ALEC is Evil personified

by Emily Atkin, Think Progress, October 2, 2014

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

The person who runs the American Legislative Exchange Council, a free-market lobbying group that opposes policies to fight climate change, is not sure whether humans actually cause climate change, according to an interview with the National Journal published Wednesday.

When asked specifically whether or not she thinks human carbon emissions are causing climate change, ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson told National Journal’s Dustin Volz, “I don’t know the science on that.” ALEC has recently come under fire for its positions on global warming, following a statement from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt that ALEC has been “literally lying” about climate change and by extension “making the world a much worse place.”

Since then, ALEC has issued statements maintaining that the group does not deny the science of human-caused climate change. However, model legislation put forth by the group has cast doubt on whether global warming is harmful, a direct refutation of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s statements that climate change increases the risk of “severe,” “pervasive,” and “dangerous” events. And in a presentation billed to be about climate science in July, ALEC members heard claims that there is “no need” to reduce carbon emissions; there is “no scientific consensus” on climate change; and that carbon dioxide increases have not caused sea level rise or polar ice melt.

ALEC also works to kill statewide programs that promote the use of renewable energy, and is pushing a bill that would require public schools to teach climate denial.

The fact that ALEC’s chief executive claims not to know the science of climate change while pushing these policies is drawing outrage from environmental groups who say Nelson should know better, given the breadth of scientific information available about climate change. Michael Brune, executive director of Sierra Club, said in a statement to ThinkProgress that Nelson’s statements were “disingenuous,” an excuse to continue pushing policies scientists know to be harmful.

“ALEC is claiming they don’t know the science on climate change while pushing legislation to teach climate denial in schools,” Brune said. “That’s like saying they don’t know whether smoking causes cancer while peddling cigarettes to kids.”

Aliya Haq, the special projects director at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate program, said Nelson’s assertion that she doesn’t know the science not only represents “willful ignorance,” but shows that ALEC knows it can not directly deny climate science and remain a credible organization. This, she said, is well-represented by the recent exodus of multiple large tech companies from ALEC, many citing a desire not to be affiliated with an anti-climate group.

“Nelson is panicking. She’s realizing that ALEC’s long-known climate denial is now a liability,” Haq said. “It’s a duplicitous organization that must operate in the shadows, and when Schmidt from Google shined a light on their climate change stance, ALEC panicked, and now this is all they can do.”

An ALEC spokesperson did not respond to ThinkProgress’ request for comment asking to confirm to accuracy of Nelson’s statements on her knowledge of climate science, or to respond to environmental groups’ criticisms of the claim.

Haq said a clear example of ALEC panicking is the group’s recent attempt to align its stance on net metering, a policy that essentially allows people with solar panels to potentially pay less for generating their own electricity. When responding to Google’s accusation that ALEC is anti-environment, the group issued a position statement claiming it has a similar position on net metering to NRDC.

“That is frankly offensive to NRDC,” Haq said. “NRDC is working day and night to protect the climate; ALEC is doing the opposite.”

Nelson’s assertion that she does not know the science on climate change is a familiar one. Over the last few months, it’s become increasingly popular for conservatives to use the excuse of either not “knowing the science” or not “being a scientist” to claim ignorance on the issue, while also declaring that Americans shouldn’t do anything about it. It’s a line mostfamously used by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, but has also been used by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY), and mostly recently, the Iowa’s Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, Joni Ernst.

Climate scientists do not like the tactic, as evidenced by their interviews with ThinkProgress about the phenomenon in May. “Personally, I don’t think it proper for any American to use that argument,” Donald. J Wuebbles, a distinguished professor of atmospheric sciences and coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s 2013 assessment report said at the time, noting the numerous reports he’s written specifically so that people can understand climate change.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/10/02/3574986/alec-nelson-climate-change/

Human handprint marks Australia's hottest year

Despite the Australian prime minister’s climate science scepticism, research funded by taxpayers has unanimously found man-made climate change guilty of causing the country’s record-breaking temperatures last year.

by Tim Radford, Climate News Network, October 3, 2014

LONDON − Scientists are fond of saying that it is difficult to pin the blame for any one climate event onto climate change. But they have just made an exception by reporting that many things that happened in Australia in 2013 bore the signature of man-made climate change.

In that one year, Australia recorded its hottest day ever, its hottest month in the history books, its hottest summer, its hottest spring, and its hottest year overall.

Extreme events

And in a special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, examining extreme events around the world during 2013, a series of papers home in on the Australian heat waves, and identify a human influence.

“We often talk about the fingerprint of human-caused climate change when we look at extreme weather patterns,” said David Karoly, professor of meteorology at the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences. “This research across four different papers goes well beyond that.

“If we were climate detectives, then Australia’s hottest year on records in 2013 wasn’t just a smudged fingerprint at the scene of the crime, it was a clear and unequivocal handprint showing the impact of human-caused global warming.”

In general, the world’s meteorologists have found nothing unequivocal to suggest that global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion caused, for example, the Californian drought, extreme snow in the Spanish Pyrenees or an October blizzard in South Dakota in the US.

But they did find that global warming doubled the chance of severe heat waves in Australia − making extreme summer temperatures five times more likely, increasing the chance of drought conditions sevenfold, and making hot temperatures in spring 30 times more probable.

And they reckoned that the record hot year of 2013 would have been virtually impossible without global warming. At a conservative calculation, the science showed that the heat of 2013 was made 2,000 times more likely by global warming.

Different picture

Paradoxically, Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, was one of the world leaders who pointedly stayed away from the recent United Nations climate change summit in New York, and in the past has taken a sceptical stance on climate science. Yet research funded by Australian taxpayers has consistently painted a different picture.

“When it comes to what helped cause our hottest year on record, human-caused climate change is no longer a prime suspect − it is the guilty party,” said Dr Sophie Lewis, a paleoecologist at the Australian National University.

And her colleague, Sarah Perkins, a climate scientist at the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, warned that 2013 was only the beginning.

She said: “If we continue to put carbon into our atmosphere at the currently accelerating rate, years like 2013 will quickly be considered normal, and the impacts of future extremes will be well beyond anything modern society has experienced.” 

Peter Sinclair: Shell Oil drilling platform, Noble Discoverer, continues Arctic follies -- wants weakened rules

Shell wants to drill in the Arctic. What could possibly go wrong?

[Readers, note that there is no such thing as a spill cleanup in the Arctic, and Shell doesn't want to be forced to keep emergency equipment nearby (well, what would they be able to use it for, anyway?).]

by Peter Sinclair, Climate Crocks, October 3, 2014


http://climatecrocks.com/2014/10/03/shell-oil-drilling-platform-continues-arctic-follies/

This legendary accounting firm ran the numbers on climate change

by James West, Climate Desk, September 11, 2014

With every year that passes, we’re getting further away from averting a human-caused climate disaster. That’s the key message in this year’s “Low Carbon Economy Index,” a report released by the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The report highlights an “unmistakable trend.” The world’s major economies are increasingly failing to do what’s needed to to limit global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels. That was the target agreed to by countries attending the United Nations’ 2009 climate summit; it represents an effort to avoid some of the most disastrous consequences of runaway warming, including food security threats, coastal inundation, extreme weather events, ecosystem shifts, and widespread species extinction.

To curtail climate change, individual countries have made a variety of pledges to reduce their share of emissions, but taken together, those promises simply aren’t enough. According to the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, “the gap between what we are doing and what we need to do has again grown, for the sixth year running.” The report adds that at current rates, we’re headed towards 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century — twice the agreed upon rate. Here’s a breakdown of the paper’s major findings.

The chart above compares our current efforts to cut “carbon intensity” — measured by calculating the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per million dollars of economic activity — with what’s actually needed to rein in climate change. According to the report, the global economy needs to “decarbonize” by 6.2% every year until the end of the century to limit warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But carbon intensity fell by only 1.2% in 2013.

The report also found that the world is going to blow a hole in its carbon budget — the amount we can burn to keep the world from overheating beyond 3.6 degrees:

The report singles out countries that have done better than others when it comes to cutting carbon intensity. Australia, for example, tops the list of countries that have reduced the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of GDP, mainly due to lower energy demands in a growing economy. But huge countries like the United States, Germany, and India are still adding carbon intensity, year-on-year:

Overall, PricewaterhouseCoopers paints a bleak picture of a world that’s rapidly running out of time; The required effort to curb global emissions will continue to grow each year. “The timeline is also unforgiving. The [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and others have estimated that global emissions will need to peak around 2020 to meet a 2 °C [3.6 °F] budget,” the report says. “This means that emissions from the developed economies need to be consistently falling, and emissions from major developing countries will also have to start declining from 2020 onwards.” G20 nations, for example, will need to cut their annual energy-related emissions by one-third by 2030, and by just over half by 2050. The pressure will be on the world’s governments to come up with a solution to this enormous challenge at the much-anticipated climate talks in Paris next year.

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/this-legendary-accounting-firm-ran-the-numbers-on-climate-change/

VIDEO! Sea floor methane hydrate climate hazard

World methane hydrate expert explains the dangers from methane hydrate under global (ocean) warming.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXqwLTCzCt0

Chris Mooney joins Washington Post

By WashPostPR October 3 at 9:54 AM

Announcement from Greg Schneider, national economy and business editor, and David Cho, deputy business editor:

We’re thrilled to announce that Chris Mooney is joining The Post to create a new blog about the environment.

Chris joins us from Mother Jones, where he has written about science and the environment and hosted a successful weekly podcast. Before joining Mother Jones last year, Chris spent a decade as a freelance writer, podcaster and speaker, with his work appearing in Wired, Harper’s, Slate, Legal Affairs, The Los Angeles Times, The Post and The Boston Globe, to name a few [have to wonder why they left out Mother Jones]. Chris also has published four books about science and climate change.

Chris is one of the most distinctive, provocative voices writing about environmental issues today, arguing that people’s preconceptions — political, religious, cultural — color the way they view science. More fundamentally, Chris has built a loyal audience through solid reporting and vivid, authoritative writing. His approach is to look for the compelling ideas behind topics that can otherwise become arcane, leading him to write thoughtful pieces on such subjects as how melting ice caps could create a permanent Superstorm Sandy and how conservative Christians can convince skeptics about climate change.

He will start as part of Wonkblog, and build toward the future rollout of a standalone blog that will pull together the excellent work of The Post’s all-star roster of energy and environment writers. Stay tuned for more details on that.

Meanwhile, please join us in welcoming Chris when he starts Oct. 20.

The Smithsonian Institution Announces an Official Climate Change Statement

The bold assessment acknowledges that the global climate is warming because of human activities

"Rapid and long-lasting climate change is a topic of growing concern as the world looks to the future," says the Smithsonian Institution's official climate change statement. (NASA)

by Saba Naseem, Smithsonian Institution, October 2, 2014

As humans continue to transform the planet at an increasingly rapid rate, the need to inform and encourage change has become ever more urgent. The situation is becoming critical for wild species and for the preservation of human civilization. Recognizing this urgency, the Smithsonian Institution has formulated its first official statement about the causes and impacts of climate change.

With special emphasis on the Smithsonian’s 160-year history and tradition of collection, research and global monitoring, the statement delivers a bold assessment: "Scientific evidence has demonstrated that the global climate is warming as a result of increasing levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases generated by human activities."

"The 500 Smithsonian scientists working around the world see the impact of a warming planet each day in the course of their diverse studies,"reads the statement. "A sample of our investigations includes anthropologists learning from the Yupik people of Alaska, who see warming as a threat to their 4,000-year-old culture; marine biologists tracking the impacts of climate change on delicate corals in tropical waters; and coastal ecologists investigating the many ways climate change is affecting the Chesapeake Bay."

“What we realized at the Smithsonian is that many people think that climate change is just an environmental topic,” says John Kress, acting undersecretary of science at the Smithsonian. “It’s much more than that. Climate change will affect everything.”

Many scientists, including Smithsonian researchers, believe we have entered a new interval called the Anthropocene. Coined in the 1980s by Eugene F. Stoermer, a researcher in diatoms, but popularized by atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen in 2000, the term is derived from the Greek words anthrop for man and cene for current or new. Unlike the Holocene, which began at the end of the last glaciation about 12,000 years ago, the Anthropocene has no formal start date. But in adopting the term, the Smithsonian recently organized its initiative “Living in the Anthropocene” to “expand climate change outside of just science and take Smithsonian resources to look at what other scholars and professionals are doing in various areas with regard to climate change,” Kress says.

As part of this initiative, the Smithsonian is bringing together some of the nation’s top critical thinkers to offer their perspectives in a symposium on October 9 called “Living in the Anthropocene: Prospects for Climate, Economics, Health, and Security.” The symposium features Rachel Kyte, group vice president and special envoy for climate change at the World Bank; James J. Hack, the director of the National Center for Computational Science at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; George Luber, the associate director for climate change in the Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects at the National Center for Environmental Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Admiral Thad Allen, the executive vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton and former commander of the U.S. Coast Guard; and Thomas L. Friedman, a Pulitzer-winning columnist for the New York Times.

For economies to grow and prosper, especially in underdeveloped countries, the need to address climate change is crucial. Last year, the World Bank changed their business model and added a special envoy for climate change to reach their goal of eradicating poverty by 2030. “Climate change is already having an impact on our goals because of extreme weather events. If you’re a country that is vulnerable to weather events, than those events can wipe out decades worth of development in just a few minutes or hours. We’ve seen countries and regions lose anywhere from 2 to 200 percent of their GDP,” Kyte says. “In almost every aspect of our economy, climate change is beginning to bite down, and that means we have to help our climate adapt and build a resilience plan for an increasingly uncertain future.”

Admiral Allen, who was designated principal federal official for the U.S. government’s response and recovery operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and later served as the national incident coordinator for the federal response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, agrees that there needs to be resilience, although he emphasizes a bottom-up concept. “I always tell people that the first responder in any natural disaster is you and the second first responder is your neighbor. The more you become resilient, the less demand you put on the services in the community and the more you can help each other to create a resilient community.”

The Smithsonian initiative will also examine the health effects that emerge from changing environments and climate, including deaths, disease and trauma.  “We have the direct effects of events like hurricanes, which have both immediate and long-lasting health consequences, but then we also have health effects that come with changing ecology. There are pathogens such as Lyme disease or dengue fever that are sensitive to weather, and their environment can expand or shift,” says Luber, who is also an epidemiologist.  

Understanding such complex systems requires computational models, which can make predictions and reveal current activities on both grand and small scales. “The better the computational foundations and facilities to help the scientists, the more we’re going to start making progress toward more formally evaluating where uncertainties lie in the process of developing models,” Hack says. Even small uncertainties in the data could have trillion-dollar impacts and undermine faith in the modeling community, he adds.

As the struggle to understand and cope with global change continues, a “unity of effort” is needed across all platforms to better understand our challenges and determine solutions. “I think the challenge is to understand the complexity of the world we live in and the interaction of technology, human beings and the natural environment and try and think of new ways to build in resiliency into not only the human side of the planet but also the natural side,” Admiral Allen says.

James J. Hack, Rachel Kyte, George Luber, Admiral Thad Allen and Thomas L. Friedman will speak at the Smithsonian Institution on October 9, 2014 at a one-day symposium entitled, “Living in the Anthropocene: Prospects for Climate, Economics, Health, and Security,” 9:15 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., with a reception to follow in the Baird Auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History. The event is free and open to the public, but space is limited. To get your ticket, RSVP to Consortia@si.edu by October 7.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smithsonian-institution-announces-official-climate-change-statement-180952822/

Jason Box: Greenland is the new black

by Peter Sinclair, Climate Crocks, October 1, 2014

Jason Box returned to Greenland for a few days late in August, and was able to shoot the video above. Newest observations show the lowest reflectivity on record for Greenland’s Upper elevations.

And there’s this.

NBC News:

Spongy sediments under Greenland’s ice sheet may accelerate its flow into the sea — an effect that previous estimates of ice loss failed to account for, according to University of Cambridge researchers. They said that means the ice sheet may be more sensitive than previously thought to overall climate change, along with short-term events like heavy rain and heat waves. 

The researchers said it was thought that Greenland’s extensive ice fields rested on hard bedrock, but new evidence shows that soft sediments also are present. Those sediments weaken as they soak up water from seasonal melt, allowing the sheet to move faster to the sea, the researchers said. Greenland’s ice sheet covers 660,000 square miles (1.7 million square kilometers) to a depth of nearly 2 miles (3 kilometers) at its thickest. A 2012 study found that the sheet’s melting was accelerating, and a 2013 study estimated that because of melting in Greenland and Antarctica, sea levels could be 2 feet higher when today’s preschoolers are grandparents. The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and published Monday in the journal Nature Communications.

http://climatecrocks.com/2014/10/01/august-2014-greenland-is-the-new-black/ 

Lawson's Climate Denial Donor Boasts of Shale Gas Investment

by Brendan Montague, DeSmog UK, September 30, 2014

Lord Lawson accepted a donation for his climate denial charity from a millionaire financier who successfully invested in shale gas fracking,DeSmog UK can reveal.

Edgar Miller Jr, a Texan-born venture capitalist, has been named as an early donor, fundraiser, and founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) who claims he turned down the role of director when the charity was being established almost five years ago.

The revelations will be hugely embarrassing for Lawson. Miller intimates during an interview that his donation was dependent on the GWPF attacking climate science rather than policy, and he even suggests the former chancellor is “a little bit” scientifically illiterate.

Miller boasts of his “very successful” investment in one of the first fracking companies, and confirms that today he holds mineral rights relating to property once owned by his family that he hopes will earn him further profits from shale gas. “We’ll get some royalties out of it so we’re motivated to do it,” he said.

The investor has also paid thousands of pounds to Viscount Christopher Monckton, the eccentric aristocrat who tours Britain, Australia and the United States attacking climate science.

The cash paid for an investment report about climate science and led to Monckton publishing a lengthy attack in the Sunday Telegraph back in 2006. Monckton and Lawson, related by marriage, both became interested in climate change around the same time.

Early Frackers

Lawson has repeatedly stated that he would not accept funding from the oil industry or any individual with “a significant interest” in fossil fuel companies—a statement that is in fact true as Miller has enjoyed a “less than significant” financial benefit from energy investments.

Lawson last month launched the GWPF to apparently circumvent charity commission rules stipulating that his GWPF must remain “educational” rather than political. Dr Benny Peiser, a social scientist, is the director of the foundation.

Miller, a professor of private equity at the Cass Business School and owner of Palladian Limited, told a reporter over dinner: “I was concerned when they [the GWPF] weren’t really addressing the underlying science and they kept putting the focus on policy…

“Most people in the UK don’t understand the science. The UK is scientifically illiterate. I’m not saying that you don’t have great scientists or engineers, but the average person that you meet walking along the street knows very little about the science.”

He added: “Initially I refused to give them anything because they were resistant to debating the science. Benny just wanted to talk about policy; I said I completely disagree with that… I’ve also brought one or two other donors in, who have probably altogether given £30,000 to £40,000.”

“I think one of Benny’s problems is he doesn’t have a fundamental grounding in science [and] that he has a fear. That’s one of the general problems in this country… most people are scientifically illiterate. Nigel is a little bit that way.”

Miller also described Lawson as having “a huge ego” adding: “his only problem is his personal life is a disaster.” But he confirmed that the former chancellor had Osborne’s ear. “These guys are all talking to each other all the time, they go to the same dinner parties, they spend weekends together and [attend] house parties together.”

He said of his fracking investments: “Fracking is nothing, and, you know, you’ve got 30 years of experience in the States with basically no problems at all. In fact, I invested in one of the companies which was one of the early frackers back in the 80s.”

“There’s a guy who just died called [George P] Mitchell, who was a Texan, who developed the technology. It was a very [a] very successful [investment]. Very successful.”

Basically a Bullshitter

Miller, who has lived in the UK for more than 40 years, was a senior advisor in the Conservative party and claims he helped draft the 2005 election manifesto. But after initially supporting Cameron’s leadership, he found the Etonian to be “weak”, with “too many close friends around him” who “change his mind”.

After lunch with the Prime Minister and chancellor, Miller's views had crystallised: “I came away thinking Cameron was basically a bullshitter [who] didn’t want to listen to anybody [and who] lacked in substance.” He added: “Osborne I thought was as arrogant…but I thought had more intellectual substance.”

When contacted by DeSmog UK last night, Miller replied: “You imply I have been a donor to the GWPF.  I am proud to say this is true (albeit a small donor) and I would be pleased if you publicise this fact.  I encouraged Lord Lawson in the early days of GWPF and subsequently have encouraged others to donate.  I intend to continue to contribute.  

“I have the upmost admiration and respect for Lord Lawson for having the initiative, courage and fortitude to establish the GWPF, in spite of endless

criticism and ad-hominem attacks thrown at him.  

 

“He and Benny Peiser have established the GWPF as the only authoritative public source in the UK providing a fact-based perspective on the global warming issue.  I have subscribed to Benny Peiser's newsletter for years.  This and Benny's long experience in the field has made an immeasurable contribution to the undoubted success of the GWPF.”

http://www.desmog.uk/2014/09/30/lawson-climate-denial-backer-boasts-shale-gas-investment

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert: Steve Koonin takedown

by Raymond T. Pierrehumbert (Louis Block professor in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago and the King Carl XVI Gustaf chair in environmental science at Stockholms Universitet), Slate, October 1, 2014

A man scoops fish from a partially dried-up pond in China’s Zhejiang province on Aug. 13, 2013. It’s true that the climate has always changed and always will, but does that mean we should just shrug at situations like these? Photo by William Hong/Reuters

When the Wall Street Journal publishes yet another argument for doing nothing about global warming, it’s just a dog-bites-man story. So why should anybody get particularly exercised by the Journal’s latest incarnation of this fixed idea, in the form of an extended essay by Steve Koonin? It was to be expected that the Journal would try to take some pre-emptive action on the eve of the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York and the world’s largest climate-action rally. What makes Koonin’s piece noteworthy more than anything else is the messenger.

Steve Koonin is the answer to a troublesome question facing the Journal’s opinion page editors: What you do if you want to continue obstructing progress on global warming pollution, but your usual stable of tame skeptics is starting to die off (Fred Seitz), retire from active research (Dick Lindzen), or discredit itself through serial scientific errors (John Christy) or by taking fanatical and manifestly untenable positions (Heartland Institute)? That puts the editors in quite a pickle. The Wall Street Journal evidently has high hopes for promoting Koonin as a prominent new voice for inaction, having lavished on him 2,000 words and front-page Saturday exposure outside the Journal’s paywall.

Who is Steve Koonin and why should we care?

Koonin has constructed a narrative that is calculated to make people take notice even if they wouldn’t ordinarily trust anything the Wall Street Journal published on global warming: I’m a physicist bringing my brilliance and outside perspective to the backwater of climate science! (He was a professor of physics, and later provost, at Caltech.) I’m green! (He was chief scientist for BP, the oil firm that likes to tout itself as the “beyond petroleum” company, and he was involved with renewables there, among other things.) I’ve got true-blue Democratic credentials! (He was undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy during Obama’s first term.)

But there are flaws in this narrative. Being a smart physicist can just give you more elaborate ways to delude yourself and others, along with the arrogance to think you can do so without taking the time to really understand the subject you are discussing.Freeman Dyson is a famous example. Koonin’s role in the Department of Energy was marginal and largely powerless, leading ultimately to his resignation. BP’s “beyond petroleum” vision evidently includes tar sands (both extraction and refining) and petcoke (arguably the worst fossil fuel of all). And anyway, how green can you be if you’re the company that gave us the Deepwater Horizon disaster?

Koonin is currently director of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, which was formed in partnership with New York City under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. One of the missions of the center is to increase urban resilience, and there is hardly any aspect of urban resilience that is unaffected by climate change. This is highlighted prominently in the center’s roster of research interests, which states: “The effects of Hurricane Sandy on NYC and surrounding regions highlighted the combined danger of extreme weather events and the reality of global climate change.” Can somebody with Koonin’s evident misconceptions about climate science and its policy implications really be trusted to provide effective leadership for such an institution? If I were the president of NYU, or indeed Mayor Bill de Blasio, I would be having a lot of second thoughts right now.

The American Physical Society is currently reviewing its policy statement on climate change, and Koonin has had a substantial hand in that five-year process. He was a member of the society’s Panel on Public Affairs, which has responsibility for vetting policy statements, and is still listed as chair-elect. He was a member of the subcommittee charged with overseeing the statement revision, and appears to have been the organizer of a hearing on climate science conducted at the Center for Urban Science and Progress, his current home institution in Brooklyn. The full transcript of this hearing is available here.

The choice of its drafting committee indicates some serious problems with the APS process for its climate change statement, as the committee did not include a single physicist who was actually doing work in the area of climate science. Given that, one might think the committee would avail itself of the opportunity to become better educated through hearing from the best and most representative experts the field has to offer. The panel of experts it consulted did include three scientists with impeccable track records of contributions to the field: Isaac Held, Ben Santer, and Bill Collins. But these experts were “balanced” with people picked disproportionately from the tiny wing of climate skeptics: Dick Lindzen, Judy Curry, and John Christy. One participant in the process described it to me as being set up as “a show trial of the IPCC”—that is, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—rather than an educational event aimed at probing the deeper questions concerning global warming. If you expose a panel of physicists who are ignorant of climate science to 50 percent wisdom and 50 percent nonsense, one cannot hold out much hope for a good outcome.

Koonin seems to have taken most of the talking points in his Journal essay from the presentations of the skeptics, ignoring or belittling the more considered assessment given by the other invited panelists. The word I have from inside APS is that Koonin has resigned from the Panel on Public Affairs to allow himself greater latitude to make public pronouncements on climate change, so we can expect to be hearing much more from him in the future. There is a lot of good will (and intelligence) on the remaining panel, so there is a good chance that it will be able to recover from an inauspicious beginning.

A litany of discredited arguments.

Let’s first gratefully acknowledge that in some ways this piece represents a material step forward in the annals of the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of climate change: Koonin writes that the human influence on climate is “no hoax,” and that “continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate.” He affirms that “uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction.” If all the economic heavy hitters who read the Journal subscribed to these views, that would represent progress of a sort.

But the nuggets of truth in Koonin’s essay are buried beneath a rubble of false or misleading claims from the standard climate skeptics’ canon. To pick a few examples:

• He claims that the rate of sea level rise now is no greater than it was early in the 20th century, but this is a conclusion one could draw only through the most shameless cherry-picking. In reality, according to the data, the sea level trend was .8 millimeters of rise per year from 1870 to 1924, 1.9 millimeters per year from 1925 to 1992, and 3.2 millimeters per year from 1993 to 2014—i.e., the rate has actually quadrupled since preindustrial times.
• He claims that the human imprint on climate is only “comparable” to natural variability, whereas multiple lines of research confirm that the climate signature of human-caused greenhouse gas increases has already risen well above thebackground noise level. Koonin’s claim also obscures the fact that human-induced greenhouse gas increases are the only influences that have been found to provide a significant drive for warming. The most prominent natural influences, such as volcanic eruptions and heat uptake by the ocean, only serve to offset some of the warming caused by human influences.
• He states that human additions to the greenhouse effect will shift the natural greenhouse effect by only 1 percent to 2 percent by the middle of the century. This is another variant of the standard skeptics’ arguments that attempt to make the human influence seem small, but, like all such arguments, requires a lot of creative accounting. In reality, a large part of the natural greenhouse effect is due to substances (mainly water vapor, and consequent cloudiness) that are in the atmosphere only because carbon dioxide keeps the Earth warm enough to prevent them from condensing out. Carbon dioxide is the main control knob for Earth’s climate, and if one looks at the effect of doubling carbon dioxide relative to the baseline carbon dioxide greenhouse effect, that amounts to a change of over 10 percent—and at the rate our fossil fuel burning is increasing, we could go well beyond doubling. Further, if one looks at fossil fuel burning in terms of the magnitude of our disruption of the natural carbon cycle, industrial civilization looks like a force of much more than geological proportions. Fossil fuel burning is adding carbon to the Earth system at a rate that is more than 100 times greater than the volcanic sources that drive the Earth’s natural long-term carbon cycle.
• He states that the effects of carbon dioxide will last “several centuries,” whereas “several millennia” would be closer to the truth. The carbon dioxide we emit while dithering about what to do will cause essentially irreversible changes to our climate.
• He does a lot of hand-wringing about the uncertainties in ocean behavior, but doesn’t seem to appreciate that oceans cannot be a cause of long-term warming because almost all of the mass of the oceans is colder than the lower atmosphere. Oceans can delay warming by taking up heat (indeed they are, as ocean observations confirm), but the warming will be made up with a vengeance once the oceans stop taking up heat, as they eventually must.

One could go on for a long time dissecting the flaws and misleading spin in Koonin’s arguments. Most of the old chestnuts are there, including the dismissive statement that “climate has always changed and always will” (true enough, but not cause for complacency about human influences), the supposedly missing tropical “hot spot” (which Koonin badly garbles in multiple ways, but which is well-discussed by Carl Mears and by Steve Sherwood here), and the by-now-obligatory reference to the decadal “pause” in global warming. Without belaboring the point, let’s just say that Koonin’s arguments are not the sort of thing that would emerge from a period of deep reflection by some brilliant mind turning serious attention to the subject. Rather, they are the sorts of things one could pick up in a weekend surfing a few of the more willfully ignorant skeptic’s blogs.

Climate science is not settled, but it’s settled enough.

Koonin’s most seriously misleading claims concern uncertainty. There are two parts to his attack: first, that climate scientists systematically suppress discussion of uncertainty, especially when communicating with policymakers; and second, that climate science is too uncertain to provide a basis for policy decisions.

To anybody with even a cursory familiarity with the climate science literature, the claim that it is impermissible to discuss uncertainties is laughable. There is hardly anything else scientists do, in climate science or elsewhere, besides dispute received wisdom and one another’s findings. The reward structure in all of science favors those who overturn some widely accepted theory over those who just confirm or provide an elaboration on what is already known. A lot of these disputes (and I have been party to several myself) are more like bar fights than the secretive “hushed sidebar conversations” Koonin makes them out to be. Climate science has been refined in the fires of such disputes for well over a century now, and the constant turmoil of questioning still dominates the professional journals and meetings. Indeed, most of the uncertainties highlighted by Koonin were first identified and reported in professional journals by climate science “insiders” (in some cases even IPCC authors), and continue to be vigorously discussed there. For example, the case of the (possibly) missing tropical hot spot was first discussed in a paper by Dian Gaffen in 2000, and has been the subject of numerous other papers, including this recent one co-authored by Suki Manabe, one of the founding fathers of climate modeling. Climate sensitivity—the amount by which the global average temperature increases upon doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—is one of the key uncertain factors governing our climate future, and results on this key parameter are almost invariably presented in terms of adistribution of possible values.

Science is never settled, but it can be settled enough. Newtonian mechanics was not settled science—it was overturned by both relativity and quantum mechanics. Nonetheless, it was, and continues to be, settled enough to build bridges and design airplanes. It is in this spirit that the word settled is used sometimes in connection with climate science, and not in the cartoonish sense that Koonin fabricates in his straw-man argument. It is always easy to find gaps—even very significant gaps—in the understanding of a system as complex as the climate, but the issue on the table isn’t whether our understanding is complete, but whether it is complete enough to justify the need for serious controls on carbon dioxide emissions. It’s not the situation that the range of climate predictions runs from “pretty good” to “somewhat bad”—the truth is more like “bad” to “extremely bad,” unless emissions growth is halted and eventually reversed.

Rickshaw pullers wade through a flooded road after heavy rains at Guwahati in the northeastern Indian state of Assam on June 27, 2014. Photo by Utpal Baruah/Reuters

Let’s imagine you are a smoker and go to the doctor with a variety of troubling physical complaints. She tells you, “Well, a lot of these troubles are typically associated with smoking, but you don’t have cancer yet and the fact is we don’t know everything about the precise biochemical pathways that connect smoking to cancer, and anyway there’s always the chance you’ll get emphysema before you get cancer.” If you were to apply Koonin’s reasoning to this situation, your response would be, “OK, Doc, I’ll wait to give up smoking until you can tell me exactly how it will kill me and when.”

Climate science is settled enough to provide the policy guidance that matters most, namely that there is an urgent need for halting, and eventually reversing, the worldwide growth in carbon dioxide emissions. At a time when essentially nothing effective is being done, it is pointless to fret, as Koonin does, about exactly how much reduction is optimal—the clear answer from climate science is: “The more the better, the sooner the better, and whatever we actually do is apt to be less than what is really needed, though worth doing nonetheless.” Major policy decisions are routinely made in economic and national security areas in the face of far greater uncertainty than prevails in climate science.

The conclusion that climate science is settled enough proceeds from two well-established properties of the climate system: No. 1, most climate damages rise with the rise in global mean temperature, though the regional distributions of the damages are uncertain and vary from model to model; and No. 2, the peak global mean warming is approximately proportional to the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted up to the time such emissions cease completely. Given current rates of emissions growth, about 2.5 percent annually, we will exceed a threshold corresponding to 2 degrees Celsius of warming in a matter of a few decades, if climate sensitivity turns out to be in the middle of the uncertainty range. If we are lucky and climate sensitivity turns out to be at the lower end of the range of scientifically credible estimates, then given a 2.5 percent annual rate of growth of emissions, the good news would buy us only an extra 28 years beyond the perilously short time that would be allotted to us under midrange climate sensitivity. Given that we really should have started decarbonizing the economy 30 years ago, that’s not much justification for inaction; in fact, it would be nothing but good news since it would make the task more feasible. 

But what if we are unlucky and climate sensitivity turns out to be at the high end of the range? In that case we would be locked into 4 degrees Celsius of eventual warming within the next few decades, even in the unlikely event we were able to stop using fossil fuels cold turkey. As Koonin rightly notes, the past 30 years of intensive research in climate science has not managed to narrow the uncertainty range in climate sensitivity. What he fails to note is that this uncertainty provides an argument for more rather than less action on emissions control, since it means that no scientifically credible argument advanced in the past several decades has been able to rule out the risk that climate sensitivity is at the high end of the range. In the face of that, the only way to avert the risk is to simply not emit so much carbon dioxide. And the millennial duration of the warming induced by carbon dioxide means that we don’t have the luxury of waiting a few more decades before taking action, in the hopes that 30 more years of research will finally accomplish what the past 30 failed to do. As the Swedish cookbook pioneer Kajsa Warg is reputed to have said, “You cook with what you have.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/10/the_wall_street_journal_and_steve_koonin_the_new_face_of_climate_change.html

Why Greenland is likely to melt much more quickly

Scientists who have examined the role of the bedrock on which the Greenland ice sheet rests think it shows the huge island is more vulnerable than realised to global warming

by Tim Radford, Climate News Network, October 1, 2014

LONDON - Climate scientists have thought a little more deeply about the state of the Greenland ice sheet and their conclusions are ominous.

They think that the northern hemisphere’s largest assembly of ice and compacted snow is more vulnerable to climate change than anybody had previously thought.

Marion Bougamont of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, UK, and colleagues report in Nature Communications that they factored in not just a mathematical model of the melting ice from Greenland, but also the role of the soft, yielding and absorbent mud and rock beneath.

The Greenland ice sheet is the planet’s second largest body of terrestrial ice. It covers 1.7 million square kilometres and if it were all to melt, the world’s sea levels would rise by more than seven metres.

Right now, about 200 gigatonnes of Greenland ice a year turn to water and run into the sea. This alone raises sea levels at the rate of 0.6 millimetres a year. In fact the increase in sea levels from all causes – glacier retreat worldwide, ice cap melting and ocean thermal expansion -  is now 3 mm a year.

Researchers have repeatedly found evidence of an acceleration of melting, in some cases by looking at what is happening within the ice or on the surface, or by taking a new look at satellite data.

Less stable

But the latest calculation goes even deeper: into the mud below the ice. According to the new model, and to evidence from surveys, melting will be complicated by the conditions deep under the ice.

The ice sheets are moving, naturally and at different speeds, causing the ice to shear or flow, and the assumption has always been that the ice is flowing over hard and impermeable rock. A closer look suggests a different process.

Lakes of summer meltwater tend to form on the ice sheet surface: if the ice below fractures, these lakes can drain in a matter of hours. The meltwater flows down within the ice, and into the sediment below it.

“The soft sediment gets weaker as it tries to soak up more water, making it less resistant, so that the ice above moves faster. The Greenland ice sheet is not nearly as stable as we think,” said Poul Christofferson, a co-author.

And Dr Bougamont said: “There are two sources of net ice loss: melting on the surface and increased flow of the ice itself, and there is a connection between these mechanisms that isn’t taken into account by standard ice sheet models.”

Rapid change

At present, the annual flow of ice meltwater is more or less stable. In warmer years, the ice sheet becomes more vulnerable because more meltwater gets to the muddy absorbent bedrock. Because there is a limit to how much the sediment below can hold, the ice sheet becomes more vulnerable during extreme events such as heat waves.

And, of course, if under such a scenario it is vulnerable, it continues to become more vulnerable as average temperatures rise and extreme events become more frequent, and more extreme. And a closer look at recent geological history shows just how fast change can happen.

In a separate study in Nature Communications, Katharine Grant of the Australian National University and colleagues report that they examined evidence of the melting process at the close of each of the last five ice ages.

They looked at data from wind-blown dust in sediment cores from the Red Sea, and matched these with records from Chinese stalagmites to confirm a picture of pronounced climate change at the end of each ice age, and calculated that sea levels rose at the rate of 5.5 metres per century.

These however were exceptional events, and there were more than 100 smaller sea level events in between the big five.

“Time periods with less than twice the modern global ice volume show almost no indications of sea level rise faster than about 2 metres per century,” said Dr Grant. “Those with close to the modern amount of ice on Earth show rates of up to one to 1.5 metres per century.”