Spinor Info

Just when you thought Climategate was bad enough already, here’s another little tidbit.

Back in 1999, New Scientist published an interview with Indian climate scientist Syed Hasnain about melting glaciers in the Himalayas. In this interview, Hasnain speculated that “all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035 at their present rate of decline”.

Fast forward to 2007 and the (in)famous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which states that “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.” The source? A 2005 report by the World Wildlife Fund, which, in turn, quotes the New Scientist: “The New Scientist magazine carried the article ‘Flooded Out – Retreating glaciers spell disaster for valley communities’ in their 5 June 1999 issue. It quoted Professor Syed Hasnain, then Chairman of the International Commission for Snow and Ice’s (ICSI) Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology, who said most of the glaciers in the Himalayan region ‘will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming’. The article also predicted that freshwater flow in rivers across South Asia will ‘eventually diminish, resulting in widespread water shortages’.”

So, it appears that a popular science magazine was the primary source for such a dramatic statement. The assertion that Himalayan glaciers might disappear by 2035 was never published in a peer reviewed journal. Worse yet, note how the statement became inflated over time: whereas the original article spoke of “all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas”, the WWF translated this into “most of the glaciers in the Himalayan region”, and by the time this gloomy prediction got into the IPCC’s report, it read simply, “”Glaciers in the Himalaya”.

Now New Scientist is taking them to task, leaving many to wonder: is this really representative of the quality of the science on which dire global warming predictions are based?

For the record, while glaciers in the Himalayas may suffer from global warming, they’re not (yet) in danger of disappearing anytime soon. Certainly not by 2035.

I’m reading an opinion piece in last week’s New Scientist, by Michael Le Page and Catherine Brahic. It’s titled, “Why there’s no sign of a climate conspiracy in hacked emails”. It is intended to reassure us that “Climategate” notwithstanding, we should trust the basic science. Yet I feel that it misses the point on all counts.

Take the title, for starters. While I am sure there are conspiracy nuts out there who view the hacked e-mails as a smoking gun, I think many more people see a more nuanced picture: the e-mails prove no conspiracy, but they do demonstrate contempt towards dissenters and the general public, not to mention the scientific process, and they do raise questions about the validity of the so-called “scientific consensus” on climate.

But it’s not just the title that’s deceptive. The authors raise five points, in the form of questions and answers. At least that’s how the article appeared in print; on-line, two of the questions were turned into unambiguous statements, according to which we are “100% sure” that the world is getting warmer and it’s because of greenhouse gases as the main cause. No, we are not 100% sure. If you want to assign a percentage, then take the data, fit the models, and show us a covariance matrix that tells us exactly how sure we are that a long-term trend is present. Leave this “100%” nonsense to political activists.

The print edition stuck to the question-and-answer form. “How can we be sure that the world really is warming?” they ask, but it’s a misleading question: of course the world is warming, the real question is, how much of that warming is due to short/medium/long term natural periodicities, and how much of it is due to a more sudden (e.g., linear, exponential, etc.) trend that may be due to human activity. Do we have enough data to distinguish unambiguously (never mind 100%, 1-sigma can do nicely) natural fluctuations from more direct trends?

Then they ask, “How do we know greenhouse gases are the main cause?”, and assure as that “The physics is clear: carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere, and CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere.” This is pure nonsense of course, since I could just as well say something like, “urine is a liquid, adding a liquid to the oceans increases ocean volume, I keep peeing into the ocean, hence cities will be swallowed by rising sea levels”. Their answer sounds more like an attempt to divert attention away from genuine questions, such as those concerning the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas (CO2 is a very weak greenhouse gas; for instance, if rising CO2 levels somehow reduced the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, the net effect would be global cooling), the accuracy of models describing the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere (I’ve read a paper, for instance, that questions the ability of widely used physics models to deal properly with the discontinuity of the atmosphere-surface boundary), or the “chicken-and-egg” question concerning the climate record, namely the extent to which CO2 caused warming trends or rising temperatures caused an increase in CO2 during past warm periods.

Their third question reads, “So why are scientists ‘fixing’ temperature data?”, which they answer by explaining that raw data almost always has to be manipulated to correct measurement problems or reconcile measurements made in different ways. True. But that is no excuse to discard the raw data. Not to mention that the data manipulation that caught so many people’s attention in the Climategate e-mails was not about fixing up raw data… it was about using two incompatible sets of data to change the appearance of a fitted curve, lest it gives the wrong impression to a scientifically illiterate audience. They do address this issue separately in the on-line version, but the explanation they offer raises its own questions: for instance, they say that “there has been no attempt to conceal this”, but how does that reconcile with the phrase, “hide the decline”, quoted from the hacked e-mails?

Lastly, their final two questions are about the attempts to suppress skeptical papers and attempts to prevent data from being released. We’re told that an independent inquiry is still ongoing, and in any case, the scientists may not have had the right to release the data. That’s a non-answer. You don’t need an independent inquiry to explain how it is acceptable to “redefine the peer review process” just to keep skeptical papers out, and as to the data, how about answering the question insofar as it concerns data that they did have the right to release?

All in all, I could have come up with much better arguments myself… instead of attempting to side-step the questions, I’d have tried to address them. Data were manipulated because a fit indeed gave a curve that would give the wrong impression to the uninitiated, and adding the instrumental data to the fossil temperature record seemed like an honest “trick” to avoid this. Skeptical papers were suppressed because those involved may genuinely believe in their science, may genuinely believe that many of the skeptics are motivated by something other than pure scientific curiosity (especially if they happen to be financed by, say, a friendly neighborhood oil company), and may genuinely believe that we just don’t have time for this nonsense while the planet is heading towards a global disaster. Data were withheld because otherwise, all the time in the world would not be enough to deal with clowns who take that data, ignorantly (or nefariously) manipulate it, and come up with nonsense conclusions. These explanations may not justify the actions taken, but they might be closer to the truth in the end… and supposedly, truth and integrity are the only real currencies that science has at its disposal. Currencies which will be needed badly in the coming decades, in order to convince the inhabitants of Earth not to trash their planet beyond repair… regardless whether or not CO2 leads to global warming.

41,000 tons of CO2 is the amount of “CO2 equivalent” that the Copenhagen climate summit is expected to produce. No, it’s not the amount produced by Switzerland in a year, even though CNN’s Jack Cafferty said so, probably missing the phrase, “thousands of” in the column heading of Wikipedia’s statistics. But it IS the amount of CO2 some smaller or less developed countries, e.g., Slovenia, Lithuania, or Kenya produce in a day. Another way of looking at it is that during its 12 days, the climate summit will be responsible for about 0.004% of the entire world‘s CO2 output.

No need to worry, I am sure there is a neat “trick” that can be used to “hide” this embarrassing little data point, too, lest it dilutes the message about the coming climate disaster.

I’m still trying to digest this… the meaning of recently released e-mails that suggest, to put it mildly, questionable behavior on behalf of some of the world’s leading climate researchers.

One e-mail that’s most hotly debated is about this:

This plot contains two types of data: long-term reconstructed temperatures from the fossil record, and shorter term instrumental temperatures. Now the trouble is, the smoothed curve (green) based on the reconstructed temperatures alone points slightly downward… no dramatic warming trend. In contrast, the instrumental temperatures show an upward trend. This apparent disagreement is purely a mathematical artifact; anyone who ever attempted to fit, for instance, a polynomial curve to some data knows that the fit tends to diverge near the ends of the data interval. But it wouldn’t look good on a report that is designed to influence world opinion and global policy to show a downward trend, would it. So there’s a neat “trick”: the apparent downward trend can be eliminated by using the instrumental temperatures to pad the reconstructed temperature data set, and produce an upward trend.

Note that this doesn’t mean that there is a downward trend. The planet may very well be warming, due to what people are doing to it. Unfortunately, the information content of manipulated graphs is zero, or less than zero even… they can generate skepticism towards genuine future results and delay a necessary public response.

There are many other questionable e-mails in the lot, including e-mails that suggest the hiding of data from freedom-of-information requests, e-mails that suggest efforts to block the publication of research by climate change skeptics, and at least one eyebrow-raising comment cheering at the death of a climate change skeptic, leading to calls for a researcher to resign.

I’m still digesting this, but it reinforces my conviction that phrases like “standard model” or “scientific consensus”, far from reassuring, should be a clear indication that the science might be shaky, and that an attempt is being made to substitute authority in place of convincing data and firm logic.