BBC Focus Magazine

[Shadowwolf]

Worse is that whilst I think many will just resort to their old "the boffins got it wrong again, stupid scientists don't know nothing". They may also believe that they have carte blanche to act as they please, no recycling, no limitation, nothing.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Exactly, and in the process it could put hard won environmental arguments back decades, which are, and always will be, far more important than some odd variations in the climate.

Some of my colleagues think I will be pleased by all this loss of faith in global warming but really I just feel rather cheated and not a little annoyed by it all.

[Shadowwolf]

Some think that it is all about the glory of being right.

[M Paul Lloyd]

This is worth reading, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8299426.stm

'Scary' climate message from past
A new historical record of carbon dioxide levels suggests current political targets on climate may be "playing with fire", scientists say.
Researchers used ocean sediments to plot CO2 levels back 20 million years.
Levels similar to those now commonly regarded as adequate to tackle climate change were associated with sea levels 25-40m (80-130 ft) higher than today.
Scientists write in the journal Science that this extends knowledge of the link between CO2 and climate back in time.

Scary stuff indeed, and given what is said in the body of the article you might be forgiven for agreeing with this sentiment.
"If anyone still doubts the link between CO2 and climate, they should read this paper."

but then a few lines later the whole thing gets turned on its head with this direct quote from one of the actual people involved..

"There aren't any perfect analogies in the past for climate change today or in the future," she said.

Which to my way of thinking completely negates the point of the BBC news item. It might, but it might not, hardly a definitive argument is it?

[Ush]

The article is a bit dodgey but here ya go MPL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

Are you pleased?

Maybe the planet just wont heat up again until the CO2 reaches a certain level? There isn't a 1-1 correlation after all.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Are you pleased?

Well no, not really, sorry, as it means that all that effort and sacrifice was for nothing, and that all the hype about how we were facing the greatest catastrophe of all time was just so much silliness.

No, actually I'm left feeling quite angry by it all.

[Ush]

That's an understandable reaction.

I wonder how things will pan out for global warming and I really hope that people don't do a 180 and start polluting like there was no tomorrow.

[M Paul Lloyd]

I think it will be just like it was when, some thirty to forty years ago they told us we were all heading for a new iceage which also never happened, and so we all went down the pub and carried on as normal.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Strange that this should be headline news when NASA's daily Arctic sea ice sheet map site seems to be broken.

Arctic to be 'ice-free in summer'
The Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free and open to shipping during the summer in as little as ten years' time, a top polar specialist has said.
"It's like man is taking the lid off the northern part of the planet," said Professor Peter Wadhams, from the University of Cambridge.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8307272.stm

[Flakkarin]

Well, I've just come from a meeting in the states of my new group of scientist friends (we're VAST - Volcanism in the Arctic System) and there was THE most interesting guy there who I had the pleasure of sharing a dinner table with - a guy called Caspar Amman who does a lot of the modelling that ends up in IPCC reports.
Honestly, I wish I had a dictaphone, or at least half his knowledge and experience...

But one thing that I remember clearly was he was giving us an example of a long email return between him and a climate 'denier' (yes, MPL, I'm afraid this does actually seem to be the used term in the US! I nearly laughed my socks off when they kept saying it). He showed us loads of graphs the guy had sent him as an example of how rational scientists can be easily and slyly convinced to sign things saying climate change isn't real, or not as bad etc etc. One graph was of an experiment of temp. vs CO2 concentration in a box, and showed that at first temperature increases very rapidly with CO2, but that at the levels we are currently, and predicted to experience, the change was negligible. Pretty convincing huh? At first look, wouldn't you agree that what we put into the atmosphere now doesn't matter? But Caspar pointed out serious flaws in the experiment - for example that it was done at sea level, where yes, the pressures would cause the rising CO2 at higher levels to just be dissolved. This in no way represents the whole atmospheric column. But I'm sure, if you just showed the public that graph, no-one would ask those questions, and would leap upon this 'evidence'.
It would be tempting to think the same goes on on both sides though right? But a lot more serious, peer-reviewed science goes on on the 'non-denier' side.

The sea ice thing is interesting. We talked a lot about it in the meeting, and sea ice certainly is shrinking away, but the year-on-year levels have a lot to do with clouds. No clouds = lowest sea ice.
I just wrote a small article for my glaciology class that was about something people often don't realise - that until only a couple of decades ago, scientists actually thought it was impossible for anthropogenic climate change to affect the large ice caps, and were actually astonished to find Greenland and Antarctica melting away. In our meeting one guy had a very interesting talk about small ice caps in the Canadian Arctic melting out that had not been ice free since even before Medieval warm period.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Hello Flakkarin, so good to see you back and with such a wonderful post.

Excellent input this and much appreciated. Yes Denier does seem to have entered the language regardless of its inappropriate silliness which only goes show just how simplistic some of the attitudes are in all of this.

And by way of an example the idea that the atmosphere would ever behave like the air in a box... well, but hey-ho what do I know...? Except that recent reports by a certain climate expert, that the Arctic ice cap is shrinking and thinning dramatically, is clearly at odds with the evidence as supplied by NASA for the past two years. Odd that.

Yes it is thinner and smaller than it was thirty years ago but at the present rate of increase it will be back to 1979 levels within the next few years rather than have gone for good as suggested..... and also... just where is all the dramatic sea level rise associated with all this supposed melting ice???

[Shadowwolf]

What I don't like about 'climate denier' is that it suggests the individuals deny that climate change happens or is happening. That's a little different from any who doubt or have yet to be convinced that it is all humanities fault; though I know the full climate change denier does exist.

It would be tempting to think the same goes on on both sides though right?

Is the latest information on the hockey stick graph not that sort of thing? I had also recently read a report on a site that was pro-human caused change of one group of climate scientists, that had not found the temperature values they expected to find from their research. Their solution was to search in other areas until they found values that would provide them with the results they wanted to see; alas the link was on the other forum and now gone so you've only my word on it, which is rather short of being evidence.

Was the guy sending the graphs actually seeking to have this Caspar sign things?

[Flakkarin]

I wasn't aware Greenland was regaining mass, in fact I read something recently about the margins undergoing far more melting than was expected (hmm, it appears I didn't save that link - always the way!)
Which brings up an interesting point about the dynamics of large ice caps. Gaining mass in the centre of an ice field is not necessarily a sign of health if the margins are melting rapidly - there will then be a giant imbalance and the glacier will start to accelerate towards the margins. Relatively then, the glacier will melt faster.
I'm not so sure how Greenland is divided up, but at least for Antarctica the ice caps doesn't behave as one entity. There are various 'ice divides' making several distinct sections. The two that have probably received the most attention are the Antarctic Peninsula and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The Antarctic Peninsula has shown the most signs of rapid degradation so far - who can forget the calving off and breaking up of Larsen B in just 30 days? But, the vast melting there doesn't increase sea level because most of it is floating ice shelves - floating ice doesn't add volume as it melts. Same as the sea ice in the North, it's disappearance is disastrous for polar bears etc that survive on it, but doesn't change sea level. The real worry comes form the apparent signs of instability the WAIS is showing - if it were to collapse a la Larsen B, sea level would rise, as most of this volume presently lies on the land.

Huh, I learnt more in my glaciology class than I thought...

That hockey stick graph thing was interesting, but it doesn't mean there aren't 100 other legitimate graphs that show the same thing. And yes, it odes go on on both sides - I think I was trying to say more that in my experience there is a greater volume of peer-reviewed, 'good' science on the climate change side. (What's the opposite of 'denier'? 'affirmer'? ) Note that none of the data these guys were sending Caspar were published.
I don't think these guys were trying to make Caspar sign anything, just enjoying the thrill of trying to convince a guy who makes the IPCC models...
The more worrying thing was the case of another woman on our table, who had found her name as having 'signed' one of these things - but did not authorise that in any way! Something she had said was taken completely out of context and quoted as supporting their cause. Disgusting.

[Shadowwolf]

Hijacking names is most below the belt, either they give support or no.

Regards the 'hockey stick', is it just one, the most well known or first one that is less than stellar; but there are others that are reputable and show the same thing?

[M Paul Lloyd]

As far as I know only one 'hockey stick' graph has ever been proposed but it has several critics.

http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/colu ... -fire.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/05/u ... te-report/
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=4018
http://www.climatechangefraud.com/clima ... under-fire

Personally I don't trust graphs as they can be so easily manipulated by very simple adjustments of the vertical and horizontal scales, substitute degrees for tenths of degrees against decades and things can look very different indeed.

[Flakkarin]

Hot damn, I wish I'd read about the Hockey Stick controversy before I went to the meeting - one of the original authors organised it! Ray Bradley was there, darn I missed such a good opportunity to ask him about all this...
Why I said '100 different graphs' is because I thought there were plenty more constructed from a hundred different proxies. As much as I hate to reference wikipedia, it's as far as a sleepy saturday night will take me, and I think this graph is quite nice:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
At least it shows quite a few studies coming to the same conclusion.

By the way, you guys stay up late thinking about science don't you!

[Flakkarin]

Huh I forgot how to edit posts, but I just wanted to add this:

I just found this very nice, detailed report on the controversy actually from Caspar and Gavin Schmidt:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/02/dummies-guide-to-the-latest-hockey-stick-controversy/

The final paragraph is interesting:

9) Was MBH98 the final word on the climate of last millennium?

Not at all. There has been significant progress on many aspects of climate reconstructions since MBH98. Firstly, there are more and better quality proxy data available. There are new methodologies such as described in Rutherford et al (2005) or Moberg et al (2005) that address recognised problems with incomplete data series and the challenge of incorporating lower resolution data into the mix. Progress is likely to continue on all these fronts. As of now, all of the ‘Hockey Team’ reconstructions (shown left) agree that the late 20th century is anomalous in the context of last millennium, and possibly the last two millennia.

[Flakkarin]

Where the heck has my edit button gone?? All I wanted to add was that there are also more up-to.date views on the hockey stick controversy on that site, like this one http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/false-claims-by-mcintyre-and-mckitrick-regarding-the-mann-et-al-1998reconstruction/
It seems like such a silly thing to put in a single post, but it's done now!! I'll spare you my signature by way of apology.

[M Paul Lloyd]

I think I will have to extend the editing button time limit for you Flakkarin.

As for references from Wiki one of the most damning reports of the hockey stick idea was the discovery of Wiki info in the graph data.

[Flakkarin]

There's a time limit for editing? Ooh, I should try to do my research faster...

How could Wiki data be in the graph? I thought the original graph was created a long time ago, before those days. I find that claim a touch unbelievable...