Lomborg gets spanked

Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist,” has always bugged me as a rather shady character. Now Howard Friel started fact-checking Lomborg’s footnotes, and found them to be wanting.

But when Friel began checking Lomborg’s sources, “I found problems,” he says. “As an experiment, I looked up one of his footnotes, found that it didn’t support what he said, and then did another, and kept going, finding the same pattern.” He therefore took on the Augean stables undertaking of checking every one of the hundreds of citations in Cool It. Friel’s conclusion, as per his book’s title, is that Lomborg is “a performance artist disguised as an academic.”

Read the rest. He seems to have had the habit of citing his sources as saying the exact opposite of what they actually said.

Alaska’s War on Science

Several people expressed surprise at Alaska’s high position on the list of non-religious states. We can’t have people’s expectations shattered, so here’s something to reassure you all that the world has not turned inside out: an Alaskan scientist castigates the state’s attitude on science.

Alaska’s escalating war on science should be a grave concern to us all. On climate change, endangered species, predator control, environmental impacts of industrial development, and other important policy issues, Alaska now has arguably the most anti-science government anywhere in the nation.

It just goes to show that simply leaving the church behind does not guarantee that a population will live the life of reason.

Spotting the black hats among the climate change denialists

Jim Lippard has put up an excellent post identifying the major institutions behind climate change denial. They are almost uniformly conservative and populated with old and unqualified cranks, although Jim is too genteel to put it that way. It’s useful information if you need a scorecard to keep track of the players.

It’s also amusing. Lippard makes this passing mention of a certain notorious crank in a discussion of the denialists with the best academic credentials:

The top-cited scientist, Lubos Motl, has 150 citations for his fourth-most-cited paper, but he’s a theoretical physicist with no publications containing the word “climate.”

Lubos Motl replies!

Commie,

I urge you to instantly remove the libels and lies from this blog, otherwise I will start to work on the legal liquidation of the criminal that you are.

These things may be common among the green trash in which you seem to live but I won’t tolerate it against myself.

Wow. “Legal liquidation.” I’m impressed. Although…did anyone spot any lies or libels against Motl? Does he have 151 citations for that paper, or what?

If you hadn’t realized that Motl is a freakish little sociopath before, that comment may just persuade you.

Why climatologists used the tree-ring data ‘trick’

Since we’re arguing over global warming this week, I thought I’d post a commentary piece that was published in the Morris newspaper this week, by my colleague Pete Wyckoff. Pete is our local tree and climate expert, who works in both the biology and environmental studies discipline, and is very well qualified to describe what was going on with some of the adjustments in the climate data that have some of the nuts screaming shrilly on Fox News.

Local Commentary: Thoughts on ‘Climate-gate’: Mitigate our impact

By Pete Wyckoff

Is the planet cooling? “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick…to hide the decline,” writes climate scientist Phil Jones in a stolen 1999 e-mail which has caused a frenzy. FoxNews.com tells us that we finally have a ‘smoking gun’–proof that scientists are manufacturing a global warming crisis so that they can… they can…(I’ve never really understood the goals of the evil scientific conspirators).

The planet is warming. The data are unequivocal and based on measured temperatures (corrected for things like the “heat island” effect, so please don’t write an angry response claiming that the thermometers are wrong). What Phil Jones was referring to is something else: past temperatures estimated via tree rings. Since 1960, the rings in trees seem to have lost some of their power to record temperature.

Why should tree rings indicate temperature at all? As most of us learned in childhood, the trunks of trees at our latitude tend to put on a distinct growth ring every year. All other things being equal, when the trees are happy, they put on a large ring. When the going gets tough, the rings get thin. What makes a tree happy? Light, nutrients, lack of disease, and warmth (to a point). What do trees despise? Drought. By careful interpretation of past tree growth patterns, we can learn a lot about past climates.

Scientists have spent many years developing the techniques needed to reconstruct climate via tree rings. The problem is that in the past few decades, the tree ring-climate relationships seem to have become “decoupled” in many areas. Why? The main cause seems to be increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. While carbon dioxide is famously a gas that heats the planet (the greenhouse effect is real and uncontroversial), carbon dioxide also directly impacts plants. Carbon dioxide fuels photosynthesis, and increased carbon dioxide in the air can both speed-up plant growth and make plants less sensitive to drought.

Decreased drought sensitivity is an expected response for plants exposed to high levels of carbon dioxide. All along the underside of a plant’s leaves are little holes called “stomata.” These holes can open and close. A tree must open its stomata to take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. Unfortunately, plants lose water out of their open stomata. Plants growing in air that has lots of carbon dioxide can reduce the amount of time their stomata are open, thus making them lose less water and become less susceptible to drought.

Biologists call the concept here “water-use efficiency,” and it is of crucial interest to farmers and foresters alike. Carbon dioxide causes warming that will likely make west central Minnesota a drier place in the future. At the same time, increased carbon dioxide in the air makes plants growing in our region less susceptible to drought. The balance between these two forces will be crucial.

The changing relationship between climate and tree growth is a hot topic of research at your local university. Last Friday, Dr. Chris Cole and Dr. Jon Anderson, of the University of Minnesota, Morris, published a paper in the journal “Global Change Biology” showing that aspen trees in Wisconsin are growing faster than they used to, and much of the increase is attributed to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. Two weeks ago, a former student and I published a paper in the “Journal of Ecology” showing that oak trees in west central Minnesota became less sensitive to drought during the 20th century. If “dust bowl”-severity droughts come again soon, we project that the local oaks will suffer 50 percent less mortality than they likely did in the 1930s.

So what does this all mean? The relationship between tree rings and climate is becoming muddied by the rapid recent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. For most of the past 10,000 years, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere remained reasonably stable. Now they are skyrocketing. Modern tree rings are no longer the reliable recorders of temperature they once were. It is a good thing that we now have thermometers.

What does Phil Jones’ stolen e-mail not mean? It does not mean that global warming is a hoax. It does not mean that there are really any cracks in the scientific consensus that humans are causing dangerous alterations to the global climate.

We humans are changing the climate, largely by emitting vast quantities of carbon dioxide via the way we heat our houses, fuel our cars, and generate our electricity. This is unwise. Yes, the future climate, along with the increased carbon dioxide, may be good for some. For most people, however, the downsides of climate change are likely to far outweigh the benefits. Don’t let Fox News mislead you. As a prudent, conservative people, we should take serious steps to mitigate our impact.

Dr. Pete Wyckoff is Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris.

The buggy comment registration bites us again. There was an interesting discussion between a reader, Don Baccus, and Pete Wyckoff about a small misconception in his editorial. Since they couldn’t post it in a comment, I’m putting it here.

I tried to post this to PZ Myers’ blog (about tree ring proxy temp reconstructs)

But it requires registration, and when I registered, the promised confirmation e-mail never arrived (not even in my junk folder).

You’ve got the “divergence problem” backwards, I think – the problem is there’s a *decline* in the tree ring widths in recent decades, while your description of CO2 effects, if I understand correctly, would lead to an *increase*.

That’s the “hide the decline” comment, “decline” in this case refers to the “divergence problem” (divergence from the instrumental temperature record).

Several leading candidates for the cause of this problem are anthropogenic, though, primarily air pollution. And apparently none of the researchers looking into this believe that the divergence problem indicates any problem with the reconstructions deeper into the past, except possibly during periods as warm as today (but other proxies tell researchers that on a global scale, at least, there hasn’t been such a period for 1,000+ years), and where the timeframes overlap, the tree ring reconstructions map other proxy reconstructions quite nicely. The leading natural, non-anthropogenic candidate appears to be drought, i.e. at a certain temperature threshold drought dominates for those locations that show the problem (BTW not all of the tree ring reconstructions show these problems).

Here’s a recent (2007) survey paper on the divergence problem:

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~liepert/pdf/DArrigo_etal.pdf

Anyway, though you might want to dig a little deeper into this …

—-
Don Baccus
http://donb.photo.net
http://birdnotes.net
http://openacs.org

This is from Pete Wyckoff:

Hey Paul (and Don),

Thanks for picking up my editorial–one of your alert readers has pointed me to an area where my thinking was perhaps muddied by my temperate forest bias. In a 2008 paper in Global and Planetary Change (vol 60, pp 289-305), D’Arrigo et al. discuss possible causes for the “divergence problem” as it applies to very high latitude tree ring records. Not only have some of those records become merely unclear (which could well be carbon dioxide-related), but the particular ring records that caused Mann et al. problems did actually show a decline in growth despite increased temperatures. (To make things even more complicated, I believe the problematic records were based on ring density, not ring width, which is the metric I use in my work). As many of your commenters have correctly pointed out, carbon dioxide fertilization and carbon dioxide-induced drought tolerance can explain the loss of a climate signal, or an artificially enhanced growth signal, but are not likely to jive with a failure to grow.

In reading D’Arrigo et al., my lay person summary for what is going on is this: the Artic is rapidly warming. The trees that we might naively expect to rejoice at this development are instead showing signs of stress. The possible reason for this (of the many presented) that I find most convincing is that the warming is changing the regional hydrology to the point where trees are drought stressed so severely that they just can’t take advantage of the warmth–despite the rise in carbon dioxide!

How did I become confused in the first place? Well, for one, I’m a scientist and I am human, and when I saw a hot topic where my own work seemed relevant (which it is), I immediately jumped to a conclusion that inflated the connection to my own work. I was also led astray by a discussion of the “hide the decline” controversy (which I found disappointingly terse) on RealClimate that linked Briffa et al’s 1998 paper “Trees tell of past climates: but are they speaking less clearly today? “

Is there a way to get this posted? I’m pretty ignorant about how the whole blog-discussion thing is supposed to work.

Back to grading. I keep resolving to give shorter finals, but I never actually follow through.

Cheers,

Pete
PS. Don Baccus seems to be both a computer guy and a excellent nature photographer. Check out his on-line galleries.

Don Baccus replies:

Thanks for the response.

The D’Arrigo 2008 Global and Planetary Change paper is probably the same paper (perhaps modified to meet reviewer critiques) that I linked to as being “in press” in 2007?

Or is it a later paper with more info? If so, I’d appreciate a URL if it’s not behind a firewall (being a humble software engineer and, as you note, photographer, I’m not plugged into the climate science/dendro/biology infrastructure and have no academic access).

It’s interesting stuff … not interesting in the way that the rabid anti-science fuckhead (pardon me!) reality-denying luddite denialsphere types are saying, though. It’s interesting in the true scientific sense … what’s going on today that causes this subset of chronologies to diverge?

Here …

” (To make things even more complicated, I believe the problematic records were based on ring density, not ring width, which is the metric I use in my work)”

Yes, “maximum latewood density” apparently jargoned into “MXD” … high altitude/high latitude trees in the right circumstances apparently (you tell me, you’re the expert!) show most growth in a few short weeks in summer, and therefore are temperature-sensitive (more weeks of sufficiently warm weather means more growth). Makes sense to me, but my professional biology experience is limited to being a field tech doing raptor migration work. All I know about plants is that sometimes they grow, sometimes they don’t, and in field camp sometimes I burn them to keep warm :) Anyway, the claim is that this is a better metric for temperature sensitivity than simple tree ring width, and I believe it, from what I’ve read. In the sense that I trust experts, just as I’d hope you’d give me similar respect if you asked me about a computer science question.

“The possible reason for this (of the many presented) that I find most convincing is that the warming is changing the regional hydrology to the point where trees are drought stressed so severely that they just can’t take advantage of the warmth–despite the rise in carbon dioxide!”

This is the leading non-anthropogenic candidate …

I think the major problem researchers are having with this, though, is that the divergence problem is sort of randomly distributed with no immediately obvious correlation with available precip info. Then again, by definition, “high latitude” means “remote” and “no nearby (usually) met stations” so microclimate etc problems are well, problems. But I do think this is a very strong candidate (and if D`Arrigo 2008 states this more strongly, beyond her 2007 draft, perhaps even stronger, I’d like to read the latest paper rather than just the 2007 draft).

But all that holds true for possible anthropogenic causes. There’s a lack of localized data, I think that’s a big problem here in terms of pinning down the cause of the divergence problem.

But none of this seriously calls into question reconstructions that match available proxy and instrument data for like 90% or so of the period in which the data overlaps. Even the recent divergence problem in areas that have long term data available overlaps with thermometers for about 2/3 of the historical record (one reason why they think that some anthropogenic cause might be there, or a temperature threshold causing drought cause (which would make the denialist claims of a “warm as today” MWP even weaker than they are now, because you don’t see divergence back then)).

And of course, there are chronologies that don’t show the divergence problem at all, something the denialists are strangely quiet about …

Anyway the rational response to the divergence problem is to research it. Not to use it as a basis for claiming that all of science that might bear on climatology is a fraud :) I know I’ll be interested in what researchers find out about this over the next five to ten years …

Thank you very much for your response, and for taking the time to do some reading based on my e-mail, and for taking the time to respond.

And, PZ, thank you for being such a bulldog for what’s right and against what’s wrong.

PS. Don Baccus seems to be both a computer guy and a excellent nature photographer. Check out his on-line galleries.

And thanks for that, too :)

—-
Don Baccus
http://donb.photo.net
http://birdnotes.net
http://openacs.org

And one more from Baccus:

On Dec 17, 2009, at 8:31 PM, Peter Wyckoff wrote:

How did I become confused in the first place? Well, for one, I’m a scientist and I am human, and when I saw a hot topic where my own work seemed relevant (which it is), I immediately jumped to a conclusion that inflated the connection to my own work. I was also led astray by a discussion of the “hide the decline” controversy (which I found disappointingly terse) on RealClimate that linked Briffa et al’s 1998 paper “Trees tell of past climates: but are they speaking less clearly today? “

Regarding the Real Climate stuff … the terseness comes, partly, I believe, from the fact that climate science is so under the microscope that the anti-science/pseudoscience and the rational people share vocabulary and background to such an extent that such terseness is perfectly clear to those of us who are fixated on it.

Not much different than the biology vs. genesis (in all its permutations) debate. We all can talk in code, now, and if you don’t know it, it can seem terse.

Oh, and I missed that Real Climate link to the 2008 paper, I’d found the D’Arrigo 2007 in press work via google …

BTW I hope you don’t think that I don’t think you or any working scientist isn’t human, and are incapable of making mistakes, or having human feelings, and all that :) Or that your response in any way reflects on your expertise in the stuff you work on.

Is there a way to get this posted? I’m pretty ignorant about how the whole blog-discussion thing is supposed to work.

The way it’s supposed to work is that working scientists are supposed to be shouted down and humiliated by torch-burning, castle-storming Rush Limbaugh-worshipping “true Americans”. Filmed in black-and-white like the original Frankenstein movie, appropriate for the anti-progress mindset of these people.

And if scientists don’t crawl away and hide their research … death threats, attempts to get them fired, censured, etc.

(I’m not kidding, one climate scientist in Texas was given a police bodyguard before giving a talk in the last couple of months because of death threats, and scientists at CRU and Ben Santer at LLNL have gotten death threats, Ben Santer as far back as 1996, and they’re not the only ones). At this week’s AGU, a scientist at Penn State said an alumni tried to get him fired for saying “there’s no peer reviewed papers that overturn mainstream climate science” (paraphrase). James Hansen reports he and his co-workers are now spending much of their time working on FOIA requests that ask for all their correspondence to be released into the public domain.

Fear for science, dudes. The far right, especially here in the US, wants to bury science in the name of both extreme biblical literalism and libertarianism.

Anyway, thanks again, Peter, for your response.

—-
Don Baccus
http://donb.photo.net
http://birdnotes.net
http://openacs.org

Randi responds

Unfortunately, he still doesn’t understand the gist of our complaint, but he does clarify a few issues.

I do not, and did not, deny the established fact — arrived at by extensive scientific research — that average global temperatures have increased by a bit less than one Celsius degree. My commentary was concerned with my amateur confusion about the myriad of natural phenomena that obviously bring about worldwide climate changes and whether we can properly assign the cause to anthropogenic influences. Yes, I’m aware of the massive release of energy — mostly heat — that we’ve produced by exhuming and burning oil, natural gas, and coal. We’ve also attacked forests and turned them into fuel by converting them into paper at further energy expense, paper that is also burned, in turn. My remarks, again, are directed at the complexity of determining whether this GW is anthropogenic or not. I do not deny that possibility. In fact, I accept it as quite probable.

One of the more pernicious tactics of denialists is not to outright take a stand and reject an established point, but to instead raise unfounded doubts where there are none of any significance — to falsely state that there is a respectable middle ground of “the scientists aren’t sure” when the science hammers home over and over again that they are pretty damned sure.

Yes, it is quite probable that global warming has a significant anthropogenic component. About as probable as the idea that HIV causes AIDS, species diversity is driven by evolutionary processes, and that the world is round. Sure, someone could reasonably suggest that there are other agents that cause AIDS (so find them already and show us the evidence), or that there are new mechanisms that drive biological change (yes, please, show us some evidence), or that…OK, no one is going to contradict the fact that the world is an oblate spheroid. What we know is that humans are pumping out greenhouse gases released from sequestered carbon sources and gently tipping the balance of solar heat retention towards more warming. No, Randi, we aren’t burning fuel and heating the world directly. That’s a red herring.

I’m a bit disappointed. This was a case where Randi ought to have either a) admitted simple error, or b) recused himself from the argument, citing a lack of information. Either would have been the responsible thing to do.

Or he could have taken Phil Plait’s approach, and simply linked to a site that beautifully refutes the AGW deniers chief claims. Randi chastises me for not consulting him before posting his criticisms, but I wonder if Randi ran his not-pology by Phil before posting it?

The one thing he shouldn’t have done is reaffirm doubt where it is undeserved. It reminds me of all the apologists for Uri Geller, who like to say that although he sometimes does a few tricks when he’s nervous, his powers are real whenever Randi isn’t around to intimidate him. Of course it’s possible — it’s just that the case has been made so strongly that Geller is a phony and that human CO2 emissions contribute to global warming that it’s disingenuous to argue for the exceedingly unlikely…especially when there are special interests out there eager to grab onto that glimmer of false doubt to continue to promote more self-destructive behavior.

I stand by my earlier objection. Randi has made a mistake that will make denialists gleeful, and his current denial of denial doesn’t change a thing.

But here, on a lighter note:

I should add that conditions that make the frigid north a bit more tropical do not bode well for Randi’s home in Florida.

Say it ain’t so, Randi!

This is so disappointing: James Randi joins the ranks of the climate change denialists, and he does so on the basis of an extremely poor argument. I know, he’s a professional skeptic about everything, but skeptics must have some standard for evidence … a standard which the climatologists have reached, while the denialists have not. Here’s the core of Randi’s dissent from the scientific consensus.

I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid. I base this on my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of the facts about planet Earth. This ball of hot rock and salt water spins on its axis and rotates about the Sun with the expected regularity, though we’re aware that lunar tides, solar wind, galactic space dust and geomagnetic storms have cooled the planet by about one centigrade degree in the past 150 years. The myriad of influences that act upon Earth are so many and so variable — though not capricious — that I believe we simply cannot formulate an equation into which we enter variables and come up with an answer. A living planet will continually belch, vibrate, fracture, and crumble a bit, and thus defeat an accurate equation. Please note that this my amateur opinion, based on probably insufficient data.

At least he’s self-aware enoughto realize that he has come to this conclusion on the basis of his personal ignorance. He has two main reasons otherwise to disagree with the idea of anthropogenic global warming.

One is the idea that climate is such a complex product of multiple phenomena that we should expect significant variation, and that no one could possibly have a single equation that describes it all. This is entirely true, but irrelevant. Climate scientists have collected a huge amount of data, and the confounding fact that none of them would ever deny is that it’s variable, messy, noisy stuff, with loads of daily/monthly/yearly variation, and it has to be analyzed to find long term trends. The consensus was not reached because somebody had a magic formula that predicts a result. It was reached because a body of observation has shown long term change is going on. They are aware of possible causes, and they know that phenomena like volcanic eruptions and cyclic changes in solar activity effect climate…and our situation is not sufficiently explained by those kinds of natural events. One consistent change is a rise in CO2 levels, and we know that we are digging up huge reservoirs of sequestered carbon and dumping it into the atmosphere.

The other source of his skepticism is one that Randi should have been more skeptical about: the Petition Project. This is a project by the denialists to gather enough signatures to show a strong pattern of dissent in the scientific community (Sound familiar? The Discovery Institute has done exactly the same thing with their “Dissent from Darwin” list). They’ve got over 30,000 signatures so far! However, as with the Discovery Institute’s list, only a tiny proportion of the signatories are actually qualified, and their procedure for gathering signatures is incredibly sloppy and prone to accumulate fake names. This is what you’d expect: they don’t want quality control, for the propaganda purposes of this list, all you need is quantity.

The source for this list is also rather dubious. It comes from a tiny team of crank scientists operating out of a ‘think tank’ in a small town in Oregon.

I would expect Randi to have given his denialist sources the same degree of critical analysis that he gave to the conclusions of the IPCC. Maybe he did, since he has shown no understanding of the IPCC determinations at all, but I think it was a gross mistake on his part to therefore charge in and decide on the basis of his rudimentary knowledge that maybe the fringe cranks were right.