Arctic Warming Overtakes 2,000 Years of Natural Cooling

National Center for Atmospheric Research, September 7, 2009


BOULDER,CO---Arctic temperatures in the 1990s reached their warmest level of any decade in at least 2,000 years, new research indicates. The study, which incorporates geologic records and computer simulations, provides new evidence that the Arctic would be cooling if not for greenhouse gas emissions that are overpowering natural climate patterns.

The international study, led by Northern Arizona University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will be published in the September 4, 2009, edition of Science. It was primarily funded by the National Science Foundation, NCAR's sponsor.

The scientists reconstructed summer temperatures across the Arctic over the last 2,000 years by decade, extending a view of climate far beyond the 400 years of Arctic-wide records previously available at that level of detail. They found that thousands of years of gradual Arctic cooling, related to natural changes in Earth's orbit, would continue today if not for emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

"This result is particularly important because the Arctic, perhaps more than any other region on Earth, is facing dramatic impacts from climate change," says NCAR scientist David Schneider, one of the co-authors. "This study provides us with a long-term record that reveals how greenhouse gases from human activities are overwhelming the Arctic's natural climate system."

Darrell Kaufman of Northern Arizona University, the lead author and head of the synthesis project, says the results indicate that recent warming is more anomalous than previously documented.

"Scientists have known for a while that the current period of warming was preceded by a long-term cooling trend," says Kaufman. "But our reconstruction quantifies the cooling with greater certainty than before."

Greenhouse gases overtake a natural cycle

The new study is the first to quantify a pervasive cooling across the Arctic on a decade-by-decade basis that is related to an approximately 21,000-year cyclical wobble in Earth's tilt relative to the Sun.  Over the last 7,000 years, the timing of Earth's closest pass by the Sun has shifted from September to January. This has gradually reduced the intensity of sunlight reaching the Arctic in summertime, when Earth is farther from the Sun.

The research team's temperature analysis shows that summer temperatures in the Arctic, in step with the reduced energy from the Sun, cooled at an average rate of about 0.2 °C (about 0.35 °F) per thousand years. The temperatures eventually bottomed out during the "Little Ice Age," a period of widespread cooling that lasted roughly from the 16th to the mid-19th centuries.

Even though the orbital cycle that produced the cooling continued, it was overwhelmed in the 20th century by human-induced warming.  The result was summer temperatures in the Arctic by the year 2000 that were about 1.4 °C (2.5 °F) higher than would have been expected from the continued cyclical cooling alone. 

"If it hadn't been for the increase in human-produced greenhouse gases, summer temperatures in the Arctic should have cooled gradually over the last century," says Bette Otto-Bliesner, an NCAR scientist who participated in the study.

Natural archives of Arctic climate

To reconstruct Arctic temperatures over the last 2,000 years, the study team incorporated three types of field-based data, each of which captured the response of a different component of the Arctic's climate system to changes in temperature.

These data included temperature reconstructions published by the study team earlier this year. The reconstructions were based on evidence provided by sediments from Arctic lakes, which yielded two kinds of clues: changes in the abundance of silica remnants left behind by algae, which reflect the length of the growing season, and the thickness of annually deposited sediment layers, which increases during warmer summers as deposits from glacial meltwater increase. 

The research also incorporated previously published data from glacial ice and tree rings that were calibrated against the instrumental temperature record. 

The scientists compared the temperatures inferred from the field-based data with simulations run with the Community Climate System Model, a computer model of global climate based at NCAR. The model's estimate of the reduction of seasonal sunlight in the Arctic and the resulting cooling was consistent with the analysis of the lake sediments and other natural archives. These results give scientists more confidence in computer projections of future Arctic temperatures. 

"This study provides a clear example of how increased greenhouse gases are now changing our climate, ending at least 2,000 years of Arctic cooling," says NCAR scientist Caspar Ammann, a co-author.

The new study follows previous work showing that temperatures over the last century warmed almost three times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.  This phenomenon, called Arctic amplification, occurs as highly reflective Arctic ice and snow melt away, allowing dark land and exposed ocean to absorb more sunlight.

"Because we know that the processes responsible for past Arctic amplification are still operating, we can anticipate that it will continue into the next century," says Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado at Boulder, a member of the study team. "Consequently, Arctic warming will continue to exceed temperature increases in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, resulting in accelerated loss of land ice and an increased rate of sea level rise, with global consequences." 

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Link:   http://www.americantowns.com/co/boulder/news/arctic-warming-overtakes-2-000-years-of-natural-cooling-211451

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes on mountaintop-mining magnate Don Blankenship

by David Roberts, Grist, January 22, 2010

On Thursday the University of Charleston in West Virginia hosted a debate between Don Blankenship, CEO of mountaintop-removal mining firm Massey Energy Co., and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., environmental lawyer and founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance. I kept up a running play-by-play that can be accessed by scrolling back through my Twitter feed, but I didn’t take notes, so this is from memory and I won’t be using direct quotes.

The mystery to me going in was why Blankenship agreed to it. What possible incentive is there for a corporate CEO to put himself in a risky situation, publicly defending a widely reviled product? What’s the upside? Why not just buy some ads or hire more lobbyists?

Having watched the debate, I’m more mystified than ever. If that was supposed to be damage control, I’d hate to see damage. Blankenship had every advantage, with a friendly hometown crowd eager to applaud him and a moderator who helpfully read off pro-coal facts during commercial breaks, but he was painfully and obviously outmatched by Kennedy. I guess it’s easy to get over-confident when you’ve effectively purchased a state government and broken the law with impunity for years.

He didn’t seem even cursorily prepared. Kennedy reeled off fact after fact about declining mining employment in WV, the age of Appalachian ecosystems and the impossibility of recovering them after MTR mining damage, the enormous health and economic impacts of coal on Appalachia, the size of Chinese investments in clean energy, the number of Clean Water Act violations from Massey, and on and on and on. Every fact was geared toward a plea to West Virginians: look, this man is making himself rich by making you poor. He’s sapping your state of jobs, income, health, and a future.

In response Blankenship had nothing but ressentiment and nativism. Over and over he dismissed Kennedy’s facts as “rhetoric” and “just false” claims that “you can find on the internet,” but not once did he refute or even convincingly contest a particular claim. He asked the audience to dismiss them based purely on crude stereotypes about out-of-state environmentalists.

His very first rebuttal drew on a familiar conservative trope: environmentalists are are overly emotional and rely on extremist rhetoric rather than facts and cool reason. But no sooner had the words left his mouth than he was talking about how the coal industry is really “your neighbors” and “Sunday school teachers,” working to create down-home energy so terrorists don’t come over and kill us. He warned that pesky regulatory constraints from do-gooders mean “we all better learn to speak Chinese.” This is what reasoned, non-emotional rhetoric looks like, I guess: if you criticize my company you hate Sunday school teachers, love terrorists, and want to surrender national sovereignty to Red China.

When Kennedy accused him of leaving behind ghost towns across WV, Blankenship responded that he’d bought up all those homes at fair market value (“those people left voluntarily”). In response to Kennedy’s points on water pollution, Blankenship effectively dismissed the threat of mercury as a bunch of hype on the internet. (If mercury is dangerous, he asked, how is it people in India live to be 79? Really, that was his argument. Apparently he’s never heard of Minimata disease.) When Kennedy listed the social and health damages done by coal—“externalities” the industry charges to taxpayers—Blankenship mumbled, “do we have some of those externalities? I don’t know. Maybe.” When Kennedy pointed out that China is dumping trillions into renewable energy, Massey responded that they were only building windmills to appease the UN. When Kennedy pointed out that Massey’s own disclosure revealed some 12,000 violations of the Clean Water Act last year, Blankenship responded that they’re reducing their violations year to year, now that they’ve been reminded by the EPA that it would be a good idea.

In short, Kennedy was the encyclopedic superego of environmentalism and Blankenship was the raw id of crony capitalism.

I’ll admit I’ve always been perversely fascinated by Blankenship. Most big corporate CEOs have mastered the art of calorie-free management speak. They’ve learned how to stay on message and skirt controversy. Not Blankenship. Not only does he openly flaunt the law and buy political access, he remains defiantly unpleasant in person, speaking in an affectless, heavily accented mumble. Watch toward the end of this video, the archival footage (YouTube.com link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UofmDWd3XeE ):



He still talks like that. He simply dismissed Kennedy’s facts and stuck to his narrative:  global warming’s a hoax, hippie environmentalists are strangling free enterprise,  out-of-staters have no right to question what happens in WV, and China is going to take over if we don’t mine and burn all the coal we can as fast as we can. We’re crazy to be worried about “parts per million” of pollutants when coal is the only thing keeping our life expectancy above Angola’s. We’re in a ruthless global competition for dominance and the most productive and efficient win, mountains and poor people be damned.

In sharp contrast to, say, Duke Energy’s congenial, folksy CEO Jim Rogers, Blankenship fashions himself a hillbilly John Galt and doesn’t give a f*ck what you think about it.

Why he’d want to take that act to a national audience is a true puzzlement.

Addendum: By the way, asked what they might agree about, the Blankenship and Kennedy settled on two things: they don’t like “free trade” and they think carbon capture and sequestration is nonsense.

Link:  http://www.grist.org/article/2010-01-22-robert-kennedy-debate-mountaintop-mining-magnate-don-blankenship

NYT: China shows its extreme arrogance and lies again to the international community about having an open Internet

WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE FOOLING?

DOES CHINA REALLY BELIEVE THAT THEY CAN CONTINUE TO LIE TO EVERYONE WHEN WE ALL KNOW THAT THEY HACK AT WILL OUR SECURITY AGENCIES, OUR ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE, OUR GMAIL ACCOUNTS AND THEY CENSUR THEIR OWN PEOPLE'S ABILITY TO RECEIVE INFORMATION -- LET'S BE CLEAR!  CHINA IS NOT A COMMUNIST COUNTRY, IT IS A DICTATORSHIP!

FURTHERMORE, IT IS NOT THE AMERICANS WHO ARE THE IMPERIALISTS HERE -- IT IS THE CHINESE.

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT HAS BEHAVED LIKE AN OUT-OF-CONTROL BELLIGERENT CHILD FOR THE PAST DECADE.

THEY SIMPLY BELIEVE THAT THEY CAN DO ANYTHING THEY LIKE AND GET AWAY WITH IT AS IF NO ONE WERE WATCHING.

WELL, THE WORLD IS WATCHING.

From The New York Times, January 22, 2010 (by Edward Wong):

China Says U.S. Criticism of Its Internet Policy Harms Ties

BEIJING — The Chinese Foreign Ministry lashed out Friday against criticism of China in a speech on Internet censorship made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, calling on the United States government “to respect the truth and to stop using the so-called Internet freedom question to level baseless accusations.” [WHOPPING LIES]

Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a written statement posted Friday afternoon on the ministry’s Web site that the criticism leveled by Mrs. Clinton on Thursday was “harmful to Sino-American relations.”

“The Chinese Internet is open,” he said.  [A WHOPPING HUGE LIE!]

The statement by the Foreign Ministry, along with a scathing editorial in the English-language edition of The Global Times, a populist, patriotic newspaper, signaled that China was ready to wrestle politically with the United States in the debate over Internet censorship.

President Obama promised last year to start a more conciliatory era in United States-China relations, pushing human rights issues to the background, but the new criticism of China’s Internet censorship and rising tensions over currency valuation and Taiwan arms sales indicate that animus could flare in the months ahead.

Mrs. Clinton’s sweeping speech with its cold war undertones — likening the information curtain to the Iron Curtain — criticized several countries by name, including China, for Internet censorship. It was the first speech in which a top administration official offered a vision for making Internet freedom an integral part of foreign policy.

The debate over Internet censorship was brought to the fore in China last week when Google announced it might shut down its Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, and curtail its other operations in mainland China if Chinese officials did not back down from requiring Google to censor search results.

Until now, the Chinese government had been trying to frame the dispute with Google as a commercial matter, perhaps because officials want to avoid having the dispute become a referendum on Internet censorship policies among Chinese liberals and foreign companies operating in China. On Thursday, He Yafei, a vice foreign minister, had said the Google dispute should not be “over-interpreted” or linked to the bilateral relationship with the United States, according to Xinhua, the official state news agency.

But in the aftermath of Mrs. Clinton’s speech, that attitude could be changing. Mrs. Clinton pointedly said that “a new information curtain is descending across much of the world” and identified China as one of a handful of countries that had stepped up Internet censorship in the past year. (Starting in late 2008, the Chinese government shut down thousands of Web sites under the pretext of an antipornography campaign.) She also praised American companies such as Google that are “making the issue of Internet and information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions.”

The State Department had invited at least two prominent Chinese bloggers to travel to Washington for Mrs. Clinton’s speech, and on Friday the United States Embassy here invited bloggers, mostly liberals [EXCUSE ME, NYT, WHAT DOES SOMEONE'S POLITICAL BIAS HAVE TO DO WITH THIS ISSUE? -- LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES BOTH BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY (well, Republicans used to, but they are generally quite fascist these days)], to attend a briefing on Internet issues.

A White House spokesman, Bill Burton, said Friday that “all we are looking for from China are some answers.”

In its editorial, the English-language edition of The Global Times said Mrs. Clinton “had raised the stakes in Washington’s clash with Beijing over Internet freedom.”

The American demand for an unfettered Internet was a form of “information imperialism,” the newspaper said, because less developed nations cannot possibly compete with Western countries in the arena of information flow.

“The U.S. campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted Internet is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy,” the newspaper said, adding that the “U.S. government’s ideological imposition is unacceptable and, for that reason, will not be allowed to succeed.”

Articles on the Chinese-language Web site of   asserted that the United States employs the Internet as a weapon to achieve worldwide hegemony.

One big question is whether ordinary Chinese will, to any large degree, accept China’s arguments justifying Internet censorship. Although urban, middle-class Chinese often support government policies on sovereignty issues such as Tibet or Taiwan, they generally deride media censorship. That feeling is especially pronounced among those who call themselves netizens. China has the most Internet users of any country, some 384 million by official count, but also the most complex system of Internet censorship, nicknamed the Great Firewall.

Except in the western region of Xinjiang, which is only starting to restore Internet access after cutting service off entirely after ethnic riots in July, canny netizens across China use software to get over the Great Firewall while chafing at the controls.

Jonathan Ansfield and Xiyun Yang contributed reporting.

Link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/world/asia/23diplo.html

George Monbiot: John Tomlinson beats his own record for climate denial nonsense

John Tomlinson beats his own record for climate denial nonsense

John Tomlinson, the Michigan Mauler, has now written a column with a cracking 38 howlers in his denial of global warming

 
by George Monbiot, The Guardian, May 1, 2009

I'm really annoyed with Michigan columnist John Tomlinson. First, the Michigan Mauler has walked all over the competition for the prestigious Christopher Booker Prize, just a couple of months into the contest to find the world's most misguided comments on climate change. He set a high bar with his first article about global warming, which contained 18 magnificent errors. I feared that this would be impossible to beat.
How wrong I was! He has now seen off all possible contenders (except perhaps a repeat performance by his good self), with a cracking 38 howlers in one short column for the Flint Journal. Ironically he made these errors in response to my exposure of his previous claims.

Amazingly, this even beats his own provisional world record for density: the ratio of falsehoods to words. His first column averaged one misleading statement for every 26 words. This one delivers one per 21 words. I intend to submit his second column to the Guinness Book of Records as the most inaccurate article ever published in a newspaper.

Secondly, this astonishing wealth of disinformation means it has probably taken me 100 times longer to respond to his article than he took to write it. This is why there's been such a long delay in my response, and a general hold-up in all further entries for the Christopher Booker Prize. The amount of time I've wasted on his nonsense means I'm beginning to regret launching this prize. And beginning to lose the will to live. I warn you now: this is a very long blog post.

Like most climate change deniers, the Michigan Mauler makes no attempt to answer his critics. He does not seek to defend his previous claims; he simply abandons them and switches to another set of falsehoods. For example, in the first column he maintains that "The Earth's temperature peaked in 1998. It's been falling ever since". In the second column he claims that "Temperatures plunged until 1850, then rose, peaking in 1934." He makes no attempt to justify this switch. He really doesn't care, does he?

There is no attempt to argue here, just to machine-gun his readers with so much nonsense that only people daft enough to devote several days to investigating his claims - as I have just done - can answer them all. I was not entirely surprised to discover that the Mauler makes his living by practising hypnosis. Something of the hypnotic method appears to be at work in his articles: if you say it loudly and confidently enough, people will fall under your spell. As Tomlinson says in promoting his practice, "Hypnosis is easy … intelligence and will, aspects of the conscious mind, are irrelevant. Only imagination matters. Almost everyone can be hypnotized, if they so choose."

I have decided to accept no further entries from the Michigan Mauler. He's just too good at this stuff. He's almost certain to win the prize, though I'll be looking high and low for another contender. The problem is that in order to win they'll have to produce at least 39 howlers, and the thought of documenting them all is just too much to bear. Is it worth it, or should I just give up and award this prize to Tomlinson now?

Anyway, here, in all their glory, are his falsehoods:

Claim 1. For most of the last 10,000 years, Earth was much warmer than today.

Fact: This is bunkum. Tomlinson, as usual, gives no source for this claim, but it's probably a new variant on
the mid-Holocene canard, which he has somehow extrapolated to the entire period. NOAA has this to say about it:

In summary, the mid-Holocene, roughly 6,000 years ago, was generally warmer than today, but only in summer and only in the northern hemisphere. More over, we clearly know the cause of this natural warming, and know without doubt that this proven "astronomical" climate forcing mechanism cannot be responsible for the warming over the last 100 years

Claim 2. Even 1,000 years ago it was much warmer.

Fact: Rubbish again. As you can see from the graphs of past temperature reconstructions (page 467 in this chapter by the IPCC), none of the curves suggest that temperatures 1,000 years ago matched those of today, let alone were much warmer.

Claim 3. Temperatures plunged until 1850, then rose, peaking in 1934.

Fact: No - only in 48 states of the US, comprising 2% of the world's surface.

Claim 4. According to Nasa, the 1930s was our warmest decade in the 20th century.

Fact: This appears to be a double extrapolation. First Tomlinson extends the US 1934 data to the whole planet. Then he extends it to the whole decade. The 1930s weren't the warmest decade by any stretch of the imagination, even in the US.

Claim 5. We're still below that temperature.

Fact: Nonsense again, as you can see from the Met Office series.

Claim 6. Next, a sharp cooling trend began, bottoming in 1979. This produced the now infamous "ice age" scare. GW alarmists always start their numbers from this bottom because temperatures rose until 1998, before dropping once again.

Fact: Given that Tomlinson, in the same article, cites the recorded temperature series, beginning in 1850, and the palaeoclimate reconstructions of the past 2,000 years, he evidently knows that this too is bunkum. I have never seen any scientist or environmentalist use 1979 as the starting point for temperature records.

Claim 7. Because temperatures rose until 1998, before dropping once again. Now, 11 years later, that bounce is almost gone.

Fact: For the umpteenth time, 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded, but the trend shows a steady rise across the decades, with the result that eight of the 10 warmest years since 1850 have occurred since 2001.
In other words, Tomlinson is doing exactly what he wrongly accuses his critics of doing (see 6): starting his temperature series at a point convenient to his argument.

Claim 8. The whole GW argument hinges on which temperature source you quote.

Fact: No it doesn't. It hinges on the entire range of data, observations, reconstructions and models, spanning many thousands of scientific papers.

Claim 9. Many climatologists believe the University of Alabama-Huntsville is the world's foremost temperature monitoring source because it uses satellite scanning, as opposed to ground stations.

Fact: No, they see it as one among many useful sources, all of which contribute to the scientific understanding of climate trends and causes.

Claim 10. Its data absolutely do not support GW theory.

Fact: Oh yes they do.

Claims 11 and 12. It's the other global temperature monitoring source, the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) that started the scare.

Facts: "The other" suggests that Tomlinson believes this is the only alternative data source.
Attention was first drawn to the prospect of man-made global warming in 1896, by Svante Arrhenius.

Claim 13. In 1988, testifying before Congress, Dr James Hansen, head of GISS and an expert in computer modelling, said CO2 production was destroying Earth.

Fact: He said no such thing.

Claim 14. Enlisting Al Gore and his Hollywood minions, they brought fear to the hearts and minds of women and children everywhere.

Fact: Al Gore began raising concerns about climate change soon after becoming a congressman in 1977.

Claim 15. As head of GISS, Hansen personally determines the temperature numbers they publish.
Incredibly, he refuses to say how he got them.

Fact: Yes, it is incredible, and plain wrong. Here are some of the places in which Hansen and Nasa explain their methodology:
Hansen, JE, R Ruedy, Mki Sato, M Imhoff, W Lawrence, D
Easterling, T Peterson & T Karl, 2001: A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 106, 23947-23963, doi:10.1029/2001JD000354.
Hansen, J, R Ruedy, J Glascoe, & Mki Sato, 1999: GISS analysis of surface temperature change, J. Geophys Res, 104, 30997-31022, doi:10.1029/1999JD900835.
GISS Surface Temperature Analysis: Sources

Claim 16. Nevertheless, two Canadians, Stephen McIntyre, a mathematician, and environmental economist Ross McKitrick, decided to check.

Fact: Stephen McIntyre has written on this issue. Ross McKitrick has not.

Claim 17. They first achieved fame in 2004 by completely discrediting Michael E Mann, famous for creating the "hockey stick"-shaped temperature graph Gore used to scare the bejesus out of people.

Fact: Yaaawn. I suppose I'll have to say it again. The first hockey-stick paper, produced by Michael Mann et al has been vindicated by subsequent studies (see the IPCC).

As a result of the controversy whipped up by climate change deniers, the hockey-stick paper was investigated by the National Academies of Science in the US. Its Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years found the following:

The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years.

Claim 18. Mann also refused to reveal his methodology.

Fact: Blimey, this ancient meme again. Mann et al's methods and data have been picked over more comprehensively than those of just about any other scientific paper over the past 20 years, as Tomlinson must surely know. They are available for anyone to see.

Claim 19. Did you know Gore's key global warming "fact" was completely destroyed five years ago?

Fact: Er, no. It has been repeatedly upheld during that period.

Claim 20. The mainstream media won't mention it.

Fact: Apart from the hundreds of articles on this topic published in newspapers including the Sunday Telegraph, Daily Express, Australian, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, etc.

Claim 21. Fortunately, Canadians know their hockey sticks! Riding that success, McIntyre and McKitrick took on Hansen's data to see if maybe he made any mistakes. Sure enough, he did. On August 8, 2007, NASA announced these guys had found a gaping flaw in Hansen's numbers. The error was huge:  0.8 °C annually.

Fact: No, it was not 0.8 °C, it was 0.001 °C. How's that for a "gaping flaw"?

Claim 22. To put this error into context, the entire GW scare is over a net rise of 0.6 °C in the 20th century.

Fact: No it's not. The concern about global warming arises from the knowledge that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to raise global temperatures (the rise is already 0.8 °C since the beginning of the 20th century).

Claim 23. Once NASA re-did Hansen's numbers, 1934 became our hottest year and 1998 only a secondary peak.

Fact: As NASA points out:

Contrary to some statements flying around the internet, there is no effect on the rankings of global temperature. Also our prior analysis had 1934 as the warmest year in the US (see the 2001 paper above), and it continues to be the warmest year, both before and after the correction to post-2000 temperatures. However, as we note in that paper, the 1934 and 1998 temperature are practically the same, the difference being much smaller than the uncertainty. The effect on global temperature (the left side of the figure; see larger GIF) was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable.

Claim 24. McKitrick, assistant professor at Guelph University, published a study on GISS data collection in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres in 2007.

Fact: He did not use GISS data.

Claim 25. He found GISS, which relies on surface measures, overstated warming by "about half" due to a laundry list of collection errors.

Fact: Bunkum, yet again. As Gavin Schmidt has shown, McKitrick's results emerge only if you don't take proper account of the fact that nearby locations have correlations in both temperature and economic activity.

Claims 26 and 27. Interestingly, GISS lost about 50% of its stations after the USSR fell in the early 1990s. As those stations were replaced with computer simulations, Hansen's "new" numbers began to show a huge acceleration in global warming.

Facts: Gavin Schmidt of NASA comments:

"Wow. This one is really out to lunch. Spatial coverage is pretty much the same as it was in the early 1990s, and no computer modelling is involved in the GISTEMP analysis."

Claim 28. Today, the vast majority of GISS sites are in the US. Computer guestimates cover outlying areas, particularly across continents such as Africa and South America, where data collection is almost nonexistent.

Fact: Gavin Schmidt tells me:

"Again simply not true. While there are areas that are less well covered by stations, the area covered remains at about 80% of the land area."

Claim 29. Because GISS relies on surface stations, its ocean coverage is abysmal.

Fact: Oh no it doesn't. Its land-ocean index uses satellite data over the oceans.

Claims 30 and 31. NASA oceanographer John Willis found that ocean temperatures have been falling since at least 2003.

Facts: It's JOSH Willis. And, as he has shown, his findings were the result of calibration mistakes. They have since been corrected.
 
Claim 32. GISS had no idea.

Fact: Of course it didn't, because it was a data-gathering error.

Claim 33. Now, it turns out, even GISS can't find any global warming whatsoever in the southern hemisphere.

Fact: Nonsense again, as the GISS figures show.

Claim 34. Imagine, 70% of Earth's surface temperature dropping sharply, and the global warming geniuses didn't have a clue.

Fact: Yes, you'll just have to imagine it.

Claim 35. Global warming is all about confiscating wealth and power.

Fact: No, it's about scientific observation and prediction.

Claim 36. Congress passed a law making it illegal (in five years) to use incandescent lightbulbs because they cause global warming.: 

Fact: No, the act merely ensures that they will no longer be sold by 2014. It does not ban their continued use.

Claim 37. That's how we're slowly losing our freedom: chancing prison for using politically incorrect light bulbs.

Fact: And he accuses other people of scaremongering!

Claim 38. Truly, the world isn't getting warmer

Fact: Yes, it is getting warmer.

For how much longer will the Flint Journal employ John Tomlinson to produce this rubbish?

www.monbiot.com

Link:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/apr/30/climate-change-scepticism-climate-change

M. J. Menne, C. N. Williams, Jr., & M. A. Palecki, JGR-A (2010), On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record

Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, 2010, in press.

On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record

Matthew J. Menne*, Claude N. Williams, Jr., and Michael A. Palecki
(NOAA/National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, NC 28801, U.S.A.)

Abstract

Recent photographic documentation of poor siting conditions at stations in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has led to questions regarding the reliability of surface temperature trends over the conterminous U.S. (CONUS). To evaluate the potential impact of poor siting/instrument exposure on CONUS temperatures, trends derived from poor and well-sited USHCN stations were compared. Results indicate that there is a mean bias associated with poor exposure sites relative to good exposure sites; however, this bias is consistent with previously documented changes associated with the widespread conversion to electronic sensors in the USHCN during the last 25 years. Moreover, the sign of the bias is counterintuitive to photographic documentation of poor exposure because associated instrument changes have led to an artificial negative (“cool”) bias in maximum temperatures and only a slight positive (“warm”) bias in minimum temperatures. These results underscore the need to consider all changes in observation practice when determining the impacts of siting irregularities. Further, the influence of non-standard siting on temperature trends can only be quantified through an analysis of the data. Adjustments applied to USHCN Version 2 data largely account for the impact of instrument and siting changes, although a small overall residual negative (“cool”) bias appears to remain in the adjusted maximum temperature series. Nevertheless, the adjusted USHCN temperatures are extremely well aligned with recent measurements from instruments whose exposure characteristics meet the highest standards for climate monitoring. In summary, we find no evidence that the CONUS temperature trends are inflated due to poor station siting.

Conclusion

Given the now extensive documentation by surfacestations.org (Watts [2009]) that the exposure characteristics of many USHCN stations are far from ideal, it is reasonable to question the role that poor exposure may have played in biasing CONUS temperature trends. However, our analysis and the earlier study by Peterson [2006] illustrate the need for data analysis in establishing the role of station exposure characteristics on temperature trends no matter how compelling the circumstantial evidence of bias may be. In other words, photos and site surveys do not preclude the need for data analysis, and concerns over exposure must be evaluated in light of other changes in observation practice such as new instrumentation.

Indeed, our analysis does provide evidence of bias in poor exposure sites relative to good exposure sites; however, given the evidence provided by surfacestations.org that poor exposure sites are predominantly MMTS sites, this bias is consistent with previously documented changes associated with the widespread conversion to MMTS-type sensors in the USHCN. Moreover, the bias in unadjusted maximum temperature data from poor exposure sites relative to good exposure sites is, on average, negative while the bias in minimum temperatures is positive (though smaller in magnitude than the negative bias in maximum temperatures). The adjustments for instrument changes and station moves provided in version 2 of the USHCN monthly temperature data largely account for the impact of the MMTS transition, although an overall residual negative bias remains in the adjusted maximum temperature series. Still, the USHCN adjusted data averaged over the CONUS are well aligned with the averages derived from the USCRN for the past five years.

The reason for station exposure not playing an obvious role in temperature trends probably warrants further investigation. It is possible that, in general, once a changeover to bad exposure has occurred, the magnitude of background trend parallels that at well exposed sites albeit with an offset. Such a phenomenon has been observed at urban stations whereby once a site has become fully urbanized, its trend is similar to those at surrounding rural sites [e.g., Boehm, 1998; Easterling et al. 2005]. This is not to say that exposure is irrelevant in all contexts or that adherence to siting standards is unimportant. Apart from potentially altering the degree to which a station’s mean value is representative of a region, poor siting in the USHCN may have altered the nature of the impact of the MMTS transition from what it would have been had good siting been maintained at all stations. Moreover, there may be more subtle artifacts associated with siting characteristics such as alterations to the seasonal cycle. Classification of USHCN exposure characteristics as well as observations from the very well sited USCRN stations should prove valuable in such studies. Nevertheless, we find no evidence that the CONUS temperature trends are inflated due to poor siting.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Anthony Watts and the many volunteers at surfacestations.org for their considerable efforts in documenting the current site characteristics of USHCN stations. The authors also thank Anthony Arguez for helpful comments on this manuscript. Partial support for this work was provided by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research, U.S. Department of Energy (Interagency Agreement DE-AI02-96ER62276).

*Correspondence e-mail:  MatthewMenne@noaa.gov

Accepted for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres.  Published 2010 American Geophysical Union. Further reproduction or electronic distribution is not permitted. Not subject to U.S. copyright.

Link to complete open-access paper:  http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/menne-etal2010.pdf

Menne et al., JGR 2010: On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record

On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record

by John Cook, Skeptical Science, January 22, 2010

The website surfacestations.org enlisted an army of volunteers, travelling across the U.S. photographing weather stations. The point of this effort was to document cases of microsite influence -- weather stations located near car parks, air conditioners and airport tarmacs and anything else that might impose a warming bias. While photos can be compelling, the only way to quantify any microsite influence is through analysis of the data. This has been done in On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record (Memme 2010), published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The trends from poorly sited weather stations are compared to well-sited stations. The results indicate that yes, there is a bias associated with poor exposure sites. However, the bias is not what you expect.

Weather stations are split into two categories: good (rating 1 or 2) and bad (ratings 3, 4 or 5). Each day, the minimum and maximum temperature are recorded. All temperature data goes through a process of homogenisation, removing non-climatic influences such as relocation of the weather station or change in the Time of Observation. In this analysis, both the raw, unadjusted data and homogenised, adjusted data are compared. Figure 1 shows the comparison of unadjusted temperature from the good and bad sites. The top figure (c) is the maximum temperature, the bottom figure (d) is the minimum temperature. The black line represents well sited weather stations with the red line representing poorly sited stations.

Figure 1. Annual average maximum and minimum unadjusted temperature change calculated using (c) maximum and (d) minimum temperatures from good and poor exposure sites (Menne 2010).

Poor sites show a cooler maximum temperature compared to good sites. For minimum temperature, the poor sites are slightly warmer. The net effect is a cool bias in poorly sited stations. Considering all the air-conditioners, BBQs, car parks and tarmacs, this result is somewhat a surprise. Why are poor sites showing a cooler trend than good sites?

The cool bias occurs primarily during the mid and late 1980s. Over this period, about 60% of USHCN sites converted from Cotton Region Shelters (CRS otherwise known as Stevenson Screens) to electronic Maximum/Minimum Temperature Systems (MMTS). MMTS sensors are attached by cable to an indoor readout device. Consequently, limited by cable length, they're often located closer to heated buildings, paved surfaces and other artificial sources of heat.

Investigations into the impact of the MMTS on temperature data have found that on average, MMTS sensors record lower daily maximums than their CRS counterparts, and, conversely, slightly higher daily minimums (Menne 2009). Only about 30% of the good sites currently have the newer MMTS-type sensors compared to about 75% of the poor exposure locations. Thus, it is the MMTS sensors that are responsible for the cool bias imposed on poor sites.

When the change from CRS to MMTS are taken into account, as well as other biases such as station relocation and Time of Observation, the trend from good sites show close agreement with poor sites.

Figure 2: Comparison of U.S. average annual (a) maximum and (b) minimum temperatures calculated using USHCN version 2 adjusted temperatures. Good and poor site ratings are based on surfacestations.org.

Does this latest analysis mean all the work at surfacestations.org has been a waste of time? On the contrary, the laborious task of rating each individual weather station enabled Memme 2010 to identify a cool bias in poor sites and isolate the cause. The role of surfacestations.org is recognised in the paper's acknowledgements in which they "wish to thank Anthony Watts and the many volunteers at surfacestations.org for their considerable efforts in documenting the current site characteristics of USHCN stations."

A net cooling bias was perhaps not the result the surfacestations.org volunteers were hoping for but improving the quality of the surface temperature record is surely a result we should all appreciate.

Link:  http://www.skepticalscience.com/On-the-reliability-of-the-US-Surface-Temperature-Record.html

NYT: Past Decade Warmest Ever, NASA Data Shows

Past Decade Warmest Ever, NASA Data Shows

by John Broder, New York Times, January 22, 2010

WASHINGTON — The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by theNational Aeronautics and Space Administration show.
The agency also found that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.

James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that global temperatures varied because of changes in ocean heating and cooling cycles. “When we average temperature over 5 or 10 years to minimize that variability,” said Dr. Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, “we find global warming is continuing unabated.”

A separate preliminary analysis from another NASA office, the National Climatic Data Center, found that 2009 tied with 2006 as the fifth warmest year on record, based on measurements taken on land and at sea. The data center report, published earlier this week, also cited the years 2000 to 2009 as the warmest decade ever measured. The new temperature figures provide evidence in the scientific discussion of global warming but are not likely to be the last word on whether the planet’s temperature is on a consistent upward path.

Dr. Hansen, who has been an outspoken figure in the climate debate for years, has often been attacked by skeptics of global warming for what they charge is selective use of temperature data. The question of whether the planet is heating and how quickly was at the heart of the so-called “climategate” controversy that arose last fall when hundreds of e-mail messages from the climate study unit at the University of East Anglia in England were released without authorization.

Critics seized on the messages as evidence that, in their view, climate scientists were manipulating data and colluding to keep contrary opinion out of scientific journals. But climate scientists and political leaders affirmed what they called a broad-based consensus that the planet was growing warmer, and on a consistent basis, although with measurable year-to-year variations.

The NASA data released Thursday showed an upward temperature trend of about 0.36 °F (0.2 °C) per decade over the past 30 years. Average global temperatures have risen by about 1.5 °F (0.8 °C) since 1880.

“That’s the important number to keep in mind,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Goddard. “The difference between the second and sixth warmest years is trivial because the known uncertainty in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years.”

Policy makers at the United Nations climate change summit conference in Copenhagen last month agreed on a goal of trying to keep the rise in average global temperatures to 3.6 °F, or 2 °C, to try to forestall the worst effects of global warming.


Link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/science/earth/22warming.html

Real Climate's Raypierre: Plass and the Surface Budget Fallacy

Plass and the Surface Budget Fallacy

— raypierre, Real Climate, 13 January 2010

RealClimate is run by a rather loosely organized volunteer consortium of people with day jobs that in and of themselves can be quite consuming of attention. And so it came to pass that the first I learned about Gavin’s interest in the work of Plass was — by reading RealClimate! In fact, David Archer and I have a book due to appear this year from Wiley/Blackwell (The Warming Papers), which is a collection of historic papers on global warming, together with interpretive essays by David and myself.

Needless to say, we pay a lot of attention to the seminal work by Plass in this book. His 1956 QJRMS technical paper on radiative transfer, which is largely the basis of his more popular writings on global warming, was one of the papers we chose to reprint in our collection. In reading historic papers, it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that investigators of the past are working on the basis of the same underlying set of assumptions in common use today. Through a very close reading of the paper, David and I noticed something about the way Plass estimated surface temperature increase, that Gavin and all previous commentators on Plass — including Kaplan himself — seem to have overlooked.


These days, it is fairly common knowledge that determination of surface temperature change requires simultaneous satisfaction of the top-of-atmosphere energy budget and surface energy budget, and that in most circumstances it is the top-of-atmosphere budget that plays by far the leading role. This is one of the many things that Arrhenius got spot-on right in his conceptual framework for computing surface temperature. His computation explicitly takes both balance requirements into account, though substantial inaccuracies were introduced because the onerous computations involved in solving the model pretty much restricted him to a one-layer representation of the atmosphere. Later workers improved on Arrhenius by introducing multiple layers and more accurate spectroscopy, but did not always note the importance of satisfying the top-of-atmosphere balance. I think it seems natural to most people to assume that if one is interested in surface temperature, the surface budget must be the most important thing to look at. Plass, for all his brilliance in computing the radiative effects of CO2, was one of the ones who was led astray by this fallacy.

Since discussions of radiative forcing today are almost invariably based on top-of-atmosphere budgets (or at least top-of- troposphere budgets, which are almost the same thing), it is natural for the modern reader to assume that when a paper quotes a radiative forcing, it must be a top-of-atmosphere forcing. This is what Gavin assumed, but a close reading of the 1956 QJRMS paper shows that this is not, in fact, what Plass was talking about. In that paper, Plass does not get around to turning his voluminous radiative calculations into a surface temperature change until nearly the last page of the paper, and when he does, he spends barely a page explaining the reasoning.

The radiative forcing Plass quotes is actually the increase in downward infrared radiation to the surface, which you get if you double CO2 while holding the atmospheric temperature fixed . This back-radiation increases because increasing the concentration of a greenhouse gas makes the atmosphere a more efficient emitter of infrared radiation, at least up to the point where the lowest bits of the atmosphere emit so well that they essentially have become a blackbody, whereafter the emission to the ground can no longer increase unless the air temperature changes. For Earthlike conditions, the emission from CO2 is nowhere near saturated in this sense (see this post ) , so Plass was entirely correct in inferring an increase in the back-radiation, at least for a relatively dry atmosphere. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere is a bit like turning up the dial on a heat lamp you are lying underneath.

It is in the final stages of the calculation that Plass went wrong. He assumed that the surface would get rid of the extra infrared radiation it was receiving by heating up until it was able to radiate away the excess. This reasoning ignores the fact that radiation is not the only means of exchanging heat between the atmosphere and the surface. There are also turbulent exchanges, including evaporation, and these would tend to limit the surface warming to values far less than the values Plass estimated. Further, when the lower atmosphere is warm and moist, such as in the tropics, the great infrared opacity of the large quantity of water vapor tends to limit the direct effect of CO2 on back-radiation into the surface, which further limits the surface warming if the air temperature is held fixed as Plass did. To be fair, Plass does include a sentence implying that he was concerned about the portion of the retained flux that exited through the top of the atmosphere, but even if one gives the most generous interpretation to what might have been meant by this statement, there is no way to make a consistent calculation out of it, given the use of the surface back-radiation as radiative forcing.

The way the greenhouse effect really works is that adding CO2 reduces the infrared out the top of the atmosphere, which means the planet receives more solar energy than it is getting rid of as infrared out the top. The only way to bring the system back into balance is for the whole troposphere to warm up. It is the corresponding warming of the low level air that drags the surface temperature along with it — an effect left entirely out of Plass’ calculation.

A more quantitative discussion of the way all this works can be found in The Warming Papers, and a yet more advanced discussion of such things can be found in Chapter 6 of my book Principles of Planetary Climate (which at long last has been shipped off to Cambridge University press, animula vagula blandula)
In point of fact, Plass did compute the top-of-atmosphere radiative forcing due to doubling or halving the concentration of CO2. The result is plainly shown in the rightmost graph of his Figure 7, where he shows the vertical profile of upward and downward flux for three different CO2 concentrations. Reading the values from the top of the graph, I get that Plass computes a 3.2 Watt per square meter reduction in the outgoing radiation for a doubling of CO2. This is really quite close to the modern value. Plass does not mention this number, or its importance, anywhere in the text, however. Still, it would be fair to give Plass the credit for the first calculation of top-of-atmosphere radiative forcing using correct modern radiative physics. Though he did not make good use of the calculation himself, the methods he introduced are largely the same as those used by Manabe and Wetherald in 1967, who were the first to put together correct spectroscopy with a correct framework for computing surface temperature, adding in accurate water vapor spectroscopy and the effects of convection along the way.

Thus, while Plass made seminal contributions to radiative transfer, his actual estimate of surface temperature increase cannot be regarded as an improvement over Arrhenius. Plass had better spectroscopy than Arrhenius, but a framework that would not give the right answer no matter how good the radiative transfer was. The point of all this historical deconstruction is not to poke fun at Plass or detract from his contributions. Theories do not spring from scientists full-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Science often proceeds through a series of errors and corrections, and those who move the ball forward are in the thick of this process even if they have made some mistakes. The point is that our current understanding of global warming rests on the shoulders of some of the greatest giants of physics of the past century or more, and myriad lesser but still substantial intellects as well.
So, when push comes to shove, was Plass a Hedgehog or a Fox? The answer is: a bit of both. With regard to computing the radiative fluxes due to CO2, Plass was a true hedgehog — he knew that one thing really, really well, and that had a lasting impact on our science. But in his Tellus article, he also showed himself to be quite a fox, in that by knowing (and explaining) many independent lines of thinking, he helped to revive attention to the wide-ranging importance of CO2 in climate. You could say he was not enough of a fox to have also absorbed the lesson of the importance of top-of-atmosphere balance, known already to Arrhenius. But also, you could say that if you’re going to be a hedgehog and pick one thing to be the central organizing principle of your world view, it had better be a pretty darn universally important thing to know. If you’re going to be a climate hedgehog, the constraint imposed by top-of-atmosphere radiation balance would be a pretty good place to hang your hat.

Link:   http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/01/plass-and-the-surface-budget-fallacy/

Joe Romm insists Andy Revkin stop misrepresenting climate scientists in his tweets

Australian Scientists: Contrary to media reports (and tweets), “our paper does not discount climate change as playing a role in this most recent drought, the ‘Big Dry.’ In fact, there are indications that climate change has worsened this recent drought.”

"The severity of the 'Big Dry' has been exacerbated by recent warmer air temperatures over the past few decades.... In a warmer world, the severity of droughts would likely become far worse." (Duh)

 
by Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, January 19, 2010
 

Australia is most definitely getting hotter, much as the entire planet has, much as climate scientists have been predicting would be the inevitable result of unrestricted emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

The figure is from the “Annual Australian Climate Statement 2009,” which notes:

2009 ends Australia’s warmest decade on record, with a decadal mean temperature anomaly of +0.48 °C (above the 1961-90 average). In Australia, each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the preceding decade. In contrast, decadal temperature variations during the first few decades of Australia’s climate record do not display any specific trend. This suggests an apparent shift in Australia’s climate from one characterised by natural variability to one increasingly characterised by a trend to warmer temperatures.

At the same time, parts of Australia are getting drier, much as as climate scientists have been predicting would be the inevitable result of unrestricted emissions of GHGs.  And Dr. Bertrand Timbal, of the Bureau of Meteorology’s Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR), concludes in his paper, “The continuing decline in South-East Australian rainfall: update to May 2009”:

The recent 12 year, 8 month period is the driest in the 110 years long record, surpassing the previous driest period during WWII….

This change in the relative contributions by the autumn and spring seasons now more closely resembles the picture provided by climate model simulations of future changes due to enhanced greenhouse gases.

So it was odd that Andy Revkin tweeted to disagree with the following statement in a recent guest essay by Auden Schendler and Mark Trexler (“The coming climate panic?  Will U.S. conservatives usher in the era of permanently big government?”):

Meanwhile, that very planet is visibly changing—epic droughts, fires and dust storms in Australia; floods in Asia, alarmingly fast melting of land ice in Greenland and Antarctica; the prospect of an ice-free summer on the Arctic Sea; raging, unprecedented fires throughout the world; and mosquito-borne illnesses like Dengue spreading to regions previously untouched. Measurements show that the oceans are rising and becoming more acidic, while the Earth’s average temperature was higher in the past decade than at any time in the past century.

At some point, even climate change becomes teenager obvious: “Well, duh, Dad! Look around you!”

The constraints of twittering turn that statement by Schendler and Trexler into this Revkin tweet (see “Why journalists should not twitter, Parts 87, 88, 89”)

Joe R still sees Aussie’s Big Dry as co2-driven event http://j.mp/co2panic Not what climate scientists see: http://j.mp/AusDry

Now aside from the misattribution from Schendler/Trexler to me, it turns out that the authors of the study Revkin cites were concerned enough about the misreading of their work in the media that they issued a “Clarification,” which begins:

The implications of our work (Ummenhofer et al., 2009) have been misunderstood in some media commentary, with some reporters asserting we have discovered that south-eastern Australia’s recent “Big Dry” is not related to climate change. This is not correct.

Their study focused on the connection between negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) events and drought.  Their clarification ends:

When taken in the context of other historic droughts over the past 120 years, the “Big Dry” is still exceptional in its severity.  The last negative IOD event occurred in 1992. This is the longest period on record over the past 120 years without a single negative IOD event.

Furthermore, the severity of the “Big Dry” has been exacerbated by recent warmer air temperatures over the past few decades (Figure 1). Warmer air temperatures lead to increased evaporation, which further reduces soil moisture and worsens the drought. While this work does not explicitly focus on the link between changing IOD frequency and recent regional and global warming, it does send a stark message: in a warmer world, the severity of droughts would likely become far worse.

In short, our paper does not discount climate change as playing a role in this most recent drought, the “Big Dry.” In fact, there are indications that climate change has worsened this recent drought. Refer to Abram et al. (2008), Cai et al. (2009), and Nicholls (2004) who investigate changes in IOD frequency and south-eastern Australian drought due to climate change.

Here is part of Figure 1, “Historical record of … mean climatic conditions over southeast Australia.”

Time series of anomalous … (c) 5-yr running mean of temperature (°C), with a 15-year running mean superimposed in green, and (d) 5-yr running mean of Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) over southeastern Australia during June-October. The grey shaded bars highlight periods of below-average precipitation when the 5-year running mean falls below one standard deviation. The duration of three major droughts has been indicated in (d) with horizontal black bars.

So the work of these Aussie scientists cannot be used to argue that the “Big Dry” is not “a co2-driven event” (which in any case isn’t quite what had been asserted originally).  Indeed, the scientists find that climate change has probably worsened this recent drought, which again is not new climate science (see “Must-have PPT: The ‘global-change-type drought’ and the future of extreme weather”).  Warm-weather droughts are generally worse than cooler-weather droughts — and this has been a hot-weather drought, which is perhaps the worst of all.  Future droughts will increasingly be very hot weather droughts.

So I repeat again:

Journalists simply shouldn’t be twittering on science or other subjects that require more than 140 characters to discuss intelligently, which is pretty much every topic.

Link:  http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/19/australian-scientists-media-tweets-climate-change-play-role-in-drought-the-big-dry/

Joe Romm, If you think Lula means what he says about reduction of deforestation of the Amazon, I have a bridge to sell to you

Grist exclusive:

Amazon Burning:  A fiery battle over land in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest

by Brenda Baletti, Grist, January 12, 2010

 [The photo mentioned in the legend below is no longer available on line, even at the site of original publication, perhaps due to legal reasons.]
On the Arapiuns River, barges of illegally taken timber smolder after being set aflame to protest logging in Gleba Nova Olinda, Amazon Rainforest. All photos: Brenda Baletti

While world leaders were meeting in Copenhagen to address the challenge of climate change last month, indigenous and traditional Brazilians in the Amazon region were gathering to defend one the globe’s most important climate-stabilizing resources: the rainforest.

The protesters are battling against the evisceration of their homelands by illegal logging. At the root of the conflict lie two competing conceptions of the rainforest: 1) it can be a place that supports traditional communities and a variety of plant and animal specis; or 2) it can be a source of cheap wood, soy, and beef for global markets.

Just as the Copenhagen effort ended in a frustrating stalemate, the success of this uprising remains very much in doubt. But while the Copenhagen drama involved heated meetings and street protests, blazes are being set and shots being fired in the rainforest.
Showdown on the River
Early one morning in late November, a group of 30 people set out by motorized canoes from the community of Santa Maria of Uruará, in the lower Brazilian Amazon to the junction of the Tamataí and Uruará Rivers, at the boundary of the Extractive Reserve Renascer. The group set up a camp on the riverbank in order to do what the government has not—block illegal loggers who have been taking wood from inside the reserve.

In June of 2009, after more than a decade of conflict between the traditional riberinho (river dweller) communities of the region and loggers and commercial fishers, the Renascer Extractive Reserve was created, albeit at half of the size that the communities had requested. The size was limited in order to accommodate logging and mineral interests, according to government officials involved with the process.

But the creation of the reserve changed nothing—illegal loggers protected by armed gunman have continued to extract timber from inside the reserve’s boundaries. The state and federal government agencies (SEMA and IBAMA respectively) say they have no resources to monitor and enforce restrictions inside the reserve. In fact, after the creation of the reserve, the number of timber barges leaving the area actually increased; until the locals started blocking shipments of logs, up to five barges per day were floating down the river with a total of up to 5,000 cubic meters of wood illegally logged from the reserve.

 The camp that started in late November quickly grew to hundreds of people, blocking passage of river barges and waiting for government agents to come and negotiate with them. What started as a few hammocks strung up in a muddy, mosquito-ridden forest has grown to a village. They cleared out the brush, and each family built a makeshift house from plastic and wood and dug a fire pit. They take turns fishing, and periodically one of them sacrifices a cow to feed the group.

Because the protesters prevented barges from floating down the river for more than a month, the thwarted loggers began to retaliate.  Their planes periodically make threateningly low flyovers; loggers in passing boats yell threats. One night, five men set fire to brush next to the camp.

The Jaurú logging company attempted to bribe the community members to let wood pass down the river. When their offer was rejected, the company hired gunmen to accompany their barges to market. In the early morning of Jan. 3, five log-laden barges set forth, accompanied by 40 armed men. When they reached the encampment, they opened fire on the sleeping, unarmed protestors. Two people were shot. The victims were rushed to the hospital; they survived.

Loggers Call the Shots
The demonstration at Renascer was in part inspired by action taken a month earlier and 100 miles to the west, in an area called Gleba Nova Olinda at the source of the Arapiuns River. On Nov. 12, 2009, people from over 40 indigenous and traditional communities—frustrated after more than a decade of failed negotiations with the state for territorial rights, and increasingly suffering threats and attacks against their leaders—closed the Arapiuns River to logging traffic and sequestered two barges full of timber. The protestors camped on the river’s edge for a month as they waited, to no avail, for state and federal governments to arrive and address the problem. Finally, they set fire to the 2,000 cubic meters of wood on the barges. The fires blazed on for three days.

Over the last 10 years, logging has increased dramatically in the west of Pará, where both of these conflicts are located. Pará is a state in lower Brazilian Amazon that is larger than most countries and is notorious for violent land conflict. The incursion of logging into their territories there has resulted in traditional and indigenous people demanding land rights as a way to protect their communities. But the people have grown increasingly frustrated at the government’s unwillingness or inability to protect their homelands; often, land rights are not granted, reserves are not protected, and laws and management plans are not enforced. 

In some cases, the government is asking for GPS coordinates and photos to prove that illegal logging is taking place—a totally unrealistic request of people who have on average studied to a fifth-grade level, live from subsistence and small-scale market agricultural production, and have only recently gotten gas-powered motors that provide electricity to their homes.  Even when NGOs and outside researchers collect this data, it frequently comes to naught, because officials never follow up and because laws are written or circumvented in favor of logging interests.

So the river dwellers and other indigenous people are taking matters into their own hands, trying to stop the injustices committed against their communities.  Ironically, they’re now the ones being branded as criminals.

In the case of the Renascer encampment, the loggers got a municipal judge to issue an order saying that the camp must be disbanded or the people imprisoned.  Two weeks ago, the police began an action to put six of the leaders from the Arapiuns in “preventative prison,” which would lock them up indefinitely until they are exonerated of all charges. Such imprisonment is normally imposed on people who are at risk of fleeing or who lack physical addresses and jobs, neither of which applies to these leaders.

This sort of punitive action accomplishes two things—it robs the movement of its leadership, and it diverts the movement’s time and energy into a legal battle, distracting from its larger goal of fighting for land rights and curbing illegal logging.

Thus are the power relations in rapidly industrializing Brazil. For people in the United States, tussles over territorial rights and protest camps can seem provincial and distant—regrettable, yes, but in a world overflowing with injustice, not cause for excessive concern. 

But the Amazon is not your average disputed territory.  In recent decades, tropical forests have absorbed 20% of global fossil-fuel emissions, and the Amazon has been the biggest carbon sink of them all, absorbing nearly 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year.  The river dwellers aren’t defending a vision of the rainforest as a pristine carbon sink, but rather as a homeland that can support a broad range of species and vegetation, including humans. That might not be what Western environmentalists what to hear, but it’s surely a more ecologically responsible vision than clear-cutting followed by vast soybean monocrops.

As climate change charges forward, illegal logging in the Amazon doesn’t just harm the rainforest’s indigenous residents. It imperils us all.

Link:  http://www.grist.org/article/2010-01-12-battle-brazil-rainforest/

Brian O'Neill, Keywan Riahi & Ilkka Keppo, PNAS (January 13, 2010), Mitigation implications of midcentury targets that preserve long-term climate policy options

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online before print January 13, 2010; doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903797106

Mitigation implications of midcentury targets that preserve long-term climate policy options

Brian O'Neill* (National Center for Atmospheric Research, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307, U.S.A., and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria), Keywan Riahi* (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria) and Ilkka Keppo (Energy Research Center of the Netherlands, P.O. Box 56890, 1040 AW Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Edited by Stephen H. Schneider, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved October 23, 2009 (received for review April 8, 2009).


Abstract

Midcentury targets have been proposed as a guide to climate change policy that can link long-term goals to shorter-term actions. However no explicit mitigation analyses have been carried out of the relationship between midcentury conditions and longer-term outcomes. Here we use an integrated assessment modeling framework with a detailed representation of the energy sector to examine the dependence of climate change outcomes in 2100 on emissions levels, atmospheric concentrations, and technology characteristics in 2050. We find that midcentury conditions are crucial determinants of longer-term climate outcomes, and we identify feasibility thresholds describing conditions that must be met by midcentury to keep particular long-term options open. For example, to preserve the technical feasibility of a 50% likelihood of keeping global average temperature at < 2 °C above preindustrial in 2100, global emissions must be reduced by about 20% below 2000 levels by 2050. Results are sensitive to several assumptions, including the nature of future socio-economic development. In a scenario with high demand for energy and land, being below 2 °C with 50% likelihood requires a 50% reduction in emissions below 2000 levels by 2050, which is only barely feasible with known technologies in that scenario. Results suggest that a greater focus on mid-century targets could facilitate the development of policies that preserve potentially desirable long-term options.

*Correspondence e-mails: boneill@ucar.edu or riahi@iiasa.ac.at


Link to abstract:  http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/01/08/0903797106.abstract


Link to free, open-access article:  http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/01/08/0903797106.full.pdf

NatureNews: Missed 2050 climate targets will reduce long-term options

Missed 2050 climate targets will reduce long-term options

Models suggest that drastic action will be needed in the latter half of the century

by Jeff Tollefson, Nature News, January 11, 2010 [Sorry readers, the full article is not free.]

After last month's United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen failed to produce a binding agreement to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, the outlook still isn't getting any better.

A modelling study suggests that the massive mobilization necessary to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 is "barely feasible" unless global development patterns shift radically.

Link:  http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100111/full/news.2010.6.html

New study quantifies what happens to long-term policy options if mid-term CO2 emissions targets are not met

Disappearing Options

A new study quantifies for the first time what happens to long-term policy options if mid-term emissions targets are not met

by Douglas Fischer, Daily Climate editor, January 11, 2009, Correction appended.

[Dear Readers, anyone who thinks we do not need to get back under 350 and try to get back to 300 ppm needs to get a head check, IMNSHO.]

BOULDER, Colo. – Turns out climate policy has some tipping points.

Failure to set and meet strict targets for greenhouse gas emissions cuts over the next 40 years could put long-term goals – such as limiting planetary warming to 2 ºC by 2100 – permanently out of reach.

That's the conclusion of one of the first analyses to explore the relationships among energy use, mid-century targets and long-term policy options, published Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study establishes the notion of "feasibility frontiers," the point at which end-of-century goals become unobtainable or increasingly unlikely unless specific mid-century benchmarks are met.

The study also for the first time establishes odds of hitting specific long-term targets. If energy demand remains high, for instance, it finds that even if the world's governments manage to cut global emissions in half by 2050 and then do everything possible to limit emissions from 2050 on, society has only even odds of limiting global temperature increases to 2 ºC, a goal noted in the recent Copenhagen Accord.

These so-called "mid-century" benchmarks must be hit, in other words, to preserve options for future generations. The study was published by scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, and the Energy Research Center in the Netherlands.

"The long-term target discussion, as important as it is, is less important than the interim," said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist and policy expert at Princeton University who was not involved in the study but is familiar with the research.

Another example of a long-term goal is a cap on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, which today are rising as a result of human activity. The science is not clear what level poses a threat, but some research suggests concentrations must remain at or below 450 parts per million (ppm) to prevent drastic climate change. Some advocacy groups seek a goal of 350 ppm, a level the atmosphere surpassed during the Reagan administration. Preindustrial levels were 287 ppm; today's readings are closer to 387.

But emissions today are on a path toward 550 ppm or beyond. If a 50% emissions cut is deemed too expensive for today's economies, and emissions instead remain flat for the next few decades – no easy feat in itself – the chances of holding atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at 480 ppm or less evaporate. Even a future with 550 ppm CO2 becomes – depending on various energy assumptions – difficult or extraordinarily expensive to achieve, according to the analysis.

"There are thresholds here as well. You might find yourself running into a wall where you thought there was a door. " (Gary Yohe, Wesleyan University)

"There's a cost to preserving options," said NCAR climate scientist and lead author Brian O'Neill. "What is the value of preserving an option you may want to exercise in the future?"

Gary Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan University, said the paper is notable for showing that climate policy has tipping points that work much the same way such thresholds work in various Earth systems. Tip an ecosystem or planetary process – such as the atmosphere – too far in one direction, and it may suddenly and irreversibly "flip" into an altered state that precludes any notion of going back to the unaltered version.

These feasibility frontiers work similarly. Fail to make specific targets by mid-century, O'Neill said, and no amount of effort will bring long-term goals in range.

The authors preclude any pie-in-the-sky solutions such as radical behavioral change or unproven technologies such as geo-engineering and nuclear fusion.

Other scientists call the work groundbreaking for the urgency it lends to a task that has so far eluded the world's leaders: translating long-term goals into short-term action.

The discussion about near-term targets, Oppenheimer said, is the next step in both climate modeling and policy. "The policy decision has always been one step behind the reality, and what Brian's doing is really looking over the horizon."

As more countries focus on the next few decades, Oppenheimer said the task, oddly enough, becomes easier.

"A lot becomes possible. The world opens up in terms of where we need to go, how ambitious we can be, how ambitious we need to be," he said. "You want to send policy makers a message that their emissions decisions really need to fit within a certain box.

"This is the next step in a longer discussion."

And it puts the cost of failure in plain language, added Yohe, who was not author of the study but is familiar with the research.

"There are thresholds here as well," he said. "You might find yourself running into a wall where you thought there was a door."

"These guys have said if you wait too long, or if you don't do 'x,' the cost of even trying to achieve 'y' is just going to go through the roof," he added.

"That's a currency that everybody talks about."

Correction appended by author (11 January 2010): An earlier version of this story implied a majority of scientists believe atmospheric carbon dioxide levels must remain at 450 ppm to avoid dangerous warming. The science is not so settled.

Link:  http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2010/01/disappearing-options