Stochastic Observations of Climate News

My guess for the UAH global lower troposphere anomaly for August is 0.31°C, which would be the 4th-warmest August in their 34 years of records. The El Nino year 1998 is still the warmest, at 0.45°C.

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Speaking of El Nino, the Queensland (Australian) Department of Environment and Resource Management says "approximately 80 per cent of international global climate models, and most models surveyed by the BoM (‘ENSO Wrap-Up’(PDF) July 31), indicate the possibility of an El Niño event developing before summer." That would be good news for relief of the US drought, bad news for global temperatures.

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Some of the "fake skeptics" have been saying that Arctic sea ice records only go back to the start of the satellite era in 1979. Tamino shows that's not true.

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PIOMAS has released their monthly estimates of Arctic sea ice volume early, no doubt to get in on the record-breaking. The losses in volume are stunning. Here are the losses from past years, compared to their last data point of 8/26/12:

in 5 years: -47% 

in 10 years: -68% 

in 20 years: -76% 

in 30 years: -74% 

I wonder how low it can go before their model breaks down.

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I can't get too worked up about Mitt Romney's speech last night, where he made fun of global warming:

"President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans," pausing for the audience to laugh at the absurdity, "and to heal the planet. My promise ... is to help you and your family."

Let's face it, Romney will say anything to get elected, whether it's consistent with what he's said in the past or not. There has probably never been a less principled and more craven person running for president.... I actually feel kind of sorry for the guy (but will be even sorrier for the country if he is elected.)

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George Monbiot goes there:

The third event was that the Republican party in the United States began its national convention in Tampa, Florida – a day late. Why? Because of the anticipated severity of hurricane Isaac, which reached the US last night.... The Republican party's leading lights either deny climate change altogether, or argue that people can adapt to whatever a changed climate may bring, so there's nothing to worry about. The deluge of reality has had no impact on the party's determination to wish the physical world away. As Salon.com points out, most of the major figures lined up to speak at the convention deny that man-made climate change is happening. When your children ask how and why it all went so wrong, point them to yesterday's date, and explain that the world is not led by rational people.

One hurricane does not prove global warming! For crying out loud.... This kind of thing, like McKibben's Twitter feed that Keith Kloor called "a dutiful chronicler of weather-related bad news," does more harm than good. It turns people off and makes them dismiss you -- as they should, because it's no different than 'it was cold last week in Missoula, Montana" items that are pumped out from the likes of co2science.org.

Besides, to me hurricanes are far down on the list of concerns from global warming. Sure, they can be bad if you're in one, but they're local, people can always get out of the way, and they're hardly new or unprecedented. Would you rather be in 5 hurricanes today or the one back in New England in 1938 (it killed about 700 people)?

The Tea Party's Fundamental Error

William Connolley provides a succinct summary:

"I don't perceive them [Tea Partiers] as amenable to reason over [global warming] GW, which is what I'm interested in for public purposes. They have made a fundamental error:

1. I don't like govt
2. GW, if true, requires action from govt
3. Therefore GW is false

This makes them idiots. Although I doubt [Paul] Ryan is an idiot on this matter, instead my best guess is that he is dishonest."

(It's down in the comments.)

The Discouraging Trendlines of US Energy Sources

Here is the percentage of U.S. energy derived from non-fossil fuels (nonFF), renewables, and nuclear power, for the last 4 decades. The trend looks somewhat encouraging:

But if you include fossil fuels, it looks much less encouraging -- in fact, I would call it positively discouraging:

What we need is to basically to switch the positions of the red and black curves. I could project them out and see where they cross, etc., but why bother -- it's clear that whatever we've been doing won't get us there for a couple of centuries.

Stunning Picture from Mars

Here's a great photograph taken by the Curiosity rover on Mars, of Mt. Sharp. The stratification shows exactly why geologists are so interested in it, and somehow the rover is going to climb up it.

Climate Moving at One Foot Per Hour

Ken Caldiera has a great article in the September issue of Scientific American -- "The Great Climate Experiment" -- that takes a longer view of climate change, past 2100, over millenia and longer (hectomillenia?).

He puts it all out simple and plain, with neither alarming nor solace. For example, he writes "The outlook may be for increased crop productivity overall, with increases in the north exceeding the reductions over the equator. Global warming may not decrease overall food supply, but it may give more to the rich and less to the poor."

He notes that in the northern midlatitudes (30°N to 60°N), the annual average temperature drops about 2/3rds of a degree C with each degree of increasing latitude.

"With five degrees of warming in a century, that translates into an average poleward movement of more than 800 kilometers in that period, for an average poleward movement of temperature bands exceeding 20 meters each day. Squirrels may be able to keep up with this rate, but oak trees and earthworms have difficulty moving that fast." 

Over the last 20 years, GISS's northern hemisphere temperature has increased at a rate of 0.27°C/decade. Let's exclude the equatorial region and call it 0.2°C/decade. That implies a current rate of climate shift of over one foot each hour. Over 6 millimeters a minute. 2.1 miles a year.

You should read his article, even if you have to buy the issue, a special one themed "Beyond the Limits of Science," for your tablet or off the newstand.

"Phi" by Giulio Tononi

In the mail: Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul by Giulio Tononi. From the publisher:

From one of the most original and influential neuroscientists at work today, here is an exploration of consciousness unlike any other—as told by Galileo, who opened the way for the objectivity of science and is now intent on making subjective experience a part of science as well.

Galileo’s journey has three parts, each with a different guide. In the first, accompanied by a scientist who resembles Francis Crick, he learns why certain parts of the brain are important and not others, and why consciousness fades with sleep. In the second part, when his companion seems to be named Alturi (Galileo is hard of hearing; his companion’s name is actually Alan Turing), he sees how the facts assembled in the first part can be unified and understood through a scientific theory—a theory that links consciousness to the notion of integrated information (also known as phi). In the third part, accompanied by a bearded man who can only be Charles Darwin, he meditates on how consciousness is an evolving, developing, ever-deepening awareness of ourselves in history and culture—that it is everything we have and everything we are.

Not since Gödel, Escher, Bach has there been a book that interweaves science, art, and the imagination with such originality. This beautiful and arresting narrative will transform the way we think of ourselves and the world.

Publisher's Weekly has a short review here, and in case you can't read the above (in which case, why are you here in the first place?), here is the marketing review above read by a computer:


(I fear we may someday have everything read aloud to us like this.)

What I've Been Up To

I have a couple of articles that have come out recently: an interview in Scientific American with John Grotzinger, the Project Scientist of the Mars Curiosity rover mission, done the morning after it landed. There's also an associated podcast.

And a feature article in Physics World magazine, "When supergravity was born," that tells the story of a late-night computer calculation in 1976 that showed the existence of supergravity -- a field theory that merges Einstein's gravity with supersymmetry.

Malcolm Browne

The journalist Malcolm Browne died yesterday, at age 81. He was famous as a correspondent during the Vietnam War, where he took one of the war's most famous photographs, of a Buddist monk setting himself on fire in Saigon. Later he did science journalism (his education was in chemistry), and maybe ten years ago (or more) I read an article by him that impressed me greatly and that I still remember. It was in the Science Times, and only about 500 words, and while I don't remember all the details it was about a paper that found some flocking-like behavior in certain types of cells that might be a basis for the phenomenon in birds, fish, etc. After reading his article I went and read the scientific paper -- I think it was in Physical Review Letters, if I recall correctly -- and it was your typically dry paper with only a hint of the thrust of Browne's article. I was deeply impressed at how he had found the essence of that work and brought it out into a very readable account by, I guess, talking a lot with the researchers and others. He really made that paper come alive, and I saw how a really great journalist embeds the paper in a larger context, how they move from the paper's often narrow technical result to its larger significance, something I sometimes struggle with. I was somewhere in New Hampshire, and I can still picture the story on the page -- it was only 5 short columns, spread wide across the top of the second page of the Science section -- and probably one of the most important articles I've ever read.

The Times obituary quotes from an essay he wrote:

“After a time, a news writer may begin to sense a kind of sameness in most of the events that pass as news,” he wrote. “When that happens a lucky few of us discover that in science, almost alone among human endeavors, there is always something new under the sun.”

Will NRO Get Access to Mann's Emails?

Another thing I don't understand about the Michael Mann v. National Review conflict is why the NR side thinks they will get access to his long-sought emails.

Jonathan Adler wrote (and this sentiment has been widely written elsewhere):

A month later, the blog post is still there, and National Review is not backing down. Here’s the response from their lawyer, which notes (correctly in my view) that Mann is a public figure who would have to prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that NR published “a provably false statement” with actual knowledge the statement was false or “reckless disregard” for the truth or falsity of the statement. Further, the letter notes, in order to defend itself NR would be entitled to seek discovery, and in the process obtain access to e-mails and other records that Mann has, thus far, resisted disclosing in various freedom-of-information suits prompted by ClimateGate.

(emphasis mine).
The "hockey stick papers," MBH98 and MBH99, were written when Mann was at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before he went to the University of Virginia. It's this work that Mark Steyn called "fraudulent," and while I'm no lawyer, I can't see how a court would allow a party to troll through any and all emails, especially those that came after the work that is the focus of the suit.

Do courts really allow those sued for defamation to have access to all of the plaintiff's correspondence and records -- all postal mail, all email, all voice mail, all documents, regardless of when they occur and their relevance? I seriously doubt it.

The Arctic Records That Still Remain

Now that Arctic sea ice extent has set a new record minimum in the recorded era -- Jennifer Francis told the NY Times, “It’s hard even for people like me to believe, to see that climate change is actually doing what our worst fears dictated. It’s starting to give me chills, to tell you the truth” -- about the only records remaining are the lowest year and the 12-month moving average.

The lowest annual SIE, calculated as the average of each day in the year, still belongs to 2007, at 9.97 Mkm². But it depends on how you interpret days with missing data -- I've chosen to linearly interpolate across any data gaps. In this way, 2011 averaged 9.98 Mkm².

Year-to-date, 2012 ranks 4th, with 2011 the lowest (11.08 Mkm²), then 2007 (11.14 Mkm²), 2006 (11.16 Mkm²), and 2012 (11.28 Mkm²). YTD-2012 is closing in on YTD-2011 fast though, at about 0.005 Mkm² each day, and at current rates will beat it in about two months.

The daily availability of data lends the undeniable feeling of a horserace to all this. I'm undecided if that's positive or negative. Emphasizing short-term phenomena is always risky in matters of climate change, and perhaps there's an appearance that some are cheering for the records to be broken (Marc Moreno wrote, "...Climate Depot extends congratulations to the global warming activists as they celebrate current Arctic ice conditions and try to convince the public that it is a significant event that is due to man-made global warming," but then, spin is the very essence of his business model).

On the other hand, everyone is much more aware of what's happening than all but the researchers would have been before the Web, which accelerates overall concerns where there should be concerns. At the ISEC Space Elevator Conference I just returned from, one of the speakers said we have been "criminally slow to act on the climate crisis." While more data is always needed, it surely isn't because we lack adequate information about what's happening -- we're now getting it on a daily basis.

These Aren't Merely "Negative Things"

Judith Curry writes:

"I am trying to figure out what Mann is trying to accomplish with these lawsuits.  I guess he is hoping to intimidate people into not saying negative things about him?" 

I don't get that at all. Simberg wrote that Michael Mann engaged in "data manipulation." Mark Steyn called his work "fraudulent." Those aren't merely "negative things" -- they are statements about Mann and his co-author's integrity.

Being wrong would be one thing. Being dishonest is something else entirely, and it seems to me Mann is here defending his integrity and personal reputation, not the correctness of his scientific findings. Who wouldn't do the same? Scientists, like everyone else, have the right to be wrong. That alone does not give anyone else the right to impugn their integrity.

And, just to be clear, I don't know of any evidence whatsoever that Mann et al were dishonest in their hockey stick work, or that it is obviously wrong. It seems important to me that several other groups, and completely independent mathematical methods, have found essentially the same results. Are there reasons to argue about the details of normalization, centering, etc? Sure -- that kind of thing is always part of any science and happens in science all the time. Besides the M&M papers, there is this one by Peter Huybers (and MM's reply). But Simberg and Steyn were not doing that, of course.

[I am at the point in all this where to say anything more I'd need to completely work through everyone's calculations, which isn't going to be my priority. Peter Huybers' calculations are here.]

US Emissions Are On Obama's Reduction Track

In 2009, President Obama proposed that US emissions in 2020 should be 14% below 2005's baseline, and that year the House of Representatives passed legislation that mandated a 17% reduction. (The Senate never passed the bill.)

So how is the US doing? Thanks largely to the surge in use of natural gas instead of coal, it's actually on-track to meet that target -- to meet it 3 years early, in fact:

And per capita emissions are, as of April of this year, even better: 13.2% below December 2005. 

But Obama also proposed a reduction of 80% by 2050, which, despite the chart, is much more difficult (if not impossible, without new technologies.)

Note: These are emissions from fossil fuel use; they don't include those from land changes. They also don't include emissions embedded in the products purchased by Americans that are manufactured in other countries; by one estimate, 9% of China's emissions are from goods shipped to the US, and 6% from goods shipped to Europe. (HT: The Climate Fix). In 2010 that would add 749 Mt CO2 to US emissions (13%), and 11% to Europe's emissions.

Laughing to Scorn

“Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation, because the prophet invariably falls between two stools. If his predictions sound at all reasonable, you can be quite sure that in 20, or at most 50 years, the progress of science and technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative. On the other hand, if by some miracle, a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn.

"So if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable, then I will have failed completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen.”

-- Arthur C Clarke, 1964

Space Elevators, Carbon Nanotubes and Toxicity

This weekend I'm going up to Seattle for the ISEC Space Elevator Conference. (I went last year, which spawned this feature article for Physics World.) A realistic space elevator -- one that isn't ridiculously wide at geostationary orbit -- requires a material with an extremely high tensile strength-to-density ratio -- something on the order of 30-60 GPa/(g/cm³) [Gigapascals per gram-per-cubic-centimeter]. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are the prime (and, so far, only) candidate that meets this requirement in principle, but so far no one knows how to make them into extended structures like a rope or ribbon, let alone braid them into long pieces (a total of about 100,000 kilometers would be needed for a space elevator).

So I especially noticed this press release that just arrived: "Super-Strong, High-Tech Material Found to be Toxic to Aquatic Animals by Researchers at MU and USGS"

CNTs are microscopically thin cylinders of carbon atoms that can be hundreds of millions of times longer than they are wide, but they are not pure carbon. Nickel, chromium and other metals used in the manufacturing process can remain as impurities. Deng and his colleagues found that these metals and the CNTs themselves can reduce the growth rates or even kill some species of aquatic organisms. The four species used in the experiment were mussels (Villosa iris), small flies’ larvae (Chironomus dilutus), worms (Lumbriculus variegatus) and crustaceans (Hyalella azteca).

“One of the greatest possibilities of contamination of the environment by CNTs comes during the manufacture of composite materials,” said Hao Li, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at MU. “Good waste management and handling procedures can minimize this risk. Also, to control long-term risks, we need to understand what happens when these composite materials break down.”

A space elevator, if it can ever be built, would likely be built on an base in the ocean, for a few reasons. First, you want to built it very near the equator because you get maximum centrifugal force there (an elevator is basically a taut string hanging off a spinning object), and because few storms cross the equator, and if the elevator was ever severed and fell back to Earth you'd want to avoid killing people. (After all, the thing has a mass of about 10⁵ kg, or over 100 tons at the Earth's surface.)

I don't have a copy yet of the above paper, so I don't know at what concentration they found CNTs to be toxic. It's a big ocean, after all. Still, you might not want to have carbon nanotubes flaking off it, or big pieces falling off and dissolving in the ocean. Maybe you coat the CNT ribbon with some polymer or something, but that adds mass and reduces your strength-to-density ratio.

And if these are toxic to marine animals, what about other animals, including human animals? I honestly don't know. I do seem to see a relatively steady stream of press releases about nanotechnology safety, and my (mostly uninformed) impression is that this area is understudied and behind the curve of nanotech R&D. I'm not even sure about nanoparticles in sunscreens, to be honest -- information like this isn't completely reassuring.

At the very least, environmental groups will likely have another target when/if a space elevator is ever seriously proposed.

We might never get off this damned planet.

Stuff I Found Here and There

National Geographic has a good article this month by Peter Miller: "Weather Gone Wild." Worth reading.

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A report by the European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, assessing priorities for research in materials for energy technologies, has a section on the Fleischman & Pons
Effect -- viz. cold fusion. Apparently some in Europe are now practicing intellectual austerity in addition to financial austerity. (Via Joe Wells)

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A recent article by George Will, "Apocalypse Not," crows about the failure of projections that we would be running out of some valuable commodities by now, like gold or aluminum or oil. Being George Will he uses this as a reason to bash climate projections, and being George Will he gets it completely wrong, as one commenter noted but now I can't find. The point is that people innovate and find more gold, oil, or whatever because those things have a value. Right now the atmosphere -- especially an atmosphere with a pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide -- has no value. It's a no-fee waste dump. If it is to prosper by innovation, that atmospheric state should be valued. If it were, people would apply their ingenuity and market tools to making more of it, and until it is valued, the only people doing that will be those directly supported by government funds or the extremely charitable and well-intentioned.

Hipsters in Hats

I saw someone doing this just yesterday.

Pipeline Operators Aren't Required to Tell Them

This is dumbfounding:

"Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a report that was harshly critical of the federal government’s regulation and oversight of pipeline safety following a spill of more than one million gallons of dilbit [dilluted bitumen] into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan in 2010. The accident underscored not only how different dilbit is from conventional oil, but how unprepared we are for the impending flood of imports.

"After the dilbit gushed into the river, it began separating into its constituent parts. The heavy bitumen sank to the river bottom, leaving a mess that is still being cleaned up. Meanwhile, the chemical additives evaporated, creating a foul smell that lingered for days. People reported headaches, dizziness and nausea. No one could say with certainty what they should do. Federal officials at the scene didn’t know until weeks later that the pipeline was carrying dilbit, because federal law doesn’t require pipeline operators to reveal that information." (David Sassoon, New York Times)

Officials didn't know what to do because they didn't know what was in the pipeline.
Because the pipeline operators aren't required to tell them.

You can't get on an airplane with a bottle of water, but you can run pipelines all over creation without telling anyone what's in them.

And corporations complain about over-regulation.

In the Way of Swamping Boats

"A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats."

-- Stephen Crane, The Open Boat

The Cabo Test

Here's a passage from Roger's book that gets to the essence:

"A related issue is that many advocates for action have emphasized that climate policy requires sacrifice, as economic growth and environmental progress are necessarily incompatible with one another. This perspective has even been built into the scenarios of the IPCC, and is advocated by its chairman. However, experience shows quite clearly that when environmental and economic objectives are placed into opposition with one another in public or political forums, it is the economic goals that win out. I call this the iron law of climate policy....

"Some may wail and scream about this fundamental reality, and instead demand that people around the world reorder their values such that environmental objectives trump considerations of economic growth. Considerable effort has been expended by advocates on many issues in an effort to reshape societal values. The world's religions, for example, have been trying to reorder values for millennia. While over time value reshaping certainly occurs, there is little evidence to suggest that efforts to achieve a global value restructuring offer a useful path forward on decarbonization of the global economy, or improved resilience to climate extremes. Of course, people will try. Even so, for climate policy the reality is that the iron law of climate policy will hold fast for the foreseeable future. Those interested in real progress on decarbonization of the global economy should respond accordingly."

-- Roger Pielke Jr., The Carbon Fix, pg 59

Let's call this the Cabo Test: If today someone offered you a week-long, all-expenses vacation in Cabo San Lucas, in the finest beachside resort, would you turn it down because of the carbon emissions of the plane you'd fly in? I doubt more than a few percentage of people would decline it. Even the environmentally aware would start compromising in their head: I'll fly this time but will skip a vacation next year. I'll fly but will read a book about climate change. I'll fly but will buy carbon offsets.

I just re-read The Red Badge of Courage, and it's a little like the main character Henry Fleming: he runs from his first battle, and then spends the rest of the book trying to justify why he ran and how he can live with himself. In the end he convinces himself that fleeing was, in fact, a great thing: it will reduce his egotism, it would enable him to see truths more clearly, he believes he will gain "a large sympathy for the machinery of the universe." Ok, perhaps I'm reaching...but we are all selfish at heart, and climate policy needs to reflect that.

Bringing the US Kaya Factors Up-to-Date

I obtained the US monthly energy consumption data, and updated my earlier plot of the factors in the Kaya Identity factors for the United States:

I annualized the data to get rid of seasonal squiggles in energy use. "Tech" is what Roger labels technology -- the carbon intensity of the economy:

Tech = EI*CI = C/GDP

(see this post for the acronym definitions). The story remains the same: most of our flattening carbon emissions come from using energy more efficiently, not from reducing carbon emissions per se.

Here's a plot that shows that the average American is actually using less energy than a few decades ago:

[Yes, energy isn't measured in Watts, but since we're talking about a fix period of one year, the two are directly related.] We're flat in energy not because we are trying to use less of it, but because we use it more efficiently.