Global warming and the future of New Zealand
An opinion piece in this week’s Nature features the views of five diverse climate scientists on how the IPCC might be reformed or restructured in the light of the recent fuss about “errors” in AR4. The headine asks if we should “cherish it, tweak it or scrap it?” It makes interesting reading (it’s behind a paywall, unfortunately), but here’s a summary.
Continue reading “IPCC’s future: babies, bathwater, or a new bath?”
What was it Richard Treadgold and Rodney Hide were saying? Here’s Hide, speaking yesterday in Parliament:
So, before Christmas, I asked NIWA to disclose the adjustments and their reasons. They said they would. But they have just told the Climate Science Coalition they don’t have the record of the adjustments.
And here’s Treadgold and the NZ Climate Crank Coalition:
This follows an admission by NIWA that it no longer holds the records that would support its in-house manipulation of official temperature readings.
Just to to provide a little balance, here’s NIWA, yesterday:
NIWA has added two new documents to its National Climate Centre web pages to outline how and why it made adjustments to its 7-station temperature readings in order to provide accurate and meaningful data to use in a time series of temperature information.
One document [PDF] lists all the adjustments made to the station records used in NIWA’s long term New Zealand temperature series, while the second [PDF] looks at one station, Hokitika, and explains in detail the rationale for that station’s adjustments.
I look forward to the prompt release of apologies from Rodney Hide, Richard Treadgold, Terry Dunleavy and the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition to NIWA, Jim Salinger and all the scientists involved in preparing and maintaining NZ’s climate records, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Jonathan Leake at the UK Sunday Times has been swift to hail another supposedly damaging inaccuracy in the IPCC report. Africagate, the headline calls it. It occurs in the Working Group II report, which deals with the question of impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. I’ve looked up the section, which is in chapter 9 of the report, looking at possible impacts in Africa. The section is headed Agriculture (page 447-448 of the chapter). It opens with this sentence:
Results from various assessments of impacts of climate change on agriculture based on various climate models and SRES emissions scenarios indicate certain agricultural areas that may undergo negative changes.
There follows some closely referenced accounts of possible negative effects, as well as some possible positive effects. It’s in the course of the negative effects that the offending sentence is found:
In other countries, additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-2020 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003).
The Agoumi paper with which this sentence is referenced is apparently not peer-reviewed. I’ve already pointed out in another post that it is not a requirement for IPCC authors that all references be to peer-reviewed material, and in the Working Group II and III reports it is likely that other literature will be cited as well. (Working Group III addresses mitigation possibilities.) But not only is it not peer reviewed, it is a policy paper written in 2003 for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think tank. Professor Agoumi is Moroccan, and his paper apparently looks at prospects for Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
I don’t know what sort of weight the Agoumi report should be allowed. A lengthy blog on the British Democracy Forum website, which I presume provided the material for the Sunday Times article, presents a case for doubting its reliability. I’ll suspend judgment in the meantime, since the same blog triumphantly links the matter to “Climategate”, “Glaciergate”, and “Amazongate” and suggests together they spell the demise of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri. I’ve already said what I think of “Amazongate”, and Gareth has written on “Climategate” here and here. Granted the Himalayan glacier reference was an error, which has been acknowledged by the IPCC.
However, even if it turns out to have been a mistake to have included the findings of the Agoumi paper in the IPCC report it hardly warrants the hyped up attention Jonathan Leake gives it in his Sunday Times article (yes, the same Jonathan Leake whose sloppy journalism I wrote about here and here). I don’t read the IPCC reports as revealed truth and it has never occurred to me to take the Working Group II report as anything other than an outline of the kind of effects we can expect to see increasingly as global warming takes hold. Nor does the report itself claim anything remotely approaching certitude – words like ‘may’ and ‘could’ in the above extracts are typical of its statements.
However, bit by bit the public is being told that alarming cracks are opening up in the credibility of the IPCC report and of climate scientists generally. Even the Guardian seems to me to have flirted with the possibility in the extraordinary time and attention it has given to the email saga. And if recent public opinion polls are anything to go by some of the public is buying it.
Trifles are being magnified at the cost of proper attention to the overwhelming reality of climate science. The great danger threatening the human future has not gone away because journalists and others find it more interesting to focus on the pedigree of a few references or the workplace character of a small group among thousands of scientists. Journalists and their editors might ask themselves how they can justify giving so much attention to comparative trivia and allowing public attention to be diverted from the mounting threat ahead.
For those of us who accept that the threat is real and present there is no option but to keep affirming and trying to communicate the science and to hope that the ground currently being lost in public opinion can be regained and strengthened before we run out of even more time.
The campaign by the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition and Richard Treadgold’s “Climate Conversation Group” to cast doubt on the NZ temperature record and to smear the scientists who have worked on it has stepped up a notch or two in recent days, following a response by NIWA to an Official Information Act request from NZ C”S”C secretary Terry Dunleavy. It seems Dunleavy and Treadgold didn’t like the answers they were given, because they immediately jumped on one small part of the response, and rushed out a press release throwing up their hands in in horror. Here’s Dunleavy:
The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has been urged by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) to abandon all of its in-house adjustments to temperature records. This follows an admission by NIWA that it no longer holds the records that would support its in-house manipulation of official temperature readings. [my emphasis]
In December, NZCSC issued a formal request for the schedule of adjustments under the Official Information Act 1982, specifically seeking copies of “the original worksheets and/or computer records used for the calculationsâ€. On 29 January, NIWA responded that they no longer held any internal records, and merely referred to the scientific literature.
“Merely” referred to the scientific literature? That’s where scientific knowledge is to be found, not in worksheets or computer records. Treadgold developed the theme at his blog, under the heading FARCE: NIWA don’t have the changes:
Heads must roll – Turning into farce
In an astounding admission of ineptitude, after their former arm-waving and expostulations of injustice, NIWA have finally confessed that they cannot provide the adjustments they made to the original temperature readings in the official NZ temperature record.
Luckily for us, Treadgold later posted pdf copies of NIWA’s response, as well as Dunleavy’s original request, and so we can see for ourselves what NIWA said. Funnily enough, things are not quite as Dunleavy and Treadgold would wish us to believe.
Continue reading “Treadgold and the NZ CSC: dogging a fled horse”
In the current open journalistic season on IPCC sniping the NZ Herald has joined in with an editorial taking up new accusations made by the UK’s Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times.
The editorial begins with the Himalayan glacier error, which the IPCC itself has accepted and expressed regret for. But the Herald has the scent of blood and moves on to take up the claims of the UK newspapers with uncritical enthusiasm.
“If the Himalayan debacle was bad enough, the panel references to disappearing ice in the Andes, the European Alps and Africa are even more embarrassing.
They turn out to have been based on a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine.”
This absurd accusation probably originates with a Sunday Telegraph article, though it is not cited. Let’s look at what is involved. In chapter 1 of Working Group II’s report there is a section on observed changes in the cryosphere. In the course of the section a short table (page 86) of selected observed effects is provided. Included among them is the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, the Alps and Africa. It is in relation to this minor observation that the student dissertation and climbing magazine article are cited by the IPCC. But somehow the Herald manages to imply that the IPPCC references to disappearing ice are based on these two sources.
The reality is that the Working Group I report in chapter 4 (pages 356-360) deals with observed changes glaciers in a section densely packed with scientific information, whereas the Working Group II report in which this report is found describes the observed effects on the environment and on human activities due to these recent cryospheric changes. And the loss of ice climbs is a tiny part of those effects.
But, says the Herald, the articles fall some way short of scientific evidence. Admittedly they are anecdotal, but I imagine the IPCC authors regarded that as not unreasonable in a matter more likely to be noticed by climbers than researched in scientific papers. The author of one of the articles commented: “I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes.” Worth noting too that the magazine article was written by Mark Bowen, a keen climber and author of Thin Ice, the excellent story of Lonnie Thompson’s efforts to drill cores in high altitude tropical glaciers. Bowen went with Thompson on a number of expeditions, so knows his stuff. IPCC authors are not, as is commonly thought, entirely restricted to peer-reviewed literature. Their instructions include the following:
“The authors will work on the basis of peer reviewed and internationally available literature, including manuscripts that can be made available for IPCC review and selected non-peer reviewed literature. Source, quality and validity of non-peer reviewed literature, such as private sector information need to be critically assessed by the authors and copies will have to be made available to reviewers who request them. Disparate views for which there is significant scientific or technical support should be clearly identified in IPCC reports, together with relevant arguments. Expert meetings and workshops may be used to support the preparation of a report.”
Maybe their judgement can be faulted in this particular case. Not by me, I hasten to say. But it is hardly a matter of any great substance. Indeed it is tiny. The Herald editorial grossly exaggerates its significance.
And there is more, says the Herald. There has been a critical examination of the IPCC’s ”attempts to link natural disasters to global warming”. The Herald doesn’t mention that this ”critical examination” was conducted by the UK Sunday Times.
“ [The IPCC’s] claim in 2007 that the world had ‘suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s’ turns out to have been based on a paper that had not been peer-reviewed or published at that time.”
The words in quotes look as if they are from the IPCC report. They’re not. They’re from the Sunday Times article. The IPCC report is restrained and cautious. The Sunday Times article is sloppy and wildly inaccurate. You can read what I wrote about it on Hot Topic here. I won’t repeat myself. I described it as simply untrue. But it has evidently entered the journalistic canon.
I guess we should be relieved that the Herald shows no inclination to join the denialist community as a result of its uncritical acceptance of the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times articles, but it should think again about the strictures which it was lavish with. The IPCC reports are massive in size and massive in value. It may be asking a bit much that editorial writers should spend time acquainting themselves with them, but if they are not going to do that they should at least treat with great caution the ”revelations” of its failures in scientific rigour. There will no doubt be more of those, since I suspect the denialist community is going through the IPCC references with a fine comb. If they prove correct the IPCC will again acknowledge error and express regret, as it did over the Himalayan glaciers. But the Herald should make sure it is dealing with matters of reasonable substance before it rushes to judgement.
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