Economics ignored by economics professor?

by robstephaustralia

SuperFreakonomics Ignores the Business Case for Sustainability
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s SuperFreakonomics has certainly gotten a lot of people worked up. The point of contention is a chapter about global warming which makes the case that Al Gore and others are getting us way too worked up about the climate problem because the only way to solve it is to convince people to “put aside their self interest and do the right thing even if it’s personally costly.”

The authors go on to explain their solution — geoengineering — which purportedly isn’t going to require us to cut back on our energy use or rethink the way we do business. But what they have completely failed to address — and what the (ahem) lively discussions on the topic have missed as well — is what the benefits of tackling climate change might be, instead of just the costs.

The authors have missed a major economic issue: the process of shifting our economy to a low-carbon one has enormous upsides completely aside from the benefits to climate balance.

I’m not going to try and take apart their arguments or judge the soundness of their climate science as a whole; there are some others who are already doing a detailed job of that. If you like your climate discussions hot and sarcastic (which can be entertaining), see Joe Romm’s posts on his Climate Progress blog. Or if you like the cool, dispassionate analysis, I’d recommend the Union of Concerned Scientists or the well-respected journalist Eric Pooley’s take on how the authors — who he says are friends of his — “flunk” the science.

There’s also been a fascinating back and forth which includes the authors and Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman. In short, Krugman is not pleased and he lays out some devastating concerns about the mental exercise the authors have undertaken (“We’re not talking about the ethics of sumo wrestling here; we’re talking, quite possibly, about the fate of civilization. It’s not a place to play snarky, contrarian games”).

The brouhaha is truly unfortunate on many levels. It’s not that having a discussion of geo-engineering is a bad thing — we should explore and assess many options. But the real problem is that the authors of SuperFreakonomics — and even the big critics who have gotten sucked into it — seem to have taken too narrow a view of the problem. While the authors clearly believe that there is too much climate-change hype, there is some agreement that there’s a warming problem (or why propose a solution — the main point of the chapter — at all?). But the focus of the discussion is entirely on a way to counteract the effects of greenhouse gases, as if there are no other issues related to our reliance on fossil fuels.

Instead, let’s just think about the business benefits of changing our products and processes to reduce carbon emissions, regardless of the atmospheric benefits. How will changing to a lower-carbon economy help companies? Well, there’s real money involved here — energy and other resources are getting fundamentally more expensive over time as demand around the world rises and supply gets harder to find. Oddly, the SuperFreakonomics authors acknowledge this Econ 101 supply problem in passing with the statement: “In just a few centuries, we will have burned up most of the fossil fuel that took 300 million years…to make.” So why wouldn’t we want to move away from a declining resource?

[More]

Steven Levitt is one of the authors of Superfreakonomics and an economic professor at the University of Chicago. Yet according to this article, he seems to have taken off his economic hat in the chapter on climate change. Or at least he decided to wear his hat somewhat askew.

Moving away from fossil fuels has very strong economic implications, particularly since these fuels are a dwindling resource which will become more expensive over time.

The countries and companies that decouple themselves from fossil fuels will slash their costs and increase profits mightily. In fact, as Robert Kennedy, Jr. pointed out in a speech recently, the countries that have already reduced their reliance on fossil fuels — such as Iceland, with its geothermal energy, and Sweden, with a carbon tax driving down energy use as the country grew — have made their economies richer and more stable. (Yes, Iceland then bet its wealth on bad investments at the heart of the financial crisis in 2008 and bankrupted itself, but that’s another story.)

As many have repeatedly argued, we also place ourselves at great risk globally by continuing to pour money into oil markets. We send hundreds of billions of dollars a year to parts of the world that don’t like us very much. And we place ourselves at personal risk — the National Academy of Sciences just estimated, conservatively, that fossil fuels cost $120 billion per year in health costs and cause 20,000 premature deaths (that’s more than six 9/11s if you’re counting).

In their admiration of geoengineering, which only covers up the effects of burning fossil fuels, the authors appear to ignore the benefits that moving away from fossil fuel use engenders.

So, not only did they mess up in several ways when it came to the solutions to climate change, they also missed the economic implications of continuing to burn fossil fuels. I guess being contrarian was more important than fundamental economics. It helps sell more books, I guess.

More on Gore’s book

Al Gore’s Climate Choice

[Via Dot Earth]

Al Gore’s new book finds the core of the climate challenge, and solutions, in the human brain.

[More]

I bought the book and have started reading it. Revkin provides a nice viewpoint but the comments are full of people who are spouting the same drivel that has been shown to be either wrong or misleading.

But it does appear that there are a lot more who agree with Gore’s perspective. Perhaps some day soon we will make some real progress.

[Listening to: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds from the album "Greatests Hits Vol. II" by Elton John]

Senate rules are awesome!

by Hey Paul

Can a GOP walkout really stop the climate bill?

[Via Congress Matters]

No.

I’m posting from the road, on my phone, so this won’t be as comprehensive and link-rich as it should be, but here goes.

It’s been pointed out that there’s a rule in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that requires the presence of two minority side Senators for a markup to go forward. But like most such rules, it’s probably not “self-executing,” meaning that in order for it to have an effect, someone needs to show up to point out that there aren’t the requisite number of minority Senators in attendance. A majority side Senator could certainly do that, but why? The job of protecting minority rights belongs chiefly to the minority. Let them do it. And when they do, you politely point out that if you’re present enough to object, then you’re present enough to count towards a quorum.

Now, this particular rule requires two minority Senators, not just one. That sounds like a rule designed by someone who had been burned by the one-Senator rule before. So technically, one Republican can show up, point out that there aren’t two, and try to invoke the rule. And if that happens, what can the chair do about it?

Well, one way around it is the way the Judiciary Committee traditionally deals with a similar rule. They ignore it.

Another would be to bypass the formal use of the committee entirely, and use Rule XIV to move the bill to the floor when they’re ready. That is, Chairwoman Boxer could convene a meeting of anyone who’s on the committee and who wants to participate in the process, and in effect simply ask them, “If this were a committee markup, what amendments would you offer, and how would you vote on them?” Then she could alter her draft bill accordingly, and either try to move it to the floor under Rule XIV, pass the resulting document on to the next committee of jurisdiction for its consideration, or set it aside for whatever future merger process the leadership may have planned for it.

[More]

I wrote about this the other day.The Republican members of the committee were going to vanish, making it impossible to continue because 2 minority members were required for markup to continue.

But it requires someone to be present to ‘notice’ that the minority members are absent. If no one ‘notices’ then things are fine. What an perfectly diabolic way to get around a rule.

And then if someone from the GOP does show up to ‘notice’ well, the majority just says that this is not a real committee meeting. “We just happened to get together to talk about the bill. Want to join us?”

Parliamentary procedure at its best!

It will be interesting to see the response

by simone.brunozzi
The must-read solutions book — “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis” by Al Gore.:
[Via Climate Progress]

The long-awaited sequel to An Inconvenient Truth comes out Tuesday. If you want a preview, Gore and the book are featured in an excellent Newsweek cover story, The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.

In September, Nature Reports Climate Change asked me (and several others) to suggest three books to read ahead of the Copenhagen conference. Of those, they then asked me to review Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis:

When your last work led to an Oscar and Nobel Prize, anticipation is high on the sequel. And former US Vice President Al Gore’s new book delivers. Our Choice, due out in November, is a wonderfully readable treatise on climate solutions.Whereas An Inconvenient Truth framed the crisis that climate negotiations are tackling, this followup spells out what needs to be done.

Based on 30 of Gore’s ‘Solutions Summits’ as well as one-on-one discussions with leading experts across multiple disciplines, the book aims, in Gore’s words, “to gather in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now”. Gore naturally focuses on energy, the source of most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and discusses many underappreciated strategies such as concentrated solar thermal power and cogeneration. He also devotes a full chapter to soil, a major carbon sink that is gradually degrading. Farming strategies for restoring soil carbon are described, including biochar, a porous charcoal that can potentially enhance the soil sink while providing a source of low-carbon power. And like its PowerPoint-based predecessor, Our Choice is replete with lush photos and simple but powerful charts. This [is] a must-read book for those who want a primer on all the key solutions countries will be considering at Copenhagen.

[More]

Here is a guy who held summits with people from many walks of life in order to gather information for this book, who has altered his opinions as new data emerges, and I bet many people will just ignore him. While two guys who have no background in this issues and really talked to very few people (apparently mischaracterizing those they did talk with) will make the best seller lists.

We shall see but I am just completely amazed at the vitriol that gets thrown at Gore without any real basis. What has Gore every really DONE that makes him such a target? No sex scandals. No financial scandals. A Vietnam vet.

People can disagree with his politics but I just have no idea where the vitriolic disdain comes from. He is used as a scare word, like ACORN or Kennedy. It apparently does not matter that he is right more often than not and that many of the initiatives he sponsored have had huge positive impacts on us all.

I expect his ideas will be more useful and achievable, with lower overall costs , than those of Superfrteakonmics. They will most likely actually be based in reality.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Government, Politics, Science, Sustainability

I love my representative

Rep. Jay Inslee slams SuperFreakonomics: “People are still trying to write books to deceive the American public” on climate science.:
[Via Climate Progress]

This is a repost from Wonk Room.

Yesterday, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) rebuked the authors of SuperFreakonomics for participating in a “continuing effort to deceive the American public” on the science of climate change. During an investigative hearing on forged letters sent by the coal industry to oppose climate action, Inslee condemned the industry’s effort to “hoodwink, defraud, and deceive the American public now to cover up the toxicity to the world environment” of global warming pollution. Inslee then turned to Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, criticizing them for “absolute deception” in their work on global warming:

The second thing I want to note is this is not the only continuing effort to deceive the American public. I want to note a book called Freakonomics, or SuperFreakonomics, that some authors wrote, that basically said or asserted we don’t have to control CO2, we’ll just pump sulfur dioxide up into the atmosphere and that will solve the problem. They purported to quote a scientist named Ken Caldeira from Stanford who’s one of the predominant researchers in ocean acidification to suggest that Dr. Caldeira didn’t think we should control CO2. Which is an absolute deception. Dr. Caldeira I’ve spoken to personally. He’s told me we have to solve ocean acidification. You can’t solve ocean acidification without controlling CO2 and yet people are still trying to write books to deceive the American public. And we ought to blow the whistle on them, we’re blowing the whistle on one today, we’ll continue to do it, because ultimately science is going to triumph in this discussion.

[More]

Deception and mischaracterization of the science are typical tools used by those hoping to obfuscate the debate. It is nice to see Inslee, who represents my district, get a chance to have a few words.

But I guess it all sells books. Capitalism at its best. People love lies and rumors.

Well, at least some people.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Government, Science

More from the party of no

GOP Takes Clean Energy Bill Obstructionism To Yet Another Level:
[Via Crooks and Liars]

From NOW on PBS–Power Struggle. More available here.

This is what I hate having to explain to my relatives and friends abroad in Europe about politics in the US. We know that global warming is a fact. We know that our actions, if they didn’t cause global warming, definitely exacerbate it. We know that we must reduce our dependency on oil, for both ecological and political/strategic reasons. And yet, what we are able to do is hampered so predictably by the Republican party:

Here we go again. James Inhofe, the most prominent climate change denier in the United States Senate, has concocted a new and innovative strategy to thwart the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. To wit, he and his Republican colleagues on the Environment and Public Works Committee have worked up a plan to simply not show up for next week’s markup:

But Boxer cannot hold the markup unless at least two Republicans show up, and EPW ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) signaled that he has unanimous support among the panel’s minority members to boycott the session until they get more data on the legislation from U.S. EPA and the Congressional Budget Office.

Inhofe said he will wait for Boxer to file an official notice of the markup — expected today — before responding with his own declaration of the GOP’s markup strategy.

“As soon as we find out what her announcement is and what she wants to do, we’ll have our response,” Inhofe told E&E last night. “We’ll have our unanimous expression ready.”

[More]

You have to admire their discipline. Ideology is always so much more important than actually doing anything. So minority of a minority can prevent government action. It might almost be admirable if Inhofe was not such a black helicopter denialist. But then, why should he really care about the rest of us? He has his.

I wonder who will play Inhofe in the stirring docudrama about this Profile In Courage?

Technorati Tags: Environment, Politics

A devastating response

by SophieG*
An open letter to Steve Levitt:
[Via RealClimate]

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, particularly with regard to the question of how various means of putting a price on carbon emissions may alter human behavior. Some of the lines of thinking in your first book, Freakonomics, could well have had a bearing on this issue, if brought to bear on the carbon emissions problem. I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.

I am addressing this to you rather than your journalist-coauthor because one has become all too accustomed to tendentious screeds from media personalities (think Glenn Beck) with a reckless disregard for the truth. However, if it has come to pass that we can’t expect the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor (and Clark Medalist to boot) at a top-rated department of a respected university to think clearly and honestly with numbers, we are indeed in a sad way.

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. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing. 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.

[More]

This article, which uses simple math, destroys one of the points from the book. Since many of the other points in the book are also based on just as much ‘just-so science’ , the post serves as a good example of what to look for.

If he was so wrong with his point of view on something that was so easily examined, how far off is he on all the other things he discusses? Why should we believe anything he says about geoengineering if he is misleading on other approaches?

One of the things a contrarian should do is not use misleading ideas. Getting people to look at problems from a different perspective can be very helpful. But forcing a new perspective by using distortions does not accomplish anything helpful at all.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

Making mistakes

by Johnny Jet
Plimer the plagiarist

[Via Deltoid]

Eli Rabett has been investigating Ian Plimer’s claim that climate scientists were coking the books on the CO2 record. Plimer wrote:

The raw data from Mauna Loa is ‘edited’ by an operator who deletes what is considered poor data. Some 82% of the raw data is “edited” leaving just 18% of the raw data measurements for statistical analysis [2902,2903]. With such savage editing of raw data, whatever trend one wants can be shown. [p 416 of Heaven and Earth]

The raw data is an average of 4 samples from hour to hour. In 2004 there were a possible 8784 measurements. Due to instrumental error 1102 samples had no data, 1085 were not used due to up slope winds, 655 had large variability within 1 hour but were used in the official figures and 866 had large hour by hour variability and were not used.[2102] [p 418]

This drew a correction from NOAA’s Pieter Tans:

To illustrate how misleading Plimer is I made a plot of 3 years of all hourly data, with 2004 in the middle because Plimer discussed 2004. … In the plot, “selected” data means that we have used it in constructing the published monthly mean because those hours satisfy the conditions for “background” measurements. The red stripes are extremely close to the published monthly means. … Also plotted in purple-blue are all non-background data. If one constructs monthly means from ALL data, incl. non-background, one obtains the purple-blue stripes. The differences are only slight, with the seasonal cycle becoming a bit larger due to upslope winds, esp. during the summer.

Tans concludes that Plimer is a con man, but the story doesn’t end there. Plimer’s reference 2102 is ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/. I analyzed the 2004 Mauna Loa data from there and found there were some minor errors in Plimer’s numbers: In fact, due to instrumental error 1103 samples had no data, 1097 were not used due to up slope winds, 655 had large variability within 1 hour and were not used and 881 had large hour by hour variability and were not used.

[More]

One of the easiest way to tell plagiarism is when mistakes are carried forward by the plagiarist. In fact, some people actually put errors into such things as the Index or other sorts of databases. Then is the error is copied, they know that their database was copied also.
In this case, the error appears to come from a paper that directly refutes the exact point Plimer is trying to make. Awkward.
When people try to accuse researchers of manipulating data, data that others have been able to examine for years, they had better make sure they know what they are doing. There is no grand conspiracy of scientists because if these data had been manipulated to get certain results, other researchers would have gone “Great. Now I can get a paper demonstrating that they did it wrong.” We live for publications and being able to demonstrate where someone else went wrong is a great way to make a career.
The fact that this data has been vetted by others and found to hold up makes Plimer reasoning even more off kilter.

[Listening to: She Said She Said from the album "The Beatles]

If you kick an anthill, don’t whine about getting bit

Rules for Contrarians: 1. Don’t whine. That is all:
[Via Crooked Timber]

I like to think that I know a little bit about contrarianism. So I’m disturbed to see that people who are making roughly infinity more money than me out of the practice aren’t sticking to the unwritten rules of the game.

Viz Nathan Mhyrvold:

Once people with a strong political or ideological bent latch onto an issue, it becomes hard to have a reasonable discussion; once you’re in a political mode, the focus in the discussion changes. Everything becomes an attempt to protect territory. Evidence and logic becomes secondary, used when advantageous and discarded when expedient. What should be a rational debate becomes a personal and venal brawl.

Okay, point one. The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people. Now opinions may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do – I think it’s fantastic – but if annoying people is what you’re trying to do, then you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do. If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you’re in a fight. It’s the definition of passive-aggression and really quite unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your standards of a calm and rational debate. If Superfreakonomics wanted a calm and rational debate, this chapter would have been called something like: “Geoengineering: Issues in Relative Cost Estimation of SO2 Shielding”, and the book would have sold about five copies.

[More]

Being truly contrary is a lot of work, something these guys seem to have missed. If you actually misrepresent what people say and believe, you should not be to surprised if they come back hard.

And if you try to go up against something with a lot of factual data behind it, you had better get your facts straight. Their apparent approach to being contrary – where they take a conventional wisdom and reflexively say it is not true, gee whiz, darn it – reminded me of this other exercise in taking a contrary position:

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

More bad acid, man

by Sea_daddy
Climate Change – what’s worse than the heat?:
[Via Observations of a Nerd]

**A post about Climate Change as a part of Blog Action Day 2009**

When people talk about climate change, they, more often than not, talk about global warming. Yes, the effects of increased temperature will be diverse and generally bad for most creatures on Earth, including us. But the most dramatic effect of climate change won’t be due to the heat – it will be due to ocean acidification. I might seem biased (being a marine biologist and all), but trust me, the addition of carbon dioxide to the ocean and its subsequent effects will be far worse in the long run than a change in temperature. Not so sure? Let me explain.

[More]

This is a great discussion of the science behind carbon dioxide and water. We could perhaps survive the heat but the acid could be far deadlier.

I’ve written about ocean acidification before (here, here, here, and here). This is more than just disappearing coral reefs. It is about the disruption of the ocean’s food chain from the bottom. The inability of plankton and other organisms to properly form a calcium shell has huge ramifications.

This Nature paper, from 2005, states:

In our projections, Southern Ocean surface waters will begin to become undersaturated with respect to aragonite, a metastable form of calcium carbonate, by the year 2050. By 2100, this undersaturation could extend throughout the entire Southern Ocean and into the subarctic Pacific Ocean. When live pteropods were exposed to our predicted level of undersaturation during a two-day shipboard experiment, their aragonite shells showed notable dissolution. Our findings indicate that conditions detrimental to high-latitude ecosystems could develop within decades, not centuries as suggested previously.

This is well within the lifetimes of many people alive. The ability of these organisms to properly grow and thrive will have impacts all the way up the food chain. How far is almost too scary to contemplate.

Because these organisms are a big part of the biological side of the carbon cycle. They also generate a lot of oxygen in our atmosphere. The loss of them would effect many of the normal cycles of the planet that we depend on.

We might survive but who really knows? Why take the chance?

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

Hurricanes make a lot of seismic noise

by au_tiger01

Seismic noise unearths lost hurricanes:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

Seismologists have found a new way to piece together the history of hurricanes in the North Atlantic—by looking back through records of the planet’s seismic noise. It’s an entirely new way to tap into the rich trove of seismic records, and the strategy might help establish a link between global warming and the frequency or intensity of hurricanes.

[More]

This could be really useful. Essentially, the researchers, using digital files, were able to identify the seismic markers of hurricane activity. The could detect these markers even from seismographs 1000 miles away from the hurricane.

This means that we can now examine seismic data, which extends many years earlier than we have been able to so far, in order to get a better understanding if hurricane activity. Just one big problem:

At least one major hurdle remains before scientists will be able to pull together a complete hurricane history out of the seismic records. For most of the 20th century, seismograms recorded data on rolls of paper. Those records, which contain hundreds of thousands of hours of data, will need to be digitized. Ebeling is looking for an efficient way to do that.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

It’s the acid, man

[Crossposted at A Path to Sustainable]

by RemusShepherd

Why Everything in Superfreakonomics About Global Warming Is Wrong

[Via Deltoid]

I reviewed Freakonomics when it first came out and really liked it. So I was looking forward to the sequel Superfreakonomics. Unfortunately, Levitt and Dubner decided to write about global warming and have made a dreadful hash of it. The result is so wrong that it has even Joe Romm and William Connolley in agreement.

So what went wrong? One possibility is that Freakonomics was superficially plausible but also rubbish, and it was only when they wrote about an area where I was knowledgable that I noticed. But I don’t this is the correct explanation. I’ve read the journal papers on sumo cheating, Lojack and abortion and crime that they cite in Freakonomics and they are fairly represented. Superfreakonomics, on the other hand, misrepresents the scientific literature on global warming. The difference here is that the papers cited by Freakonomics were Levitt’s own work and he understood them, while Levitt and Dubner do not understand the climate science literature. This by itself would not be fatal, but what has taken them off the cliff is the Freakonomics formula: “What you thought you knew about X is wrong!”. If you want to apply this formula to global warming you can easily find many superficially plausible arguments on why the mainstream science is wrong. Bang those into your chapter on global warming without bothering to check their accuracy and the only work that remains is the tour to promote your book.

But enough on why they got everything wrong. Let’s look at what they got wrong. My Global Warming Sceptic Bingo Card is a bit out of date but they manage to tick five boxes: global warming is a religion, ice cores show warming comes first, ice age predicted in the 70s, water vapour dominates and climate modelling isn’t scientific. William Connolley stopped when he had found ten serious errors, so I’ll continue where he left off and see if I can find ten more. To make it more of a challenge, I’m just going to look at the extract that appeared in the Sunday Times entitled “Why Everything You Think You Know About Global Warming Is Wrong” (not yet available from their website). And remember, this is on top of the ten serious errors that Connolley found.

[More]

I really hate this sort of thing. We spend so much time stomping out mistruths and misrepresentations and then something like this comes along and starts the whole process again.

This sort of complete flubbing of the matter seriously puts any of their writings on tenuous grounds. This entire chapter sounds like a complete travesty, with long debunked stories brought back to life because they did not actually talk with people who knew the subject matter.

And this is just from excerpts of the book. It has not even been published yet. I wonder how far off it will be in other places.

And you can guarantee that every denier will be using this, just as they used Michael Crichton’s words, even when he was wrong.

One of the major problems with simply geoengineering our way out of warming, by somehow making less of the sun’s energy hit our planet, is that it does nothing for the acidification of the oceans. This is caused simply by the high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we are putting there.

More acid makes it harder to form calcareous shells. No shell means no plankton. No plankton not only means a collapse in the entire structure of aquatic life but also is a major source of oxygen. According to National Geographic, half the world’s oxygen supply comes from plankton.

This should be greater worry than warming itself and no sort of geoengineering attempt works here. We might survive warmer temperatures. It is much less likely we could survive if the oceans get much more acid.

Not too much cooling

Second warmest September on record for the globe

[Via Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog]

The globe recorded its second warmest September since record keeping began in 1880, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. The combined global land and ocean temperature anomaly was 0.62 °C (1.12 °F), falling only 0.04 °C (0.07 °F) short of tying the record set in 2005. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies also rated September 2009 as the 2nd warmest September on record, falling 0.02 °C short of the record set in 2005. It was the 33rd consecutive

[More]

The cherry-picking that produces the so-called ‘global warming is over’ meme can also be reversed. ‘So, if the world is cooling, then why was September only two one hundredths off from setting a new record, one that had only been set in 2005?’ The two hottest Septembers ever recorded are within 4 years of one another.

In fact, August 2009 was the second warmest August on record. July was the fifth warmest and June was the second warmest, making the June-August months the third warmest ever recorded. January through June was the fifth warmest ever. Remember, this is all globally.

Put this all together and this year is one of the warmest ever. Not much cooling to me.

Of course, the truth is that long term trends have to be used, not just immediate data for a short period of time. In truth, there have even been very long periods in the past where heating paused before starting its rise back up.

I expect deniers to be very excited when that happens again. They still have not real insight into what is happening. They just like saying “No” to the data. That is why they are called deniers.

Winter weather

by Sister72

The bad boy is back:
[Via CEJournal]

A fresh El Niño shaping up in the Pacific will dominate U.S. weather this winter, according to a forecast from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center released on Thursday.
A pool of warm ocean water has been building up in the equatorial Pacific ocean — a signature of El Niño. This usually “shifts the patterns of tropical rainfall that [...]

[More]

A new El Niño will have significant effects on the weather of North America. Most of he country could have a warmer winter with the Pacific NW getting less rain. But California might get some much needed rain.

Could be a bumpy ride.

Technorati Tags: Environment

Talking with those who refuse to listen

by cesarastudillo

Publicize or perish: The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential catastrophe of climate change.

[Via Climate Progress ]

Physics World asked me to write for a special issue on Energy, Sustainability and Climate Change. The article, “Publicize or perish,” is online and reposted below with links.

The fate of the next 50 generations may well be determined in the next few months and years. Will the US Congress agree to a shrinking cap on greenhouse-gas emissions and legislation to achieve the transformation to clean energy? If not, you can forget about a global climate deal. But even if the bill passes and a global deal is achieved, both will need to be continuously strengthened in coming years, as the increasingly worrisome science continues to inform the policy, just as in the case of the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances.

The International Scientific Congress on climate change held in Copenhagen in March, which was attended by 2000 scientists, concluded that “Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized.” That would mean that by 2100 there would be atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of more than 1000 ppm, total planetary warming of 5 °C and sea-level rises probably on the high end of recent projections of 1–2 m followed by a rise of as much as 2 cm per year or more for centuries. We would also see one-third of inhabited land reaching dust bowl levels of aridity, half or more of all species becoming extinct, and the oceans increasingly becoming hot, acidic, dead zones. And if we do not change course quickly, the latest science predicts that these impacts may be irreversible for 1000 years. [See "Intro to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water.]

[More]

This is a very interesting article and demonstrates the inability of scientists to reach people who largely do not want to be reached. In fact, scientists who actively try to engage with the public on this issue often see their research career disappear. They become targets for political operatives.This active effort to reduce complex ideas into political chaff can be seen by these very easy numbers:

As one example of how bad scientific messaging has been, let me go through Gallup polling over the past decade as discussed in a 2008 article in Environment magazine entitled “A widening gap: Republican and Democratic views on climate change”.

The article reported that in 1997 some 52% of Democrats said that the effects of global warming had already begun and 52% said most scientists believe global warming is occurring. In 2008 some 76% said warming had begun and 75% said most scientists believe warming is occurring. It would appear that Democrats believe most scientists.

Few leading climate scientists or major scientific bodies would disagree that the scientific case that the planet is warming – and that humans are the dominant cause of recent temperature rises – has become stronger in the past 10 years. That is clearly seen in the scientific literature – as summarized in the IPCC reports.

And yet for Republicans, in 1997 some 48% said warming had begun and 42% said most scientists believe warming is occurring – a modest six-point differential. By 2008, the percentage of Republicans saying the effects of global warming had already begun had dropped to a mere 42% (an amazing statistic in its own right given the painfully obvious evidence to the contrary). But the percentage saying most scientists believe global warming is occurring had risen to 54% – a stunning 12-point differential.

In short, a significant and growing number of Republicans – one in eight as of 2008 – simply do not believe what they know most scientists believe. That is quite alarming news, given that it is inconceivable that the US will take the very strong action needed to avert catastrophe unless it comes to believe what most scientists believe, namely that we are in big, big trouble and can delay no further.

Here is the lesson for scientists: in the last decade, we have apparently become less convincing to Republicans than the deniers have been. They have apparently become better at messaging, while we have perhaps become worse.

Twelve years of increasing temperatures and LESS Republicans see this than did in 1997. Talk about denying the facts.

Twelve years of continuing scientific proof that the climate is warming yet fewer believe that now than 12 years ago. Wow!

But what is astounding is that they do feel more scientists see global warming than did Republicans in 1997. So the obvious conclusion is that as we have gained a huge amount of new data that demonstrates the factual increase in global temperatures, in a multitude of independent ways, and as Republicans understand that more scientists see these changes, FEWER Republicans think it is actually happening!

As more information has become available, they have become MORE skeptical not less. They even recognize that themselves. They are able to see that others are less skeptical, thus their ability to see an increase in the percentage of scientists.

What do you call someone who becomes less comfortable with the conclusion as more and more data are generated that support the conclusion? The more you show them the truth, the greater their skepticism becomes?

Demonstrate to most people that jumping off of a 3 story building will result in broken bones, and they would not jump off of 3 story buildings. These Republicans, on the other hand, would most likely move to a higher floor.

It seems they would rather distrust scientists, believe that the researchers are twisting the facts for purely political purposes, than to see that there are really strong factual foundations for these changes.

Let’s see, in 1997, there was really little difference between what Democrats felt and what Republicans (54% vs 48%). Twelve years later, it is 76% vs 42%, a 32 point difference. When there is such a discrepancy in the change over the years simply along political lines, it really indicates that there are political reasons for this, not simply a matter of poor scientific engagement of the communities.

On the Republican side, there has been a strong and active disinformation campaign providing a safe haven for people to be skeptical. Little of this safety is coming from scientists but instead is from political operatives who have a vested interest in keeping people ignorant and skeptical.

How do you reach people like that? Who seem to want to remain ignorant and skeptical?

Not very easy because they often actively refuse to be reached. As more data demonstrating climate change has become available, fewer want to accept it. They would rather develop conspiracy theories that scientists are just wrong Even though the researchers have more data over the last decade to indicate that they were right, fewer Republicans want to see that.

Apparently, to them, it is more likely that there is a conspiracy of scientists, thousands of them all over the world working in a multitude of disciplines, to push this for political reasons. Either that or all those thousands of scientists are completely wrong while groups with obvious conflicts of interest are right.

As a scientist, I think there is an appropriate ring of Hell for those people and organizations that knowingly lie and distort the facts in order to further their own political and business goals.

There is a reason for the increasing skepticism of Republicans. It has nothing to do with the science and everything to do with well-funded groups who tell conservatives what they want to hear.

Deniers are very hard to reach with facts. They have an unnatural view of the world that requires them to ignore logical precepts and even most emotional ones. Few Young Earth Creationists will listen to anyone seriously about the facts of evolutions. It is easier for them to listen to people who have made a career solely out of feeding creationists what they need.

I think the thing to concentrate on is not the 58% of the Republicans who fail to see warming. They are a lost cause. I think we need to concentrate on empowering the 42% who see the facts. Perhaps if they feel more supported, they will engage their own community and get it to recognize facts. Researchers from outside the community will always be suspect.

Maybe just getting them to ask other Republicans a simple question: “What would have to be done to demonstrate to you that climate change is actually happening?” Ignorance can be fixed and engaging people in this way could be helpful. But I feel that most will only listen to people from inside the community, not from those perceived to be outside it, such as scientists.

Finding trusted leaders and working with them might work. However, this will require real strength and courage on their part. They risk being tossed out of the community for daring to speak ‘controversial’ views about climate change.

Truthfully, I think a large part of the 42% of Republicans who see warming happening are actually scientists. So perhaps they could do a better job discussing this with their conservative friends.

I think I will spend my time with those who actually respond to facts in positive ways.