct. Each of these organizations is separately administered and relies on its own scientific processes and collaborating scientists. That similar and consistent conclusions are reached by each body does not substantiate the petitioners’ claim. To the contrary, when independent institutions reach similar findings, it strengthens confidence in those findings.“
• “Petitioners asserted that improper data sharing, peer review, and editorial practices biased the underlying scientific literature used by the major assessments. EPA finds that this assertion of an extensive, concerted effort to manipulate peer-reviewed literature is unsupported. The CRU e-mails, for example, show a small group of scientists privately discussing their scientific views of a handful of papers. The petitioners raised concerns that certain research papers were kept out of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, but these concerns are unfounded; the papers did appear in the IPCC assessment.”
• “Several independent committees have examined many of the same allegations brought forward by the petitioners as a result of the disclosure of the private CRU e-mails. Their conclusions are consistent with EPA’s review and analysis. The independent inquiries have found no evidence of intentional data manipulation on the part of the climate researchers associated with the e-mails.“

Congressional Efforts to Obstruct EPA’s Ability to Protect Americans’ Health and Welfare Under the Clean Air Act

As EPA was considering the petitions challenging its endangerment finding, some in Congress have sought to obstruct EPA through legislation.  On 10 June the Senate debated and defeated S.J.Res.26 (Murkowski Resolution), a resolution that would have effectively vetoed EPA’s endangerment finding.  Russell Train, WWF’s Founder and Chairman Emeritus, and EPA administrator during the Nixon and Ford administrations responded at the time:

“Today, the Senate rightly rejected a proposal to overturn science and replace it with politics. The resolution offered by Senator Murkowski would have undermined the authority of the EPA and its ability to protect the health and welfare of the American people. That the Senate would even consider taking such a step when the nation is facing the most destructive environmental disaster in its history, is nothing less than outrageous. The last thing the senators should be doing at this moment is attempting to weaken longstanding environmental laws. I commend those senators who voted to preserve the role of science in critically important environmental decisions, and I urge all senators to now refocus their time and energy on real solutions to our current challenges. In particular, the Senate should now work with vigor and urgency to pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation that will break our oil addiction and place firm limits on fossil fuel pollution. In doing so, it should preserve the essential tools that are provided to the EPA under the Clean Air Act.”

“The defeat of the Murkowski resolution is a victory for sound science,” said Lou Leonard, WWF’s Director of US Climate Policy.  “Only in Washington could the Senate waste precious time debating the basic science of climate change on the same day that NASA announced the warmest spring in recorded history. But this vote should finally allow us to move on from political attacks on science to creating solutions that break our addiction to oil and other dirty fuels and move America to a clean energy economy. “

Though the legislative effort to veto EPA’s endangerment finding failed, there are other efforts being made in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to impede EPA’s effort to execute the provisions of the Clean Air Act as they relate to greenhouse gas emissions.  These include measures that would delay for years EPA action under the act.  Given the current prospects of comprehensive energy and climate legislation in the Senate (see WWF Statement on Senate’s Failure to Pass Clean Energy & Climate Legislation, 27 July 2010), it will be especially important to maintain progress under the Clean Air Act to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

“The EPA just reconfirmed that climate change is a danger to public health,” said Keya Chatterjee.  “Despite the dangers of inaction, last week the Senate failed to act in the interests of the public and advance climate and clean energy legislation.  It is now even more urgent that EPA continue to commit itself to acting on climate change and that Congress zealously protect EPA’s capacity to address the problem under the Clean Air Act.”

– This article is reposted from the World Wildlife Foundation Climate Blog.

Related Resources from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:

• Denial of Petitions for Reconsideration of the Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act
  • Decision document: Pre-publication copy of FR Notice (PDF) (217 pp, 536K)
  • Preface (PDF) (7 pp, 39K)
  • Volume 1: Climate Science and Data Issues Raised by Petitioners (PDF) (166 pp, 1.2MB)
  • Volume 2: Issues Raised by Petitioners on EPA’s Use of IPCC (PDF) (84 pp, 368K)
  • Volume 3: Process Issues Raised by Petitioners (PDF) (116 pp, 575K)
• Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act.
• Petitions for Reconsideration of the Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act.

Scientists may have found the most devastating impact yet of human-caused global warming — a 40% decline in phytoplankton since 1950 linked to the rise in ocean sea surface temperatures.  If confirmed, it may represent the single most important finding of the year in climate science.

The headlines above are from an appropriately blunt article in The Independent about the new study in Nature, “Global phytoplankton decline over the past century” (subs. req’d).  Even the Wall Street Journal warned, “Vital Marine Plants in Steep Decline.”  Seth Borenstein of the AP explains, “plant plankton found in the world’s oceans  are crucial to much of life on Earth. They are the foundation of the bountiful marine food web, produce half the world’s oxygen and suck up harmful carbon dioxide.”

We’ve known for a while that we are poisoning the oceans and that human emissions of carbon dioxide, left unchecked, would likely have devastating consequences — see “2010 Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.”  And we’ve known those impacts might last a long, long time — see  2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years.”

But until now, conventional wisdom has been that big ocean impacts might not be seen until the second half of the century.  This new research in Nature suggests we may have much less time to act than we thought if we want to save marine life — and ourselves.  The study concludes:

In the oceans, ubiquitous microscopic phototrophs (phytoplankton) account for approximately half the production of organic matter on Earth. Analyses of satellite-derived phytoplankton concentration (available since 1979) have suggested decadal-scale fluctuations linked to climate forcing, but the length of this record is insufficient to resolve longer-term trends. Here we combine available ocean transparency measurements and in situ chlorophyll observations to estimate the time dependence of phytoplankton biomass at local, regional and global scales since 1899. We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ~1% of the global median per year. Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures.

The WSJ explains, “The data are more reliable for recent decades, translating into a 40% decline since 1950.” It points out:

The team investigated several factors that could have caused the decline. “We found that temperature had the best power to explain the changes,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie and co-author of the study.

Marine algae live in the upper layers of the ocean but rely on nutrients that circulate up from lower layers. Rising temperatures mean the different layers mix less with each other, so fewer nutrients reach the algae. However, Dr. Worm noted that algal abundance can be affected by other factors, such as shifts in predator-prey populations.

Mike Behrenfeld, an expert on phytoplankton at Oregon State University, said the paper was similar to a 1992 study that used Secchi data to show a long-term decline in marine algae in the north Pacific. “But this paper covers the globe,” he said. “And the scientists also took the next step of relating the [algal decline] to sea temperatures.”

Yes, I know, the marine biologist is named Boris Worm.  Readers may recall that last year, Worm was lead author on a major study on fisheries in Science, and the WashPost quoted him predicting that “if fishing continued at the same rate, all the world’s seafood stocks would collapse by 2048” (see “What’s in a name? For the slimehead and toothfish, the extreme makeover leads to rampant overfishing“).  And people think I’m a pessimist!

The Independent also catches a quote from Worm:

“If this holds up, something really serious is underway and has been underway for decades. I’ve been trying to think of a biological change that’s bigger than this and I can’t think of one,” said marine biologist Boris Worm of Canada’s Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He said: “If real, it means that the marine ecosystem today looks very different to what it was a few decades ago and a lot of this change is happening way out in the open, blue ocean where we cannot see it. I’m concerned about this finding.”

… “Phytoplankton are a critical part of our planetary life support system. They produce half of the oxygen we breathe, draw down surface CO2 and ultimately support all of our fishes.” he said.

Certainly, scientists are going to have to verify this finding in the coming years, but as AP reports:

Previous plankton research has mostly relied on satellite data  that only goes back to 1978. But Worm and colleagues used a low-tech technology — disks devised by Vatican scientist Pietro Angelo Secchi, in the 19th century. These disks measure the murkiness of the ocean. The murkier the waters, the more plankton.

It’s a proxy the scientific community has long accepted as legitimate, said Paul Falkowski of Rutgers University, who has used Secchi disk data for his work.

He and other independent scientists said the methods and conclusions of the new study made sense.

Recognizing the importance of the article, Nature published a second piece by two leading ocean scientists, that discussed the methodology and findings, calling the work “an impressive synthesis of the relevant data”:

Taking great care, they created time series of phytoplankton biomass in the pelagic ocean, quantified as surface chlorophyll concentrations. They find a strong correspondence between this chlorophyll record and changes in both leading climate indices and ocean thermal conditions. They also show statistically significant long-term decreases in chlorophyll concentrations for eight of the ten ocean basins, and for the global aggregate.

We ignore these results at our gravest peril.

Related Posts:

• Imagine a World without Fish: Deadly ocean acidification — hard to deny, harder to geo-engineer, but not hard to stop
• U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm

Showing hopeful signs that maybe he hasn’t bought into the Breakthrough myth, Ezra Klein:

There’s something to this line of thinking. We really don’t know what we’ll be able to do by the year 2100. America’s best scientists are studying the problem. China just committed more than $700 billion to funding clean energy research over the next decade. We’re human beings. We’ll think of something.

But will it be enough? The example I’ve been using to show the limits of techo-optimism has been the BP spill. We could’ve stopped it from happening, but we couldn’t reverse it once it happened. And we know a lot more about managing oil spills than about manipulating the atmosphere. But reading Atul Gawande’s article on dying brought another example to mind: cancer.

Cancer, of course, has been a long-term problem. For decades now, we’ve put an enormous amount of money into researching cures and treatments. We’ve thrown our best minds at the problem. And we’ve made some remarkable advances. But not nearly enough of them. Insofar as we’ve been waging a war on cancer, there’s a very good argument that we’re losing, and it’s not clear when, or whether, we’ll turn it around. Sometimes, the best minds and a lot of money are enough. That’s been the case in computers. As this proposal for more energy research says, if our technology had been left in 1975, the iPod would cost $1 billion and be the size of a building. But sometimes, money and minds are not enough. We can’t solve problems so much as try and prevent them. And the death of cap-and-trade means we’re not going to hedge against the possibility of our failure.

There is a really silly paper in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences, which claims that global warming will cause millions of Mexicans to migrate to the United States. As anybody with some basic knowledge about history knows, mass migrations always come before the warming, and not after it. The Völkerwanderung or Migration period where Goths, Vandals, Anglons, Saxons and Huns moved around over Europe came before the Medieval Warming Period (see map). The great migration from the Old to the New World happened before the Recovery from The Little Ice Age period. Hence global warming cannot cause migrations - it must be the other way around.



And if Mexican migrations really would become a threat, the easiest solution for the United States would be to adapt and build a wall. Or maybe invade Canada. That would make much more sense than to stop using fossil fuels, which wouldn't have any noticable effects on the climate anyhow.

Utinam barbari spatium proprium tuum invadant!

The Washington Post has one of the best, short analyses of the climate bill’s death that I’ve seen in the status quo media.  In the print edition, it’s titled “How Washington failed on climate change.”

The author, Stephen Stromberg, gets two thirds of the main blame about right.  First, he notes, “With few exceptions, Republicans have behaved shamefully on climate issues in this Congress, opposing policies that their party embraced in the 1990s (think cap-and-trade). Yet none of them will pay a price in November, and many GOP challengers will benefit.”  Second, he makes a good case that “The president had the political capital and the numbers in Congress to pass something big. He chose health care” over climate.

The irony is that Stomborg is “Deputy opinions editor of washingtonpost.com,” and he is strangely silent on the role of the media, which I think deserves much more blame than Obama (but less than the GOP).  The dreadful media coverage simply creates little space for rational public discourse.  The media has for a long time downplayed the importance of the issue, miscovered key aspects of the debate, given equal time to pro-pollution disinformers, and generally failed to inform the public.  And the Washington Post itself is worse than most, which is why it won the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism.

Even Eric Pooley, author of the must-read political history of how we got into this mess, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth, leaves out the media in his listing of Murderer’s Row for the climate bill’s homicide at Yale e360:

1. The Professional Deniers
2. Senate Republicans
3. Senate Democrats
4. The Green Group
5. The Power Barons: When the eleventh-hour search for a compromise began, the utilities got too greedy
6. The President:  Barack Obama chose not to lead on this issue. His decision to address health care reform before energy and climate change doomed the latter.

What’s strange about this omission is that Pooley’s book certainly takes the press to task, and in fact, Pooley wrote the must-read (again) Harvard study: How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics — “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress.” He analyzed the 2008 media coverage of the Senate debate over the bipartisan Warner-Lieberman climate bill and concluded:

The press misrepresented the economic debate over cap and trade. It failed to recognize the emerging consensus … that cap and trade would have a marginal effect on economic growth and gave doomsday forecasts coequal status with nonpartisan ones…. The press allowed opponents of climate action to replicate the false debate over climate science in the realm of climate economics.

The press failed to perform the basic service of making climate policy and its economic impact understandable to the reader and allowed opponents of climate action to set the terms of the cost debate. The argument centered on the short-term costs of taking action–i.e., higher electricity and gasoline prices–and sometimes assumed that doing nothing about climate change carried no cost.

Editors failed to devote sufficient resources to the climate story. In general, global warming is still being shoved into the “environment” pigeonhole, along with the spotted owls and delta smelt, when it is clearly to society’s detriment to think about the subject that way. It is time for editors to treat climate policy as a permanent, important beat: tracking a mobilization for the moral equivalent of war.

Sound familiar?

• David Broder is the sultan of the status quo, stenographer of those centrists who are fatally uninformed about global warming.
• The New Yorker (!) parrots right-wing talking points
• NYT’s Matt Wald blows the “Alternative and Renewable Energy” story, quotes only industry sources, ignores efficiency and huge cost of inaction

During a crucial time period for the debate, valuable print real estate and TV time was devoted to grossly imbalanced and inaccurate coverage of the stolen e-mails and the like, rather than simply explaining the science:

• N.Y. Times and Elisabeth Rosenthal Face Credibility Siege over Unbalanced Climate Coverage
• Abandoning all journalistic standards, CBS libels Michael Mann based on a YouTube video — while reporting his exoneration!
• In yet another front-page journalistic lapse, the NY Times once again equates non-scientists — Bastardi, Coleman, and Watts (!) — with climate scientists
• NY Times, WSJ, and Washington Post all rejected op-ed/letter from 255 National Academy of Sciences members defending climate science integrity
• Newsweek staff who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet.

We have seen again and again the media skew the debate and misrepresent our increasing understanding of how dire the climate situation according to the latest science:

• Boykoff on “Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change”:  Freudenburg: “Reporters need to learn that, if they wish to discuss ‘both sides’ of the climate issue, the scientifically legitimate “other side” is that, if anything, global climate disruption is likely to be significantly worse than has been suggested in scientific consensus estimates to date.”
• NYT’s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation

Often, it simply fails to inform the public at all about the likely connection between human-caused global warming and serious impacts we are seeing now:

• Signs of global warming are everywhere, but if the New York Times can’t tell the (bark beetle) story (twice!), how will the public hear it?
• CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story — never mention climate change
• Exclusive interview: NCAR’s Trenberth on the link between global warming and extreme deluges
• As nation, Russia, and world swelter under record-smashing heat waves, The New York Times sets one-day record for most unilluminating stories

And since this piece started with an op-ed from a deputy opinions editor at washingtonpost.com, let’s remember that the WashPost is basically the paper of record for inside the Beltway conventional wisdom.  On the climate issue, the Washington Post editors shamefully abandoned journalism in 2009:

• The day DC journalism died: Washington Post is staffed with people who found ZERO mistakes in George Will’s error-filled denial column
• In a blunder reminiscent of Janet Cooke scandal, the Washington Post lets George Will reassert all his climate falsehoods plus some new ones
• The Washington Post, abandoning any journalistic standards, lets George Will publish a third time global warming lies debunked on its own pages
• Will the Washington Post ever fact check a George Will column?
• Memo to Post: If George Will quotes a lie, it’s still a lie
• Washington Post reporters take unprecedented step of contradicting columnist George Will in a news article
• Gawker: The Washington Post Has the Worst Opinion Section in America
• Memo to Washington Post: Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt just recycled a right-wing WSJ op-ed. If you won’t fire him, could you move him over to obits where he can’t hurt anyone?
• WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ.
• Washington Post, Fred Hiatt turn op-ed page into a “joke” with yet another falsehood-filled piece attacking climate action and clean energy — by GOP quitter-in-chief Sarah “Four Pinocchios” Palin!
• The Washington Post goes tabloid, publishes second falsehood-filled op-ed by Sarah Palin in five months — on climate science and the hacked emails!

The media coverage is so bad it is an open question as to whether even a great speechmaker like president Obama could have broken through with a strong, repeated public message on the urgent need for passing a climate bill.  The media would have felt a need to balance that message with bad economics and scientific disinformation from the Republicans and pro-pollution disinformers.  And they would quickly have tired of presenting the message, just as they I’m tired of reporting on the basics of climate science and the countless studies that have come out in recent years that make clear urgent action is both necessary and affordable.  Unfortunately, we’ll never know because Obama wimped out.

But there is no question that most of the traditional, status quo media simply doesn’t get the dire nature of the climate situation that our latest understanding of science makes clear.  And that media reaches vastly more people than President Obama.  If the media won’t stand up to the well-funded, poll-tested disinformation campaign, then the public’s view of climate his unlikely to change dramatically until we have a series of unambiguous signals aka mini-catastrophes aka climate Pearl Harbors?

Of course, that would still require the media to explain them to the public, or even make any connection between them and global warming whatsoever, so perhaps these are going to have to be medium-sized catastrophes.  More on that shortly.

Related Post:

• What if the MSM simply can’t cover humanity’s self-destruction?

In the mucked stirred up by the CRU hack, one denialist talking point has risen to the surface:

...the Russell inquiry did not ask Jones whether he deleted any email. Russell's report cites two of the most damning deletion requests, then declares: "There seems clear incitement to delete emails, although we have seen no evidence of any attempt to delete information in respect of a[n FoIA] request already made."

Note the distinction between deleting emails in respect to a request already made, and deleting emails because someone might make an FoIA request to see them--something which, if I am remembering correctly, would not be illegal under U.K. law.

In any case--whatever the Russell inquiry did or did not ask--New Scientist recently put this very question to Phil Jones:

Phil, did you delete any emails out of concern that they might be the subject of FOI requests?

PJ I haven't deleted any emails that were the subject of FOI requests, but I have deleted emails because I just have too many to cope with. I'm deleting 50 every day at the moment. It would be very difficult to guess what might be asked for in the future so I don't go around deleting emails just because they might be asked for at some point.

So there you have it.

Noah Shachtman compares a Wikileaked battle log with his reporting.



Wikileaks - War - History - United States - War in Afghanistan

Here is another terrific climate cartoon from Tom Toles, “The devil made us do it” — along with his thoughts on the source of our failure in science education:

People work in mysterious ways — I love it!

The cartoonist is also providing running commentary:

The adults aren’t alright

Everybody is worked up about the state of education in the United States. The KIDS are FALLING BEHIND. No, it’s not the KIDS, it’s the SCHOOLS. No, it’s not the SCHOOLS it’s the TEACHERS. No, it’s not the TEACHERS, it’s the PARENTS. Okay, so if we fix the schools and the teachers and the parents, will our kids stop falling behind?

I’m inclined to extend the ring of panic out one ring further. If it’s true that the supporting envelope of the home is crucial to education, might it not also be true that the supporting envelope of society is important, too? It’s not just the kids or the schools or the teachers or the parents, it’s the CULTURE. Look around. Where is the support for careful reasoning? Our political/media discourse is a jailhouse cafeteria brawl. TV is now a THOUSAND channels of drivel.

We have all just flunked our big test of dealing with the climate catastrophe because we couldn’t even agree on the science. Everyone feels entitled to their own science now. And it’s no big surprise that we can’t understand climate science, since we’re still arguing about EVOLUTION after 150 years! Good luck, science teacher. –Tom Toles

Hear!  Hear!

Related Posts:

• Best Toles cartoon ever
• Toles slams our failed energy policy, right wing