Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA, click to enlarge) has a widely used plot of sea ice area.

The notion that the Arctic sea ice was somehow on a long-term recovery trend based on a short-term two-dimensional analysis (i.e. sea ice area or extent just over the last 2 years) — had no basis in fact.  That goes double (triple?) when you look at three dimensions (i.e. volume) over a multi-year period, as I’ll discuss below.

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Here is an update of my review of the best papers on climate science in the past year.  If you want a broader overview of the literature in the past few years, focusing specifically on how unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas emissions are projected to impact the United States, try “An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water.”

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Warning:  Please put your head in a vise before reading further.

Andy Revkin has just written the most illogical climate post on Earth.  Or maybe he’s written the most logical climate post on the Bizarro World Htrae.

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According to the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (2007):
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A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems….

Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.

The National Academy released three reports today on “America’s Climate Choices.”

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Revkin asks me via Dot Earth, “What if The Public had Perfect Climate Information?”  Ahh, the hypothetical question that launches us into an alternative history.  Reminds me of that Saturday Night Live routine, “What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?”

I’d love your answer.  Here’s mine.

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UPDATE:  Judith Curry comments below — including this new puzzler.  I reply.  Feel free to do the same.

As a general rule for scientists, one shouldn’t hitch one’s wagon to long-debunked purveyors of disinformation.  Because then you might end up circling the wagons with the wrong … tribe (see “The curious incident of Judith Curry with the fringe“).

I’m on a plane today, so I commend to you an outstanding Real Climate post, “The Montford Delusion,” by Tamino — and the stunning comments section.  NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt and Tamino are in the role of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and company.  Judith Curry (and Peter Webster) have apparently thrown in with the Clantons.  Like all analogies, this one isn’t perfect, but I’m afraid the outcome is pretty much the same.

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James Powell, Executive Director, National Physical Science Consortium, has produced an excellent YouTube video summarizing the evidence for anthropogenic global warming

Powell is a former college and museum president.  “President Reagan and later, President George H. W. Bush, both appointed Powell to the National Science Board, where he served for 12 years.”

Great for sending to any septics you may know:

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Physicist John Cook of Skeptical Science has a good piece on “The significance of the CO2 lag” that I’m reposting here, followed by a discussion of the best-studied feedbacks and their likely impact (with links to the literature).

When we examine past climate change using ice cores, we observe that CO2 lags temperature. In other words, a change in temperature causes changes in atmospheric CO2. This is due to various processes such as warmer temperatures causing the oceans to release CO2. This has lead some to argue that the CO2 lag disproves the warming effect of CO2. However, this line of thinking doesn’t take in the full body of evidence. We have many lines of empirical evidence that CO2 traps heat. Decades of lab experiments reveal how CO2 absorbs and scatters infrared radiation. Satellite measurements find CO2 trapping heat and surface measurements confirm more radiation at CO2 wavelengths returning to the Earth’s surface. So the full body of evidence gives us these two facts: warming causes more CO2 and more CO2 causes warming. The significance should by now be obvious. The CO2 lag is evidence of a climate positive feedback.

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This post by physicist John Cook was first published in Skeptical Science.

In science, the only thing better than measurements made in the real world are multiple sets of measurements – all pointing to the same answer. That’s what we find with climate change. The case for human caused global warming is based on many independent lines of evidence. Our understanding of climate comes from considering all this evidence. In contrast, global warming skepticism focuses on narrow pieces of the puzzle while neglecting the full picture.

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Please offer suggestions for improving the one liners below.

Progressives should know the most commonly used arguments by the disinformers and doubters — and how to answer them.  You should know as much of the science behind those rebuttals as possible, and a great place to start is SkepticalScience.com.

BUT most of the time your best response is to give the pithiest response possible, and then refer people to a  specific website  that has a more detailed scientific explanation with links to the original science.   That’s because usually those you are talking to are rarely in a position to adjudicate scientific arguments.  Indeed, they would probably tune out.  Also,  unless you know the science cold,  you are as likely as not to make a  misstatement.

Physicist John Cook has done us a great service by posting good one-line responses, which I repost with links below.  For instance,  if somebody  raises the standard talking point that the climate has changed before, you can say, “Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time, which now is dominated by humans.”  That  it is actually quite similar to my standard response, “The climate changes  when it is forced to change,  and now humans are forcing it to change far more rapidly than in the past” (see “Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks” and “Yes, the atmospheric CO2 fraction has risen at a dangerously fast rate in the past 160 years, reaching levels not seen in millions of years“).  Working in the “now is dominated by humans” part is a good idea.

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Before we begin the investigation into the usual suspects, some background for people who those who don’t follow climate science closely, which certainly includes most of the disinformers and  apparently at least two statisticians.

1. There is a high probability that the recent warming is unprecedented for 1000 years and probably much longer (see “Sorry disinformers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years“ and here and here).
2. This conclusion is based on an analysis of multiple proxies for temperature, which individually engender much uncertainty and collectively still engender a fair amount.  It is a canard of Curry-esque proportions to assert that scientists have not clearly explained the nature and extent of these uncertainties. They have bent over backwards to do so.
3. The temperature trend in the past millennium prior to about 1850 is well explained in the scientific literature as primarily due to changes in the solar forcing along with the effect of volcanoes, whereas the recent rise in temperature has been driven primarily — if not almost entirely — by human activity (see Scientist: “Our conclusions were misinterpreted” by Inhofe, CO2 — but not the sun — “is significantly correlated” with temperature since 1850 and Part 3 [to come]).
4. Absent human emissions, we’d probably be in a slow long-term cooling trend due primarily by changes in the Earth’s orbit — see Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds.
5. Thus, the rate of human-driven warming in the last century has exceeded the rate of the underlying natural trend by more than a factor of 10, possibly much more.  And warming this century  on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions is projected to cause a rate of warming that is another factor of 5 or more greater than that of the last century.  We are punching the climate beast — and she ain’t happy about it!

Back to the investigation of attempted murder — and the ‘innocent victim’ who may have been killed in the attempt.  The folks who don’t follow climate science closely have been trumpeting a new paper “A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable?” by McShane and Wyner about to be published in Annals of Applied Statistics.   Supposedly it is fatal to the Hockey Stick.

Here is the police lineup.  Take a look at three independent reconstructions of the past one to two  millennia and the new one by the statisticians — and see if you can pick out which one allegedly killed the others (with apologies to Deltoid):

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Earth has done an ecological about-face: Global plant productivity that once flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline, struck by the stress of drought.

NASA-funded researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running, of the University of Montana in Missoula, discovered the global shift during an analysis of NASA satellite data. Compared with a six-percent increase spanning two earlier decades, the recent ten-year decline is slight — just one percent. The shift, however, could impact food security, biofuels, and the global carbon cycle.

“We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested that global warming might actually help plant growth around the world,” Running said.

“These results are extraordinarily significant because they show that the global net effect of climatic warming on the productivity of terrestrial vegetation need not be positive — as was documented for the 1980’s and 1990’s,” said Diane Wickland, of NASA Headquarters and manager of NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology research program.

That’s from a remarkable NASA news release today, “Drought Drives Decade-Long Decline in Plant Growth” (see narrated video below).

On Friday, the journal Science publishes the study itself, ” Drought-Induced Reduction in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 2000 Through 2009” (subs. req’d), which found:

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60-month and 132-month running means of global surface temperature anomaly with a base period 1951-1980.

The nation’s leading — and most scientifically prescient — climatologist has a new website, Updating the Climate Science: What Path is the Real World Following? It “will present updated graphs and discussion of key quantities that help provide understanding of how climate change is developing and how effective or ineffective global actions are in affecting climate forcings and future climate change.”

He also has a new essay, “Activist”, for “J. Henry Fair’s upcoming book.”  As an aside I simply can’t imagine why Fair titled his book, “The Day After Tomorrow,” the dreadful, scientifically inaccurate 2004 climate movie that many folks, like director James Cameron, actually say set back the cause of informing the public about climate science and the dangers of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions.

I’ll excerpt the essay and repost some of the graphs below:

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From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books….

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts….

– George Orwell, “Why I write”

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts (see here).

What I have learned most from the success of my blog, from the rapid growth in subscribers and visitors and comments, along with the increasing number of websites that link to or reprint my posts, is that there is in fact a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk. It is a hunger to learn the truth about the dire nature of our energy and climate situation, about the grave threat to our children and future generations, about the vast but still achievable scale of the solutions, about the forces in politics and media that impede action—a hunger to face unpleasant facts head on.

Unlike Orwell, I knew from a very early age, certainly by the age of five or six, that I would be a physicist, like my uncle, and I announced that proudly to all who asked.

I knew I did not want to be a professional writer since I saw how hopeless it was to make a living that way.  My father was the editor of a small newspaper (circulation under 10,000) that he turned into a medium-sized newspaper (70,000) but was paid dirt, even though he managed the equivalent of a large manufacturing enterprise — while simultaneously writing three editorials a day — that in any other industry would pay five times as much.  My mother pursued freelance writing for many years, an even more difficult way to earn a living (see also “This could not possibly be more off topic“).

Why share this?  Orwell, who shares far, far more in his many brilliant essays, argues in “Why I write“:

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