James Hoggan: Slamming the Climate Skeptic Scam

Slamming the Climate Skeptic Scam

by James Hoggan, desmogblog, June 15, 2009

There is a line between public relations and propaganda -- or there should be. And there is a difference between using your skills, in good faith, to help rescue a battered reputation and using them to twist the truth -- to sow confusion and doubt on an issue that is critical to human survival.

And it is infuriating -- as a public relations professional -- to watch my colleagues use their skills, their training and their considerable intellect to poison the international debate on climate change.

That's what is happening today, and I think it's a disgrace. On one hand, you have the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – as well as the science academies of every developed nation in the world – confirming that:

• climate change is real;
• it is caused by human activity; and
• it is threatening the planet in ways we can only begin to imagine.

On the other hand, you have an ongoing public debate - not about how to respond, but about whether we should bother, about whether climate change is even a scientific certainty. While those who stand in denial of climate change have failed in the last 15 years to produce a single, peer-reviewed scientific journal article that challenges the theory and evidence of human-induced climate change, mainstream media was, until very recently, covering the story (in more than half the cases, according to the academic researchers Boykoff and Boykoff) by quoting one scientist talking about the risks and one purported expert saying that climate change was not happening – or might actually be a good thing.

Few PR offences have been so obvious, so successful and so despicable as this attack on the science of climate change. It has been a triumph of disinformation – one of the boldest and most extensive PR campaigns in history, primarily financed by the energy industry and executed by some of the best PR talent in the world.

As a public relations practitioner, it is a marvel – and a deep humiliation – and I want to see it stop.

Here’s how it works: Public relations is not a process of telling people what to think; people are too smart for that, and North Americans are way too stubborn. Tell a bunch of North Americans what they are supposed to think and you’re likely to wind up the only person at the party enjoying your can of New Coke.

No, the trick to executing a good PR campaign is twofold: you figure out what people are thinking already; and then you nudge them gently from that position to one that is closer to where you want them to be. The first step is research: you find out what they know and understand; you identify the specific gaps in their knowledge. Then you fill those gaps with a purpose-built campaign. You educate. If people are afraid to take Tylenol (as they were after someone poisoned some pills), you explain the extensive safety precautions now typical in the pharmaceutical industry. If people think Martha Stewart is arrogant and uncaring, you create opportunities for her to show a more human side.

In the best cases – the cases that are most personally rewarding – your advice actually guides corporate behavior. That is, if a client wants to protect or revive their reputation, if they want to convince the public that they’re running a responsible company and doing the right thing, the most obvious public relations advice is that they should do the right thing.

It's the kind of advice that, historically, has been a hard sell in the tobacco industry, in the asbestos industry - and too often in the automotive industry. Those sectors have provided some of the most famous examples of PR disinformation: "smoking isn't necessarily bad for you," "it's not certain that asbestos will give you cancer," "your seatbelt might actually kill you if you're the one person in five trillion whose buckle jams just as your car flips into a watery ditch."

But few PR offences have been so obvious, so successful and so despicable as the attack on the scientific certainty of climate change. Few have been so coldly calculating and few have been so well documented. For example, Ross Gelbspan, in his books, The Heat is On and Boiling Point sets out the whole case, pointing fingers and naming names. PR Watch founder John Stauber has done similarly exemplary work, tracking the bogus campaigns and linking various pseudo scientists to their energy industry funders.

I have filled a whole book with details of the documented corporate action plans to deny climate change and confuse the public. Climate Cover-up will hit the shelves in the fall of 2009. In the meantime, one of the best proofs of climate disinformation came in a November 2002 memo from political consultant Frank Luntz to the U.S. Republican Party. Luntz followed the rules: he did the research; he identified the soft spots in public opinion; and he made a clever critical judgment about which way the public could be induced to move.

In a section entitled "Winning the Global Warming Debate," Luntz says this:
"The Scientific Debate Remains Open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."

If you download the memo and read the whole thing, you will notice that Luntz never expressly denies the validity of the science. In fact, he says, "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but is not yet closed."
" ... not yet closed"? Among those who disagreed with that assessment when Luntz wrote this report were the 2,500 scientists in the IPCC, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada. In 2004, Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science magazine, said, "We're in the middle of a large uncontrolled experiment on the only planet we have." And to back up this sense of certainty, he reported that University of California, San Diego science historian Dr. Naomi Oreskes had published an analysis in Science in which she had combed through  928 peer-reviewed climate studies published between 1993 and 2003 and found not a single one that disagreed with the general scientific consensus.

Yet journalists continued to report updates from the best climate scientists in the world juxtaposed against the unsubstantiated raving of an industry-funded climate change denier - as if both were equally valid.
Notwithstanding, Luntz wrote: "There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science." He recommended that his Republican Party clients do just that. He urged them to marshal their own "scientists" to contest the issue on every occasion. He urged them to plead for "sound science" a twist of language of the sort that George Orwell once said was "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind."

Luntz's goal – which was embraced with unnerving enthusiasm by the Bush Administration - was to manufacture uncertainty and to politicize science. Like all tragedy, it would be hilarious if you could play it for laughs.

Luntz himself actually backed off this position a couple of years later, saying that the evidence of climate change was overwhelming. So it’s difficult to tell who is being wilfully blind and who, like Luntz, was falling victim to gross negligence in the way they ignore the science - and in the potential catastrophic risks that they promote. Whichever way you cut it, their actions reflect badly on the whole public relations industry.
As you might assume from my earlier criticism, I'm not suggesting that Frank Luntz or even a dubious cabal of ethics-free PR people are solely to blame for the public confusion on climate change. They have received extensive, if clumsy assistance from the media, which in a facile attempt to provide "balance" is willing to give any opinion an “impartial” airing as long as it is firmly in contradiction with another.

This is not just a feature of the point/counterpoint talking heads that have emerged as the principal vehicle for television news. Newspaper reporters are just as guilty of canvassing "both sides" of every argument, often without providing any critical judgment as to the validity or relative weight of either side. On the issue of climate change, journalists have consistently reported the updates from the best climate scientists in the world juxtaposed against the unsubstantiated raving of an industry-funded climate change denier - as if both are equally valid. This is not balanced journalism. It is a critical abdication of journalistic responsibility. Any reporter who cannot assess the relative merits of a global scientific consensus - especially in contradiction to an "expert" that the coal industry is paying to help "clear the air" - deserves to have his pencil taken away in solemn ceremony and broken into bits.

There is yet more blame to go around. You could criticize scientists for the dense, cautious and conditional language that they use in talking about the threats of climate change. But in science, credibility is a currency (this, in apparent contradiction to the state of affairs in journalism or PR). A scientist who strays, even momentarily, off the path of certainty or who wanders from hard science into policy is immediately dismissed as someone with an axe to grind.

You could also criticize environmentalists, whose tendency has been to stray too far in the other direction, extrapolating scientific assumptions to create scare stories so dispiriting that they create apathy rather than activism. These, in turn, have made easy targets for the energy industry's climate change deniers.
The important thing at this point, however, is not to assign blame. It is to educate yourself and to join this increasingly urgent political debate. This is not one of those relatively low-level PR boondoggles. We're not talking about single individuals dying because the auto industry held out against seat belt laws. We're not even talking about many 100s of thousands of people dying of lung cancer because the tobacco industry held out for "sound science" while actively increasing the amount of addictive nicotine in their product. We're talking about the future of the planet.

So please read on.

Read everything.

If you are actually practicing public relations, take a close look at your clients and at your own performance. There has to be a point where principle trumps short-term economic gain, a point where you admit to yourself that it’s not worth the money to put the planet at risk.

Whatever you do, you must keep a wary eye. By all means, read the sites that deny the reality of climate change. But then check on www.sourcewatch.org to see who paid for those opinions. Read the DeSmogBlog. Don't accept the word of people who pass themselves off as "skeptics." Be skeptical yourself. Ask yourself what motive the scientific community has to gang up and invent a phony climate crisis. Compare that to the motives that ExxonMobil or Peabody Coal might have to deny that burning fossil fuels indiscriminately could change irrevocably our existence on the planet.

And if you still leave the lights on when you're done, make sure they're shining in the shamed faces of the PR pros who are still trying to prevent sound, sensible policy change to affect this, perhaps the biggest threat humankind has ever faced.

Link:  http://www.desmogblog.com/slamming-the-climate-skeptic-scam

The Invention of Lying about Climate Change: Climate Cover-up -- The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore

by Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, October 8, 2009

I don’t review many books because:

1. It’s too time-consuming.
2. I’m not sure how many of my readers (or anyone else) really devote time to reading non-fiction books on climate.
3. There haven’t been many good books out there to review, books with useful, well-written information you can’t really get on the web.

But I have a dozen books on my table right now — and another dozen will be coming in the next couple of months.  Some are very good, including Gore’s new book on solutions due early November.  Right now, I am happy to unhesitatingly recommend Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by James Hoggan editor of  with Richard Littlemore, key figures behind the terrific Desmog.blog.

I think everyone who follows the climate issue needs to understand the whole gory history of the most immoral and, so far, most successful, disinformation campaign in US history — the effort, largely funded by conservatives and fossil fuel companies, to deny climate science and delay the urgent action needed to preserve the health and well-being of countless future generations:

Starting in the early 1990s, three large American industry groups set to work on strategies to cast doubt on the science of climate change. Even though the oil industry’s own scientists had declared, as early as 1995, that human-induced climate change was undeniable, the American Petroleum Institute, the Western Fuels Association (a coal-fired electrical industry consortium) and a Philip Morris-sponsored anti-science group called TASSC all drafted and promoted campaigns of climate change disinformation.

The success of those plans is self-evident. A Yale/George Mason University poll taken late in 2008 showed that — 20 years after President George H.W. Bush promised to beat the greenhouse effect with the “White House effect” — a clear majority of Americans still say they either doubt the science of climate change or they just don’t know. Climate Cover-Up explains why they don’t know. Tracking the global warming denial movement from its inception, public relations advisor James Hoggan (working with journalist Richard Littlemore), reveals the details of those early plans and then tracks their execution, naming names and exposing tactics in what has become a full-blown attack on the integrity of the public conversation.

Leveraging four years of original research conducted through Hoggan’s website, DeSmogBlog.com, Hoggan and Littlemore documented the participation of lapsed scientists and ExxonMobil-funded think tanks. Then they analyzed and explained how mainstream media stood by — or in some cases colluded — while deniers turned a clear issue of science (and an issue for public safety) into a partisan argument that no one could win.

This book will open your eyes, it will raise your ire and, most especially, it will inspire you to take back the truth — to end the Climate Cover-up.

While I follow the issue very closely, I still learned a lot from this book, especially the fascinating Chapter 11 on “using courts and cash to silence critics of climate confusion.”  I didn’t know the whole story of how uber-denier Fred Singer managed to get Roger Revelle (one of Al Gore’s teachers, who famously alerted Gore to the climate threat) to co-author a piece of nonsense.  I didn’t know the story of the lawsuit that resulted when Revelle’s graduate student tried to speak up about “what he saw as Singer’s blatant manipulation — his outright bullying of — of Revelle” who “was in his eighty-second and it would turn out last year,” who “had already suffered a serious heart attack and was in failing health — unable according to his students and staff to pay attention for more than 15 or 20 minutes.”  And if you want some more details on that, you can go here and here.  But while some of the details are on the web, sometimes you just need to curl up with the whole well-told story.

This is a must-read book.

Link to Climate Progress blog:  http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/08/the-invention-of-lying-global-warming-denial/

Tripati, Roberts, Eagle, Last time carbon dioxide levels were this high: 15 million years ago

Last time carbon dioxide levels were this high: 15 million years ago

ScienceDaily, Oct. 9, 2009 — You would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on Earth as high as they are today, a UCLA scientist and colleagues report Oct. 8, 2009, in the online edition of the journal Science.

"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

"Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth's history," she said.

By analyzing the chemistry of bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists have been able to determine the composition of Earth's atmosphere going back as far as 800,000 years, and they have developed a good understanding of how carbon dioxide levels have varied in the atmosphere since that time. But there has been little agreement before this study on how to reconstruct carbon dioxide levels prior to 800,000 years ago.

Tripati, before joining UCLA's faculty, was part of a research team at England’s University of Cambridge that developed a new technique to assess carbon dioxide levels in the much more distant past — by studying the ratio of the chemical element boron to calcium in the shells of ancient single-celled marine algae. Tripati has now used this method to determine the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere as far back as 20 million years ago.

"We are able, for the first time, to accurately reproduce the ice-core record for the last 800,000 years — the record of atmospheric C02 based on measurements of carbon dioxide in gas bubbles in ice," Tripati said.

"This suggests that the technique we are using is valid.

"We then applied this technique to study the history of carbon dioxide from 800,000 years ago to 20 million years ago," she said. "We report evidence for a very close coupling between carbon dioxide levels and climate. When there is evidence for the growth of a large ice sheet on Antarctica or on Greenland or the growth of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, we see evidence for a dramatic change in carbon dioxide levels over the last 20 million years.

"A slightly shocking finding," Tripati said, "is that the only time in the last 20 million years that we find evidence for carbon dioxide levels similar to the modern level of 387 parts per million was 15 to 20 million years ago, when the planet was dramatically different."

Levels of carbon dioxide have varied only between 180 and 300 parts per million over the last 800,000 years — until recent decades, said Tripati, who is also a member of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. It has been known that modern-day levels of carbon dioxide are unprecedented over the last 800,000 years, but the finding that modern levels have not been reached in the last 15 million years is new.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the carbon dioxide level was about 280 parts per million, Tripati said. That figure had changed very little over the previous 1,000 years. But since the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide level has been rising and is likely to soar unless action is taken to reverse the trend, Tripati said.

"During the Middle Miocene (the time period approximately 14 to 20 million years ago), carbon dioxide levels were sustained at about 400 parts per million, which is about where we are today," Tripati said. "Globally, temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, a huge amount."

Tripati's new chemical technique has an average uncertainty rate of only 14 parts per million.

"We can now have confidence in making statements about how carbon dioxide has varied throughout history," Tripati said.

In the last 20 million years, key features of the climate record include the sudden appearance of ice on Antarctica about 14 million years ago and a rise in sea level of approximately 75 to 120 feet.

"We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in carbon dioxide levels of about 100 parts per million, a huge change," Tripati said. "This record is the first evidence that carbon dioxide may be linked with environmental changes, such as changes in the terrestrial ecosystem, distribution of ice, sea level and monsoon intensity."

Today, the Arctic Ocean is covered with frozen ice all year long, an ice cap that has been there for about 14 million years.

"Prior to that, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic," Tripati said.

Some projections show carbon dioxide levels rising as high as 600 or even 900 parts per million in the next century if no action is taken to reduce carbon dioxide, Tripati said. Such levels may have been reached on Earth 50 million years ago or earlier, said Tripati, who is working to push her data back much farther than 20 million years and to study the last 20 million years in detail.

More than 50 million years ago, there were no ice sheets on Earth, and there were expanded deserts in the subtropics, Tripati noted. The planet was radically different.

Co-authors on the Science paper are Christopher Roberts, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and Robert Eagle, a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology.

The research was funded by UCLA's Division of Physical Sciences and the U.K.'s National Environmental Research Council.

Tripati's research focuses on the development and application of chemical tools to study climate change throughout history. She studies the evolution of climate and seawater chemistry through time.

"I'm interested in understanding how the carbon cycle and climate have been coupled, and why they have been coupled, over a range of time-scales, from hundreds of years to tens of millions of years," Tripati said.
In addition to being published on the Science Express website, the paper will be published in the print edition of Science at a later date.

---

Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles. Original article written by Stuart Wolpert.

Link:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm

A. K. Tripati, C. D. Roberts & R. A. Eagle, Science (2009): Coupling of CO2 and ice sheet stability over major climate transitions of the last 20 million years

Science, published online October 8, 2009; DOI: 10.1126/science.1178296

Reports

Coupling of CO₂ and ice sheet stability over major climate transitions of the last 20 million years

Aradhna K. Tripati ^* (Departments of Earth and Space Sciences and Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, U.S.A.; Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EQ, U.K.), Christopher D. Roberts (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EQ, U.K.), and Robert A. Eagle (Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, U.S.A.) 

(Submitted on June 26, 2009; accepted on September 28, 2009.)

Abstract

The CO₂ content of the atmosphere has varied cyclically between ~180 and ~280 ppmv over the last 800,000 years, closely coupled with temperature and sea level. For earlier periods in Earth’s history, pCO₂ is much less certain and the relationship between pCO₂ and climate remains poorly constrained. We use boron/calcium ratios in foraminifera to estimate pCO₂ during major climate transitions of the last 20 million years (myr). During the Middle Miocene, when temperatures were ~3-6 °C warmer and sea level 25-40 meters higher than present, pCO₂ was similar to modern levels. Decreases in pCO₂ were synchronous with major episodes of glacial expansion during the Middle Miocene (~14-10 million years ago; Ma) and Late Pliocene (~3.3 to -2.4 Ma).

^*Correspondence should be addressed.  Aradhna K. Tripati, e-mail: aradhna.tripati@gmail.com

Link to abstract:  http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1178296

Scientists race to prevent ash tree's extinction

Scientists race to prevent ash tree's extinction

by Melanie S. Welte (Associated Press Writer), Associated Press, October 8, 2009

DES MOINES, Iowa -- Mark Widrlechner is out to save a species from extinction. It's the native ash tree, and although it provides $25 billion worth of timber and decorates backyards across North America, an unstoppable bug has slowly killed millions of trees in 13 states and could cause the species' ultimate demise -- unless Widrlechner is successful.

The horticulturist for the federal Agriculture Research Service in Iowa is heading an effort to collect tens of millions of ash seeds from across the U.S. that can be frozen and ready to plant when researchers figure out how to kill or control the emerald ash borer.

The process is tedious since seeds must be hand-picked from branches only in the fall. But scientists hope to avoid what happened to the American elm, chestnut and butternut trees, which were nearly wiped out by disease.

Widrlechner said the ash borer is especially devastating because it can kill very young trees and reduce the possibility that the species develop a tolerance.

"This one to me looks like it's much more likely to lead to extinction if we don't do anything about it," predicted Widrlechner, who also is a professor at Iowa State University in Ames.

Ash trees are used commercially for baseball bats, kitchen cabinets and other products, and dominate the landscape in parts of the Midwest.

In Kansas and Nebraska, they account for 25-35% of trees and up to 60% in some North Dakota communities. In Iowa alone there are an estimated 88 million ash trees, state experts said.

The eastern U.S. produces nearly 114 million board feet of ash saw timber valued at $25 billion, according to the 2009 manual by the Department of Agriculture on the emerald ash borer. The potential impact on the urban landscape could include 30-90 million trees and cause $20 billion to $60 billion in damage, the report estimated.

The insect is native to Asia and was first identified in the U.S. in 2002, when it was spotted in Michigan. It's now found in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The adult beetles are relatively harmless and nibble on leaves, but the larvae are deadly. They drill into trees, eat through the vascular tissue and stop the flow of water. An infested tree can die within a few years, and the emerging generation of beetles moves to other trees, Widrlechner said.

Federal and state agencies tried to limit the ash borer's movement through quarantines, but scientists agree that there's no way to stop the insect's spread unless new techniques are developed.

"This pest is one like we've never dealt with before," said John Bedford, pest response program manager with the Michigan Department of Agriculture. "It doesn't seem to leave much in its wake."

In parts of Michigan, "a majority of the ash trees are dead and gone," he said.

Crews have collected at least 2 million seeds from stands of green, white, black, blue and pumpkin ash -- only about 10% of the number needed to ensure the diversity of each species is represented, Widrlechner estimates.

Noel Schneeberger, an entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service, said billions of ash trees are scattered across the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

The seed collection project began in New England in 2007, then expanded to Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri. It also includes the Forest Service, the National Resources Conservation Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department, several state forest agencies, American Indian tribes, botanical gardens and even people with ash trees in their yards.

Ash seeds grow in clusters on branches with anywhere from a dozen to 50 seeds hanging in a group. The seeds are hand-picked in the fall and put in paper bags, then dried and sorted. Seeds shared with researchers are put in large jars and refrigerated, Widrlechner said.

Seeds in the "base collection," which will be used to replenish the ash species, are sealed in plastic and stored in a walk-in freezer. Some remain at the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station in Ames, and some are sent to the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colo.

A similar but smaller project by the Department of Agriculture and North Carolina State University is under way for the Eastern and North Carolina hemlocks, which are threatened by the Hemlock woolly adelgid.

Large-scale seed collections were not taken before diseases nearly wiped out Dutch elms between 1930 and the mid-1970s and American chestnut trees by the 1950s. Butternut, a hardwood native to eastern North American forests, is still affected by a canker disease.

Schneeberger hopes the ash tree will avoid a similar fate. He said the problem shows that urban areas must use a variety of trees, noting that many ash trees were largely planted to replace dying elms.

"We need to pay attention to planting the right trees for the right place in urban areas and diversify the urban canopy," Schneeberger said. "We don't plant one street full of ash, for example, we plant a variety of species."

Link:  http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20091008/4acd71d0_3421_1334520091008-2062431490

Four-degree climate change – alarmist or realist?

by Lynn Kalaugher, environmentalresearchweb.org, October 2, 2009

It's not often that an entire roomful of scientists is in agreement but that was certainly the case when delegates at the 4 Degrees and Beyond: International Climate Conference in Oxford, UK, were asked to raise their hands if they thought that talking about an average global warming of 4 °C by 2100 was alarmist: not a single researcher waved their arm in the air.

"Two degrees is in danger of looking complacent [as a target]," said Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: Our future on a hotter planet and a member of the panel for the debate. "Seven or eight degrees is now what I'd call alarmist." According to Diana Liverman of the University of Oxford and the University of Arizona, Lynas was in part responsible for the idea behind the 4 Degrees and Beyond conference as research a few years ago for his book highlighted that the impacts community had not then done any studies for temperature changes above 2 °C.

The panel debating the topic – Lynas; Liverman; Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the University of Manchester; Ian Noble of the World Bank; Chris West, director of the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP); and James Painter of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the University of Oxford – agreed that the concept of four degrees was alarming rather than alarmist. Noble and West were about to jet off to the UN climate negotiations in Bangkok, from where they reported that little progress had been made so far.

Kevin Anderson found the conference an emotional rollercoaster. While he's naturally quite pessimistic about climate change, believing that we don't have a "cat in hell's chance" of keeping warming to less than two degrees, the afternoon's session on adapting to four-degrees warming had cheered him up no end. "You're telling us we can adapt," he said. "I felt optimistic today briefly for the first time in seven years." That optimism was brief, however, once he realised that the adaptation sessions had been focusing on economic, rather than human, aspects of adaptation.

The Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) used in the IPCC's fourth assessment report came in for a particular slating. Lynas, for example, said that the scenarios assumed that no policy on emissions would be implemented in the 21st century. "We've seen so much effort go into analysing scenarios that are about places we'll never go," said Ian Noble. "The biggest challenge is how we get to where we want to be." Noble reckons that both the third and fourth IPCC assessment reports were too cautious – he's awaiting the fifth report with interest.
 
Lynas raised concerns that scientists are not giving out a clear message on climate to the public, and pleaded for a more focused communications strategy among climate scientists. "The Working group III report of the IPCC fourth assessment was a disaster to get through," he said. "We need a Realclimate but with a broader base."

About the author: Liz Kalaugher is editor of environmentalresearchweb.

Link:   http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/research/40592

Joseph Romm (on ERW): Publicize or Perish

Publicize or perish

The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential catastrophe of climate change. Joseph Romm urges scientists to start engaging with the public – now

Something to shout about

by Joseph Romm, environmentalresearchweb.org, October 7, 2009

The fate of the next 50 generations may well be determined in the next few months and years. Will the US Congress agree to a shrinking cap on greenhouse-gas emissions and legislation to achieve the transformation to clean energy? If not, you can forget about a global climate deal. But even if the bill passes and a global deal is achieved, both will need to be continuously strengthened in coming years, as the increasingly worrisome science continues to inform the policy, just as in the case of the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances.

The International Scientific Congress on climate change held in Copenhagen in March, which was attended by 2000 scientists, concluded that "Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized." That would mean that by 2100 there would be atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of more than 1000 ppm, total planetary warming of 5 °C and sea-level rises probably on the high end of recent projections of 1–2 m followed by a rise of as much as 2 cm per year or more for centuries. We would also see one-third of inhabited land reaching dust bowl levels of aridity, half or more of all species becoming extinct, and the oceans increasingly becoming hot, acidic, dead zones. And if we do not change course quickly, the latest science predicts that these impacts may be irreversible for 1000 years.

In short, the fate of perhaps the next 100 billion people to walk the Earth rests with scientists (and those who understand the science) trying to communicate the dire nature of the climate problem (and the myriad solutions available now) as well as the ability of the media, the public, opinion-makers and political leaders to understand and deal with that science.

Disinformation and scientific illiteracy

So far, we are failing miserably. Neither the US nor the world as a whole has taken any consequential action to reverse emissions trends. And if the scientific community does not help lead the way in reversing emissions, then we will justifiably bear serious blame from future generations, who will no doubt become increasingly bitter about the havoc our ignorance and myopia has brought them. Nobody will be writing books calling us "the greatest generation."

As one example of how bad scientific messaging has been, let me go through Gallup polling over the past decade as discussed in a 2008 article in Environment magazine entitled "A widening gap: Republican and Democratic views on climate change".

The article reported that in 1997 some 52% of Democrats said that the effects of global warming had already begun and 52% said most scientists believe global warming is occurring. In 2008 some 76% said warming had begun and 75% said most scientists believe warming is occurring. It would appear that Democrats believe most scientists.

Few leading climate scientists or major scientific bodies would disagree that the scientific case that the planet is warming – and that humans are the dominant cause of recent temperature rises – has become stronger in the past 10 years. That is clearly seen in the scientific literature – as summarized in the IPCC reports.

And yet for Republicans, in 1997 some 48% said warming had begun and 42% said most scientists believe warming is occurring – a modest six-point differential. By 2008, the percentage of Republicans saying the effects of global warming had already begun had dropped to a mere 42% (an amazing statistic in its own right given the painfully obvious evidence to the contrary). But the percentage saying most scientists believe global warming is occurring had risen to 54% – a stunning 12-point differential.

In short, a significant and growing number of Republicans – one in eight as of 2008 – simply do not believe what they know most scientists believe. That is quite alarming news, given that it is inconceivable that the US will take the very strong action needed to avert catastrophe unless it comes to believe what most scientists believe, namely that we are in big, big trouble and can delay no further.

Here is the lesson for scientists: in the last decade, we have apparently become less convincing to Republicans than the deniers have been. They have apparently become better at messaging, while we have perhaps become worse.

In part, this has occurred because there is an organized disinformation campaign promoted by conservative think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and well funded by fossil-fuel companies like ExxonMobil, with key messages repeated by conservative pundits and politicians like George Will, Rush Limbaugh and Republican Senator James Inhofe. At the same time, the media have treated this more as a political issue than a scientific one, thereby necessitating in their view a "balanced" presentation of both sides, notwithstanding the fact that the overwhelming majority of scientists understand humans are warming the planet and dangerously so. Also, increasingly profit-driven media have been abdicating their role in science education. Science writer Chris Mooney and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum offer these grim statistics in their recent book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future (2009, Basic Books):

• For every five hours of cable news, one minute is devoted to science;
• Some 46% of Americans believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old;
• The number of US newspapers with science sections has shrunk by two-thirds in the last 20 years;
• Just 18% of Americans know a scientist personally;
• The overwhelming majority of Americans polled in late 2007 either could not name a scientific role model or named "people who are either not scientists or not alive".

The lack of scientific messaging

Yet just when the media are abandoning science coverage, many scientists are increasingly reluctant to address politicized issues like global warming.

Scientists who are also great public communicators, like Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman, have grown scarcer as science has become increasingly specialized. Moreover, the media like the glib and the dramatic, which is a style that most scientists deliberately avoid. Scientists like to focus on the things that they do not know, since that is the cutting edge of scientific research. So they do not keep repeating the things that they do know, which is one reason that the public and the media often do not hear from scientists about the strong areas of consensus on global warming. And as the physicist Mark Bowen writes in Thin Ice (2006, Holt), his book about glaciologist Lonnie Thompson, "Scientists have an annoying habit of backing off when they're asked to make a plain statement, and climatologists tend to be worse than most."

As scientist and writer Jared Diamond wrote in a 1997 article in Discover magazine on scientific messaging (or the lack thereof), "Scientists who do communicate effectively with the public often find their colleagues responding with scorn, and even punishing them in ways that affect their careers." After Sagan became famous, he was rejected for membership of the National Academy of Sciences in a special vote. This became widely known, and, as Diamond writes, "Every scientist is capable of recognizing the obvious implications for his or her self-interest."

Scientists who have been outspoken about global warming have been repeatedly attacked as having a "political agenda". As a 2006 article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society explained (87 1025), "For a scientist whose reputation is largely invested in peer-reviewed publications and the citations thereof, there is little professional pay-off for getting involved in debates that mix science and politics."

The scientific community must figure out how to effectively engage the public on this crucial issue. The physics community in particular must help lead the way. After all, it was effective at warning the public and policymakers about the dangers of that other existential threat to the human race – nuclear weapons. We appear to have walked back from the precipice of global nuclear war only to face an equally grave threat from our unbridled consumption of fossil fuels.

I believe that the major scientific bodies and leading scientists in the US must come together immediately to develop and quickly implement a serious communication strategy. We are again at the precipice. Indeed, it is, as the current Presidential Science Advisor and physicist John Holdren has said many times, too late to avoid dangerous anthropogenic warming of the planet. Now the only question is whether we can avoid unmitigated catastrophe.

One final point. If the scientific community is unable to help persuade the public, opinion-makers and political leaders to take the necessary action now, then the entire relationship of science to the broader world will change forever. When the US and the world do get desperate about global warming in the next decade or two, then the entire focus of society, of scientists and engineers, and of academia will be directed toward a Second-World-War-scale effort to mitigate what we can and adapting to the myriad miseries that our myopic dawdling has made inevitable. I do not think that the scientific community has even begun to think about that.

Link:  http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/opinion/40615

Robert Corell: significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point

A NEW Special Report

The Climate Agenda

Explore news and resources & debate policy with our expert panel. Full Report »

New analysis forecasts dire 6.3 °F temperature increase

by Juliet Eilperin Friday, September 25, 2009, Washington Post Staff Writer

Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 °F by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.

The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

Robert Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative and reviewed the UNEP report's scientific findings, said the significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

"We don't want to go there," said Corell, who collaborated with climate researchers at the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute, Massachusetts-based Ventana Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do the analysis. The team has revised its estimates since the U.N. report went to press and has posted the most recent figures at ClimateInteractive.org.

The group took the upper-range targets of nearly 200 nations' climate policies -- including U.S. cuts that would reduce domestic emissions 73% from 2005 levels by 2050, along with the European Union's pledge to reduce its emissions 80% from 1990 levels by 2050 -- and found that even under that optimistic scenario, the average global temperature is likely to warm by 6.3 °F.

World leaders at the July Group of 20 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, pledged in a joint statement that they would adopt policies to prevent global temperature from climbing more than 2 °C, or 3.6 °F: "We recognize the broad scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2 °C."

Corell, who has shared these findings with the Obama administration as well as climate policymakers in China, noted that global carbon emissions are still rising. "It's accelerating," he said. "We're not going in the right direction."

Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director, told reporters at the National Press Club on Thursday that the report aims to update the IPCC's 2007 findings to reflect both new physical evidence and a more sophisticated understanding of how Earth systems work.

"With every day that passes, the underlying trends that science has provided is . . . of such a dramatic nature that shying away from a major agreement in Copenhagen will probably be unforgivable if you look back in history at this moment," Steiner said. He noted that since 2000 alone, the average rate of melting at 30 glaciers in nine mountain ranges has doubled compared with the rate during the previous two decades.

"These are not things that are in dispute in terms of data," he said. "They are actually physically measurable."
Other findings include the fact that sea level might rise by as much as 6 feet by 2100 instead of 1.5 feet, as the IPCC had projected, and the Arctic may experience a sea-ice free summer by 2030, rather than by the end of the century.

While the administration is pressing this week for an end to fossil-fuel subsidies as part of the current G-20 summit in Pittsburgh -- and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told reporters Thursday that world leaders appear open to such a proposal -- activists such as 350.org director Bill McKibben said politicians worldwide are not taking aggressive enough steps to address climate change.

"Here's where we are: The political system is not producing at the moment a result which has anything to do with what the science is telling us," said McKibben, whose group aims to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, well below the 450 ppm target that leaders of the Group of 20 major nations have embraced.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), co-sponsor of the House-passed climate bill that researchers included as part of their new temperature analysis, said, "As sobering as this report is, it is not the worst-case scenario. That would be if the world does nothing and allows heat-trapping pollution to continue to spew unchecked into the atmosphere."

Michael MacCracken, one of the scientific reviewers for the IPCC and a contributor to the UNEP report, said that if developed nations cut their emissions by half and the developing countries continued on their current path, or vice versa, the world would still experience a temperature increase of about 2 °F by 2050.

"We face a situation where basically everybody has to do everything they can," MacCracken said.

Link:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/24/AR2009092402602.html

Daniel Pauly: Aquacalypse Now (all commercial fish stocks will collapse by 2048 according to study in Science)

Aquacalypse Now

The End of Fish

• Daniel Pauly, The New Republic,

  Daniel Pauly

  view bio

  • Aquacalypse Now

   September 28, 2009

Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff–like callousness by the world’s fisheries. Beginning in the 1950s, as their operations became increasingly industrialized--with onboard refrigeration, acoustic fish-finders, and, later, GPS--they first depleted stocks of cod, hake, flounder, sole, and halibut in the Northern Hemisphere. As those stocks disappeared, the fleets moved southward, to the coasts of developing nations and, ultimately, all the way to the shores of Antarctica, searching for icefishes and rockcods, and, more recently, for small, shrimplike krill. As the bounty of coastal waters dropped, fisheries moved further offshore, to deeper waters. And, finally, as the larger fish began to disappear, boats began to catch fish that were smaller and uglier--fish never before considered fit for human consumption. 

Many were renamed so that they could be marketed: The suspicious slimehead became the delicious orange roughy, while the worrisome Patagonian toothfish became the wholesome Chilean seabass. Others, like the homely hoki, were cut up so they could be sold sight-unseen as fish sticks and filets in fast-food restaurants and the frozen-food aisle.

The scheme was carried out by nothing less than a fishing-industrial complex--an alliance of corporate fishing fleets, lobbyists, parliamentary representatives, and fisheries economists. By hiding behind the romantic image of the small-scale, independent fisherman, they secured political influence and government subsidies far in excess of what would be expected, given their minuscule contribution to the GDP of advanced economies--in the United States, even less than that of the hair salon industry. In Japan, for example, huge, vertically integrated conglomerates, such as Taiyo or the better-known Mitsubishi, lobby their friends in the Japanese Fisheries Agency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help them gain access to the few remaining plentiful stocks of tuna, like those in the waters surrounding South Pacific countries. Beginning in the early 1980s, the United States, which had not traditionally been much of a fishing country, began heavily subsidizing U.S. fleets, producing its own fishing-industrial complex, dominated by large processors and retail chains. Today, governments provide nearly $30 billion in subsidies each year--about one-third of the value of the global catch--that keep fisheries going, even when they have overexploited their resource base. As a result, there are between two and four times as many boats as the annual catch requires, and yet, the funds to “build capacity” keep coming.

The jig, however, is nearly up. In 1950, the newly constituted Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimated that, globally, we were catching about 20 million metric tons of fish (cod, mackerel, tuna, etc.) and invertebrates (lobster, squid, clams, etc.). That catch peaked at 90 million tons per year in the late 1980s, and it has been declining ever since. Much like Madoff’s infamous operation, which required a constant influx of new investments to generate “revenue” for past investors, the global fishing-industrial complex has required a constant influx of new stocks to continue operation. Instead of restricting its catches so that fish can reproduce and maintain their populations, the industry has simply fished until a stock is depleted and then moved on to new or deeper waters, and to smaller and stranger fish. And, just as a Ponzi scheme will collapse once the pool of potential investors has been drained, so too will the fishing industry collapse as the oceans are drained of life.

Unfortunately, it is not just the future of the fishing industry that is at stake, but also the continued health of the world’s largest ecosystem. While the climate crisis gathers front-page attention on a regular basis, people--even those who profess great environmental consciousness--continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable practice. But eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee. In the past 50 years, we have reduced the populations of large commercial fish, such as bluefin tuna, cod, and other favorites, by a staggering 90%. One study, published in the prestigious journal Science, forecast that, by 2048, all commercial fish stocks will have “collapsed,” meaning that they will be generating 10% or less of their peak catches. Whether or not that particular year, or even decade, is correct, one thing is clear: Fish are in dire peril, and, if they are, then so are we.


The extent of the fisheries’ Ponzi scheme eluded government scientists for many years. They had long studied the health of fish populations, of course, but typically, laboratories would focus only on the species in their nation’s waters. And those studying a particular species in one country would communicate only with those studying that same species in another. Thus, they failed to notice an important pattern: Popular species were sequentially replacing each other in the catches that fisheries were reporting, and, when a species faded, scientific attention shifted to the replacement species. At any given moment, scientists might acknowledge that one-half or two-thirds of fisheries were being overfished, but, when the stock of a particular fish was used up, it was simply removed from the denominator of the fraction. For example, the Hudson River sturgeon wasn’t counted as an overfished stock once it disappeared from New York waters; it simply became an anecdote in the historical record. The baselines just kept shifting, allowing us to continue blithely damaging marine ecosystems.

It was not until the 1990s that a series of high-profile scientific papers demonstrated that we needed to study, and mitigate, fish depletions at the global level. They showed that phenomena previously observed at local levels--for example, the disappearance of large species from fisheries’ catches and their replacement by smaller species--were also occurring globally. It was a realization akin to understanding that the financial meltdown was due not to the failure of a single bank, but, rather, to the failure of the entire banking system--and it drew a lot of controversy.

The notion that fish are globally imperiled has been challenged in many ways--perhaps most notably by fisheries biologists, who have questioned the facts, the tone, and even the integrity of those making such allegations. Fisheries biologists are different than marine ecologists like myself. Marine ecologists are concerned mainly with threats to the diversity of the ecosystems that they study, and so, they frequently work in concert with environmental NGOs and are often funded by philanthropic foundations. By contrast, fisheries biologists traditionally work for government agencies, like the National Marine Fisheries Service at the Commerce Department, or as consultants to the fishing industry, and their chief goal is to protect fisheries and the fishermen they employ. I myself was trained as a fisheries biologist in Germany, and, while they would dispute this, the agencies for which many of my former classmates work clearly have been captured by the industry they are supposed to regulate. Thus, there are fisheries scientists who, for example, write that cod have “recovered” or even “doubled” their numbers when, in fact, they have increased merely from 1% to 2% of their original abundance in the 1950s.

Yet, despite their different interests and priorities--and despite their disagreements on the “end of fish”--marine ecologists and fisheries scientists both want there to be more fish in the oceans. Partly, this is because both are scientists, who are expected to concede when confronted with strong evidence. And, in the case of fisheries, as with global warming, the evidence is overwhelming: Stocks are declining in most parts of the world. And, ultimately, the important rift is not between these two groups of scientists, but between the public, which owns the sea’s resources, and the fishing-industrial complex, which needs fresh capital for its Ponzi scheme. The difficulty lies in forcing the fishing-industrial complex to catch fewer fish so that populations can rebuild.

It is essential that we do so as quickly as possible because the consequences of an end to fish are frightful. To some Western nations, an end to fish might simply seem like a culinary catastrophe, but for 400 million people in developing nations, particularly in poor African and South Asian countries, fish are the main source of animal protein. What’s more, fisheries are a major source of livelihood for hundreds of million of people. A recent World Bank report found that the income of the world’s 30 million small-scale fisheries is shrinking. The decrease in catch has also dealt a blow to a prime source of foreign-exchange earnings, on which impoverished countries, ranging from Senegal in West Africa to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, rely to support their imports of staples such as rice.

And, of course, the end of fish would disrupt marine ecosystems to an extent that we are only now beginning to appreciate. Thus, the removal of small fish in the Mediterranean to fatten bluefin tuna in pens is causing the “common” dolphin to become exceedingly rare in some areas, with local extinction probable. Other marine mammals and seabirds are similarly affected in various parts of the world. Moreover, the removal of top predators from marine ecosystems has effects that cascade down, leading to the increase of jellyfish and other gelatinous zooplankton and to the gradual erosion of the food web within which fish populations are embedded. This is what happened off the coast of southwestern Africa, where an upwelling ecosystem similar to that off California, previously dominated by fish such as hake and sardines, has become overrun by millions of tons of jellyfish.

Jellyfish population outbursts are also becoming more frequent in the northern Gulf of Mexico, where the fertilizer-laden runoff from the Mississippi River fuels uncontrolled algae blooms. The dead algae then fall to a sea bottom from which shrimp trawling has raked all animals capable of feeding on them, and so they rot, causing Massachusetts-sized “dead zones.” Similar phenomena--which only jellyfish seem to enjoy--are occurring throughout the world, from the Baltic Sea to the Chesapeake Bay, and from the Black Sea in southeastern Europe to the Bohai Sea in northeastern China. Our oceans, having nourished us since the beginning of the human species some 150,000 years ago, are now turning against us, becoming angry opponents.

That dynamic will only grow more antagonistic as the oceans become warmer and more acidic because of climate change. Fish are expected to suffer mightily from global warming, making it essential that we preserve as great a number of fish and of fish species as possible, so that those which are able to adapt are around to evolve and propagate the next incarnations of marine life. In fact, new evidence tentatively suggests that large quantities of fish biomass could actually help attenuate ocean acidification. In other words, fish could help save us from the worst consequences of our own folly--yet we are killing them off. The jellyfish-ridden waters we’re seeing now may be only the first scene in a watery horror show.

To halt this slide toward a marine dystopia, government intervention is required. Regulatory agencies must impose quotas on the amount of fish caught in any given year, and the way they structure such quotas is very important. For example, simply permitting all fisheries to catch a given aggregate number of fish annually results in a wasteful build-up of fleets and vessels as fisheries race to grab as large a share of the quota as possible before their competitors do. Such a system may protect the fish, but it is economically disastrous: The entire annual quota is usually landed in a short period, leading to temporary oversupply, which, in turn, leads to low prices. The alternative is to limit the number of fishermen, with those retaining “access privileges” being able to catch their assigned fraction of the overall quota whenever they want, without competing against other fishermen. Such individual quotas lead to less overall fishing effort and, hence, bigger profit in the fishery.
Unfortunately, most fisheries economists, fixated solely on corporate short-term profits, argue that, for such a system to work, access privileges must (a) be handed out for free, (b) be held in perpetuity, and (c) be transferrable (i.e., sellable and buyable like any other commodity). They call this construct “fishing rights” or “individual transferable quotas.” However, there is no reason why a government should not auction off quotas with access privileges. The highest bidder would secure the right to a certain percentage of the quota, with society as a whole benefiting from providing private access to a public resource. This would be similar to ranchers paying--as they do--for the privilege to graze their cattle on federal lands. Grazing “rights” on the other hand, would simply give ownership of public land to ranchers, which is something few would consider.

Some Pollyannas believe that aquaculture, or fish farming, can ensure the health of stocks without government action--a notion supposedly buttressed by FAO statistics showing such rapid growth in aquaculture that more than 40% of all “seafood” consumed now comes from farms. The problem with this argument is that China reports about 68% of the world’s aquaculture production, and the FAO, which has been burned by inflated Chinese statistics before, expresses doubt about its stated production and growth rates. Outside of China--where most farmed fish are freshwater vegetarians, such as carp--aquaculture produces predominately carnivorous marine fish, like salmon, which are fed not only vegetal ingredients, but also fishmeal and fish oil, which are obtained by grinding up herring, mackerel, and sardines caught by “reduction fisheries.” Carnivore farming, which requires three to four pounds of smaller fish to produce one pound of a larger one, thus robs Peter to pay Paul. Aquaculture in the West produces a luxury product in global terms. To expect aquaculture to ensure that fish remain available--or, at least, to expect carnivore farming to solve the problem posed by diminishing catches from fisheries--would be akin to expecting that Enzo Ferrari’s cars can solve gridlock in Los Angeles.

Others believe that fish populations can be rebuilt through consumer awareness campaigns that encourage buyers to make prudent choices. One such approach is to label seafood from fisheries deemed sustainable. In Europe, for example, consumers can look for the logo of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), a nonprofit started by the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever, which has a large fish-trading division. At first, the MSC certified only small-scale fisheries, but lately, it has given its seal of approval to large, controversial companies. Indeed, it has begun to measure its success by the percentage of the world catch that it certifies. Encouraged by a Walton Foundation grant and Wal-Mart’s goal of selling only certified fish, the MSC is actually considering certifying reduction fisheries, with the consequence that Wal-Mart, for example, will be able to sell farmed salmon shining with the ersatz glow of sustainability. (Given the devastating pollution, diseases, and parasite infestations that have plagued salmon farms in Chile, Canada, and other countries, this “Wal-Mart strategy” will, in the long term, make the MSC complicit to a giant scam.)

The other market-based initiative, prevalent in the United States, distributes wallet-size cards designed to steer consumers toward fish that the group issuing the cards deems to have been caught sustainably. Their success is considerable if measured by the millions of cards given away, for example, by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but assessing the impact on the fisheries is difficult. For one thing, the multitude of such cards leads to contradictions and confusion, as the same fish are assessed differently by different organizations. For example, ahi tuna is rated as “safe,” “questionable,” and “avoid” on the wallet cards issued by three U.S. nonprofits. A bigger issue, however, is that these cards generate only “horizontal” pressure--that is, a group of restaurant-goers might chide each other for ordering the cod filet or might ask the overworked student who served them where the fish came from, but this pressure does not reach wholesalers, fleet operators, or supermarket chains. “Vertical” pressure exerted by environmental NGOs on such decision-makers is far more effective. But, if that’s true, why not directly pressure the government and legislators, since they are the ones who regulate the fisheries?

The truth is that governments are the only entities that can prevent the end of fish. For one thing, once freed from their allegiance to the fishing-industrial complex, they are the ones with the research infrastructure capable of prudently managing fisheries. For another, it is they who provide the billions of dollars in annual subsidies that allow the fisheries to persist despite the lousy economics of the industry. Reducing these subsidies would allow fish populations to rebuild, and nearly all fisheries scientists agree that the billions of dollars in harmful, capacityenhancing subsidies must be phased out. Finally, only governments can zone the marine environment, identifying certain areas where fishing will be tolerated and others where it will not. In fact, all maritime countries will have to regulate their exclusive economic zones (the 200-mile boundary areas established by the U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty within which a nation has the sole right to fish). The United States has the largest exclusive economic zone in the world, and it has taken important first steps in protecting its resources, notably in the northwest Hawaiian islands. Creating, or re-creating, un-fished areas within which fish populations can regenerate is the only opportunity we have to repair the damage done to them.

There is no need for an end to fish, or to fishing for that matter. But there is an urgent need for governments to free themselves from the fishing-industrial complex and its Ponzi scheme, to stop subsidizing the fishing-industrial complex and awarding it fishing rights, when it should in fact pay for the privilege to fish. If we can do this, then we will have fish forever.

Daniel Pauly is a professor at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia and the principal investigator of its Sea Around Us Project.


Link to article:  http://www.tnr.com/article/environment-energy/aquacalypse-now

Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist, TWC: Off the chain without a 'cane'

Off the chain without a 'cane

 

Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist, TWC, October 3, 2009

That's what the weather was in the Atlanta metro area early last week, and things were wiggy in the U.S. for much of September. Usually during that month when there's wild weather, including precipitation extremes, it's as a result of a hurricane or tropical storm. Not in 2009.

This "ex-skeptic" hasn't blogged about climate change in a while. For that matter, I haven't blogged about anything for a while! Been a bit distracted, but it's time to jump in the water again. Or maybe I should say, time to dust off my Nomex suit and put it on!

Before you fire up the flamethrower, though, let me say what this long entry is NOT about.
It's not about H.R. 2454 (more commonly known as the Waxman-Markey bill).

And I'm not telling you that you can't drive your SUV.

This blog is about the effect of climate change upon day-to-day weather. About physics and thermodynamics not politics.

It was two years ago last week that I first thoroughly laid out the basic premise.

Nothing that's gone on in the atmosphere since then has convinced me otherwise, and I've continued to add gazillions of weather events to this PDF [56MB file, and now up to 529 slides]. My goal has been and continues to be to document and objectively analyze these cases.

There have been anomalies and extremes for as long as there has been weather on the planet; the key is to assess how they are now changing as the climate changes.

To review:

--The global climate is overall warmer than it was in the 1970s. (That shouldn't be too controversial a statement!)

Technical talk: The atmospheric warming has resulted in an increase in 1000-500 millibar thicknesses. Those increased thicknesses are manifesting themselves primarily by an increase in 500 mb heights (particularly notable in mid-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere), as there has not been a similar rise in 1000 mb heights. Although there is of course natural year-to-year variability, the overall trend at 500 mb has clearly been upward.

Analogy: It's like bread baking in the oven. As it warms, the dough expands in depth. Although the details of the science involved are different, the analogy works, which is that the depth (thickness) of a given layer of the atmosphere is increasing on average as that layer warms. Furthermore, in this case, the bottom of that atmospheric layer (1000 millibars) is not significantly changing, just as the bottom of the bread isn't (in that case, it's fixed by the bottom of the pan).



Technical talk: In turn, one of the ways in which those increased mean 500 mb heights are manifesting themselves is by way of individual (temporally short-term and spatially small-scale) 500 mb positive height anomalies. These positive 500 mb height anomalies are also playing a role in concomitant short-term negative anomalies.

Translation: What we've been observing over and over again in recent years is exceptionally strong ridges of high pressure, sometimes accompanied by strong, persistent "cutoff lows" (upper-level lows cut off from the main jet stream) to the south of the ridges.

Over and over and over again, there has been one of those ridges of high pressure bulging northward. One week it might be in Eurasia, the next in North America. Like when you squeeze a kids' squishy ball in one place and then another, as I've done on the air and in talks I've given. For an example of a TWC segment (from July 1, 2009), click on the screen capture below.


The upshot: many weather events/patterns in recent years which have been topsy-turvy and/or produced precipitation extremes and temperature anomalies.

The past few months help illustrate all of this.

As I recently reported in a TWC segment, it's extremely important to look at the context of this year's cool summer in a portion of North America including the U.S. Midwest! That was a local anomaly of blue dots (below-average temperatures) amidst a sea of red dots (above-average temps). The map is for "climatological summer," or June, July, and August (JJA). And this was occurring in the context of the global temperature rankings.



The temperature pattern was associated with a negative 500 mb height anomaly (persistent troughs/cutoffs) "trapped" to the south of a strong positive height anomaly (strong ridging in the Arctic). Here are a conventional "cylindrical equidistant" map projection to provide that perspective, and a "polar stereographic" map which doesn't exaggerate the area around the North Pole. Both maps of 500 mb height departures from average show the very clear and persistent pattern.



Then after JJA came September, and the atmosphere outdid itself.

First, there was the flash flood disaster in Istanbul, produced by what was reportedly the largest amount of rain there in 80 years.

The atmospheric circulation signature aloft at the time?


In the U.S. a couple days later, a non-tropical low pressure system took on some tropical characteristics and became a hybrid as it was forced northwestward (an atypical direction) from out in the Atlantic to Delaware Bay, due to a cutoff low in tandem with a strong bulging ridge aloft to the north of it. The cyclone brought wind damage to southern New Jersey from gusts as high as 61 mph, and also locally heavy rain there and other locations in the Northeast.


The pattern aloft at the time:


Then, in one of the oddest, most deviate meteorological things I've ever seen in my career, an upper-level cutoff low at ~45-50N latitude in mid-September not only "retrograded" to the west but it did a complete 360 degree loop over the course of several days (September 10-14), from southwest Saskatchewan to South Dakota to Wyoming and back to southwest Saskatchewan.

This was occurring at a time when there was an extreme spike in the preliminary satellite-derived globally-averaged mid-tropospheric (600 mb, or 14,000 feet) temperatures to a value which was by far the highest in the ~30-year period of record.

Just sayin'.

[Click on image for larger version. Source: UAHuntsville; NASA; DISCOVER Technologies]

Global cooling?

Fortunately that bizarro cutoff low did not have catastrophic consequences, but while that situation was happening another remarkable weather pattern was unfolding. And this system, like the one in Turkey, would ultimately bring disaster.

A persistent mid and upper-level low just sat and meandered and sat and meandered day after day after day over the ArkLaTex and Oklahoma, producing a series of localized deluges from September 9-21 and resulting in record September rainfall in Texarkana and Tuscaloosa.


The pattern during that period:


Starting to look familiar yet?

This all culminated in the flash flood calamity not far from The Weather Channel in the Atlanta suburbs, affecting some TWC employees and causing 10 tragic fatalities in Georgia including one involving a heart-wrenching 911 emergency phone call.

Rainfall quickly went off the chain, unheard of for September in Georgia without a hurricane or tropical storm. [Side note: Is El Nino totally to blame for such an exceptionally quiet Atlantic hurricane season? Hmmm.]

Many locations in the northern part of the state received more rain in one week than previously on record for the entire month of September, those prior records having been set in 2004, when the remnants of Frances, Ivan and Jeanne brought torrential downpours.

Record floods occurred on Suwannee Creek near Suwanee and on the Chattahoochee at Whitesburg.
The two images below are from not quite the end of the event, but most of the rain had fallen by then; the first shows the rainfall accumulation at one location and the second is a mapped radar estimate of the amounts.



Dewpoints, representative of the amount of moisture in the air (and indirectly the warmth) helping to fuel the extreme rainfall rates, were as high as 80 degrees, exceptionally high for late September.

The pattern at the time on September 20-21:


And last but not least, on the 22nd ...

While it fortunately did not result in any new flood misery, this was the off-the-chain coup de grace meteorologically: a ridge that bulged so strongly for this time of year that it set the record for the highest 500 millibar height so late in the season so far north in the United States (5950 meters at Spokane, Washington). And for icing on the cake, there was yet another cutoff low stuck to the south.




Was all of this just an "accident"? Let's look at the bigger picture. This has happened in the context of overwhelmingly positive 500 mb height anomalies (higher-than-average pressure aloft) so far this year, as has also been the case in recent years.




So what does all this mean? Did global warming "cause" the Atlanta flood?

Well, the atmosphere is very complex, and with any weather event there's a combination of factors rather than a single one for an outright cause. Additionally, there's no way of knowing what would have happened without the climate having changed. Maybe there would have been an even more extreme and deadly catastrophe by way of a landfalling major hurricane. And large-scale climate drivers didn't determine the small-scale specifics of, for example, my neighborhood having been spared serious flooding while other Atlanta suburbs got hit hard.

Nevertheless, there's a straightforward connection in the way the changing climate "set the table" for what happened this September in Atlanta and elsewhere. It behooves us to understand not only theoretical expected increases in heavy precipitation (via relatively slow/linear changes in temperatures, evaporation, and atmospheric moisture) but also how changing circulation patterns are already squeezing out that moisture in extreme doses and affecting weather in other ways.

While it's important to consider what may happen in 50 or 100 or 200 years, and debate what should be done about that via H.R. 2454 or other measures, we need to get a grip on what's happening *now*.


Mableton, Ga., Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009. [AP Photo / John Bazemore] 

Posted at 1:05 pm ET

Link to TWC article:  http://www.weather.com/blog/weather/8_20427.html