Category: environment and ecology

Misuse of political office: science under attack

A couple of months ago I posted on Michael Mann’s fight back against the denialist attacks he is constantly subjected to.  Now there’s a new kind of attack.  The Attorney General of Virginia, one Ken Cuccinelli, has made a Civil Investigative Demand to the University of Virginia for a long list of documents relating to the grant-funded research of Michael Mann while he was working at the University from 1999 to 2005. Among the materials requested by May 27 were email correspondence with a long list of other climate scientists, including several who, like Mann, were prominent figures in Climategate. The Attorney General’s demand is made on the grounds that he is investigating possible violations by Mann against the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act when he sought funding for a number of research projects.

Cuccinelli is a climate change denier who describes the science as “unreliable, unverifiable and doctored”.  He is currently suing the Environment Protection Agency over its efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

His justification of his action against Mann to the Washington Post this week was: “In light of the Climategate e-mails, there does seem to at least be an argument to be made that a course was undertaken by some of the individuals involved, including potentially Michael Mann, where they were steering a course to reach a conclusion. Our act, frankly, just requires honesty.”

In addition to Mann’s email correspondence with other scientists, Cuccinelli asks for material which suggests he intends a scientific investigation of Mann’s work. It includes “any and all computer algorithms, programs, source code, or the like created or edited by … Mann” from 1999 to the present, and “any data, information or databases, structured or unstructured information, source code and formulas that may be stored in any format or media type…”  Such investigation is obviously well beyond the expertise of a law enforcement office and one wonders who Cuccinelli has in mind to do it.  Fred Singer perhaps? Singer has already welcomed Cuccinelli’s move:

“There is a good chance that Virginia’s Attorney-General Ken Cuccinelli will come up with the “smoking gun” — where other so-called investigations have only produced one whitewash after another.

“We know from the leaked e-mails of Climategate that Prof. Michael Mann was involved in the international conspiracy to ‘hide the decline’ [in global temperatures], using what chief conspirator Dr. Phil Jones refers to as ‘Mike [Mann]’s trick.’ Now at last we may find out just how this was done.”

It’s worth noting that not all deniers welcome what Cuccinelli has done. Steve McIntyre calls it “a repugnant piece of over-zealousness by the Virginia Attorney General, that I condemn.”

Mann went from Virginia to Penn State University in 2005.  He says: “It seems clearly to me that it’s an attempt to intimidate and to silence me and to make an example of me for other scientists who might speak out on the science of climate change.”

Rachel Levinson, senior counsel with the American Association of University Professors, said Cuccinelli’s request had “echoes of McCarthyism.”

“It would be incredibly chilling to anyone else practicing in either the same area or in any politically sensitive area.”

The faculty of the University of Virginia has made a strong statement, which includes the following:

“Dr. Mann is an internationally respected and highly cited climate scientist. The funding he received for his research resulted from impartial, stringent peer review by respected independent scientists under the auspices of national scientific research organizations. His research findings, including many of those involved in this investigation, have been reported in leading scientific journals, which are themselves subject to additional exacting review by the scientific community prior to publication…

“We maintain that peer review by the scientific community is the appropriate means by which to identify error in the generation, presentation and interpretation of scientific data. The Attorney General’s use of his power to issue a CID under the provisions of Virginia’s FATA is an inappropriate way to engage with the process of scientific inquiry. His action and the potential threat of legal prosecution of scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer-review standards send a chilling message to scientists engaged in basic research involving Earth’s climate and indeed to scholars in any discipline. Such actions directly threaten academic freedom and, thus, our ability to generate the knowledge upon which informed public policy relies.”

In a subsequent television interview Cuccinelli, who has been in his elected office only three months, drew back from the implication that he was making a scientific enquiry:

Warren: “What gives your office the authority to interpret what is scientific data?”
Cuccinelli: “That’s a worthwhile question. We aren’t targeting scientific conclusions. That’s not the issue. It’s the expenditure of taxpayer dollars.”
Warren: “Do you believe that manmade gases are actually warming the climate?”
Cuccinelli: “I think the jury is still out.” He went on to say, “I don’t think the evidence at this moment as it’s been presented would lead one to man-caused conclusion in that respect.”
Warren: “If you don’t believe manmade gases are warming the earth, how can we trust what your office finds? In other words, politics could be at play here?”
Cuccinelli: “There are some people who will never believe anything we do. But, for people who know me, I’m capable of being extremely objective.”

That objective capability he claims is hardly demonstrated in the demand he has made of the University of Virginia. The University at least initially believes it is obliged to accede to the demand, but the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Association of University Professors have sent a joint letter to the Rector urging him to use every legal avenue to resist providing the information and offering their assistance if wanted.

It is too soon to sense how this will play out. Probably the action of Cuccinelli should come as no surprise given the fevered pitch and irrationality of American denialism.  But attacks by politicians on established science and scientists are always unnerving.  Even Rodney Hide’s foolish statements in the New Zealand parliament carried a touch of menace with them. American academics and scientists will need to be united and firm in their defence of scientific independence. There is plenty of evidence that they will be, some of it referred to above, and more seen in an open letter from prominent members of the National Academy of Sciences published in the Guardian today.  It probably predates the Cuccinelli affair, but the principle clearly applies.

“We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular…

“Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence.

“…there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change.”

Down to the sea

An interview with climatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson published yesterday in Yale Environment 360is a reminder that for those working with ice there’s not much doubt about where we’re heading. She spent six weeks of the summer on her ninth visit to Antarctica drilling ice cores on the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the fastest-warming places on earth. Its winter temperatures have increased by 6 degrees over the past 60 years and year-round temperatures by 2.8 degrees. As a result, sea ice now covers the western Antarctic Peninsula three months less a year than three decades ago, 90 percent of glaciers along the western Antarctic Peninsula are in retreat, and large floating ice shelves are crumbling.

 

Mosley-Thompson headed a team of six for the drilling, and they were part of a larger group attempting to understand the warming behind the break-up of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002. Ecologists were looking at an ecosystem on the ocean bottom that until eight or nine years ago had been covered by ice for thousands of years and considering how it is adjusting to the new normal. Glaciologists were looking at how much more rapidly the glaciers are discharging into the ocean with the disappearance of the buttressing ice shelf. A marine group was looking at changes in marine geo-chemistry, collecting new cores in the area that was covered by ice to compare with the cores previously drilled in the ocean bottom along the outer margins of Larsen B when it was in place.

It’s an impressive range of investigation she describes. The ice drilling on the Bruce Plateau was able to get right down to bedrock at 455 metres, and the cores will be closely analyzed back in Ohio for the information they contain about past climate, perhaps to the last glacial period and beyond.

Mosley-Thompson is married to Lonnie Thompson, the highly respected glaciologist. While his wife has been working mostly in Greenland and Antarctica he has done more ice corings of low-latitude glaciers –- in the Andes, Africa, and the Himalayas –- than any other person alive. Yale Environment comments that their work, taken together, paints a sobering portrait of the rapid retreat of most of the world’s glaciers and ice caps in the face of the buildup of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Here are some of the things Mosley-Thompson has to say in the interview about the overall global picture. In response to the interviewer’s observation that the deep Antarctic ice cores taken at Dome C years show that we have got more CO2 in our atmosphere than at any time in 800,000 years:

“Very clearly. If you look back over the eight glacial/interglacial cycles, you essentially see that CO2 never rises above 300 parts per million and we’re at about 389 now. Methane never rises above about 800 parts per billion, and I think we’re at about 1,700 parts per billion. So we’re clearly outside the range of natural variability. I personally think that graph simply showing the natural fluctuations in those two important greenhouse gases, over almost a million years of Earth history — and then you see the two dots [today] that are so much higher than anything that we see in that near-million history — tells us very clearly that we have a serious problem.”

What does the cumulative ice coring  work show about what we’re experiencing in the last century or so in terms of the warming of the planet?

“ Well, from the tropical work, the cores in the Andes and the Himalaya, the oxygen isotopic ratio in those cores, when you stack those cores together, show very clearly that the last 50 or 60 years have been the warmest in the last 2,000 years.”

The ice cores from the Andes do show a Medieval Warm Period signature and a very distinct Little Ice Age cool signature.  Not surprising, she says, because both those periods are expressed most strongly around the Atlantic Basin and the moisture that builds the glaciers in the Andes of Peru actually comes from the Atlantic.  But the cores from the Tibetan Himalaya show virtually no signature of these periods.

“so when we put these records together, the medieval warming is very modest and the Little Ice Age signature is strongly muted as well. And what really stands out when you put these all together and into the composite, is the last 60 years. The oxygen isotopic enrichment in the tops of the cores [indicating warming] is very striking.”

She notes that particularly in the case of the tropical ice fields the glaciers are retreating very rapidly:

“And, in fact, several of the ice fields, particularly one that we recently published the results [for] in the southwestern Himalaya, it has not gained mass or has no ice that was deposited after 1950. It’s like these glaciers are just literally being decapitated. And it’s very frightening.”

And what about the IPCC error on Himalayan melting?

“…when you look at the breadth of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, and how much information is in there, the fact that this must be the most egregious error, otherwise they would be making more of something else –  I think it’s astounding that the IPCC got as much right as they did because there was just tremendous potential for error.”

And if we don’t begin to rein in CO2 emissions, where is the cryosphere, the Earth’s ice zone, heading?

“To the oceans. Ultimately that’s where all water goes, to the lowest level.”

Life in the Hothouse

“Wetlands are wastelands” was the explanation the chair of a local trust in my city gave for opposing a grant to a wetlands restoration project. He’s a rabid climate change denier and hence unlikely to read Melanie Lenart’s recently published book Life in the Hothouse: How a Living Planet Survives Climate Change. If he did he would discover how wrong he was. Not that he needed wait for her book: it has been evident for many years that wetlands are vital to ecological health. So are forests, which play an equal part in Lenart’s explanation of how Gaia, or, if you don’t like metaphor, the complex interacting system of the biosphere, responds to maintain a temperature within a range suitable for life. A scientist with a background in journalism, Lenart is well placed to provide a coherent account for the general reader of the work of a host of researchers who have explored some of the intricacies of response to warming in Earth’s ecosystems.

She opens with an interesting account of hurricanes as both a symptom of global warming and one of its cures. A warmer world is likely to mean they are more intense. She considers them from the perspective of their cooling function, helping to shift heat away from the tropics. Their destructive power, which is clearly pictured, paradoxically boosts plant life in the sea and on land through sediment stirring and transfer and so aids the drawing down of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They also contribute to carbon sinks by burying logs, soil and sediment in landslides, the ocean, and anywhere they can better escape decay.  In these respects they are one of Gaia’s natural defences to rising temperatures.

A chapter on circulation patterns explores many of the ways in which precipitation has increased in warmer climates in the past and considers the contribution of such features as the Hadley circulation between the equator and the sub-tropics. The comparative dryness of the ice ages came as a surprise to climatologists. The evidence Lenart adduces spanning the ice ages to ancient hothouses makes it clear that global precipitation rates increased as the climate warmed. This she sees as helping boost a Gaian response to changing climate, namely increased plant growth.

There follows a survey of carbon dioxide uptake by plants and trees and how various forests fared in past climates.  More carbon dioxide has meant more growth.  More precipitation and more warmth has helped that growth. The contribution of plant life in taking carbon dioxide from the air is significant.  The world’s trees alone hold nearly as much carbon as the atmosphere. In this way life becomes part of the Gaian attempt to regulate temperature.

Soils and wetlands also soak up excess carbon dioxide. Wetlands’ special talent for this is related to their remarkable productivity combined with their slow decay rates. Decay stalls in stagnant waters, including the decay of organic material from far and wide that ends up in wetlands because of their low-lying position.  The world’s soils are considered by some researchers to hold three times the amount of carbon in the vegetation growing on them. Lenart explains in detail how this happens, with coal being the prime example of the process in the distant past: carbon well sequestered until we started to extract and burn it.

Weathering is the final process Lenart considers as another method by which Earth balances its carbon dioxide ledger. It takes place over a long term and is perhaps not likely to be of much assistance in dealing with our present problems, but it’s a fascinating sequence she describes as nature’s version of acid rain works to break down rocks with a resultant carbon storage in the sea – for limited periods in the case of limestone, but more permanently in the case of basalts and granites, at least until it becomes volcano fodder.  Weathering speeds up in hot, humid climates, pulling more carbon dioxide out of the air when there is more than usual there.

I’ve scratched the surface of chapters that are packed with interesting detail about both past and present.  Lenart does an excellent job of pulling together information from numerous studies, often updated by direct communication with the experts involved, and building it into a sustained overall picture. The story is enlivened by some of her own direct experience in forest and desert. The good science writer or journalist is able to render the general reader this service in a way that the specialists engrossed in their work would be harder put to provide.

The book’s strands come together in a chapter titled systematic healing. Lenart fully subscribes to the recognition that our use of fossil fuels must be drastically cut. She’s not suggesting any alternative to that. Her particular interest is rather in how we can also work with the natural systems her book has been describing to help moderate the warming and soften the severity of its impacts. She acknowledges that is difficult in our current economy where the bottom line ignores environmental costs and overlooks environmental services. In fact the services provided to humans by wetlands and forests, including urban forests, go well beyond carbon counting. Urban forests provide shade and evaporative cooling valuable in times of elevated heat.  She refers to the efforts in Chicago to plant rooftops and increase ground tree and shrub planting as an example other cities might follow. Urban greenery not only cuts heat, but provides habitat for birds and other wildlife, insulates against noise, offers recreational possibilities and reduces air pollution including carbon dioxide. There is even some evidence that it cuts crime!

Forests on a larger scale  promote rainfall. Forests and wetlands slow down winds. Wetlands absorb storm surge and slow flooding rivers. They also purify water. Biodiversity and genetic diversity are greatly assisted by wetlands and estuaries. These and many other services are additional to the carbon capture contribution made by forests and wetlands, the protective shield a warming planet produces. Our current experiment is to interfere with the development of these natural protective processes. We are lowering biomass, lowering water tables, lowering the quantities of weathering product reaching the sea through extensive development, logging, groundwater pumping, and river diversion.

Lenart metaphorically shudders at the thought of some of the geo-engineering fixes being proposed. Why build artificial trees to chemically remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, she asks, when Gaia can make trees that provide food and shelter, sunscreen and windbreaks, and flood-control and drought-prevention services even while collecting carbon dioxide and other pollutants? She looks to a variety of forest and wetland restoration projects to restore these key systems. The more we can count on forests and wetlands to stabilise the carbon dioxide drawdown, the less pressure we put on oceans to take up the gas and thus increase their acidity. And the more we pull down greenhouse gases into forests, their soils and wetlands, the less need the planet will have for cooling hurricanes and floods. Life gets better at all scales when we boost Gaia’s natural defences.

Ah, I see you have the Wishart that goes “ping”

n Ian Wishart’s lexicon, to “ping” someone seems to mean catching them out in a mistake or false claim. It’s a word he’s fond of using in his regular attacks on Hot Topic, most recently over my post on sea ice volume, and a comment thereunder by William “Stoat” Connolley. My post was “bad science” and I’m a “science illiterate” it seems. Unfortunately, all Ian does is demonstrate that his own science literacy is somewhat limited. His ping, like sonar, comes bouncing right back at him…

 

My post Feel floes (gone by 2016) was mainly concerned with looking at the issue of whether the Arctic sea ice was “recovering” from the record minimum of 2007. Wishart says it is “recovering strongly for the third year in a row”, but the volume data shows that to be nonsense. Wishart’s main bone of contention, however, seems to be about the impact of sea ice reduction on northern hemisphere climate. Here’s his first misdirection:

Gareth, incidentally, tries to argue in reply that volume is relevant because of the heat exchange to the atmosphere involved in re-freezing water.

My reply made no mention of volume versus area — I was just pointing out that albedo effects (though important) are not the only climate impact to be expected from a reduction in sea ice. The last three years have averaged around 2 million square kilometres below the average minimum over 79-00. That huge area of ice has to refreeze in autumn, and in so doing releases heat to the atmosphere. It seems Ian doesn’t have the foggiest how much is involved.

But here’s some news that evidently they missed over at HT: when ice grows in volume, it’s because sea water is converting to solid ice, with the same heat exchange taking place in regards to the first six inches of ice, the next six inches of ice, and all the ice thereafter. And sea ice grows because it is freakishly cold, and what little heat is liberated in the process is not strong enough to compensate for the cold.

Read that last sentence again: “what little heat is liberated in the process is not strong enough to compensate for the cold.” Time for today’s lesson. The heat required to warm 1 kg of water by 1ºC is a little over 4,000 Joules. The heat required to melt 1kg of ice is 333,550 Joules (aka the enthalpy of fusion) — about 80 times as much. The same applies in reverse — that is, when 1 kg of water turns to ice, it releases 333 kilojoules of energy. Now consider how much extra heat (compared with the long term average) is being liberated by the formation of 2 million km2 of new ice, which over winter will become about 1.5 metres thick. It’s a very big number indeed — my back of the envelope calculation (corrections and precisions welcome — William?) suggests it’s of the order of 11.5 x 1011 GJ (gigajoules). A big number. Let’s halve it, to allow for ice acting as an insulator. Still more than big enough to show up in the figures for Arctic climate. And it does.

Wishart dislikes Skeptical Science almost as much as Hot Topic (he describes John Cook as my alter ego, which is much more flattering to me than John). There’s a recent post there about a new paper describing the feedback loop between summer sea ice reductions and autumn and winter warming (also at Science News). But there’s an earlier paper to refer to, that I’ve written about before: The emergence of surface-based Arctic amplification by Serreze et al (The Cryosphere, 3, 11–19, 2009 – PDF) who examined Arctic climate data up to 2007 and found them to be “consistent with the emergence of surface-based Arctic amplification associated with declining sea ice extent”. There’s a good discussion of what this is and what it might mean for climate and weather in Mark Serreze’s chapter in last year’s WWF Arctic report, discussed at Hot Topic here. In any event, it’s not news. You might have expected someone as au fait with the literature as Wishart to have been keeping up. Or perhaps not…

Still, I did learn something interesting from his post. He’s finished his “Climategate” revision of Air Con, and apparently this “new edition also contains extensive new information on why ocean acidification is not being caused by CO2“. Oh really? That’ll be news to the oceanographers of the world. An excellent excuse for another look at his “work”, perhaps… ;-)

[The hospital sketch (bonus audio edit)]

Time of the season

Climate change involves more than straightfoward warming, it also affects the patterns of weather and the seasons, as John Parker discovers in an excellent feature — What’s happened to the seasons? — in the Spring issue of The Economist’s Intelligent Lifemagazine. Parker’s done his homework, and his article is the best overview of recent changes in seasonal weather around the world, and the knock on impacts on agriculture and ecosystems that I’ve read. Here’s a sample:

Some seasons have vanished altogether. In Kashmir there used to be a brief rainy season between winter and spring, called tsonth -— three or four weeks of torrential downpours, bright sunshine and snow on the ground. But, says Rais Akhtar of the University of Kashmir, the state has not seen a tsonth for ten years. The first rainy season seems to have dried up in Uganda. In Ntchenachena, in northern Malawi, villagers used to describe four episodes of rain, each with their proper name and association with particular farming events. Since 2001, they say, the pattern can no longer be discerned.

Parker points to increasing unpredictability in “traditional” seasons posing a challenge to agriculture as well as dislocations in ecosystem linkages. We may even have seen an example of that in the last year in New Zealand. 2009 was a remarkable switchback between hot and cold weather. May was very cold, but August was the warmest in the 155 year record. And temperatures then flatlined through until the end of October, which was the coldest for 64 years. Check out the NIWA summary of the year, or MetService Weather Ambassador Bob McDavitt’s round up at Sciblogs. Perhaps global warming really is turning out to be global weirding.

[Zombies (I used to play for the same cricket team as Colin Blunstone, but never at the same time, unfortunately)]