Recently in Climate change Category

Purchasing offsets for carbon dioxide is an appealing idea. Sometimes we have to travel to meetings or we have to travel for research.¹ Often that travel involves plane flights, and planes emit a lot of carbon dioxide. By purchasing a carbon offset, I invest a small amount of money in a project that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere equivalent to what my flight added.² In other words, my flight didn't contribute to global warming.

Responsible Travel was one of the first companies to offer such offsets to travelers.

But last month Responsible Travel canceled the program, saying that while it might help travelers feel virtuous, it was not helping to reduce global emissions. In fact, company officials said, it might even encourage some people to travel or consume more. (source)

Andy Revkin doesn't buy carbon offsets when he travels. I plan to continue buying them, because I'm buying them for travel I would have taken anyway. I'm not traveling more because the offsets are available. And I'll try to travel less, do more with conference calls, and I'll use Skype and web conferencing more often. I'll encourage groups I'm part of to do the same.

Buying offsets in that context has to help at least a little, doesn't it?³

A week ago leaders of 18 scientific organizations released a letter to Congress restating the consensus view on climate change. The letter has not been widely noticed, but there are a few people who noticed. The ones I know about are:

• Joe Romm, Climate Progress
• Jon Gelbard, Conservation Value
• Dina Cappiello, Associated Press (a glancing mention in the 4th paragraph of the article)

If you happen to run across others, let me know, either in an e-mail or in comments here.

WASHINGTON -- Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.

Only one problem: It's not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

...

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

"If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect," said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina. (Seth Borenstein, Associated Press)

'Nuff said.

Climate change is real, but it's hard to grasp the impact it will have on our daily lives. The graphic above brings it home. It's from an interactive climate change map put together by the Science Museum in London.

The map shows the impact of an average 4C rise in global temperature, which John Beddington, the government's chief scientist, said would be "disastrous". A study by the Met Office last month said that such a 4C rise could come as soon as 2060 without urgent and serious action to reduce emissions. (source)

Disastrous indeed.

Houston, we have a problem. Jon Stewart thinks cap and trade is boring. And as if that weren't bad enough, a new survey out from the Pew Research Center for People & the Press tells us

There has been a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. And fewer also see global warming as a very serious problem - 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.

As the graph at the left shows, the decline is independent of political affiliation. There's been a decline in the number of people who think there's good evidence for climate change among Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. In 2006, over 90% of Democrats agreed that there's good evidence for global warming. Now only 75% agree.

That decline occurred in the face of ever-mounting evidence that climate change is real and that humans are contributing to it. To quote from the letter to senators released a couple of days ago: "[C]limate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver."

Clearly we have a problem here, and the problem isn't lack of data or lack of evidence. It's lack of communication. I wish I knew how to solve the problem, but I don't. Suggestions welcome.

Update, 22 October: Joe Romm noticed the letter. His conclusion? "Kudos to all those scientific organizations who did sign on!"

Earlier today the leaders of 18 scientific organizations delivered a letter to senators restating the consensus view on climate change.

[C]limate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science. Moreover, there is strong evidence that ongoing climate change will have broad impacts on society, including the global economy and on the environment.

We¹ do not take a position on any particular legislation or policy proposals in this letter, although we do point out that "[i]f we are to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change, emissions of greenhouse gases must be dramatically reduced." Instead,

We in the scientific community offer our assistance to inform your
deliberations as you seek to address the impacts of climate change.

If you'd like to read the whole letter² and see the signatures, you can download the PDF. AIBS has also issued a press release about the letter.³ Here's a brief notice from ScienceInsider.

It is not just about what governments do; we all have to take responsibility to cut emissions from our homes, our cars and our places of work. (See below for the source of this quote.)

We will always have climate change couch potatoes with us, but let's not let them stop the rest of us from making progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The IPCC synthesis report concluded that not only will the global average temperature rise significantly as a result of climate change, but the frequency and magnitude of extreme events will increase. Among other things, the report pointed out that

• it is very likely we'll see increases in the frequency of heat waves and heavy precipitation,
• it is likely we'll see more tropical cyclones, i.e., hurricanes, and
• there is high confidence that many arid and semi-arid areas will have fewer water resources than they do now.

From December 7 through December 18 representatives of nations from around the world will converge on Copenhagen to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto protocol. Today more than 9300 bloggers around the world, including UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are making posts like this one¹ urging world leaders to action as part of Blog Action Day 2009. Gordon Brown has good people working for him, and rather than to suggest something of my own, I'm just going to quote a little of his post today:

I will go to the talks in December if it means we will get an agreement and I am urging other leaders to join me. But it must be the start of something not the end.

And it is not just about what governments do; we all have to take responsibility to cut emissions from our homes, our cars and our places of work.

Sarah and I are trying to do our bit. In Downing Street, we are composting, recycling, using energy-saving light bulbs and buying locally-sourced and sustainable food whenever possible. It's little things like this which will make a big difference if we all do them.

Before we get started, I have to make a disclaimer. I'm not a climatologist. I haven't read the tree ring construction papers McIntyre criticizes, nor have I read his detailed critiques. I can't argue the merits of using one method of climate reconstruction from tree rings versus another. I can argue that Mr. McIntyre doesn't seem to be following normal scientific practice in "publishing" his critiques.

Whew! Now that that's over. Let's get down to business.

Earlier this week Andy Revkin at DotEarth reported about recent exchanges between McIntyre and several climate scientists including Thomas Crowley, Keith Briffa, Michael Mann, and the folks at RealClimate.org. Here's a brief description of the controversy (see McIntyre's post and RealClimate's response for details).

McIntyre regularly challenges the broad scientific consensus reflected in the 4th IPCC report that recent warming of the earth's climate is unusual. In the post linked to above, he challenges a particular data set used for reconstructing climate history -- tree ring data from nortwhestern Siberia, the Yamal data set. McIntyre burrowed into the details of the data set and found what he claims are large inconsistencies. He further claims that climate reconstructions depending on the Yamal data set are not robust and could be misleading.

The folks at RealClimate.org have a detailed response. They argue, among other things, that McIntyre's claim of inconsistencies is flawed and that even if the Yamal data set were flawed, paleoclimate reconstructions depend on several different proxies and the likelihood that errors in any one of them would have a large impact is small.

Fine. Sounds like a normal scientific controversy doesn't? Well, it would be, except that it's all playing out in the blogosphere, not in scientific journals. Why does that matter?

Climate change couch potatoes employ a variety of tactics to delay action. They sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They claim that dissent is being suppressed and that the evidence for climate change isn't clear.¹ I don't know whether Talking Squid had climate change couch potatoes in mind when he illustrated how to change a clear trend

into a graph designed to sow confusion. but take a look at the graph above and the one below and ask yourself, "Doesn't this remind me of the obfuscation typical of climate change couch potatoes?" To quote the (sarcastic) conclusion:

Evidence is your friend. More evidence means more cutoffs to choose from, more trends to analyse, more phases to count, more outliers to discover, and more confusion to sow. Be careful to disguise the fact that you and not the data are the source of the confusion.