The Heat is On at Climate Central

The folks at Climate Central are developing a real knack for catchy graphic presentations of interesting data.

First there was the fascinating Surging Seas, which interactively lets you see the danger from sea level rise and storm surge along the US coast. Now they have released, The Heat is On, an interactive map based on the average daily temperatures for the continental 48 states from 1912 to the present, and also from 1970 to the present. Along with the wealth of data on individual states, the site documents two broad trends:

1. Warming rates accelerated everywhere after 1970
2. The rate of warming varies dramatically from one state to another.

Rio + 20 in Nature

In the run up to the Rio+20 conference, the June 6 issue of Nature put together a fascinating set of articles assessing the current state of knowledge on the two issues that dominated the original Rio agenda: biodiversity and climate change.



1) In "Biodiversity and its Impact on Humanity" Cardinale et.al. review current understanding about the role of biodiversity in relation to ecosystem functioning and the provision of ecosystem services. Key findings re: ecosystem functioning:

• There is now unequivocal evidence that biodiversity loss reduces the efficiency by which ecological communities capture biologically essential resources, produce biomass, decompose and recycle biologically essential nutrients.
• There is mounting evidence that biodiversity increases the stability of ecosystem functions through time.
• The impact of biodiversity on any single ecosystem process is nonlinear and saturating, such that change accelerates as biodiversity loss increases.
• Diverse communities are more productive because they contain key species that have a large influence on productivity, and differences in functional traits among organisms increase total resource capture.
• Loss of diversity across trophic levels has the potential to influence ecosystem functions even more strongly than diversity loss within trophic levels.
• Functional traits of organisms have large impacts on the magnitude of ecosystem functions, which give rise to a wide range of plausible impacts of extinction on ecosystem function.
• The impacts of diversity loss on ecological processes might be sufficiently large to rival the impacts of many other global drivers of environmental change.
• Diversity effects grow stronger with time, and may increase at larger spatial scales.
• Maintaining multiple ecosystem processes at multiple places and times requires higher levels of biodiversity than does a single process at a single place and time.
• The ecological consequences of biodiversity loss can be predicted from evolutionary history.

The findings re: ecosystem services were more tentative:

• There is now sufficient evidence that biodiversity per se either directly influences (experimental evidence) or is strongly correlated with (observational evidence) certain provisioning and regulating services.... For provisioning services, data show that (1) intraspecific genetic diversity increases the yield of commercial crops; (2) tree species diversity enhances production of wood in plantations;
  (3) plant species diversity in grasslands enhances the production of fodder; and (4) increasing diversity of fish is associated with greater stability of fisheries yields. For regulating processes and services, (1) increasing plant biodiversity increases resistance to invasion by exotic plants; (2) plant pathogens, such as fungal and viral infections, are less prevalent in more diverse plant communities; (3) plant species diversity increases above ground carbon sequestration through enhanced biomass
  production (but see statement 2 concerning long-term carbon storage); and (4) nutrient mineralization and soil organic matter increase with plant richness.
• For many of the ecosystem services reviewed, the evidence for effects of biodiversity is mixed, and the contribution of biodiversity per se to the service is less well defined.
• For many services, there are insufficient data to evaluate the relationship between biodiversity and the service.
• For a small number of ecosystem services, current evidence for the impact of biodiversity runs counter to expectations.

2) In "A global synthesis reveals biodiversity loss as a major driver of ecosystem change" Hooper, et. al. summarize evidence showing that extinctions are altering key processes important to the productivity and sustainability of Earth’s ecosystems

3) In "Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere" Barnosky et. al. review the basics of state shift theory, review the evidence relating to past planetary-scale critical transitions and state shifts, and examine research related to a number of contemporary global-scale forcing mechanisms: human population growth with attendant resource consumption, habitat transformation and fragmentation, energy production and consumption, and climate change.

4) The political/policy pieces -- documenting how poorly nations have done in realizing their 1992 promises and describing developments that hold out the potential for a more optimistic future -- are worth checking out as well, but they are significantly less interesting than the articles summarizing current scientific knowledge.

Climate Change Narratives in the US News

Frederick Mayer has published Stories of Climate Change: Competing Narratives, the Media, and U.S. Public Opinion 2001-2010. Rather than simply categorizing news accounts as pro, con, and neutral, the objective was to analyze the narrative content of the news reports in order to see what stories they told: What were their plots? Who were the villains, victims, and (potential) heroes? What was their meaning?

He found that TV news coverage from 2001 to 2010 typically exemplified one of six basic narrative lines and that there were striking on-air differences between cable coverage on Fox and CNN and broadcast news on ABC and other traditional networks. Here are the six different narratives that were tracked:

• The Climate Tragedy: A story of impending disaster, in which we (or big energy) are the villains, scientists and environmental advocates the potential heroes.
• He Said, She Said: A conflict story about the contest between scientists: some say that humans are altering the climate, some say we aren’t, inaction is the prudent path.
• Don’t Kill the Goose: A story in which climate change may be happening (most likely from natural causes) but the real threat is regulation.
• Hoax: A tragic story in which climate science is part of a conspiracy (along with liberal elites and the UN) to empower government, and the heroes are those who expose them.
• The Denialist Conspiracy: A story about those who tell the Hoax story, in which they are part of a right-wing conspiracy (funded by energy interests and wealthy ideologues).
• The Policy Game: A story about the contest over policy, similar to “horse-race” stories in elections, in which the reader/viewer is encouraged to take a rooting interest.

Stories of climate change told by Fox and CNN began to differ dramatically from those told by traditional television network news during the decade from 2001 to 2010. By 2009, the crucial year both for congressional action on climate change and for the global negotiations in Copenhagen, the divergence was almost complete.

On Fox the dominant climate change story had become some variation of a “Hoax” narrative: climate change is a fraud foisted on the public by scientists, the UN, and liberal elites and the media. If Fox were one’s only source of information, it would have been nearly impossible to even imagine that climate change was real, let alone an issue society should do anything about.

On CNN, a potpourri of narrative lines did battle: “Hoax” stories, “He Said/She Said,” and “Don’t Kill the Goose,” on one side; “Climate Tragedy” on the other; and “Policy Game” reporting on the fortunes of climate risk-management initiatives.  If CNN were one’s only source of news, it would have been hard not to be confused.

And on the traditional ABC, CBS, and NBC networks, a curious thing happened. Although each had provided extensive coverage of climate change in 2006 and 2007 — a huge majority of them with some variation of a “Climate Tragedy” story — they all but stopped covering climate change in 2009. If one of these networks were one’s only source of news, it would have been perfectly reasonable to imagine that somehow climate change was no longer an issue.

Because the patterns of coverage at NBC and CBS were nearly identical to those of ABC, the research focused on only the one traditional network. The results were striking. On ABC, “Climate Tragedy” dominated, with most stories about the impending disaster and about what we should do about it. As Figure 1 shows, the network gave considerable play to these stories in 2006, the year Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released, and even more in 2007, the year the United Nations/World Meteorological Organization’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its strongly worded report on climate change and shared the Nobel Prize with Gore.

But in 2009, the year of “cap and trade” in the U.S. Congress and of the December Copenhagen climate summit, ABC was AWOL, airing only a fraction of the stories it had broadcast two years before. (CBS and NBC had strikingly similar patterns of coverage.) The pattern of stories on Fox, shown in Figure 2, provides a stark contrast. In the early years of the decade, Fox had barely attended to climate change. In 2007, though, its coverage increased substantially, perhaps triggered by the IPCC report and the accolades showered on Gore. But its mix of stories was predominantly of the “Hoax” narrative, a story in which climate scientists (in cahoots with the UN, liberal elites, and Gore) were cast as the villains. And in 2009, unlike ABC (and also unlike CBS and NBC), Fox continued to shout “Hoax!” culminating in a frenzy around “Climategate,” the story about hacked e-mails among climate researchers that climate “skeptics” by and large interpreted as showing those scientists “cooking the books.”

CNN, the other major national source of television news, might be characterized as going for maximum conflict. As can be seen in Figure 3, in 2006-2007, CNN told both the “Climate Tragedy” story and the “Hoax” narrative (the conservative firebrand Glenn Beck was then on CNN). Again in 2009, when it offered extensive coverage before and during the Copenhagen summit, CNN’s favorite formula involved pitting the two narratives against each other. Leading up to the December summit, for example, it ran with four consecutive nights of “Climate Change: Trick or Truth?”

What difference might the differing mix of stories have made? It seems quite likely that they contributed to the remarkable shift in public opinion (toward decreasing concern over climate change) in the latter part of the decade, particularly among those on the right of the political spectrum who were more likely to be Fox viewers.

After peaking in 2007, the year IPCC issued its most recent assessment and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Gore, Americans’ belief in climate change headed downward. By the crucial year of 2009, with the Congress debating nationwide “cap and trade” carbon dioxide emission legislation, the percentage agreeing that “there is solid evidence that the Earth is warming” had dropped from 77 percent to only 57 percent, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Even more problematic in terms of the politics and what has become a full-fledged split between Democrats and Republicans, only 35 percent of Republicans agreed with the “solid evidence” premise, down from 62 percent. And only 18 percent of Republicans said they believed warming was substantially caused by human emissions.

Why the dramatic drop? The “Great Recession” that began in 2008 almost certainly played its part. In economic hard times, combating climate change, as with addressing most other environmental problems, becomes a lower priority, and not acting is just plain easier to justify if one rejects that there is a problem in the first place.

But the economic downturn cannot account for the growing partisan divide, a divide that had become particularly glaring in the context of the past several months’ presidential primary campaigns. Part of the shift in public opinion, and particularly the collapse of belief among Republicans, was likely driven also by the impact of an increasingly partisan media and the different stories they told.

(The above is a slightly rearranged and slightly modified version of Mayer's summary of the study.)

Canada's Auditor General on GHG policy

As the figure shows, Canada's reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions have become less ambitious over time.

The Auditor General of Canada's spring report has a scathing chapter documenting both the shifting goal posts of Canada's GHG policies and its consistent failure to come anywhere near any of them. Here is the conclusion:

2.36 Since 1992, the Government of Canada has committed, in various plans and agreements, to address climate change by reducing its national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, national GHG emissions have risen and were 690 million tonnes in 2009, which is 24 percent above the Kyoto target.
2.37 In 2010, the Government of Canada made new international and domestic commitments to reduce GHG emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. Environment Canada has announced a sector-by-sector regulatory approach in alignment with the United States. However, we concluded that the Department has not put in place an appropriate implementation plan to support this approach, which is designed to meet the 2020 target established by these commitments. As of February 2012, only one of the sectors, the transportation sector, was under regulation for GHG emissions. No regulations were in place for the oil and gas sector, the second-largest emitter of GHG. Because regulations are complex, and can take up to five years to develop and result in GHG reductions, it is unlikely that the regulatory approach will contribute emission reductions that are sufficient to meet the 2020 target.
2.38 In July 2011, Environment Canada released Canada’s Emissions Trends, a report that outlines expected GHG emission reductions up to 2020, under varying scenarios. This document is an important step toward a transparent accounting of Canada’s efforts to reduce GHG emissions. However, the forecast shows that in 2020, Canada’s GHG emissions will be 7.4 percent above the 2005 level instead of 17 percent below, which indicates that the 2020 target will not be met with existing measures.

Two takes on extreme weather

Extreme Weather, Climate and Preparedness in the American Mind is the most detailed look to date at the link between extreme weather and public attitudes toward climate change. Among the key findings:

• Overall, 82 percent of Americans report that they personally experienced one or more types of extreme weather or natural disaster in the past year.
• Over the past several years, Americans say the weather in the U.S. has been getting worse – rather
  than better – by a margin of over 2 to 1 (52% vs. 22%).
• About half of all Americans say that heat waves (53%), droughts (46%) and very heavy rain storms
  (43%) have become more common in their local area over the past few decades.
• As shown in the figure below, 69% of Americans agree that global warming is affecting weather in the US and a large majority believe that global warming made several high profile extreme weather events worse. 

 

So, not surprisingly, a number of climate change advocates like Bill McKibbon (with the Connect the Dots event on May 5 aimed at cementing the connection between climate change and extreme weather) and Climate Central's Extreme Planet blog are attempting to use the climate change / extreme weather connection as a hook to mobilize action on climate change.

There is some intuitive sense to this. As you put more thermal energy into the system, the planet will find ways to distribute that energy and extreme weather events are a plausible vehicle for accomplishing that.

But, the scientific distinction between weather and climate is notorious complex. And the weather folks are pushing back. See, for example, Extreme Silliness on the blog of University of Washington  meteorologist Cliff Mass or the recent March Maddness-weather wise op-ed piece by atmospheric scientist John Wallace. Looking at the data, for example the graph below of global hurricane events over a 40 year period from an article by Roger Pielke Jr. and others, it is hard to discern a trend.

Surging Seas

Climate Central has a new project, Surging Seas, an interactive map that shows the threat from sea level rise and storm surge to all 3,000+ coastal towns, cities, counties and states in the Lower 48 of the US. I don't know of a similar map for Canada. If you do, please leave a comment with the relevant info.

Here's a write up about the research behind the map from the Washington Post:

Nearly 4 million people across the United States, from Los Angeles to much of the East Coast, live in homes more prone to flooding from rising seas fueled by global warming, according to a new method of looking at flood risk published in two scientific papers.

The cities that have the most people living within three feet (one meter) of high tide — the projected sea level rise by the year 2100 made by many scientists and computer models — are in Florida, Louisiana, and New York. New York City, often not thought of as a city prone to flooding, has 141,000 people at risk, which is second only to New Orleans’ 284,000. The two big Southeast Florida counties, Miami-Dade and Broward, have 312,000 people at risk combined.

All told, 3.7 million people live in homes within three feet of high tide. More than 500 US cities have at least 10 percent of the population at increased risk, the studies said.

“Southeast Florida is definitely the highest density of population that’s really on low coastal land that’s really most at risk,” said lead author Ben Strauss, a scientist at Climate Central. Climate Central is a New Jersey-based group of scientists and journalists who do research about climate change.

The studies look at people who live in homes within three feet of high tide, whereas old studies looked just at elevation above sea level, according to work published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research and an accompanying report by Climate Central. That’s an important distinction because using high tide is more accurate for flooding impacts, said study co-author Jonathan Overpeck, a scientist at the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment. And when the new way of looking at risk is factored in, the outlook looks worse, Overpeck said.

“It’s shocking to see how large the impacts could be, particularly in southern Florida and Louisiana, but much of the coastal U.S. will share in the serious pain,” Overpeck said.

And it’s not just residents of coastal areas who will be hurt by this, said Sharlene Leurig, a senior manager for the insurance program at Ceres, a Boston-based investment network. Most coastal areas get flood insurance from the federal program and with more flooding, the program will have to spend more and that will come out of all taxpayers’ wallets, she said.

Sea level has already risen about 8 inches since 1880 because warmer waters expand, Strauss said. In addition to the basic physics of ever-warming water expanding, scientist say hotter climate will cause some melting of glaciers in Greenland and western Antarctica that would then cause seas to rise even more.
Flooding from Hurricane Irene last year illustrated how vulnerable coastal places such as Manhattan are with a combination of storms and sea level rise, Strauss said.

Using data from the latest census, Climate Central also has developed an interactive system that allows people to check their risk by entering a ZIP code.

Sea level rise experts at the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration who weren’t part of the studies said the results make sense and were done by experts in the field.
“All low elevation places in the many urban areas along the coast will become more vulnerable,” said S. Jeffress Williams, scientist emeritus for the USGS, who wasn’t part of the studies. He pointed to Boston, New York City, Norfolk, Va., New Orleans, Charleston, S.C., Miami and Washington and its Virginia suburbs. “More people and infrastructure will be at increasing risk of flooding.”

Current rate of ocean acidification may be unprecidented

The current issue of Science includes The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification, the first summary of the geologic record for evidence of ocean acidification over the past 300 million years. The article suggests the world's oceans may be turning acidic faster today from human carbon emissions than they did during four major extinctions in the last 300 million years, when natural pulses of carbon sent global temperatures soaring. The complex set of processes examined in the article are summarized in the diagram below.

The press release has a nice summary:

The oceans act like a sponge to draw down excess carbon dioxide from the air; the gas reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid, which over time is neutralized by fossil carbonate shells on the seafloor. But if CO2 goes into the oceans too quickly, it can deplete the carbonate ions that corals, mollusks and some plankton need for reef and shell-building.

That is what is happening now. In a review of hundreds of paleoceanographic studies, a team of researchers from five countries found evidence for only one period in the last 300 million years when the oceans changed even remotely as fast as today: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, some 56 million years ago. In the early 1990s, scientists extracting sediments from the seafloor off Antarctica found a layer of mud from this period wedged between thick deposits of white plankton fossils. In a span of about 5,000 years, they estimated, a mysterious surge of carbon doubled atmospheric concentrations, pushed average global temperatures up by about 6 degrees C, and dramatically changed the ecological landscape.

The result: carbonate plankton shells littering the seafloor dissolved, leaving the brown layer of mud. As many as half of all species of benthic foraminifers, a group of single-celled organisms that live at the ocean bottom, went extinct, suggesting that organisms higher in the food chain may have also disappeared, said study co-author Ellen Thomas, a paleoceanographer at Yale University who was on that pivotal Antarctic cruise. "It's really unusual that you lose more than 5 to 10 percent of species over less than 20,000 years," she said. "It's usually on the order of a few percent over a million years." During this time, scientists estimate, ocean pH—a measure of acidity--may have fallen as much as 0.45 units. (As pH falls, acidity rises.)

In the last hundred years, atmospheric CO2 has risen about 30 percent, to 393 parts per million, and ocean pH has fallen by 0.1 unit, to 8.1--an acidification rate at least 10 times faster than 56 million years ago, says Hönisch. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that pH may fall another 0.3 units by the end of the century, to 7.8, raising the possibility that we may soon see ocean changes similar to those observed during the PETM.

Heartland gets Desmoged

Desmogblog has an interesting post documenting the climate denial activities of the Heartland Institute, complete with links to a number of original documents at Heartland Institute Exposed: Internal Documents Unmask Heart of Climate Denial Machine. Additional analysis, including a description of plans to convince grade schoolers that climate science is a "major scientific controversy" is available at Thinkprogress.

Feb 19 Update: The Guardian has an interesting follow-up on the consequences of the revealed Hartland documents, including information about a letter from climate scientists to the Institute asking them to "recognise how its attacks on science and scientists have poisoned the debate about climate change policy," and the revelation that the Institute's tax-exempt status is being challenged. There are also claims that one of the released documents is fake. The Toxic Debate Over Climate Science has an interesting take on these developments.

Should we fear the crackpots?

A recent NYTimes article Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot documents a new twist in a long standing fear among a small segment of the US population; a fear that the UN is plotting to establish a totalitarian world government (see New World Order conspiracy theory). The twist is the comparatively recent fixation on the link with sustainable development as encapsulated in the Agenda 21 document produced at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. According to the article:

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.
...
In Maine, the Tea Party-backed Republican governor canceled a project to ease congestion along the Route 1 corridor after protesters complained it was part of the United Nations plot. Similar opposition helped doom a high-speed train line in Florida. And more than a dozen cities, towns and counties, under new pressure, have cut off financing for a program that offers expertise on how to measure and cut carbon emissions.
...
Fox News has also helped spread the message. In June, after President Obama signed an executive order creating a White House Rural Council to "enhance federal engagement with rural communities," Fox programs linked the order to Agenda 21. A Fox commentator, Eric Bolling, said the council sounded "eerily similar to a U.N. plan called Agenda 21, where a centralized planning agency would be responsible for oversight into all areas of our lives. A one world order."
...
At a Board of Supervisors meeting in Roanoke in late January, Cher McCoy, a Tea Party member from nearby Lexington, Va., generated sustained applause when she warned: "They get you hooked, and then Agenda 21 takes over. Your rights are stripped one by one."

Echoing other protesters, Ms. McCoy identified smart meters, devices being installed by utility companies to collect information on energy use, as part of the conspiracy. "The real job of smart meters is to spy on you and control you -- when you can and cannot use electrical appliances," she said.

According to Google Insights, searches linking Agenda 21 to the NWO conspiracy emerged in 2009, grew to a peak on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and, following a decline, have seen a significant resurgence during the first few months of 2012.

Here, from 2009, is one of the earliest YouTube posts about the plot claiming, among other things, that sustainable development initiatives under Agenda 21 aim to do away with national sovereignty, abolish private property, restructure the family and undermine the constitution. There is a clear implication that things labeled unsustainable -- such as consumerism, reliance on fossil fuels, pesticides, etc. -- will be regulated out of existence by the global government and that people will be "stacked and packed" into small, densely settled urban areas in order to maximize areas of unspoiled nature.



Grassroots interest in the link between local regulations and Agenda 21 received a substantial boost in February of 2011 when the New American printed an article, Your Hometown and the United Nations' Agenda 21, drawing attention to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.

Reaction to the information in the NYTimes article has largely been dismissive, treating the individuals involved as crackpots. Here's an example:

It's true, the blueprints were kept secret until now, but smart monitoring of energy use is designed to turn you into a godless slave of the great beast that is the UN. Using a combination of electromagnetic waves and psychotropic medications released from the devices, it's victims will be turned into mindless, left-wing voting slaves of the beast.
I think the tea party has started electing paranoid schizophrenics to their leadership. You couldn't make this stuff up. This stuff is so great I have to resurrect (drumroll) the Tin Foil Hat!

But dismissing these individuals as isolated crackpots fails to account for a number of interesting facts. First, the idea is obviously spreading. Second, why connect the NWO trope to Agenda 21 now? The document has been around for nearly 20 years without attracting much attention from the conspiracy community. Third, the Google Insight data suggest this is a distinctly American phenomenon -- fully 100% of the searches originated in the US.

More significantly, there is an obvious connection to the larger dynamics of American politics. These ideas are predominantly held by members of the Tea Party movement, a group that emerged in 2009. The connection with local environmental issues is an extension of their denial of climate change and specifically the notion that cap and trade schemes, ironically introduced as the free market solution to climate change, are a global government plot.

A detailed statistical profile of Tea Party views (and how they compare with other groups) on climate change can be found in Politics and Global Warming: Democrats, Republicans, Independents and the Tea Party. Among the more interesting findings:

• Values: While Democrats have stronger egalitarian values than all other groups, Tea Party members
  hold relatively anti-egalitarian views. Tea Party members have stronger individualistic values than all other groups, with strong anti-government attitudes. In other words, Tea Party members are hierarchical-individualists in the parlance of the cultural theory of risk.
• Beliefs about Climate Change: Tea Party members are substantially more likely to deny climate change or attribute it to natural processes (71%) than Republicans (54%), Independents (40%) or Democrats (27%).
• Intensity of their Beliefs: Tea Party members are three times as likely to say that they are “very well informed” about global warming than members of the other groups (Democrats, Republicans, Independents). Likewise, Tea Party members are 2 to 2.5 times as likely to say they “do not need any more information” about global warming to make up their mind and half as likely as other group members to agree that they could change their mind based on additional information.

This set of facts is particularly interesting in light Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas:

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. ... “When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.” 

For the full study, see Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities (warning, dense math).

Obviously, the RPI study needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It is a mathematical model and one can easily think of counter-examples. The abortion debate, for instance, consists of two opposing groups each with more than 10% of the population that posses unshakable beliefs. There is no indication that either is going to run the other out of existence. But, at the same time, the facts of the situation warrant consideration. Tea Party members make up about 12% of the population and, compared to the members of other political groups, hold their beliefs about climate change with an exceptional fervor. These are precisely the characteristics the RPI study identifies as necessary conditions for the rapid spread of the belief.

The Politics of Data

Going Down the Up Escalator is an interesting post discussing the politics of separating signal from noise in climate change data. As the post notes:

There are also a number of effects which can have a large impact on short-term temperatures, such as oceanic cycles like the El Niño Southern Oscillation or the 11-year solar cycle.  Sometimes these dampen global warming, and sometimes they amplify it.  However, they're called "oscillations" and "cycles" for a reason - they alternate between positive and negative states and don't have long-term effects on the Earth's temperature.

Thus, by selectively picking the range of data, it is possible to argue that the temperature is cooling rather than warming (as shown in the graphs below).

 

Climate Change vs Energy

As public discussion of climate change has become increasingly polarized, the Obama administration's rhetoric has shifted from a discussion of 'climate' to a focus on 'energy.'

This trend is documented in a recent study, Running from Climate Change: The Obama Administration’s Changing Rhetoric.

The always interesting Max Boycoff weighs in on these observations with A dangerous shift in Obama’s ‘climate change’ rhetoric.

But what do we lose when global warming and climate change get repackaged as clean energy? We wind up missing a thorough understanding of the breadth of the problem and the range of possible solutions.

To start, talking only about clean energy omits critical biological and physical factors that contribute to the warming climate. “Clean energy” doesn’t call to mind the ways we use the land and how the environment is changing. Where in the term is the notion of the climate pollution that results from clear-cutting Amazon rain forests? What about methane release in the Arctic, where global warming is exposing new areas of soil in the permafrost?

“Clean energy” also neatly bypasses any idea that we might need to curb our consumption. If the energy is clean, after all, why worry about how much we’re using — or how unequal the access to energy sources might be?
And terms such as “carbon pollution” ignore that climate change isn’t just a carbon issue. Some greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide, do not contain carbon, and not all carbon-containing emissions, such as carbon monoxide, trap heat.

When the president moves away from talking about climate change and talks more generally about energy, as he did in the State of the Union, calling for “an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy,” the impact is more than just political.

Calling climate change by another name creates limits of its own. The way we talk about the problem affects how we deal with it. And though some new wording may deflect political heat, it can’t alter the fact that, “climate change” or not, the climate is changing.

True enough, but this appears to be another example of Obama's 'don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good' philosophy. Convinced, realistically, that the current chances of getting the Congress to act on climate change are essentially zero, he's opted for a frame that could, potentially, lead to legislation. The operative question is to whether "clean energy policy" remains that, or becomes simply "energy policy." If it becomes the latter, with its unrelenting emphasis on ways to maintain the current fossil fuel fixation, then any incremental advantage to the climate issue will have been lost. And, as described in the recent Wired article Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust, keeping the clean in energy policy will not be easy.

Climate Change and Extinctions

Biologists have long argued that the current rate of species loss rivals the five great mass extinctions of the geological past. As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year, or three species per hour. Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis — this “Sixth Extinction” — is even more severe, and more imminent, than Wilson had supposed. Significantly, where past extinction events were the result of physical processes, the current uptick is largely a product of human actions: transformation of the landscape and resultant habitat destruction, overexploitation of species, pollution, and the introduction of alien species. An article in the current issue of Nature argues that climate change may significantly increase the rate of species extinction through processes that have not previously been considered. Here's how Nature describes the article

More species may become extinct as a result of climate change than previously thought, a modelling study suggests. As the climate warms, many species are predicted to shift their ranges to stay within comfortable temperature zones. However, some species will be better able to do so than others. Mark Urban at the University of Connecticut in Storrs and his colleagues have created a model that takes into account the competition that species face for habitats when they move to new ecosystems. They modelled the effect of 4 °C of warming over 100 years on 40 simulated species, and found a much higher number of extinctions than did models that do not account for species competition and species' differing dispersal abilities. Even species with broad heat tolerances might be outcompeted — either by the arrival of newcomers in their current habitats or by native species in ecosystems that become habitable to them in future.

More technical details are provided in the abstract below:

Most climate change predictions omit species interactions and interspecific variation in dispersal. Here, we develop a model of multiple competing species along a warming climatic gradient that includes temperature-dependent competition, differences in niche breadth and interspecific differences in dispersal ability. Competition and dispersal differences decreased diversity and produced so-called ‘no-analogue’ communities, defined as a novel combination of species that does not currently co-occur. Climate change altered community richness the most when species had narrow niches, when mean community-wide dispersal rates were low and when species differed in dispersal abilities. With high interspecific dispersal variance, the best dispersers tracked climate change, out-competed slower dispersers and caused their extinction. Overall, competition slowed the advance of colonists into newly suitable habitats, creating lags in climate tracking. We predict that climate change will most threaten communities of species that have narrow niches (e.g. tropics), vary in dispersal (most communities) and compete strongly. Current forecasts probably underestimate climate change impacts on biodiversity by neglecting competition and dispersal differences.

A Study of Migration and Climate Change

from the Energy Bulletin:

Climate Change, Migration and Conflict: Addressing Complex Crisis Scenarios in the 21st Century

by Michael Wertz and Laura Conley

Migration

Migration adds another layer of complexity to the scenario. In the 21st century the world could see substantial numbers of climate migrants—people displaced by either the slow or sudden onset of the effects of climate change. The United Nations’ recent Human Development Report stated that, worldwide, there are already an estimated 700 million internal migrants—those leaving their homes within their own countries—a number that includes people whose migration is related to climate change and environmental factors. Overall migration across national borders is already at approximately 214 million people worldwide, with estimates of up to 20 million displaced in 2008 alone because of a rising sea level, desertification, and flooding.

One expert, Oli Brown of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, predicts a tenfold increase in the current number of internally displaced persons and international refugees by 2050. It is important to acknowledge that there is no consensus on this estimate. In fact there is major disagreement among experts about how to identify climate as a causal factor in internal and international migration.

But even though the root causes of human mobility are not always easy to decipher, the policy challenges posed by that movement are real. A 2009 report by the International Organization for Migration produced in cooperation with the United Nations University and the Climate Change, Environment and Migration Alliance cites numbers that range from “200 million to 1 billion migrants from climate change alone, by 2050,” arguing that “environmental drivers of migration are often coupled with economic, social ad developmental factors that can accelerate and to a certain extent mask the impact of climate change.”

The report also notes that “migration can result from different environmental factors, among them gradual environmental degradation (including desertification, soil and coastal erosion) and natural disasters (such as earthquakes, floods or tropical storms).” (See box on page 15 of the report for a more detailed definition of climate migrants.) Clearly, then, climate change is expected to aggravate many existing migratory pressures around the world. Indeed associated extreme weather events resulting in drought, floods, and disease are projected to increase the number of sudden humanitarian crises and disasters in areas least able to cope, such as those already mired in poverty or prone to conflict.

Muller Confirms Climate Change

Berkeley Physicist Richard Muller and his BEST team (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study) have finished their analysis of global temperature studies and have come to a startling conclusion: the Earth is warming substantially, it is largely man-made warming, and the temperature factors cited by the climate skeptics, including Anthony Watts, have at best only a marginal effect on global warming. And this is coming from a KOCH BROS. FUNDED STUDY on climate change, which was undertaken for the purpose of REFUTING the climate change thesis. Furthermore, Muller and his team found that some of the temperature data reported thus far has UNDER-reported the amount of warming that has already taken place.

from Climate Progress:

"Climate Progress actually broke this story back in March — see Exclusive: Berkeley temperature study results “confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.” That was based on an email Climatologist Ken Caldeira sent me after seeing their preliminary results and a public talk by Muller confirming:

• “We are seeing substantial global warming”
• “None of the effects raised by the [skeptics] is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.”

But now the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study have completed their “independent” analysis of all of the temperature stations and found a rate of warming since the 1950s as high NOAA and NASA and faster than the (much maligned) UK Hadley/CRU data:

I had posted on this story back in March myself on this EcoSoc blog. My money was on Muller, who I believed was a scientist with integrity who wanted to rigorously test the climate change thesis. The kicker was that he took money from the Koch Brothers to finance the project. My hunch was that he would end up proving that the climate change deniers were wrong, that the climate really was warming, and that this would be the ultimate kick in the skeptics' crotch: using Koch Bros. money to refute their own campaign of lies and disinformation. Bravo, Dr. Muller.

See his initial video report here:

Ironically, Muller even discusses the reality of peak oil, as a liquid fuel shortage, but which he believes can be replaced by compressed natural gas.

Rifkin on Energy, Communications and Complex Societies

I still don't think that a distributed hydrogen grid could supply the same density of energy that fossil fuels does. I'm not convinced that distributed energy will run the kind of "global" economy that we have now (which, he is right, is in its death throes). If Rifkin followed Rifkin's own thinking, the third industrial revolution is distributed production, in which each locality produces what it needs and trades with other nearby localities. Instead of globalized agribusiness, we have small farms everywhere that produce food for a local market. I can't say with any certainty how a "distributed manufacturing system" would operate.

The biggest hole in Rifkin's thesis is that he's only talking about electricity production: he's not talking about transport energy. Electrified transportation is only good for short distances (compared with gasoline, diesel and jet fuel). Reliance on electricity for transport would be a limiting factor that would tend to localize production, and would discourage trading over long distances. And that's another reason why Rifkin's distributed energy grid won't fuel a globalized economy. But for him to leave the discussion of mobility and transport out of the discussion altogether seriously weakens his thesis. As Robert Hirsch said again recently, the peak oil crisis is a liquid fuel crisis that primarily impacts transportation.

Review: The Inquisition of Climate Science

A post following up on the previous one, using James Powell's recently released The Inquisition of Climate Science to illustrate why science communication can't be left entirely to scientists. 

A brief meditation on science, democracy and complexity

A recent article in the Ventura County Reporter, Our Ocean: As Healthy as it Looks?, does a nice job of contrasting public perception (the ocean looks great from Highway 101, the fishing is good, altogether it seems pretty healthy) with a series of scientific reports predicting environmental catastrophe due to ocean acidification, rising global carbon emissions, overfishing, pollution and a variety of other factors.

What accounts for the differing views of scientists and the public? And why is the situation likely to get much worse? Read on after the jump ...

Paleoclimate evidence on rapidity of climate change

How rapidly will climate change occur? Traditionally, the changes were expected to be linear -- that as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere went up, the temperature would rise proportionately. Over the past few decades, this view has increasingly been replaced with the recognition of tipping points and the possibility of comparatively rapid change. James Hansen and Makiko Sato have recently produced a pair of papers -- one technical and the other focused on a more general audience -- describing their recent findings suggesting that the bulk of change from certain feedback processes will occur in a period of decades rather than centuries. Here is the introduction from the non-technical version: Earth's Climate History: Implications for Tomorrow

The past is the key to the future. Contrary to popular belief, climate models are not the principal basis for assessing human-made climate effects. Our most precise knowledge comes from Earth's paleoclimate, its ancient climate, and how it responded to past changes of climate forcings, including atmospheric composition. Our second essential source of information is provided by global observations today, especially satellite observations, which reveal how the climate system is responding to rapid human-made changes of atmospheric composition, especially atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). Models help us interpret past and present climate changes, and, in so far as they succeed in simulating past changes, they provide a tool to help evaluate the impacts of alternative policies that affect climate.

Paleoclimate data yield our best assessment of climate sensitivity, which is the eventual global temperature change in response to a specified climate forcing. A climate forcing is an imposed change of Earth's energy balance, as may be caused, for example, by a change of the sun's brightness or a human-made change of atmospheric CO2. For convenience scientists often consider a standard forcing, doubled atmospheric CO2, because that is a level of forcing that humans will impose this century if fossil fuel use continues unabated.

We show from paleoclimate data that the eventual global warming due to doubled CO2 will be about 3°C (5.4°F) when only so-called fast feedbacks have responded to the forcing. Fast feedbacks are changes of quantities such as atmospheric water vapor and clouds, which change as climate changes, thus amplifying or diminishing climate change. Fast feedbacks come into play as global temperature changes, so their full effect is delayed several centuries by the thermal inertia of the ocean, which slows full climate response. However, about half of the fast-feedback climate response is expected to occur within a few decades. Climate response time is one of the important 'details' that climate models help to elucidate.

For those who want the technical details, here is the abstract of the scientific publication.

Paleoclimate data help us assess climate sensitivity and potential human-made climate effects. We conclude that Earth in the warmest interglacial periods of the past million years was less than 1{\deg}C warmer than in the Holocene. Polar warmth in these interglacials and in the Pliocene does not imply that a substantial cushion remains between today's climate and dangerous warming, but rather that Earth is poised to experience strong amplifying polar feedbacks in response to moderate global warming. Thus goals to limit human-made warming to 2{\deg}C are not sufficient - they are prescriptions for disaster. Ice sheet disintegration is nonlinear, spurred by amplifying feedbacks. We suggest that ice sheet mass loss, if warming continues unabated, will be characterized better by a doubling time for mass loss rate than by a linear trend. Satellite gravity data, though too brief to be conclusive, are consistent with a doubling time of 10 years or less, implying the possibility of multi-meter sea level rise this century. Observed accelerating ice sheet mass loss supports our conclusion that Earth's temperature now exceeds the mean Holocene value. Rapid reduction of fossil fuel emissions is required for humanity to succeed in preserving a planet resembling the one on which civilization developed.

Jefferson vs Webster: America's First Global Warming Debate

Interesting article in the Smithsonian describing an early debate over human impact on the climate. Jefferson, measured the temperature on his farm twice daily for 50 years.

In his 1787 book, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson launched into a discussion of the climate of both his home state and America as a whole. Near the end of a brief chapter addressing wind currents, rain and temperature, he presented a series of tentative conclusions: “A change in our climate…is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep….The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now.” Concerned about the destructive effects of this warming trend, Jefferson noted how “an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold” in the spring has been “very fatal to fruits.”

Jefferson was affirming the long-standing conventional wisdom of the day. For more than two millennia, people had lamented that deforestation had resulted in rising temperatures.

Daniel Webster, best known for his dictionary, disputed the argument -- both in its traditional anecdotal/historical form and in the more empirical/scientific version that Jefferson and others made subsequent to the invention of the thermometer.

Webster concluded by rejecting the crude warming theory of Jefferson and Williams in favor of a more subtle rendering of the data. The conversion of forests to fields, he acknowledged, has led to some microclimatic changes—namely, more windiness and more variation in winter conditions. But while snow doesn’t stay on the ground as long, that doesn’t necessarily mean the country as a whole gets less snowfall each winter: “We have, in the cultivated districts, deep snow today, and none tomorrow; but the same quantity of snow falling in the woods, lies there till spring….This will explain all the appearances of the seasons without resorting to the unphilosophical hypothesis of a general increase in heat.”

Webster's arguments basically ended the debate and the idea that human activity significantly affected the climate was forgotten until the middle of the 20th century.

Global Heating or What's in a Name?

As the global warming / climate change debate has become stuck in an intractable rut, people have started looking for different words that more accurately convey what is going on. Tom Friedman, for example, has proposed 'global wierding'  in order to focus attention on the proliferation of unusual and extreme climate events. Over at Tumblr, Andrew Revkin has suggested the term global heating and provided a wonderful graphic to back up the choice.

The diagram/term have two big benefits. First, it dramatically emphasizes the importance of the ocean as repositories of heat energy relative to the land and atmosphere. Second, it focuses attention on changes to the system  -- accumulation of heat energy -- rather than attempting to describe the consequences of that change.