SciBlogs

Archive January 2010

Miliband: denialism profoundly dangerous Bryan Walker Jan 31

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At risk of further accusation of being over-impressed by politicians’ words I welcome what Ed Miliband is reported as saying in today’s leading article in the Observer. He declared a “battle” against the “siren voices” who denied global warming was real or caused by humans, or that there was a need to cut carbon emissions to tackle it.

His interview with the Observer is described as his first response to University of East Anglia scientists being accused of witholding information and to the IPCC Himalayan glacier error.  He said it would be wrong to use a mistake to somehow undermine the overwhelming picture that’s there.  He described in broad terms the basic physics and the observed effects that point to the existence of human-made climate change, pointing out that “that’s what the vast majority of scientists tell us”.  He cited the thousands of pages of evidence in the IPCC report and was adamant that the IPCC was on the right track.

The danger of climate scepticism was that it would undermine public support for unpopular decisions needed to curb carbon emissions, including the likelihood of higher energy bills for households, and issues such as the visual impact of wind turbines. Miliband is energy secretary as well as climate secretary. 

“There are a whole variety of people who are sceptical, but who they are is less important than what they are saying, and what they are saying is profoundly dangerous… to take what the sceptics say seriously would be a profound risk.”  

That strikes me as plain speaking from a politician.  It would surprise the New Zealand populace if s senior minister here spoke in such terms.

Miliband also went on to acknowledge the “disappointment” of Copenhagen, though noting that there were also achievements including the agreement by countries responsible for 80% of emissions to set domestic carbon targets by today. I liked what he added: “There’s a message for people who take these things seriously: don’t mourn, organise.” He has previously called for a Make Poverty History-style mass public campaign to pressure politicians into cutting emissions.

Meanwhile back here in New Zealand yesterday’s Herald provided an example of how readily wild accusations levelled at IPCC scientists can make it into the journalistic canon. I wrote a few days ago about the UK Sunday Times’ untruthful article on the IPCC and predicted it would be reported uncritically by other newspapers.  Right on cue a Herald writer, reporting on the NIWA decision to put its temperature data on the web, at the end of her report listed the Sunday Times article as one of three items under the heading “IPCC’s Intemperate Year in the Headlines”.

New dimensions in earth science uncovered by NZ blogger Gareth Renowden Jan 30

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Exciting new concepts in earth systems science are emerging from the fertile intellect of one of Hot Topic’s most diligent readers, Ian Wishart. Either that, or he’s demonstrated (again) that he doesn’t understand what he’s writing about. In this astonishing post, published yesterday, he considers something he calls the “feedback warming effect”, and attempts to use a new paper on carbon cycle feedbacks to support Monckton’s nonsense on climate sensitivity.

Just as Chicken Little pontificates about the minutiae of a Monckton allegation about warming amplification being overestimated by six of seven times, along comes a new study in Nature that compared real data with the computer models and found CO2’s feedback warming effect has been exaggerated in the models by five or six times.

Monckton’s TV lies are not mentioned — minutiae to Wishart, obviously — but he then points to this paper: Ensemble reconstruction constraints on the global carbon cycle sensitivity to climate, Frank et al, Nature, 2010; 463 (7280) as if it offers support for Monckton. It doesn’t, as I shall explain, but is Wishart wrong about Monckton, wrong about Frank et al, or both?

Monckton’s “paper”, Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered, is about what it says it is — the global temperature response to (by definition) a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Monckton tries, and fails, to show that this response is small — he claims under 1ºC at doubling. Wishart refers to climate sensitivity as “warming amplification”, which — to be charitable — is a terminological inexactitude.

Frank et al, on the other hand, is the latest effort to pin down how much extra CO2 will be released from the various parts of the carbon cycle as global temperature increases, and suggests that it could be smaller than had been expected [Science Daily]. This “extra” CO2 clearly is an amplification of warming caused by human emissions, and it’s good news that this may be smaller than expected. Wishart describes the study thus:

…[it] compared real data with the computer models and found CO2’s feedback warming effect has been exaggerated in the models by five or six times.

What did Frank et al actually do? Physics World describes their method:

… David Frank and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Research Institute in Birmensdorf, the University of Bern and the Gutenberg University in Mainz have performed the most comprehensive analysis of carbon dioxide and temperature data yet. The team studied the period 1050–1800 AD, when manmade emissions were small enough to be ignored. Carbon dioxide levels were determined from three Antarctic ice cores. Average temperatures in the northern hemisphere were derived from nine different “proxy reconstructions” of temperature – average temperatures derived mostly from tree rings and the isotopic content of ice cores.

No comparisons with models, but a lot of use of paleoclimate data — you know, the tree ring stuff you find in those “debunked” hockeystick blades — and ice cores (and in Wishart-world they can’t be trusted, because Wishart relies on the “work” of EG Beck). Frank and his co-workers use this data to try to work out how much extra CO2 is released when the planet warms — and find that instead of the 40 ppmv/ºC found in previous empirical studies, it was more likely to be in the range 2–21 ppmv/°C, with 8 ppmv/°C being the most likely. The BBC asked Frank what this means for model projections of temperature change this century:

He said that if the results his paper were widely accepted, the overall effect on climate projections would be neutral.
“It might lead to a downward mean revision of those (climate) models which already include the carbon cycle, but an upward revision in those which do not include the carbon cycle.
“That’ll probably even itself out to signify no real change in the temperature projections overall,” he said.

Wishart doesn’t seem to have much of a handle on carbon cycle feedbacks and what they mean for model projections, but he’s canny enough to spot that someone might quibble with his penetrating analysis, so he includes this caveat:

A note for the pedants: the Monckton claim and the Nature paper are approaching a similar problem (magnitude of feedback warming) from slightly different directions (Monckton’s comment relates to rise in temp caused by doubling of CO2, whilst the Nature paper examines the increase in CO2 caused by a rise in temperature), but the general thrust of the arguments is similar: extra carbon dioxide is not going to cause as much feedback as previously claimed.

Clear as mud, Ian. This pedant would point out that the problems being considered are not the same and the “general thrust of the arguments” is not at all similar. Monckton isn’t talking about “feedback warming”, he’s talking about warming caused by a fixed increase (by definition a doubling over pre-industrial conditions) in CO2. He wants us to believe that the temperature response to increasing CO2 is tiny. On the other hand, Frank et al’s conclusions are based on linking small changes in global temperature over the period from 1050 to 1800 to small increases and decreases in CO2 levels.

In other words, if Monckton is right, then Frank et al’s methodology can’t work. Far from supporting Monckton, Frank et al add yet more reasons why he has to be wrong. Meanwhile, Wishart is wrong on all counts. I wonder how such an expert climate commentator could have failed to notice? Perhaps he should get his stuff peer reviewed. Where’s Monckton when you need him…?

Hansen: it can be cold in a warming world. Bryan Walker Jan 30

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“If it’s that warm, how come it’s so darned cold?” is the heading James Hansen has given to a recently finalised essay circulated to his email list. In more sober terms he subtitles it Regional Cold Anomalies within Near-Record Global Temperature. 

The essay explains how the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) goes about analyzing global temperature change, using electronic receipt of data from three sources: (1) weather data for several thousand meteorological stations, (2) satellite observations of sea surface temperature, and (3) Antarctic research station measurements. And for those who might suggest that there’s secret manipulation going on Hansen makes it clear that the data is available for others who want to use it:

“Although the three input data streams that we use are publicly available from the organizations that produce them, we began preserving the complete input data sets each month in April 2008. These data sets, which cover the full period of our analysis, 1880-present, are available to parties interested in performing their own analysis or checking our analysis. The computer program used in our analysis can be downloaded from the GISS web site.”

The results are that 2009 tied (with 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 – differences too close to matter) as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature record.  The warmest was 2005.  Hansen discusses the variance of the GISS figures with the Hadley Centre (HadCRUT) which has 1998 as the warmest year, and which has been used so frequently to support claims that the globe since 1998 is now cooling. After careful comparison he concludes that the differences that have developed between the GISS and HadCRUT global temperatures are due primarily to the extension of the GISS analysis into regions that are excluded from the HadCRUT analysis. He expresses a reasonable degree of confidence in the GISS preference for 2005. Over the decade the conclusion is easier: the world has become warmer, not cooler.

What about that cold 2009 December?  There was an unusual exchange of polar and mid-latitude air in the northern hemisphere, related to the most extreme Arctic Oscillation since the 1970s. His conclusion is that December 2009 was a highly anomalous month. High pressure in the polar region can be described as the “cause” of the extreme weather. There is no apparent basis for expecting frequent repeat occurrences of December 2009 conditions, though high winter variability including cold snaps will surely continue.

Further discussion of seasonal temperature anomalies leads to the observation that the change in the probability that the seasonal mean temperature at any given location will fall in the category that was defined as unusually warm during 1951-1980 has increased from 30 percent during that period to about 60 percent today. This will be illustrated in an upcoming publication.

The bottom line?

“The Earth has been in a period of rapid global warming for the past three decades. The assertion that the planet has entered a period of cooling in the past decade is without foundation. On the contrary, we find no significant deviation from the warming trend of the past three decades.”

I haven’t attempted to offer any of the detail with which Hansen builds his conclusions, but can report it as readily accessible to the lay person prepared to give it reasonably patient attention. The essay is another example of his skill in communicating serious science to non-scientists and of his laudable willingness to do so.

His preliminary remarks are worth separate attention. He notes that scientists reporting global warming have come under attack for a supposed conspiracy to manufacture evidence of global warming. Vicious personal messages are sent to the principal scientists almost daily.

“The spiral into an almost surrealistic situation with ad hominem attacks on scientists may have originated in part with vested interests who do not want society to address climate change. But there is more than that – including honest, wishful thinking that climate change is not really happening. But wishing does not alter facts.”

He stoutly supports the work of scientists:

“The scientific method practically defines integrity… All scientists make honest mistakes, but the scientific method is designed to correct them. The skeptical nature of the scientific method causes conclusions to be reexamined as new data appears. Cases of deliberate fudging of data, of scientific fraud, are so rare that these infrequent episodes live in infamy for decades and even centuries.”

He knows of no cases of fraud in analyses of global temperature measurements. In the face of unfounded accusations “our best approach is simply to continue to report our scientific results as clearly as possible.” 

He thinks that most of the public continue to respect scientists for what they do and how they do it. I hope he’s right. Sometimes I think the forces of denial have taken on the aspect of a rampaging demonic power, against which the forces of quiet reason are for the time being ineffectual.

Monckton, “high priest of climate sceptics”, tells lies on TV NZ Gareth Renowden Jan 29

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Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (a nice little village in Kent with good pubs, at least when I was growing up nearby) has arrived safely in Australia and embarked on the hectic round of talks and media opportunities that is his birthright and expectation wherever he goes. On Monday morning, my spies tell me he popped up on TV One’s Breakfast show, and managed to get away with an egregious falsehood.

One of his themes for this tour seems to be that the “UN’s climate panel” has exaggerated the warming to be expected from a doubling of CO2 by “six or seven times”. Asked about this on Breakfast, he said (my transcription – starts about 1 minute into the interview):

The scientists have indeed got their sums wrong, because there are only perhaps 40 or 50 scientists involved in calculating that one central quality, which is known as climate sensitivity, how much warming will you get. It’s a very narrow, very specialist field in which I have actually published work in the [slight pause] reviewed literature, and there’s not many people who have done that. Very few people people have actually done work in this field, and unfortunately what they have done is they have preferred at the UN’s climate panel to rely on computer models which are in effect a form of guesswork.

You could describe this whole statement as a big lie, because it contains so many constituent falsehoods. For instance, the assertion that the IPCC has preferred to “rely on computer models” for estimates of climate sensitivity is simply not true, as a quick glance at AR4 WG1 Chapter Nine, section 9.6 Observational Constraints on Climate Sensitivity shows. But the really outrageous falsehood is his claim to have published a paper in the “reviewed literature”. He has done no such thing. He wrote a “paper” which appeared in the July 2008 American Physical Society Physics & Society newsletter (here). Monckton’s employers at the Science and Public Policy Institute (an organisation with close ties to the Scaife funded Frontiers for Freedom Institute) sent out a press release claiming it to be “peer-reviewed”, prompting the APS to add this to the start of the article:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review, since that is not normal procedure for American Physical Society newsletters.

The only peer who reviewed Monckton’s piece appears to have been himself. That may go some way to explain why it contains so many mistakes. Arthur Smith catalogued 125 errors, and Tim Lambert at Deltoid provided a nice (and much shorter) overview of Monckton’s sleight of hand with the numbers here. Bottom line? Monckton is quite wrong.

However, this is old news. Monckton’s “paper” was published in July 2008 (there’s a full time line at Rabett Run), and it was comprehensively debunked within weeks. Monckton appears to be relying on the general media not knowing the deep background to the things he says. He doesn’t expect a breakfast TV presenter to be able to call him out on his embellishments of the truth, and perhaps he thinks that after a year and a half he can say what he likes and get away with it.

In one respect, however, he seems to have misjudged the credulity of the TV One interviewer, and even more so that of Sean Plunket, who had the pleasure of interviewing him for RNZ National’s Morning Report on Wednesday morning. Neither were buying his hyperbole about left wing scams. You can hear Plunket’s incredulous tone, after Monckton talks about the “wall to wall lefties” at the ABC, and how all left wingers are “instinctively totalitarian” (podcast here at 8:27). The TV One host even felt moved to challenge him on the “extremity of your rhetoric”, and got a shirty response. One has to hope the Aussie media are being at least as challenging, but glancing at Miranda Devine’s breathless little hagiography in the Sydney Morning Herald today doesn’t fill me with hope.

UK Sunday Times’ sloppy journalism attacks IPCC Bryan Walker Jan 27

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A couple of days ago one of Hot Topic’s denialist commenters triumphantly waved a UK Sunday Times article claiming that the IPCC had erred not only in relation to the likely rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers but also in linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters. 

I had a quick look at the IPCC report referred to and responded  by pointing out that the section pointed to by the Sunday Times wasn’t about the frequency of extreme events but about their costs.

I think the matter is worth longer treatment than I gave it there, because it is an example of shocking carelessness, if not deliberate misrepresentation, passing itself off as responsible journalism on climate change.  The Sunday Times article was written by Jonathan Leake, their science and environment editor. 

We’ve caught the IPCC at it again, he virtually proclaims.  The IPCC has based its claims that natural disasters are increasing as a result of global warming on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny. On this slender basis developing nations have demanded compensation from rich nations and Ed Miliband, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have been led into exaggerated statements.

It was news to me that the whole question of the frequency of severe events rested on a single report, and it rapidly becomes apparent in Leake’s report that he is confused (I hope not disingenuous). Here is what he writes:

“The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC’s 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had ‘suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s’.

“It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: ‘One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend.’”

Costs? Losses? This must surely be from Working Group II of the IPCC which deals with the impacts of climate change, not from Working Group I which deals with the physical science.  And so it proved.  The study he talks about  is by Robert Muir-Wood, of the London consultancy Risk Management Solutions.  It is referred to in a short section on economic and insurance losses, part of a longer section on disasters and hazards. The inference that this paper is the basis of the IPCC’s findings on the frequency and severity of natural disasters is simply ridiculous.  Here is what the IPCC says of Muir-Woods paper: 

“A global catalogue of catastrophe losses was constructed (MuirWood et al., 2006), normalised to account for changes that have resulted from variations in wealth and the number and value of properties located in the path of the catastrophes, using the method of Landsea et al. (1999). The global survey was considered largely comprehensive from 1970 to 2005 for countries and regions (Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, the USA, Caribbean, Central America, China, India and the Philippines) that had centralised catastrophe loss information and included a broad range of peril types: tropical cyclone, extratropical cyclone, thunderstorm, hailstorm, wildfire and flood, and that spanned high- and low-latitude areas.

“Once the data were normalised, a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% per year (see Supplementary Material Figure SM1.1). However, for a number of regions, such as Australia and India, normalised losses show a statistically significant reduction since 1970. The significance of the upward trend is influenced by the losses in the USA and the Caribbean in 2004 and 2005 and is arguably biased by the relative wealth of the USA, particularly relative to India.”

A restrained statement, I’d have thought, and certainly staying firmly within the topic of costs, not using the Muir-Wood paper as a basis for evidence on the wider question of increased frequency of severe events.  There are statements in many places in the IPCC report about changes in extremes and disasters, and it is absurd to treat this one section and this one paper as the basis of what it has to say.  How on earth does a journalist carrying the responsibility for science and environment on a major newspaper not know that?  I was pleased to see the IPCC issue a statement on Monday firmly refuting the Sunday Times article as misleading and baseless.  The first point their statement makes is:

“[The Sunday Times article] incorrectly assumes that a brief section on trends in economic losses from climate-related disasters is everything the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (2007) has to say about changes in extremes and disasters. In fact, the Fourth Assessment Report reaches many important conclusions, at many locations in the report, about the role of climate change in extreme events. The assessment addresses both observations of past changes and projections of future changes in sectors ranging from heat waves and precipitation to wildfires. Each of these is a careful assessment of the available evidence, with a thorough consideration of the confidence with which each conclusion can be drawn.”

(A convenient summary of what Working Group I has to say may be seen in their Frequently Asked Questions section . The question ‘Has there been a change in extreme events?’ is responded to on p.107, and the question ‘Can Individual Extreme Events be Explained by Greenhouse Warming?’ on p.119.  Both answers are restrained and cautious.)

But even on the matter of trends in economic losses and disasters the Sunday Times has grossly misrepresented the IPCC, as Monday’s IPCC refutation adds:

“The second problem with the article in the Sunday Times is its baseless attack on the section of the report on trends in economic losses from disasters. This section of the IPCC report is a balanced treatment of a complicated and important issue. It clearly makes the point that one study detected an increase in economic losses, corrected for values at risk, but that other studies have not detected such a trend. The tone is balanced, and the section contains many important qualifiers. In writing, reviewing, and editing this section, IPCC procedures were carefully followed to produce the policy-relevant assessment that is the IPCC mandate.”

The full section is here on p.110 if you want to check the veracity of that judgement.

The Sunday Times article is simply untrue. It is lazy, sloppy journalism at best, deliberate misinformation at worst.   It has been taken up trumphantly by the denialist world and reported widely and uncritically by other newspapers. I hope the paper is ashamed of what it has achieved, but I fear it will be rejoicing at the attention it has gained.

Welcome words from a politician Bryan Walker Jan 26

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“This is a century in which we will recognise that living within your means can no longer just be about money, but also must be about first living within your carbon means and second living within the natural world’s ability to support humankind over issues like fishing and deforestation.”

I took pleasure in the these words from UK Environment Secretary Hilary Benn, reported in the Guardian today, while realising that I open myself to the accusation of being too ready to credit that a politician can mean what he or she says. 

Benn is calling for a way to be found to price the impact of our decisions on biodiversity in the same way that the international community is finding a way of pricing carbon. He warns that the world may be going through its sixth great extinction event.  He’s hoping that a report being prepared for the European commission by the Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev into the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity may “do for our understanding of the natural world what Nick Stern did for the understanding of the economic impact of climate change.”

“Stern made people sit up and take notice. Stern said ‘this is the cost of dealing with climate change and this is the cost of not dealing with it.’ Stern brought this issue to the attention of business people and economists. We have to realise we live in a world where we can no longer take without consequence”.

Earlier in the month Benn contributed an opinion piece in the BBC’s Green Room series explaining his biodiversity concern at greater length. He was careful to conjoin it with climate change: “Climate change and biodiversity are inextricably linked. We ignore natural capital at our peril.”

Benn is only saying what many scientists have been pointing out for some years.  But it matters that politicians should be saying it.  The general populace needs to hear it from them.  It’s called political leadership and it has often mattered at critical times in the past.  I commented in an earlier post on the willingness of the Milliband brothers and Gordon Brown to speak unequivocally about climate change to the UK electorate. John Prescott was similarly outspoken and active in the lead-up to Copenhagen.

Admittedly the Copenhagen experience was dispiriting in relation to the rhetoric we were increasingly hearing from political leaders beforehand.  Benn will address that fact in a speech he is due to deliver tomorrow, when he will say that a way has to be found to reverse “the collective loss of personal, economic and environmental optimism”.

Our own political leadership is not given to statements like that of Benn’s which opened this post.  I realise they make a virtue of not wanting to promise more than they can deliver, but the New Zealand electorate needs to hear unequivocally from the government (and from the main opposition party for that matter) that climate change and biodiversity loss are supremely important issues, with the corollary that our catching up with Australian incomes is a rather lesser matter.

Whole Earth Discipline Bryan Walker Jan 25

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Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist ManifestoWhen James Lovelock, Edward O. Wilson and Ian McEwan jostle to praise a book I assume it will be worth attention.  Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto doesn’t disappoint. The title echoes the Whole Earth Catalogue which he founded over forty years ago as an ambitious reference aid for skills, tools and products useful to a self-sustainable lifestyle.

Times have changed and Brand has changed with them. Climate change has become a clear and present danger. He has become more of a pragmatist, though no less of an environmentalist. His pragmatism leads him to regard with favour three factors which put him to some extent at odds with others in the environmental movement. The three are urbanisation, nuclear power and genetic engineering, and part of the purpose of the book is to urge the Green-inclined to consider how the three may now be considered significant contributions to facing up to climate change.

There’s no questioning the seriousness of climate change. James Lovelock is frequently Brand’s point of reference in this regard. He hopes that things won’t get as bad as Lovelock’s prediction that we are in the process of moving to a stable hot state 5 degrees warmer than now, but recognises that even the 2 degree rise which politicians seem to be regarding as an acceptable limit will mean large species loss, more severe storms, floods and droughts, refugees from sea level rise, and other expensive and inhumane consequences. It’s against the background of this concern that he sets his case.

Urbanisation is proceeding apace, and is to be welcomed. Brand takes a positive view of what cities mean for the people who are now flooding into them, even if they begin in the squatter settlements which can look so dismal to outside observers. He points to on-the-spot slum researcher reports which observe that cities are very successful in promoting new forms of income generation, that it is much cheaper to provide services in urban areas and that getting people to move to the city may be the most realistic poverty reduction strategy. From the environmental perspective, natural systems in the countryside fare better with fewer inhabitants. Subsistence farming on marginal land can give way to more concentrated cash-crop agriculture on prime land. Aquifers recover. Forests recover. Birth rates drop when people move to cities. Women play a more powerful role in city society. Urban societies become greener in their sensibilities, which can lead to increasing protection for the countryside.

This is only a sample of the wide-ranging survey Brand offers of the positives in growing urbanisation. He acknowledges the negative actualities as well. Cities are far from an unmitigated good. But he is firm that the prospect of 80 percent of humanity living on 3 percent of the land will be a net good for the planet. Infrastructure efficiency, energy use reduction, less pressure on rural natural systems, and the like, are adduced to support this conclusion.

Brand’s section on nuclear power is prefaced with a variously attributed quote: “With climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened. With nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.” His own stance on nuclear power has flipped from anti to pro for two reasons. First, he gradually realised that nuclear waste disposal no longer looked like a cosmic-level problem. Second, nuclear power looked like a major solution in the light of growing worries about climate change. Coal is the enemy. He endorses Hansen’s statement in his open letter to President Obama, “Coal plants are factories of death”, and the accompanying observation “One of the greatest dangers the world faces is the possibility that a vocal minority of anti-nuclear activists could prevent phase-out of coal emissions.”

Brand is all for energy efficiency and for renewables, but impressed by the claim that renewables cannot be relied on for the baseload electricity currently provided by coal in many countries. The dangers supposed attendant on nuclear power generation are not now serious.  Much work has gone into minimizing the risk of accidents. The accumulated effects of low-dose radiation are no longer thought significant for human health. Waste storage arrangements are not as hazardous as once thought. There is every reason for it to be part of the energy portfolio we will need to replace fossil fuel sources. 

Brand reserves his strongest accusation of the environmental movement for its opposition to genetic engineering (GE). “We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”  Noting the lack of alarm about genetic engineering among biologists he comments that “they know what a minor event it is amid the standard chaos of evolution and the just-barely-organised chaos of agricultural breeding.” Taking the example of GE herbicide-tolerant crops he points to the great ecological win they represent in that they encourage no-till agriculture. This offers major climate benefits along with improvements to soil structure because tillage releases carbon from the soil, which holds more carbon than all the living vegetation and the atmosphere put together. He regrets that organic farmers, whose work he values highly, can’t use GE but must continue to plough. Some of those farmers also regret it.

There is a great deal more than this example in the chapters which proclaim the green possibilities of GE and his hope that the organic farming and food industries will come to terms with the technologies of “ecology in the seed”.  

Having dealt with the three developments which he considers need to be embraced, not rejected, by the environmental movement, Brand moves on to some general considerations as to how not to repeat the mistakes made in those areas. Greens need to be less romantic and more scientific.  “Environmentalists do best when they follow where the science leads, as they did with climate change. They do worst when they get nervous about where science leads, as they did with genetic engineering.” 

Ecosystem engineering and niche construction are part of what humans have always done. Brand makes an emphatic case for tending the wild, for people being densely involved with nature. “It’s all gardening” is the chapter heading. Restoration is part of it, but so is agriculture which merges with the practices of tending the wild. 

Humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role. The trend of the changes we have made lately indicates we are doing a poor job of it.  “We are forced to learn planet craft – in both sense of the word: craft as skill and craft as cunning.” For that we need a better knowledge of how the Earth system works. “We are model-rich and data poor.”

Brand writes with clarity and verve. He grips reader attention. Whatever one thinks of the positions he holds there is high interest in his explanations of them and no denying their importance in relation to the seriousness of the challenge of climate change. How in fact the balance between nuclear power and renewables will be worked out remains to be seen, and the whole question of non-fossil fuel energy sources seems still very open. Some who have no objection to nuclear power on principle still consider it unlikely to play a major role. But Brand’s concern is to establish that there is no reason to exclude it from consideration, or indeed to exclude anything else which science affirms as useful to ecological balance.

In the wake of Poseidon Gareth Renowden Jan 24

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windfarmwakes.jpg

A little something for the weekend: a wonderful picture of windfarm wakes — clouds forming in the wakes behind the front row of the Horns Rev windfarm, 14km off the coast of Denmark. Picture comes from here. Discussion of the implications for windfarm design at David McKay’s Without Hot Air blog, h/t to Stoat and someone on Twitter.

[King Crimson]

The power of the ocean Bryan Walker Jan 20

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The following column was published in the Waikato Times on 19 January

Silent, invisible, predictable, sustainable. Those are the four words Crest Energy uses to describe its planned marine turbine power generation project in the Kaipara Harbour. Capturing the power of the tidal movement of the up to 8,000 million cubic metres of water which pass in and out of the harbour each day, the project may eventually contribute as much as 3% of New Zealand’s electricity supply. Assuming it gets under way, that is. However, that has just become more likely with the news that the Environment Court has delivered an interim decision in favour of consent, subject to a fine-tuning of consent conditions. Mainly the Court wants further monitoring work to satisfy concerns about possible interference with Maui’s dolphin and snappper fisheries.

Like wind, the ocean around New Zealand offers many promising sites of renewable electricity generation. None of us who have stood on a beach can doubt the power of the ocean.  Harnessing a little of it for our human purposes is now technically feasible and, if we ever face up to the real cost of fossil fuels, no doubt feasible economically as well. Ultimately in New Zealand wave power is the larger potential source, since our tidal range is not great.  But tidal flow offers significant opportunities in some places, as the Kaipara project makes apparent.  Cook Strait is one, and Neptune Power has consent to trial a turbine there, probably in the near future. They comment that the mass flow in Cook Strait makes it the most concentrated energy resource in New Zealand. Foveaux Strait is another site where tidal flow is very large and it is not fanciful to imagine the Bluff aluminium smelter powered from it.

The advantage of tidal power over wave is its predictability. Waves vary according to the weather. Nevertheless there are plenty of waves around New Zealand, and trials are under way to test their electricity generating capacity.  Last year the government made a grant of $760,000 to Wellington company Power Projects Ltd to enable deployment of a 20 kw device, building on their successful trialling of a smaller model. Surveys indicate that the potential from wave power is high in relation to New Zealand’s total electricity requirements.  A plus is that wave energy tends to peak in the winter season when power demand is at its greatest.

There are currently no fewer than 26 wave and tidal energy projects at various stages of development in New Zealand. That doesn’t mean that generation is imminent, but we should not be surprised if very rapid growth occurs as the technologies mature.  I’m in no position to predict how the various renewable energy options presented by New Zealand’s geography will sort themselves out, but between wind, marine and geothermal power there appears to be a wealth of resources. That could soon see us no longer reliant on the burning of fossil fuels which currently provides 34% of our electricity. Renewables should be well able to include supplying electrically-powered plug-in vehicles. 

It would be nice to report that the government is enthusiastically driving the change to renewable energy.  In the case of marine energy it has, admittedly, provided $8 million over a period of four years to support selected projects. But it committed $20 million over three years to gather seismic data in support of oil and gas exploration, and has extended tax exemptions for offshore exploration.  The Minister of Energy reserves his greatest enthusiasm for when he speaks of the prospects for fossil fuel extraction and export over coming decades. In a rational world we’d be more interested in finding ways of leaving it in the ground, knowing, as we now do, the fearful prospects ahead if we keep burning the stuff. There’s still some priority-sorting needed at government level.

Analysis of stolen CRU emails by NZ blogger shows tawdry manipulation of facts – Poneke’s credibility now in tatters Gareth Renowden Jan 19

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homer.jpgThis may be one of the least important posts I’ve ever written. It’s only 1,100 words (including quotes), but that’s all that was necessary. When a blogger makes as many simple mistakes, and indulges in so much gross distortion of the truth as seen in the last two posts by Poneke (aka former journalist David McLoughlin), then it really doesn’t take long to show him to be incapable of a fair-minded assessment of climate science, or the emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK. This is how he begins his first post on the subject of the stolen emails:

Having now read all the Climategate emails, I can conclusively say they demonstrate a level of scientific chicanery of the most appalling kind that deserves the widest possible public exposure.

Oh really? Let’s parse that post…

The emails reveal that the entire global warming debate and the IPCC process is controlled by a small cabal of climate specialists in England and North America.

Rubbish. That’s not only untrue, it’s unfair to the cabal of NZ climate scientists who have played a key role in the IPCC process.

This cabal, who call themselves “the Team,” bully and smear any critics.

They were dubbed “The Team” by blogger Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit, as a reference to McIntyre’s persistent, but failed, attempts to discredit the so-called “hockey stick” graph of temperature over the last 2,000 years.

They control the “peer review” process for research in the field and use their power to prevent contrary research being published.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is simply not feasible. Poneke clearly has no idea how many journals publish climate-related material, or how the peer review process works. Grant at Code For Life does.

They falsely claim there is a scientific “consensus” that the “science is settled,” by getting lists of scientists to sign petitions claiming there is such a consensus.

Pardon? That’s what the deniers do to assert there’s no consensus — with their Oregon Petition. Perhaps Poneke is getting confused about the statements on climate change by all the world’s leading scientific bodies. But of course, they’re all controlled by Michael Mann and Phil Jones, even the Glorious Scientific Academy of the People’s Republic of Kazakhstan.

They have fought for years to conceal the actual shonky data they have used to wrongly claim there has been unprecedented global warming this past 50 years.

…followed by a considerable misunderstanding of ten year old discussions about paleoclimate studies.

They show Team members becoming alarmed and despondent at global temperatures peaking in 1998, then slowly falling to the present, while publicly trying to hide the fact that there was a peak and now a decline.

But… 1998 is only the warmest year in the CRU record, and they’re The Team who’ve been fiddling the data, so we can’t trust them can we? But never mind, it doesn’t matter which temperature record you choose, the first decade of the 21st century was warmer than the last decade of the 20th.

The Climategate emails (and accompanying computer data) were almost certainly leaked by a whistleblower inside the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (the “CRU” — the supplier of much key IPCC historic climate data), not hacked from there by an outsider, as initially thought.

He provides no evidence for that assertion, beyond wishful thinking. The computer forensic specialists of the UK’s National Domestic Extremism Unit are helping the East Anglia police with their investigation into the theft. The CRU servers were hacked at least twice, and the entire email database was stolen, my sources tell me. The released emails are a carefully edited selection of that database. An investigative journalist might ask who did the selection, and who stood to gain from their release? Poneke can’t be bothered.

McLoughlin then gets the Chris de Freitas/Climate Research story exactly the wrong way round (it was CdF perverting peer review to get shonky papers published, not “The Team” trying to prevent it – see Mediamatters report), further demonstrates his misunderstanding of the “hockey stick” controversy (not dropped by IPCC reports (it’s on p467, WG1, Chapter 6), explicitly endorsed by the US National Research Council review), and misrepresents what NZ scientist Kevin Trenberth meant by his comment on “cooling”. You can find out what Trenberth was talking about, in his own words, here. It was published before McLoughlin’s ill-advised and ill-educated rant.

To this outsider (I know no more about “Poneke” than can be gleaned by reading his blog), it looks as though McLoughlin has approached the stolen emails with a set of preconceptions — or perhaps knowledge of what what was being said in climate crank circles — and then managed to find his preconceptions confirmed. A modicum of research, of looking into what the scientists he so freely maligns have to say might have made for a less embarrassing article.

If any journalist produced a shoddy report like this — and claimed it to be the most important thing they’d written — any self-respecting editor would fire them on the spot.

Meanwhile, unhappy with being told he’s wrong by scientists who happen to blog at Sciblogs, he’s busy attacking the messenger:

…I really do question their using taxpayer’s money to push what looks suspiciously like shrill propaganda in support of their cause.

The only shrill propaganda in this sorry little episode is coming from a once-respected writer who has forgotten what looking at both sides of a story really involves.

[NB: Before DM complains, Hot Topic is syndicated to Sciblogs, not hosted there. I hold no brief for the SMC. They can look after themselves.]

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