Category: Climate science

Methane rise continues

More cautionary news on rising methane levels is reported in yesterday’s Independent. Two leading experts on CH4in the atmosphere, Euan Nisbet and Ed Dlugokencky, were due to reveal at a conference that, after a decade of near-zero growth, “globally averaged atmospheric methane increased by [approximately] 7ppb (parts per billion) per year during 2007 and 2008.” They consider it likely that 2009 will have shown the same rising trend, since the figures for the first half of the year showed a 7 ppb rise on the 2008 level.

They are properly cautious about the rises and comment that they may just be a couple of years of high growth which may drop back to what it was.  But they stress the importance of understanding the causes of the rises, because of the potential for increased CH4 emissions from strong positive climate feedbacks in the Arctic where there are unstable stores of carbon in permafrost. Permafrost melt carries the potential for methane release.

If there is a feedback mechanism at work it’s bad news as the Independent makes clear in terms that its readers can understand:

“Many climate scientists think that frozen Arctic tundra… is a ticking time bomb in terms of global warming, because it holds vast amounts of methane, an immensely potent greenhouse gas. Over thousands of years the methane has accumulated under the ground at northern latitudes all around the world, and has effectively been taken out of circulation by the permafrost acting as an impermeable lid. But as the permafrost begins to melt in rising temperatures, the lid may open – with potentially catastrophic results”.

This is not alarmism on the part of the Independent. The scientists involved in reporting the rises are careful and restrained in their statements.  We may hope that the increases turn out not to be significant in terms of feedbacks under way.  But it is a sober reminder of how quickly things may change if natural feedbacks kick in and amplify the warming already caused by our human activity.  See Gareth’s earlier post on methane hydrates in the Arctic.

Incidentally, it was good to see a newspaper competently and thoroughly reporting climate change science news.  It can happen, and when it does it’s a different world from the ignorant and careless journalism that has been so apparent recently in relation to the UEA emails and the IPCC report.  Rationality and proportion marked an excellent piece of science reporting.

The Listener joins the attack

“…serious and growing questions over the standards and credibility of the international body whose job it is to determine the scientific truths about climate change.” 

The Listener is not going to be left out.  Ruth Laugesen writes in the current issue that “probes by a variety of international media have uncovered a smattering of poorly based and even shonky assertions” in the IPCC reports.  By the time she comes to list them later in her article they have become “potential inaccuracies”. The list is familiar enough.  First is the Himalayan glacier melt rate, which has been acknowledged by the IPCC as a regrettable error.  Of the other four, two track back to Jonathan Leake at the Sunday Times – dubbed Amazongate and Africagate – and both have been shown up as lacking any substance by Tim Lambert here and here. Another refers to the mistaken statement that 55% of the Netherlands is below sea level when the correct figure is 26%, yet Laugesen acknowledges that this relied on a figure supplied by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. The remaining item concerns the reliability of data from weather stations in East China used in a research paper by Phil Jones and others published in Nature in 1990. Jones has reasonably responded to the accusation of fraud here.

 

Against the massive and impressive IPCC reports these are all matters of negligible substance, as anyone who has cast an eye over the reports would immediately recognise.  Only one of them reveals a clear failure to observe the processes and standards expected of the IPCC authors.  It is absurd to suggest that they add up to serious and growing questions.  All they add up to is a demonstration of how savagely determined climate change deniers are to cast doubts on climate science by whatever means they can find.  Is it too much to ask that a staff writer for the Listener treat her “international media” with more caution?  Journalists around the world seem to be engaged in an operation where you simply pass on something you have read about climate science in another publication without feeling the need to check on its initial reliability.  The more this happpens the more the story becomes entrenched. And the longer the public is left thinking there may be some deep uncertainty about human-caused climate change. The abdication of intellectual responsibility is alarming.

And it’s not only journalists who are letting the public down. Depressingly, and I wish I could add surprisingly, Climate Change Minister Nick Smith when questioned by Laugesen has chosen not to deny the notion that the IPCC report is untrustworthy.  “It does raise questions – if those parts of the report have mistakes in them, what about the rest of the report?…The reality is that governments respond to the mood of the public. And the fact that there are errors in the IPCC report is of concern.”

He says that the errors will be one reason for the government being “a bit more cautious” on climate change policy.  How much more cautious can the government get without giving up on the issue altogether?  If Smith is taking his lead from the mood of the public he should not be occupying the post of Climate Change Minister.  He has access to expert scientific advice.  He should be telling the public how serious the situation is, not letting their mood be determined by superficial journalism.

He even has the nerve to advise the 16 NZ scientists involved in the IPCC process that “it is better to pursue quality than quantity.”

Thankfully Laugesen includes comments from NIWA’s chief climate scientist, David Wratt, NZ’s representative on the 31-member IPCC governing bureau.  He introduces a note of sanity into the article. One hopes the Listener readership is sophisticated enough to see with whom the truth lies, but journalists certainly aren’t making it easy.

Economist says climate science deserves praise

A forthright article from economist Jeffrey Sachs in today’s Guardian acknowledges that recent harsh attacks on the science of climate change have disconcerted the global public.

But the fact is that the critics, few in number but aggressive in their attacks, are deploying tactics that they have honed for more than 25 years. They greatly exaggerate scientific disagreements in order to stop action on climate change, with special interests like Exxon Mobil footing the bill.  The free-market idealogues of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page provide a platform.

Continue reading “Economist says climate science deserves praise”

Pearced to the heart: Fred gets it wrong

I have been a reader of the Guardian newspaper for 55 years and was more than a little astonished when they ran a series of articles by prominent environmental journalist Fred Pearce on the stolen University of East Anglia emails. For that matter I was surprised that Fred Pearce wrote them. He is no climate change denialist, and makes it perfectly clear that the emails in no way alter the case that humans are warming the planet. But he seems to have taken them at the face value the hackers presumably hoped for, and drawn some unjustified and unfair conclusions. The Guardianobviously thought he was on to something significant. A “major investigation” they proclaimed, getting at the “real story”. Revelations and exposures abound.

 

Let’s take a closer look at one of the revelations. It’s an article claiming that the emails reveal “strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics”.  It was the one chosen for inclusion in the latest Guardian Weekly. As a reader of that paper I’d been quietly hoping we’d be spared the sight of any of the articles, but there it was, on the science page, with the lurid headline “Research red in tooth and claw.”

Pearce claims that there have been obvious cracks in the peer-review system for years, mentioning an open letter from 14 stem cell researchers to journal editors to highlight their dissatisfaction with the process, alleging a small scientific clique is using peer review to block papers from other researchers.

From there he jumps to the emails, where he claims “many will see a similar pattern.”  Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, was regularly asked to review papers “and he sometimes wrote critical reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising his work.”

Pearce quotes from a 2004 email in which Jones mentions that he had recently rejected two papers from people saying CRU (his climate research unit) has it wrong over Siberia.  “If either appears I will be very surprised.”   Pearce acknowledges that Jones doesn’t say why he rejected the papers (might it have been that they were poor science?).  Pearce also doesn’t know what the papers were, but announces that the Guardian has established that one of them was probably from Lars Kamel, a Swedish astrophysicist who analysed temperature records from parts of southern Siberia and claimed to find much less warming than Jones.

Pearce admits that Kamel’s paper could be criticised as being slight and lacking in detail about its methods of analysis.  However, he surmises, Jones would have known that Kamel called mainstream climate research “pseudo-science” and that publication of the article in a serious journal would have attracted the attention of professional climate sceptics. (Presumably suggesting that this would prejudice Jones in his estimation of the paper?) In spite of the paper’s inadequacy Pearce says that because it was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones’ analysis “some would have recommended its publication.”

So is Pearce suggesting that if a scientist of Jones’ stature considers papers to be lacking scientific rigour he shouldn’t say so, lest he might be instrumental in persuading an editor not to publish them?  Or is he suggesting that Jones deliberately sets out to prevent publication of anything which questions his own position?  He hardly makes himself clear, but succeeds, on the basis of much conjecture, in casting a slur on Jones’ integrity.

He later makes a good deal of Jones’ “harsh criticism” of the journal Climate Research for publishing papers he “disagreed with”.  It seems to me that Jones and others had every reason for their criticism. Chris de Freitas, the editor responsible for publishing the Soon and Baliunas paper, is our well known crusading climate change denier. He constantly seeks and gains publicity for standard denialist claims (one might not unreasonably say lies) that increases in carbon dioxide don’t dangerously change the climate, that there is no acceleration in sea level rise, that climate scientists exaggerate for the sake of money, and so on. If he accepted the paper against the advice of four reviewers there is every reason to suspect the quality of the journal’s editorship.  But no, Pearce manages to imply that Jones and Mann did something improper and damaging to the publication of scientific papers.

It’s one thing for Pearce to discuss the general question of the mechanics of peer review, but quite another to use Jones as an example of the abuse of the system. That’s a rush to judgment which I find hard to believe the Guardian allowed.

I was pleased to discover that the Guardian at least invited climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA to comment on Pearce’s article.  If you click on the highlighted yellow sections of the article (linked to above) you can see his annotations.  He roundly rejects much of what Pearce has to say. I’m no scientist, but it seemed apparent to me as a general reader that Pearce was pushing the email material way beyond anything it justified.  It was good to have that view confirmed by a working scientist.

I’m left wondering why this sort of “investigation” was ever supported by the Guardian.  It pre-empts the independent review the University has arranged.  It treats stolen and possibly selected emails as evidence, though to do so it has to make all sorts of assumptions about what the authors might have meant. It is manifestly unjust to the scientists concerned and trivialises their work.

Note:  Jones has recently been interviewed by Nature and although there are aspects of the Climategate allegations that he is not able to comment on he defends himself against some of the accusations made against his work.

Tipping and other points

During the Copenhagen kerfuffle a lot of interesting stuff hit the web: here’s something that deserves a bit more air – a Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) special issue on tipping elements in the earth system, edited by John Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Tipping elements (or points, as Malcolm Gladwell would have them) are changes that once started take on a life of their own, and can’t easily be returned to their original state. In the climate system that might be the rapid loss of an ice sheet in a few decades or hundreds of years, while regrowing it might take many thousands. The PNAS special issue deals with nine: dust production in the Bodélé Depression in Chad, ENSO, Arctic sea ice and ice sheets, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, deep ocean hydrates (not shallow sea bed, Siberian methane) — David Archer dubs them a “slow tipping point”, the Amazon rainforest (no “Amazongate” here, just a confirmation that concern is justified), monsoons, oceans, and policy responses to the climate challenge. And the best thing is that all the articles are available online, free (click on the link above). Schellnhuber contributes an introduction, and the Potsdam press release also provides a good overview. For some introductory thoughts, check out Tim Lenton’s discussion here.

Another recent example of a real tipping point is the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica. Recent modelling suggests that the glacier’s grounding line retreated beyond a ridge in 1996, and is now free to retreat by several hundred kilometres inland. This could happen in a hundred years and result in the loss of half of the ice in the glacier — enough to raise sea level by 24cm. New Scientist reports:

Observations already show that the model severely underestimates the rate at which PIG’s grounding line is retreating, says Katz. “Ours is a simple model of an ice sheet that neglects some important physics,” says Katz. “The take-home message is that we should be concerned about tipping points in West Antarctica and we should do a lot more work to investigate,” he says.

Amen to that.