Help close the consensus gap using social media Posted May 2013 by Matt Birdoff

Over the last few days, there has been intense interest in our consensus paper and The Consensus Project website. The fact that the paper has been reported widely in mainstream media across the world is an important step towards reducing the gaping chasm between public perception of scientific consensus and the 97% reality. HavingPresident Obama tweet about our paper to over 31 million followers (with 2,400+ retweets!) will certainly help close the consensus gap.

However, as the above Consensus Gap graph shows, it will take a broad, persistent effort to reduce this misperception. To contribute to this effort, our team at SJI Associates (who put together the amazing Consensus Project website) will continue to work on eye-grabbing, compelling graphics. These graphics are designed to be shared through social media - on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Read more…

Source: skepticalscience.com

Has the rate of surface warming changed? 16 years revisited Posted May 2013 by Kevin C

Climate scientists have traditionally looked at climate over long periods - 30 years or more. However the media obsession with short term trends has focussed attention on the past 15-16 years. Short term trends are much more complex because they can be affected by many factors which cancel out over longer periods. In a recent interview James Hansen noted “If you look over a 30-40 year period the expected warming is two-tenths of a degree per decade, but that doesn’t mean each decade is going to warm two-tenths of a degree: there is too much natural variability”.

Over the winter vacation we produced a video which tried to explain the contributions to the recent temperature trend based on the best evidence available at the time, however the rapid pace of development in this area has thrown significant doubt on the conclusions. While the video has significant educational content, the conclusions do not reflect a scientific consensus, so we will be withdrawing it and will work on an updated version.

The problem

The video was based on an approach pioneered by Lean and Rind (2008) and Foster and Rahmstorf (2011), by determining the contribution of known influences on global temperature to best explain those temperatures. However this approach can give misleading results if significant influences on temperature are missing from the analysis, or if wrong influences are included. Therefore we need a comprehensive list of possible factors which might affect the short term trend. Based on the latest literature, the following should be considered:

Natural influences (included in the 16 years video):

1. Volcanic eruptions. The recovery from the Pinatubo eruption is responsible for a short term warming, although in the video the effect is small.
2. The solar cycle. The current low solar activity produces a small cooling effect.
3. The El Nino oscillation. The recent run of La Niñas produces a moderate cooling effect.

Observational biases (not included in the video):

1. Coverage bias. The HadCRUT4 and NOAA temperature records don’t cover the whole planet. Omitting the Arctic in particular produces a cool bias in recent temperatures. (e.g. Hansen et al 2006, Folland et al 2013). The video avoided this problem by using GISTEMP. However the issue affects the Foster and Rahmstorf analysis of the other records.
2. Sea surface temperature bias. The GISTEMP and NOAA temperature records don’t include corrections for the transition from warm-biased engine room measurements to buoy measurements over the past 15 years. This produces a cool bias in recent temperature trends, although this result is based on only one study (Kennedy et al2012).

Other short term influences (i.e. things we are trying to detect):

1. Changes in ocean heat uptake. A number of recent papers have found evidence that heat has been going into the oceans rather than the atmosphere recently, see in particular Balmaseda et al (2013), Guemas et al (2013), Nuccitelli et al (2012) and Levitus et al (2012).
2. An increase in cooling particles in the atmosphere. While we can assume a near-linear short-term response to long lived greenhouse gasses such as CO2, short-lived atmospheric constituents can violate this assumption. Chinese aerosol emissions have varied significantly over the past 16 years (Klimont et al 2013), however Murphy (2013) suggests the impact has been limited. Neely et al (2013) find a significant cooling contribution from volcanoes.

There may also be contributions from long term ocean cycles such as the AMO and PDO. Any of these factors may contribute to a slowdown in surface warming over the past 16 years.

Here is the problem: We have too many explanations for a recent slowdown, If all of these influences are present, we should probably have seen significant cooling over the past 16 years. And yet if the simple fitting calculation is correct, there has been little or no change in the underlying rate of warming.

How is this discrepancy to be resolved? On the basis of analysis by Troy Masters (part 1,part 2), I believe that the most significant problem lies in fitting the volcanic response. While the magnitude of the volcanic response is fairly well estimated, its duration is not. Changes in the duration of the response translate to a big change in the adjusted trendsince 1997. The following animation shows the problem:

If the Pinatubo cooling is long lived then some of the recent warming is due to a recovery from that cooling, leaving less to be explained by greenhouse warming. Or conversely, if there has been a slowdown in warming, the simple fit would account for it by demanding a short Pinatubo response.

What does the literature say about the Pinatubo response? There are papers supporting both a long response (and thus a reduction in the adjusted temperature trend) and a short response (and thus no reduction in trend). Here are a sampling:

Short Pinatubo ResponseLong Pinatubo ResponseParker et al 1996Soden et al 2002Lean & Rind 2008Bender et al 2010Foster & Rahmstorf 2011Hansen et al 2011Folland et al 2013Rypdal 2012 Merlis et al Survey by Troy Masters

The volcanic temperature response from the video is compared to three different estimates from the table above in Figure 2:

Hansen et al (2011) produces the strongest volcanic contribution to recent trends. The impact of this difference can be seen in the adjusted trends since 1997, and the contributions of the various influences. 16 years Hansen Observed trend 0.0800.080 Volcanic-0.0100.082 Solar—0.014-0.012 El Niño—0.041-0.045 Adjusted trend=0.1240.056

The Hansen paper is an extreme case, combining a strong volcanic forcing with a model with high sensitivity, and so probably provides an upper bound for the volcanic influence on temperature. That effect is however substantial, more than cancelling the effect of the El Niño and solar influences, and producing an adjusted trend which is less than the observed trend.

Conclusions

Where does this leave us? In order to reliably interpret surface temperature variations we need a good idea of all the causal factors, including El Niño, solar irradiance, volcanic eruptions, observational biases, changes in ocean circulation and possible long term oscillations. Fitting the surface temperature record is attractive because surface temperatures are easy to understand, and the calculations are easily reproducible by non-specialists. However it may be that the surface temperature record is simply too complex to analyse in this way. The more direct measure of global warming provided by measuring the energy content of the climate system avoids many of these problems, although the observational record is shorter and less complete (e.g. Church et al 2011).

There will undoubtably be new developments in the measurement and attribution of short term trends over the coming months, and we will report new results as they are released. The ‘16 years’ video still contains useful material for showing how natural influences impact global temperatures and so we aim to produce a new version in future. However the conclusions of the current video do not represent a consensus in the peer-reviewed results, and thus we will be withdrawing the current version.

Source: skepticalscience.com

 

Cosmos Will Get a Sequel Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson BY MATT BLUM

More than three decades after it aired, Carl Sagan’s groundbreaking, brilliant 13-part TV series Cosmos:A Personal Voyage will finally get a sequel.

Cosmos, which originally ran in 1980 and was rerun many times over the following decade, is widely regarded as one of the first, and best, TV shows to make science accessible to everyone. You can watch the show now on Hulu, but despite its brilliance it is still a show from more than 30 years ago, and you can tell — the special effects are primitive by today’s standards, but more importantly some of the content has been superseded by discoveries in the intervening years.

So, it’s high time someone made a sequel to it, and now someone is! In partnership with Sagan’s colleagues Ann Druyan (who is also his widow) and Steven Soter, Seth MacFarlane — yes, that Seth MacFarlane — is going to produce a new 13-part series to serve as a sequel and modern update to Sagan’s masterpiece.

Taking over the hosting duties will be none other than well-known astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has served as host of NOVA ScienceNOW on PBS for the past five years, so he has plenty of experience making science accessible to the general public. It would be difficult to think of anyone who would be better able to succeed the late, great Carl Sagan.

The folks working on it will take their time and do it right — it’s not scheduled to air until sometime in 2013.

The producers of the show say the new series will tell “the story of how human beings began to comprehend the laws of nature and find our place in space and time.” They go on to boast: “It will take viewers to other worlds and travel across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest scale. The most profound scientific concepts will be presented with stunning clarity, uniting skepticism and wonder, and weaving rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual into a transcendent experience.”

That’s the good news. The bad — or at least, potentially bad — news is that, because of MacFarlane’s involvement, the series will air in prime time, and on Fox.

Now, in one way I’m all for showing it in prime time on a major network, because it’ll be that much more likely that people who routinely ignore the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel and, yes, PBS will actually see it.

I’m less thrilled, though, that it will have to compete with other, more mainstream prime-time shows — and it’ll be on Fox, which doesn’t have the greatest track record for giving shows a chance to pull their ratings up once they go down.

Now, maybe the fact that MacFarlane is involved — and Joss Whedon isn’t — will help. I certainly hope so.

You can find out more about the plans for the series.

Photo: NASA (public domain)

Source: wired.com

"I became so involved with the personal and materialistic world that I didn’t think about the impact of the death of Carl Sagan until recently. This short video best expresses what Carl meant to everyone that I can remember. There is nothing wrong with having a spiritualistic existence as well as a rational one. He will always be with us there.

http://youtu.be/FV0gH-cHiQg?t=1h22m10s

"

Remembering COSMOS.

TalkingStick - Kshama Sawant - Relevance of Socialism in Seattle Today.

Talk by Kshama Sawant with Socialist Alternative on “Relevance of Socialism in Seattle Today?” recorded May 16, 2013 at the Common Good Cafe at University Temple United Methodist Church in Seattle WA.

For more information see Socialist Alternative.

(Source: youtube.com)

2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #20B Posted May 2013 by John Hartz

Burning tar sands = ‘unsolvable’ climate crisis: Hansen

Fresh off his resignation from NASA, leading climate scientist James Hansen is making the rounds this week, warning media and lawmakers that not only are we heading for a “tremendously chaotic” climate, but if we dig up and burn Canadian tar sands, the climatecrisis will be rendered “unsolvable.”

Burning Tar Sands = ‘Unsolvable’ Climate Crisis: Hansen by Jacob Chamberlain, Common Dreams, May 17, 2013

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Climate change has shifted the North and South Poles

Increased melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and other ice losses worldwide have helped to move the North Pole several centimeters east each year since 2005.

Climate Change Has Shifted the Locations of Earth’s North and South Polesby Richard A. Lovett, Nature magazine, Scientific American, May 14, 2013

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Climate change is happening… So what?

Seven in 10 U.S. citizens believe climate change is real and happening now. Yet most have never even contacted a government official about the issue, let alone volunteered with an environmental organisation or taken other action.

These findings are part of an exploration of Climate Change in the American Mind issued  by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

Climate Change Is Happening… So What? by Silvia Romanelli, Inter Press Service (IPS), May 16, 2013

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Fiji’s villagers move uphill to escape rising seas

Fiji’s picturesque Natewa Bay must be a hard place to leave, and for none more so than the villagers of Vunidogoloa, who are preparing to abandon their ancestral home in the face of the rising sea. But they have little choice: big waves now overtop a once-protective sea wall, their salt-polluted vegetation is dying. They are to move as a community a mile inland, and uphill, to a new site on the northern island of Vanua Levu. Devout Methodists, they have named Kenani, Fijian for Canaan – the promised land. 

Fiji’s villagers move uphill to escape global warming’s rising seas by Geoffry Lean, The Telegraph, May 17, 2013

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Global warming has not stalled

Suggestions that global warming has stalled are a “diversionary tactic” from “deniers” who want the public to be confused over climate change, according to the world’s best-knownclimate scientist. Prof James Hansen, who first alerted the world to climate change in 1988, said on Friday: “It is not true that the temperature has not changed in the two decades.” 

Global warming has not stalled by Damian Carrington, The Guardian, May 17, 2013

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Go fish (somewhere else): Warming oceans are altering catches

The new study in Nature shows these anecdotes aren’t simply a fluke. Data from fish catches from around the world show it’s happening everywhere the ocean is warming — which is just about everywhere.

Go Fish (Somewhere Else): Warming Oceans Are Altering Catches by Richard Harris, NPR, May 15, 2013

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Ignoring the cost of climate change is bad business

In the financial markets, volatility is rising and all manner of derivatives are employed to hedge against potentially catastrophic losses. In the real world, the climate is becoming more volatile, yet cities and businesses – make that entire industries – are doing little to protect themselves from extreme weather.

Ignoring the cost of climate change is bad business by Eric Reguly, The Globe and Mail, May 17, 2013

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Mount Everest’s ice is melting

Earth’s global thaw has reached Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak, researchers said today (May 14) at the Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico.

Glaciers in the Mount Everest region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years and the snowline has shifted upward by 590 feet (180 meters), Sudeep Thakuri, a graduate student at the University of Milan in Italy, said in a statement. Located in the Himalaya Mountains on the border between China and Nepal, Everest’s summit is 29,029 feet (8,848 m) above sea level.

Mount Everest’s Ice is Melting by Becky Oskin, LiveScience, May 14, 2013

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Profits vs. disaster in Arctic meltdown

Many eyes are turning north to the Arctic, some in horror at the rapid decline of a key component of our life support system, others in eager anticipation at the untapped resources beneath the vanishing snow and ice.

“I’ve worked in the north for 21 years and the scale and speed of change up there is astonishing,” said Douglas Clark of the University of Saskatchewan.

Profits vs. Disaster in Arctic Meltdown by Stephen Leahy, International Press Service, IPS, May 16, 2013

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Warmer springs linked to dwindling snow in Rocky Mountains

Snow cover across the Rockies has been shrinking since 1980. This meltwater accounts for 80 percent of the annual water supply for more than 70 million people in the U.S.

Warmer Springs Linked to Dwindling Snow in Rocky Mountains by Denise Chow and LiveScience, Scientific American, May 15, 2013 

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Why we know about the greenhouse gas effect

Our understanding of how certain atmospheric gases trap heat dates back almost 200 years to 1824 when Joseph Fourier described what we know as the greenhouse effect. Fourier, a French mathematician and physicist, asked what seems to be a simple question: why doesn’t the planet keep heating up as it receives sunlight? What is regulating our atmospheric temperature? 

Why we know about the greenhouse gas effect by David Wogan, Scientific American, May 16, 2013

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Zombie climate sceptic theories survive

Study finds overwhelming scientific consensus that humans have caused global warming, but media still hasn’t caught up.

Zombie climate sceptic theories survive only in newspapers and on TV by Graham Readfearn. PlanetOz, The Guardian, May 17, 2013

Source: skepticalscience.com 

White House counsel kept IRS probe results from Obama

(Reuters) - Two senior White House aides knew weeks ago that a probe of the Internal Revenue Service had found that the U.S. tax agency had inappropriately targeted conservative groups, but did not tell President Barack Obama, a White House spokesman said on Monday.

A Treasury Department official informed White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler on April 24 about the preliminary findings of a report that would fuel the latest in a series of scandals to confront Obama at the start of his second term.

The report was issued by a Treasury inspector general on May 14, four days after an IRS official had acknowledged, and apologized for, the agency’s targeting of conservative groups with names such as “Tea Party” and “Patriots” that had applied for tax-exempt status.

Soon after learning of the report’s preliminary findings, Ruemmler briefed White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and some other senior staff members, White House spokesman Jay Carney told a regular news briefing.

Ruemmler chose not to inform Obama about the findings to avoid any appearance that he had any role in shaping the report - a role the president would not have taken anyway, Carney said.

Source: reuters.com

Team Wins Cubesat Berth to Gather Earth Energy Imbalance Measurements - NASA Earth

Radiometers may be flown on a constellation of satellites, like the one shown here in this graphic. The goal would be to gather data about Earth’s energy budget. Credit: JHU/APL

A team of scientists has won a berth on a tiny satellite to explore one of NASA’s most important frontiers in climate studies: the imbalance in Earth’s energy budget and the extent to which fast-changing phenomena, like clouds, contribute to that imbalance.

NASA’s In-Space Validation of Earth Science Technologies (“InVEST” for short) program has funded a team led by Lars Dyrud, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., to develop a miniature instrument that will measure the amount of solar energy reflected by Earth and the amount emitted to space as infrared radiation or heat. The instrument will fly on APL’s Multi-Mission Nanosatellite, a diminutive spacecraft known as a Cubesat, that measures only 4 inches wide and 13 inches long. A launch date has not been set; however, the mission expects to fly within three years.

“Understanding this imbalance is the new Holy Grail,” said Warren Wiscombe, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., one of the team members. “It’s the single-most crucial measure of climate change — much more reliable than surface air temperatures, which occasionally flat-line — and can foretell climate change in the pipeline. The imbalance tells us how fast the Earth responds to greenhouse-gas forcing and the relative roles of the oceans and aerosols in modulating that forcing.”

Widely cited papers by James Hansen, the former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York City, have concluded more energy is being absorbed from the sun than is emitted back to space, throwing the Earth’s energy out of balance and warming the globe. In a study released last year, Hansen’s team calculated that, despite unusually low solar activity between 2005 and 2010, the planet continued to absorb more energy than it returned to space. In particular, the team concluded that Earth absorbed more than half a watt more solar energy per square meter than it released, bringing the finely tuned system into a state of imbalance.

Wiscombe based his findings on ocean temperature measurements from 3,400 free-drifting Argo buoys, which monitored temperature, pressure and salinity of the upper ocean to a depth of 6,560 feet. His analysis, along with other ground-based and satellite data, showed that the upper ocean absorbed 71 percent of the excess energy. The so-called abyssal zone of the ocean — between 9,800 feet and 20,000 feet below the surface — absorbed 5 percent, while ice and land absorbed 8 and 4 percent, respectively.

“The fact that only 8 percent of the extra energy caused the vast amount of ice melting that NASA satellites have measured gives perspective on the size of this extra energy,” Wiscombe said.

Pinpointing the magnitude of Earth’s energy imbalance and its causes are fundamental to climate science, Wiscombe said. “Instead of just warming the air, the extra energy mostly warms the ocean, and the rate of change in ocean heat correlates with the imbalance,” he said. In fact, surface temperatures, considered the gold standard in detecting global climate change, have, in fact, flat-lined since the great El Niño of 1998, which caused an unprecedented spike in warming. “This has caused us to rethink our way of thinking about climate change,” he said “We need to focus on Earth’s radiation budget, not surface air temperatures.”

Carbon-Nanotube Detector

With the InVEST funding, the team plans to demonstrate a new technique for measuring Earth’s radiation budget. The team is building a radiometer — an instrument that measures the flux of electromagnetic radiation — and equipping it with a next-generation detector made of carbon nanotubes. The Vertically Aligned Carbon Nanotube detector is made of a thin layer of vertically aligned, multi-walled carbon nanotubes 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair.

“If you want to measure outgoing radiation with the accuracy necessary to improve our predictions of global climate change, you have to make measurements everywhere, all the time,” Dyrud said. “This carbon-nanotube radiometer allows us to do this accurately and in a small enough form that it fits in a Cubesat, which are necessary developments that make these measurements possible and affordable.”

Grown on silicon and other materials, these tiny hollow tubes are highly efficient at absorbing and trapping light across multiple wavelength bands — so efficient, in fact, that only a tiny fraction of the light actually escapes. Testing performed by Goddard technologists in 2011 revealed that the technology absorbed more than 99 percent of the light in the wavelength bands where Earth’s energy is emitted into space. “I call this detector the roach motel for photons,” Wiscombe said. “Light goes in, but it doesn’t come out.”

With this application, radiation leaving the Earth, both reflected solar and emitted infrared, would strike the VACNT detector, which, in turn, would absorb the radiation and measure the change in temperature, providing scientists with a more comprehensive picture of Earth’s radiation budget. The team plans to test the VACNT detectors this spring aboard a commercial suborbital vehicle that takes off and lands vertically.

Source: nasa.gov

"

On May 9, 2013, CO2 levels in the air reached the level of 400 parts per million (ppm). This is the first time in human history that this milestone has been passed

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced … to at most 350 ppm.

"

Entering Unknown Territory.

(Source: climate.nasa.gov)