Hansen on Climate Sensitivity and Models

"Climate sensitivity will never be defined accurately by models."

-- James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren, pg 44

(He prefers paleoclimate studies instead.)

In San Francisco for AGU Meeting

I'm in San Francisco for this week's AGU meeting. Expected attendance: 22,000.

There were obviously many other attendees on the flight down and the BART in -- science nerds tend to have a certain look, and a lot of them were carrying poster tubes.

I'll be covering the meeting for the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, along with Bruce Lieberman and our editor Bud Ward.

I'll tweet at @davidappell, and we'll all be tweeting at @yalemediaforum with the conference hashtag #agu13.

The meeting has a virtual meeting option at http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2013/virtual-options/ . There will be nearly 100 sessions put online (almost 600 presentations in total), either live or on demand at
http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2013/virtual-options/live-stream-video-demand/

Should be fun.

Let's Stop Comparing Global Warming to the Hiroshima Bomb

Skeptical Science has a widget that claims to show how much additional heat is being trapped on the Earth by anthropogenic factors: 4 Hiroshima bombs per second, or 4 Hiros/s.

The Hiro is an useful energy unit when discussing global warming, and I've certainly used it in the past, but a recent mailing list post I read has convinced me it's unnecessarily alarmist, and probably insensitive too.

It's useful because an energy imbalance of 1 W/m² over the Earth's entire surface = 8.1 Hiros/second -- the yield of the Hiroshima bomb being 63 terajoules (TJ), or 15 kilotons of TNT.

But a couple of months ago, Alan Robock, who's done a lot of work on nuclear winter scenarios, wrote on a geoengineering mailing list:

I think this is a terrible comparison to make and should not be used.  I heard someone this summer who was trained by Al Gore use this and she did not distinguish between all the effects of atomic bombs and the energy equivalent of the atomic explosions.

Equating nuclear war and global warming is a false comparison.  Nuclear war is a much worse fate for our planet, and is a scare tactic.  The number is correct (I did the calculation myself when I first heard of this), but trapping energy has completely different effects from dropping nuclear bombs on people.  Using this is distracting, sensational, and easy to refute if the speaker does not carefully explain that it is the energy released by the bombs, with no other effects including radioactivity, fires, and blast.

I told John Cook this at the AGU Chapman Conference on Climate Communication this summer, and he said he would consider this recommendation, but I don't know if he plans to continue to feature this idea on Skeptical Science.

But see http://thebulletin.org/how-many-hiroshimas-does-it-take-describe-climate-change for another point of view.

He convinced me: the "Hiro" is inappropriate -- a scare tactic. And a false equivalence that neither captures the essence of global warming (since the energy is spread over the entire planet and not just a city), nor captures or respects the tragedy of the bombs dropped on Japan.

As someone who in his late twenties often had nightmares about nuclear war and woke up screaming (much to the fright of a few girlfriends), and who when younger thought there would certainly be a global nuclear war in my lifetime, I'm not going to use the "Hiro" any more.

So what is a better unit? I asked Alan via the list, and he responded:

I think an array of incandescent light bulbs around the world would work much better.  If you have 100 W bulbs, and want to model an imbalance at the surface of 1 W/m², then you will need one light bulb every 100 m2, multiplied by 1 over the fraction of energy emitted by each bulb that is heat rather than light.  Light bulbs in an array separated by 5-10 m on a side would not perhaps seem dramatic, but if you would zoom out and see them everywhere on Earth, it could be.

It isn't as dramatic, which underscores the point: the "Hiro" is used for its incendiary nature, purposely trying to elicit fear. While global warming is, in some sense, scary, it's sloooooooow long-term scary, unfolding over decades, centuries, and millennia, and not wake-up-screaming scary.

Another option is to compare it to sunlight. At the top of its atmosphere, the Earth receives 1,376.6 W/m2 from the Sun, or 2,768 Hiros/second (as the Earth's intercepting area is only πR²). So global warming's 4 Hiros/second is equivalent to 0.1% more sunlight at the TOA.

Or, an energy imbalance of 4 Hiros/s is, over an entire year, an extra 8 billion terajoules, or 13 extra hours of sunlight at the TOA. That sounds impressive, but not in the way something terrifying is impressive.

Or, 4 Hiros/s = 252 terawatts, or about 14 times the power consumption of the entire Earth.

UAH: Last 5 Years Still the Warmest

The UAH anomaly for the lower troposphere for November was +0.19°C, which doesn't look impressive until you remember that their base period, 1981-2010, is quite recent.

(Really, is it too much to ask for the five major groups to get together and decide on, and use, a common base period? And for UAH and RSS to decide if their results warrant 2 significant figures (UAH, though they give 3 on Roy Spencer's blog) or 3 (RSS)? They're using the same raw data, after all, though with slightly different methodologies.)

In any case, this is still the warmest 5 years in the UAH record, though this isn't a statisically significant statement at the canonical level.

The Post Office Responds to Amazon

Blame the Drone

You just watch -- this is going to put reindeer out of business.

Via Someecards.

No, Climate Science Hasn't Lost It's Way

Judith Curry writes:

by linking to an LA Times article about medical science (which, let's stipulate, is not a physical science; see below).

In my opinion (and as I commented on Curry's blog), any scientist who has to ask “has science lost its way?” has just admitted that their ideas can’t compete in the arena of ideas. They are looking to win the argument by other (unscientific) means.

There is a simple way to win the scientific debate: produce better science. Period.

That has never, ever failed to win the day.

Ever.

But medical science is very different from the physical sciences like physics, chemistry, geology, mathematics, climate science, biology, etc.

For one thing, it's not nearly as rigorous. Yes, climate science deals with a very complicated beast -- the Earth's climate -- but medical science deals with one that is far more complicated -- the human body, or, more appropriately, the vertebrate body or even the organic organism.

That body is an immense bag of miracles, developed over billions of years of evolution, reaching a complexity we can barely begin to understand.

Not so for physics, or climate. We know, very well, the laws of blackbodies, and of quantum mechanics, and of radiation, and we know that the Earth will emit infrared radiation and that gases like CO2, CH4 and H2O have molecular energy levels that will absorb it.

Some of that absorption will be emitted back downward, towards the surface.

That is global warming. That's really about all you really need to know.

Global warming is required by the laws of physics. I think it was Michael Mann who said, during one of the times he was unjustifiably hauled before a Congressional committee, and then asked what it would take for him to admit that anthropogenic global warming was wrong, who replied, "Everything I know about physics and chemistry would have to be wrong."

And he was right. Completely.

Our world -- surface, oceans, sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets -- must warm if we continue to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Yet how that downward, extra heat gets distributed into the Earth's systems, and how it makes them evolve over time, is a very, very difficult problem. There are a great many variables, and the equations that describe these processes are very complicated, full of feedbacks.

But the planet will warm. It has to. It must. It will.

Attempts to parse that warming, by claiming that science is wrong because it can't yet describe the distribution of the warming, are inaccurate if they claim the Earth's many systems won't be affected, that they won't change.

Those systems will change, just in ways we can't yet predict, both in extent and in time.

But we can predict that they will change, somehow.

That's very, very different from medical studies where, primarily, a huge amount of money is at stake, from patents and partnerships and the results of clinical trials and how the science is interpreted.

If these clinical trials even are science. I once heard a talk by a science journalist (no names) that what journalists claimed as a  "medical science" wasn't really a science, because it had too many variables and too many unknowns.

And I mostly agree with him.

So trying to piggyback on studies about medical papers isn't very convincing. They are barely doing science -- climate scientists are doing science, in the grand tradition of the king of the sciences, physics.

Their vulnerabilities are not the vulnerabities of the physical sciences. And they shouldn't be lumped toether, and blamed together. There are standards, and then there are standards.

The Fence -- Then and Now

Via Imgur.

Clues to Typhoon Haiyan’s Ferocity

An article in this week's Science magazine suggests that one factor behind Typhoon Haiyan's immense strength was warmer ocean waters underneath the surface.

In "Clues to Supertyphoon’s Ferocity Found in the Western Pacific" (sub req'd), Denis Normile writes:

Tropical storm watchers agree that Haiyan was probably the strongest typhoon to make landfall when it slammed into the Philippines on 8 November, packing winds of up to 314 kilometers per hour. What gave Haiyan, which killed thousands and displaced millions, its deadly wallop?

Researchers think they have at least a partial answer to that question: unusually warm subsurface Pacific waters east of the Philippines. A related phenomenon—rising sea levels in the western Pacific—likely abetted Haiyan's devastating storm surge, which caused more deaths than the winds themselves.

Typhoons draw heat from the ocean for the energy that generates their winds. Typically, as a storm's winds increase, they stir up deeper, cooler ocean waters that temper its strength. This cooling effect "is nature's brake to stop typhoons from intensifying," says I-I Lin, a specialist in typhoon-ocean interactions at National Taiwan University in Taipei.

Drawing on data from satellite observations and Argo floats—thousands of instrumented, subsurface probes that measure ocean temperature, salinity, and current speeds—Lin and others have documented a steady 2-decade rise in subsurface temperatures in the western North Pacific and a bulging warm water layer. The warmer and thicker that subsurface layer, the more heat is available to feed a storm. Oceanographers use a measure called the Tropical Cyclone Heat Potential (TCHP) to quantify the heat reservoir. Lin and colleague Iam-Fei Pun reported online on 3 September in Geophysical Research Letters that the TCHP where most cyclones develop in the western North Pacific has increased 10% since the early 1990s.... While surface waters along Haiyan's path were only slightly warmer than normal, waters down to 100 meters were 3° warmer than the historical average. So as Haiyan churned up western Pacific waters, it drew more wind-intensifying heat, Lin says.

But it's not nearly as simple, these researchers say, as "global warming means a warmer ocean":

The warm bulge in the western North Pacific is the result of stronger easterly trade winds. This phenomenon also aggravated Haiyan's storm surge. In addition to blowing heat westward, the winds are literally piling up water in the western Pacific, where the cumulative sea-level rise over the past 20 years exceeds 20 centimeters, says Bo Qiu, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. "It is likely that the elevated sea level contributed to the flood and inundation problems" in the Philippines, he says.

While many observers blame Haiyan's destructive power on climate change, tropical storm experts say there is little hard evidence of a link. "It is possibly natural variability," Lin says. Nor is it certain that the western Pacific has become a supertyphoon breeding ground. Although warmer subsurface waters might raise the risk, Lin says, atmospheric conditions may not always cooperate.

Cellular Injections

This is an image of nanowires being used to inject chemical compounds into immune cells from leukemia patients. Made by Alex K. Shalek, Jellert T. Gaublomme, and Hongkun Park of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Harvard University; part of the the Koch Institute Image Awards, from the journal Cell.

Noam Chomsky Shuts Down "Truthers" of All Stripes

At a recent talk, Noam Chomsky was confronted by a 9/11 "truther" who asked him to get onboard with an investigation of Building 7 (the the third World Trade Center building that fell later on that day), because "the media is covering up things."

Chomsky's reply was spot-on, and applies to climate change even more than it does to 9/11:

During a "Policy and the Media Prism" lecture at the University of Florida several weeks ago, 9/11 truther activist Bob Tuskin asked Chomsky what he had to say about Building 7, the third structure to collapse on Sept. 11, 2001. The media, in Tuskin's opinion, has ignored evidence about the building's collapse.

Chomsky shut down Tuskin's claims. If scientists had strong evidence to support 9/11 conspiracy theories, he said, they would have presented their discoveries to other architects and engineers, would have published their arguments in scientific journals and attempted to persuade other professionals that they'd found something worth investigating.

"There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics," he added, "but it doesn't work like that ... There's a reason there are graduate schools in these departments."

2013 Atlantic Hurricane TIKE Near-Record Low

The most commonly cited measure of hurricane activity is ACE - Accumulated Cyclone Energy.

Except it's not an energy; its definition is

where the summation (that's the capital sigma, "Σ") for a particular storm is taken every six hours starting at midnight, v_max is the estimated maximum sustained velocity of the storm, and the 10^-4 is just to make the number reasonably small and friendly.

This isn't an energy, because it doesn't take into consideration the mass of the storm, which is the total of its density for every small parcel of air times the volume of that parcel. (If you assume all storms have the same height, you can substitute area for volume.) That's what the new metric IKE does - Integrated Kinetic Energy -- which I wrote about earlier this year.

It was invented by Vasu Misra and colleagues at Florida State University. (Here's a PDF of their preprint.) In practice the integral is taken every six hours, but does include a storm's size -- Misra et al take the storm's height to be 1 meter, centered at the 10-meter level. And if you want to gauge a storm's potential for damage, you're going to want to know its size as well as its velocity.

TIKE - Total Integrated Kinetic Energy - is then the sum of all the IKEs.

After Hurricane Haiyan I asked Misra if he'd calculated its IKE, which he hadn't, but he and his colleagues did just calculate the TIKE for the 2013 Atlantic Hurricane system. As the figure on the right snows, it was near a record low of 1,350 terajoules (TJ), with mid-September's Hurricane Ingrid in northern Mexico accounting for 41% of that.

(By way of comparison, the yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 63 TJ, but this isn't really a direct comparision, because, again, the height of the storms is taken to be 1 meter -- in essence, all storms are taken to be the same height, which is then divided out of the definition.)

They write:

"... the total TIKE value for 2013 is equal to only 16% of the average annual TIKE value from 1988-2012. By this metric, the 2012 season was about ten times more active than this most recent season, and Hurricane Sandy accumulated more kinetic energy than did the entire 2013 season. The only North Atlantic hurricane season since 1988, to accumulate less TIKE than this past season, was the 1993 season, which had just over 1000 terajoules of track integrated kinetic energy."

So how do TIKE and ACE compare? This is from Misra et al's paper:

You can't really compare TIKE and ACE, since they have different units, but you can compare their trends (relative to, say, their total average).

Ryan Maue publishes the monthly ACE values for the globe and four different regions; for the North Atlantic hurricane season (assuming it's over), the total ACE for 2013 was 29, compared to an average of 94 since 1970, and 133 last year.

So this year there was an even bigger dropoff in TIKE than in ACE.

Comet ISON May Have Disintegrated

Says Science News:

http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2013/11/scienceshot-comet-ison-could-be-no-more

John Hiatt & The Goners - Your Dad Did

Judith Curry's Version of Denialism

Here is a very good example of what's wrong with much of the science blogosphere, and why science, with its emphasis on evidence and careful, deliberate thought, doesn't really fit in to it.

Judith Curry passes along an interview with Hans von Storch, said to be translated by someone named "Pierre Gosselin." Here is her quote, and here is how Gosselin's translation ends:

Also, von Storch believes that the oceans could be warming up, but that there is very little data out there to confirm it.

That's how Gosselin's interview ends -- with no supporting evidence at all.

That matters, since almost all of global warming goes into the ocean.,

That makes the statement gossip, not science. There is no evidence whatsoever to support it. 

von Storch offers nothing -- or, if he did, the interview didn't communicate it.

First of all, if there is such little data to confirm it the oceans are warming, why does von Storch believe it? Does he believe things for which there is no evidence? 

And Curry passes it along without any supporting evidence at all. 

That is not what a good scientist does. 

Real scientists support their assertions, and accept the assertions of others based on the evidence. 

That, clearly, is not what's happening here. 

Judith Curry wants to be a player. Clearly. My distinct impression is that she thinks that means she has to offer up controversial statements and take an obstinate position.

It might get her a lot of comments. I wonder if it gets her a lot of respect.

Because a great deal of work has gone into calculating the changes in ocean heat content over the last 50+ years. Really hard work, digging up records and undestanding them and figuring out what they say and their limitations.

People like Sydney Levitus, who just retired from NOAA, have spend entire careers trying to understand ocean warming. Look at this document -- NOAA Atlas NESDIS 60, WORLD OCEAN DATABASE 2005 -- an enormous amount of work has gone into it -- millions of observatoins. And even then they can't get the error bars for OHC less than about 50% for the 1950s-1960s. 

Look at Ch 4, pg 69 -- "EXPENDABLE BATHYTHERMOGRAPH DATA"

The next few pages show clearly that they have worked on understanding XBT accuracy, their errors, teir corrections, etc.

Or check out their section 1.2, pg 24:

With the distribution of WOD05 there are now approximately 7.9 million temperature profiles and 2.7 million salinity profiles (as well as other profile data and plankton data) available to the international research community in a common format with associated metadata and quality control flags.

That is really difficult scientific work. Damn hard. Infinitely harder than blogging.

So people like Judith Curry and Hans von Storch don't get to dismiss that work with a wave of the hand.

And this is just one example. It is endemic in the denialist blogosphere -- and, yes, I am choosing the word "denialist" knowing full well what it means -- it means people who take a position without regard to the evidence. Which is exactly what Curry is doing here. 

Maybe von Storch did too -- but I can't tell without knowing the full transcript of his interview that was translated. 

This kind of shit has to end. Either people like Judith Curry are scientists, or they are not. Posts like this indicate she is not, even if journalists (including me -- I try to include all voices in my writing, though it's getting ever harder) write her and even if she gets creampuff interviews on NPR -- one of the sadder recent moments in my trade of science journalism. 

Summary on ocean acidification

A good review document is always hard to find, so here's one on ocean acidification by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme: Ocean Acidification Summary for Policymakers 2013.

Here are the first few points of the report:

"Climate scientists are the opposites of weathermen"

This, by Bryan Walsh on Time.com, is very well put:

Climate scientists are the opposites of weathermen — the further out they’re asked to forecast, the more confidence they tend to have in their predictions.

I think a lot of people don't understand this, including meteorologists used to wresting with the next day or two's forecast. In physics there are a great many things that you can calculate over large spatial scales and/or over long time periods, that you cannot calculate for small distances or short time frames -- like essentially all of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Or fluid flow. Or cosmology. Physics is very good at dealing with very simple systems, like a hydrogen atom or Mercury's orbit around the Sun, and large things, like the average temperature of a body of water or the properties of a universe. It's all the stuff in between that's difficult, and that's where most of climate science falls, once you get past the basics of energy balance. We probably knew enough to be wary of the dangers of fossil fuels shortly after Arrhenius did his calculation in 1896 -- and if he'd lived in India instead of Sweden, he might not have thought the warming would be so beneficial.

Physics leads to an argument like this, a comment on John Baez's blog Azimuth:

UK Politicians Grapple With Cowtan and Way

This is why you shouldn't take your science from politicians; from The Independent, writing about the Cowtan and Way study:

Of course, it's perfectly plausible that both the ocean is warming and surface warming has been underestimated, and (therefore) that the rate of global warming is accelerating....

At least Lord Lawson of Blaby, a prominent scoffer in the UK, is willing to first read the paper:

Other people are spinning as fast as they can. David Whitehouse sniffs that the paper's explanatory video wasn't warranted -- because, you know, we just can't have any attempts to clarify and explain the paper's findings:

This research is interesting but doesn’t live up to the headline that it explains the ‘pause.’ It also does not warrant such an extensive press release, complete with explanatory videos. It is clear that it has been used as a political tool to deride ‘sceptics’ who rightly see the ‘pause’ as significant. By aiming at ‘sceptics’ such an approach also derides many working scientists who are trying to explain the ‘pause.’ This is regrettable.

The Pause has been good to scoffers and naturally they will be sad to see it go. WUWT has had several posts on Cowtan & Way since it came out -- do you remember when WUWT once criticized the surface station records? Now they are defending them. It must be very confusing....

Monckton tries the usual malarkey, posting this:

Why would you pick a seemingly random starting point like December 2000? Do you even have to ask? It's the first month when the HadCRUT4 linear trend to the present turns negative:

Cost to Sequence a Genome

The cost to sequence a human genome may be botomming out at about $5,000, from NEJM:

State-of-the-art sequencers do it in about 24 hours....

Cartoon: Budget Squeeze for 2 C

This is from the IEA's recently published World Energy Outlook 2013:

 

Blogger Lars Boelen took this and added historical information from CDIAC, to get a more detailed picture:

We are a generation that will go down in infamy.