Thursday
May192011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Back from the brink
A sudden outbreak of sanity seems to have taken hold Canada. Firstly the idea of a carbon tax appears to have been killed off for good:
Conservatives kill carbon tax
Conservatives have kiboshed a carbon tax, Environment Minister Peter Kent confirmed Thursday.
"It's off the table," he told reporters Thursday after accepting an award from World Wildlife Fund International on behalf of Parks Canada.
"There's no expectation of cap-and-trade continentally in the near or medium future."
...and then this:
Government delays pulling plug on old-fashioned light bulbs
Tories propose pushing deadline to 2014 over lack of alternatives to incandescents
(H/T to Ross McKitrick, who offers to send a real estate guide)
Reader Comments (63)
As I said, you are just a bunch of denialists feeding off each other. A New Zealander who claims he is a Pacific Islander and posts nonsense about the Islands.Does he like Morner claim that the Islands are sinking because of the weight of the Plantations. That is the true measure of cenial. Does he deny that coasta areas of Bang;adesh are already feeling the effects of SLR and increasing storm activity?
Then there is the "Religious Fanatic" slur. Perhaps the most stupid of all the denial "put downs." More than half of all denialists deny based on religion. Shimkus who says it won't happen because "God won't let it." The Southern Baptists in the USA who fervently refuse to accept AGW. One Branch of that has now changed and is almost as strongly supportive of action now.
Lost an argument. I don't think so. I refuse to get into a silly and unproductive "argument" about a statistic and, instead, gave you facts about what is happening: as every climate scientist in this world agrees.
But, as I told you, I do not have time for this. There are real people to work on in the real world.
John
Good to see you back and sounding as reasonable and willing to engage as ever.
Re sea level rise, there are a couple of important studies to consider. First, let's look at Watson (2011), published in the eminently uncontroversial and respected Journal of Coastal Research.
From the abstract (emphasis as original):
P. J. Watson (2011) Is There Evidence Yet of Acceleration in Mean Sea Level Rise around Mainland Australia?. Journal of Coastal Research: Volume 27, Issue 2: pp. 368 – 377.
Watson concludes his introductory summary of the literature on SLR with this (emphasis added):
I particularly recommend a reading of Holgate (2007) if you are not already familiar with it.
Watson's carefully-worded paper concludes (emphasis added):
Before we go on to consider the very interesting findings of the BOM SEAFRAME study of the Western Pacific island group (which includes Tuvalu), I would be interested to hear your reaction to Watson's work.
Incidentally, I must ask you to stop using the word 'denier'. First because it is a loaded and offensive term; second because it does not apply to me. I do not 'deny' AGW and never have.
I am simply unconvinced by the 'science is settled' argument you present, especially as it is profoundly pessimistic and ignores real scientific uncertainty about the amount of warming and its likely effects. And please, no more Dunning/Kruger quips either.
Sorry, I missed a closing HTML tag after the Holgate reference.
A few points:
First, where did I say that "the science is settled?" That kind if allegation is what earns you the "brush-off" I did give.
Science is never settled. However, the science is settled in lay terms in that there is nor reasonable doubt that all the things I spoke of are happening and that the future is going to be far grimmer.
I call anyone who questions this a denier for the reason that such a one is a denier. There is no contradictory evidence. Thus, there can be no contradiction. To belong to the group that favours the lower end of the predictions merely means that one does not expcet catastrophic consequences until a few decades later.
I am not familiar with Watson's work. I am familiar with many others. Nothing in Watson's paper that I can see precludes accelerating SLR. It seems to say (without reading the paper) little about Global SLR and is only a descriptor of the past rates.
That tells little about SLR rise in the context of oceans that are storing most of the increasing heat balance. Up to now, there has been very little rise in Global waters since the rise to this time, is almost exclusively due to thermal expansion. Melting sea ice makes little contribution and the melt from ice sheets is so far insignificant.
But, I think you know all this and I fail to see why you do not inform all those "deniers" who communicate on your site. Look at the recent National Geographical piece on Bangladesh - I don't have the link for what SLT is doing.
But, I really do not have time. As I have said, I do real life things. For example, next Wednesday I will be giving a talk to a local audience on the perils of climate change and I have to prepare for that. I will be sharing the stage with a "denier" and I look forward to burying him.
I think that you and I could have a useful exchange but it would not serve a practical purpose.
"all the things I spoke of are happening..."
all those unsupported assertions, unbacked by any probabilities or demonstrations that they are climatic changes rather than just just fairly normal weather events?
"Would that change the fact that the 300 year heat wave event in Russia last year is expected to a decadal event within 30 or 40 years? Would it prevent the failure of the crops there?
Would it mean that those Pacific Islanders who are preparing to abandon their homelands could stay home? Would it stop the water wars in the Horn of Africa and Darfur?
Would it mean that the arrival of Spring in the Canadian Arctic 50 days early this year did not happen. Would it end the possibility of flooding in all the world's major coastal cities within the next half century?"
So which Pacific islanders are currently packing their bags?
If you look at history, a large number of coastal cities have suffered flooding at various times...is the threat really any greater now and is it definitively caused by global warming?
Who says that the Russian warming is expected to become a decadal event? Crops have failed in various countries at various times. Your style of argument is very strange because you leap from a few observations of phenomena to the conclusion that these events will become more frequent in the future without any attempt to show how or why.
A quote from http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Extreme_Earth_Waves_of_Water_Wind_and_Heat_999.html
Proving that not wacky weather event is climate change related, the study out of NOAA and the University of Colorado at Boulder found that natural variability produced the 62-day mercury spike that killed 11,000 people in Moscow, scorched 300,000 acres, and destroyed 1,500 homes. By using simulation modeling, the researchers found that the heat wave was the result of abnormal atmospheric patterns caused by displaced subtropical air that was blocked as it descended and then amplified because of reduced cloud cover and drought.
If this had been climate related, there should have been a pattern of these kinds of events increasing in Russia over time, the researchers say. But there's been no significant warming trend over the last century and a half, nor any indication of a trend towards increasing warm weather extremes.
They write that "no statistically significant long-term change is detected in either the mean or variability of western Russia July temperatures, implying that for this region an anthropogenic climate change signal has yet to emerge above the natural background variability."
John
Busy day, and it's Monday, so I am ripping through this. Apologies for typos, and the inevitable HTML formatting screw-ups.
Your opening statement is self-contradictory and confused:
What you say next is equally muddled, and suggests that even your (entirely forgiveable) speed-read of Watson has missed the salient point:
You are claiming - as fact - that an acceleration in SLR is already happening:
Watson shows that not only is this assertion incorrect, but that
- the recent rate of SLR is not unusual in a centennial context
- the rate of SLR is slightly decreasing
This is another example of the difference between the observations and alarmist rhetoric.
The first example was the simple statement that the observed trend in GATA 1979 - present is significantly lower than the projected trend yielded by the multi-model mean.
Interestingly, the most global coverage is provided by the satellite measurements of the top lower troposphere (TLT), and both data sets (RSS and UAH) are in excellent agreement with a trend of 0.14 per decade 1979 - present. These are of course, the trends most at variance with the MMM.
UAH and RSS. Common 1981 – 2010 baseline; trend.
Now you can ignore this if you want, but it doesn't make it any less true. Nor am I a liar for pointing out the facts.
The observations support the broad scientific position that CO2 forcing is elevating global average T. Your presentation of them is a product of activism and the media.
What I am trying to convey here is that there is plenty of room for the estimates of climate sensitivity to converge on a lower value than the current median value of ~3C per doubling of CO2.
To this, you respond:
Which again shows a real lack of understanding of the fundamentals. If climate sensitivity is at the lower end of the estimated range, there will be less warming and the effects will be slower to be felt. Given that to work on, the process of decarbonising the global economy has at least a fighting chance.
So long as the anti-nuclear hysterics are not allowed to prevent the planetary economy displacing coal with nuclear for baseload, of course.
Before we go on, I have something to say about Bangladesh, a subject close to my heart.
The misrepresentation by activists of what is really happening is, bluntly, sickening.
Here are the facts:
- The Gangetic delta is subsiding, as all deltas are. This is because it is made of mud, and it compacts under its own weight.
- This produces a relative rise in sea level which is consistently misrepresented as absolute change in the Indian Ocean/Bay of Bengal.
- The extensive felling of coastal mangrove by a rapidly growing population has removed a superb natural barrier against both storm surges and coastal erosion.
- The effects of both have been exacerbated and are invariably misrepresented as the result of absolute (rather than relative) sea level rise.
- The extensive and accelerating pumping of ground water by the rapidly expanding population has caused further subsidence and salination of the water table.
- Both are (inevitably) misrepresented as the effects of absolute SLR.
- The cause of increased mortality amongst coastal fishermen is misrepresented as 'worsening weather' on the BoB. There is no meteorological evidence for this. What has happened is that the increasing population in the hinterland has driven up demand for fish. Traditional fishing in small boats has depeleted fish stocks in inshore waters. Poverty-stricken fishermen cannot afford new boats so put out ever-further to sea in search of a catch. Their un-seaworthy craft frequently capsise in open-ocean weather conditions, and lives are lost.
- This is misrepresented as another 'human cost' of climate change. It is not.
This kind of activist-driven propaganda is anathema to science. So why indulge in it? Try researching some of the enlessly-repeated 'facts' instead. Start with Bangladesh.
This isn't the same as saying 'there's no AGW'. It is saying that the effects we have seen are tirelessly misrepresented and exaggerated by activists. Most scientists - with a few disappointing exceptions - are more circumspect.
This comment is getting over-long, so I will break it up. See below for a BBC interview with the eminent and respected climate scientist Mike Hulme on the misrepresentation of 'catastrophic climate change' by activists and the media. The interview dates to 2006. Nothing significant has changed since then. I have reproduced it in full. Please read it all, bearing in mind who Prof. Hulme actually is.
BBC News VIEWPOINT
By Mike Hulme, Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
As activists organised by the group Stop Climate Chaos gather in London to demand action, one of Britain's top climate scientists says the language of chaos and catastrophe has got out of hand.
Climate change is a reality, and science confirms that human activities are heavily implicated in this change.
But over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country - the phenomenon of "catastrophic" climate change.
It seems that mere "climate change" was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be "catastrophic" to be worthy of attention.
The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers "chaotic", "irreversible", "rapid" - has altered the public discourse around climate change.
This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as "climate change is worse than we thought", that we are approaching "irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate", and that we are "at the point of no return".
I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.
It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns.
Boarding the bandwagon
Some recent examples of the catastrophists include Tony Blair, who a few weeks back warned in an open letter to EU head of states: "We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing a catastrophic tipping point."
Today, a mass demonstration in Trafalgar Square will protest, aiming to "stop climate chaos" - the name for a coalition of environmental activists and faith-based organisations.
The BBC broadcast in May its Climate Chaos season of programmes. There is even a publicly-funded science research project called Rapid.
Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science's predictions?
James Lovelock's book The Revenge of Gaia takes this discourse to its logical endpoint - the end of human civilisation itself.
What has pushed the debate between climate change scientists and climate sceptics to now being between climate change scientists and climate alarmists?
I believe there are three factors now at work.
First, the discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device being mobilised in the context of failing UK and Kyoto Protocol targets to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
The signatories to this UN protocol will not deliver on their obligations. This bursting of the campaigning bubble requires a determined reaction to raise the stakes - the language of climate catastrophe nicely fits the bill.
Hence we now have the militancy of the Stop Climate Chaos activists and the megaphone journalism of the Independent newspaper, with supporting rhetoric from the prime minister and senior government scientists.
Others suggest that the sleeping giants of the Gaian Earth system are being roused from their millennia of slumber to wreck havoc on humanity.
Second, the discourse of catastrophe is a political and rhetorical device to change the frame of reference for the emerging negotiations around what happens when the Kyoto Protocol runs out after 2012.
The Exeter conference of February 2005 on "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" served the government's purposes of softening-up the G8 Gleneagles summit through a frenzied week of "climate change is worse than we thought" news reporting and group-think.
By stage-managing the new language of catastrophe, the conference itself became a tipping point in the way that climate change is discussed in public.
Third, the discourse of catastrophe allows some space for the retrenchment of science budgets.
It is a short step from claiming these catastrophic risks have physical reality, saliency and are imminent, to implying that one more "big push" of funding will allow science to quantify them objectively.
We need to take a deep breath and pause.
Fear and terror
The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. It will not be visible in next year's global assessment from the world authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
To state that climate change will be "catastrophic" hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science.
Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe?
The language of fear and terror operates as an ever-weakening vehicle for effective communication or inducement for behavioural change.
This has been seen in other areas of public health risk. Empirical work in relation to climate change communication and public perception shows that it operates here too.
Framing climate change as an issue which evokes fear and personal stress becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By "sexing it up" we exacerbate, through psychological amplifiers, the very risks we are trying to ward off.
The careless (or conspiratorial?) translation of concern about Saddam Hussein's putative military threat into the case for WMD has had major geopolitical repercussions.
We need to make sure the agents and agencies in our society which would seek to amplify climate change risks do not lead us down a similar counter-productive pathway.
The IPCC scenarios of future climate change - warming somewhere between 1.4 and 5.8 Celsius by 2100 - are significant enough without invoking catastrophe and chaos as unguided weapons with which forlornly to threaten society into behavioural change.
I believe climate change is real, must be faced and action taken. But the discourse of catastrophe is in danger of tipping society onto a negative, depressive and reactionary trajectory.
Mike Hulme is Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
[If you don't know what the Tyndale Centre is, please Google it. I'm guessing you've heard of the UEA...]
John
Finally, we arrive at the claims about the Pacific islands.
Yesterday, you asked:
There is no evidence for significant sea level rise at Tuvalu or any other island in the South Pacific Sea Level & Climate Monitoring Project (SPSLCMP) SEAFRAME study.
This is a high accuracy, GPS calibrated tide gauge network (12 sites) measuring sea level change in the SW Pacific.
Download page for reports.
Tuvalu is frequently featured in media reports claiming that it is at great risk from inundation. The latest available report for Tuvalu (2009) is
available here (PDF).
The report misrepresents the trend in sea level rise for Tuvalu as 4.7mm/yr. It is easy to see how this has happened.
See Fig 1 Sea level anomalies at SEAFRAME sites. The transient fall in sea level in 1998 (associated with the 1998 El Nino, see below*) provides the variation in the record that accounts for the trend. All the upward trend quoted in Table 4 is derived from this exceptional event.
To confirm this, see Figure 4. Evolution of relative sea level trends (mm/year) at SEAFRAME stations. Once the record stabilises, there is no trend whatsoever. This figure must be considered alongside the trends quoted elsewhere in the report.
It is clear even from Fig 1 that the same problem significantly affects the trends for at least seven islands in the study.
The oceans may be warming, and humans may be causing some or most of it, but there is still no trend at Tuvalu, or indeed any of the islands in the study.
This is the best observational data for the Pacific islands that there is. And it absolutely refutes the claim that they are at risk of inundation.
*Note on the attribution of the transient fall in sea level 1998. From
Watson (2011):
The SEAFRAME tide gauges show the 1998 fall in sea level was far more pronounced for the islands in the study than the subsequent transient rise in 1999. This has introduced a spurious trend into the data most strongly evident for the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, Tuvalu and Samoa.
You signed off you last with this:
Frankly, given what you say and the way you say it, I'm inclined to agree. Let's call it a day.
Just remember this exchange and the examination of certain 'facts' it contains, and above all the interview with Mike Hulme, when you are giving your talk about the 'perils of climate change'.
"sea is not rising- the land in Tuvalu is instead sinking due to inept irrigation by Japanese pineapple companies and local farmers who want to cover up their blunder."
Re Morner and the Tuvalu is not in danger camp. Depsite the SLR being the subject of the greatest number of peer reviewed studies on any aspect of Climate Change.
Bang;adesh: you focus on the rationalisations that deal only with some parts of the Delta where subsidence is indeed, for the moment, greater than SLR. But you ignore the very real SLR and the millions of Bangladeshis who have already been uprooted.
Hulme: I pay no attention at all to his interview. Hulme is a credible scientist who is certainly not sceptical about climate change. He is, however, one of that very tiny minority of scientists who is an "optimist" about this.
His co-authoring of a paper with Pielke robbed him of credibility in his forecasting.
And that, is all I have time for.
Thanks for keeping it polite. It is rare these days.
John
The comment on Tuvalu is entirely based on the SEAFRAME study, which is carried out under the aegis of BOM. Morner's work is not referenced at all. It's a shame you found it necessary to introduce a distortion like this after so much effort has been made to illustrate the science honestly and clearly.
On Bangladesh, you are I'm afraid misled by activists. You and only you can sort this out. You need to get the distinction between absolute and relative SLR straight - this does not seem to be the case. And stop listening to the manipulative and self-interested rhetoric of NGOs and the likes of Oxfam. They are playing you like a harp.
Simply dismissing what Hulme has to say out of hand, as you do, ends this exchange. The ad hom about Pielke Jr is absolute and final confirmation of your extreme (and poorly reasoned) position.
Beyond this, I may cease to be polite, so let's just cease and desist while moderate civility still maintains.
But you are wrong, to continue with the polite term. There are any number of studies that are entirlely opposed to what you are saying and to your misreadings.
I don't take your threat seriously since I am fully aware of most of the work available with these. I know, intimately, one scientist who has done work on the Pacific SLR and related matters.
No John. No more. I've said what I have to say. I will leave it to others to decide who has made the better case.