Global warming and the future of New Zealand
Two images of the day: above — the picture says it all. Doesn’t look like much, does it? [via Ecohustler, h/t @Revkin]. And below, a NASA photograph from the International Space Station showing what that thin skin of air looks like in situ. Note the large cumulonimbus clouds casting shadows, especially the one left of centre, which looks as though it’s bumped into the tropopause. [h/t In It For The Gold]
Christchurch readers might like to know that I’m talking at the local Skeptics in the pub meet up next Tuesday evening (23 March) — working title is Sceptics, skeptics and septicsâ„¢. Should be a lively evening… 😉 Meet at The Twisted Hop from 5-30pm, talk begins at 6pm, probably over the road at CPIT before returning to the pub. Keep an eye on the Skeptics MeetUp page for final details.
[â„¢ as coined by Stoat, headline by David Byrne.]
This column was published in the Waikato Times on March 16.
The media has paid disproportionate attention to an error in the monumental 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In a chapter surveying the possible future impacts of climate change on the Asian region the report included a prediction that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. The glaciers will certainly melt if we continue on our current course, but not as soon as that. This was a mistake which the IPCC has acknowledged and regretted. Not too bad in a volume of 3000 pages, but a mistake that shouldn’t have occurred and wouldn’t have if procedures had been properly applied.
Since then there have been regular media “revelations” claiming other errors as well. For all the fanfare with which they have been produced these have so far turned out to hinge on little more than minor technicalities. They cause much excitement in the denialist community, but they amount to nothing of consequence.
Overstatement is what the IPCC is being accused of. But the reality is that its report is generally conservative and cautious and in one very important matter likely to have understated a real danger ahead. That is sea level rise.
The IPCC does predict sea level rise in the century ahead, somewhere between 18 and 58 centimetres, depending on how high the level of greenhouse gases is allowed to climb. It sounds reassuringly manageable. But this predicted rise comes only from a combination of thermal expansion of the oceans because of warmer temperatures, and the continued slow melting of glacier ice. It assumes there will be no increase in the rate at which melting has occurred in the great ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic.
Time has passed, and it is now widely accepted in scientific circles that there is reason to expect a significant acceleration in the rate at which the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets lose mass to the sea. The dynamics of ice movement are beginning to be better understood, and they are not reassuring. Those massive ice sheets are seemingly not as impervious as once thought and their melting not necessarily a slow predictable linear process. Disintegration may be a more accurate word than melting.
If the IPCC predictions are too cautious, what level of rise is now being considered likely in this century? One metre say some. Others say that’s still not allowing sufficiently for the acceleration likely to build, and recommend planning for a two metre rise. James Hansen of NASA is prepared to consider five metres as a real possibility, though he doesn’t offer that as a prediction..
Of all the predicted impacts of climate change, sea level rise is the one that I find most unnerving. Its effects on human populations are distressing to contemplate. The deltaic nations such as Egypt, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Myanmar will be badly hit. Some atoll nations will disappear. Countries with large low-lying coastal plains, such as the US, China and Brazil will be faced with tremendous disruption. Some great cities will be severely threatened, including Miami, New York, Tokyo and Amsterdam. It won’t be all that straightforward in New Zealand for that matter – a one metre sea level rise would put Tamaki Drive under water for example.
And it’s not the kind of damage that can be undone. How could we get water to return to the ice sheets? That’s why it is so important that we stop it happening in the first place. Any suggestion that a minor error in the IPCC report has somehow put the urgency of that task into question is out of touch with reality.
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It is likely that this is the last in the series of columns I have been invited to write for the Waikato Times over the past couple of years. The columns are directed to the general public, not Hot Topic readers, but they may have been useful here in indicating what can be written in public forums. It’s well worth anyone’s effort to get the message across in newspapers. I often wish there were more scientists writing in that medium, though I know it can be difficult to secure a space for opinion pieces. There are always the letters to the editor, which journalists tell me are popular with readers. The company there can sometimes be embarrassing, but if you’re willing to take that risk a clear statement on climate change will receive wide attention. It has been quite depressing to see in our local paper far more letters (often muddled) from contrarians than from those who take climate change seriously.
Australia’s CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology have released a State of the Climate report [PDF], a succinct six page effort designed to provide the Aussie public with an overview of how their climate has been changing, and how it is expected to change in the future. Headlines (from the media release):
- Highly variable rainfall across the country, with substantial increases in rainfall in northern and central parts of Australia, as well as significant decreases across much of southern and eastern Australia.
- Rapidly rising sea levels from 1993 to 2009, with levels around Australia rising, between 1.5cm and 3cm per decade in Australia’s south and east and between 7cm and 9cm in the country’s north
- About half of the observed reduction in winter rainfall in south-west Western Australia can be explained by higher greenhouse gas levels.
The news about temperature isn’t good either. All of the continent has warmed over the last 50 years, but some regions have warmed at up to 0.4ºC per decade during that time (see the dark red blobs on the map above) and have seen warming of 1.5 — 2ºC. By 2030 the average temperature is expected to have increased by a further 0.6 — 1.5ºC, and decreases in rainfall will continue in the south, south-east and southwest. The graphics are particularly good — and very telling.
I’m not aware of any similar recent overview for New Zealand, and with the usual suspects doing their level best to promote uncertainty and inaction at the moment, it would be helpful if the local climate science community could cooperate on producing such a clear statement of current evidence and future change. NIWA’s last set of projections for NZ were released in 2008, and are summarised on this informative but rather dense web page. I had a go at bringing the details to a wider public, via articles in NZ Geographic (not my knees, by the way) and Good magazine, but apart from press coverage when the projections were launched, there’s not been much since. I doubt many people will seek out Climate Change Effects and Impacts Assessment: A Guidance Manual for Local Government in New Zealand, 2nd Edition (Ministry for the Environment 2008) for an easy introduction to the subject…
One sometimes wonders how the scientists most reviled by the denial industry are bearing up under the onslaught. Michael Mann is one of them, so I was interested to listen to him being interviewed by Chris Mooney on a recent Point of Inquiry podcast. Here is a summary of some of Mann’s responses (not an accurate transcript, though mostly in his words):
On the science:
The bottom line is the basic physics and chemistry of the greenhouse effect. Observation that the globe is warming and that the warming is unusual in the long term context fits what the basic physics and chemistry says. After decades of work by thousands of scientists round the world pursuing every lead – thinking of all the possible different explanations of the phenomena they observe – there is literally no evidence that calls into question the basic radiative properties of greenhouse gases. You increase greenhouse gas concentrations, you will warm the atmosphere. Questioning that basic reality is almost like questioning the spherical nature of the Earth.
What scientists actually spend time debating and pursuing are issues like feedbacks – the processes that might amplify or diminish that warming. There are open questions relating to such matters as clouds, El Ninos, hurricanes, and so on, which are being actively pursued. But on the basic issue – the scientific community moved on from that question decades ago.
On the strategy of attacks on the science:
The critiques almost never actually discredit a line of evidence or a basic conclusion. They take some small technical part of an analysis, try to manufacture a controversy about that to essentially discredit the work by finding some small potential flaw with one part of an analysis.
On the hockey stick:
There are more than a dozen reconstructions; every one of them comes to the same conclusion as our decade-old work that the recent warming is anomalous in at least 1000 years. Our attackers never want to look at the big picture, never want to look at whether they have any impact on the bottom-line conclusions, because they know that they don’t.
Even if they had been successful in taking down the hockey stick, which they haven’t been, it still wouldn’t amount to undermining the central case for the science.
On concealing data:
All of our data was available in the public domain and any claim to the contrary was dishonest. The question of making codes public is different and is not considered required as general practice. However I and my collaborators have made a decision to put every scrap of code as well as every scrap of data in public domain at the time we publish a paper. We’ve gone beyond what the standards of the community are.
On Phil Jones request to delete emails:
It was an email he wrote in the heat of the moment. He was under attack. Keep in mind this guy received something like 40 freedom of information demands over a weekend. He was being harassed intentionally and the freedom of information demands that were being made were for materials that CRU legally could not even distribute. These were frivolous demands. Under that sort of harassment people sometimes say foolish things – we certainly didn’t delete any emails and I don’t think he did himself
On the “trick”:
This is a good example of how those working to make mischief can take a term that they probably fully know is perfectly innocent in scientific lingo, but exploiting the fact that it sounds very different to a non-technical person. It shows the disingenuousness of those leading the attack. They intentionally misrepresent words and phrases cherry-picked from thousands of emails in a cynical attempt to distort the scientists’ views and cast aspersions on a scientific discipline.
On fighting back:
The idea that scientists under siege should unilaterally disarm, give in to the sometimes criminal attacks of the anti-science forces looking to discredit them and their science, not stick up for their science and their colleagues, not fight back against these criminal efforts to misrepresent them and to impugn their integrity – it would be terribly misplaced if scientists were not to do all they can to fight back
On the difficulties:
Our detractors are extremely well funded, extremely well organised, they have had an attack infrastructure for decades. They developed it during the tobacco wars, they honed it further in other efforts to attack science that industry or other special interests find inconvenient. So they have a very well honed, well funded, organised machine that they are bringing to bear in their attack now against climate science. It’s like a marine in a battle with a cub scout when it comes to the scientists defending themselves. We don’t have the resources, the experience: we haven’t been trained, we’re not public relations experts, lawyers, lobbyists, we’re scientists. It’s a classic example of asymmetric warfare.
Many of us didn’t believe it would come to this – the scientific case for the reality of human-caused climate change has been clear now for several years, though there is much we have still to learn. Many of us thought, perhaps somewhat naively that in the end science would carry the day, that the strength of the scientific consensus would be enough. I wasn’t so sure. But what we all underestimated was the degree, the depth of dishonesty, the dirtiness, and cynicism to which the climate change denial movement would be willing to stoop to advance their agenda.
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A stout defence from Michael Mann. What he wasn’t asked and doesn’t say is how high the stakes are. But anyone who has taken the trouble to understand the basic science knows they are very high indeed. The attack on climate science is an attack on all humanity. Not one for which the perpetrators are likely to be called to account, and perhaps it won’t really matter that they’re not. What matters more is that they call off the campaign, though one suspects that even if they wanted to, the forces they have loosed have so committed themselves that they will not heed any call to come to heel. Meanwhile those of us who are not climate scientists but can see the danger we are in must offer strong support to the science and opposition to the insidious campaign of denial.
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