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James Hansen on the Warmest Year Brouhaha
Jamie writes "In response to earlier reports, Dr. James Hansen, top climate scientist with NASA, has issued a statement on the recent global warming data correction. He points out 'the effect on global temperature was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable.' In a second email he shows maps of U.S. temperatures relative to the world in 1934 and 1998, explains why the error occurred (it was not, as reported, a 'Y2K bug') and, in response to errors by 'Fox, Washington Times, and their like,' attacks the 'deceit' of those who 'are not stupid [but] seek to create a brouhaha and muddy the waters in the climate change story.'"
Why do we still call it global warming? It's global climate change. Some areas will get warmer. Some areas will get cooler. Some areas will be under water.
:-)
The nice thing about it is that the majority of us will live to see the changes. We are in for some interesting times over the next 30-50 years.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
He's a scientist with an ego... which most scientists have and is a danger and possibly a barrier to objectivity. Being corrected and somewhat mocked for his mistake is, I'm sure, embarrassing and a shot to his ego. Of course, if he had simply released his findings instead of using them as a platform to promote his theories of climate change, I'm quite sure the response to the mistake would not have been so negative. The fact that they trumpeted the first findings and quietly released the second makes one wonder about the real reason for releasing them in the first place. Do real scientists keep things to themselves if their experiments don't fit with their original hypothesis? Do they tweak experiments until they come up with the intended outcome? That's not science... that's politics.
Is it possible that conservatives have been too quick to support the captains of industry? The basic problem is that national religious conservative leadership has focused exclusively on issues like "the rights of the young and the unborn" and the gay 'agenda'.
Those (in leadership positions) who desire to shift away from political gay/abortion/Jesus activism and towards things like helping the poor and conserving the environment are mostly told to STFU & get back on message. "They" don't want to split the consideral political capital that's built up behind the religious conservative bloc.
Religion has always influenced politics, but IMO, in the last 30 years, politics has been corrupting religion.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Also, beach erosion; how is that bad at all; except for the idiots who build houses or hotels on beaches? Isn't that simply a natural process? I think beaches communities should reverse development, and build back the dunes between the towns and the water. Screw the beach front hotels; it's bad for the environment, and we can still enjoy the beach without having a house or hotel on it!
As for your comment about west nile virus, hell, we had malaria here too; but back before you or I were born, we defeated it. DDT being a big help there; amongst other things. West Nile is not a biggie. If we can stop malaria in Cuba and the South, we can stop it here when it gets warmer. People can adapt.
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me
The real problem is that this error had to be found out by reverse engineering because climate scientists have a bad habit of not releasing their code and data. We're told that they use a list of high quality temperature sensing stations and discouraged from actually checking. Then when somebody actually does go out and check, we find a significant fraction of them are just awful, hopelessly compromised by local heat island effects. Fixing those problems will only increase the accuracy of predictions and data quality but instead of welcoming it, we had an abortive attempt to take the station list locations private for "privacy reasons" after being public for decades.
Data quality is a major issue with global warming. If the numbers aren't right, we don't really know what's going on. This is just one more case of obfuscation hiding error and the AGW proponents falling back to the nearest trench line and adopting the same shoddy tactics of delay, deny, and obfuscate on data quality issues.
This is not how real science is done and that's why so many people who know and love the scientific method and its fruits have a growing unease about the whole AGW enterprise. Can you blame them?
The US is reputed to have one of the best temp sensor networks in the world and I believe has the only organized effort to go to original sources and check stations. Yet instead of calling for a review of all the data and figuring out, for real, how bad the problem is, what we get is a political effort to firewall the contamination and an implied "let's not bother" checking the rest. Real science is "trust but verify". Climate science seems to have a strain of something else going on.
What Hansen considers the really significant distortion in the 1934-vs.-1998 comparison is this: while the absolute temperature difference between the two years (for the U.S.) was negligible, the U.S. was much warmer than the rest of the world in 1934, whereas in 1998 it was close to the global average. You can see this if you go back and read the PDF http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/realdeal.16aug20074. pdf of Hansen's second e-mail, and especially take a look at Figure 2 on page three. In 1934, the U.S. is a red spot surrounded by cooler areas, whereas in 1998 it's glowing red all over. Of course, the colour codes for a difference against baseline, not absolute temperature, but the difference is clear: 1934 temperatures in the U.S. were anomalously warm vs. the rest of the world, whereas in 1998 they were much more typical.
"The deep-fried Mars bar is a symptom of a wider crisis." -- Nutritionist Ann Ralph, on the Scottish diet
1) Global plant biomass up 6% since the 1970s due to more CO2, and longer growing seasons. A big win on dozens of fronts, but two bear particular mention:
Plant biomass can go up as a whole, but the effect of CO2 fertilization is strongly limited by water and nutrient availability, which in many regions will go down. Longer growing seasons do not occur everywhere, but only in places that don't get too hot or too dry.
3) Increased crop yields, contributing to making the famines that used to regularly afflict India, China, etc. a thing of the past.
Increased crop yields have far more to do with agricultural practices than CO2 fertilization or climate change. Furthermore, even when crop yield goes up, nutritional content often goes down: the planets are bigger but not as good for you.
4) Decreased mortality. Deaths increase from a one degree drop in temperature at around four times the rate of a one degree rise in temperature.
That contradicts other studies I've read, but now I have to do some hunting for them.
5) Extra calamari! Squids get bigger and grow faster in warmer oceans.
Ocean acidification, ecosystem stress, forced migration
6) Fewer typhoons/hurricanes/etc., due to increase in wind shear making them less likely to form.
The studies I've read indicate that hurricane numbers stay constant or increase, not decrease, and that hurricane strength may increase.
7) Better beer! There's no water more pure than that from melting ice caps. Strangely enough, the positive vastly outweighs the negative. Really? Then why do leading economists like Nordhaus find net economic damage from warming? Even Tol, who's in the "small warming is good" camp agrees that we need to mitigate our emissions to avoid large warming.
Your one sided story neglects all the other negative impacts of climate change (sea level rise, drought, flooding, heat waves, abrupt threshold responses in the climate system), etc., and also neglects the difference between the climate change which has occurred so far, and the much larger change which is predicted to occur in the future.