Wining The Battle, Losing The War

This blog had been pretty inactive as well as the usual reason of being busy with work I also got re-married in that I have now been married for 25 years and decided to do it all again but this time In Las Vegas,  with Elvis of course,  which took a lot of organisation.

I also treated myself to a Nexus 7 tablet which I am slowly writing this on, using an app.  The irony is that I am now probably on the internet more but in less convenient position to knock up a post.

But during my sabbatical I have been thinking that the battle to get the problem of climate change raised and publicly accepted has been won. Unfortunately not purely by the science but the ever increasing record number of weather events now being called Global Weirding or the New Normal. Even before Tropical Storm Sandy caused so much loss in the climate denial stronghold of the US, polls show that concern about climate change was high and most believed that anthropogenic causes do have some responsibility. With Sandy that level of acceptance has only increased and unless we enter into an unlikely prolonged period of climate stability, what the weather will most likely have in store for us will only harden those views. That battle is effectively won.

But the cynic in me worries that the war is being lost or may even already be lost. Even the re-election of Obama,  the only choice if anything can be done to tackle climate change globally,  is little comfort as there seems little appetite with politicians to do anything.  We are in the same position we were in decades ago.  Adaption rather than any attempts at mitigation seems to be favoured and Sandy shows just what we can expect with adaption.

People like me don't need to be alarmist, the conclusions of the science are alarming enough. What to do? We can keep on raising awareness,  keep on confronting denial,  keep on tackling ignorance in the best way we know, but in the end all that effort will pale beside what people are going to experience first hand with floods, droughts, storms and other extremes that are lining up to convince people where sound science has failed for decades. By then the door to mitigating solutions will have closed and adaption will mainly be one of repairing after the damage and the pain has occurred.

Am I wrong to feel that I am looking at the horse bolting?  

Record-High Antarctic Sea Ice Levels Don't Disprove Global Warming

The region's ice has weathered global warming better than Arctic ice

Steve Goddard must be feeling shell shocked. Only a few months ago at the winters peak, the Arctic Sea Ice extent (not volume) was almost normal which he touted loudly on his blog, only to see the fastest melt on record to a new low. With the Battle lost he turns his attention to the Antarctic winter and the growing ice there.

This is a repost from SKYE at weather.aol.com

(Credit: Jeremy Potter NOAA/OAR/OER)

Distracting from the news that Arctic sea-ice extent reached a record low on Sept. 16 is a widely circulating blog article claiming that at the opposite end of the Earth, Antarctic sea ice is more than making up for the losses.

In the post, climate change skeptic and blogger Steven Goddard states that Antarctic sea ice reached its highest level ever recorded for the 256th day of the calendar year on Sept. 12. He reasons that the Southern Hemisphere must be balancing the warming of the Northern Hemisphere by becoming colder (and thus, net global warming is zero).

The National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC), which tracks sea ice using satellite data, explains on its website why Antarctic ice has weathered global warming more robustly than Arctic ice. Goddard dismisses the explanation, concluding instead, "Antarctic and Arctic ice move opposite each other. NSIDC's dissonance about this is astonishing."

Despite its lack of scientific support, Goddard's post has garnered attention around the Web. In a Forbes.com column about the record high Antarctic sea ice, skeptic James Taylor writes, "Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data."

But if anyone had asked an actual scientist, they would have learned that a good year for sea ice in the Antarctic in no way nullifies the precipitous drop in Arctic sea-ice levels year after year - or the mounds of other evidence indicating global warming is really happening.

"Antarctic sea ice hasn't seen these big reductions we've seen in the Arctic. This is not a surprise to us," said climate scientist Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC. "Some of the skeptics say 'Well, everything is OK because the big changes in the Arctic are essentially balanced by what's happening in the Antarctic.' This is simply not true." [Former Global Warming Skeptic Makes a 'Total Turnaround']

Projections made from climate models all predict that global warming should impact Arctic sea ice first and most intensely, Serreze said. "We have known for many years that as the Earth started to warm up, the effects would be seen first in the Arctic and not the Antarctic. The physical geography of the two hemispheres is very different. Largely as a result of that, they behave very differently."

The Arctic, an ocean surrounded by land, responds much more directly to changes in air and sea-surface temperatures than Antarctica, Serreze explained. The climate of Antarctica, land surrounded by ocean, is governed much more by wind and ocean currents. Some studies indicate climate change has strengthened westerly winds in the Southern Hemisphere, and because wind has a cooling effect, scientists say this partly accounts for the marginal increase in sea ice levels that have been observed in the Antarctic in recent decades.

"Another reason why the sea-ice extent in the Antarctic is remaining fairly high is, interestingly, the ozone hole," Serreze told Life's Little Mysteries. This hole was carved out over time by chlorofluorocarbons, toxic chemicals formerly that were used in air conditioners and solvents before being banned. "The ozone hole affects the circulation of the atmosphere down there. Because of the ozone hole, the stratosphere above Antarctica is quite cold. Ozone in the stratosphere absorbs UV light, and less absorption [by] ozone makes the stratosphere really cold. This cold air propagates down to the surface by influencing the atmospheric circulation in the Antarctic, and that keeps the sea ice extensive."

But these effects are very small, and Antarctic sea-ice levels have increased only marginally. In the coming decades, climate models suggest rising global temperatures will overwhelm the other influences and cause Antarctic sea ice to scale back, too.

The extent of Arctic sea ice at its summertime low point has dropped 40 percent in the past three decades. The idea that a tiny Antarctic ice expansion makes up for this - that heat is merely shifting from the the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern and therefore global warming must not be happening - is "just nonsense," Serreze said.

Idiotic Denier Of The Day

Some awards come easily to some people and this one for Idiotic mis-interpretation of the evidence is well deserved by Steve Goddard and awarded to him over at uknowispeaksense, full repost below;

Idiotic denier graph of the day, August 26,2012

Yep, something a little different. I got my 3-year-old niece to draw on a piece of paper with a fat blue crayon and this is what she drew.

Conrats Steve Goddard! You have graduated from preschool.

Yes, ok. You got me, my niece would never use such a fat crayon to draw a graph, unless she wanted it to be fuzzy. This masterpiece is the work of Steve Goddard who, at his woefully misnamed blog, “Real Science” is trying to debunk a strawman. According to Steve, in 2007 AGW proponents, “went hysterical and told us that the Arctic would be ice free by 2008, 2010, 2012 or 2013″ and then provided this……..graph to debunk it. Of course, Steve ‘I just graduated preschool’ Goddard, didn’t provide a reference to these statements. So some mythical scientists have been debunked. Well done Steve, well done. You really showed…….them. Of course, my mate Geoffrey Brown faithfully cut and paste the same graph over at my favourite denier den, the official blog of the Climate Sceptics Party and included an admission to being a conspiracy theorist of the highest order, but that’s for another day.
So what of this….graph? Well, Steve supplied a link to the data he has used for his blue crayon special and it seems it goes all the way back to 1979. It’s no wonder he cherrypicked the last few years. Here’s a graph or two from the same website. First, what Steve’s magic blue crayon graph would have looked like if he used all the data.


Next, let’s take it back a little further and look at the longer term trend broken down into seasons.
So, there you have it. “Real Science” and real science. Which are you going to accept? Personally, I think I’ll go with the latter. I’m not really into crayons.

Losing Your Own Argument With Your Own Argument

It takes someone really special to achieve this. And we have someone very special indeed - Suyts.

He recently had a moan about Prof. Mann's threat to sue the National Review for libellous comments in an article, but even though Mann has every right to use the courts to protect his reputation, Suyts believes that to stoop to saying “I’ll sue!!!!” "is what happens when you lose the intellectual argument".


Problem is that if this is true then Suyts along with Lord Monckton have already lost the intellectual argument because we all know how keen the Lord is in threatening litigation and Suyts fully supports it.

Yep, it takes a special person to lose an argument with yourself.

Scraping A Barrel

"The forecast high for Rock Rapids, Iowa tomorrow is 84 degrees. It was 109 degrees on the same date in 1936. Experts tell us that 2012 is hotter than 1936."

This is what passes for a credible post on Real Science. I seriously hope that anyone capable of reading it has enough critical facilities to see the desperate cherry pick that it is.

CENSORED and BANNED! Well It Had To Happen

It appears that any comments I make to Real Science do not now appear - I suspect I have been banned for talking sense but maybe there is a technical issue let me just check....

Nope, my comments are no longer appearing and some have disappeared.

It seems to have occurred while commenting on this post which I covered in my own post here. In his comments I compared Steve Goddard's cherry picking of record high temps to claim that summers were actually cooling to measuring the time of a journey by only the fasted speed.

One of his acolytes, miked1947, was not happy with my analogy. He then went on to say some really strange things like,

“If we have more days below 90 degrees now than we did then, it is getting cooler” 

Suggesting if we had 1 day above 90 and 99 at 60 then that would be warmer than 100 days at 89 and,

“If I wanted to know whether it was warmer or cooler I would want the average temperature for all the Summers. Because they only provide MAX, MIN and MEAN,”

Clearly he had not quite grasped the definition of MEAN!

After a little polite back and forth miked1947 basically, if unintentionally agreed with me about Goddard's graph by claiming that MAX and MIX were not suitable measures to determine anything significant about temperature trends - while I might not completely agree with what he said he had painted himself into a position where like me he must surely disagree with Goddard's use of maximum temperatures to make his cooling claim.

So I replied asking him why he was explaining this to me and not to Steve Goddard. My comment appeared, the the next day it was gone. I posted the comment again in case there was a technical issue the first time but nothing appeared at all. A test post on another thread of Real Science had the same result - the comment I typed did not appear - I had been banned!

 NOTE: The actual publishing of this post has been delayed for a while because when I double checked to see if my posts would appear some then did including the response to miked1947 mentioned above - which has not been replied to. But currently nothing is appearing. I can't actually ask Goddard if it is now his policy to restrict my comments, as I currently can't comment. If I get some sort of response I will update this post and apologise if it is simply a technical with the Wordpress site.

However it does seem a rather innocuous comment to get quietly banned without ceremony from a site considering I have had Steve Goddard in full name calling mode at me only to have him realise I was right and he was wrong, and issue a retraction.

So perhaps getting one of his minions logic turned around where he had to agree with me was just a final straw, or perhaps it was what I said about his 'birther' beliefs in another thread as I noticed my comment has also vanished from there as well. Actually Steve Goddard has been very sly about this because he has not deleted any of my comments that were replied too, only ones that had no reply giving the impression that I either had no interest in the subject or that I could not think of anything reply.

I wonder what Goddard has said in his own blog on the subject of censorship and banning debate? Well that may make another post.

Suyts Fails To Touch Base

It seems that either my criticisms at suyts place or my last post pointing out that his claim about Arctic temperatures in the thirties compared to today used temperatures over a decade out of date embarrassed him enough to do a further post where he actually tried to get some current temps to compare the thirties with. He even dedicated the post to me! - Now there is someone who is easy to awe. He even got off to a good start by choosing UAH satellite data.

Unfortunately he made another totally embarrassing hash of his analysis. His commentators even congraulated and fawned over it and one even re-blogged it, so it doesn't bode well for their critical thinking skills. To be honest it was doomed from the start because suyts already had the answer he wanted so it didn't really matter what the data showed, he was always going to get the answer he needed.

The technique he chose involved 'splicing' the UHA data to the Cosimo graph mentioned in the last post. This is not necessarily a bad thing if done correctly but like so many AGW deniers he says it shouldn't be done. Adding data sets from different sources in appropriate in a Meta Analysis is common across all science disciplines. It is especially common in climatology, and the likes of Prof Mann has done it, so if deniers can convince themselves it shouldn't be done at all it allows them to dismiss at least some of the science showing how wrong their thinking is.

So suyts makes it clear that he doesn't like 'splicing'. In fact he makes the point several times but then does it anyway and uses his results as evidence he was right all along. That's right - he uses a technique he believes is invalid to get a result that proves his case and makes a post about it. The irony of the contradiction seems lost on his commentators but wouldn't be on anyone with the slightest sense of true skeptcism.

So by all rights this post should end here with another embarasment to suyts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

However 'splicing' is a valid thing to do so maybe even if suyts doesn't like it he still has made a valid point - if only:

He first graphs the last decade of the UHA data set with a trend and a 60 month moving average and gets this;

Then he sticks aligns 'the anomaly axis to match Cosimo’s' graph that he used in his first failed post and gets this;

I suppose because the black smear, (highlighted by my red arrow), is below the 'thick black line' he added then he believes that the current 5 year average is below that of the 1930s and claims 'that the arctic, after adding the recent arctic temps, is still colder than what it was in the late 1930s'. 

 

Oh Dear!

Combining data sets, when done appropriately, is valid. If you don't understand why then consdier this; If various samples; ice cores, tree rings, lake sediments etc., when tested are known to contain different values related to temperature, then how can you can you determine what those temperatures are unless you align the values with known and reliable temperatures for at least part of the record? So these proxy temperature records are aligned with known temperatures, usually the most accurate instrument record for the same area the proxies are taken from, to determine temperatures back in that record when temperatures are known with less certainty. So if it is valid to calculate proxy temperatures using this method how can it be invalid to add (splice) the most accurate temperatures to the record? This is really all that Prof Manns 'Nature Trick' amounted to - he added the most accurate instrument record to over write and extend the proxy record and had it documented in research published in Nature magazine.

What suyts had done is not the same technique, even if he believes it is. You just can't take different data sets and align 'the anomaly axis' to zero. This shows such ignorance of the basics it is difficult to believe that he not only did it but his, (now apparently just as ignorant), commentators didn't call him out on it.

Different data sets have different base lines!

The Cosimo graph appears to use data with a 1961-1990 (HadCru) base line. The UHA satellite data has a 1979-1999 base line - this data set didn't start until the December 1978. Of course the 5 year trend of the UHA is going to be below! The only way to do the 'splicing' properly is to average the same time period for all data sets used - something I'm not prepared to spend time on as there is plenty of current research showing recent Arctic temperatures are unprecedented in several centuries. But I thought I would do a rough calculation on the differences in the base lines and reapply suyts technique to see what he would have got if he had knowing anything about science. 

Using this link I got the data for the major temperature data sets and worked out the average of HadCru between 1979 - 1999 and also for the UHA data for the same period. I found HadCru = -0.03742 and UHA = -0.0933, so a difference or the offset is 0.055888.

I then plotted the same UHA decade that suyts used in his post to ensure we were both using the same data set in the same way and got this;

The graph looked the same so I rescaled it with the offset and added it to the original Cosimo graph and ended up with this:

As you can see the trend is well above the 1930s level. I know this technique is not very accurate in either calculating the offset nor the alignment so just to check that it wasn't a totally inaccurate depiction I looked for a graph showing past to current Arctic temperature trends and found this from the Alaska Satellite Facility;

It has an 11 year rather than a 5 avg year but it still clearly shows the peak in the 1930s and it even more clearly shows it was not as warm as current temperatures.

So how did suyts do?

Other than using a technique that he believes wont give a valid answer, and displaying little knowledge of some very basic scientific methods, and being totally ignorant of the concept of data sets having a different zero base line for anomalies the boy did rather well! It remains to be seen if he has the honesty and maturity to correct his rather obvious mistakes and perhaps even apologise for misleading his very gullible readers, but based on his example so far and  this latest nonsense  it doesn't bode well so I'm not going to be holding my breath - however time will tell.

Goddard Gets Hot Under the Collar

Mr Steve Goddard is getting hot under the collar and it's not only due to the terrible wild fires in Colorado, it's the result of the media highlighting the possibility that the wild fires may have been exasperated due to global warming.

So much so he is again misleading his, largely ignorant, following on his blog. It's uncertain if he does this deliberately or through his own basic ignorance - it's difficult to tell, but both James Hansen and Phil Jones get targeted by his nonsense - I mean his 'theory' - that they are wrong because temperatures have not increased in Boulder Colorado so global warming cant be linked to these wild fires.

The thing is, it doesn't take much on an intellect to realise that temperature isn't the main factor in wild fires, it's drought. Temperature isn't even the main factor in drought, it lack of water. So what does current drought conditions for Colorado look like;

It went from this;

To this in just over two months;

But Mr. Goddard isn't likely to reveal this to his readers any time soon.

Fox News Can't Decide if Climate Change is for Real

A mirrored post from Christopher "Tanoro" Grays' blog; A Personal blog of science and reason

Just last week, I was arguing with someone on Facebook that when an organization with a clear-cut bias that claims to report the news cannot even get its own position straight, we should become less inclined to take said organization seriously. At the time, I was talking about NaturalNews.com, the Fox News of alternative health. This time, it's Fox News doing what it does best.
My boss told me this morning that Fox News released an article indicating that new research shows that wind farms may cause global warming.

New research finds that wind farms actually warm up the surface of the land underneath them during the night, a phenomena that could put a damper on efforts to expand wind energy as a green energy solution.

The title of the article is very misleading and doesn't quite reflect what the study's author actually said.

"Overall, the warming effect reported in our study is local and is small compared to the strong year-to-year changes" that result from natural variation, said Liming Zhou.

This means that a big enough wind farm could cause small, but noticeable, change in local meterology, a warming effect quantified in the study as 0.72°C per decade in the regions containing such wind farms. That doesn't mean climate change! As usual, Fox News is trying to sensationalize the story.
What I find troubling, however, is what story was right below this one on Fox News' homepage.
The article highlighted here discusses a blog by climate change denier, Steven Goddard, a former guest author on WattsUpWithThat. The blog questions whether or not greenhouse gases cause severe weather patterns attributed to climate change. Now, this is not a topic with which I am familiar, so I cannot comment on it. What I found most laughable is the author's introduction in the Fox News article.

Steven Goddard, who runs the skeptical climate blog Real Science and has a background in geology and computer science, has spent thousands of hours studying bad weather events around the world.

What is wrong with this picture? First of all, Fox News is quoting an expert in geology and computer science on the subject of meterology and climatology? I can actually hear my brain cells shriek in pain.

Secondly, Fox News has no trouble spelling out the pseudo-science claptrap of the anti-science minorities, but they fall flat on their faces when trying to transmit a simple message from the peer reviewed literature. What's worse, the message they successfully conveyed is by a stark opponent against climate change while the headliner is an article suggesting alternative energy causes climate change. Fox News, if I "head desked" everytime you got something hopelessly wrong, I'd have brain damage that strongly correlates with the frequency in which I read your content.

Sources:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1505.html
http://grist.org/list/wind-farms-do-not-cause-climate-change/
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/04/30/wind-farms-are-warming-earth-researchers-say/
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/04/30/proof-global-warming-isnt-making-weather-wackier/

Hitler Liked Dogs. Do You?

I have been following the news of Heartland's ill judged ad campaign. I'd say ill judged only if you consider shooting yourself in the foot while it is in your mouth, ill judged.  Didn't they learn anything from the not funny satirical 10:10 ads?

By pretty much suggesting that those who accept the science of global warming are like serial killers and terrorists they have managed to alienate supporters and funders alike. Drink giant Diageo who owns brands like Guinness, Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker and Moët & Chandon and gave Heartland $10,000 over the past two years say they have no plans to work with the Heartland Institute in the future. State Farm an insurance company has also announced that they were severing all ties with the Heartland Institute.This company gave $114,000 in 2010, $230,000 last year and $95,000 this year according to Heartland's leaked fund-raising plan. Ouch!

'my participation in the upcoming Heartland conference has now become untenable.' With her book being advertised on the same Heartland web page she believes her ' reputation has been harmed'. She also reports;

'Ross McKitrick said in an a strongly-worded letter to Heartland yesterday:
You cannot simultaneously say that you want to promote a debate while equating the other side to terrorists and mass murderers.'

Perhaps more can be learned about the ethics and morals of those who appear to see nothing wrong with this sort of campaign. Enter stage left my Member of the European Parliament, Roger Helmer. He became an MEP on a Conservative ticket before defecting to the more extreme right UKIP party who has for a deputy leader Mad Monckton. Helmer has been mentioned on my blog before;

Who voted for this idiot?
Rape victims share responsibility for the crime!
Winds of Change?

Helmer is still down to attend this Heartland conference as a breakfast speaker;

"Breakfast - May 23, 2012: SPEAKER, Roger Helmer, European Parliament, Great Britain - $39.00 "

By all accounts this insidious Ad campaign is no barrier to him giving his speech. According to Leo Hickman;

'He confirmed he was still attending, adding:
I am delighted that the Heartland campaign for the Chicago climate conference has succeeded in its purpose and attracted the attention of the Guardian.'

So with Helmer and his conservative opinions in mind I thought I'd give Heartland a few suggestions for alternatives to their posters. This ones for Rog;

 But Heartland's ads are really a reverse version of the Appeal to Authority. Choose someone who is noteworthy in some respect and use them to promote something unrelated. I can't see dairy farmers being too pleased to see this around the country;

Or, as the title of this post suggests, dog breeders liking this;

But to really show the absurdity and irrationality of this add campaign, suppose an environmental group had commissioned this;

Real Science Hacked

It appears that someone has got control of the Real Science Blog and posted an announcement of Steve Goddard's death at the age of 81.

From what I can tell from posts on the likes WUWT, the person going under the name of Steven Goddard is fine but has lost access to his own blog for now at least. I hope he gets it back soon.

The hacked site claims that there will be no posts today out of respect so it will be interesting to see what if anything is posted tomorrow if the hackers still have access. Comments to the site are moderated so news of the hack and the true state of Steve's well being never appear. It must be weird seeing your own messages of condolences.

I immediately suspected something was amiss as the announcement claimed Steve Goddard was a scientist, and I'm not being unkind but as far as I know he has never claimed to be a scientist.

Another Look At Goddard's Graph Gaffs

Steve Goddard's inability to understand graph data has led to yet another Gaff on his part. He thinks he has discovered more wrong doing, this time by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.

He takes the Hi resolution map of Sea Ice Extent  for the 17th of April 2012 and gets his colouring crayons out again to use a very inaccurate and unscientific method to measure the change in extent form the 1979 - 2000 average. Just like in any good comedy of errors he rather predictably gets it all wrong and the farce continues when he uses errant values support his insinuations of skulduggery. I'm certain a good comedy writer could make a whole series out of the errors and misinformation on 'Real Science'. Perhaps it could be call Goddard's Gaffs, featuring a bumbling shambolic character in front of a monitor trying to save the world from a secret shadowy cabal of men in black that don't actually exist.

Here is how Goddard gets it so wrong - again!

He takes the original map from the NSIDC web site;

And, for some reason turns it around, and gets colouring. To end up with the work of art here;

He then claims to count the red (ice loss) and the green (ice gain) and compare them. He states;

"The area of green is 3544 pixels, and the area of red is 2941 pixels."

Which may well be correct, and then uses the difference, a whole 603 pixels to suggest that the sea ice extent must be that much above normal. He then presents the NSIDC graph here to say;

"The NSIDC graph should be showing Arctic ice extent slightly above normal, for the first time in nearly ten years.

Instead, the graph shows well below normal ice extent."

The first ting to notice is that the original image contains over 1.6 million pixels so I doubt very much if 603 pixels is going to be noticeable 'above normal'. But why isn't it showing at least normal?

Well it is all down to 2 gaffs by Goddard. The first is, like any good six year old when it comes to colouring in, they say within the lines, unfortunately they don't always reach the lines sometimes miss bits. Goddard does exactly that  as can be seen here indicated by purple and yellow arrows;

To be honest this probably averages out with missing bits that should be either red or green but this is more like child's play than a 'scientific method' and he is only talking about 603 pixels after all.

The biggest error occurs due to his treatment of the orange 'extent line' itself. The NSIDC clearly indicate that the orange line in the extent image is the1979 to 2000 average extent. That means that the outside of the line is the outside of the extent and should be included as red in every red area. Goddard doesn't bother about any such details.

How much difference can such a thin line really make to Goddard's pixel count if he had done it correctly? When zoomed in on the original NSIDC image the orange line is about 5 pixels wide and it will be thousands of pixels long. That is many thousands of pixels that should have been included and would have offset Goddard's mighty 603 pixels 'above normal' even if he had done his colouring to the lines correctly.

 Clearly Steve Goddard is wrong again and the Arctic Ice Extent should not be 'slightly above normal' and I would suggest that the graph above represents exactly where it should be.

Between the science and a hard place: The intellectual incoherence of lukewarmism.

This is a mirrored post from Idiot Tracker, that is too good not to share.

Part One: jimming the Overton window.

In recent years, the climate wars have witnessed the rise of a group of self-identified "lukewarmers," people who, to borrow Greg Easterbrook's self-description, believe that:

    [G]lobal warming is scientifically confirmed but exaggerated as a threat; that greenhouse gas regulation is justified, but not an emergency need.

The first use of the term I have found was by David Smith, on "Watts Up With That" (a bit of foreshadowing, that):

    I am a “lukewarmer” who thinks that the world is warmer than it would otherwise be due to anthropogenic gases (but doubts that the impact will be extreme).

Probably the most famous "lukewarmer" is Lucia Liljegren, a mechanical engineer (surprise!) whose blog, The Blackboard, can be found on the blogroll here. The Blackboard entertains many lukewarmers, along with a bunch of deniers and a smattering of pro-consensus folks, including myself.

Another self-described lukewarmer, Steven Fuller, has stepped into the giant floppy red shoes of Steven Goddard at WUWT, now that Steve has metastasized to his own blog. His self-description is the closest to providing a clear, testable proposition, as well as reflecting, by my reading, the central thrust of the comments by the "lukewarmers" on The Blackboard:

    It’s because I am a ‘lukewarmer,’ one who believes that the physics of climate change are not by theselves controversial, but who believes that the sensitivity of the earth’s atmosphere to a doubling of concentrations of CO2 is not yet known, but is likely to be lower than activists have claimed.

Before I get into what the climate sensitivity might be, it's important to note who the lukewarmers are, which is slightly different from their self-definition. The lukewarmers to a person are critical of the IPCC, but when we take a look at the estimates of climate sensitivity cited by the IPCC, it's clear that thinking climate sensitivity is low is not enough to get on the outs with them:




Most estimates of climate sensitivity, regardless of how they are derived (and there are several lines of evidence including comparisons with paleoclimate, response to modern forcings like the Mount Pinatubo eruption, and climate modeling) include in their 95% confidence interval sensitivities between 1-2C. In some cases, the central estimate is between 1.2-1.5C for a doubling of CO2. So favoring a low number for climate sensitivity is not, by itself, enough to put you at odds with the "consensus." You need the other piece – the it's-not-a-big-deal piece. And that's where the trouble starts.

There is a half-full glass here, which is that a number of people who clearly identify emotionally and politically with the denialist movement have taken major steps towards the scientific consensus in order to maintain their credibility. While sharing the denialosphere's loathing of "activists" and its demonization of scientists like Hansen and Mann (whose unforgivable sin was to establish beyond a reasoned doubt that humans are causing a rapid and substantially unprecedented warming of the earth's climate) the lukewarmers avoid three major pitfalls of denialism:

1. They do not have to deny the basic physical laws which dictate that greenhouse gases cause warming.

2. They do not have to refute the massive physical evidence that the climate is warming.

3. They do not have to pretend that the vast majority of scientists who accept the theory of AGW are participating in a vast conspiracy to hide the truth about (1) and (2).

The lukewarmist position also allows one to position oneself as a moderate threading the needle between two extremes. Steven Fuller again:

    The operation of CO2 as a greenhouse gas is one of the least controversial ideas in physics. The calculations that show a temperature rise of between 1 and 2 degrees Celsius if concentrations double is also widely accepted, including by all skeptic scientists without (AFAIK) exception.

    We don’t know the sensitivity of the atmosphere to a doubling of CO2, so the effects of feedbacks are not know. Activists think it is 3 degrees or higher. Contrarians think it is very low–1, maybe 2, tops, some thinking it is even lower.
    If activists are right we have a very big problem on our hands. If contrarians are right we don’t. If both are wrong, there is a lukewarmer’s way.

Note that the best science around puts climate sensitivity between 2.6-4.1C. It's not "activists" who put climate sensitivity at around 3C or higher – except as far as the activists are saying: Hey, those scientists that have spent their lives in this field probably are the best source of information regarding climate sensitivity.

The real contrast here is not between "activists" and "skeptics" but between deniers and everybody else – between the science and the right-wing lunacy. But lukewarmers are exploiting the shift in the Overton window brought about by voluble climate deniers to position their radical views as a sane middle ground.

Here's the problem. Lukewarmism doesn't get its adherents where they want to go – because even if we accept at face value their claims, the world would still require intense efforts to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases in order to stave off disaster.

Scientists estimate a warming of 2C as the upper limit of what our civilization can adapt to, and not suffer disaster on a planetary scale. This is probably an optimistic number:

    … even a “moderate” warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, a target of 2°C seems almost cavalier.

The hard lower limit of climate sensitivity -- the lowest it can possibly be and account for our direct observations – is about 1.1C (the real number is very likely to be in that range of 2.6C-4.1C – but we are following the "lukewarmist" argument to see where it leads). The change in forcings expected from a "business as usual" 21st century are +8.5W/m^2 – about 2 1/3 doublings of CO2.

Hence with the lowball number – the number Steven Fuller attributes not to lukewarmers but to out-and-out deniers – put us on course for 2.5C of warming this century. In other words, the lukewarmers' own numbers belie their causal attitude to reducing greenhouse emissions.

Now the deniers – sorry, excuse me, the "lukewarmers" – may say the projected emissions are much too high; that the IPCC is way off with those numbers as well. Or they could take the bull by the horns and claim, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that warm can tolerate warming of 3C or 4C without any major problems (the last time the world was that hot was several million years ago; there were no ice caps to speak of and the sea level was hundreds of feet higher). The trouble with that position is that it undermines the whole thrust of lukewarmism – which is to acquire credibility (or, to be fair, possibly to exercise intellectual honesty) via the advantages (1), (2), and (3).

Disputing one point with the scientific community – climate sensitivity – is compatible with a reasonable, pro-science argument. Hey, it happens -- an idea becomes the established consensus, and it turns out to be, not completely wrong maybe, but off (this has already happened several times in climate science -- unfortunately, every time, to date, the majority of the mistakes have been in the direction of under-estimating the speed and magnitude of the effects of global warming.)

However, when you begin to argue that not only does science have climate sensitivity wrong but also emissions and maybe impacts to boot – well, you're going to have a hard time explaining why thousands of scientists have made not one but a series of mistakes, all supposedly exaggerating the dangers of global warming. Go down that road, and pretty soon you're right back in the tinfoil-hat camp lukewarmist rhetoric was supposed to deliver you from. If you allege not one but a whole series of gigantic mistakes by huge numbers of investigators, all tending to undermine a scientific conclusion (only rapid reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases can prevent a substantial risk of planetary disaster) to which you are avowedly hostile, the simplest conclusion is not that you are a genius and the rest of the scientific community are fools; it is that you are a partisan and you are attacking science with implications contrary to your political goals.

In Part 2, I'm going to give the "lukewarmers" even more rope, and show how even widely unrealistic lowballing of climate change fails to make a rational case for business as usual.