Brad DeLong

Eric Rosten's Shtick Is Asking Dumb Questions: Harry Potter vs the Codfish Weblogging

Eric Rosten:

Dumb Question: Is Harry Potter Really Less Important Than Global Warming? - Bloomberg: This week’s dumb question was put to J. Bradford DeLong, who is professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a blogger, and a former Clinton administration Treasury official. 

The Grid: Can I ask you a dumb question?  Last week you wrote a blog post that asks why people seem to care more about “imaginary friends” like Harry Potter than about real stories from the past or even projections of the future -- whether it holds global wealth or global warming. Do you mind explaining a bit more why imaginary friends like Harry Potter are less important than imaginary issues like global warming? 

Brad DeLong: Hundreds of millions of people are greatly concerned with Harry Potter--he’s one of the most important things in life. What happens to him is what they most desperately want to know.

Why are they paying attention to the imaginary Harry Potter, instead of the man behind the curtain -- global warming? There are two billion peasants living in the great river valleys of Asia. Global warming either means more or less snow on the Tibetan plateau, which melts either faster or slower, which means either drought or flood or both. And none of these two billion people have enough resources to leave their land and move to the cities, because the land is what they’ve got.

Surely what happens to all two billion of them is a more important story than what happens to one single person, who doesn't even exist. Isn't it?

It’s not just the “eight million stories in the naked city.” It’s two billion. Why, if we can organize ourselves to have Harry Potter festivals, can’t we organize ourselves to deal with global warming?

The right answer is that we are jumped-up East African plains apes who have barely managed to evolve an inferior and inadequate kind of intelligence.

This is yet more evidence of how inferior and inadequate our intelligence is. 

Ramesh Ponnuru Denies Global Warming Thrice

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Obama's Bogus Journey: The world will little note nor long remember anything President Barack Obama said in his second inaugural…. Obama said that developing “sustainable-energy sources” is “what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.” Does anyone believe that in a week anyone will find that an arresting and compelling thought? Or credit it for being a thought at all?

And this is a person who is held up as an example of the "decent", "intellectual" right whom one can talk to…

Feh!

Niagara Falls Is 167 Feet High, Lake Erie Has an Average Depth of 64 Feet and a Maximum Depth of 210 Feet...

…and in 50,000 years erosion will have carried Niagara Falls all the way up to Lake Erie.

How fast will Lake Erie then empty? And what will the Great Lakes look like then?

Michael Mann vs. Nate Silver on Global Warming

Ask Nate Silver about global warming skeptics, and he will say something like:

One type of skepticism flows from self-interest. In 2011 alone, the fossil fuel industry spent about $300 million on lobbying activities.... What they say should not be mistaken for an attempt to make accurate predictions.... A second type of skepticism falls into the category of contrarianism. In any contentious debate, some people will find it advantageous to align themselves with the crowd, while a smaller number will come to see themselves as persecuted outsiders.... “If you look at climate, if you look at ozone, if you look at cigarette smoking, there is always a community of people who are skeptical of the science-driven results,” Rood told me.

Views on Age of Planet Differ: No, Marco Rubio Would Not Be an Acceptable President Edition

Paul Krugman:

Views Differ on Age of Planet - NYTimes.com: Quite a few bloggers are having fun with Marco Rubio’s bobbing and weaving in response to a question from GQ: "How old do you think the Earth is?"… As I like to say, the GOP doesn’t just want to roll back the New Deal; it wants to roll back the Enlightenment. But here’s what you should realize: when Rubio says that the question of the Earth’s age “has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow”, he’s dead wrong. For one thing, science and technology education has a lot to do with our future productivity — and how are you going to have effective science education if schools have to give equal time to the views of fundamentalist Christians?More broadly, the attitude that discounts any amount of evidence — and boy, do we have lots of evidence on the age of the planet! — if it conflicts with prejudices is not an attitude consistent with effective policy. If you’re going to ignore what geologists say if you don’t like its implications, what are the chances that you’ll take sensible advice on monetary and fiscal policy? After all, we’ve just seen how Republicans deal with research reports that undermine their faith in the magic of tax cuts: they try to suppress the reports…. So don’t laugh over Rubio’s young-earth apologetics. If he, or anyone else from his party, wins in 2016, the joke will be on us.

Brad Plumer: Yes, Hurricane Sandy is a good reason to worry about climate change

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/29/yes-hurricane-sandy-is-a-good-reason-to-worry-about-climate-change/

Meanwhile, as Sandy Makes Landfall...

It just took 150% of the predicted time for a panful of shortbread to brown. It's like high-altitude baking. #sandy #brooklyn

— tnielsenhayden (@tnielsenhayden) October 29, 2012

XKCD: The End of the 2005 Hurricane Season

http://xkcd.com/1126/

Joe Romm: Seminal Study Finds 'Climate-Change Footprint’ In North America, ‘Continent With The Largest Increases in Disasters’

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/21/1054571/seminal-study-climate-change-footprint-in-north-america-the-continent-with-the-largest-increases-in-disasters/

September 2012 Tied For The Warmest Ever Recorded

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/15/1015511/september-2012-ties-for-the-warmest-ever-recorded-globally/

Maple Trees in New Mexico

Walter Jon Williams:

There is exactly one canyon in New Mexico where you can find maple trees, trapped here by changing climate after the last Ice Age. This is clearly the time of year to go see them…. The canyon?  It’s tucked away in the Manzano Mountains… named after the Fourth of July.

Kudos to Modeled Behavior for Weighing in at Forbes on the Desirability of Carbon Taxes…

Kudos to Adam Ozimek for writing:

I will take Brad’s new advice and try to convince the readers of Forbes that a carbon tax is a good idea…. I am a proponent of carbon taxes…. [S]urely higher gas taxes are a good idea. In his Pigou Tax paper Mankiw cites on study that shows of the $2.10 optimal tax on gasoline, only 6 cents was due to global warming. The rest came from other externalities like congestion and accidents. Gas taxes also show us that international “coordination” is possible…. Noah [Smith] is correct that efficiently taxing a globally traded externality producing commodity does require global cooperation. But… many developed nations… [set] high gas taxes, and it’s time we got on board. This will be many times more efficient than CAFE standards…. I am also on board with Noah’s larger suggestion though that we should be heavily subsidizing basic research for clean energy….

[W]hile Noah is correct that carbon taxes and gas taxes are unpopular, so are the taxes that would be needed to raise the money for the research he wants. As Matt Yglesias points out, this money needs to come from somewhere. Better to be tax an activity that generates an externality to raise this money than to tax income or capital gains.

A final important reason conservatives should support taxes and research is because it will help the government get out of the energy regulation business in the long-run. If innovation drives solar and battery prices low enough, the energy sector may become no different than any other industry in producing limited externalities. Thus the special regulatory consideration it merits will no longer exist. That and of course it will help reduce the risk that we destroy the planet. Conservatives should care about that too.

For the Next Five Years or so, Until the Next Local Minimum, Steve Levitt and Steve Dubner Will Say: "Did You Know That There Is More Ice in the Arctic Ocean than in 2012?"

The Arctic Icecap Melt

The Xuelong Sails the Northwest Passage!

Panama Canal better cut its rates!

This Year's Arctic Icecap

This Is an Actual Statement by Ryan Lizza: "Who Is Worse: Flat-Earthers or Round-Earthers Who Refuse to Speak Up?"

https://twitter.com/RyanLizza/status/221641633756753921

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

---

Oh. And the round-earthers not only are not silent--not only speak out--but also do stuff:

Nancy Pelosi:

American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009: [L]aunch a new clean energy economy—to create 1.7 million American jobs (with the Recovery Act); help reduce our dangerous dependence on foreign oil by 5 million barrels per day; keep energy costs low for Americans, protects consumers from price increases with lower income families seeing no cost; with no increase to the deficit.  Requires a reduction in the carbon pollution causing climate change from major U.S. sources of 17 percent by 2020 (the basis for America’s proposal going into the Copenhagen Climate Summit) and 80 percent by 2050, compared to 2005 levels.  Invests in new clean energy and efficiency technologies. Passed House June 26, 2009.

Harry Reid:

Climate Change: Global warming is one of the greatest challenges of our time.  The United States accounts for approximately 4 percent of the world’s population, yet it is responsible for about 25 percent of the world’s global warming pollution.  Our government must provide domestic and global leadership on this issue because we have a moral responsibility to leave future generations with a safe and habitable world.

Climate change will have enormous consequences for Nevada, the Great Basin, and all of the Southwest – average temperatures are currently rising, and it is widely predicted that climate change will decrease precipitation.  Drought will make farming and ranching tougher, increase the frequency and intensity of wildfires, and could drive many plant and animal species to extinction.  Some invasive plants, such as cheatgrass, are better suited to hotter climates, and are already replacing native vegetation.  These effects create serious challenges and could become catastrophic in the future if we fail to take action.

Climate change’s impact on our water supply could be the most devastating near-term impact on the desert southwest, which is why I have introduced legislation like the Drinking Water Adaptation, Technology, Education and Research (WATER) Act, the Water Efficiency, Conservation, and Adaptation Act, and the Water Infrastructure Resiliency and Sustainability Act.  These bills would help address the urgent need for more research and investment to improve the ability of America’s water systems to meet our nation’s escalating water supply needs, in light of reduced water supplies caused by longer droughts from hotter temperatures.

Barack Obama:

Climate Change: In December 2009, President Obama and other world leaders came together to negotiate the Copenhagen Accord, an important milestone in which, for the first time, all major developed and developing economies agreed to implement measures to limit their greenhouse gas emissions and to do so in an internationally transparent manner. In 2010, the Cancun Agreement confirmed and substantially extended the core elements of the Copenhagen Accord…. In December 2011 at Durban, the United States and the international community took important steps to make operational all of the key elements of the Cancun agreement, including a transparency regime to monitor and review mitigation efforts….

President Obama is pursuing a wide range of initiatives that reduce greenhouse gas emissions through clean energy technologies and policies. The Administration has made the largest clean energy investment in American history and these investments have allowed us to nearly double America’s renewable power generation since 2008….

For the first time, the United States is comprehensively cataloguing greenhouse gas emissions from the largest sources – an important initial step toward measurable and transparent reductions in carbon emissions, which will reduce air pollution and protect the health and welfare of the American people. In January 2012, the Administration launched an online tool that makes comprehensive greenhouse gas emission data publicly available for 29 different industrial categories and other large sources of greenhouse gas pollution.

President Obama has also directed the Federal Government – the largest energy consumer in the U.S. economy – to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from direct sources such as building energy use and fuel consumption by 28 percent by 2020.  He also directed Federal agencies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions from indirect sources, such as those from employee commuting, by 13 percent by 2020. By meeting these goals, Federal agencies can save up to $11 billion dollars in energy costs and eliminate the equivalent of cumulative 235 million barrels of oil over the next decade. In 2011, the Administration released the first-ever comprehensive Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions Inventory for the U.S. Government, allowing agencies to leverage data to gauge the effectiveness of their renewable energy investments and their energy and fuel efficiency efforts….

Federal agencies are drafting their first-ever climate change adaptation plans to help ensure smart decisions that protect our investments and safeguard the health and security of our communities, economies and infrastructure from the impacts of severe weather, rising sea levels and other changing climate conditions….

Through the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), U.S. government scientists are conducting world-class research on global climate change. The USGCRP is a collaborative effort involving 13 Federal agencies to evaluate the current and future impacts of climate change, inform policy-makers and the public about scientific findings, and investigate effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deploy cost-effective clean energy technology.

Yes, the Global Warming Climate-Change Signal Is Emerging from the Weather Noise. Why Do You Ask?

Climate Central:

Ongoing Heat Wave in U.S. Rivals Events of Dust Bowl Era: During the past 30 days, a stunning 6,439 warm temperature records were set or tied in the Lower 48 states, including 240 all-time warm temperature records. For the year-to-date, warm temperature records have been outpacing cold temperature records by a lopsided 7-to-1 margin.

In a long-term trend that demonstrates the effects of a warming climate, daily record-high temperatures have recently been outpacing daily record lows by an average of 2-to-1, and this imbalance is expected to grow as the climate continues to warm. According to a 2009 study, if the climate were not warming, this ratio would be expected to be even. Other studies have shown that global warming increases the odds of extreme heat events and may make them warmer and longer lasting.

The individual records set during the ongoing heat wave tell the story of how unusual this event has been so far…

Yes, Global Warming Is a Real Threat. Why Do You Ask?

Kevin Drum:

Clouds Are the Last Hope of the Climate Deniers: The New York Times reports today that climate skeptics have pretty much run out of plausible pseudo-science to support their claim that global warming is a myth. Sunspots are a joke. Weather station innacuracy isn't an issue. Paleoclimate reconstructions seem to be fine. Urban heat islands aren't a distorting measurements. And no, it hasn't been getting cooler since 1998.

Summer in March

Michael LePage:

Has global warming brought an early summer to the US?: North America has been experiencing unusual weather of late. After a mild winter over much of the continent, last week it experienced record-breaking summer-like conditions. In Canada, for instance, the thermometer in St John's, New Brunswick, hit 25.4 °C on 21 March, smashing the previous record high for March of 17.5 °C.

Where Does Richard Tol's Claim That Tokyo Today Is 16 Feet Lower Relative To Sea Level Than It Was in 1900 Comes From?

William D. Nordhaus: "Energy: Friend or Enemy?" http://goo.gl/MFW6O

Brad Plumer: CO2 Emissions Now Worse than in IPCC Worst Case Scenario

Brad Plumer:

Global CO2 emissions rising faster than worst-case scenarios - The Washington Post: [E]missions are now rising faster than the worst-case scenarios envisioned by the IPCC in its 2007 report. What would this mean for global warming?…. If emissions keep growing at their current pace, then the average prediction from MIT’s modeling is that the world could heat up 5.2°C by 2100. But that’s just the average. There’s a 9 percent chance that global surface temperatures could rise more than 7°C — truly uncharted territory…

It Is too Warming Blogging...

Yes, the hockey stick in climate is still there: >Chris Mooney: Score Another Victory for Scientists, Michael Mann and the Freedom of Inquiry.

Yes, Global Warming Is Very Real

Nobody has any business working for, contributing to, or voting for any candidate of this Republican Party in any general election. Nobody. Nobody at a all:

Arctic ice levels hit historic low, researchers say – This Just In - CNN.com Blogs: "The amount of Arctic sea ice has melted to a historic low, with the area of land covered by ice at the smallest level since scientists began observing it with satellites in 1972, researchers from the University of Bremen in Germany report…. Researchers, including those from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, had predicted earlier this summer that Arctic sea ice levels could reach extreme lows. But the University of Bremen physicists said there was uncertainty in July about whether the ice melt would surpass the previous record.

They said their studies indicated that continuing ice decline was related to man-made global warming. "It seems to be clear that this is a further consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences," researchers said in their report.  "Directly, the livehood of small animals, algae, fishes and mammals like polar bears and seals is more and more reduced." As Arctic sea ice has continued to decline, it also has become drastically thinner overall, the report said….

The National Snow and Ice Data Center did not have updated data to confirm the German report but said it expected the historic low to be hit based on the past few weeks' data.  Its site is only up to date to September 6. The historic levels were reached two days later. The center said it would "make a preliminary announcement when ice extent has stopped declining and has increased for several days in a row" and said it would release monthly data for September early next month…

Joe Romm on Michael Mann and the "Hockey Stick"

Me? I had always thought that the "hockey stick" was more a measure of our ignorance of the pre-1800 climate--when you don't know much, your best estimate is going to be close to your sample mean and is not going to move around very much, while when you do know what is going on your estimates will track a quite possibly changing reality.

But since Mann and company first started their reconstructions, the evidence that we have now substantially exceeded past historic climate variability on a global scale has been piling up.

And now Joe Romm reports:

Climate Secret: NSF Quietly Closes Out Inspector General Investigation with Complete Vindication of Michael Mann: NSF Inspector General:  “Finding no research misconduct or other matter raised by the various regulations and laws discussed above, this case is closed.”

Two things we know with extremely high confidence:

1. Recent warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause (so the temperature history looks like a Hockey Stick).
2. Michael Mann, the lead author on the original Hockey Stick paper, is one of the nation’s top climatologists and a source of first-rate analysis.

We know these things because both the Hockey Stick and Mann have been independently investigated and vindicated more times than any other facet of climate science or any other climate scientist….  While the anti-science extremists who rule the Tea Party and the right-wing bunkosphere keep shouting lies about the Hockey Stick and Mann — and urging their followers to “shout down” science-based commenters on independent websites — the vindications of the science and the man are reported as quietly as if they came from the Whos of Whoville. And so after countless investigations — 3 in the U.K., 2 by Penn State, the EPA, the NOAA IG — that have all unanimously found the allegations against climate scientists and their research conclusions based on the hacked “ClimateGate” emails to be wholly unsubstantiated, a top GOP presidential candidate backed by the fossil fuel industry still gives voice to the Texas-sized lie (see “Denier Rick Perry Takes $11 Million from Big Oil, Then Claims Climate Scientists ‘Manipulated Data’ For Money“).

And so while Mann and the Hockey Stick were getting yet another full vindication (from Penn State) earlier this year, Fox News was trumpeting one final investigation:

But the final say will be in the hands of a skeptical inspector general at the National Science Foundation, the primary funder of the research into global warming. According to published documents obtained by FoxNews.com, the IG must determine whether Penn State’s investigation was adequate. The Office of Inspector General confirmed that it will review the misconduct charges. A spokeswoman told FoxNews.com that “in accordance with our research misconduct regulation, (45 C.F.R. part 689), when the OIG is provided with an institution’s investigation report, we review it for fairness, accuracy and completeness” — issues the investigation has already been faulted for….

The IG analyzed all of the charges “de novo” and concluded:

Finding no research misconduct or other matter raised by the various regulations and laws discussed above, this case is closed.

I have uploaded the full report here, but you can also go the NSF IG website here and insert “A09120086.”

Let me end with some key findings of the Penn State investigation:

“An Investigatory Committee of faculty members with impeccable credentials” has unanimously “determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.”

His work “clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field…. Dr. Mann’s work, from the beginning of his career, has been recognized as outstanding.“

So Mann isn’t merely a competent researcher.  He is one of the leading climate scientists in this country, which of course is precisely why the anti-science crowd has gone after him, much as they have with other leading climate scientists, including Hansen and Santer.

And that’s one more reason why the major media outlets who smeared and defamed him owe him an apology and a retraction — loud ones!

Recent Studies Vindicating the Hockey Stick:

1. Temperatures of North Atlantic “are unprecedented over the past 2000 years and are presumably linked to the Arctic amplification of global warming” — Science (2011)
2. GRL (2010):  “We conclude that the 20th century warming of the incoming intermediate North Atlantic water has had no equivalent during the last thousand years.“
3. JGR (2010):  “The last decades of the past millennium are characterized again by warm temperatures that seem to be unprecedented in the context of the last 1600 years.”
4. Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds (2009)
5. Unprecedented warming in Lake Tanganyika and its impact on humanity (2010)"

This Is Going to Be the Fifth Year in a Row That the Northwest Passage Is Going to Open!

Henry Hudson, eat your heart out:

Jeebus Save Us!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index

False Forbes Claims That Per Capita Grain Production Is Rising Because of Warmer Temperatures: For the Virtual Green Room

Rebutted by Peter Gleick:

Forbes, which regularly publishes biased, misleading, and distorted opinion pieces on climate issues, has just published a remarkable one by Patrick Michaels. Michaels is well known for his regular misleading statements about climate. And while his statements are mostly worth ignoring, this one contains a particularly remarkable combination of errors and falsehoods.... In this case, his misstatements are easily checked (though not, apparently, by Forbes fact-checkers) by actually looking up the real data on world food production. Here are Michaels’ most grossly misleading or simply false statements:

False Statement #1. Michaels says: Gillis claims that “[t]he rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed” because of global warming. His own figures show this is wrong. The increasing trend in world crop yields from 1960 to 1980 is exactly the same as from 1980 to 2010. [Emphasis added.]

Did Michaels think no one would actually look at the data? Gillis is right and Michaels is wrong. Crop yields are certainly increasing, on average, as we do better and better with technology. But the trends are in the wrong direction. Very simply, from 1960 to the present, yield increases have been slowing (exactly as Gillis notes), even accounting for year-to-year variation....

False Statement #2. Michaels states: “And per capita grain production is rising, not falling.”

In this case, Michaels does not provide any year. Rising between when and when? In fact, per-capita grain production has been flat for decades as increases in production have been countered by increases in population. Indeed, in 2008, per-capita grain production was around 374 kilograms per person (and it dropped a bit in 2009, the last year for which global data are available). But the peak in per-capita grain production was 1984 and 1985 — more than a quarter century ago....

Finally, the heart of Michaels’ Forbes piece seems to be that climate change will be good for food production, not bad. In his op-ed, under the title “Facts,” Michaels says the following:

Facts: Global surface temperature rose about three-fourths of a degree Celsius in the 20th century. U.S. corn yields quintupled. Life expectancy doubled. People got fat. Global warming didn’t cause all of this, but increased atmospheric carbon dioxide directly stimulated plant growth. Further, greenhouse warming takes place more in the winter, which lengthens growing seasons. With adequate water, plants then fix and yield more carbohydrate. [Emphasis added.]

Here, Michaels is saying that the warming of the past century was largely responsible (even if it “didn’t cause all”) for increases in U.S. corn yields, life expectancy, and people’s well-being (which is presumably what he means when he says “People got fat.”). This isn’t “fact.” It is... in contradiction to actual science on food and agriculture....

Truthful statement, but not in the way Michaels means it: “I continue to be amazed at how little the facts are checked on global warming, even when writing for the so-called newspapers of record.”

Well, this statement is certainly true. Alas, it applies to Michaels and Forbes.

Rebuttals to talking-points misinformation that I want to have at the forefront of my brain--for when I am surprised, as I will be, by an unexpected question from an unexpected direction while talking to reporters, phone callers, passers-by, radio interviewers, cable TV interviewers, etc....

Yet Another Reason Jon Huntsman Is Likely to Be a Bad President

Joe Romm:

Jon Huntsman: Elect Me Leader of the Free World Because I Succumbed To Peer Pressure on Climate Change: For some reason, the media and the pundits have been treating Jon Huntsman as if he is the “serious GOP candidate” for president. I suppose if one is grading on a curve, then he may be the most serious.  Hmmm.  Did you know Moe is the most serious of the Stooges?  I digress.

Huntsman’s idea of demonstrating his serious leadership qualifications is to blame his previous support for climate action on peer pressure. As The Hill reported yesterday in its piece, “Huntsman on past cap-and-trade support: Everyone was doing it”: Huntsman backed cap-and-trade last decade as a way to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but distanced himself from it in an interview Wednesday, casting it as a policy solution from another era. “Every governor was talking about dealing with emissions back many, many years ago only to find that with the economic implosion, we can’t afford anything that is going to put any kind of hamper on economic growth. So cap-and-trade is not something that is viable today,” Huntsman told Fox News. “Everybody talked about it. At least a lot of people did, consulting with CEOs, consulting with all the experts. Everyone took it seriously,” he said...

Spring 2011 Climate Anomaly

The Fukushima Incident Heats Up

Charlie Stross:

Radioactive turd, meet punchbowl: If this report is true, then: a) Reactor 1 at Fukushima Daiichi melted down within sixteen hours of the quake (about eight hours after all active cooling was lost), b) TEPCO management knew about it, c) The press were systematically nobbled (an early report of the meltdown was withdrawn), d) Going by his rather extraordinary remarks during the subsequent weeks, the Prime Minister, and presumably the rest of the Japanese government, were systematically misled by TEPCO.

Meltdown

BBC:

BBC News - Setbacks at Japan nuclear plant: A reactor at Japan's crippled nuclear plant has been more badly damaged than originally thought, operator Tepco has said. Water is leaking from the pressure vessel surrounding reactor 1 - probably because of damage caused by exposed fuel rods melting, a spokesman said.... Work to restore cooling systems had been most advanced at reactor 1, the smallest and oldest at the site. But a spokesman for the power giant said when a faulty gauge had been repaired, it showed water levels in the pressure vessel 5m (16ft) below the level needed to cover fuel rods.

Reckless Governor Pawlenty...

Think Progress:

Polar Explorer Who Worked With Pawlenty ‘Baffled’ By His ‘Reckless’ Flip-Flop On Climate Threat: Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) was once a champion of policies like cap-and-trade to combat global warming pollution, but he now calls his past climate leadership “stupid” and a “disaster.” The polar explorer who worked with Pawlenty to “convince the skeptics” and find solutions to greenhouse pollution from oil and coal, Will Steger, is now “baffled” by Pawlenty’s reversal. In an interview with Mother Jones, Steger says that he believed “morally we were on the same level” when they met in 2006, and praised the governor’s acts of leadership in 2007 to build “unity in this community” around a clean energy economy. Now, however, Steger — who has conquered both the North Pole and Antarctica — feels defeated by Pawlenty’s “reckless” abandonment of our children’s future: “I’m baffled by that—did he actually say that?” says Steger, when asked about Pawlenty’s recent statements. “I’m baffled by that. But I think he’s getting information from the wrong source and it’s really too bad for our children. It’s reckless.”

“A lot of environmentalists think I want to dump on the governor because he changed around,” Steger told Mother Jones. “No, I respect the governor and I’m thankful that he did what he did do. It’s too bad that he couldn’t carry the flag, but in that party, you don’t carry that flag.”

John Quiggin: Richard Lindzen Does Not Understand Statistics

Indeed. The moment I first read global warming denier Richard Lindzen's claim that "there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995" my first reaction was: "does he really not understand how to do statistical power calculations?" And, indeed, the answer was no: he did not know enough statistics to even know that he did not know enough statistics to understand what he was trying to do. And somebody who speaks with such authority about things he demonstrably fails to understand raises red flags: how much of the rest of what he says with such authority is really not so at all? The answer is: quite a lot.

John Quiggin:

John Quiggin » Lindzen, Davidson and statistical significance: Among the many anti-science talking points, a striking one is the widely repeated claim (originating with Richard Lindzen) that there has been no significant warming since 1995. In his original statement, Lindzen was careful to refer to “statistically significant” warming.... [A]ll Lindzen’s claim means is that, given the noise in the data, you need more than the 14 annual observations from 1995 to 2008 (when he made the claim) to get statistical significance. Of course, we had the additional observations, namely those before 1995, so Lindzen’s statement was trivial. It was also safe to predict that, given a few years more data, the trend for the period since 1995 would be significant, and so it has proved.

Sinclair Davidson... introduce[s] a new wrinkle.

Davidson wants to use monthly data, with a first-order autoregressive error structure... [a model] with two estimated parameters... instead of one. That means... the statistical significance of the parameters will be slightly lower.... And, sure enough, he gets a p-value just above 0.05, so, for this model, he can still just claim that the trend is not statistically significant. But this is just another version of Lindzen’s original cheat. There’s no reason to start with 1995, except that it’s the latest date that will fail to give a statistically significant trend....

It’s safe to predict though, that the next El Nino will confirm the upward trend, even with the arbitrary starting point of 1995. At one level, I’m sure Davidson is aware of this (and absolutely sure Lindzen is aware of it). But this isn’t about objective truth. By the time the post-95 trend is confirmed as statistically significant beyond any possibility of a fiddle, they will have moved on to a new talking point.

A final observation is that this bogus controversy illustrates how unhelpful is the classical statistical apparatus of “significance” and hypothesis testing. I’d prefer a Bayesian approach which would work as follows. Start at 1990, when we had a fair bit of evidence and theory supporting global warming, but it was still possible to argue that the observed warming was a natural cycle.... [I]f the observed warming were a natural cycle it would be highly likely to stop or reverse (say 90 per cent), but there would be a small probability of it continuing by chance. Now suppose that Lindzen initially thought the natural cycle hypothesis was likely to be true with a probability of 80 per cent, while Hansen thought the same for the AGW hypothesis. What has actually been observed since 1990... is warming consistent with the AGW hypothesis. We can now update the conditional probabilities using Bayes theorem. For Hansen, the likelihood of (observed outcome + AGW true) is 0.8*0.9= 0.72, while the likelihood of (observed outcome + AGW false) is 0.2*0.1= 0.02, so his revised probability for AGW is 0.72/0.74 = 0.97.... For Lindzen, the likelihood of (observed outcome + AGW true) is 0.2*0.9= 0.18, while the likelihood of (observed outcome + AGW false) is 0.8*0.1= 0.08, so his revised probability for AGW is 0.18/0.26 = 0.69.

That is, if Lindzen was an honest seeker after truth, he would concede that the observed outcome is radically different from what he would have predicted in 1990 based on his preferred model and therefore that his model was most probably wrong. But of course Lindzen isn’t an honest seeker after truth. He’s an irresponsible contrarian who made a wrong call twenty years ago, and is willing to tell any lie necessary rather than admit the fact.

Andrew Gelman vs. Nathan Myhrvold and the Freakonomists

AG:

My last post on albedo, I promise: After seeing my recent blogs on Nathan Myhrvold, a friend told me that, in the tech world, the albedo-obsessed genius is known as a patent troll. Really? Yup. My friend writes:

It's perhaps indicative that Myhrvold comes up in the top-ten hits on Google for [patent troll]. These blog posts lay it out pretty clearly: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtmlhttp://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/12/giant_patent_troll_awakens_as.phphttp://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/intellectual-ventures-goes-to-court

Just about anyone's that's been in the tech game thinks patents are ridiculous. The lab where I used to work wanted us to create an "intellectual mine field" in our field so the companycould block anyone from entering the space. Yes, we made stuff, but the patents were for totally obvious ideas that anyone would have. Even Google's PageRank was just a simple application of standard social network analysis models of authorities in networks. Who knew? I'm used to seeing Myhrvold's "Intellectual Ventures" company described adoringly by reporters from the New Yorker etc as being a place where brilliant minds create the ideas of the future. Then on the other side is this patent stuff. I know nothing about patents and so am in no position to judge this one. So let me say clearly that I'm not describing his work as patent trolling; I'm merely noting that this perception exists....

I Googled Myrhvold.... Wikipedia... describes Intellectual Ventures as In 2000 Myhrvold co-founded Intellectual Ventures, a patent portfolio developer and broker," which sounds about right, descriptive rather than pejorative. Later down on the first page of the Google search are a Wall Street Journal article referring to Myhrvold as "the king of patent aggregating" and a TechCrunch article referring to his "patent extortion fund."... [T]his shouldn't really have anything to do with the albedo fiasco, but it provides a bit more perspective, in that Myhrvold has a lot going on. Really the problem was not so much the hasty statements about albedo, so much as the tendency of various journalists from Levitt to Lanchester to just accept them without checking with a physicist. (As a physics graduate myself, I can assure you that a degree in physics does not immunize a person from making physics mistakes.)

And:

Physics is hard - : Readers of this bizarre story (in which a dubious claim about reflectivity of food in cooking transmuted into a flat-out wrong claim about the relevance of reflectivity of solar panels) might wonder how genius Nathan Myhrvold (Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton at age 24, postdoc with Stephen Hawking for chrissake) could make such a basic mistake.... Phil is surprised I didn't take a stronger stance on the albedo issue after reading Pierrehumbert's explanation. Phil asks: Why did I write "experts seem to think the albedo effect is a red herring" instead of something stronger such as, "as Pierrehumbert shows in detail, the albedo effect is a red herring"? I didn't do this because my physics credentials are no better than Myhrvold's. And, given that Myhrvold got it wrong, I don't completely trust myself to get it right!

I majored in physics in college and could've gone to grad school in physics--I actually almost did so, switching to statistics at the last minute. I could be a Ph.D. in physics too. But I've never had a great physical intuition. I could definitely get confused by a slick physics argument. And I suspect Myhrvold is the same way. Given what he's written on albedo, I doubt his physics intuition is anywhere near as good as Phil's. My guess is that Myhrvold, like me, got good grades and was able to solve physics problems but made a wise choice in leaving physics to do something else.

Now, it's true, I don't think I would've made Myhrvold's particular mistake, because I would've checked...

And:

A possible resolution of the albedo mystery!: Remember that bizarre episode in Freakonomics 2, where Levitt and Dubner went to the Batcave-like lair of a genius billionaire who told them that "the problem with solar panels is that they're black." I'm not the only one who wondered at the time: of all the issues to bring up about solar power, why that one?

Well, I think I've found the answer in this article by John Lanchester:

In 2004, Nathan Myhrvold, who had, five years earlier, at the advanced age of forty, retired from his job as Microsoft's chief technology officer, began to contribute to the culinary discussion board egullet.org.... "Modernist Cuisine" contains hundreds of pages of original, firsthand, surprising information about traditional cooking. Some of the physics is quite basic: it had never occurred to me that the reason many foods go from uncooked to burned at such speed is that light-colored foods reflect heat better than dark: "As browning reactions begin, the darkening surface rapidly soaks up more and more of the heat rays. The increase in temperature accelerates dramatically."

Aha! Now, I'm just guessing here, but my conjecture is that after studying this albedo effect in the kitchen, Myhrvold was primed to see it everywhere. Of course, maybe it went the other way: he was thinking about solar panels first and then applied his ideas to the kitchen. But, given that the experts seem to think the albedo effect is a red herring (so to speak) regarding solar panels, I wouldn't be surprised if Myhrvold just started talking about reflectivity because it was on his mind from the cooking project. My own research ideas often leak from one project to another, so I wouldn't be surprised if this happens to others too.

With background:

RealClimate: An open letter to Steve Levitt: Dear Mr. Levitt,

The problem of global warming is so big that solving it will require creative thinking from many disciplines. Economists have much to contribute to this effort....

By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics, but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them....

I will take Nathan Myhrvold’s claim about solar cells, which you quoted prominently in your book, as an example. As quoted by you, Mr. Myhrvold claimed, in effect, that it was pointless to try to solve global warming by building solar cells, because they are black and absorb all the solar energy that hits them, but convert only some 12% to electricity while radiating the rest as heat, warming the planet. Now, maybe you were dazzled by Mr Myhrvold’s brilliance, but don’t we try to teach our students to think for themselves? Let’s go through the arithmetic step by step and see how it comes out. It’s not hard.

Nathan Myhrvold and the Freakonomists:

Freakonomics » Are Solar Panels Really Black? And What Does That Have to Do With the Climate Debate?: The Internet provides the ultimate extremist platform. Every blogger can reach millions, and given the lack of scrutiny or review over content, there is little accountability. Indeed, the more over-the-top the discourse is the better — because it is entertaining. Ancient Romans watched gladiators in much the same way that we read angry bloggers.

That seems to be the case with Joe Romm, a blogger with strong views about global warming and what he calls “climate progress.” In a recent series of blog posts, Romm levels one baseless, bald charge after another. What provoked this? The best summary I’ve seen comes from a comment by DaveyNC to the Freakonomics blog which says:

No, no, no, no — you have committed apostasy; heresy! You are not allowed to speak of warming except in the most emotional, alarmist tones!

You are not allowed to follow an objective, skeptical line of reasoning in this matter. You are not allowed to consider whether or not it is cost-efficient or even possible to cease all carbon emissions; you simply must do it.

That pretty much sums it up, as far as I can tell.... As an example, he goes on and on about a comment that I made about how solar photovoltaic cells have a problem because they are black. Romm attacks me as if I think that this means that solar cells are bad. Yet that wasn’t the point in SuperFreakonomics at all. I am quoted in the book as follows:

As an example he points to solar power. “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat — which contributes to global warming. Although a widespread conversion to solar power might seem appealing, the reality is tricky. The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal-burning and other power plants would create a huge long-term “warming debt,” as Myhrvold calls it. “Eventually, we’d have a great carbon-free energy infrastructure, but only after making emissions and global warming worse every year until we’re done building out the solar plants, which could take 30 to 50 years.”...

Since this is at least partly a technical point, I will go to the trouble of explaining it further.

The point I was making to Dubner and Levitt is the following: when you build a solar plant it costs you energy.... Solar cells pretty much have to be “black” in the energetic side of the solar spectrum because they absorb sunlight! Of course no material is a perfect absorber, so when I say “black,” what I mean is very high absorption of light — 90 percent or more. Solar cells often have a bluish tint to them because they reflect a tiny bit more blue light than other colors, but that is small enough that it doesn’t matter for our purposes here....

It’s well known in climate circles that the Earth’s albedo (how much light the surface reflects from the surface) is very important. It’s one of the reasons climate scientists are worried about Arctic sea ice melting; you go from a white surface that reflects 90 percent of the light (albedo 0.9) to ocean which is almost black and reflects 10 percent or less (for an albedo of 0.1). Climate studies published in peer-reviewed journals have shown that making roofs white would potentially be a great help against global warming. Other studies have looked at the impact of forests and logging on albedo. It is well known that albedo matters; this isn’t my private theory — it is mainstream climate science...

Joe Romm Defends Al Gore Against Richard Muller

UPDATE April 2, 2011: Rich Muller emails:

Dear Brad,

In the olden days, you would have checked with me before publishing something about me. It is interesting how the time pressure of blogging has changed the standards. You might consider writing an article about that.

Here is a guideline that I strive to maintain: I am often mistaken, but I never lie.

It would be good to discuss the facts of "An Inconvenient Truth" sometimes. In my book, "Physics for Future Presidents", I go into some details about the misleading statements former VP Al Gore makes. I'd be happy to send you a paperback copy.

Rich

---

Original Post March 29, 1011: Joe Romm:

Climate Progress: Muller launched the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study.... [A]s Muller revealed in a public talk last week, BEST’s results to date show “We are seeing substantial global warming” and “None of the effects raised by the [skeptics] is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.” Muller, clearly, isn’t a denier like Koch.  But he does share one thing in common with Koch — Gore Derangement Syndrome.... Brad Johnson has the story of just how far Muller will go to smear Gore:

Unlike Koch, Muller recognizes that fossil fuel pollution is threatening civilization, Muller argues that existing climate policy is corrupt and misguided, and that many leading climate scientists are guilty of academic fraud — just as Koch argues.... As with Koch, a particular target of Muller’s righteous scorn is Vice President Al Gore, whom he calls an “extremist” and “alarmist.” In a recent lecture at the University of California at Berkeley.... Muller claimed that Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was lambasted by esteemed climate scientist Dr. Ralph Cicerone, the head of the National Academy of Sciences:

Al Gore, when he talks about the polar bears being killed by the receding glaciers, no basis for that. In fact, let me jump ahead and tell a little story. Ralph Cicerone, head of the National Academy, said there are lots of things wrong in his movie, and Al Gore asked him to come and explain this to him, and he did come. And he said, “Well, what’s wrong with my movie?”

“Well, lots of things, like the polar bears. We track polar bears. Not a single polar bear has died because of retreating ice.”

And Al Gore turned to his movie producer and said, “So, why did we put that in?” The movie producer said, “Well, it really gets people emotionally involved.”

See, this is what politicians do. They put in things that they consider a real danger that represents what they consider to be reality. Doesn’t matter if it’s technically true or not. So, there’s so much misinformation on this field. Global warming is real. I am deeply concerned about it. I am leading a major study on global warming. But most of what made the newspaper headlines is either wrong, or backward, or simply exaggerated.

Muller’s story is not “technically true.” In fact, it’s false. The meeting between Gore and Cicerone that Muller describes is apocryphal.... Bill Skane, the Executive Director of News & Public Information for the National Academy of Sciences explained in an email that the supposed conversation never took place:

There was no meeting or conversation between Dr. Cicerone and Vice President Gore or his film producer regarding An Inconvenient Truth and thus no comment about polar bears. We’ve contacted Dr. Muller today about his speech and are hoping to hear back from him.... Dr. Muller’s remarks regarding Dr. Cicerone were in error....

Not only did the conversation not take place, Muller’s depiction of An Inconvenient Truth was false as well. Here’s the transcript of what Gore actually said about polar bears in his documentary, which was released in 2006:

Right now, the Arctic ice cap acts like a giant mirror, all the sun’s rays bounce off, more than 90%. It keeps the Earth cooler, but as it melts, and the open ocean receives that sun’s energy instead, more than 90% is absorbed, so there is a faster buildup of heat here, at the North Pole, in the Arctic Ocean, and the Arctic generally than anywhere else on the planet. That’s not good for creatures like polar bears, who depend on the ice. They’re now, actually, looking for other ecological niches. It is sad what’s going on in the Arctic ecosystem.

Unsurprisingly, Cicerone said essentially the same thing a year before Gore’s documentary came out, in testimony before the U.S. Senate:

The Arctic has warmed at a faster rate than the Northern Hemisphere over the past century. A Vision for the International Polar Year 2007-2008 (2004) reports that this warming is associated with a number of impacts including: melting of sea ice, which has important impacts on biological systems such as polar bears, ice-dependent seals and local people for whom these animals are a source of food; increased rain and snow, leading to changes in river discharge and tundra vegetation; and degradation of the permafrost...

My view is that "An Inconvenient Truth" is not perfect--for example, the "hockey stick" is much more a demonstration of our ignorance of pre-1800 climate than convincing proof of low climate variability in previous centuries relative to the twentieth century--but is on balance quite good on the issues...

Are There Any Changes in the Paperback Edition of SuperFreakonomics?

The paperback edition of Levitt and Dubner, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance is coming out on May 24, 2011...

Anybody know if they made any corrections to the "global cooling" chapter?

As I said, if I were Levitt and Dubner, I would:

pp. 165-6: Change to no longer put "global cooling" in the 1970s and "global warming" today in parallel: The scientists in the 1970s who were worried about global cooling had neither the quantative evidence, the climate models, the understanding of forcing processes, or the peer-reviewed consensus that analysis of global warming has today. Placing the two in parallel is simply wrong.

pp. 165-6: Change to remove false claim that the quotes from Newsweek were the words of "scientists."

pp. 165-6: Change to remove false claim that Newsweek was accurately citing the 1975 NAS Study--which says not that the globe is likely to cool but instead that we don't know enough about climate to forecast trends, and tht we need to do more research.

p. 167: Change to make explicit the claim that switching to an all-vegetarian diet reduces your carbon footprint by about the same order of magnitude as does switching to a hybrid car. But do not say that cars and trucks do not "contribute an ungodly share of greenhouse gases." They do--it's just that human meat-intensive agriculture contributes and ungodly share as well.

p. 168: Change to make the point that the fact that our estimates of climate effects are imprecise is not an argument for doing less or waiting to offset global warming--it is an argument for doing more and doing more now. Uncertainty is not our friend at all

p. 169: Change. Currently massively confused about Marty Weitzman's work. Marty focuses on the chance and valuation of catastrophe. He concludes that a version of the precautionary principle is appropriate: when distributions have fatter tails than log normal--which Marty thinks they do--the right policies are those that minimize the possibiliity of catastrophe. Which means starting to act now.

p. 170: Change to no longer imply that James Lovelock has some special role or authority in climate analysis or climate policy.

p. 170: Change to debunk rather than approve of British conservative Boris Johnson's claim. Johnson's statement is simply wrong. It is not the case that "the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful." We can measure greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, solar radiative forcings, and temperatures. We can tell whether acts of propitiation and atonement are working.

p. 171: Change the highly misleading: "When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay..." that 98% of carbon emissions are part of an ongoing biological cycle is not an argument supporting an "agnostic" position. And Levitt and Dubner should not hve claimed that it is.

p. 171: Change highly misleading paragraph to stress that what is relevant is not the stock but the flow: not that human activity accounts for 2% of the flow but rather that but for industrial emissions one-third (and growing) of the stock of greenhouse gases would simply not be there today.

p. 173: Change to no longer dismiss out-of-hand global agreement on climate policy. Dubner and Levitt currently write: "when it comes to actually solving climate change externalities through taxes, all we can say is good luck.... [G]reenhouse gases do not adhere to national boundaries.... Nor does one nation have the right to tell another what to do." But if the big four--U.S., EU, China, and India--of 2050 do agree, they then have the cultural, economic, and diplomatic power to coerce the rest of the world. Reaching global agreement is a very reasonable prospect.

pp. 177-181: Change to tone down the puff piece on Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures--the subsequent pages contain a lot of clues that Myhrvold and company really don't know very much about what they are talking about.

p. 182: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Wood: "Everybody turns their knobs... so they aren't the outlier, because the outlying model is going to have difficulty getting funded..." Alternatively, back this claim up with some real evidence that it is so. (The climate modelers who I talk to say that it is not.)

p. 182: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Wood: "current climate models 'do not know how to handle water vapor and various types of clouds'..." Current climate models may not handle water vapor and clouds especially well, but they do handle them.

p. 182: Change to reinforce point that uncertainty in climate models is not an argument for doing less now but rather an argument to do more.

p. 183: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Myhrvold: "most of the global warming over the past few decades... might actually be due to good environmental stewardship." It's not.

p. 183: Change to remove false claim that worldwide particulate pollution is shrinking rather than growing. It is still growing rather than shrinking, and so still cooling the earth more with each passing year--it's only in the clean North Atlantic that heavy particulates been shrinking.

p. 183: Change to rephrase: "Nor does atmospheric carbon dioxide necessarily warm the earth"--other things equal, it certainly does.

p. 184: Change to remove false claim: "Yet [Ken Caldeira's] research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight."

p. 186: Change to debunk rather than approve of false quote from Wood: "most authoritative literature on the subject suggests a [sea level] rise of about one and a half feet by 2100."

p. 186: Remove false claim: "a most surprising environmental scourge: trees." Distinguish between (a) tropical trees, (b) temperate trees, and (c) boreal trees in regions where there is a great deal of snow cover.

p. 186: Remove false claim that the earth has been cooling "over the past several years."

p. 187: Claim that "coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide" needs much, much more backing-up: I can't see how it could possibly be true.

p. 187: Change to remove false claim: "A lot of things that people say would be a good thing probably aren't.... As an example he points to solar cells..."

p. 187: Remove claim that "The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal-buring and other power plants would create a huge long-term 'warming debt'"--I cannot see how this could possibly be true. The overwhelming majority of power plants that are going to be in operation in 2050 have not been built yet, and building closed-carbon-cycle or non-carbon plants is not much more expensive than building open-carbon-cycle ones.

p. 188: Remove claim that "Myhrvold... has probably thought about such [ecological disaster] scenarios in greater scientific detail than any climate doomsayer."

Polar Bears...

Can anybody tell me why and how making fun of Al Gore on polar bears became a wingnut talking point? Seems to me that what The Inconvenient Truth says about polar bears is correct, and unexceptionable...

Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/blog/gw/An%20Inconvient%20Truth%20Transcript.pdf:

I went up to the North Pole. I went under that ice cap in a nuclear submarine that surfaced through the ice like this. This thing started patrolling in 1957. They have gone under the ice and measured with their radar looking upward to measure how thick it is because they can only surface where the thickness of the ice is 3 and half feet thick or less. So they have kept a meticulous record and they wouldn’t release because it was national security. I went up there in order to persuade them to release them, and they did. And here’s what that record showed. Starting in 1970 there was a precipitous drop off in the amount and extent and thickness of the arctic ice cap. It has diminished by 40 percent in 40 years. There are two studies showing that in the next 50 or 70 years in summertime it will be completely gone. Now you might say, “Why is that a problem? How could the arctic ice cap actually melt so quickly?” When the sun’s rays hit the ice, more than 90 percent of it bounces off right back into space like a mirror. But when it hits the open ocean more than 90 percent is absorbed.

As the surrounding water gets warmer, it speeds up the melting of the ice. Right now the arctic ice cap acts like a giant mirror. All the sun’s rays bounce off, more than 90 percent, to keep the earth cooler. But as it melts and the open ocean receives that sun’s energy instead more than 90 percent is absorbed. So there is a faster build up of heat here at the North Pole in the Arctic Ocean and the Arctic generally than any where else on the planet. That’s not good for creatures like polar bears that depend on the ice. A new scientific study shows that for the first time they’re finding polar bears that have actually drowned, swimming long distances up to 60 miles to find the ice. They did not find that before. What does it mean to us to look at vast expanse of open water at the top of our world that used to be covered by ice? We ought to care a lot because it has planetary effects.

Monnett and Gleason:

SpringerLink - Polar Biology, Volume 29, Number 8: Charles Monnett and Jeffrey S. Gleason: "Observations of mortality associated with extended open-water swimming by polar bears in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea": Abstract: During aerial surveys in September 1987–2003, a total of 315 live polar bears were observed with 12 (3.8%) animals in open water, defined for purposes of this analysis as marine waters >2 km north of the Alaska Beaufort Sea coastline or associated barrier islands. No polar bear carcasses were observed. During aerial surveys in early September, 2004, 55 polar bears (Ursus maritimus) were seen, 51 were alive and of those 10 (19.9%) were in open water. In addition, four polar bear carcasses were seen floating in open water and had, presumably, drowned. Average distance from land and pack ice edge for live polar bears swimming in open water in 2004 (n=10) were 8.3±3.0 and 177.4±5.1 km, respectively. We speculate that mortalities due to offshore swimming during late-ice (or mild ice) years may be an important and unaccounted source of natural mortality given energetic demands placed on individual bears engaged in long-distance swimming. We further suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues.

The Arctic Melt Season Begins...

How much of this icecap do you think will be left at the end of September?

Henry Farrell: Epistemic Closure: Climate Change Edition

Henry Farrell:

The Monkey Cage: Epistemic closure - climate change edition: Via via Serendipity and Ethan Zuckerman, an article suggesting that partisanship and level of education have the same kind of interaction effect on beliefs about climate change that Bartels finds for economic inequality. Drawing on surveys of New Hampshire and Michigan Upper Peninsula residents, Lawrence Hamilton finds that:

The probability of perceiving global warming as a threat increases with education among Democrats, but decreases with education among Republicans. Only two respondents out of a thousand described themselves as "strong Democrats" or "strong Republicans" with less than an 8th grade education, so the crossover at far left in Fig. 3 should not be over-interpreted. Setting aside this extreme, threat perceptions are roughly similar among Republicans and Democrats with lower education. They are most divergent among those with higher educations. ... Earlier researchers found education (along with age) to be the most consistent predictor of citizen concern about the environment, and about climate in particular. ... The inconsistency marks a social shift away from patterns seen in older research. It reflects the efficacy of media campaigns that provide scientific-sounding arguments against taking climate change seriously, which disproportionately reach educated but ideologically receptive audiences. Among many educated, conservative citizens, it appears that that such arguments have overshadowed the scientific consensus presented by the IPCC reports and other core science sources.

The relationship is, to put it mildly, stark - the predicted probability that a strong Republican with postgraduate education will think that climate change is a threat is rather less than 10%. The article argues that this is a result of selective media consumption via the Internet.

The Internet and cable television news make it easier for us not only to process information selectively ourselves, but to selectively acquire information that has been processed already, when we only tune in to ideologically compatible Web sites, cable news shows and so forth .... The bias or selectivity of our sources can be higher than the newspapers, magazines or broadcast news that formerly supplied most current- events information. Narrowcast media, including many Web sites devoted to dis- crediting climate-change concerns, provide ideal conduits for channeling politically inspired but scientific sounding arguments to an audience predisposed to retain and repeat them. The power to repeat favored arguments has been vastly expanded as well, through forwarding emails or posting links and content online, in a process that can become "viral" as it motivates new readers to do the same.

This seems a plausible surmise, but it is unlikely to be the only mechanism involved. If Gentzkow and Shapiro are right, then there is less ideological segregation in consumption of Internet information sources than one might imagine e.g. from looking at blogs alone. It is possible, for example, that highly educated strong Republicans may be exposed to both contrarian and conventional sources of information on climate change, but trust the former much more than the latter because of partisan cues.

The Arctic Melt

dr2chase:

dr2blog: This looks bad: When people say they think the IPCC Climate predictions are too conservative, they’re talking about stuff like this.

From The Copenhagen Diagnosis, via Skeptical Science.

The Energy Intensity of GDP Curve

Courtesy of David Roland-Holst.

Yet Another Hockey Stick

Joe Romm:

Temperatures of North Atlantic “are unprecedented over the past 2000 years and are presumably linked to the Arctic amplification of global warming” : Study after study finds recent warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause.  The anti-science crowd keeps trying to debunk one or two old Hockey Sticks, but new ones crop up faster than a speeding puck. Science just published a new one, “Enhanced Modern Heat Transfer to the Arctic by Warm Atlantic Water” (subs. req’d), news release here, “Warming North Atlantic water tied to heating Arctic, according to new study.” I have pulled out the key graph — and it is one heck of a Hockey Stick.... derived from “planktic foraminifers in a sediment core.... This astonishing warming in the past century is clearly not, as the anti-science crowd likes to say, some sort of recovery from the so-called Little Ice Age (see “A detailed look at the Little Ice Age“), which, in any case, is barely noticeable in this data.   The lead author, Robert Spielhagen of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said, “Such a warming of the Atlantic water in the Fram Strait is significantly different from all climate variations in the last 2,000 years.”  The fact is, over 90% of human-caused warming is going into the oceans — and it is melting ice whereever it goes (see “Deep ocean heat is rapidly melting Antarctic ice“).

Air temperatures in Greenland have risen roughly 7 degrees F in the past several decades, thought to be due primarily to an increase in Earth’s greenhouse gases, according to CU-Boulder scientists. “We must assume that the accelerated decrease of the Arctic sea ice cover and the warming of the ocean and atmosphere of the Arctic measured in recent decades are in part related to an increased heat transfer from the Atlantic,” said Spielhagen.

Here are the abstract and conclusion:

The Arctic is responding more rapidly to global warming than most other areas on our planet. Northward-flowing Atlantic Water [AW] is the major means of heat advection toward the Arctic and strongly affects the sea ice distribution. Records of its natural variability are critical for the understanding of feedback mechanisms and the future of the Arctic climate system, but continuous historical records reach back only ~150 years. Here, we present a multidecadal-scale record of ocean temperature variations during the past 2000 years, derived from marine sediments off Western Svalbard (79°N). We find that early–21st-century temperatures of Atlantic Water entering the Arctic Ocean are unprecedented over the past 2000 years and are presumably linked to the Arctic amplification of global warming….

Although we cannot quantify from our data the variability of previous AW inflow to the Arctic by volume, our temperature data series and the above observational link suggest that the modern warm AW inflow (averaged over two to three decades) is anomalous and unique in the past 2000 years and not just the latest in a series of natural multidecadal oscillations. Both effects—a temperature rise as well as a volume transport increase—introduce a larger heat input into the Arctic Ocean. Although there is no direct contact of the AAWL [Arctic Atlantic Water Layer] with the ocean surface in the Arctic, such an increased heat input has far-reaching consequences. The strong AW warming event in the Arctic Ocean in the 1990s caused a shoaling of the AW core and an enhanced heat flux to the surface , concurrent with decreasing sea ice. Recent oceanographic data from the Laptev Sea continental margin indicate the impact of warm AW-related water masses on the shallow (<50 m) shelf, a feature not observed before in a >80-year time series. The data also provide evidence for a significant heat flux to the overlying shelf waters. Even without any modification of the vertical heat transfer processes, the enhanced temperature contrast between the AW and the surface sea water freezing point (increased from ~5 to 7 K as identified here) leads to an increase in the vertical heat flux of ~40%. Any positive-feedback mechanism will magnify the effect of this flux increase on the ice cover. Complementing the strong feedback between ice and atmospheric temperatures, warming of the AW layer, unprecedented in the past 2000 years, is most likely another key element in the transition toward a future ice-free Arctic Ocean.

Energy and Environmental Policy: What We All Know

For the Atlantic Energy Efficiency Conference, Boalt Hall, February 11, 2011

http://delong.typepad.com/20110211-delong-environment.pdf

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Open publication - Free publishing

Atlantic Energy Efficiency Workshop...

Carol Ness reports on an earlier talk by David Roland-Holst:

Climate change: David Roland-Holst uses bubbles, big and small, on a chart to demonstrate a fundamental truth.... [E]nergy use against per capita income; the bubbles represent countries by population. Floating high on both axes are the medium-to-small bubbles of the United States and the rest of the industrialized world, rich countries that use a lot of energy. Hanging near the bottom are two giant bubbles, China and India, where both energy use and income are low — and rising. ARE economist David Roland-Holst's chart — which one of his graduate students calls his 'demonic bubble bath' — shows the tight relationship between energy use and prosperity, a key climate change issue. Based on World Bank and International Energy Agency data, the vertical axis plots per capita energy use in terajoules/year; the horizontal is per capita income as measured by the GDP. Bubble sizes represent population.

The relationship between income and energy use is no coincidence, and recognizing that simple fact is an essential part of getting past the current stalemate and finding answers to climate change.... Roland-Holst’s slides illuminated — from an economist’s point of view — China’s stand against limits on greenhouse-gas emission.... “[E]nergy is prosperity,” and economic growth is China’s top priority, asserted Roland-Holst. To maintain full employment, he said, China needs to generate 30 to 40 million new jobs every year. China’s power use will triple in the coming decades, mainly from coal-fired plants. And as China grows wealthier, car ownership will rise exponentially, from just 18 per 1,000 people today (in the U.S. the number is 800). The environment is a less immediate concern, he said. “We have to recognize it, we have to understand it, we need more experience in trying to devise cooperative solutions among very discordant interest groups, multinationally,” Roland-Holst said. “Until we do that, there will be deaf ears in the negotiations”...

And consider that India right now has twice and China four times the energy intensity of GDP of the United States...

Gavin Schmidt: Water Vapor: Feedback or Forcing?

Gavin Schmidt:

RealClimate: Water vapour: feedback or forcing?: While water vapour is indeed the most important greenhouse gas, the issue that makes it a feedback (rather than a forcing) is the relatively short residence time for water in the atmosphere (around 10 days).... I did a GCM experiment where I removed all the water in the atmosphere.... At Day 0 there is zero water, but after only 14 days, the water is back to 90% of its normal value, and after 50 days it’s back to within 1%. That’s less than 3 months. Compared to the residence time for perturbations to CO2 (decades to centuries) or CH4 (a decade), this is a really short time.

Only the stratosphere is dry enough and with a long enough residence time (a few years) for the small anthropogenic inputs [to water vapor] to be important. In this case (and in this case only) those additions can be considered a forcing....

When surface temperatures change (whether from CO2 or solar forcing or volcanos etc.), you can therefore expect water vapour to adjust quickly to reflect that. To first approximation, the water vapour adjusts to maintain constant relative humidity.... [T]he total amount of water vapour will increase adding to the greenhouse trapping of long-wave radiation. This is the famed ‘water vapour feedback’....

How do we know that the magnitude of this feedback is correctly simulated? A good test case is the response to the Pinatubo eruption. This caused cooling for up to 3 years after the eruption – plenty of time for water vapour to equilibriate to the cooler sea surface temperatures. Thus if models can simulate the observed decrease of water vapour at this time, it would be a good sign that they are basically correct. A good paper that demonstrated this was Soden et al (2002) (and the accompanying comment by Tony DelGenio). They found that using the observed volcanic aerosols as forcing the model produced very similar cooling to that observed. Moreover, the water vapour in the total column and in the upper troposphere decreased in line with satellite observations, and helped to increase the cooling by about 60% – in line with projections for increasing greenhouse gases.

To be sure there are still some lingering uncertainties.... However, given the Pinatubo results, the models are probably getting the broader picture reasonably correct.

Hudson Bay Still Not Frozen Solid...

NSIDC:

Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis: Arctic sea ice extent averaged over January 2011 was 13.55 million square kilometers (5.23 million square miles). This was the lowest January ice extent recorded since satellite records began in 1979. It was 50,000 square kilometers (19,300 square miles) below the record low of 13.60 million square kilometers (5.25 million square miles), set in 2006, and 1.27 million square kilometers (490,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average.

Ice extent in January 2011 remained unusually low in Hudson Bay, Hudson Strait (between southern Baffin Island and Labrador), and Davis Strait (between Baffin Island and Greenland). Normally, these areas freeze over by late November, but this year Hudson Bay did not completely freeze over until mid-January. The Labrador Sea remains largely ice-free.

Joe Romm: ABC on the role Global Warming Plays in Extreme Weather

JR:

Another terrific ABC News story — on the role global warming is playing in extreme winter weather « Climate Progress: Earlier this month, ABC ran one of the best climate change stories ever to appear on a major network’s evening news show:  “Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming.” On Friday they aired another very good piece — and now we know the secret of their accurate reporting.  As they explain:

ABC news contacted 10 climate scientists to ask their take, if the extreme winter like the one we’re having is the way of the future.  The consensus:  global warming is playing a role by shifting weather patterns in unpredictable ways.  Many say the forecast for the future calls for record-breaking precipitation and extreme temperatures year-round — and that means winter with more snow....

The dividing line between good climate reporting and bad climate reporting is almost always whether the reporter talked to real climate scientists.  Typically, the more a reporter talks to, the better the story. It is very hard to get the story wrong if you talk to several of the leading climate scientists in any specific subfield...

Holy Fracking Climate Frack!!

Now that's a positive temperature anomaly!

Bob Henson:

Cold comfort: Canada's record-smashing mildness: Some fascinating weather has unfolded across the Northern Hemisphere over the last month... heavy snow that battered the mid-Atlantic and New England states in late December... the United Kingdom’s coldest December in at least the last century. Meanwhile, the sparsely populated Canadian Arctic basked in near-unprecedented mildness.

It’s the second chapter of a tale that began a year ago, when Canada as a whole saw the warmest and driest winter in its history.  Much of the blame went to El Niño, which typically produces warmer-than-average weather across Canada.  So far, so good—but similar things are happening this winter, even with a La Niña now at the helm.

Just how mild has it been?  The map at right shows departures from average surface temperatures for the period from 17 December 2010 to 15 January 2011, as calculated by NOAA’s Earth Systems Research Laboratory.  The blue blip along the southeast U.S. coast indicates readings between 3°C and 6°C (5.4–10.8°F) below average for the 30-day period as a whole. That’s noteworthy—and in fact, it was the coldest December in more than a century of record-keeping across south Florida.... Blue also shows up across the UK, where December averaged 5.2°C (9.4°F) below normal.

What really jumps out, though, is a blob of green, yellow, orange, and red covering a major swath of northern and eastern Canada. The largest anomalies here exceed 21°C (37.8°F) above average, which are very large values to be sustained for an entire month.

To put this picture into even sharper focus, let’s take a look at Coral Harbour, located at the northwest corner of Hudson Bay in the province of Nunavut. On a typical mid-January day, the town drops to a low of –34°C (–29.2°F) and reaches a high of just -26°C (–14.8°F). Compare that to what Coral Harbour actually experienced in the first twelve days of January 2011.... After New Year’s Day, the town went 11 days without getting down to its average daily high. On the 6th of the month, the low temperature was –3.7°C (25.3°F). That’s a remarkable 30°C (54°F) above average. On both the 5th and 6th, Coral Harbor inched above the freezing mark. Before this year, temperatures above 0°C (32°F) had never been recorded in the entire three months of January, February, and March....

In mid-December, a vast bubble of high pressure formed in the vicinity of Greenland. At the center of this high, the 500-mb surface rose to more than 5.8 kilometers, a sign of remarkably mild air below. Stu Ostro (The Weather Channel) found that this was the most extreme 500-mb anomaly anywhere on the planet in weather analyses dating back to 1948.... Farther west, a separate monster high developed over Alaska last week....

Why so freakishly mild?  One factor that both feeds and is fed by the warmth is the highly unusual amount of open water across seas that are normally frozen by late November. On the winter solstice (December 21), Hudson Bay was little more than half frozen... the Baffin/Newfoundland Sea fell weeks behind schedule in freezing up. As evident in the charts at bottom, these bodies of water remain in catch-up mode....

The extraordinary Arctic warmth and the midlatitude chill and snow bear the fingerprints of a negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the pattern that prevailed for much of last winter as well. As opposed to a positive NAO, where the jet stream whisks mild air across the Atlantic, a negative NAO—which has predominated since October—features a blocked-up jet stream that allows cold air to plunge more easily southward and mild air to take hold in the Arctic. It seems plausible that the open water between Greenland and Canada has played a role in the record warmth observed at the surface and aloft and the associated negative NAO. However, the NAO’s causes remain mysterious, and its future is impossible to predict...