Category: Book reviews

A very public own goal…

Airconcover.jpgIt didn’t take long for my last post to draw a reply from Ian Wishart, and — no surprises — it’s another lengthy diatribe. Unfortunately for Ian, it is also a very public own goal –demonstrating very nicely one of my central contentions: he doesn’t understand the stuff he’s writing about. Here’s the relevant passage (sorry about the lengthy quote, but it takes him a while to get his shot lined up):

…Gareth helpfully directs to a NASA feature on ocean cooling. There’s nothing in it that contradicts my usage of Willis in the book, but what it does say backs up one of my other assertions that Gareth had a problem with in our “anonymous” discussion thread on Tumeke previously about the impact of undersea volcanoes on ocean heat and GHG emissions.

When I pointed out scientists have recently discovered a massive volcanic field under the Arctic that began erupting in a catastrophic, albeit submarine, sense in 1999, Gareth, posting as “Response to Ian”, stated:

“If you are implying that they are influencing Arctic sea ice you are absolutely out in la-la land. The amount of heat released is miniscule compared to the heat capacity of the cold Arctic ocean.”

So if a large volcanic field under a relatively small area of ocean has no impact on warming the water, why does the NASA study on ocean cooling Gareth pointed us to say this:

“They are also exploring how volcanic eruptions influence ocean heating, and whether a better understanding of how volcanoes influence the energy balance of the ocean will help explain short term variability in ocean warming and cooling”

The NASA feature then quoted the CSIRO research team directly:

“One thing we found was that climate models that do not include volcanic forcing tend to overestimate the long term change, and their simulated decadal variability is not in agreement with the observations…this kind of result tells us volcanic forcing is important, but that we don’t totally understand it yet”.

Another example, then, of Trufflehunter shooting from the lip because he isn’t across the latest scientific research. 95% of the world’s active volcanic vents are underwater. I quoted other scientists in the book who thought volcanic and tectonic activity might well be significant in regard to sea levels and thermal expansion, but Gareth’s response was:

“One possibility that Wishart fails to consider is that tectonics and volcanoes weren’t ignored and their effects are trivial.”

Well, Gareth, go back and read the report you referred us to. Apparently other scientists don’t think they’re trivial at all.

And the ball’s in the back of his own net! It’s a mistake that only someone who had no real grasp of the subject could make, and Wishart makes it in a typically aggressive manner. The CSIRO team are (of course) talking about the cooling effects of large, Pinatubo-style volcanic eruptions (you know, the ones that occur above the surface of the sea) as a brief check of their paper would have told him…

Church et al. (2005) show that large volcanic eruptions cool [my emphasis] the global ocean and produce a drop in global sea levels. While this volcanic signal is clear in appropriately forced models and the global tide-gauge record, it is not as clear in the global thermosteric sea level record (the component of sea level change due to the thermal expansion of the ocean and closely related to ocean heat content), and there are several instances where global sea level is rising but steric sea level is falling…

Looks a lot like Ian’s indulging in “half-baked schoolboy science” to me. I believe the internet jargon for this situation is p*wned.

[Update 7/5: Wishart concedes and admits to “winging it”, but then proceeds to enlarge the deep hole he’s already dug for himself. Any readers care to explain for his benefit precisely why undersea volcanism has a trivial impact on oceanic heat budgets? The rest of his post is just wibble.]

Quirk, strangeness, not much charm

Airconcover.jpgAnother day, another angry diatribe from Air Con author Ian Wishart — longer and more intemperate that his last, but I’m getting used to the style. It seems he believes that attack is the best form of defence, which is great if you’ve got the ammunition (like the Crusaders backs of recent seasons, if not this one 🙁 ), but rather unwise if you lack basic understanding of the issue in contention. I’ll deal with the points he raises, but can’t resist first giving you a flavour of his writing:

I could go on, and on, but I don’t see why I should bear the burden of disproving your half-baked schoolboy science masquerading as genuine informed comment on climate change. I’ve illustrated here that Gareth Renowden’s credibility on climate change, based on his Air Con review, is non existent. Go for it Truffle, crawl back to your den and think carefully before launching ad-hom attacks on me again.

“Half-baked schoolboy science”? Oh the irony, the chutzpah…

Continue reading “Quirk, strangeness, not much charm”

Extreme Ice Now

Extreme Ice Now: Vanishing Glaciers and Changing Climate: A Progress Report

“Once upon a time, I was a climate-change skeptic. How could humans affect this huge planet so much?  Could activists be creating a new cause to sell?  Could scientists be trying to create research grants?  Could the computer models be wrong?  Could the media be over-hyping the science?

“Though if I was once a skeptic, I’m not one anymore. The evidence is in the ice. This knowledge of melting glaciers made me despair. But despair and defeat are not options. We must invest in our optimism and in our strength. This is the way forward.”

Not a lot of words for the first nine pages of a book.  But they are ingeniously arranged and interesting to look at.  And they point straight to the heart of James Balog’s Extreme Ice Now: Vanishing Glaciers and Changing Climate: A Progress Report. The book’s publication by National Geographic was timed to coincide with his film Extreme Ice recently showed on National Geographic channels and previewed here.

Balog is an award-winning American photographer, exhibitor in many museums and galleries and author of photography books. After gaining a master’s degree in geomorphology he turned to nature photojournalism, covering a range of subjects over the years, including endangered wildlife and trees.  Latterly his attention has focused on ice. Outdoor adventure has long been part of his life.

Extreme Ice Now contains a number of short essays written by Balog, interleaved with many wonderful photographs from the ice world.  He explains the Extreme Ice Survey, begun in 2007, a collaboration between image-makers and scientists to document the changes transforming Arctic and alpine landscapes. Time-lapse cameras in selected places, taking images once in every hour of daylight over a period of years, are part of the record, along with a portfolio of still images, and the documentary film.  Art meets science to convey the reality of global warming to a worldwide audience, to celebrate the beauty of the landscapes, and to assist scientists understand the mechanisms of glacial retreat.  “If the story the ice is telling could be heard by everyone, there would no longer be any argument about whether or not humans are causing global warming.  We are.”

His essays are mostly about his personal response to this realisation. He puzzles over what is holding us back from acting. He thinks probably a natural psychology of denial, allied with complacency, avoidance of responsibility, and fear. Add to this the “toxic effluent” poured through journalistic pipelines by vested interests to counter solid, observed, physical, empirical facts, and we have a recipe for confusion.

Balog chooses optimism though doesn’t find it easy: “…photography is something of an act of love. The sustained attention we give to our subjects draws us closer and closer as we get to know them better … I was filled with despair when I realised that the object of my fixation just might vanish before I returned in October.”  But the idea that the people of his time will be the ones responsible for destroying something as monumental as the climate of this huge planet is too sickening to accept. Despair is not an option. We must exercise the will-power and technological resolve needed to change our ways.

The interest in Balog’s reflections is not that they offer any new information, but that they express very well the thoughts that probably many of us entertain in the face of the ongoing evidence of global warming.  And they encourage us to believe that a solution can be found and to commit ourselves to working for it.  The voice from the increasing ice flows of Greenland or the retreating glaciers of the Rockies and the Andes lends determination to those of us who frequent less challenging terrains.

The book may be for the coffee table but it has serious things to say as well as striking images to delight in.

Somethin’ stupid…

Airconcover.jpgI hardly know where to begin with this book. It appears to come from another planet; it has a view of the world so far removed from the reality that most of us operate in that it’s difficult to know whether the author is misguided, malicious, or malignant. Consider the mental space occupied by someone who is willing to write, publish and promote this (p247):

What they [“wild greens”] really mean is that they want ordinary families and kids to become extinct, leaving space for the Green elite to run the planet and enjoy exclusive bird-watching excursions while feasting on the bones of six year olds who’d earlier been sold to Asian brothels.

In Air Con: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming, Ian Wishart appears to have held the techniques of Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels a little too close to his heart (he certainly refers to Goebbels often enough… four times in all, the first time on p16). An intense dislike of all things “green” seems to make him lose touch with any concept of good taste or accuracy in a mad rush to denigrate the green movement and environmentalists.

Continue reading “Somethin’ stupid…”

Hell and High Water

Hell and High Water: The Global Warming Solution

For some months now I have been visiting Joseph Romm’s blog Climate Progress regularly, valuing it for its lively and informed commentary on climate science and politics and its focus on the solutions already available to us. The cover of his book Hell and High Water is prominent on the website and I grew uncomfortably aware that I hadn’t read it, and perhaps I should.  At last I have.

It was well worth the reading.  Romm holds a PhD in physics from MIT and is a senior fellow at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress. During the Clinton Administration he was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy with a focus on energy efficiency and renewable energy.  His service towards a sustainable energy future was recognised last year when he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The fact that the book is addressed to Americans doesn’t lessen its significance for the rest of us. What happens in the US is crucial in determining whether we succeed in successfully addressing global warming.

The book is in two parts. In the first Romm surveys the science and what the future holds if we continue on our present path.  He doesn’t discuss the detailed evidence for global warming and climate science but rather selects some aspects to establish the seriousness of the future threat. Invoking Broecker’s image of climate as “an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges” he discusses the possibility of climate’s sudden response to forcings, which the paleoclimate record reveals so remarkably. Increased global hurricane intensity and frequency, a matter of great importance to the US, is investigated and affirmed in an interesting sequence.  Droughts and wildfires, also on the agenda for the US, are explained. He emphasises the need for systems thinking in considering how four key carbon sinks could turn to sources under increased warming and drive vicious feedback cycles – the oceans, the soils, the tropical forests, and the  arctic tundra, permafrost and frozen peat.  Finally he looks at the prospects for ice movement in Greenland and Antarctica and provides scenarios for US cities enduring continually rising sea levels combined with increased hurricane activity. On our current emissions path the planet will almost certainly be 3 degrees warmer than pre-imdustrial levels by the end of the century. In that case we can expect to battle with metres of sea level rise over a relatively short space of time.

The question of the century is: “Do we humans have the political will to stop the great ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica from melting … to stop Hell and High Water?” The global-warming problem is no longer prmarily a scientific matter.  Nor is it a technological problem because we have the technologies to avoid the disasters that await us if we keep doing nothing. It is a problem of politics and political will. This is the focus of the second part of the book.

Romm discusses how the cautious and factual language of  scientists has not availed against the conservative leaders in America who have chosen to use their superior messaging and political skills to thwart serious action on global warming.  It is hard to see how anything could avail against the counsel of Luntz Research Companies whose advice to politicians on how to prevent efforts to tackle global warming Romm describes.  The passages Romm refers to reveal a level of manipulative cynicism and disregard for truth which is breathtaking. (You can see the Luntz memo here.)  The advice has clearly been followed by many politicians and publicists.  Delayers and Denyers are Romm’s preferred names for the sceptics. He describes a campaign which certainly has little to do with scientific scepticism. But it has everything to do with political partisanship. Global  warming became a partisan issue, at least in the US, and the sorry consequences are detailed by Romm, including the Bush White House’s deliberate strategy of impeding the scientific message.

One of the tactics employed by the Delayers has been to speak of the need for long-term technological breakthroughs, conveniently some distance into the future. Romm regards this as mostly empty rhetoric because it has not been matched by adequate funding.  Meanwhile the Gingrich congress cut funds for programmes aimed at accelerating the deployment into the American market of  cost-effective technologies already available. Romm identifies three technology areas which offer dramatic emission reductions in electricity generation at low cost and are ready to hand. They are energy efficiency, cogeneration and renewables. Energy efficiency is the enabling strategy which generates the savings that pay for the zero-carbon energy sources.

Fuelling transport receives considered treatment.  Fuel efficiency standards are an essential start, and after discussing various options Romm concludes that the best option for the future will be plug-in hybrids using electricity generated by wind.  Cellulosic ethanol may also have an important part to play.

Why has media coverage of global warming in the US  failed to adequately inform the public about the urgency of the problem and the huge effort needed to avert catastrophe?  Romm points to a declining number of science reporters, but worst of all to the “misguided belief that the pusuit of ‘balance’ is superior to the pursuit of truth – even in science journalism.”  This has played into the hands of the Delayers and Denyers who have exploited the flaw very successfully.  Time is the one US publication which has consistently delivered timely and powerful stories on global warming, largely unfettered by faux balance.  Romm recalls the April 2006 cover: ‘BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED.’

Romm’s book was published in 2007.  Today there is a new Administration in the White House which has committed itself to positive action to combat global warming.  That does not mean that the Denyers and Delayers have gone away.  In his conclusion Romm, looking forward, feared that even after Bush had gone conservatives in Congress would hold enough strength to continue to block significant action on climate, should they so choose. The results of inaction will be dreadful and will eventually force government action on a scale that would dwarf the straightforward government-led solutions available today – and by then even drastic action may be ineffectual.  Romm’s advice? “Get informed, get outraged, and then get political.