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Lou Grinzo at 12:11 PM on 21 February 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
Given the forces we've set in motion -- past and current emissions, long atmpspheric lifetime of CO2 (the ultimate "inconvenient truth", IMO), unleashing even some of the 1.7 trillion tons of permafrost carbon (not to mention the methane hydrates), etc. -- it's clear that once we start seeing a Blue Arctic every summer, it will be a "permanent" fixture, with the onset and re-freeze dates being theonly thing worth tracking. (Plus CO2 and CH4 emissions from the permafrost, Arctic ocean temps, Greenland melt, ...)
As for what constitutes a Blue Arctic, we could argue endlessly about that, with people preferring any one of numerous plausible, defensible alternatives; I prefer to go with the famous US Supreme Court Justice comment about obsenity: I'll know it when I see it. -
mandas at 12:11 PM on 21 February 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
To make a proper prediction, you would have to take into account the environmental conditions, which would be virtually impossible to predict.
But I would like to suggest that, statistically speaking, the curve is more likely to be asymptotic, and would 'level out' as it approaches zero, rather than declining to zero in 2034 as suggested in Cawley's graph.
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Tristan at 11:51 AM on 21 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
Charney and Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) are the same thing, and it requires many centuries to fully realise.
Earth System Sensitivity is the whole hog, including such long term feedbacks as albedo change from ice sheet loss. That requires milennia.
TCR should be the focus, the effects are more immediate (~70 year forecast) and the estimates more precise (you don't have to deal with certain complex dynamics).
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Adam H at 11:18 AM on 21 February 2013Geologic Time and Climate Change Science
Re 12
In NH, Holocene interglacial maximum received LESS summer insolation than Eemian interglacial maximum. New paper in Nature (NEEM (Dahl-Jensen et a) 2013) shows Greenland survived this, allbeit shedding half its mass. This means that because the Eemian sea level data are hard to ignore, the WAIS likely disintegrated (at least partially).
Not sure what the future has in store for WAIS, mainly because no one can know, but the science is progressing as we speak (and it is very interesting...)
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Cara Hernandez at 10:56 AM on 21 February 2013There is no such thing as climate change denial
James Taylor has followed up on his dishonest editorial of last week with a second editorial based on misrepresenting the very same study. The latest editorial is entitled "As The Consensus Among Scientists Crumbles, Global Warming Alarmists Attack Their Integrity" and can be found here.
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Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
adrian smits - The 2-4.5 C Charney climate sensitivity (mid-term; 50-100 years) includes feedbacks such as water vapor, clouds, climate driven aerosols, sea ice, and snow cover. See Hansen et al 2007 for a reasonable discussion of climate sensitivity and various feedbacks.
Of these feedbacks, the largest is water vapor increases driven by temperature, roughy doubling the temperature change from long lived GHGs alone. Aerosols (based on ice core evidence) decrease with warming, as (obviously) do sea ice and snow cover. Cloud feedback represents a fairly uncertain, but small, contribution to feedbacks, based on the evidence so far.
And, perhaps more importantly, we have far more evidence (and lines of evidence) supporting total climate sensitivity than we do for some of the components of feedback. If clouds turn out to supply less positive feedback, then perhaps aerosols provide more? Whatever the uncertainties about the ratios of the components, the strongest evidence is for the sum of feedbacks and total climate sensitivity - transient, Charney, and equilibrium.
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L. Hamilton at 10:38 AM on 21 February 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
Back in October, I posted at Neven's a set of predictions for extent, area and volume based simply on Gompertz curve extrapolation. The same method worked reasonably well over the previous 2 years, and expecially so for volume. I view this as a rough null hypothesis for comparison with more elaborate physical models.
PIOMAS mean Sep 2013 volume: 3,100 km^3
NSIDC mean Sep 2013 extent: 3.8 million km^2
CT 1-day 2013 minimum area: 2.3 million km^2
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adrian smits at 10:16 AM on 21 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
If the actual increase in temperature from a doubling of c02 is one degree celcious without feedbacks and one of the major contributers to additional warming was supposed to be a large positive feedback from clouds. Should not that mean that if clouds only represent a small positive feedback the estimate of additional warming should be adjusted downwards?
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Citizen 7 at 08:27 AM on 21 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
I've spent quite a bit of time today studying the two papers in Nature Climate Change on contrail cirrus that Sphaerica so kindly provided as references, and I want to say I really appreciate the insight into how this phenomenon is being discussed by atmospheric scientists. I am also rather intrigued by the way people who inquire about the phenomenon are sometimes treated, even on this list--like they have become misled by an idea that has cooties on it and needs to be batted away, "debunked," in the same way the very notion of global warming is "debunked" by the climate change denialists. No, DSL, books like Merchants of Doubt are not being ignored; various kinds of academics are starting to analyze the process. Denial is a very real psychological/social phenomenon that results when important strands in one's--and one's social group's--belief bubble are being challenged. And of course the "belief bubble" that we all inhabit, which takes for granted assumptions like the notion that our human enterprise must continue to "grow" ad infinitum, is challenged by the discovery that if we keep doing what we're doing, only more and more of it, we're going to shove the planetary system into a new and inhospitable state--so of course there's a lot of implicit climate change denial in the fact that we all keep marching in lock step, even if only certain well-funded think tanks are generating the explicit kind of denial that you're trying to challenge on this website.
But there are multiple other layers of denial as well, "new rules" and new realities that we don't want to face--climate change almost seems to be one of the easier ones, especially since it's getting to be more and more "in our faces" all the time, but we're going to have to penetrate all of them eventually.
I gather from the papers in Nature Climate Change several things about what is being called "aviation-induced cloudiness," which apparently can result from two different mechanisms, the fanning out of ice crystals from aircraft contrails into high, cirrus-like clouds, and also aerosols of soot and other particulates emitted by aircraft that could serve as nuclei for ice crystals. Modeling the effects of contrail formation and spread demonstrated that spreading "contrail cirrus" clouds increase radiative forcing by a considerable amount--a net globally of 37.5 mW per square meter, and up to 300 mW per sq m over the eastern U.S. and central Europe. Boucher goes on to say that "overall, and despite their short lifetime, contrails may have more radiative impact at any one time than all of the aviation-emitted carbon dioxide that has accumulated in the atmosphere since the beginning of commercial aviation." That sounds to me like a pretty significant statement, even if aviation is only responsible for "an estimated 2-14% of anthropogenic climate forcing." It sounds, in fact, like an important item to throw in the mix if you come across people concerned about what they're seeing in the sky, to get them concerned about climate change, instead of making fun of them.
Boucher notes that "both ground- and satellite-based cloud observations have suggested a small but noticeable increase in regions of high air-traffic density." And Burkhardt and Karcher specifically identify the southeastern U.S. is as having "coverage" by the young, linear contrails of up to 1%, the highest figure given for that kind of cloud. I happen to live in the southeastern portion of the U.S., and I know what I see in the sky now is qualitatively and quantitatively different from what I saw only a few years ago, when contrails might be seen sometimes but never 10, 12, 15 of them lining up from horizon ro horizon, or fanning out into herringbone patterns of cirrus to cover half the sky and more.
On the "chem trail debunking" website, old photos are being presented purporting to show that "it's always been like this"--that's crap, and I greatly resent this Orwellian attempt to rewrite history. There may be a few photos of such things appearing now and then, going way back--I did see short, transient contrails from time to time as far back as I can remember--but the kind of huge, dominating formations that I see now, no--that would have been a very occasional thing, if it ever occurred. I grew up in and around the "picture postcard" St. Pete beaches before there were condos lining every shoreline, and if there had been lots of contrails crisscrossing the skies they would have stood out like a sore thumb. In contrast, there are some mornings these days when I feel like I'm living in some kind of Stephen King novel--"under the dome" of "aviation-induced cloudiness," of whatever cause.
So to me, someone who with great emotion flat-out denies that there's anything different going on in the skies today, at least where I live, is engaging in something very like climate change denial. There's a certain belief bubble that will apparently be threatened if some new information is admitted. And that doesn't seem very scientific to me at all--rather, it's a clinging to the "old paradigm," as Thomas Kuhn describes, and reinforced by a kind of groupthink--you don't want to believe something, and the people you talk to don't want to believe it either, so you all reinforce each other's erroneous but deeply held beliefs--it works to keep thoughts of climate change tidily at bay, why not other discomfiting thoughts? The same kind of denial seems to mark the reluctance of the scientific community to weigh in on the physical events of 9/11--instead of "debunking" the truly incredible standard explanation and asking what happened to all that mass, there are gatekeepers like Michael Shermer working hard to "debunk" the questions that are raised. When we start finding the courage to deal with that whole ball of wax, maybe moving on to tackling climate change won't seem so hard to do.
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CBDunkerson at 07:52 AM on 21 February 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
Note that the 2012 maximum volume is barely higher than the 1979 minimum volume. Also that the August and October volume figures are just a hair higher than the September minimums... suggesting that if we hit 'zero' volume at some point in September it will likely only be a few years after that before we start seeing 'zero' volume for three months straight.
Note: I put scare quotes around 'zero' because there will always be some small amount of Arctic sea ice which is still attached to land or only recently broken off from land until Greenland completely melts out.
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Paul W at 07:35 AM on 21 February 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
Since we are most likely seeing the developement of increasing positive feedbacks, I expect that the deteriation in ice volume and extent will exceed the statistical estimates. My guess is 3M km2.
The other prediction is more weather extremes for the NH than last year.
I wish I could predict a colapse in public gulibility for contrarian double think but that does seem to be going strong with the majority being only "luke warmers".
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DSL at 07:32 AM on 21 February 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
As for regression to the mean, keep in mind that ASV minimum has exceeded the previous year exactly once in the last decade. I'm going with 2600 km3 in ASV, 3.9m km2 in extent, and 2.2m km2 in area. Thickness will spend at least 45 days under 1m average (26 days in 2012).
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ubrew12 at 06:43 AM on 21 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
Lomborg says: "Consider hurricanes [or droughts, fires, etc] ... If the aim is to reduce storm damage, then first focus on resilience... better building codes and better enforcement [and, presumeably, SECOND, or last, focus on prevention]". It sounds reasonable but prevention is needed TODAY to prevent DROWNING tomorrow, not just 'storm damage'. I think Lomborg's 'dirty little secret' is that prevention measures take 30-40 years to have any effect, thanks to the heat capacitance of the oceans. You can harden Miami all you want, but without prevention it's still going to float away. And the WINDOW whereby you prevent that fate is closing NOW.
Lomborg: "Instead of pouring money into subsidies and direct production... focus on ... research..." And how much CO2 does research prevent from entering the atmosphere again? Lomborg here seems not to understand how capitalism works. First you build the market and THEN the investors come (and hire the researchers, etc). For example, much of the cost innovation in Germany's solar program is in the supply chain. How does a researcher simulate THAT development in the lab? This call to put our faith in the 'X factor' of pure research is just a delay tactic, but in any case works against Lomborg as easily as for him. Why don't we stop burning fossil fuels until the 'X factor' invents ways to easily sequester CO2? Lets have our cake and eat it too! Of course, cap n trade or a carbon tax would be more consistent with capitalism, but Obama's direct support for solar and wind is just an end run around a Congress that will never support those reasonable measures (despite the fact that Republicans invented them). What Lomborg is really saying is to put alternative energy behind closed gov't research doors, where it'll be 'out-of-sight/ out-of-mind'. He's saying this despite the fact that that is exactly where they've been for the last 40 years.
On Lomborg's website, a review of his book, 'Cool-It' says that he "argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and... a safe, fresh water supply". This is astonishing: the reason we haven't solved AIDS is because of those global warming nutcases. Now I understand those Chevron commercials: "We Agree! AIDS is going to lose!" Despite an overwhelming desire to launch into multiple lines of sarcasm, I'm going to treat this astonishing claim as serious. Seriously, then: Lomborg doesn't want his audience to know that the WINDOW for preventing the worst effects of global warming in the next half-century is closing NOW. THAT IS WHY there's such a rush on the subject of PREVENTION, among people who take it seriously. You snooze... and your grandchildren lose.
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michael sweet at 06:22 AM on 21 February 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
The weather last summer was not especially favorable for melt but a record was still set. What if the weather is more favorable for melt this year? I guess 3million km2 for sea ice extent. Hopefully Dr. Meier is right and the melt slows.
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Esop at 06:17 AM on 21 February 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
Funny how the deniers are now celebrating "recovery". Does that mean they feel that 2012 was as low as it would go, and 2013 and so on will have more extent , area and volume. Would be great to know. Also, if they could point out why they think that will be the case.
I feel pretty confident that when the 2012 record is broken (likely before 2015), the deniers will claim that they expected that, and it was due to so and so natural cause.
Thus, I would really like the deniers to make a prediction. Will 2013/14/15 see recovery or a new record and why/why not.
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Daniel Bailey at 06:01 AM on 21 February 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
Going with Maslowski (I've ridden that horse for 5 years now, why stop?), I'll go with 2750 km3 for 2013 expected September volume.
My only worry is that I'm being too conservative.
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dwr at 05:34 AM on 21 February 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
4.25m km2, i.e. above last year's minimum, but below the 2007 minimum.
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william5331 at 04:39 AM on 21 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
This article is a clear demonstration of the difference between the arguments of climate scientists and climate deniers. Here all the available evidence is presented before a conclusion is reached and the reader can go back to source and make his own evaluation. Climate deniers sound like preachers. Everything is clear and worked out and the conclusions are in no doubt. In itself, it doesn't proove that the climate scientists are correct but it sure gives one more confidence that they are on the right track (and that they will change their conclusions if contrary evidence is found). Some of us need certainty in our lives so much that we become religious and become climate change deniers. It is so much more comfortable than wrestling with the evidence but so much less satisfying. I wonder if the insane level of PC and lack of "hard" subjects in our schools is partially to blame. We no longer study euclidian geometry starting with SAS and ASA and building the whole structure from scratch. There are no longer any winners and loosers and competition is to the bottom instead of to the top. It's not cool to be the top student any more.
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dana1981 at 04:01 AM on 21 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
bjchip @7 - the original article is linked in the greenbox at the top of the post.
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Philippe Chantreau at 03:20 AM on 21 February 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
FYI Dikran, Tamino also just took a look at the Cyosat/Piomas comparison and has plotted the differences. Interestingly, contrarian delirium set aside, this winter shows a pretty low volume; last year, a similar low volume led to the staggering record we remember, so the likelihood of being closer to last year's value than to the mean may be significant.
Robinson's imagery is of superb quality but scary by the astounding loss it shows. We are now so close to zero in summer minimum that is hard to imagine we won't hit a September ice free Arctic before 2030.
Imagine the first team working on these data when satellite were launched in 1979. Now, some dude comes around and tells them: "From these data and others', you're going to see an 80% loss of ice volume over the next 30 years." No doubt they would have laughed. Indeed what phenomenon could possibly be powerful enough to cause what is best described as a geological scale event?
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Chris G at 03:01 AM on 21 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
Here is an analogy:
What would it have cost to, say, discourage increasing wheat production in west-central America in the years leading up to 1933?
What did the dust bowl cost America?
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Chris G at 02:35 AM on 21 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
Tom Curtis has it. There are those who fail to see that GDP is not independent of the ecology on which people depend. Trash the ecology, and GDP will be negatively impacted.
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Chris G at 02:30 AM on 21 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
I would not get hung up on using GDP.
Is it a perfect measure? No.
Are people living in a country with a GDP that equals $40,000 per person generally living more comfortable lives than people living in a country where the figure is $20,000? Yes
How you measure the prosperity of a country is subject to vagueries on how the money is counted, exchange rates, inflation, etc., but that does not mean the metrics are not useful. -
LarryM at 02:25 AM on 21 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
Bob Loblaw @4 pointed out that Lomborg inappropriately compares the total cost of addressing climate change with only the individual costs of climate change impacts rather than the collective cost of all impacts. SkS has done many posts on the cost of action vs inaction on climate change that are nicely summarized on this graphic.
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LarryM at 01:57 AM on 21 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
I once worked on a contrail formation and mitigation project with Boeing researchers and can add a little to Bob Loblaw @15's comments about contrail frequency. Jet engines inject heat, water vapor, and soluble and insoluble particles (e.g., sulfates and soot) into the ambient conditions, and if the environment is super-saturated with respect to ice, then ice crystals that nucleate on these particles will grow and spread to form "contrail cirrus" (nice summary here). Contrails form by the same processes as cirrus cloud particles, called homogeneous and heterogeneous ice crystal nucleation, generally in the upper troposphere at temperatures below about -40C if the air is ice-supersaturated. When air reaches 100% RH it is saturated with respect to liquid water and water droplets will nucleate around aerosols in the air, but below 0°C water vapor reaches saturation with respect to ice at a lower RH that decreases with decreasing temperature. For example, at -40C water vapor is in equilibrium with an ice crystal at 67% RH, so if the environment is at 80% RH (supersaturated with respect to ice) then a contrail ice crystal will grow, but at 66% RH it will sublimate and disappear and a contrail won't persist).
There weren't many contrails before there were jet engines injecting moisture and particles into the atmosphere. The physical and optical characteristics of contrails can and have changed over time due to changes in aircraft fuels (which changes the composition, concentration, and physical properties of the ice-forming nuclei), and changes in engine efficiency (cooler exhaust in more efficient engines increases the likelihood of contrail formation).
The project I worked on with Boeing was to quantify contrail-forming conditions at sites in the U.S., UK, and Germany based on radiosonde temperature and humidity data, such as determining contrail-formation probability distributions over some city as a function of time-of-day and season, and characterizing the thickness of ice-supersaturated layers. Boeing used these data to evaluate strategies for mitigating contrail formation by changing the flight level by 2000-4000 feet if the aircraft is in a contrail-forming layer, and looking at the tradeoff with the extra fuel burned to change from the optimal flight level.
The above link also points toward contrails having a net warming effect on climate, just like cirrus clouds.
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Citizen 7 at 01:03 AM on 21 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
What we have here, in terms of what actually exists in the ontologically objective modality, is a global Earth System inhabited by, among other lifeforms, a species of primate which has become remarkably numerous, has temporarily escaped from its original ecological niche and its evolutionarily expected trophic level, and is consuming a greater and greater proportion of planetary NPP in addition to tapping more and more of fossilized solar energy, fragmenting and impoverishing ecosystems and driving other species into extinction at a rate many orders of magnitude above the background rate, and, of course, altering the chemistry and increasing the available energy of the atmosphere and the oceans in the process, threatening to throw the whole system into a wholly new "basin of attraction." Why are we continuing to do this, now that we're aware of its ultimately suicidal consequences?
In order to answer that, we have to turn to the ontologically subjective modality, our shared human belief systems. What enabled us to accomplish all of this (and some still seem to feel quite proud of attaining this state of affairs!) was our development of the ability to symbolize, to have sounds and marks on paper stand for things, properties, relationships, qualities and quantities--we learned to speak and write and count, and this enabled us to cooperate together in groups and build things. Our human cultures built up their own worldviews out of this process of symbolization, and recently they've been coalescing into a kind of globalized "belief bubble" that unfortunately incorporates many assumptions woven into western, industrialized culture: the idea that everything else besides humans, living or dead, is nothing but a "resource" for human use, for example, and also the notion that continual "growth" in just about everything is necessary and good and can continue on forever--growth in the human population, growth in the material throughput fueling human societies, growth in concrete and pavement and pipelines and fish harvests, and above all growth in the numerical abstractions of economics, like "GDP," which, as several of you have pointed out, is a measure of monetized throughput that goes up just as much when rebuilding from a disaster as it does when something actually new and beneficial is created.
Why do we not see the difference between an abstract mathematical sum and the real world of living organisms linked together in biological systems? As scientists, you can surely see the difference between what is produced when green plants carry out photosynthesis and what is "produced" through the mathematical calculation of compound interest, or when a bank "creates money out of nothing" by making a loan. If we're going to come to our senses as a species and seriously start cutting down our GHG emissions, we're going to have to tackle that "belief bubble" that has us all mystified. We're currently giving more ontological credence to our own social constructions--which ultimately reduce to nothing but shared sets of beliefs and expectations in the heads of us human primates--than we are to planetary realities.
To come to terms with this problem, of course, we have to start seeing ourselves as the ultimate "groupish" animal, highly influenced by "what other people think," to the point that, if other people appear to think that "the economy" is more real than the ecology, we as individuals conform to their assumptions and go along with it too. Nonsense. We need more people in the mold of Mark Twain and Stephen Jay Gould who can point out that the "Emperor's new clothes" don't really exist in actuality. There are much saner ways for us humans to organize our collective activities upon this Earth than the ways in which they are organized now. Just playing the same old game with an added "carbon tax" or a subsidy here and there won't come close to solving the problem. We have to get tough with ourselves, and first comes honesty about what's real and what is entirely contingent and mutable.
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BWTrainer at 00:13 AM on 21 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
bjchip@7: I think the word you're looking for is inefficient, or maybe insufficient. The purpose of the subsidies is to increase the amount if renewable energy deployed relative to what would have been in the absense of the subsidy. In order for the subsidy to be wasteful, you would have to show that more renewables would have been deployed without the subsidies in place, which doesnt appear to be true.
Certainly a carbon tax or something like it would have been more effective (depending on the price), but it's not an either/or proposition between subsidies and carbon pricing. So Lomborg is still wrong.
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Daniel Bailey at 22:56 PM on 20 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
Citizen 7, as a proof source, the atmospheric increase in water vapor statement comes from Trenberth, Fasullo and Kiehl 2009 (p. 317), and is best illustrated by this graphic:
[Graphic source: personal communication with Dr. Trenberth]
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Tom Curtis at 21:16 PM on 20 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
Gustafsson @10, that is not the only problem with GDP. Essentially it only measures productive work done for payment. Accordingly, as measured by GDP, if some householder starts growing their own veggies rather than buying them from the supermarket, the economy, and the general welbeing declines. Likewise, by this measure, if four neighbours each build their own tenis court, and spend their time bouncing balls of the practise wall, they have contributed more to general well being than if they construct a single, shared tennis court and spend their time playing doubles.
Flawed measure though it undoubtedly is, it still represents a reasonable index of improved economic well being.
My problem with the econometric approach to global warming is not that they use GDP as the measure of economic wealth; but that their models assume global warming will not impact on growth of GDP. In the models, Queensland may lose the Great Barrier Reef, and Brazil the Amazon; but their GDP will keep on growing that the 20th century average rate. To my mind, that makes those models as informative as a model of orbital mechanics based on Aristotelian physics as a means of planning moon landings.
In fact, by incorporating that feature in their models, they are making it a premise (not a conclusion) of their models that the harm from global warming will be small relative to economic growth.
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Gustafsson at 20:38 PM on 20 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
It is fascinating how some people equate GDP and wellfare without considering that it is quite possible for GDP to rise while we as a society are worse off than before since it only measures production and doesn't take loss of value into account. Thus having something worth 1 million $ destroyed in a flood and then replacing it with a new thing of the same value increases the GDP by 1 million $ without producing any kind of new value. The money would surely have been better spent elsewhere.
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Klaus Flemløse at 19:09 PM on 20 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
Damage caused by hurricanes Bjorn Lomborg writes that the global damage costs of hurricanes will decrease from 0.04% of gross domestic product to only 0.02% in 2050, representing a decrease of 50%. Bjorn Lomborg makes a comparison of non-comparable entities. The damage caused by hurricanes will be concentrated in the coastal areas especially around the Caribbean. The increase in gross domestic product will come from all areas of the world, such as from Russia, Austria etc. People in the coastal areas prone to hurricanes, will not experience it as a diminishing threat, but as a growing threat of rising claims costs and Russia or Austria will not pay for the damage caused by these hurricanes. It does not make sense what Bjørn Lomborg writes. It is likely that we - in the hurricane prone areas - will see people moving to other places, improvements in building standards, better protections of dikes and better warning. Therefore, the total damage costs per. hurricane - all else being equal - will be smaller. However, it is uncertain if this will balance out the increased frequency of Major Hurricanes. Bjørn Lomborg does not write this. The insurance and reinsurance industry has developed tools to simulate the damage costs of hurricanes. We can using this tool simulation the costs of a storm passing 200 km north of the actual storm track or letting a 25 year old storm passing through the same area today and calculating the damage cost. There is therefore a good opportunity to explore what a historical storm would have affected of damage to day. The problem is to assess the impact of improved building construction or location, etc. Experts in this field are Swiss Re, Munich Re, U.S. insurance companies and a couple of consulting companies. -
Klaus Flemløse at 18:15 PM on 20 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
For more information about Bjørn Lomborg please look into:
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bjchip at 17:25 PM on 20 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
Two things. It would be good to have a link to the original article. I cannot get there from here. Not sure of the original date. It seems to be something from January 23 ?
The second thing is that while Lomborg is an awfully optimistic lukewarmer, there is one thing referred to above that is correct.
"renewable energy subsidies, are wasteful"
They are indeed if compared to the alternative of actually putting a price on CO2 emissions that is realistic, one that in FACT changes behaviours. and alters business plans. The change we want to make is to make less CO2. Any indirect attempt to make some technology or energy source competitive with the emitting industries invites inefficiency and is apt to fraudulent exploitation. The "Cap and Betrayed" debacle with the banksters clipping the CO2 tickets is merely one example.
So there is this tiny point on which I am agreeing with Lomborg.... and a whole world of hurt that I am blaming him for.
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Chris G at 16:38 PM on 20 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
GDP: Well, GDP does have a real impact on people's lives, but I believe it has been demonstrated that mitigation is cheaper than adaptation.
Bob has said what I was also thinking; the cost of hurricanes is not the only cost of unmitigated climate change, but Lomborg treats it in isolation.
Loosely related, an op-ed on the Keystone XL in the New York Times was responded to by Jim Hansen. Nocera has a mental blockage; he states, "He said that such a tax could reduce emissions by 30 percent within 10 years. Well, maybe. But it would also likely make the expensive tar sands oil more viable. "
Huh? The tar sands are more carbon heavy than conventional oil and would receive a higher rate; how would that favor tar sands over conventional?
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A Glimpse at Our Possible Future Climate, Best to Worst Case Scenarios
curiousd - "Should I take these results as encouraging some optimism?"
Given that Eemian conditions included temperatures ~3°C higher than todays (in range for a 3-4°C rise if we don't change our emission practices), No, that's not encouraging.
A few papers have recently suggested that Greenland apparently did not melt as much as previously thought during the Eemian. Which indicates that Antarctica, the other major store of ice, may be more vulnerable to temperatures than we thought - that portions of the West Antarctic ice sheet (and perhaps part of East Antarctica) melted during that period - otherwise the 5-7 meter sea level rise seen during the Eemian couldn't have occurred.
Whatever the source, 5-7 meters of sea level rise is still going to have a huge impact.
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curiousd at 14:11 PM on 20 February 2013A Glimpse at Our Possible Future Climate, Best to Worst Case Scenarios
Here are a couple of interesting links to the conditions during the Eemian, after the penultimate ice age glacial minimum, I think?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130123133428.htm
also
http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&RCN=34734
Peer reviewed results show that during the Eemian the temperatures attained were higher than now, and the Greenland melting, though serious, was less than one would expect for those temperatures under today's conditions. (Perhaps the nature of oceanic circulation was different?)
Should I take these results as encouraging some optimism?
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calyptorhynchus at 14:02 PM on 20 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
About 20 years ago I picked up a copy of the Skeptical Environmentalist in a bookshop and opened it at random. My eye fell on a sentence in which Lomborg stated that we didn't need to worry about tropical deforestation because forests in the temperate latitudes were expanding.
'Nuff said.
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Bob Loblaw at 13:53 PM on 20 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
In my reading of Lomborg's stuff,the thing I was always bothered by was that he would compare the costs of averting global warming with the costs of achieving a reduction in one adverse factor via different methods - but he would do them one at a time. For example, if the effect of global warming was reduced crop yields, he'd compare the total cost of averting climate change with a cost of doing something like increasing agricultural productivity through breeding or irrigation, or some such. And he'd say it was cheaper to just invest in technology to maintain crop yields.
The catch was that He'd make the comparison over a number of climate-related efects, but he'd keep treating the cost of preventing climate change as if it was a new cost each time - he'd never factor in that we'd already paid that cost when we solved problem A, and we don't need to pay it again when we want to solve problems B, C, and on up to Z. Yet the alternative "solutions" never got added up to see what the total cost was. Even if preventing climate change costs Y=20*X, and you have a hundred X's that are solved with one cost Y, he'd always compare one Y to one X, not one Y to 100 X's.
Speculation as to whether he knew he was doing this falls outside the comments policy.
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Bob Loblaw at 13:34 PM on 20 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
Citizen 7 @ 6: "could someone explain why these trailing clouds look so different from the contrails I remember seeing in my youth"
Answering a question with several other questions:
- how long ago was it that you were a "youth"? That could be 10, 20, 30, or 70 years ago.
- where were you a "youth", and is it a different place from where you are today?
Why am I asking? Well, contrails form because aircraft engines give off water vapour (combustion byproduct). Under the right conditions (air close to saturation), the vapour will condense to liquid water or sublimate to ice crystals, forming contrails. If there is enough mixing in the air, the contrails will rapidly dissipate and be thin and short-lived. If the air is very stable and very close to saturation, the contrails may last quite a while and be quite thick.
The appearance of the contrail will depend on the amount of water vapour released, the local temperature and humidity, and the local atmospheric motions - which can depend on the height the aircraft is flying at, the current weather, and the season. The amount of water vapour released will depend on the fuel consumption, which depends on engine and aircraft design and efficiency.
When I was a "youth", there were still a lot of piston-engined aircraft around. Now, there are highly-efficient jets that often fly at higher altitudes. A lot of factors to consider, only some of which relate to the atmospheric conditions.
[...speaking as a professional atmospheric scientist and former amateur pilot...]
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DSL at 13:29 PM on 20 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
And yet, Sph and DB, the actual, well-documented conspiracies (reviewed in Merchants of Doubt) are simply ignored. Too much evidence, I guess. Takes all the mystery out of it.
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Miriam O'Brien (Sou) at 12:34 PM on 20 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
Agree with Citizen 7. I call it 'short-termism'.
I got to thinking about this issue because Lomberg et al don't factor in the medium to longer term impacts of 'waiting'. (And even then I'm only thinking medium to long term in regard to human civilisation - centuries and millennia, not to the entire earth timespan which would be hundreds of millennia to billenia.)
We've set in train long term ecological changes - loss of biodiversity, changes to waterways and long term warming. It's as if the Lomborg's, Pielke Jrs etc only see twenty or thirty years ahead (and even then are blinkered to system-wide impacts) instead of looking ahead on the century and millenia time scale.
As Citizen 7 implies, economics is not the right tool. We need to do a lot more work to develop a more holistic and far-sighted discipline to address this critical situation. This will probably mean stepping back from human-centric disciplines like economics and putting more emphasis on earth system studies, while providing some sort of 'translation' device with the human-centric disciplines for practical implementation. (Not sure where I'm heading with this one - better minds that I are undoubtedly working on it.)
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Rob Honeycutt at 12:34 PM on 20 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
Citizen 7... You're actually breaking the very first rule of science in saying contrails look different to you today than they did just a few years ago. That rule is: Don't trust your senses! Human perception is the worst measuring device known to man.
If you think there "might" be a difference, what you have to do is find a way to test that hypothesis. Find a way to measure the phenomenon you believe you're seeing. Find ways where you can make sure your perception is not fooling you.
This statement is immediately suspect: "...who will kind of nervously maintain that the skies have ALWAYS looked like they do now. No, they have not."
When you start from a position that you are correct before you have methodically tested that your perception you're merely listening to your need to find something there, regardless of whether something is there or not.
You state, "In some cases the "conspiracy theory" label is used to prevent people from demanding good scientific explanations for what they see..." But you do not yet know for sure that you actually see what you believe you see.
Before you test your idea you can do nothing but get into a battle of different faulty perceptions. I've been around a good number of years. I'm a GA pilot so I've long watched the sky for cloud formations and with special interest in aircraft. I have never noticed a change in contrail formations.
But I would also not rule it out until I saw strong empirical evidence one way or another.
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Citizen 7 at 12:17 PM on 20 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
To compare "GDP" with the physical and biological changes resulting from glbal warming is to make a serious category mistake; you're comparing two different ontological modalities, two different modes of existence, something that exists independently of our human beliefs, desires, and expectations--the biosphere, the Earth System--and something whose existence is entirely dependent on our human beliefs, the abstractions of economics, all of which will vanish when we humans no longer tread the Earth, and which may come about all the sooner if we continue to take them for concrete reality. As a professional philosopher, I am always amazed when scientists, whom one would expect to be pretty hard-nosed about what exists in the physically actual world and what doesn't, fails to mark this obvious distinction.
The important thing to understand about our socially constructed reality, our economics, politics, word-and-number games and the like, is that we humans can change these creations of ours. The physical and biological world, on the other hand, we screw around with at our peril. What is the meaning of "money," "cost," etc. when the stability of the system that supports our actual lives is at stake?
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Miriam O'Brien (Sou) at 11:49 AM on 20 February 2013In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
There seem to be a number of people saying that GDP is projected to increase faster than damage from global warming - and then say let's wait because we will be better able to pay for the damage as it happens in the future.
I don't see the analysis of the interaction between the two. It's as if the aforementioned people see GDP growth and global warming travelling on separate paths and never intersecting, which doesn't make sense to me. As adverse weather events become more common and worse, surely there will come a point where the cost of reparation and recovery starts to affect the gross domestic product, and GDP will not rise as projected and probably start declining.
What is needed is to do what we can now to avoid that situation, which can only happen if we both cut carbon emissions as well as prepare for worse droughts, floods, storm surges, fires etc.
When rebuilding after floods and cyclones in developed nations at least, building codes and planning schemes are usually altered to increase resilience for the future. During a drought desal plants and added water storage are built or planned. So that part is already happening to some degree.
I suspect that many planners/decision-makers are finding it difficult to envisage what a two degree rise will bring though. People like Lomborg (and Pielke Jr) aren't helping.
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Citizen 7 at 11:48 AM on 20 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
Thank you, Sphaerica, for the references; the longer Nature Climate article by Burkhardt and Karcher is especially informative. I notice that they speak of contrail cirrus as "a new cloud class," at least for their model, however, and their first set of graphics shows significant foci of young, linear contrails almost exclusively over Europe and eastern North America, something that seems to merit more explanation unless the air traffic in those areas is much, much greater than elsewhere. And I'm pretty sure I did not observe these prominent, persistent bands of clouds in the sky overhead before just a few years ago, whereas I see them regularly now--did the amount of air traffic go up suddenly? I am wondering about how new this phenomenon is, and why the geographical concentration--is there a clear correlation with the quantity of air traffic, over both time and space? Does anyone have data about this?
I also appreciate the information from Daniel Bailey that the atmosphere has "some 4% greater humidity levels" than 40 years ago--is that a direct result of global warming, or are there other factors involved? I can see how such a change might lead to a different appearance of the trails left by aircraft between now and then, though presumably such a change would have been slow and gradual. Would you say this is the primary reason they appear so prominent now?
There seems to be quite a bit of scientific uncertainty about this phenomenon, given the numerous qualifiers in the paper, but I am very glad to read a serious scientific discussion of it, rather than encountering the kind of immediate denial/debunking response I've had from some, who will kind of nervously maintain that the skies have ALWAYS looked like they do now. No, they have not. I think it's important--and surely what is required for good science--to stay with the testimony of our own eyes rather than yield quickly to "what others say," as in the Solomon Asch experiments (e.g., http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psychology/social/asch_conformity.html). In some cases the "conspiracy theory" label is used to prevent people from demanding good scientific explanations for what they see, such as the sudden and perfectly symmetrical descent of WTC 7, when official versions seem to be lacking in explanatory power (as apparently at least one of other the posters here--funglestrumpet?--seems also to have noticed.
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Daniel Bailey at 10:56 AM on 20 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
I hear ya. I hear there's even a blog post on some blog somewhere detailing those kinds of conspiracies...and others...
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Bob Lacatena at 10:44 AM on 20 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
My goodness... there's a conspiracy for everything, isn't there?
I'll bet there's even a conspiracy to spread conspiracies (thus hiding the one, true conspiracy that they don't want us to figure out).
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Daniel Bailey at 10:37 AM on 20 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
As to why contrails now may appear differently than those from yesteryear, consider that the atmosphere today has some 4% greater humidity levels than that of just 40 years ago. Since contrails are essentially water vapor, that will effect dissipation and spreading.
This site is a useful reference for more information on contrails (I use it to debunk the chemtrailers):
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Bob Lacatena at 10:27 AM on 20 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
Citizen 7,
The exact effect is unknown. In daytime, contrails reflect sunlight and so have a cooling effect. In both daytime and nighttime, contrails also have a warming greenhouse effect.
Airplane Contrails Boost Global Warming, Study Suggests
Global radiative forcing from contrail cirrus -- Ulrike Burkhardt and Bernd Kärcher
Airplane contrails worse than CO2 emissions for global warming: study
Atmospheric science: Seeing through contrails -- Olivier Boucher
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Jsquared at 10:08 AM on 20 February 2013Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers
dana1981@5 - There has to be some good physics in that order-of-magnitude difference in the size of the responses. What could be so different in the short-term and long-term response of water vapor? All that comes to mind offhand is that aerosols don't have a chance to do their thing - nucleation - in the short-term response, or maybe it's a latitudinal effect built into the CERES and MODIS measurements? It's a little hard to give either one much credence.
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