Who lifeguards the lifeguards?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Who guards the guards themselves? Who...keeps the beekeepers. You would need quite a large hive for that I suppose. Alright, maybe that last one doesn't work, but one that certainly does work is: who attacks the attack blogs? Or, in the nomenclature of the internet, who trolls the trolls? In the climate change world there is an answer to that question, and like anything in this viper's nest of a debate, it's a controversial one. Please allow me to introduce to you the virtual phenomenon that is Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues at the university of Western Australia. 

 

In summer 2012, Lewandowsky et al. submitted a paper to the journal Psychological Science with the title “NASA Faked the Moon Landing – Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science.” This is quite an entrance, it must be said. If you've managed to link the climate change debate to the Moon Landing conspiracy theory in the very first sentence on the page, it's pretty clear where you stand.

 

Now, since this is a psychology paper and I have no background in this area, I'm not going to try and address the papers merits. I can tell you what they did though. They asked 1377 followers of climate denial blogs to fill in a questionnaire, the purpose of which was to ascertain whether they believed in conspiracy theories or not. The theories they asked about are listed in table 1 of the paper, ranging from “AIDS was introduced by the Government and administered to gay and black men in the 1970's” to “In July 1947, the U.S. military recovered the wreckage of an alien spacecraft from Roswell, NM, and covered up the fact.” From this questionnaire, they found that “endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed Martin Luther King, Jr.) predicted rejection of climate science as well as other scientific findings.” 

 

This obviously did not go down well with the climate sceptic/denialist blogs. So, in a move so ironic that it made a clanging sound as it dropped, Lewandowsky and his colleagues starting trying to trace the comments about their original paper on these blogs to see how conspiracy theories evolve. The conspiracy theory they were looking at in question being that their research was made up because they're puppets of the climate change hoax. Woah. I might need Christopher Nolan to help me out with that many levels. 

 

In February of this year the new paper appeared, named in delightfully circular fashion: “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.” This time around, they "identify and trace the hypotheses that emerged in response to LOG12 (the previous paper) and ... show that many of the hypotheses exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking." Here the story gets really interesting, because the journal in which that article appeared have recently taken it offline, because it was the “subject of complaints”. However it has not been retracted or withdrawn, which happens when a paper is fundamentally flawed. So now the most recent paper is just kind of in limbo, although you can find versions of it kicking around on the web. 

 

Clearly this is an ongoing story, and one which is little more than a sideshow to the overall problems caused by climate change. I happen to be a little sceptical myself about the results from internet surveys, with the obvious problem of only getting responses from the people particularly interested in the subject. As I said though, I'm not really in a position to judge, not being a psychological scientist. I'm certainly still interested in what happens to their most recent paper in the end. Whatever the outcome, as long as Anthony Watts and co. are furious, Lewandowsky et al. have certainly acheived something worthwhile.

Lewandowsky S, Oberauer K, & Gignac GE (2013). NASA Faked the Moon Landing--Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science. Psychological science PMID: 23531484

CB part 2: It's The Sun Wot Did It

Apologies for taking last week off, I was in New York City. It felt rather trivial to write a climate change blog in the glaring neon light of Times Square, where any energy saving attempt seems like trying to spit out the sun. Speaking of which, today I will be covering another common climate myth, to wit:

The Idea
All of our energy comes from the Sun. If something changes, then why look any further than the source? It's pretty obvious that changes in the brightness of our home star would effect the temperature of the Earth. So even if global warming is happening, it's not humans. How dare scientists suggest it might be us. For their arrogance they should be transported to the hottest desert on Earth to KNEEL BEFORE THE MIGHTY HELIOS UNTIL BURNED TO DUST.

I'm paraphrasing here, slightly. But if you'd like to see an example, I'll choose foxnews this week. I've been picking on British newspapers a lot recently so I'll mix it up a bit.

Why it's bollocks
Well it is, and it isn't. Unlike the last one of these, where I discussed the whole "no warming for 15 years" phenomenon (which is just bad statistics), there's an actual hypothesis here, which can be tested to see if it's correct or not. The statement: "Changes in the temperature of the Sun have changed the temperature of the Earth" is something science can actually answer, unlike "but people grew wine in Greenland during the medieval warm period." That's an argument I won't be covering in this blog, because it's just an anecdote and you can't do anything with that except shrug and point to the vast quantities of proxy data collected to examine past climate.

Anyway, I digress. There are two questions when it comes to solar activity, both of which have been answered by climate scientists many times previously (which is good, because otherwise I'd have to do the research myself and this blog would take like 10000 hours and I'm kinda hungry). First, is solar activity currently increasing? Second, are we in a particularly high period of solar activity historically? The first one is easy, because we can point satellites at the sun and measure the solar energy it's kicking out in Watts per metre squared. Here's the graph. Thanks NASA.

As we can see, there is an approximate 11 year cycle in solar activity, ranging between 1365 and 1367 W/m2. The overall trend is shown as the red dotted line from 1985-2010, a whopping -0.012% per decade. From this Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) calculated a temperature trend of -0.014 to -0.023 °C/yr. So there goes the first idea. We aren't done yet though, because it's possible over a longer time period solar activity is much higher that it used to be. We need to answer the second question I referred to earlier.

This is much tricker, because we don't have a time machine or a 1000 year old satellite record. Handily, 17th century astronomers like Thomas Harriot and Galileo have come to our rescue by observing sunspots, dark patches on the surface of the Sun caused by high magnetic activity. Turns out there is a very clear link between number of sunspots and the amount of solar radiation the Earth receives. Thanks long dead folks who spend their days staring at the sun until they went insane. We owe you one.

Lean et al (1995) looked at the sunspot record and found a surface warming of around 0.5 degrees since 1700 due to increased solar activity. So it is fair to say the current climate is warmer than it was 300 years ago because of the sun. However, they also point out that of the 0.36 degrees of warming from 1970-1995 solar forcing accounted for around 0.11 degrees, leaving two thirds of the problem unaccounted for. Since then, solar forcing has decreased but the surface has continued to warm.

That should be it for the theory of solar forcing then, especially since the last paper I referenced was published in 1995. Surely the media wouldn't continue to lazily publish stories about already answered questions though would it? What? Oh. Right.

evaluating climate predictions

"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."

--Nils Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics 

It would be ridiculous if climate science simply stopped at the present. How would that conversation go with the UN?

"Well," the hypothetical scientist would say, "we've noticed a global warming trend over the last 50 years, and think maybe you should help the world prepare for a new and different climate."

"I see" hypothetical Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary general would reply. "What exactly should we expect?"

"Um, I don't know. That's in the future, you see. We perceive time in a wholly linear fashion, like mice running through an endless dark corridor, the future remaining forever intangible, yet hope filled" the extravagantly wistful scientist would reply. 

To avoid such a patently ridiculous conversation, climate models came into being. By using an enormous amount of computing power, it's possible to reproduce the complex processes of the Earth's atmosphere using dynamical equations and parameterizations. (making something complex simpler by only representing the key parts, kind of like drawing a stick man because faces are hard. Except with maths).

The problem with these kind of predictions is that the only way to know if you got it right or not is to wait and see. There are other ways of testing the skill of a model (i.e. how good it is), like hindcasts where you create the model for, say, 1950-2000 temperatures and then run it over 1900-1950. If the model does a decent job of predicting the first half of the 20th century then bingo, it must be good. This is a little unsatisfactory though, since what we really want to know is how good the model is for the period we will be living through next. To get a good idea of model skill though, you need roughly 15 years of data minimum. 

Well, luckily for this blog, this week a group of scientists have gone back and tested their own model devised 15 years ago to see how it did. The article is here and hopefully, if Research Blogging works, the citation should be at the bottom of the page.

In this brief paper, Allen et al. review the prediction they made in 2000, which was based on climate data up until 1996. They then test how the model performed from 1996-2012. The key suggestion in the paper is that if observations lie outside of a certain range, the model should be described as falsified. This doesn't imply it was created in an underhand way, simply that it isn't performing very well. 

Below is the original prediction, with the latest data added in:

 
The solid black line is the original prediction, the grey area marks the 5-95% confidence of this prediction and the black dotted line plots the middle of the uncertainty range. The red line indicates the observations in the period, with the black diamonds showing the predicted decadal mean temperature and the red diamonds showing observed decadal mean temperature for the 1990's and 2000's. The yellow diamonds show each individual year temperature from 1996-2012. 

 As we can see, this particular model prediction has done remarkable well over the last 15 years. Although the orginal prediction is a slight overestimate, the observations are well within the uncertainty range. The paper also points out that if temperatures do not warm by 2017-2026 this model will become falsified under their own definition. So although it's accurate for the first 15 years, it's not guaranteed that this model will get temperatures correct forever.

To make a prediction myself, I think this type of paper will probably become more and more common over the next few years as people start to look at the third annual IPCC report (2001) ensemble model.  Hopefully these studies will prove that climate change models are all rubbish and we can go back to burning fossil fuels without worrying about it. Based on this early paper though, it looks like the modeling community did a pretty good job. Unfortunately.  
 
Allen, M., Mitchell, J., & Stott, P. (2013). Test of a decadal climate forecast Nature Geoscience, 6 (4), 243-244 DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1788

Climate Glossary A-C

Today I'm going to begin a glossary of important climate terms, since I tend to use climate jargon without really thinking about it. Obviously, I'm doing this because it is vital to your understanding of climate change, not because the new Dr. Who episode is online now and I want to write a quick blog so I can watch it at a reasonable time. Certainly not.

A
Abrupt Climate Change - Referring to the very sudden change in temperature we see over the last 50 years, rather than a general slow increase. It's important to get a handle on timescales here; For example, we cannot be heading into an ice age for the next 200 years, because we're already in one that has lasted for 2.58 million years

Adaption - An attempt to deal with the problems of a warming planet, rather than sticking your head in the sand and screaming that it's all a conspiracy. Unless of course you're trying to cool down your head, because suddenly you live in a dessert. In which case sticking your head in the sand might be a good adaption policy.

Aerosol - Small particles or drops of liquid in the atmosphere that reflect and absorb sunlight, meaning the amount in the atmosphere dictates how much sunlight reaches the Earth's surface. Aerosols are a huge source of uncertainty in climate change, and a really important current area of study. It's therefore a bit of a shame talks on aerosols are usually more boring than watching sloths arm wrestle.

Albedo - How white something is. Albedo is usually used in the context of "what proportion of sunlight is reflected from the Earth back to space" because white stuff reflects sunlight better than black stuff. As a northern englishman, I'm so white my albedo is almost 1. Yo.

Anthropogenic - Humans did it. It's used a lot in climate circles, but you could use it pretty much anytime and be in context. "The cat was thrown out of the window, anthropogenically".

B
Biosphere - Life. the wonderful greenery of God's good Earth. All creatures great and small. Me. You. Humphrey the friendly Coelacanth.

Black Carbon effect - Because of Albedo (see A), black carbon on snow/ice absorbs more sunlight than the ice would, heating the planet further. Just another reason carbon based energy sources are so much fun to burn...

C
Carbon Dioxide - A gas representing a tiny percentage of the atmosphere, which human emissions have increased by around 25%. It's important because it's a greenhouse gas, reflecting outgoing sunlight back to the Earth's surface. I don't have a joke about that, really. You'll think of your own. I'm sure it'll be really good, I've heard you've got a great sense of humour. 


Carbon Capture and Sequestration - A set of technologies which intend to decrease our Carbon Dioxide release while still burning our lovely fossil fuel blanket. Hurray!

Coral Bleaching - A stressed coral appears white, or bleached. What do corals have to stress about? Current events. Hahahaha. No, but seriously, usually it's the increasing pH and temperature of the oceans, caused by an increased concentration of carbon, which is destroying their natural habitat.

Cryosphere - The ice on the Earth's surface, which is of interest to climate scientists because large sections of it are melting. This is pretty critical since theoretically there is 80m of sea level contained in Antarctica alone, although this is a pretty useless stat since were in no danger of that melting within the foreseeable future. Also, "Cryosphere" sounds like the name of a terrible 90's gladiator.

Next time on Climate Glossary: what's deforestation planning? Who is this mysterious El Nino fellow and just what does he want? Does F still follow E? Stay tuned to find out.

CB part 1: the end of the trend

This will be the first post in a series I'm going to write from time to time, imaginatively entitled "Climate Bollocks." The plan is to take a bunch of climate myths that get dragged up whenever the media covers climate change, and explain why these myths make less sense than trying to explain the second law of thermodynamics to a badger. He's got no use for enthalpy, it's a waste of time for both parties. 

This week: Global warming stopped 15 years ago. 


The idea:

Sure, if you look at temperature records, the world was warming from around 1980 to 1997. What they don't tell you though, is that it stopped warming then, and it's been about the same ever since. No really, we've got graphs and everything. The Earth has in fact slightly cooled since then. No need to worry, global warming is happening much slower than the Alarmists are saying. It's just a con to raise taxes.


I'm paraphrasing here, but I think those are the major points. Since I've been picking mostly on the Telegraph recently, here's the Daily Mail's version, just to mix it up a bit. 

Why it's Bollocks:
The first point to make is that the only reason the "warming plateau" started 15 years ago is because 1998 is the third warmest year on record, behind 2005 and 2010. If you want to make a temperature series that shows a downward trend, it always makes sense to pick out a warm year, so that it's almost inevitable the next few years will be colder. That's manipulating data for a political agenda 101. This is an easy trick to pull so, in the name of science, here's a non-climate dataset to prove it.


I've put together the average attendances for each game from the English Premier League season between it's start in 1992 and 2012, taken from worldfootballnet. I could have chosen any dataset really, but I like football, and this one works quite well. Here's the figure we get out of it:

I've added a trend line in black, which just shows the average change over the whole time period. It's looking like happy times for football clubs, I'd hope you agree. The FA can crack out the champagne buffet, if they ever bothered to tidy the last one away. Hang on though..what if I just look at the period 2007-2012.

Oh dear, oh dear Barry. It's an economic crisis, and nobody can afford to go to the match anymore. The economy is sunk, the premier league is buggered and Gary Lineker will have to slink back off to his mountainous pile of crisps, which he sleeps atop like a dragon guarding his treasure hoard. Probably.*

The thing is though, this is the same data, so how come we got two totally different results? Well, because in the first case I used all the data I had, and in the second case I specifically chose when to start and finish to make it look like real world economics were having any effect whatsoever on the juggernaut that is the premier league. 

This is exactly what's going on in the Daily Mail article, and lots of others like it. The truth is, although there hasn't been any drastic warming in the last 10 years, it's still true that the warmest 10 years on record are all between 1998-2012. As Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit, discussed in this BBC Q+A, you can pick certain years and come up with certain trends, but they aren't statistically significant unless you look at the long term. Equally, if this year happens to be particularly warm, we won't suddenly be in a new warming trend; you just need to use as much data as you can to get a real picture of what is going on, because the bigger the dataset the more likely your trends are significant.

It's never a particularly good idea to trust sources that run these kind of articles, where somehow they think that the Met Office in the UK has just missed a trick that the clever journalist has spotted. Scientists aren't reporting a cooling trend because they understand the data, and they understand it isn't there. Not because it's a conspiracy.

*If you're American, and none of these jokes make any sense, then I apologize. I'm feeling a little spiteful after watching 4 days of basketball, in which I literally never have any idea what any commentator is on about ever.