Category: Climate science

Bum notes from the Brill building (and a question for the minister)

The new chairman of the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition, Barry Brill OBE, is certainly not shy about parading his point of view to the world at large. Brill, a lawyer and former junior minister in the 1975-81 “Think Big” Muldoon government, has attempted to argue with John Key’s science advisor, Sir Peter Gluckman, and last weekend followed in the oversize footsteps of Bob Carter by popping up at denier-friendly Aussie “journal of ideas” Quadrant Online with a lengthy rant on the “Crisis in New Zealand climatology”. Crisis? What crisis? It appears he means the ACT Party beat-up of the shonky analysis by Richard Treadgold and un-named “researchers” at the Climate “Science” Coalition. Brill seems blissfully unaware of the real controversy surrounding this affair, but his article — and its appearance at places such as Watts Up With That— gives me another chance to demonstrate that this whole affair is nothing more than a politically-inspired attempt to undermine action on climate change.

 

Underpinning this manufactured controversy is one big lie: that the New Zealand temperature record has been important in determining government policy on climate change, and has somehow been influential on a global scale. Here’s Brill:

For nearly 15 years, the 20th-century warming trend of 0.92°C derived from the NSS [NIWA’s “seven station series”] has been at the centre of NIWA official advice to all tiers of New Zealand Government – Central, Regional and Local. It informs the NIWA climate model. It is used in sworn expert testimony in Environment Court hearings. Its dramatic graph graces the front page of NIWA’s printed brochures and its website.

Internationally, the NSS 0.92°C trend is a foundation stone for the Australia-New Zealand Chapter in the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessment Reports. In 1994, it was submitted to HadleyCRUT, so as to influence the vast expanses of the South Pacific in the calculation of globally-averaged temperatures.

At the centre of advice to government? A foundation stone for the IPCC? Brill is channelling Treadgold, but doing us the favour of being explicit. He wants us to think that the NZ temperature record is really, really important. The bad news for Brill? It isn’t, and never has been. The New Zealand record is interesting, certainly, but has only ever been a tiny part of the global evidence that has persuaded governments around the world to enact policies designed to address climate change. The truth is that even if the NZ record showed cooling (which it doesn’t), the case for taking action wouldn’t change one iota. However, Brill wants us to believe that warming in New Zealand isn’t real:

First, we know what New Zealand’s average temperature was in 1867. The predecessor of the Royal Society of New Zealand (The New Zealand Institute) made a formal minute in 1868 of:

“Tables, which form the most reliable data for judging of the Climate of New Zealand, are extracted from the Reports of the Inspector of Meteorological Stations, for 1867”.

The mean annual temperature was 55.6F – the equivalent of 13.1C. Now consider this extract from NIWA’s “Climate Summary for 2005”: The national average temperature of 13.1°C made 2005 the fourth warmest year nationally since reliable records commenced in the 1860s.

No change whatever in 138 years! In fact, if 2005 was warmer than most 21st century years, New Zealand has obviously experienced some cooling during the past century or so.

Oh really? Brill is here lifting “work” from none other than Bryan Leyland, which I dealt with in this post in January last year. But for the purposes of further showing Brill to be wrong, take a look at the cover of this book:

Hasst.jpg

This is the cover of a 2005 book from Canterbury University Press. The top sketch was painted by Julius von Haast in 1864, and shows the Cameron Glacier in the Arrowsmith Range in Canterbury. The photograph underneath shows the same scene in 2004. The glacier has retreated more than two kilometres. A lot of ice has vanished. I wonder how that happened? Fairies, perhaps? Or oofle dust? Here’s a photograph of the Cameron taken a few months ago. Still retreating, it would seem. As Jim Salinger noted in his PhD thesis, when commenting on a paper by Jim Hessell which purported to show little warming in NZ since 1930:

However, almost universal occurrence and synchroneity of the warming at 66 out of 70 sites associated with years of profound glacial retreat cannot be explained simply by instrumental or observer error.

We can be confident that New Zealand has warmed not just because the temperature record shows that to be the case, but because the country has lost a huge amount of ice over the same period. The ice melt is confirmation that the process Jim followed when adjusting station records for moves and changes was yielding results that pointed in the right direction.

Brill moves on to thank his supporters:

Piecing together the provenance of the New Zealand historical temperature record has been no easy task. Much of the detail is set out in the Climate Conversation blog. It has involved a myriad of investigative methods but the most productive has been the placement of nearly 50 Parliamentary Questions for Written Answer, for which credit must go to John Boscawen MP. The New Zealand mainstream media, all highly partisan on climate change matters, have evinced little interest in the scandal to date.

Fifty questions to Parliament, about a shonky analysis being given a politically-inspired beat-up? That sounds like an outrageous waste of tax payer funds to me. I wonder which MP will have the nous to ask Wayne Mapp, the minister responsible for NIWA, how much time and money the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research has had to expend on answering those 50 questions. Because that’s the legacy of Treadgold, Brill and the ineducable Boscawen — a spectacular waste of time and money.

There’s the real scandal. NIWA and its scientists have been subjected to baseless attacks and smears, and the organisation’s limited resources have been diverted to feed nothing more than the monstrous egos of New Zealand’s climate cranks, who are happily slinging mud as part of an extreme right wing political campaign to persuade the government to drop the ETS. Brill’s fact-challenged rant only demonstrates that he’s the latest in a long line of people prepared to spout nonsense in pursuit of inaction.

[The Animals, doing an appropriate Brill Building song (Mann/Weil)]

Gore makes a connection

If the oil spill is a disaster consider the CO2 spill, writes Al Gore in an article published yesterday in The New Republic.

“Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day – and there are over 1,400 of them.”

Continue reading “Gore makes a connection”

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.”

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)]