Climate Science Watch Weekly Update – July 13, 2010

Posted on Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Policy-focused reconstruction financing to rebuild the country; NY Times: Putting “the manufactured controversy known as Climategate behind us”; NASA: first half of 2010 set global temperature record; Giant ice sculpture to be unveiled outside U.S. Senate July 15; U.S. Climate Change Adaptation Task Force public outreach meeting. Taking notice of some current developments.

Post by Rick Piltz

Bringing the rule of law to Wall Street; Policy-focused reconstruction financing
Outstanding analysis by James K. Galbraith and strategic prescription for rebuilding the country that includes dealing with climate, energy, the Gulf Coast, and a host of priorities neglected for the past 30 years.

New York Times: “A Climate Change Corrective” (Editorial, July 11 print edition)

“Perhaps now we can put the manufactured controversy known as Climategate behind us and turn to the task of actually doing something about global warming. On Wednesday, a panel in Britain concluded that scientists whose e-mail had been hacked late last year had not, as critics alleged, distorted scientific evidence to prove that global warming was occurring and that human beings were primarily responsible….

“There have since been several reports upholding the U.N.’s basic findings, including a major assessment in May from the National Academy of Sciences. This assessment not only confirmed the relationship between climate change and human activities but warned of growing risks — sea level rise, drought, disease — that must swiftly be addressed by firm action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

“Given the trajectory the scientists say we are on, one must hope that the academy’s report, and Wednesday’s debunking of Climategate, will receive as much circulation as the original, diversionary controversies.”

On this, also see:

CSW, July 1: Interview with Michael Mann on the Penn State Final Report and the war on climate scientists

CSW May 26: NRC: US should act now to cut emissions, develop a national strategy to adapt to inevitable impacts

Climate Progress commentary
Joe Romm at Climate Progress recalls for the record: “It most be pointed out, however, that the NYT overhyped the ‘manufactured controversy known as Climategate’ as much if not more than other media outlets, from the beginning.

‘Climategate’ Debunking Gets Less Coverage Than Original [So-called] Scandal
“…what sort of stories drive coverage: a braying spectacle of scandal-mongering is sure to get attention. Dry, academic studies written by experts, not so much….This is, unfortunately, quite common. The right erupts with anger, the media treats the ‘controversy’ as a legitimate story, and the public hears all about it. We eventually learn that the story was nonsense, but at that point, the media has lost all interest.”

Giant Ice Sculpture to be Unveiled Outside U.S. Senate (July 15, Noon)

At an event at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on 15 July 2010, youth groups and climate experts will highlight the melting disinformation campaign of climate deniers.

12 Noon, East Front Lawn, U.S. Capitol (Senate side); near 1st St and Constitution NE ( Sculpture will be unveiled at noon and will be out all afternoon)

First Half of 2010 Set Global Temperature Record

Global temperature data released July 9 by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies show that the first half of 2010 was the warmest January-June period in the 130 year record (0.70 C above the long term mean. The warmth was especially pronounced in the Arctic.

U.S. Saw Much Above Normal Temperatures in June

U.S. temperature and precipitation data released July 8 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that April through June in the Eastern U.S. was the hottest on record.

Obama Administration Officials to Convene Outreach Meeting of the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force in Chicago, July 15

Live webcast

Agenda

When President Obama signed the Executive Order on Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance, on October 5, 2009, he called on the Task Force to develop, within one year, Federal recommendations for adapting to climate change impacts both domestically and internationally.

Also see:
CSW May 28, part 1: Text of remarks by Obama science adviser John Holdren to the National Climate Adaptation Summit

CSW May 28, part 2: Holdren at Adaptation Summit: We’re not serious until we put a price on greenhouse gas emissions

Finally:
It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.

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Interview with Stephen Schneider on climate science expert credibility study

Posted on Monday, July 12, 2010

Climate Science Watch talked with Stanford University Prof. Stephen Schneider about his co-authored article, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Schneider discussed the rationale and implications of the study and responded to several criticisms that have been raised. See Details for video and text from the interview. UPDATE July 19: Stephen Schneider, 1945 - July 19, 2010, R.I.P.

Post by Rick Piltz and Rebeka Ryvola

Earlier CSW post:
June 21: New study finds striking level of agreement among climate experts on anthropogenic climate change

“Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that 97-98% of climate researchers examined who are most actively publishing in the field support the IPCC conclusions, i.e., are convinced by the evidence for human-caused climate change, and that the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of researchers questioning the findings is significantly below that of convinced researchers. The authors of this first-of-its-kind study used metrics of climate-specific expertise and overall scientific prominence to examine expert credibility among scientists who agree with or question the primary conclusions of the IPCC….

Stephen H. Schneider is
Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies,
Professor, Department of Biology, and
Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment, at
Stanford University

The video contains portions of our July 8 interview with Prof. Schneider. The transcript below contains more extended text from the interview, in addition to what is included in the video.

From Stephen Schneider interview with Climate Science Watch director Rick Piltz, July 8, 2010:

CSW: The article on climate science expert credibility that you co-authored, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) – what prompted this study?

Schneider: There are so many claims out there from all kinds of interests, about how climate change is ‘the end of the world,’ or ‘good for you,’ and people – policymakers and media – are understandably confused. Part of the problem is that over time the media has fired so many of its specialists that there aren’t a lot of people left to sort out the relative credibility of all the claims. So, since a lot of those people who deny that humans have any impact on climate are claiming that they have scientific expertise, we said let’s just put it to a test.

There’s a very well-known and widely used independent index, which is: how many papers have you published and how many times have people cited them in the scientific literature? Those people who chose to put themselves on lists and petitions denying that there was a human impact on climate, let’s see how many papers they’ve published, and how many citations they have. Those people associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), let’s check them and see if there’s a difference.

CSW: In terms of how you defined the groups in the study, you have one category that you refer to as “convinced by the evidence” – convinced by the evidence for anthropogenic climate change. The other group is the “unconvinced by the evidence.” Are you defining them by scientific perspective, or are you defining them by policy positions?

Schneider: It’s a bit controversial how you define anyone in categories like “convinced” and “unconvinced” since none of us – I hope – are 100% convinced of anything, or 100% unconvinced, but we can have a vast preponderance of evidence. There are lists where groups have organized themselves into pro, basically, and con human impacts on climate. Most of the ‘pros’ work on the IPCC, mainstream science, and most of the ‘cons’ do not. Only two or three are in common. They wrote petitions saying they didn’t think there was much likelihood of anthropogenic change, and we put them in the unconvinced category. That is, they put themselves in the unconvinced category. As far as those who spent much of their life working at IPCC, there’s a very high probability they are convinced this problem is real or they wouldn’t be putting in all this time. The bottom line is that we let people self-define and then we let the numbers fall where they were, in terms of the relative credibility of each of those groups – and the credibility was vastly different. Not surprisingly, those people who do work daily in climate science have a much, much higher citation count and more published papers than those who just claim it isn’t true but really, for the most part, are not prime workers in climate change.

CSW: Well then, what about the charge that the study, in effect, is creating a ‘blacklist’ of certain scientists? It’s saying that these are the skeptics, the unconvinced by the evidence, but they don’t have any credibility and so you shouldn’t pay any attention to them.

Schneider: Well it’s laughable that it’s a blacklist. A blacklist is what somebody like Joe McCarthy did back in the 50’s, or Senator Inhofe is doing now, when we all know it’s the senator who is deliberately distorting. How could we be doing a blacklist when we’re using the names that they gave? All we did was test it. The fact that they don’t publish very much is not our issue. This is a fact check.

It really matters what your credentials are. If you have a heart arrhythmia as I do, and I also have a cardiologist, and you also have an oncological problem as I do, I’m not going to my cancer doc to ask him about my heart medicine and my cardiologist to ask about my chemo, I’m going to the experts. Who’s an expert really matters. People with no expertise, their opinion frankly does not matter on complex issues. And in my opinion shouldn’t even be quoted when we’re talking about the details of the science.

When we’re talking about what to do about it, then every citizen’s opinion is just as important as anybody else’s, and everybody should be quoted. But not about how many degrees of warming there is – that takes a lot of knowledge, to be able to know what you’re talking about. That knowledge is very well reflected in the counts of the number of times people’s scientific papers have been cited by their colleagues. That’s where the mainstream climate scientists have a major advantage over those who are unconvinced. We feel that’s a robust conclusion, that most of the claimants that there’s no anthropogenic climate change are very weak scientists – by and large – and most of their comments are really not very scientifically credible.

CSW: I believe Judith Curry argued that, on your various lists, under “convinced of the evidence” you were including people who are ecologists and biologists, and who aren’t really experts in the climate change detection and attribution research. So that somehow skews your notion of how to sort people out in terms of credibility. What’s your response to that?

Schneider: Well, there are two responses. First of all, there are a couple dozen people in the world that work in ecology – that includes people like Terry Root, Camille Parmesan, and myself, among others – who actually look at the bloom dates of roses in your grandmother’s back yard and when birds come back. We do detection and attribution studies. Those people are in the IPCC and they are legitimate experts and they have published research in Science and Nature and PNAS and places like that. There was an entire chapter on it in [IPCC] Working Group II and those people, again, like Cynthia Rosenzweig, were included in the IPCC database.

But she does have a point, that not everyone in IPCC is an expert in detection and attribution. That’s certainly true. But when she said that the IPCC group that we used in our PNAS study should be cut down to something like 20% of the original. That’s hundreds of people, that’s still quite a lot of people. If you look at the “unconvinced of evidence” group, virtually nobody in it has ever published a paper on detection and attribution. So, by Judy’s own logic, that means it’s virtually a null set. That means there’s almost nobody in the unconvinced category who has any expertise whatsoever in detection and attribution. So, if you take her logic, and apply it symmetrically to the “convinced” and “unconvinced” you narrow the “convinced” group down to a smaller but still clear and robust population and the “unconvinced” has virtually no expertise, and their opinion becomes completely irrelevant.

CSW: What about the argument that some of the people critical of the study have made, that there’s something wrong with the metric of counting numbers of publications and counting how often your work is cited by other scientists. Some people will say that just the number of your publications doesn’t necessarily tell what the quality of your science is, and of course people of similar viewpoints will cite each other, or some articles have 10 or 12 authors and that racks up a lot of totals for some people, so using the publication and citation metrics doesn’t necessarily represent a scientifically correct perspective. Rather, it’s an elitist appeal to authority claiming that one group is more credible on the basis of these questionable metrics.

Schneider: Well, first of all, there’s no perfect metric. What we’re trying to do is find out, in the spirit of risk management, where is the preponderance of evidence? Where is the preponderance of skill? We didn’t make [these metrics] up, which is the number of papers people publish and the number of times colleagues cite them. There is a very widespread belief, built on evidence, that those people with stronger publication records, getting themselves published many more times in peer reviewed literature – which is not easy – and the number of times you’re cited, the number of times other people are quoting you, is a very good metric as to whether you just published a meaningless paper about something irrelevant, or whether that paper has real clout. 

The only way you can get citation and not have quality is if you have made a big error. In fact, one of the things we did to try to eliminate that is we didn’t just look at the average number of cites, we looked at the top four or five papers each person published, and then we tried to check and see whether one of them was massively cited. We’d cut that out, saying either that was their one brilliant shining star or they made so many mistakes that everybody caught them. As it turns out it made almost no difference in the statistics. We feel that these statistics are pretty robust in giving you the strong preponderance of evidence that those people who publish more and have more citations are much more scientifically credible.

About the ‘elitist’ part: Scientists are really stuck. It’s exactly the same thing in medicine, it’s the same thing with pilot’s licenses and driver’s licenses: We don’t let just anyone go out there and make any claim that they’re an expert, do anything they want, without checking their credibility. Is it elitist to license pilots and doctors? Is it elitist to have pilots tested every year by the FAA to make sure that their skills are maintained? Is it elitist to have board certification on specialities in various health professions? I don’t think so. I think it’s the way we have safety. We have an FDA, which analyzes food and drugs.

We’re talking about planetary life support. People who are special interests in making money in the fossil fuel industry, who are ideologues, who are so deeply opposed to government regulation or international agreements, will just make any wild claim to support their ideology or special interest. They’ll find some hired gun PhD, or they’ll pick weak scientists for the most part – and should they really be afforded as much credibility? Can you tell me that a hundred institutions around the world, that have been working for 40 years, that have had dozens and dozens of carefully reviewed assessments, are somehow no more credible – even if they’re more elitist – than petroleum geologists funded by an oil company? They’re as knowledgeable about climate science as I would be about how to fix the leak in the Deepwatergate problem. I mean, they’re really not experts, and it really does matter what people know. If we do not do the due diligence of letting people understand the relative credibility of claimants of truth, then all we do is have a confused public who hears claim and counter-claim.

That’s why there’s a National Academy of Sciences: it has to sort out the relative credibility of claims. Why is there an IPCC? Because the average person is not trained in what cloud feedback is, nor is the average geologist, just as the average climate scientist is not trained in how to find oil! So, let’s stay where we have our expertise. Science is a meritocracy. You have to have evidence. When somebody says I don’t believe in global warming, I ask, “Do you believe in evidence? Do you believe in a preponderance of evidence?”

CSW: What about the charge that there is a sort of commingling of science expertise with policy prescription here, in that, to say “convinced by the evidence for anthropogenic climate change,” that takes in most of the science community but it would also incorporate people who have a range of views on what kind of a climate policy would be desirable. There may be people who accept anthropogenic climate change but don’t support legislation for a strong mitigation policy. Or don’t support strong government regulation to limit greenhouse gases. Does it seem to you that real credible expertise in climate science points in the direction of a particular type of policy prescription, that we need a strong mitigation policy? Can you disconnect the two – and should we?

Schneider: I think it’s very difficult to disentangle them, without looking up every statement everyone has ever made. But most of people that signed the petitions saying they do not believe anthropogenic global warming is very likely, and they’re not convinced, are also making very strong statements that we shouldn’t have climate policy. Actually, very often people who say they aren’t convinced by the climate science are saying that simply because they do not want regulations, because they are anti-regulation ideologues, or special interest in the fossil fuel industry, or have a world view about private rights being more important than collective protection. Now, we aren’t going to be able to specifically separate them one by one unless you can find petitions that separate them – and those petitions don’t exist. But there’s a very, very high correlation between people who are convinced that there’s anthropogenic climate change and their argument that something should be done to slow it down to protect the planetary life support system. And there’s a very very high correlation between those who are unconvinced and saying “why should we have climate policy if we aren’t even convinced this is going on?” So, I think our conclusions are quite robust, though I have no doubt there could be 10 or 20% exceptions.

We have a database of over 1,000 people. Only a small number of them are going to fit into those ambiguous categories, and therefore do almost nothing to the statistics. So these are nitpicks, designed to discredit the overall preponderance of evidence we found. So while we feel that it is not a perfect measure, it’s a very close fit to the basic preponderance of thinking of the convinced and unconvinced. And if they don’t believe that, let them do their own study. 

They also make a claim, which we haven’t discussed yet, that the reason the mainstream scientists have more papers and citations is because the “unconvinced” scientists have been systematically blocked by the peer review system, which is a cabal of government-funded scientists who are trying to eliminate the opinion of the contrarians. Now, this is pure assertion. They have absolutely no data. Have they ever shown us how many papers they’ve submitted, relative to the others?

I edit a journal called Climatic Change and I can tell you that the number of submissions I get from people with completely unconventional views is trivial, a tiny fraction of the hundreds and hundreds of submissions where people are not convinced of every detail, but they’re convinced the problem is real enough that it has to be studied and looked at and we have to take a look at the implications. So there are very few of them that are submitting. Now, they could come back and say, well that’s because we know that we’ll never get through the peer review process. Now they’re imputing that we’re some dishonest community who’s not going to give them a fair shake. When I get those papers, I often publish them, but I publish them with editorials that have opposite points of view. Just as, if I get a new radical idea in saying that climate change is going to be worse than the mainstream now thinks, I’ll probably publish it in Climatic Change, but then I’ll get an editorial from someone who is a little more conservative.

So they make this assertion that they’re being systematically excluded, because they have no other argument, they no have evidence for the assertion. Let them do a study. Let them show us the letters of all the papers that have been rejected. What we did is look at real evidence, independently collected: How many papers, and how many citations. That’s independent, and the only way you can claim it isn’t true is to invoke some massive conspiracy that is frankly laughable.

CSW: One critic, I believe it was Roy Spencer, called attention to your use of the term “tenets” –“the basic tenets of anthropogenic climate change,” or “the basic tenets of the IPCC.” He said that the term tenets belongs in religion, not science.

Schneider: Roy Spencer ought to know about religion since he publishes on creationist blog sites and I don’t, so I’ll give him expertise on religion that I don’t have. However, the word tenet has been used since I can remember being in 8th grade referring to a set of conditions and beliefs and criteria. So, in the sense that it’s criteria, or underlying aspects of a problem, I don’t have any difficulty using that word. I mean the tenets of those people who are unconvinced about climate change is that as long as there are loose ends anywhere, they don’t accept it.

The tenets on the side of the IPCC? Well it’s that greenhouse gases have increased. They trap heat. A significant fraction, almost all recent increases, are from human activities. And so forth. Each one of those is a component of the knowledge base. ‘Tenet’ is perfectly legitimate, it’s a standard word. The religion does not come from the side of the mostly convinced.

CSW: Last thoughts to leave us with?

Schneider: The main thing I want people to remember is that when we’re talking about expertise, we’re not talking about expertise in what to do about a problem. That is a social judgment and every person has the same right to their opinion as any person in climate. However, we are talking about the relative likelihood that there could be serious or even dangerous changes. Because before you even decide how you want to deploy resources as a hedge against a wide range of important social problems, you have to know how serious the problems are. All we’re trying to do in science is give the best estimate that honest people with a lot of evidence can, about the relative risks, so they can make wise decisions in their own lives and in who they elect about how we should deal with it.

If you have no idea about the risk, it’s very hard to rationally do risk management. And we feel that there many people deliberately muddying the risk waters because of a combination of ideology and special interest. We have every right to point out that they have weaker credentials in science than those who are convinced on the basis of the forty year record and longer that the scientific community has been successively examining, year after year after year. That is how we make decisions in medical, in health, or in business. We operate on the basis of preponderance of evidence. The same thing must be done for the planetary life support system. That’s why it’s so important to understand who’s credible.

“Expert Credibility in Climate Change” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online before print, June 21, 2010)

Stephen Schneider’s website

Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate

Earlier CSW posts:

May 21: Climate scientists tell House committee: We know the risk, now it’s up to policymakers to act
The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing on May 20 to examine the intersection between climate science and the political process.  Ralph Cicerone, Mario Molina, Stephen Schneider, Ben Santer, and William Happer testified. 

February 24: Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists

December 30, 2009: Stephen Schneider: Climate Denier Gate a case of Science as a Contact Sport

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Turning the tables: Virginia AG Cuccinelli under investigation for climate probe by Greenpeace

Posted on Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Greenpeace has filed a Freedom of Information request with Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office asking for records of his communications with climate change ‘skeptics’ and ‘conservative’ organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Cato Institute. Greenpeace is seeking to expose some of the inner workings of the network of denialists who are attempting to discredit the work of certain climate scientists and stop EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, SolveClimate reports.

Earlier CSW posts:
July 1: Interview with Michael Mann on the Penn State Final Report and the war on climate scientists
May 28: University petitions court to quash Cuccinelli subpoena of climate scientist Michael Mann’s papers

Excerpt from post on SolveClimate:

Virginia AG Cuccinelli Under Investigation for Climate Probe—By Greenpeace

Is his investigation of climatologist Michael Mann an unlawful, unduly burdensome and impermissible intrusion into scientific research? 

by Elizabeth McGowan - July 6, 2010

…The environmental advocacy organization Greenpeace US is now doggedly pursuing a tangled paper trail which they hope will expose the inner workings of a well-connected network of naysayers attempting to discredit the work of certain climate scientists and to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from deploying the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases….

Since becoming Virginia’s top lawyer under the Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell administration this year, [Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli] has joined handfuls of other states in filing a lawsuit against EPA for attempting to curb greenhouse gases, challenged federal health care reform and directed state-funded universities to remove sexual orientation from their list of anti-discrimination policies.

The legal action against EPA came after the agency ruled in December that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger human health. Virginia and the other states want to force EPA to reopen hearings on its December finding or block the regulations.

Their claim is that EPA’s finding depends on faulty data from the U.N.‘s climate science panel.

That latter argument is what intrigues Greenpeace researchers who are seeking transparency about who is financing attempts to undermine the work of Mann and other IPCC scientists.

Greenpeace filed Freedom of Information requests with the University of Virginia back in December and with Cuccinelli’s office in June. Specifically, the environmental advocates are looking to see if there’s a link between the attorney general and two former University of Virginia professors who argue that the man-made causes of global warming are being vastly exaggerated.

Patrick Michaels is now a senior fellow in environmental studies with the conservative Washington-based Cato Institute. He resigned from his position as Virginia’s climatologist after 27 years when critics pointed out the utility industry was funding his research. S. Fred Singer, a retired environmental science professor, is now the president of an organization he calls the Science and Environmental Policy Project.

Both climate skeptics are part of an echo chamber that continues to exaggerate the importance of the strategically circulated “Climategate” e-mails, [Greenpeace research director Kert] Davies said.

In February, Singer filed a petition requesting that the EPA withdraw its endangerment finding. He submitted it as co-founder of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, along with representatives from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Singer’s Science and Environmental Policy Project.

What information is Greenpeace seeking about Michaels and Singer? For starters, they want a list of grants that financed their research. The organization also has requested conflict-of-interest statements, disclosure forms on outside income, correspondence with conservative advocacy groups and correspondence with ExxonMobil and other companies.

From the attorney general’s office, Greenpeace wants correspondence with confirmed climate change skeptics and conservative organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Cato Institute…. [emphasis added]

Cuccinelli has not yet responded to Greenpeace’s FOI request….

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Leading US climate scientists are being subjected to a barrage of right-wing lunatic hate mail

Posted on Monday, July 05, 2010

The UK Guardian reported July 5 on how some of the leading US climate scientists are being subjected to a “vitriolic campaign” of hate mail, some of it quite menacing. US authorities appear to be doing little about it, in part because the hate speech put out by popular right-wing commentators and the bizarre and sometimes vicious e-mail they seem to inspire among some of their followers is protected under US law. The Guardian quotes Stephen Schneider, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, and Gavin Schmidt in the U.S. and several scientists in the U.K. Schneider is quoted as saying he has “observed an ‘immediate, noticeable rise’ in emails whenever climate scientists were attacked by prominent right-wing US commentators, such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.” Michael Mann, too, notes that “the emails come in bursts, and do seem to be timed with high-profile attack pieces on talk radio and other fringe media outlets.” Thus the toxic, degenerating situation in the US. We have an aggressive disinformation campaign aimed at intimidating the climate science community—in part by singling out for attack some of those who have made the effort to communicate essential climate science findings to policymakers and their fellow citizens.

From the Guardian: 

US climate scientists receive hate mail barrage in wake of UEA scandal

Vitriolic campaign targets American scientists following leak of climate unit emails
Leo Hickman
guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 July 2010 17.25 BST

Climate scientists in the US say police inaction has left them defenceless by in the face of a torrent of death threats and hate mail, leaving them fearing for their lives and one to contemplate arming himself with a handgun.

The scientists say the threats have increased since the furore over leaked emails from the University of East Anglia began last November, and a sample of the hate mail sent in recent months and seen by the Guardian reveals the scale and vitriolic tone of the abuse.

The scientists revealed they have been told to “go gargle razor blades” and have been described as “Nazi climate murderers”. Some emails have been sent to them without any attempt by the sender to disguise their identity. Even though the scientists have received advice from the FBI, the local police say they are not able to act due to the near-total tolerance of “freedom of speech” in the US.

The problem appears less severe in the UK but, Professor Phil Jones, the UEA scientist at the centre of the hacked email controversy, revealed in February he had been receiving two death threats a week and had contemplated suicide. “People said I should go and kill myself,” he said.
“They said that they knew where I lived. They were coming from all over the world.” The third and final independent review into the issues raised by the hacked UEA emails is due to be published on Wednesday when Sir Muir Russell presents his panel’s conclusions.

Professor Stephen Schneider, a climatologist based at Stanford University in California, whose name features in the UEA emails, says he has received “hundreds” of violently abusive emails since last November. The peak came in December during the Copenhagen climate change summit, he said, but the number has picked up again in recent days since he co-authored a scientific paper last month which showed that 97%-98% of climate scientists agree that mankind’s carbon emissions are causing global temperatures to increase.

Schneider described his attackers as “cowards” and said he had observed an “immediate, noticeable rise” in emails whenever climate scientists were attacked by prominent right-wing US commentators, such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

“[The senders] are not courageous people,” said Schneider. “Where are they getting their information from? They just listen to assertions made on blogs and rightwing talkshows. It’s pathetic.”

Schneider said the FBI had taken an interest earlier this year when his name appeared on a “death list” on a neo-Nazi website alongside other climate scientists with apparent Jewish ancestry. But, to date, no action has been taken.

“The effect on me has been tremendous,” said Schneider. “Some of these people are mentally imbalanced. They are invariably gun-toting rightwingers. What do I do? Learn to shoot a Magnum? Wear a bullet-proof jacket? I have now had extra alarms fitted at my home and my address is unlisted. I get scared that we’re now in a new Weimar republic where people are prepared to listen to what amounts to Hitlerian lies about climate scientists.”

Dr Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said he has also been receiving similar emails since last November when a private email of his was released into the public domain in which he had said: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Trenberth has gone on to repeatedly defend his email and explain its context, but says he has now sent a file of abusive emails totalling “19 pages of text at about 10pt font” to his university’s security officials. He said the response of the US police had been “pathetic”, but also blamed it on freedom-of-speech legislation.

Professor Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University and leading proponent of the “Hockey Stick graph”, said his experiences of hate mail were “eerily similar” to those described by Schneider. “I’m not comfortable talking about the details, especially as some of these matters remain under police investigation,” he said. “What I can say is that the emails come in bursts, and do seem to be timed with high-profile attack pieces on talk radio and other fringe media outlets.”

Last month, Mann told ABC News in the US that the following message was typical of the emails he has been receiving: “Six feet under with the roots is where you should be. I was hoping I would see the news that you’d committed suicide. Do it, freak.” Another climate scientist, who wished to remain anonymous, said he had had a dead animal dumped on his doorstep and now travels with bodyguards.

Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and co-author of the RealClimate website, said he had chosen to adopt a different strategy and now largely ignores the abusive emails he receives. “I learned a while ago that there is no way to prevent people who have no idea who you are, or what you think, or what you do, using your name to project their problems onto,” he said. “Should I be offended and get annoyed, or should I just look upon my interlocutor with bemusement and pity?”

UK-based climatologists working outside of UEA report they have received far fewer abusive emails compared to their US counterparts. Dr Myles Allen, head of the climate dynamics group at University of Oxford’s Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department, said he only tends to get such emails when he writes an article in the press and that they “tend to start off ‘Dear Communists, know that you will fail.’”

“I suspect part of the reason people feel they have to attack climate scientists is that politicians and environmentalists have a tendency to hide behind the science,” he said. “In the run-up to Copenhagen, we often heard the phrase ‘the science dictates’ - that we need a 40% cut in rich-country emissions by 2020, for example - when in fact only a very specific, and politically loaded, interpretation of the science implied any such thing. If people who claim to be on the side of the science use scientists as human shields, it is hardly surprising that the scientists end up getting shot at.”

Dr Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, said he had had “mercifully few” abusive emails or letters compared to scientists in the US. “I do get letters and emails accusing me of being wrong and stupid, but I have received few really abusive ones. I got one accusing me of being a communist, but so far at the Met Office at least we haven’t been on the receiving end of the types of hate mail the US scientists have apparently been getting. Also in Australia, I hear.”

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Earlier CSW posts:
July 1: Interview with Michael Mann on the Penn State Final Report and the war on climate scientists

June 21: New study finds striking level of agreement among climate experts on anthropogenic climate change

May 28: University petitions court to quash Cuccinelli subpoena of climate scientist Michael Mann’s papers

May 23: ABC World News: Climate Scientists Claim ‘McCarthy-Like Threats’

April 30: Denialist Morano on scientists: “Rejoicing that their entire careers are getting pissed on”

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Interview with Michael Mann on the Penn State Final Report and the war on climate scientists

Posted on Thursday, July 01, 2010

Climate Science Watch interviewed Michael Mann on the release of the Penn State University “Final Investigation Report” on allegations of misconduct levied against Dr. Mann late last year by climate change ‘skeptics’ and denialists. The report concluded that there is “no substance” to the allegations. We also asked Dr. Mann about ongoing attacks on the credibility of climate science and on the integrity of climate scientists, and about his recent comments about the iconic ‘hockey stick’ graph of the global temperature record.  See Details for video and transcript.

Post by Rick Piltz and Rebeka Ryvola

As the bogus ‘climategate’ controversy over scientists’ stolen emails – a denialist propaganda coup that was mishandled with shameful credulity in the mainstream media – recedes in the rearview mirror, there is still the ongoing war on climate science and climate scientists to deal with. Hopefully reporters and commentators won’t continue to blow the climate science story with a weakness for diversionary tactics.

Transcript of our interview with Michael Mann

Climate Science Watch director Rick Piltz:  Can you comment on the Penn State report? How should people interpret the findings? What follows from it?

Michael Mann: I was pleased that the committee, which was made up of a blue ribbon panel of leading Penn State scientists, found that I had not engaged in anything that could in any way be described or assessed as misconduct. They were unanimous on that point, that there was in fact no evidence of scientific misconduct. They were quite specific, they took their task quite seriously. They addressed every allegation that has been made by our detractors. They interviewed leading scientists in my field.  They looked at issues involving procedures in obtaining grants and writing proposals. They looked at issues involving the archiving of data. In every case they found that, despite the allegations made by my detractors, in no way have I engaged in any inappropriate scientific behavior over the course of my career. They’re simply specious allegations that have been lodged against me.

CSW: Even if we could put this bogus stolen e-mail controversy behind us, and after all the misuse that’s been made of it, the problem of the attacks on the credibility of climate science and on the integrity of climate scientists is not in the past, it’s ongoing. How is that affecting your work and the work of other climate scientists? What kinds of things are going on right now that people should know about and be concerned about?

MM: I think there’s a concerted, well-organized, and very well-funded campaign to attack climate scientists – not just the science but the scientists themselves. This campaign has been funded by industry special interests who don’t want to see action taken to combat the problem of climate change. They’ve sought to discredit the science by attacking it with misleading and specious claims, and through attacking the messenger, attacking the scientists themselves. I, of course, have been caught in the crossfire of those attacks.

I think that what this indicates is that those who continue to deny that climate change is a problem do not have science on their side. They’re not engaged in any good faith discourse on the reality of the problem. They know the science isn’t on their side and they’ll lose that argument. So instead they’ve turned to smear campaigns. They’ve turned to character assassination. I think that over time it’s become increasingly clear – at least I hope it has – to the public that this is the nature of the campaign of climate change denial. It’s intellectually dishonest and uses whatever means available to it to try to discredit the science behind the basic facts that climate change is a reality and it’s something we need to deal with.

CSW: The denialists got a lot of mileage out of the propaganda they were able to spin up on the basis of reading people’s email and cherry-picking it and misinterpreting it and so forth. That, as a tactic, is it being carried forward? Do we see systematic attempts to use various intrusive and harassing demands to get inside people computers and poke around in their documents and pull out all sorts of confidential material? Is this an ongoing tactic?

MM: Well it is. Of course, there was the criminal hack into the Climate Research Unit’s (CRU) server, where they obtained thousands of emails. But apparently they’re not happy with that, so the climate change denial movement has now sought to obtain even more personal emails of climate scientists by using legal attacks against their institutions. I know of at least a half dozen cases where conservative groups, including the Landmark Legal Foundation, another is the Southeastern Legal Foundation, another of the groups is the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Now these are all fossil fuel industry-funded front groups or groups funded by people like, for example, Richard Mellon Scaife. They’re using legal maneuvers now to try to obtain personal emails from scientists, from their institutions, so they can go through this whole process again.

Now, of course, having been seen in the light of greater scrutiny over the past several months, it’s become clear that all of the claims that they had made originally, about the stolen CRU emails, are incorrect, do not stand up to scrutiny. There is no evidence of any impropriety on the part of the scientists. There’s no indication of the fudging of data. There’s no indication of any of the things they claim that these emails showed. And every investigation that’s been done thus far has concluded that.

So, I guess they want to go back and mine even more emails in the hope that they can further distort the work of climate scientists, in the hope that they can find words or phrases to try to embarrass scientists. But they have fundamentally failed in their effort to prove that climate change is a grand hoax, a grand conspiracy. It appears, however, that they haven’t give up on their efforts to intimidate climate scientists and to try to dig for more dirt.

CSW: Well that’s clearly something we’re going to have keep an eye on, follow up on, and document to bring to people’s attention. Let me ask you one last question. You were quoted recently with reference to the so-called ‘hockey stick’ graph from the temperature record study that you published in the late 1990s that is still a bête noire of skeptics, contrarians, and deniers; sometimes they try to talk about it as if there were not a whole body of paleoclimate literature and subsequent work. You apparently made a comment to the effect that you were skeptical about how much of an icon that particular graph had become. Some of the deniers have jumped on that and said, “Aha! Michael Mann is walking back his conclusions about the temperature record.” What should people make of what you said, what is the appropriate way to take your comment?

MM: Yeah, this is all too predictable. This is what the climate change denial machine has been doing for years. What they’ll do is they’ll quote a statement out of context. In this case it was a statement I did in the course of an interview for the BBC. Then it’ll be turned into a news article in a fringe media outlet, in this case the Telegraph – which, in my view, has engaged in the sloppiest and most slanted coverage of climate change now for years. So it’s no surprise to me that the Telegraph would again publish a very misleading, slanted piece that took what I actually said out of context.

All that I said in that interview was that it was somewhat misplaced for the hockey stick to be made the central icon of the climate change debate, for the obvious reasons: It isn’t that there’s just one study. In fact, there are more than a dozen studies now that come to the same conclusion as our original work. That’s beside the point though, because paleoclimatic reconstructions are really just one line of evidence among multiple lines of evidence that indicate the Earth is warming, that the climate is changing in a way that is consistent with that warming, and that it can only be explained by the human influence on climate.

So, to pretend, as deniers like to do, that all of our understanding of human caused climate change rests on the so-called hockey stick is disingenuous, to say the least. I was simply pointing out in my interview just how disingenuous that argument is. Of course, it was twisted and contorted in the way that we now have come to expect: To imply that I was saying something other than I was actually saying. It’s really quite sad.

Penn State press release and report

Project on Climate Science press release

Earlier CSW posts:
May 28: University petitions court to quash Cuccinelli subpoena of climate scientist Michael Mann’s papers

March 10: Michael Mann interview: Denialists are waging “asymmetric warfare” against climate science

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AAAS initiative, Chris Mooney paper ask: do scientists understand the public?

Posted on Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (two AAAS’s) hosted a seminar in Washington DC on June 29 to unveil a new initiative to understand the knowledge gap between scientists and the public, and how it relates to associated public policy conflicts. Science writer Chris Mooney began by saying, “The study is driven by a sense that there is something not quite right, not quite healthy, about the relationship between scientists and the public.”

Post by Alexa Jay

Unlike the traditional “deficit” model of public scientific knowledge—the notion that more science education is the antidote to public ignorance—this effort asked a new question: do scientists understand the public? 

To open the conversation, AAAS held pilot workshops on four science-policy issues: the next generation of the Internet, public perception of nuclear waste disposal, the spread of personal genetic information, and the risks and benefits of emerging energy technologies.  In these areas, “scientists have met with varying degrees of success in working with the public,” offering a departure point for a broader inquiry.

Science writer Chris Mooney presented his paper synthesizing the workshop content, framing the issue with traditional assumptions about the origin of conflicts surrounding science-based policy issues.

Mooney pointed out that, while the tendency in the science community is to attribute public opposition to ignorance, the picture is much more complicated.  Public opinion on science-policy issues is a question of values, politics, and perceptions of risk, Mooney said, and can’t necessarily be swayed by providing more information.

On the climate issue, he said, this point is underscored by recent survey data showing that college-educated Republicans are much less likely to accept the scientific consensus than those who are not as well-educated.  Thus the problem is not the level of education, but the “powerful ideological sieve” through which information is filtered.   

Mooney distinguished issues that already have a history of conflict—such as nuclear waste and climate change—from issues with the potential for future conflict, such as personal genetic information and climate geoengineering.  On climate change and nuclear waste, “crisis communication moments were missed,” Mooney said, with “Climategate” being a prime example.

While this and future work can provide guidelines for future engagement between scientists and the public, it’s not clear how it can be applied to an issue like climate change, where opinions are already entrenched and highly correlated with political ideology.  While we can point the finger at ferocious climate change deniers, that won’t resolve the underlying issue of how and why people engage with scientific information. 

The AAAS initiative is intended to be the beginning of a conversation, and produced recommendations for future work:

1. Scientists and engineers should seek input from the public at the earliest stages of technology development and should continue to seek consensus through a participatory process.

2. When assessing the risks and benefits of new technologies, scientists and engineers should account for the non-technical and value-based concerns of the public in addition to technical concerns.

3. The expert community should value and utilize data from social scientists in order to better understand public attitudes toward science and technology.

4. Scientists and engineers need to create more opportunities to establish the trust and confidence of the public.

Chris Mooney, Do Scientists Understand the Public? paper is posted here. 

Chris is also continuing the discussion on the “Intersection” blog he writes with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Their book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, came out in paperback this month.

Climate Science Watch plans to follow up with a discussion with Chris, in particular on how he would apply his analysis to the problematic relationship between science and policymaking on climate change.

Earlier CSW posts:

June 11: Large, consistent majority of Americans believe climate change is happening, want government to act

June 9: New national survey: Public concern about global warming is once again on the rise

February 8: How does the politicization of climate change affect public opinion?

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Climate Science Watch Weekly Update, June 29

Posted on Tuesday, June 29, 2010

A brief update on events, hearings, and legislative developments that we’ll be tracking and writing about this week.

Do Scientists Understand the Public?

American Association for the Advancement of Science
Washington, DC
Tuesday, June 29, 3:30 PM
Registration required

Science and political writer Chris Mooney and Resources for the Future scholar Robert Fri will speak at the unveiling of a new American Academy of Arts and Sciences initiative on the relationship between scientists and public perception of science-based policy issues.  Chris Mooney will present his paper on the initiative, a synthesis of four interdisciplinary workshops, and had an op-ed in the Washington Post June 27 on the subject (“If scientists want to educate the public, they should start by listening”).

While considerable attention has been paid to strengthening public education in science and technology, less effort has gone into helping researchers understand what lies behind the public response to new advances and discoveries. Public concerns about scientific developments can come not only from ignorance, but also from legitimate worries. In 2008, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences launched a study on what the scientific community knows or should know about the public and its concerns. This project considers the role of the scientist and the public in deliberations about the tradeoffs inherent in scientific or technological developments.

The American Academy brought together leading scientists and technologists, ethicists, public policy experts, former public officials, science journalists, and others to discuss and improve awareness of the broader social and cultural context for scientific work. The project focused on four topics:  The Next Generation of the Internet;  Public Perceptions of Nuclear Waste Repositories; The Spread of Personal Genetic Information; and Risks and Benefits of Emerging Energy Technologies.

Hearing on the troubled satellite climate observing system

Setting New Courses for Polar Weather Satellites and Earth Observations
House Committee on Science and Technology
Tuesday, June 29, 10 AM
2318 Rayburn House

The House Committee on Science and Technology will follow up on the attempt to reorganize the troubled National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite Systems (NPOESS) program, hearing from top officials from NOAA, NASA, and the Defense Department, Shere Abbott from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and a representative from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).  The program has suffered years of delay and billions of dollars in cost overruns, threatening the continuity and future of essential global climate observations. The institution of a new management strategy via the fiscal year 2011 budget request puts DoD in charge of morning satellite orbits and NOAA at the helm for the afternoon orbits.

Witnesses:
Shere Abbott, Associate Director of the Energy and Environment Division at OSTP
Mary Glackin, NOAA Deputy Undersecretary for Oceans and Atmosphere
Christopher Scolese, NASA Associate Administrator
Gil Klinger, DoD Assistant Secretary of Acquisition
David Power, GAO Director of Information Technology Management Issues

See Committee website for 13-page Hearing Charter and webcast information.

Climate and Energy Legislation

The week begins with still more possibilities for the climate and energy bill on the table, but no actual legislation.  A meeting between President Obama and a group of Senators to discuss climate and energy legislation has been rescheduled for June 29, with hopes of long-awaited leadership from the President in the balance.  The meeting was postponed last week during the McChrystal flap, another frustration for supporters of a bill that is pushing up against a tight legislative calendar.

A June 28 ClimateWire article raised the possibility of a final energy and climate bill being assembled in a “lame duck” House-Senate conference committee session late in the year, after the immediate pressures of the November election have subsided.  This approach could allow Democrats to resurrect cap and trade if it fails to pass before the elections: “Democratic leaders could use a conference to ratchet up the climate regulations past what the Senate agreed to and beyond what Democratic House centrists want.” 

Senate Democrats met last week to discuss legislative strategy, emerging with a rallying cry for “comprehensive” legislation, but no specific proposal.  According to Climatewire, the basic thrust of their strategy “appears to be a plan to anchor the climate and energy effort to widely popular legislation that would overhaul offshore drilling regulations in the wake of the Gulf spill, and then dare Republicans to vote against it.” (ClimateWire via New York Times)

A chorus of “moderate” Republicans once considered potential backers of legislation have confirmed their opposition to a cap and trade scheme in recent weeks, including Senators Lisa Murkowski (AK), Judd Gregg (NH), Dick Lugar (IN), and Scott Brown (MA), reports POLITICO.  Maine Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe appear to be the only remaining possibilities for Democrats straining to reach 60 votes. 

Follow-up to “Expert Credibility on Climate Change” study

Our June 21 post, “New study finds striking level of agreement among climate experts on anthropogenic climate change,” focused on a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that concluded that 97-98% of climate researchers examined who are most actively publishing in the field are convinced by the evidence for human-caused climate change, and that the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of researchers questioning the findings is significantly below that of convinced researchers. The study has received both praise and criticism. We plan to post a response by the authors to key points that have been raised by critics of the study.

See other recent CSW posts:
(June 25) IPCC, key target of war on climate science, announces 831 experts to author Fifth Assessment Report

(June 25) Ocean Acidification in litigation, legislation, and research – What’s the status?

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IPCC, key target of war on climate science, announces 831 experts to author Fifth Assessment Report

Posted on Friday, June 25, 2010

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has announced its selection of 831 authors and review editors for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report to be published in 2013-2014. In light of the denial machine’s war on climate science, which seeks to delegitimize the IPCC and lay a predicate for rejecting any unwelcome conclusions of the forthcoming reports, we expect they will find a way to challenge the author selection and subsequent steps of the IPCC process.

For each chapter of the three volumes of the assessment — on The Physical Science Basis; Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; and Mitigation of Climate Change — the IPCC has designated a team consisting of Convening Lead Authors, Lead Authors, and Review Editors selected from about 3,000 nominees. These experts will also provide contributions to a Synthesis Report to be published in 2014.

The IPCC announcement on June 23 said “more than 60% of the experts chosen are new to the IPCC process, which will bring in new knowledge and perspectives.” In addition, the IPCC says, the inclusion of more women authors and more authors from developing countries in comparison with the 2007 assessment reflects a wide diversity of disciplines and scientific views.

The New York Times reported: “Working Group II, the section that focuses on the impacts of climate change and how to adapt to it, was a particular target for climate skeptics in assailing the fourth assessment report. Today the working group went into public relations overdrive.”

Chris Field, co-chairman of Working Group II and director of the department of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science said: “We were thrilled and honored by the number and quality of scientists who expressed interest in being a part of the IPCC. for this important process. It was important for our authors to reflect a range of views, expertise and geographic regions. And that priority is reflected in an author team that’s more diverse than ever.”


The bogus “Amazongate” charge: Recent retraction of one piece of anti-IPCC disinformation by the Sunday Times (UK)

Here’s a follow-up on one of the climate ‘skeptics’’ false charges against the 2007 IPCC impacts report.

On June 19 the UK Sunday Times issued the following retraction and apology for having falsely reported that the IPCC had made an unsubstantiated claim about Amazon rainfall – a charge that was promptly labelled “Amazongate” and splattered all over the denialosphere.

The article “UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim” (News, Jan 31) stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had included an “unsubstantiated claim” that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The IPCC had referenced the claim to a report prepared for WWF [World Wildlife Fund] by Andrew Rowell and Peter Moore, whom the article described as “green campaigners” with “little scientific expertise.” The article also stated that the authors’ research had been based on a scientific paper that dealt with the impact of human activity rather than climate change.

In fact, the IPCC’s Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence. In the case of the WWF report, the figure had, in error, not been referenced, but was based on research by the respected Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) which did relate to the impact of climate change. We also understand and accept that Mr Rowell is an experienced environmental journalist and that Dr Moore is an expert in forest management, and apologise for any suggestion to the contrary….

Lots of bloggers should be joining in this apology, but don’t hold your breath:

The story was covered well by Climate Progress (“Sunday Times retracts and apologizes for shameful and bogus Amazon story smearing IPCC”), World Wildlife Fund climate blog (“Sunday Times (UK) Publishes Correction and Apology for Asserting that IPCC Amazon Statement was ‘Bogus’”), RealClimate (“Leakegate: A Retraction”), DeSmogBlog (“UK Sunday Times Retracts Bogus ‘Amazongate’ Story, Apologizes to Simon Lewis”), and by Monbiot in the UK Guardian (“Sunday Times admits ‘Amazongate’ story was rubbish. But who’s to blame?”).

Morphing ‘climategate’ into an effort to blacklist scientists and discredit the IPCC

Late last year we saw the “Climategate e-mails show that the IPCC is corrupt and discredited” meme start to propagate in the denialosphere.

In December Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), ranking Republican on the House global warming committee, sent a letter to IPCC Chair Dr. Rajendra Pachauri calling for scientists whose names appeared in the e-mails stolen from the UK Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia to be blacklisted from participating as contributors or reviewers of the next IPCC assessment. This attack was indicative of how the manufactured controversy over the stolen e-mails was being turned into a larger effort to bully and intimidate the science community.  Sensenbrenner and his allies have shown no real interest in meaningful dialogue, nor in an honest examination of climate science findings.  Rather they would like to broadly discredit the climate science and assessment enterprise when it refuses to cooperate with their demand for a purge. (See our December 9, 2009 post, “Sensenbrenner IPCC witch-hunt: Attempt to blacklist climate scientists must be rejected.”)

Then, in February, Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, went a step beyond promoting his long-notorious global warming denialist propaganda. He indicated that he would use the resources of the Senate committee to seek opportunities to criminalize the actions of 17 leading scientists who have been associated with the IPCC. A report released by Inhofe’s staff on February 23 outlined this classic witch-hunt: page after page of incorrect and misleading statements, a list of federal laws that allegedly may make scientists subject to prosecution by the Justice Department, and a list of names and affiliations of 17 “key players” in the “CRU Controversy” over stolen e-mails and their connections with IPCC reports. Another Blacklist. (See our February 24 post, “Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists.”)

What will they say about the newly-announced roster of authors?

InterAcademy Council Review of IPCC

There are legitimate issues to be considered about how to ensure that IPCC’s procedures for developing the Fifth Assessment will produce a set of reports that is of impeccable quality and credibility.

At the request of the United Nations, the InterAcademy Council (IAC), a multinational organization of science academies is conducting an independent review of IPCC processes and procedures. Based on this review, the IAC will issue a report with recommended measures and actions to strengthen IPCC’s processes and procedures so as to be better able to respond to future challenges and ensure the ongoing quality of its reports. The report is scheduled to be completed by August 30.

From the IAC website:

The InterAcademy Council (IAC) is created to produce reports on scientific, technological, and health issues related to the great global challenges of our time, providing knowledge and advice to national governments and international organizations.

The IAC embodies the collective expertise and experience of national academies from all regions of the world. The current eighteen-member InterAcademy Council Board is composed of presidents of fifteen academies of science and equivalent organizations.

When requested to provide advice on a particular issue, the IAC assembles an international panel of experts. Serving on a voluntary basis, panel members meet and review current, cutting-edge knowledge on the topic; and prepare a draft report on its findings, conclusions, and recommendations. All IAC draft reports undergo an intensive process of peer-review by other international experts. Only when the IAC Board is satisfied that feedback from the peer review has been thoughtfully considered and incorporated is a final report released to the requesting organization and the public. Every effort is made to ensure that IAC reports are free from any national or regional bias.

Chris Field, who co-chairs the group that will examine the impact of climate change, told a conference call the IPCC authors were open to making changes to their work if recommended to do so by the independent review.

“I believe the [error in the 2007 report] concerning the Himalayan glaciers was a genuine mistake made in good faith,” said Field. Nevertheless, the group will put in place better quality controls, particularly for the regional reports, he said.

See here for slides of Chris Field’s June 15 presentation to the IAC Review Committee.

For full listings of authors and review editors see the IPCC website. 

Earlier CSW posts:

(June 21) New study finds striking level of agreement among climate experts on anthropogenic climate change

(May 7) Letter from 255 National Academy members on Climate Change and the Integrity of Science

(May 5) InterAcademy Council Names IPCC Review Committee

(March 11) Open Letter to the U.S. Government from U.S. Scientists on climate change and the IPCC reports

(March 7) Robert Watson: IPCC is fundamentally sound; don’t let “skeptics” distract or derail action

(February 5) Questions to an IPCC co-chair on ensuring the credibility of IPCC leadership and communications

(January 21) Worldwide glacier melt a real concern; Himalaya controversy leaves questions about IPCC leadership

(January 19) IPCC slips on the ice with statement about Himalayan glaciers

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Ocean Acidification in litigation, legislation, and research – What’s the status?

On June 23 CSW attended a panel on Ocean Acidification: Managing the Marine Impacts of Climate Change, at which experts from the scientific, nongovernmental and regulatory communities imparted a greater understanding of the science of ocean acidification, the enormity of the problem, and current action being taken to address the causes and effects of it.

Post by Rebeka Ryvola

The panel – part of Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI) Ocean Seminar Series – was co-sponsored by ELI and the Washington DC Bar Association’s Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Section of the Ocean and Marine Resources Committee.

See ELI’s excellent program of free events and ‘summer school’ lectures here.

Check out speaker PowerPoints and other materials from the panel here.

James Walpole, Chairman of the DC Bar Ocean and Marine Resources Committee (EENR), moderated the panel with the following participants:

William Snape, Senior Counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity;
Dr. Nancy Knowlton, Sant Chair for Marine Science at the Smithsonian Institution;
Dr. Susan Roberts, Director, Ocean Studies Board, National Research Council; and
Christine Ruf, Senior Policy Analyst, Watersheds Branch, US Environmental Protection Agency.

Two scientists, a policy analyst, and a lawyer discussing the impacts of rising ocean acidity made for a comprehensive look at this climate change problem. Each panel participant spoke to how their specific community – scientific, non-governmental, or federal agency - is involved in ocean acidification (OA) research, litigation, or legislation. In the end, the panel participants left us with a greater grasp of the urgency of OA, along with a better sense of the US’s progress on formulating a plan to address it.

Bleached coral in the Great Barrier Reef (AFP photo)

Dr. Knowlton, an expert on coral reefs, began with a chemistry crash-course on OA, which refers to the ongoing decrease in the pH of the ocean caused by the uptake of anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere.  The ocean has absorbed about 30% of CO2 put into the atmosphere by human activity.  The acidification rate is 10-30 times faster than in any known episode in geological time, Dr. Knowlton said,

“even faster than the only known analog we have, about 55 million years ago when there was a big increase in CO2 in the atmosphere – Even then, although the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was larger, the rate was much smaller.”

It’s the magnitude of the current rate that has scientists particularly worried, as it doesn’t allow enough time for acidic water to be buffered by seafloor sediments, a lengthy process that returns the ocean to normal pH levels.

The consequences of OA are where the science gets more complex. The repercussions of the changing chemistry of the oceans, Knowlton noted, are extremely difficult to predict. For example, coral reefs may be gone by as early as 2050. However, it’s difficult to know exactly how changes to ecosystem composition will unfold.

Dr. Knowlton discussed the most recent lab studies into OA impacts on marine organisms, the results of which have varied, depending on the organism studied and the level of acidity the organism was exposed to. While most species suffered with increasing acidity, a few were actually seen to increase in growth in the more acidic environment.

While this point is something that denialists could latch on to – Look! The alarmists are wrong, acidification is good for the ocean! - Dr Knowlton made sure it was understood that such a large-scale chemical change is not positive in any way, shape, or form; the disruption that OA could cause, and is causing, to ocean ecosystems negates any minor benefits. In fact, she pointed out, every mass extinction in history has been associated with changes in oceanic chemistry.

And the picture only gets grimmer. Dr. Knowlton reminded us:

“ocean acidification is just one of a whole bunch of things that we’re doing to the global ocean. Not only are we acidifying the ocean, we’re adding massive amounts of nutrients, toxins from industrial activities, sediments from coastal erosion due to deforestation…”

Slide from Dr. Knowlton’s presentation

Although OA is enough to substantially disrupt marine life on its own, its impacts will be compounded by an environment that is already affected by multiple stressors.

Dr. Susan Roberts then walked the audience through the National Research Council’s (NRC) recently released OA report, National Strategy to meet the Challenges of a Changing Ocean.

Related CSW post here on Ocean acidification: Senate hearing and National Academy of Sciences report.
The report can be purchased or read online for free here.

Dr. Roberts began by sketching out how OA came to be an issue of global concern. She said that OA first came onto the international radar in 2004 at The Ocean in a High CO2 World, a scientific symposium sponsored by the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research and UNESCO’s International Oceanographic Commission. Since then, the scientific community’s concern has only escalated.

OA went from being a strictly scientific interest to showing up on the policy radar as a result of the 2006 reauthorization of Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. The Act, whose purpose is “to provide for the conservation and management of the fisheries, and for other purposes,” contained a single line calling for an in-depth study into OA by the NRC. The New York Times latched onto this one line, leading to a snowballing of attention directed at OA, which eventually led to the creation of the new NRC report.

In addition to a detailed look at the science, the report includes an analysis of social issues surrounding OA. The report’s social science authors identified fisheries, coral reefs and aquaculture as the most vulnerable sectors - areas where ongoing and increasing acidification will have enormous socioeconomic impacts. Roberts said that not only is a lot of money at stake nationally, but local regions that depend on income from these sectors may be unable to persist. Degradation of marine habitats such as coral reefs and reduced reproductive rates of marine organisms may contribute to a diminished ability to rely on oceans for income.

William Snape with the Center for Biological Diversity gave a lawyer’s summing up: “We’re sure change [in the oceans] is happening. We’re sure it’s not good.” 

He then jumped into a look at the legal tools available to deal with OA. The “bevy of tools” we have, specifically naming domestic statutes like the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, are at risk of being overshadowed by new mechanisms currently being pushed forward, Snape said. Snape “caution[ed us] to be skeptical when being told by Congress that a new tool is better than a 40 year old statute” like the Clean Water or Air Act. These existing statutes are valuable, Snape said, because at their core they’re science-based, and demand science-based standards. When dealing with climate change, or more specifically OA, we need laws that have that scientific foundation.

He then led us through sections 303D and 304 of the Clean Water Act to give us a sense of how this tool can be used to address OA. 303D sets up the legal duty of the EPA to “look at something like ocean acidification as damaging to water quality ... as CO2 in the ocean most certainly is.” Section 304 has to do with water quality standards and the criteria by which those standards are articulated.

The purpose of the act is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters, Snape said. It was on this premise that the Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition and sued the EPA for erroneously approving Washington State’s quality of water, when in fact, the state’s waters were negatively impacted by CO2, and thus classifiable as polluted. In March of 2010, those actions led to the EPA being required to evaluate how to regulate OA.

While Snape noted that the EPA is now on the case of OA, knowing that the situation must be addressed, there are still two major challenges the agency will have to grapple with going forward. First, figuring out how to calculate pollution limits for CO2 will be difficult given that CO2 taken up by the ocean is global in scope and origin. Second, the agency will need to assign water quality permits based on an air pollutant – something they haven’t yet had to do.

However, he added, the EPA has the power to handle these issues, no matter how daunting they may seem. And, Snape noted, Congress is starting to get on board: 40 House members have already signed a letter to EPA urging action on OA.

Snape said that, frankly, OA might be the issue that gets us a handle on greenhouse pollutants, the issue that “finally galvanizes our species to actually do something.”

Christine Ruf from the EPA then took over to expand on 303D, the Clean Water Act’s enabling legislation. While specifics of the Clean Water Act won’t be detailed here, it is worth noting that with 303D’s current criteria, coastal monitoring isn’t as thorough as it is for the interior. Ruf noted that to date, no marine waters have been listed as impaired due to a lower than normal pH – clearly, the current criteria for monitoring OA, as noted by Snape, is not addressing the issue effectively.

During the Q & A, an audience member asked whether there are any current opportunities for movement in the international law arena, and whether action on OA could become part of the greater effort to deal with greenhouse gases, or even a separate international effort in itself.

Snape answered that the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UN CBD) has begun working on OA. The UN CBD, a legally binding treaty which was born out of the UN Environment Programme’s attempt to address global extinction issues in 1988, and was opened up for signature at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Rio “Earth Summit”) in 1992, has a good framework for addressing OA. However, while the US is a signatory of the UN CBD, it has not yet ratified the treaty. Snape said that an international accord with a focus on OA will be quite necessary to deal with an issue of such magnitude.

Coming away from the panel, it’s clear that steps are being taken to act on OA. OA is now widely recognized as a problem beyond just the scientific community, a necessary prerequisite for action. However, there’s still a long road to massive and dramatic solutions that will enable us to get ahold of this potentially devastating global challenge.

 

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Climate Science Watch Weekly Update, June 22

Posted on Tuesday, June 22, 2010

A brief summary of some of the things we are tracking and writing about this week—UPDATED 6/23

Global warming denialist watch

According to the Charlottesville Daily Progress (see here), Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is “fighting back against the University of Virginia’s request that a judge ‘set aside’ the attorney general’s subpoena for documents related to the research activities of a former climate scientist.” 

Cuccinelli’s office filed its own court documents this week in response, “saying that the attorney general’s inquiry is solely focused on rooting out possible fraud” related to research grants awarded to climate scientist Michael Mann during his professorship at the University of Virginia. 

See our earlier posts (here, here, and here) for more info on Cuccinelli’s attack on climate science disguised as an “investigative demand.”

UPDATE: A judge on Virginia’s Ablemarle Circuit Court has stayed Cuccinelli’s subpoena, pending the outcome of the University of Virginia’s legal challenge to the request.  The circuit court will hear oral arguments on August 20 (Washington Post).

Legislation

Senate Democrats met last week to discuss strategy for moving climate and energy legislation to the floor before the August recess, but emerged with no clear consensus, according to Darren Samuelsohn writing for POLITICO (see here).  During the meeting, Senators John Kerry (MA) and Joe Lieberman (CT), Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), and Maria Cantwell (WA) each made a case for their respective legislative approaches to carbon regulation.  Senator Bingaman’s bill, which cleared the Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year, would create a renewable energy standard without capping emissions, while the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act and the Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act both establish a cap.

President Obama will meet on Wednesday, June 23 with a bipartisan group of Senators to push for movement on climate and energy legislation. Climatewire reports (by subscription) that this meeting “follows a series of signals from the White House last week that sought to redraw the legislative landscape, including a willingness to entertain calls for a slimmer carbon cap applied only on utilities.  That is seen by some as a strong assertion by the administration that a leading Senate proposal to charge emitters in the transportation, industrial and electric sectors is too broad to pass.” After the meeting, the White House will host a live chat with Heather Zichal, Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change.  The chat will take place at 3 P.M. EDT, and can be accessed at Whitehouse.gov/live (link for ‘live chat’). 

UPDATE: Due to a White House schedule change to accommodate a meeting between President Obama and General Stanley McChrystal to address McChrystal’s criticism of the President, the climate and energy meeting and live chat have been postponed until further notice.  Check back at the link above for updates on the live chat.   

With the clock ticking on mid-term elections, the prospects for a comprehensive climate and energy bill look increasingly dim, and many centrist Senators are now embracing the possibility of a utilities-only cap.  White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal that it would be on the table in the President’s discussion with Senators on Wednesday, and Senator Joe Lieberman said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he would be willing to consider that approach (see here).

Book releases

This week we are reading and will be reviewing an excellent new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.  Oreskes and Conway tell the story behind the so-called contrarian scientists that have collaborated in manufacturing uncertainty about a number of science-based public policy issues in the past decades: acid rain, the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke, the ozone hole, global warming, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the banning of DDT.  The global warming denial machine is a classic example of these weapons of mass confusion in action, and Oreskes and Conway provide important insight into the methods and motivations behind the manufacturing of doubt. 

Also be sure to check out Eric Pooley’s The Climate War, an extensive history of the political battle over action on climate change.  Pooley’s website has the details. 

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New study finds striking level of agreement among climate experts on anthropogenic climate change

Posted on Monday, June 21, 2010

“Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that 97-98% of climate researchers examined who are most actively publishing in the field support the IPCC conclusions, i.e., are convinced by the evidence for human-caused climate change, and that the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of researchers questioning the findings is significantly below that of convinced researchers. The authors of this first-of-its-kind study used metrics of climate-specific expertise and overall scientific prominence to examine expert credibility among scientists who agree with or question the primary conclusions of the IPCC.

Climate change deniers have claimed that there are thousands of credible scientists who question the basic science of global warming. These claims have contributed to media fervor over the “Climategate” e-mail hack and IPCC errors, and have fostered the public perception that the leading experts within the climate science community are deeply divided.  Lazy and irresponsible news stories (see here, here, and here) implying major disagreements among mainstream scientists working in the field have furthered public confusion about the risks of anthropogenic climate change.

A new paper from William R.L. Anderegg (Stanford University), James W. Prall (Univ. of Toronto), Jacob Harold (Hewlett Foundation), and Stephen H. Schneider (Stanford) provides a clear answer on the overwhelming level of agreement among climate scientists on anthropogenic global warming, and demonstrates that the “relative climate expertise and prominence of the researchers unconvinced of anthropogenic climate change is substantially below that of convinced researchers.”  The paper will be posted online sometime after 3:00 p.m. EDT June 21 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The author team used a dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to reach the following conclusions:

1) 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing peer-reviewed studies in the field support the tenets of anthropogenic climate change outlined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports;

2) the relative climate expertise and overall scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of anthropogenic climate change is substantially below that of convinced researchers.

The authors write:

“A vocal minority of researchers and other critics contest the conclusions of the mainstream scientific assessment, frequently citing large numbers of scientists whom they believe support their claims…This group, often termed climate change skeptics, contrarians, or deniers, has received large amounts of media attention and wields significant influence in the societal debate about climate change impacts and policy.

“Despite media tendencies to present ‘both sides’ in ACC debates [anthropogenic climate change], which can contribute to continued public misunderstanding regarding ACC, not all climate researchers are equal in scientific credibility and expertise in the climate system.  This extensive analysis of the mainstream versus skeptical/contrarian researchers suggests a strong role for considering expert credibility in the relative weight of and attention to these groups of researchers in future discussions in media, policy, and public forums regarding anthropogenic climate change.”

Global climatic disruption presents a profound challenge for government policy, societal decisionmaking, media coverage, and public opinion. The formulation of an adequate response strategy must build on a bedrock foundation of scientific understanding developed within specialized fields of scientific expertise. In such a case, policymakers and the public should pay attention to the assessments and communications of those who are regarded within the science community as the leading and most credible experts in the field.

The communication between the climate science community and the wider society is too important to be distorted and manipulated by people who find the mainstream science politically inconvenient. That is what denialists and contrarians in the political arena, whether elected officials or nongovernmental operatives (those who would like to be called “skeptics” as though they were custodians of intellectual integrity) have been doing with specious claims that a large proportion of credible climate science experts reject the evidence for anthropogenic climate change.

In particular, recent activity by the global warming denial machine is aimed at undermining support for the comprehensive IPCC climate change assessment reports, by attacking the overall integrity and credibility of the IPCC and its hundreds of participating scientist-authors. There are legitimate procedural questions to be considered and dealt with appropriately in developing the next set of IPCC reports. But those who propagate the phony argument that there are two “sides” – an IPCC side and a “skeptic” side – with comparable overall climate science expertise and credibility and deserving of comparable consideration – are doing a public disservice and should be called out on it.

In getting this point across, the climate science community should speak out effectively on its own behalf. In addition, allies of the science community and advocates for government accountability would do well to lend their support. 

While a single study cannot be conclusive, this solid empirically based analysis by Anderegg et al. and similar efforts in the future can hopefully encourage greater clarity in news coverage and public conversation about the level of scientific understanding of climate change and the relative credibility/expertise of scientists who question its basic tenets.

The article, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” is available online without a paid subscription to the journal.

 

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Murkowski Resolution a rejection of broad scientific understanding of climate change threat

Posted on Friday, June 18, 2010

On June 10, the Senate voted down Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution to strip EPA of the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.  The vote, 53-47, united all 41 Republicans in the chamber in support of Murkowski along with six Democrats: Mary Landrieu (LA), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Mark Pryor (AR), Ben Nelson (ND), Evan Bayh (IN), and Jay Rockefeller (WV).  While many lawmakers defended the resolution as not a rejection of the science underlying EPA’s endangerment finding but of EPA as the proper authority for regulating greenhouse gases, its passage would, in fact, have set a precedent of overturning a robust scientific assessment to avoid uncomfortable policy implications.

Post by Alexa Jay

Senator Murkowski and her supporters waved aside the larger implications of the resolution for science-based public policy:

“My resolution does not affect the science behind the endangerment finding…Bringing climate science, the oil spill, and fuel economy into this debate are attempts at misdirection.  They are red herrings that are intended to convince Members to oppose the resolution of disapproval. But this debate has nothing to do with those topics…This is not a debate about the science. Science has been discussed a lot. Really, this is about how we respond to the science,” Murkowski said.

This is the real motivation behind Senator Murkowski’s resolution: to overturn a scientific finding because its policy implications are unpalatable.

The resolution cannot be separated from its rejection of the science underlying the endangerment finding; the endangerment finding is a scientific assessment that reflects the leading scientists’ widely shared understanding of the likely impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.  The Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the Environmental Protection Agency has the obligation to determine whether greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and welfare and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.  The EPA, drawing on the leading national and international scientific assessment reports, found that greenhouse gases do pose this threat, and therefore that the agency has an obligation under law to regulate them. 

Sen. Murkowski framed her opposition to the endangerment finding as a matter of EPA being an inappropriate vehicle for regulating greenhouse gases. This would be an “unprecedented power grab, ceding Congress’ responsibilities to unelected bureaucrats…Congress needs time to develop a more appropriate solution,” the Senator said.  But as the law stands, EPA currently does have this responsibility, this obligation.  Congress has not acted yet.  And while there may be a broad consensus that legislation is the preferred approach for regulation, the nullification of a scientific finding requiring regulation under the Clean Air Act is not justified.

Sen. Boxer (D-CA) said in her opening statement: “The Murkowski resolution we are considering today would overturn the endangerment finding developed by scientists and health experts in both the Bush and Obama administrations that too much carbon pollution in the air is dangerous—dangerous for our families, dangerous for our environment. Imagine, 100 Senators—not scientists, not health experts—deciding what pollutant is dangerous and what pollutant is not. Personally, I believe it is ridiculous for politicians, elected Senators, to make this scientific decision. It is not our expertise; it is not really our purview. ” 

Other arguments from Democrats voting down the resolution:

Sen. Sanders (I-Vermont): “This resolution really is not about whether EPA or Congress should regulate greenhouse gas emissions.  What this resolution is about is whether we go forward in public policy based on science or based on politics.”

Sen Reed (D-RI): “The Senate can pass a resolution saying practically anything, but it does not change reality.  The fact is, the best science tells us that climate change is real and that greenhouse gas emissions contribute significantly to it.”

As for the part of the Republicans, it is a strange world indeed when a legislator can stand before the US Senate and say the following:

Sen. Chambliss (R-GA): “Obviously, it was warm enough in the past for humans to live and thrive in that part of the world, even though in recent memory we only think of Greenland as covered in ice.  I talked to the scientists who have studied Greenland’s glaciers for decades.  They told me that while the climate is changing they don’t know with any certainty if the changes are natural or caused by human activity or a combination of the two.  I found it interesting that while some glaciers are melting, some are increasing in size.  We just don’t see what is happening on the back side.”

Sen. Sessions (R-AL): “Global warming developed a certain momentum and a number of scientists signed onto this idea.  Even though CO2 is a plant food and the more CO2 that is in the atmosphere the better plants grow.  And even though we breathe out CO2 and plants breathe in CO2 which produces the oxygen that we breathe in this wonderful system we are a part of.  They concluded that CO2 was increasing because we were taking carbon fuels mostly from our soils, burning it, and that was increasing the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.  Presumably it had at one time been in the atmosphere and had been sucked up by plants.”

Sen. Inhofe (R-OK): “Take Al Gore’s science fiction movie and the IPCC and look at all of the assertions they made in this movie and the IPCC has made, every one has been refuted.  I can’t find one assertion that has now not been refuted…”

These are some of the more egregious examples of scientific disinformation peddled during the debate, but they bring to mind a basic question: can these Senators possibly buy into this level of disinformation?  Are they really so uninformed or so willfully ignorant?  Many Senators, including Democrats voting for the resolution, argued that EPA regulation would have harmful economic impacts, but did not attack the basic science outright; why is it necessary for others to spread disinformation to make their case?

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Climate change preparedness - what about the risks that may come with adaptation and mitigation?

Posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2010

On June 10 CSW was at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, attending a roundtable discussion titled The Conflict Potential of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation. Discussion of climate change policy thus far has focused on what climate change impacts will look like (globally and regionally), and how we can prevent impacts from becoming severe through emissions cuts (mitigation) and seek to prepare for impacts we cannot avoid (adaptation). We haven’t yet started seriously assessing the associated security risks and conflict potential that may arise from adopting and implementing mitigation and adaptation plans. Taking this next step was the main focus of this roundtable discussion.

Post by Rebeka Ryvola

Video Archive of webcast will be here.

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars events.

See end of article for related CSW posts on mitigation, adaptation, and security.

The Conflict Potential of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation

Geoff Dabelko, Director of Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, moderated the discussion, with the following scholars participating: Alexander Carius, Co-Director and Co-Founder, Adelphi Research, Berlin, Germany; Cleo Paskal, Associate Fellow at the Energy, Environment and Development Programme, Chatham House, UK; and Stacy VanDeveer, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of New Hampshire.

Dabelko opened the roundtable with a discussion of projected global climate change impacts and how they may increase societal vulnerability. He distinguished between direct climate impacts, secondary impacts, and third or fourth order impacts.

A substantial amount of research has been conducted to expand our understanding of the changing climate system, Dabelko said, and we must continue research on the direct, or first order, impacts produced by a warming climate.

He then added that we also need research to increase our knowledge of how these direct impacts will affect human systems: What will happen when the sea level rises? How will impacted people adapt? If relocation is necessary, where will they go? Dabelko referred to these questions as secondary impacts or responses to the direct impacts.

However, Dabelko continued, while an understanding of direct and secondary impacts is vitally important to climate change preparedness, we also must begin to talk seriously about the “third or fourth order” impacts: potential conflicts or opportunities for partnership stemming from the “variety basket of mitigation and adaptation policy responses” to climate change impacts. 

He emphasized that potential consequences of mitigation and adaptation need to become part of the climate change conversation regardless of how far along we are in our understanding the specifics of projected impacts. By looking at the likely social, political and economical repercussions of the various mitigation and adaptation paths, we’ll begin to have a better idea of which measures can help us move safely towards a more sustainable economy, he said; the alternative is finding out down the road that our attempts to deal with climate change produced unexpected vulnerabilities.

Dabelko then turned to the panel for their insights on the relative risks of different mitigation and adaptation strategies. While the panel members expressed many concerns about prospective mitigation and adaptation policy responses, they did not make specific recommendations; the discussion was centered instead on the consequences of the policy responses themselves.

Due to the diverse backgrounds of the panelists, the discussion encompassed a wide range of nationally and internationally-centered problems that need to be considered as we weigh the implications of mitigation and adaptation policies. Among the US-centric topics raised were the conflict potential of shifting from a fossil fuel-based economy to one based on clean energy, the peace and conflict potential of geoengineering, and how the US is to adopt the safest mitigation and adaptation strategy possible.

Stacy VanDeveer discussed the implications of transitioning from a fossil fuel-dependent economy to one based on renewable energy sources. Bending the carbon emissions curve down may not be strictly a good thing, he said; it is difficult to know how nations that depend on fossil fuel exports will react if they are left high and dry. While some commentators, like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, have said that pulling out support for current petrol states could actually open up the potential for democratic transition, VanDeveer questioned whether this would realistically be the case. He argued that a move towards cleaner energy will be much more complex than mainstream discussions have indicated thus far.

Cleo Paskal was asked to weigh in on the implications of shifting to a renewable energy-based economy;  Dabelko inquired whether we will merely be trading one dependency for another. Paskal said that the answer to that question largely depends on the rare earth mineral markets. These minerals, upon which much of new green technologies like wind turbines, hybrid vehicles and solar panels depend, could bring many complications as more and more nations take on large-scale green energy expansions, Paskal said. 

The answer to the question of which nations will benefit from a greener economy also depends on how one views the geopolitics involved. Paskal said that China, for example, has been much more strategic in ensuring energy security than the more commercially-oriented US. This difference in trading approaches can lead to complications when the resources in question are scarce, like the rare earth minerals: strategic traders will have a much wider range of options for interacting with the nations that have the scarce resource than commercial traders that expect that “the market will provide,” Paskal says.

Dabelko then steered the discussion toward the 2009 meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, or COP15, asking why the delegates had been unable to develop an international emissions reduction agreement. 

Paskal said that in the lead-up to the conference, much of the international climate change discussion was intentionally kept very narrow, restricted to the warming of the climate and the need to reduce carbon emissions. The only focus on the security risks of climate change was in the context of poor nations with limited capabilities needing to adapt to impacts like desertification or flooding. A narrow focus on emissions reduction allowed wealthier nations to skirt the issue of climate change as a resilience weakener (e.g. increased vulnerability to extreme events) and conflict aggravator (e.g. an escalation in resource disputes) that impacts all nations, said Paskal, which allowed them to avoid a more ambitious, and therefore costly, conclusion in Copenhagen.

Here Paskal mentioned how the maladaptive actions taken in the wake of Hurricane Katrina are a good example of how an “accurate perception of the security risks” associated with climate change was lacking leading up to COP15: simply curbing carbon emissions without consideration of the danger of rebuilding on vulnerable coastlines and floodplains will not decrease future instability in the Katrina-impacted region. Hurricane Katrina is only one example of what a lack of vulnerability awareness will mean for wealthier nations as extreme events happen with greater frequency and intensity, Paskal said. 

Now, with Copenhagen behind us and COP16 in Cancun approaching, Dabelko asked Paskal to elaborate on how we are to broaden the previously narrow discussion on climate change impacts from the “developing country context” to one encompassing vulnerability and conflict threats to all nations - a topic that her book, Global Warring, focuses heavily on.

Climate change preparedness is a multi-faceted, all-encompassing problem with many players and as many solutions, Paskal said; in order to develop optimal adaptation and mitigation strategies, we must frame this massive problem in a way that is more accessible to the general public. “This isn’t one problem, it’s a million different problems and is going to require a million different answers from a million different sectors.”

City planners are one group that has enormous potential to move human society toward a more sustainable future, Paskal said, and although they don’t currently have the tools to incorporate large-scale environmental change into the way they do planning, “as soon as they do, they [could be] really solid allies.” She mentioned how British and Canadian city planning councils both had climate change as major themes for their annual conventions this year and for the first time focused on adaptation in addition to mitigation.

VanDeveer finished with a warning about the role that climate change deniers play in the fight to establish effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. These opponents, he said, “can be counted on to use whatever rhetorical strategy with whatever audience on whatever day.”

As long as deniers with a vested interest in the status quo are involved, monitoring and countering climate change disinformation will continue to be essential. Holding deniers and distorters accountable is especially important if we are to heed Paskal’s advice about the need to unify solutions from many sectors to address to the complex problem of mitigating and adapting to climate change, a mobilization that requires an accurate public perception of the risks involved. 

L - R: Cleo Paskal, Stacy VanDeveer, and Geoff Dabelko (not pictured: Alexander Carius)

Recent CSW posts on the mitigation and adaptation discussion:

Text of remarks by Obama science adviser John Holdren to the National Adaptation Summit (May 28)

Holdren at Adaptation Summit: We’re not serious until we put a price on greenhouse gas emissions (May 28)

Tom Karl discusses plans for NOAA Climate Service (March 27)

NRC: US should act now to cut emissions, develop a national strategy to adapt to inevitable impacts (May 26)

On mitigation, adaptation and national security:

AMS Climate Briefing Series takes on national security implications of climate change (June 8)

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Record Rains Pummel Oklahoma City as State’s Senator Inhofe Continues to Deny Climate Change Science

Posted on Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Just days after Senator James Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma) said he could not find one conclusion of the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that “has now not been refuted,” Oklahoma City yesterday (14 June 2010) experienced its heaviest rain in history. In 2007, the IPCC concluded that “the frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most land areas, consistent with warming and observed increase of atmospheric water vapor.” It furthermore warned that it was “very likely” that the trend would continue during this century.  [Re-posted from World Wildlife Fund Climate Blog posting of 15 June 2010]

[Thanks to Nick Sundt at WWF Climate Blog for developing this post.]

Environmental Protection Agency Finds that Greenhouse Gas Emissions Increase Risks of such Events and therefore Endanger Public Health and Welfare

Based in part on the IPCC's findings, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded at the end of 2009:

"Water resources across large areas of the country are at serious risk from climate change, with effects on water supplies, water quality, and adverse effects from extreme events such as floods and droughts. Even areas of the country where an increase in water flow is projected could face water resource problems from the supply and water quality problems associated with temperature increases and precipitation variability, as well as the increased risk of serious adverse effects from extreme events, such as floods and drought. The severity of risks and impacts is likely to increase over time with accumulating greenhouse gas concentrations and associated temperature increases and precipitation changes. "

EPA made that statement in its Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under the Clean Air Act, commonly referred to as its "endangerment finding," a document that constitutes the basis for the Federal government's planned regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions. 

Last Thursday  (10 June 2010), Senator Inhofe argued before the Senate that the EPA endangerment finding should be formally rejected by the Senate, saying that "I do not believe that" greenhouse gases contribute to climate change and that the science "has been pretty much debunked."  The other Oklahoma senator, Coburn, said during the debate that  "this is not settled science" and referred to the "incompetency at the EPA."

Neither Senator acknowledged the threat posed by climate change and the need for climate change preparedness in Oklahoma.  Both voted in support of the Murkowski Resolution which -- had it passed -- would have effectively vetoed EPA's science based findings. (see Senate Resolution to Strip EPA of Power to Regulate Climate Change Pollution is Defeated, 10 June 2010; and Video and Transcript of Senate Debate on Murkowski Resolution to Veto EPA's Science-Based Climate Change Findings, 12 June 2010).

Their remarks echoed those of Congressman John Sullivan (Republican, Oklahoma) last December at the international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark.  He said the negotiations were based on "science that is fraudulent." 

IPCC Findings Reaffirmed by the National Research Council

In fact, the science is not fraudulent and has not been debunked.  To the contrary, the National Research Council just last month (May 2010) affirmed the IPCC's conclusions.  Here is what the NRC concluded in its report, Advancing the Science of Climate Change:

"Global precipitation and extreme rainfall events are increasing.  In general, changes in precipitation are harder to measure and predict than changes in temperature. Nevertheless, some conclusions and projections are robust. For example, based on the fundamental properties and dynamics of the climate system, it is expected that the intensity of the global water cycle and of precipitation extremes (droughts and extremely heavy precipitation events) should both increase as the planet warms. Increases in worldwide precipitation and in the fraction of total precipitation falling in the form of heavy precipitation have already been observed—for example, the fraction of total rainfall falling in the heaviest one percent of rain events increased by about 20 percent over the past century in the United States. Climate models project that these trends, which create challenges for flood control and storm and sewer management, are very likely to continue."

And the NRC said:

"Droughts and floods are likely to increase. Given the observed increases in heavy precipitation events and the expectation that this intensification will continue, the risk from floods is projected to increase in the future."

See National Research Council Reaffirms Climate Change Science; Cites Urgent Need to Reduce Emissions and Prepare for Impacts , 19 May 2010.

Expert at National Center for Atmospheric Research: Increased Water Vapor in Atmosphere Exerts "Systematic Influence" on Weather Events

In Joe Romm's Exclusive interview: NCAR’s Trenberth on the link between global warming and extreme deluges, posted at Climate Progress, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research comments on the increase in extreme precipitation events.  While acknowledging that "you can’t attribute a single event to climate change," Trenberth says that "there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change."

Oklahoma Climatological Survey: Expect More Intense Rain Events

Among those warning of the consequences of climate change, and specifically of more extreme precipitation events, is none other than the Oklahoma Climatological Survey. In its Statement on Climate Change and its Implications for Oklahoma, the survey said in 2007 that it expected  "individual rain events will become more intense" and "more runoff and flash flooding will occur" under the projected range of climate change in the 21st century.

 

Projected impacts of climate change on Oklahoma (click on image for larger version).  Source: Oklahoma Climatological Survey.

Oklahoma City Deluge

Against the backdrop of mounting scientific evidence came yesterday's rains in Oklahoma City.  Jeff Masters at the Weather Underground describes what happened in his posting today, Heaviest 1-day rain in Oklahoma City history:

"Oklahoma City's rainiest day in history brought rampaging floods to the city and surrounding areas yesterday, as widespread rain amounts of 8 - 11 inches deluged the city. Fortunately, no confirmed deaths or injuries have been blamed on the mayhem, though damage is extensive. Oklahoma City's Will Rogers Airport received 7.62" of rain yesterday, smashing the record for the rainiest day in city history. According to the [National Weather Service] ...the city's previous rainiest day occurred September 22, 1970, when 7.53 inches fell. Some rivers continue to rise due to all the rain, and the Canadian River east of downtown Oklahoma City is four feet over flood stage, with major flooding expected today. You can track the flooding using our wundermap with the USGS Flood layer turned on."

The heavy rains and flooding, which extend well beyond Oklahoma City, have prompted the state to declare emergencies in 59 Oklahoma counties. See the situation update from the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management,  Impacts of Severe Flooding Continue for State (15 June 2010)

Jeff Masters: Numerous Floods this Year Associated with Record-breaking Warm Temperatures

In his posting, Jeff Masters puts the Oklahoma events into the larger context:

"We've had an inordinate number of severe floods in the U.S. so far this year. The worst was the May Tennessee flood, which killed 31 people--the highest death toll from a non-tropical cyclone flooding event in the U.S. since 1994, and the most devastating disaster in Tennessee since the Civil War. The Tennessee floods were rated as a 1000-year flood for Middle Tennessee, West Tennessee, South Central and Western Kentucky and northern Mississippi. Two-day rain totals in some areas were greater than 19 inches.Last Friday's disastrous flash flood in Albert Pike Recreation Area, Arkansas, killed twenty people. That flood was triggered by 8+ inches of rain that fell in just a few hours over the rugged mountains west of Hot Springs. And in March, record rains from a slow-moving and extremely wet Nor'easter triggered historic flooding in Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts, with several rivers exceeding their 100-year flood levels. The 16.32" of rain that fell on Providence, Rhode Island, made March that city's wettest month in recorded history.

All of these flooding events were associated with airmasses that brought record-breaking warm temperatures to surrounding regions of the country. For example, during the overnight hours when the June 11 flood in Arkansas occurred, fifty airports in the Southern and Midwestern U.S. had their highest minimum temperatures on record. During the 1000-year flood in Tennessee, 51 warm minimum temperatures records were set in the eastern half of the U.S. on May 1, and 97 records on May 2. Rhode Island's record wettest March also happened to be its record warmest March. And the air mass that spawned yesterday's Oklahoma City floods set record warm minimum temperatures at 22 airports across the central and Eastern portions of the U.S. on Monday. All this is not surprising, since more moisture can evaporate into warmer air, making record-setting rainfall events more likely when record warm temperatures are present. The total number of airports in the U.S. considered for these comparisons is around 500, so we're talking about significant portions of the U.S. being exposed to these record-breaking warm airmasses this year. For the spring months of March - May, it was the 21st warmest such period in the 116-year record, according to the National Climatic Data Center. At the 500 or so largest airports in the U.S., daily high temperature records outnumbered low temperature records by about a factor 2.5, 1200 to 508. Record high minimums this spring outnumbered record low maximums by 1163 to 568. So far in June, record daily highs have outpaced record lows by 176 to 13, and record high minimums have outpaced record low maximums, 419 to 62." 

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Climate Science Watch Weekly Update, 6/14

Posted on Monday, June 14, 2010

A brief summary of events we are attending, keeping track of, and writing about this week.

Post by Alexa Jay

Tuesday, June 15

President Obama will address the nation about the hemorrhaging Gulf oil blowout Tuesday at 8 P.M. EDT, senior White House adviser David Axelrod said Sunday on Meet the Press.  This is a key opportunity for the President to both outline his administration’s response plan and speak to the true costs of fossil fuel dependence, from the environmental disaster unfolding in the Gulf to the risks posed by global climatic disruption.  President Obama has thus far lent less-than-forceful public support to the passage of comprehensive climate and energy legislation, letting Congress take the lead in developing it.  But with rising anger over the Gulf oil disaster and an uncertain future for legislation in the Senate, the President has begun to ramp up his rhetoric in support of putting a price on carbon.  In Pittsburgh on June 2, Obama vowed that “the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months…and we will get it done.”  It remains to be seen whether he will use this opportunity to connect our fossil fuel dependence to the growing threat of climate change, or to at least set the stage for a major speech about climate impacts in the push to pass comprehensive legislation.*

[*We had a recent exchange with John Holdren, the President’s Science Adviser, in which he said we can expect at some point a major speech about climate change from the President “that puts all this together in a very forceful way.”]

Global warming denialist watch:

Climategate – A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam
The Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

From the Heritage Foundation website: “The common-sense consensus is in: Global warming is a sham. That’s what Brian Sussman, a former San Francisco meteorologist and current Bay Area talk radio show host, has been saying for years.  In his new book, Climategate, he provides the definitive word on why the architects behind such massive manipulation will employ every deception imaginable to advance their assertion that carbon dioxide emissions generated by mankind are ruining the planet.”

Sussman will speak Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has consistently opposed regulation of greenhouse gases and has distorted climate science to do so. One example from Climate Progress here.

In his new book, Sussman “asserts that the global warming hype is really just a form of communism rooted in the principles of Karl Marx,” according to an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News.  Sussman is also known for promoting “birther” theories questioning President Obama’s citizenship.  If you need any further proof that Sussman panders to extreme-right conspiracy theories, Desmogblog has the scoop.

What possible motivation could climate scientists have for orchestrating a massive Marxist conspiracy, you ask? We’re going to find out! Stay tuned.

Legislation

EPA’s economic analysis of the American Power Act is now available. (PDF, 74 pp, 738K)

Forthcoming Climate Science Watch posts:

Notes on climate science in the June 10 Senate debate on the Murkowski resolution to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientifically based “Endangerment Finding” on greenhouse gases, which was defeated by a vote of 47-53.

“Backdraft – The Conflict Potential of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation” – Notes on a June 10 panel at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

On the problem of discussing climate change preparedness at the local level – Post-mortem on the National Climate Adaptation Summit.

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