Gavin Schmidt

Real Climate Spin

by Marlo Lewis on November 24, 2009 · 2 comments

in Features, Global Warming, Zeitgeist

Real Climate.Org is chief defender of ”consensus” climatology on the Internet. One of its enduring missions has been to defend the dubious, indeed discredited “Hockey Stick” reconstruction of Northern hemisphere temperature history. The Hockey Stick was the basis for the IPCC’s claim in its 2001 report that the 1990s were the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the past millennium.

That Real Climate (RC) should feel special solicitude for the Hockey Stick is no accident, comrade. Two of the five principals at RC — Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley — were among the three researchers (Mann, Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes) who authored the Hockey Stick.

All of the RC principals (Gavin Schmidt, Caspar Ammann, Rasmus Benestad, Mann, and Bradley) are frequent senders and recipients of the thousands of emails and other documents, now posted on many Web sites, that were hacked or leaked last week from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The Wall Street Journal today published a selection of the leaked emails and an editorial concluding that the emails ”give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics.”

Even eco-radical George Monbiot says he is “dismayed and deeply shaken” by the emails, because, “There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.”

So far, the only email on which RC has seen fit to comment is one from CRU director Phil Jones dated Nov. 16, 1999, 13:31. It’s gotten a lot of buzz on the Internet, because it appears to advocate the use of a “trick” to “hide” a “decline” in global temperatures.

In a post titled “The CRU Hack” (November 20), RC writes:

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

So a “trick” is just scientific shorthand for a “good way to deal with a problem,” not something “secret.” But RC ducks the real issue. Is the ”trick” Phil Jones learned from Hockey Stick author Michael Mann a form of trickery? Does it create a false impression, as an illusionist does on stage, right out in the open, in front of an audience?

The trick, according to RC, is to splice onto the end of a temperature reconstruction, built on proxy data going back several centuries, the data from instrumental records starting in 1960 and 1981.

Now this is quite a trick, because it involves comparing apples (proxy data) to oranges (instrumental data) and pretending that the composite forms a continuous record.

As the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change observed years ago, researchers attempting to construct long-term (centuries to millennia) temperature records should ”finish the dance” with the (proxy) data they started with.

Grafting instrumental data onto proxy data to produce a seemingly continuous record is trickery, because instrumental data, unlike proxy data, are massively influenced by land-use changes and site-specific quality control issues.

Urban heat islands and irrigated agriculture can inject false warming biases into instrumental data that are absent from proxy data taken from remote forests or sediment cores at the bottom of lakes, for example. Improper placement of temperature sensing equipment near local heat sources (e.g. air conditioning vents, asphalt parking lots, waste water treatment plants) also generates significant false warming signals, as retired meteorologist Anthony Watts documents in gory detail.

So RC’s “nothing to see here” argument based on the alleged insider meaning of “trick” raises rather than allays suspicion that CRU is attempting to fit data to a predetermined conclusion.

Note also that RC says nothing about Phil Jones’s advice to backdate correspondence (Sept. 12, 2007, 11:30 a.m.), to delete emails related to the 2007 IPCC report (May 29, 2008, 11:04), and to evade FOIA requests, if necessary by deleting files (Feb. 2, 2005, 9:41 a.m.). RC also says nothing about Mann’s call to delegitimize the Journal of Climate for publishing papers critical of his work (March 11, 2003, 8:14).

The Wall Street Journal editorial’s concluding comment is spot on:  ”In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.”

Is 350 the New 450?

by Marlo Lewis on September 28, 2009 · 3 comments

in Global Warming

In today’s New York Times, Lauren Morello of ClimateWire asks, “Is 350 [parts per million] the New 450 [ppm] When It Comes to Capping Carbon Emissions?”

The answer is yes, suggests Morello, a reporter with a keen eye for the shifting fashions of climate chic.

The older viewpoint was that if the world cuts back its CO2 emissions at least 50% by 2050, with industrial countries cutting their emissions by 80% or more, we could stabilize CO2 concentrations at 450 ppm, and that, in turn, would limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

But a 45o ppm stabilization target is increasingly regarded as too weak and unacceptably risky.  Twenty scientists, in an open letter to the President and Congress, contend that the Waxman-Markey legislation, with its emission reduction target of 83% by 2050, should be considered “only a first step.”

Then there’s the 350 or Bust campaign led by the Center for Biological Diversity. CBD and its comrades demand that U.S. environmental statutes be “fully implemented” to lower CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm. In June, CBD issued a report advising EPA to establish National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for CO2 set at 350 ppm.

Morello quotes Sanford University scientist Stephen Schneider on why 350 ppm is better than 450 ppm: “We’re betting the planet. There’s no such thing as a safe level [of CO2 concentrations]. There’s a level of very risky, versus mildly risky.”

This is the familiar rhetoric that we’re ”gambling with the only planet we have.” As should be obvious by now (alas, it isn’t), Schneider and other cap-and-traders propose to gamble with the only economy we have. They talk as if there are no risks of climate policy, only risks of climate change. I would paraphrase Schneider as follows: There’s economically hazardous (stabilization at 450 ppm by 2050) and there’s economically ruinous (stabilization at 350 ppm).

In “We Can’t Get There From Here” (Mar. 14, 2009), Newsweekcolumnist Sharon Begley describes what it would take to stabilize CO2 concentrations at 450 ppm by 2050:

[Cal Tech chemist Nate] Lewis’s numbers show the enormous challenge we face. The world used 14 trillion watts (14 terawatts) of power in 2006. Assuming minimal population growth (to 9 billion people), slow economic growth (1.6 percent a year, practically recession level) and—this is key—unprecedented energy efficiency (improvements of 500 percent relative to current U.S. levels, worldwide), it will use 28 terawatts in 2050. (In a business-as-usual scenario, we would need 45 terawatts.) Simple physics shows that in order to keep CO2 to 450 ppm, 26.5 of those terawatts must be zero-carbon. That’s a lot of solar, wind, hydro, biofuels and nuclear, especially since renewables kicked in a measly 0.2 terawatts in 2006 and nuclear provided 0.9 terawatts. Are you a fan of nuclear? To get 10 terawatts, less than half of what we’ll need in 2050, Lewis calculates, we’d have to build 10,000 reactors, or one every other day starting now. Do you like wind? If you use every single breeze that blows on land, you’ll get 10 or 15 terawatts. Since it’s impossible to capture all the wind, a more realistic number is 3 terawatts, or 1 million state-of-the art turbines, and even that requires storing the energy—something we don’t know how to do—for when the wind doesn’t blow. Solar? To get 10 terawatts by 2050, Lewis calculates, we’d need to cover 1 million roofs with panels every day from now until then. “It would take an army,” he says. Obama promised green jobs, but still.

The sacrifices required of developing countries would be immense, because 90% of the growth in global CO2 emissions is expected to occur in developing countries. Here’s a graph former CEQ Chairman Jim Connaughton prepared for the December 2007 major emitters conference:

co2-emissions-connaughton2

Stephen Eule of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce shows that to lower global emissions 50% below today’s levels by 2050 (the minimum reduction required to stabilize CO2 at 450 ppm), developing countries would have to reduce their emissions 62% below the baseline projection even if developed countries magically reduce their emissions to zero. They’d have cut emissions 71% below baseline if developed countries cut their emissions “only” 84% below current levels (essentially the Waxman-Markey reduction target).
eule-developing-country-emission-cuts-needed-to-cut-global-emissions-502

Absent technological miracles (which in their nature can’t be planned or predicted), lowering CO2 to 350 ppm by 2050 would probably require a global depression sustained over several decades.

Along with the push to make 350 the new 450, I detect a shift in climate alarmist rhetoric.

 If I’m not mistaken, there is a new and greater emphasis on the so-called precautionary principle. We don’t really know that limiting CO2 concentrations to 450 ppm would keep a safe lid on global warming, so we should err on the side of caution; 350 ppm is a more protective goal, argue NASA’s James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt. Again, this completely ignores the perils of the political interventions and fossil-energy restrictions required to achieve either of those targets. 

Another rhetorical shift is a subtle revision in the concept of climate sensitivity. Climate sensitivity used to mean how much global warming you get from a given increase in CO2 concentrations. However, since 2001, although CO2 concentrations have increased at an accelerating rate, global temperatures have been stagnant or even declined slightly. To my knowledge, no scientist in the late 1990s predicted a roughly 10-year period of no warming at the start of the 21st Century. This suggests that the climate is less sensitive (less reactive to CO2 emissions) than the alleged “scientific consensus” has been telling us.

That’s inconvenient if the only way to sell energy rationing to a reluctant populace is to claim, over and over again, that climate change is “even worse than scientists previously predicted.”

So the new rhetoric emphasizes the alleged damages of global warming — melting Arctic sea ice, drought in Australia, species migration. And we’re told that these impacts are occurring faster than climate models have predicted.  Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists argued along those lines at a Ways and Means Committee hearing earlier this year on “Scientific Objectives in Climate Change Legislation.” 

Climate sensitivity is thus redefined to mean climate impacts per a given increment of warming rather temperature change per a given increment of CO2. In short, we’re supposed to believe that less warming than the IPCC predicts leads to worse impacts than the IPCC predicts. Hence the need to make 350 ppm the new 450 ppm.

All of which is obviously question-begging, because if the world isn’t warming, how do we know that, say, drought in Southern California is due to CO2 emissions rather than to ocean cycles or some other factor not related to the greenhouse effect? Indeed, if a change in weather or climatic conditions occurs faster than greenhouse climate models project, that is prima facie evidence that the change is not due to greenhouse gas emissions. 

The older view of climate sensitivity – that X amount of CO2 produces Y amount of warming — is the correct one, because it alone allows scientists to frame testable hypotheses. Scientists can measure CO2 concentrations, and they can measure global temperatures, and they can test whether a given increment in CO2 concentrations does or does not yield a hypothetical increase in global temperature.  

As discussed in a previous post, a recent observational study by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi of MIT indicates that the actual climate is about six times less sensitive to CO2 emissions than the IPCC’s “best estimate.”