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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

More on the Antarctic current here:

"The Antarctic Half of the Global Thermohaline Circulation is Collapsing"

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/05/1281907/-The-Antarctic-Half-of-the-Global-Thermohaline-Circulation-is-Collapsing

"The largest source of Antarctic Bottom Water in the global thermohaline circulation (labelled W) has ceased production.

...this study probably underestimates the amount of fresh water around Antarctica and its effects on Antarctic Bottom Water (ABW) formation...

Global political policies are not keeping up with the rate of change and our models have, to date, underestimated the rate of change. We are witnessing a total failure of global leadership to deal with changes we caused that are spiraling out of control."

Peter Ward on the consequences of this development: "When [the global ocean current conveyor belt] stops, we lose oxygen at the bottom, and we start the process toward mass extinction."

http://climatestate.com/2014/03/05/the-antarctic-half-of-the-global-thermohaline-circulation-is-collapsing/

Moderator Response:

[JH] Thank you for providing the links to additional articles. The findings of this new study have attracted quite a bit of coverage.

PS - I activated your second link.

Andy Skuce at 09:12 AM on 6 March 2014

The Editor-in-Chief of Science Magazine is wrong to endorse Keystone XL

Don9000, the same problem with losing a long comment just happened to me. I think there is a time-out problem. Luckily, I kept a copy.

Thanks for a thoughtful comment.

You say: My basic problem with the way some--including you and Hansen--are laying out the debate is that your approach creates an argument against the XL Pipeline based on the Either-Or fallacy: Either we stop the XL Pipeline from being built, Or it is game over for the planet.

I do not believe in the "game over" framing and I have critcized James Hansen for exaggerating the potential of the oil sands to change the climate. Please read my post Alberta’s bitumen sands: “negligible” climate effects, or the “biggest carbon bomb on the planet”? I wrote:

James Hansen, in a Huffington Post article, cites the IPCC AR4 WGIII report (page 268), which says that Canada’s bitumen resources represent at least 400Gt of “stored carbon” (the reference for this number is not clear). This implies an in-place mass some 68% higher than the ERCB’s in-place estimate and more than nine times the ERCB ultimate recoverable potential resource. The WGIII report states that 310Gbbl (~41GtC) of the bitumen resources are recoverable, a figure close to that of the latest ERCB number of 315Gbbl.

I also point out that Alberta's coal resource contains more carbon than its bitumen resource. I don't downplay the overwhelming relative importance of coal.

Here is a figure from that post where I compared the contribution of aggressive oil sands development with extrapolations of current consumption of other fossil fuels to the end of the century.

Quite clearly, my message is that bitumen exploitation is a step in the wrong direction, but it is clearly not the main cause of the climate problem, either now or in the future. And no, I will not give up hope if any more fossil fuel infrastructure is built.

Don9000 said : That is why I believe Skeptical Science needs to seriously consider widening this front in the war. I don't see anywhere near enough thoughtful analysis here or elsewhere regarding how carbon taxes can work.

I agree, we should do more of this and we will. However, we have already made some effort in this direction. I have written two pieces;

BC’s revenue-neutral carbon tax experiment, four years on: It’s working

Update on BC’s Effective and Popular Carbon Tax

and Dana Nuccitelli has written about carbon pricing and carbon taxes both here and in The Guardian:

Citizens Climate Lobby - Pushing for a US Carbon Fee and Dividend

True Cost of Coal Power - Muller, Mendelsohn, and Nordhaus

Can a carbon tax work without hurting the economy? Ask British Columbia

Citizens Climate Lobby pushes for a carbon tax and dividend

I think that a global carbon tax is the most important single step towards mitigating the climate crisis. It likely won't be enough, we will need additional regulations, government investment in R&D and infrastructure and a cultural change in our attitudes to emissions of long-lived greenhouse gases. And some luck with climate sensitivity, carbon cycle feedbacks and new technologies.

I agree, there is a risk that if the pipeline is not approved, some people may think that the climate problem is then solved. But many people already seem to think that buying a hybrid car or installing energy-efficient lightbulbs is sufficient. We will have to do our best to remind people that one or two small steps are not enough. The solution involves transforming the economy.

I don't claim to understand the mentality of the Republican Party, but I don't think that approving the pipeline will really make them more open to the idea of compromise on carbon pricing. It is an article of faith among most of those people that climate change is not a serious threat or is even a hoax perpetrated by extremists. As Roy Spencer recently wrote:

I’m now going to start calling these people “global warming Nazis”.
The pseudo-scientific ramblings by their leaders have falsely warned of mass starvation, ecological collapse, agricultural collapse, overpopulation…all so that the masses would support their radical policies. Policies that would not voluntarily be supported by a majority of freedom-loving people.
They are just as guilty as the person who cries “fire!” in a crowded theater when no fire exists. Except they threaten the lives of millions of people in the process.

I doubt that Spencer would interpret the approval of Keystone XL as a sign of reconciliation or as a good moment to start talking seriously about a global carbon tax. Perhaps he is not typical of people on the US right, I don't know, I am not an American.

The main reason that I am motivated to lobby against new pipelines is because this may have some effect. Yes, the effect will be small, yes it may be fleeting and only partially effective, but it is possible. In contrast, making progess on effective national-level carbon pricing policies in N America is still a few election cycles away. progress on a global carbon tax may be a generation of more away. I wish it were not so and I have vowed never to vote for any party that is not committed to introducing a carbon tax of some kind.

As David Roberts put it on Twitter, asking activists to butt out of the pipeline issue and focus exclusively on carbon pricing is to demand that they “drop achievable campaign, switch to something impossible”.

Moderator Response:

[RH] Modified image width.

grindupBaker at 09:01 AM on 6 March 2014

A Glimpse at Our Possible Future Climate, Best to Worst Case Scenarios

PhilMorris #25, Tristan #26. Yep, the numbers are vital because they separate this sensible debate from the barrage of irrelevancies by some "skeptical" types. 900 ZettaJoules to melt 3 million km^3 of ice on Greenland. It's, what, ~300 ZJ added over the last many decades (25 ZJ in 2013) but of course hardly any of it will get to the Greenland ice. So it's a slower process than a few decades but it will be accelerating for sure. 5,600 ZettaJoules to heat oceans 1 Celsius but then they only heated 3.5C during the entire 10,000 year warm up from the "ice age". It's my understanding that Greenland ice would not slide into the ocean, so it requires air-warming or rain-warming, but some large West Antarctic glaciers might do that if their sea ice buttresses get eaten away. PhilMorris might want to review those aspects if time permits. Longer than a few decades I would think.

Don9000 at 07:20 AM on 6 March 2014

The Editor-in-Chief of Science Magazine is wrong to endorse Keystone XL

Andy,

I'm in basic agreement with Mike@1 and David@3 on this. I too tried to post comment yesterday pointing out that a carbon tax is the key. Somehow, when I hit submit, it disappeared into the planetary ether.

My basic problem with the way some--including you and Hansen--are laying out the debate is that your approach creates an argument against the XL Pipeline based on the Either-Or fallacy: Either we stop the XL Pipeline from being built, Or it is game over for the planet.

I see now that you've at least conceded that you didn't make a strong enough case for a carbon tax, and I think I will begin with it. Here is what you say:

"I agree that carbon pricing is the best solution, however it is off the table, politically speaking, in the US and Canada. Using KXL approval as a bribe to get the approval of the Republican Party or Canada's Conservatives for carbon pricing does not seem feasible to me. I would love to be persuaded that I am wrong on this."

In fact, I would argue that a carbon tax, or, if you prefer, "carbon pricing" is not just the best solution, it is really the only holistic solution. Stopping the XL Pipeline is not a solution. It would merely be a kind of battlefield victory ion a much longer war, and I suspect winning this particular battle could well turn out to be a devastatingly pyrrhic victory, most obviously since stopping the pipeline would absolutely not guarantee the bitumen remained locked in the oil sands, but more insidiously because the semblance of a great victory would arguably both enrage the pro-carbon types and at the same time appease many regular Americans who don't really have a very good grasp of the scale of the problem. To me, this is the essential political calculus we have to make.

Look at it this way: By arguing that building the pipeline would be a complete disaster, or a game-over moment, or whatever hyperbolic statement you like, that argument is going to look to many average Americans who lack a strong grasp of the subject like an argument that says stopping the pipeline equates to victory over climate change.

Certainly, you can bet the oil, gas, and coal lobby would spin it that way to gain another few years to delay and obfuscate.

So, if we do stop the pipeline, where would we be? I think I can tell you: We would be forced into the position of saying, "Well, stopping the pipeline is great, and an important first step, but we have a lot more to do before we can say we've won the war."

How well do you think that argument will fly with Republicans? How well will it fly with regular Americans, who will probably be thinking that the defeat of the pipeline means they can relax?

I'll tell you how I think it will fly: it will crash. It will crash, because we will still have to come back and argue that a carbon tax is needed to really solve the problem, and the GOP will be incensed and claim they've given us everything we asked for, and now we are asking for more, and many regular Americans will agree with them.

My advice to you, if you wish to be convinced that I am right about this and your approach is wrong, is to put yourself in the shoes of the deniers and the skeptics and the general and generally ignorant public and play through in your mind how a rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline would appear to them. Don't think about how a defeat of the pipeline would appear to you: You are not Them. Alternatively, imagine how you would react if the pipeline were approved. Would you really give up at that point? If you would, then I guess you really do believe in the Either-Or fallacy, but if not ... Just think it all the way through.

Regarding your belief that a carbon tax or carbon pricing is off the table in the US and Canada at the present time, I say, "all the more reason Skeptical Science should be pushing it as the necessary first step to get carbon emissions under control." A comprehensive carbon tax will have to show up on the table soon, and will have to be put into effect, before we really are on our collective way to averting disaster. That is why I believe Skeptical Science needs to seriously consider widening this front in the war. I don't see anywhere near enough thoughtful analysis here or elsewhere regarding how carbon taxes can work.

For example, I believe that a global effort to combat global warming is so crucial that if the US enacted a carbon tax that impacted its fossil fuels and manufactured goods prices, it would have a right and in fact a duty to see to it that countries and international companies that don't take similar steps should not be allowed to export their products into the US without being charged a tax. I don't know enough about international trade law to speak on this idea with any authority, but it is clear to me that without the ability to level the playing field in this way, national carbon taxes would be a recipe for cheating on a massive scale.

So, where are we? Well, without a comprehensive approach--which a well-designed carbon tax is a necessary part of--all we are really doing is putting costly bandages on flesh wounds. It may make us feel better to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline in such a world, but stopping the pipeline would in effect exhaust our bank account of public willingness to act where action is much more effective for some time to come.

Rob Honeycutt at 07:17 AM on 6 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

William... You can find the "link" tool on the second tab, titled "Insert", above the comments box. You can use the tools there to post images and to hot link text.

william5331 at 04:49 AM on 6 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

The more we hammer at these ostriches, the more they push back. Perhaps we should tell them to forget climate change.

Forget climate change

Moderator Response:

[PS] Fixed link. (Since you comment here regularly, please learn how to embed links properly. Thank you).

PluviAL at 03:10 AM on 6 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

Excellent and concise messages: The arguments against the message are selfish and small. The critics argue that since "I", the only and most important, may not see the results of making a livable world for posterity, then investing effort in mitigating the potential catastrophe is not worth the effort. This is besides the obvious absurdity of pretending that there is no problem when all indications increasingly demonstrate the potential.

Albatross at 02:19 AM on 6 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

Andy @27, that is a great analogy!

Andy Skuce at 02:10 AM on 6 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

I think a better analogy than buying house insurance is to replace all the wiring in your home. This would mitigate the risk of a house-fire rather than just compensate you for losing your home.

Of course skeptics might object that the house might catch fire anyway from another cause and, since the old wiring has worked well for sixty years, why go to all the expense? Plus, all those intrusive government electrical safety codes are a blow to personal freedom. And how about the poor?

Albatross at 01:32 AM on 6 March 2014

Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr

Hi Tom C.,

That was a very impressive and thorough analysis. You understand the "game" that Pielke junior likes to play very well.

Also, I too have caught Pielke junior misrepresenting the IPCC SREX by omitting key sentences from the text that do not fit with his biased narrative.

CBDunkerson at 23:18 PM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

Russ R wrote: "Uncertainty Mutual sells a homeowner's policy, except they don't tell you the cost of your premiums in advance,"

Actually, there have been a number of studies on the costs of mitigating global warming. They all show that, like life and health insurance, the longer you wait the greater the risks and the higher the costs.

"the deductible is ambiguous, and they can't guarantee that your losses will actually be covered."

The analogy breaks down here as paying to mitigate the impacts of global warming will not give you money to cover the costs of the impacts which have already been unleashed. It isn't so much 'health insurance' as switching to a healthy diet and exercise... your health will be better, but any damage already done does not miraculously go away.

"Oh, and you don't have the option of cancelling your policy."

Really? Once we start a carbon tax or cap and trade or funding for renewable energy research we can never stop? How strange then that these things already have been stopped in various countries. Arguments hold more weight when they are not demonstrably false.

Dikran Marsupial at 23:03 PM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

RussR pushing an analogy beyond the point needed to explain the important concept is a well known rhetorcial technique used to evade the point being made. It is sad that this sort of behaviour is so prevelant in discussions of climate.

Mitigating against climate change has some similarities to buying insurance, in that uncertainty does not warrant inaction, but it is also different in someways. This is not a complicated message conveyed by the cartoon, and most people will be able see the similarities without fixating on the differences in order to ignore the central message.

Russ R. at 22:56 PM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

"There's a small chance my house might burn down."

"Uncertainty Mutual sells a homeowner's policy, except they don't tell you the cost of your premiums in advance, the deductible is ambiguous, and they can't guarantee that your losses will actually be covered. Oh, and you don't have the option of cancelling your policy."

"I can't say buying their insurance is worth it."

Dikran Marsupial at 21:30 PM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

The "do nothing approach" cannot be sold as insurance. The reason that insurance works is that the chance of all of the policyholders making a claim in the same year is vanishingly small. Thus the insurance company only need to have funds to meet the claims made by the appropriate proportion of the policyholders. In the climate change scenario on the other hand, it is likely that a very large proportion of "policyholders" will make a claim, so even with economic growth, we still won't be able to meet the costs. There is no point in taking out an insurance policy with a company unless there is good reason to think they will have the resources to meet your claim, should it be made. In this case, there isn't.

I agree that mitigation isn't exactly like insurance (analagies are never exactly representative of the true situation, the idea is to convey similar concepts to help explain the issue).

anthropocene at 21:18 PM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

Lets be clear here. Taking action to reduce the extent of climate change produced by human activity is mitigation not insurance. The advocates of the do nothing approach could quite easily sell that policy as an insurance strategy: concentrate on as much economic growth as possible now so that in the future we are rich enough to overcome all of the issues arising from climate change. This would mean that the public have a choice between two 'insurance' options, each with seemingly equivalent claims to be right.

For a long time, I've thought that the way to move forward on the mitigation path is to sell insurance against the (supposed) costs of mitigation being a waste of money. That is, people can buy insurance that pays out a lump sum if it turns out that (man-made) climate change predictions turn out not to be correct. These policies would have to pay out in a relatively short time say, 2050. So what measures could be used to determine if the insurance should pay out or not? I propose that they should cover the following:

1) That temperature has increased by more than a stated amount

2) A test that emission of CO2 from human activity has contributed to the majority of that temperature increase.

3) A test that the increase in temperature (either directly or by change in climate) has caused economic cost above a certain level. This could be costs on a global level and all economic costs or a single region or area of economic activity which is then extrapolated to a global scale.

If nothing else, the exercise of coming up with examples for the three tests above will be a productive one (for people from both sides of the debate).

Dikran Marsupial at 20:17 PM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

Harry Twinotter - Prof. Curry doesn't understand the fundamental principles of risk management if she thinks that uncertainty is a justification for taking no action. The principle of minimum risk decision making says that you compute a weighted sum (more accurately an integral) over all possible outcomes weighted by their probability of ocurrence and pick the strategy with the lowest expected risk. If there is high uncertainty, this integral is likely to be dominated by outcomes in the tails of the distribution (i.e. unlikely but severe impact). The possibility of those events justify action to mitigate them.

On the other hand, if there were less uncertainty, and we could rule out the possibility of these "unlikely but severe impact", we might then have a justification for doing nothing.

Uncertainty is not our friend.

Harry Twinotter at 19:00 PM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

John Cook,

taking Judith Curry's quote out of context, then introducing Risk Management cartoons like the above appears to be presenting a straw man argument against her. I think it is clear from the 2007 comment that Judith Curry does understand the "fundamental principles of risk management". I don't know about her "fellow contrarians" because you have not provided any evidence that they misunderstand risk management.

In Judith Curry's case I think the best thing would be to focus on why she feels the evidence for Global Warming is so uncertain.

Bernard J. at 17:25 PM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

Aside from the impacts of climate change that nearly all professional scientists agree will manifest, there are other reasons for action:

1) mitigation of the social upheaval that will follow the declining availability of fossil fuels,

2) mitigation of the social upheaval that will follow when geopolitical conflicts arise as a result of the declining availability of fossil fuels,

3) mitigation of the effects of losing the non-energy industrial feedstock benefits of fossil carbon,

4) mitigation of the polluting effects of the extraction and use of fossil carbon.

Only an insane person would advocate business as usual in buring fossil carbon, given the inevitable brick wall of consequences toward which humanity is rushing.

TonyW at 17:00 PM on 5 March 2014

The Editor-in-Chief of Science Magazine is wrong to endorse Keystone XL
Marcia McNutt's attempt to paint herself as a champion of reduced emissions is certainly pathetic. She explicitly ("I drive a Prius") acknowledges that she supports a society and civilisation that is ruining the life of future generations (and probably existing ones). I strongly suspect that most of her lifestyle choices negate the small things she thinks she's doing to contribute to a reasonable response the crisis of our time.

Glenn Tamblyn at 14:44 PM on 5 March 2014

Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr

And in the end Pielke's repetition of one sentence that conveyed what he wanted to say while including the counter point in a footnote is simply a case of Plausible Deniability. He can give one message, his preferred one, in the full expectation that most readers/listeners will only take in that fact (how many of the senators are actually likely to read every footnote in the written text; how many will actually read the written submission).

Then if someone calls him out on it as Holdren did he can splutter indignantly and say 'see, see I did say that as well!'

Perfect, textbook Plausible Deniability at work.

Tom Curtis at 13:26 PM on 5 March 2014

Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr

Further to my post above, here are Pielke Jr's tweets in response to

"Roger Pielke Jr. ‏@RogerPielkeJr Feb 14
1/3 John Holdren vs. IPCC on drought
Roger Pielke Jr. ‏@RogerPielkeJr Feb 14
2/3 Holdren: "we are seeing droughts in drought-prone regions becoming more frequent, more severe and longer" http://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/obama-climate-fund-103524.html#ixzz2tIoTzL8v …
Roger Pielke Jr. ‏@RogerPielkeJr Feb 14
3/3 IPCC 2013: "not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought"
Roger Pielke Jr. ‏@RogerPielkeJr Feb 14
IPCC on drought "low-confidence" vs. Holdren "one of the better-understood dimensions" Paging IPCC authors, climate scis .... anyone care?
Roger Pielke Jr. ‏@RogerPielkeJr Feb 14
US Govt report "droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent and cover a smaller portion of the US over the last century"
Roger Pielke Jr. ‏@RogerPielkeJr Feb 14
Nature paper 2012 "Little change in global drought over the past 60 years" http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7424/full/nature11575.html …
Roger Pielke Jr. ‏@RogerPielkeJr Feb 14
Holdren: "global climate change is increasing the intensity and the frequency and the life of drought" http://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/obama-climate-fund-103524.html …
Roger Pielke Jr. ‏@RogerPielkeJr Feb 14
If climate scientists want more credibility they are going to have to look at wrong things said by their political friends, not just enemies
Roger Pielke Jr. ‏@RogerPielkeJr Feb 14
OK, enough on the drought nonsense, did you hear about those fancy skate suits? http://leastthing.blogspot.com/2014/02/its-drag-those-usa-skating-suits.html …
Roger Pielke Jr. ‏@RogerPielkeJr Feb 14
@andersbolling That's right, thanks. The zombies will always be with us. But it is brazen for zombie science to show up in the White House!"

It should be noted that these are in response to Holdren's comments on Feb 14th to the press, not his testimony before Congress. Consequently, the comments Pielke addresses have not made any reference to Pielke. Further, they explicitly address the issue of drought in the SW of the US, and specifically California. Despite this, Pielke's favourite sentence from the CCSP (2008) pops up yet again, with no reference to the following sentence which explicitly addresses the region Holdren was referring to.

Further, he quotes the IPCC on global trends, but the IPCC SREX says regarding trends:

"Global-scale trends in a specific extreme may be either more reliable (e.g., for temperature extremes) or less reliable (e.g., for droughts) than some regional-scale trends, depending on the geographical uniformity of the trends in the specific extreme."

So though he puts himself forward as championing the IPCC position, he ignores the IPCC's statements of the relative importance of global vs regional trends when it comes to understanding drought.

Tom Curtis at 11:47 AM on 5 March 2014

Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr

I note with surprise that the link to Pielke's response to this article that had been provided by Russ R has been deleted. Here it is again.

Pielke makes the issue all about him. He makes the first, and foremost issue the fact that Holdren, under questioning in his testimony before Congress says, "The first few people you quoted [ie, Spencer and Pielke Jr] are not representative of the mainstream scientific opinion on this point". In his response, Pielke writes:
"To accuse an academic of holding views that lie outside the scientific mainstream is the sort of delegitimizing talk that is of course common on blogs in the climate wars. But it is rare for political appointee in any capacity -- the president's science advisor no less -- to accuse an individual academic of holding views are are not simply wrong, but in fact scientifically illegitimate. Very strong stuff."

This claim is, however, complete nonsense. To be outside the mainstream is simply to hold a distinctly minority view. All sorts of scientists have held distinctly minority views in the past, including Einstein with respect to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Nobody thinks that Einstein was a worse scientist for that. Others who have held views distinctly outside the mainstream include Darwin, Wegener, and Hansen (who is outside the mainstream on the potential rate of future sea level rise, and on the possibility of runaway global warming). I certainly do not think less of any of those scientists for daring to be different. What matters is not whether or not you agree or disagree with the mainstream, but how you go about doing so.

In fact, Pielke, if taken seriously has just condemned Spencer, Christie, Singer, Salby, Pielke Snr, and so on (in a distressingly long list) who are definitely outside the mainstream on climate science "...of holding views are are not simply wrong, but in fact scientifically illegitimate". In some cases, I would agree with that assessment, but that is based on how they defend their views, not on the nature of the views themselves. Inconstrast, according to Pielke, having a distinctly minority opinion in science means your views are "wrong" and "scientifically illegitimate". As I said, complete nonsense.
Pielke's own words, however, contrast with Pielke's extreme sensitivity to Holdren's comments. In particular, in response to Holdren's original testimony, Pielke tweeted:

"That's right, thanks. The zombies will always be with us. But it is brazen for zombie science to show up in the White House!"

I am not sure what is meant by "zombie science", but the term is clearly not meant to be flattering. It would appear in fact to be an attempt at "...the sort of delegitimizing talk that is of course common on blogs in the climate wars" (to quote Pielke). As seems often to be the case, Pielke appears to be hypocritical on this point. He is happy to do to others what he will not tolerate the slightest appearance of others doing to him.

Pielke also spends some time defending the claim that he left out vital information on the basis that he included it in a footnote. That is an odd defense. What he is charged with is not agreeing that there has been a trend towards droughts in the South West of the US. The evidence is that when he quoted CCSP report, he left out the second sentence which explicitly discusses situation in the SW US (see OP).

On this issue, I am first going to make a very technical point. Holdren says:

"[Any] reference to the CCSP 2008 report in this context should include not just the sentence highlighted in Dr. Pielke’s testimony but also the sentence that follows immediately in the relevant passage from that document and which relates specifically to the American West."

The point here is that he did not say (contrary to Pielke) that Pielke did not include the crucial sentence in the report. He said that any reference should include both. Crucially, a reference is an individual act of refering to some source. If you have a ten page report, and refer to Bloggs et al (1880) in the first page, and again on the tenth, that is two seperate references to Bloggs et al. In like maner, if you refer to Bloggs et al in the text, and then in a footnote, that is two seperate references to Bloggs et .

The reason it is two seperate references is that, in the text you will have made some comment on the quote or reference. You will have indicated agreement, disagreement, or that it only expresses the opinion of Bloggs et al, etc. These comments do not apply the quotation or reference in the footnote. That is a crucial point.

In his published testimony (later quoted by Senator Sessions), Pielke wrote:

"Drought
What the IPCC SREX (2012) says:
“There is medium confidence that since the 1950s some regions of the world have experienced a trend to more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America and northwestern Australia.”
For the US the CCSP (2008)20 says: “droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.”21
What the data says:
8. Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.”"
(Emphasis in original)

Earlier, in his "take home points", he had written:

'Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.”'

He liked that clause so much that he repeated it three times, once in bold. That is three seperate references to the same sentence in CCSP (2008). In the final one, he prefaces the quote by saying that it is "What the data says". There can be no doubt in anybodies mind that Pielke not only agreed with this claim, but thought it a crucial claim that needed to be hammered home.

In constrast, the immediately following sentence is confined to a single footnote. The footnote reads:

'CCSP (2008) notes that “the main exception is the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where increased temperature has led to rising drought trends.”'

So, whereas we are told by Pielke that the lack of an overall US trend is a "take home point", and "What the data says"; it is merely footnoted that the CCSP notes the trends in the Southwest of the US. I should not need to mention that merely noting that somebody says something does not also note your agreement. It is not legitimate to infer Pielke's agreement with the CCSP from his footnote.

More importantly, it was not possible from Pielke's footnote to determine the relative importance accorded by the CCSP to the two sentences quoted by Pielke. Orphaning the second sentence in a footnote deprives it of context, underplaying it. More crucially, it deprives the preceding sentence of context, over emphasising it. As though that was not enough, Pielke then hammered the point three times.

From this, it is clear that Pielke did not include the second sentence in any reference to the first, as suggested by Holdren. On the contrary, he referenced the first sentence three times, without including the second sentence - but then included a fourth reference to the CCSP (2008), ie, on to the second sentence in a footnote. As a result, he massively distorted the relative importance of the two sentences in the CCSP, to the point that his practise represents blatant quotation out of context. As a further result, it was not possible from his testimony to determine that he even agreed with the second sentence, and has not been possible until his response to Holdren.

This post is long enough as is, so I will not discuss the further points at issue between Holdren and Pielke, which SFAICT, depend largely on Pielke misinterpreting Holdren, in part by ignoring the fact that Holdren's article was not just a response to Pielke, but primarilly a response to Senator Sessions.

Moderator Response:

[RH] Russ' post was deleted based on the "no link only posts" rule. No problems with citing Pielke's link in the context of some discussion.

Bert from Eltham at 10:16 AM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

In Australia we have a Government that is in total denial of the science that proves AGW.

I can see the hypocrisy in their eyes as they placate drought affected farmers with yet another inadequate support plan. They know that we know that they know that it is all a sham.

This IS the new normal. And yet they ignore the science and act as if everything was the OLD normal.

Do not judge by what they say. Judge by what they do! Bert

sustainable future at 09:19 AM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

Great stuff. you could do a simialr cartoon for the contrarian guide to science. Age of the universe, evolution, continental drift, etc - there are probably a small percentage of people with some science training who are creationsist (I worked with a geneticist once who did not accept evolution), and this could be used to argue there wasn't consensus.

KR at 08:41 AM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

I would agree with Climate Bobs comment - the few and the loud make up the majority of pseudoskeptics. Reddit recently starting blocking deniers on their climate threads, and moderator Nathan Allen said that:

...We discovered that the disruptive faction that bombarded climate change posts was actually substantially smaller than it had seemed. Just a small handful of people ran all of the most offensive accounts. What looked like a substantial group of objective skeptics to the outside observer was actually just a few bitter and biased posters with more opinions then evidence...

More opinions than evidence, more time than apparent sense. It doesn't take a lot of people to generate obfuscating noise.

Albatross at 08:13 AM on 5 March 2014

Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr

Pielke junior's rhetoric really does appeal to the anti-science crowd and right-wing ideologues out there. Here are some exmaples of the sort of comments Pielke junior permitted on his blog post about Holdren:

"Holdren has been a nutcase since the 1970s, when he was promoting a scientifically lunatic theory of 'thermal pollution'..."

"If John Holdren was someone you had just met socially, and he expressed the views he has held for the past thirty years, you would immediatly conclude that he is a lunatic. "

Nice crowd ;) Not only did Pielke let those comments stand, but he did not even challenge them. Tacit agreement then?

Dennis at 07:27 AM on 5 March 2014

A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 3

I'm a professional database developer/administrator and this is major reason why I have always used stored procedures to build queries. I also prefer to make sure that the public user accounts can only reference SQL views based on the tables and not the tables themselves (and one never creates a view with private data in it). Finally, any and every free text field in a stored procedure is searched before the query is contructed, and if the search returns any positives for SQL keywords (e.g. SELECT, INSERT, UNION) in a position where they could construct a query, I exit the procedure and have the system email me an alert with the IP address where the text originated from. It's a lot of energy, but it works!

BaerbelW at 07:26 AM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

Greg Craven - aka wonderingmind42 - put together a couple of videos about risk management and how it pertains to climate science for his "How it all ends" Youtube video series. They are well worth watching (again).

Doug Bostrom at 06:58 AM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

Strictly against site policy to block quote but Knaugle's remark bears repeating:

A biology teacher once pointed out that it may take, say, 300 generations of bacteria to overwhelm a petri dish and then collapse. Yet by the 299th generation, the dish may only be half full. When crises come, they often come harder and faster than can be handled.

Emphasis mine. Like Knaugle I too think we fail to appreciate how everything can appear to be normal until we collide with the wall of system limits. All too often this is not an approach but an impact.

Pete Wirfs at 06:42 AM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

Climate Bob's observations intrigue me. I've always felt that a contributing factor to the different proportions on the internet is that people who feel they understand the science and believe what the majority of the scientists are telling us don't see any reason to 'debate' the issue, so they don't waste their time! In my local newspaper blogs the pattern seems to be just a few deniers that TALK LOUDLY AND FREQUENTLY, while the general population will post "what planet are you coming from?" types of responses and move on...

Climate Bob at 05:53 AM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

I give talks on climate change and find that deniers make up only 1 or 2% of the audiance who are mostly older white male business men. When I go on the internet the proportion goes up tp 50% and they are simply repeating a small number of tired old attitudes which have no basis in fact. From this pattern I deduce that the internet deniers are nearly all paid proffesionals. There are not that many climate change sites so it would be easy to swamp them with a relatively small number of people. But how many? I am not a mathmatician but it should not be hard to calculate how many there are bu the relative proportion of deniers compaered to the number of people on the site, The Huffington Post has a big readership and the proportion is relatively low while the Gaurdian gets ahigher proportion.

Could somebody do a calculation and work out how many there are? I think it would be somewhere between 50 and 100.

As an interesting sideline The Daily Caller has 98% deniers which shows that they have almost no natural readership at all and the journalists have to fill the comments section to make it look as though they have an active readership.

william5331 at 05:39 AM on 5 March 2014

The Editor-in-Chief of Science Magazine is wrong to endorse Keystone XL

Marcie McNutt. Talk about nominative determinism. I can't count the number of people I know that are named Fisser, Fisher, Pike and so forth who are in fisheries research. Must be something in it.

Albatross at 05:21 AM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

John Cook and Dana highlight a very salient and important tactic that is being used by dismissives and obstructionists like Curry.

Think about it, if Curry truly believed what she tells he fellow obstructionists, then she would not have house insurance, would not wear her seatbelt, would not wear a life jacket in a boat and would smoke a pack a day. So Curry's contrived rhetoric is really just a ruse to misinform and confuse and feed fodder to radicals and obstructionists.

If Curry truly believed her own words, if she were sincere in her public statements and courageous, she would say what she really believes, which is for the USA and others to not take meaningful action to reduce our GHG emisssions. Instead we are left with her word salad.

Curry should also know that in reality uncertainty cuts both ways, yet she has foolishly convinced herself that uncertainty acts only in the direction of least risk and impacts.

localis at 05:15 AM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

Even the most ardent ACW denier would still benefit from trying to use fossil fuel more efficiently so "doing nothing" might be seen as doubly foolish.

knaugle at 04:36 AM on 5 March 2014

Cartoon: the climate contrarian guide to managing risk

My question to Dr. Curry would be:
At what point would you conclude something needs to be done?
The point is that when it is utterly obvious we are in trouble, isn't that a bit late? Yet I have little doubt that is exactly the path that will be taken because it is a consistent horizon effect. That is you push the bad news far enough into the future that it no longer seems a problem. Unfortunately, the problem you can't see just keeps getting bigger and bigger 5 miles down the road until it absolutely can't be ignored, and likely can no longer be addressed.

Another similar issue is population. A biology teacher once pointed out that it may take, say, 300 generations of bacteria to overwhelm a petri dish and then collapse. Yet by the 299th generation, the dish may only be half full. When crises come, they often come harder and faster than can be handled. But not to worry, this whole AGW climate change thing is a hoax, right?!

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