Great Science: measuring the retreat of prehistoric glaciers.

This is simply a great video explaining how scientists go about reconstructing the history of the retreat of prehistoric glaciers. It's really good science and it's all part of a MASSIVE effort by scientists to understand how the Earth works so that we can better predict future changes to the Earth's climate.

Make sure to watch in HD and fullscreen to appreciate the amazing scenery.

Dilemmas of a climate denier

The scientists over at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN may announce the discovery (or likely discovery) of the Higgs Boson tomorrow. I've been quite amused reading the comments beneath an article on the subject over at WUWT. Some of the folks there are having trouble reconciling their disbelief and distrust in climate science and climate scientists, with the possibility of accepting the scientific discovery of another group of scientists. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, but it's not that easy. After all, many of those CERN scientists will have colleagues and friends that work on the issue of AGW.

Most of the attacks on the blogosphere and on conservative media against climate change predictions are not actually attacking the science, but instead focus a lot on portraying the various well known scientists and the climate science community as being dishonest and even fraudulent. I do think that one of the better arguments to use against such nonsense is to point out that the same reasoning used to criticize the climate scientists could also be used to criticize all other disciplines in science, from particle physics, to medical science and even my own field of plasma physics. Yet, for some (not so) mysterious reason, the climate deniers don't harass the folks in those other fields. The comments over on WUWT about the LHC seem to expose that dilemma in all its ugly glory.

Anyhoo, I decided to add my own tongue-in-cheek comment. I'm not sure everybody over there will get the joke. Here's what I said:

Obviously there’s no Higgs boson. It’s a hoax. It’s existence is derived from “models” and the experimental “evidence” is not directly linked to the Higgs. Instead, they use theoretical “simulations” to infer the particle’s existence from the data. If we start believing in this sort of science, then we’re on a slippery slope to believing that other models and simulations (such as those in AGW) could infer scientific “facts” from data. We can’t have that now, can we?
They’ll probably also want to build a bigger “laser” and ask tax payers for a million … sorry, strike that … a billion dollars!!

Taking a dip in the Climate Wars

I'm over halfway through reading Michael Mann's recent book "The Hockey Stick and The Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines". It's a fascinating read and I hope to write up a full review once I'm finished. I'm just writing this post to get the ball rolling and to set the stage.

It turns out that I ended up getting a bit more involved in those climate wars sooner than I thought I would. It started after I had a knee-jerk reaction to reading an article over on WUWT. That reaction was to send a tweet to Mann expressing how amazed I was that the people commenting below the WUWT article could actually bring themselves to defend the question posed to Mann by a certain Roger Sowell (who I know nothing about, at least for now). To my delight, Mann replied and we struck up a short Twitter conversation (below; read from the bottom up; click on image to embiggen).

As you can see from the end of that conversation, our initial tweets sparked a reply by Anthony Watts over on his website. I've been writing several follow up comments over on that article to point out the laziness and sloppiness of the question put forward by Sowell to Mann. One person in particular (some guy called Bill Tuttle) has attempted to knock down my arguments but he keeps digging himself into a bigger hole. Every reply seems to expose the fact that he hasn't even bothered to look at the articles by Mann (known as MBH98 and MBH99) that Sowell was trying to refer to. He's even gone as far as using McIntyre and McKitrick's work as "proof" of errors in the work by Mann et al., even though the various analyses by M&M have all been shown to be flawed or without incidence on the final hockey stick curve.

This small dip into the morass of the Climate Wars has been an interesting experience for me. The back and forth comments over on WUWT forced me to research more into the debate over the hockey stick (am slowly building up a bibliography of relevant scientific articles). It has also, however, been very informative of just how powerful the Internet can be in getting one's own armchair opinions out into the world. Although I'm somewhat flattered that my conversation with Mann made a small ripple on WUWT, it's also a lesson to me to be wary of what I post online in the future.

If you want more info related to Mann's book, I see that he is beginning to use a new hashtag dedicated to it on Twitter: #HSCW

Links to the HSCW on:
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/The-Hockey-Stick-Climate-Wars/dp/023115254X/
Amazon.co.uk: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Hockey-Stick-Climate-Wars/dp/023115254X/
Amazon.fr: http://www.amazon.fr/The-Hockey-Stick-Climate-Wars/dp/023115254X

A must-read article on the Climate Wars

Popular Science magazine (http://www.popsci.com) just recently published a very lengthy article entitled "The Battle Over Climate Science". It goes into great detail over how a large number of climate scientists "routinely face death threats, hate mail, nuisance lawsuits and political attacks". 
Here are two excerpts that particularly caught my attention, in a bad way:

A climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory answered a late-night knock to find a dead rat on his doorstep and a yellow Hummer speeding away. An MIT hurricane researcher found his inbox flooded daily for two weeks last January with hate mail and threats directed at him and his wife. And in Australia last year, officials relocated several climatologists to a secure facility after climate-change skeptics unleashed a barrage of vandalism, noose brandishing and threats of sexual attacks on the scientists’ children.

 “When I get an e-mail that mentions my child and a guillotine,” Hayhoe says, “I sometimes want to pull a blanket over my head. The intent of all this is to discourage scientists. As a woman and a mother, I have to say that sometimes it does achieve its goal. There are many times when I wonder if it’s worth it.”

But there was some positive news in the article:

Some conservative think tanks have since begun to soften their positions. Jeff Kueter, the current president of the George C. Marshall Institute, which has been advocating against mainstream climate science since the 1980s, told me in his office in Virginia last month that “climate change is not a hoax” and that “human activities undoubtedly have an impact on climate change.”

Public opinion in the U.S. about anthropogenic climate change is also changing. This spring, four major universities released polls showing that a clear majority of American citizens now say that the world is warming and that the country should take action. Jon Krosnick, a professor of communications at Stanford University, conducted one of the polls. He found that 83 percent of Americans say they believe that the Earth has been warming. One significant factor, he suggests, is that Americans can finally see and feel climate change happening. 

I've been reading quite a lot about climate change and the climate "debate" recently. A lot of the stuff I read makes me a bit angry because, as a working scientist, I feel like some of the hatred against climate scientists is directed at me and my colleagues too. This PopSci article doesn't help me abate that anger.

On the bright side, I 've been watching quite a few videos by Peter Sinclair over at ClimateCrocks.com (it was a recent article by Peter that linked to the PopSci article above). He has a series of videos called "Renewable Energy Solution of the Month". They make for very positive viewing and help give me great hope for the future.

"Scientists and Astronauts" criticizing NASA's global warming policy

I follow the climate change debate a lot and, in the spirit of keeping an open mind, I follow a variety of blogs on both sides of the debate. One of those blogs, Watts Up With That by Anthony Watts, posted this article yesterday:

Hansen and Schmidt of NASA GISS under fire for climate stance: Engineers, scientists, astronauts ask NASA administration to look at empirical evidence rather than climate models

In that article, Anthony posts a press release entitled:

Joint letter to NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidence

The letter in question is signed by "49 former NASA scientists and astronauts" who admonish NASA for "it’s role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change"

In the following post, I will lay out my criticisms of the letter. Just to be clear before you read any further, let me state that I am a strong advocate of the general consensus that human actions are leading to global warming.

Anthropogenic Global Warming - a testable hypothesis

I follow several climate change blogs and two of them recently published some interesting articles on what we knew about global warming back in the early 80's and how the models of that time predicted the changing climate of the past 30 years.

From Climate Denial Crock of the Week, by Peter Sinclair, comes the following video:

In that video we get to see how the scientific predictions from 1982 have been validated. What I found really interesting in that video was the explanation of the "fingerprint approach", which is the method used to distinguish warming caused by carbon dioxide from warming caused by other factors.

On the Real Climate blog, two contributors wrote a post about a paper by James Hansen and co-workers (here's the pdf) that was published in 1981. The real eye-opening part of that post is a graph (click here for a direct link as I'm not sure about permissions for reproducing images) where they superimpose the temperature data of the last 30 years over the model predictions by Hansen et al from 1982. The correlation is astounding! It's not perfect, but I can tell you from experience that in science, such an agreement between two curves is considered a home run. If I could get experimental data that fitted just as well with models, then publishing science papers would be a breeze!

References

• J. Hansen, D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, and G. Russell, "Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide", Science, vol. 213, 1981, pp. 957-966.