Global Warming: Your opinion ....

If Yellowstone explodes then the climate will be the last thing on people's minds in North America

 

A Heated Debate: Are Climate Scientists Being Forced to Toe the Line?

After joining a controversial lobby group critical of climate change, meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson claims he was shunned by colleagues, leading him to quit. Some scientists complain pressure to conform to consensus opinion has become a serious hindrance in the field.


News that Lennart Bengtsson, the respected former director of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, had joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), sent shockwaves through the climate research community. GWPF is most notable for its skepticism about climate change and its efforts to undermine the position of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The tremors his decision sent through the scientific community shocked Bengtsson.

The scientist said colleagues placed so much pressure on him after joining GWPF that he withdrew from the group out of fear for his own health. Bengtsson added that his treatment had been reminiscent of the persecution of suspected Communists in the United States during the era of McCarthyism in the 1950s.Not all of his fellow climatologists agree. Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and climate modeler at NASA, described the "alleged connection to McCarthy" as "ridiculous." "As someone who has actually been threatened with criminal sanctions by a United States Senator only because of published science, I don't quite see why Bengtsson's total freedom to associate with anyone he wants -- and let me be clear, he has this freedom -- has in any way been compromised," he said.
But Bengtsson insists that even close colleagues shunned him. He says that one research partner, apparently fearing damage to his reputation, withdrew from a study they had been conducting together. Bengtsson added no further details other than to state that the incident had been hurtful.
NASA's Schmidt also expressed criticism of that claim. "This is so vague as to mean anything, and without an actual example, it is impossible to know what is being alleged."
Clouds Gathered Ahead of Storm
It is now emerging that the clouds of controversy gathered ahead of the current storm. In February, Bengtsson weathered a significant setback. The scientific journal Environmental Research Letters declined to publish a study he had authored predicting a milder greenhouse effect. Peer reviewers described the report's findings as "less than helpful" and added, "actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of 'errors' and worse from the climate-skeptic media side."
Respected German meteorologist Hans von Storch of the Institute for Coastal Research at the Helmholtz Center, described the justification as "scandalous" and accused the journal of politically motivated decision-making not based on scientific standards. In a statement on the IOP Science website, Publisher Nicola Gulley emphasizes that the study was declined on scientific grounds. She argues that Bengtsson's work failed to meet the journal's high standards.
Climate researchers are now engaged in a debate about whether their science is being crippled by a compulsion to conform. They wonder if pressure to reach a consensus is too great. They ask if criticism is being suppressed. No less is at stake than the credibility of research evidence for climate change and the very question of whether climate research is still reliable.
Bengtsson said in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE that he wanted to open up the climate change debate by joining GWPF. He said that in view of large gaps in knowledge, the pressure to reach a consensus in climate research "does not make sense".
Nevertheless, by joining the political lobby group, Bengtsson opened himself up to criticism that he had taken a position inappropriate for a scientist of his stature.
'We Are not an Interest Group'
University of Washington climatologist Eric Steig says the activities of the GWPF are more reminiscent of McCarthyism than Bengtsson's case. Steig says the GWPF boasts about investigating climate researchers. "They also have published opinion articles on their web site accusing mainstream climate scientists of having 'secret societies' and having political agendas designed with specific left-wing policy aims in mind," he adds. "They have accused British schools of 'brainwashing' students by teaching them about climate change." GWPF, for its part, calls itself a think tank that documents arguments stating why climate change as a problem is being overestimated.
Reto Knutti of the ETH Zürich technical university is also critical. "Organizations like the GWPF contribute to whipping scientific debate into a religious war," he argues. "They distribute pseudo-scientific reports, even though they are actually pursuing a political aim," says Knutti. Jochem Marotzke, who is Bengtsson's successor at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, says, "GWPF works deliberately in a selective way. They mention only arguments that suit their purposes. Counterarguments are kept under wraps."
Professor Myles Allen, a climate researcher at Oxford, says, "The problem is their anti-science agenda, clearly illustrated by the fact that they refused point blank to submit their recent report criticizing the IPCC 5th Assessment Report to the same kind of open peer review that the IPCC report was itself subjected to."
GWPF Director Benny Peiser challenges assertions like that. "We are not an interest group; our scientists have no official or collective opinion -- to any topics. If there were no taboos in climate science or climate policy, the GWPF would probably not exist."
'Stealth Advocates'
Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado and professor long critical of the politicization of the climate debate, says the group uses science to cloak its political agenda. Pielke emphasizes, however, that as a lobbying group GWPF "has every right to advance whatever arguments it wants. It often focuses on stealth advocacy -- hiding its politics in science -- a strategy common across the climate issue, found on all 'sides,' and is pretty common across many issues."
Von Storch agrees that other political camps, such as environmental groups, also use "stealth advocates" to influence scientific debate. Pielke elaborates, "In a democracy people will organize around all sorts of shared interests, as they should, and many will share values that I don't. So what? Bengtsson's justifications for associating with GWPF are perfectly legitimate. That he was pressured by his peers with social and other sanctions reflects the deeply politicized nature of this issue."
He argues that scientific research must be held to higher standards than lobby groups, but even those standards now the subject of greater scrutiny.
Many climatologists have been tacitly complaining about harassment and exclusion for years. But is the situation any worse in this scientific discipline than it is in others? Roger Pielke Sr., a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado and Pielke Jr.'s father, says, "Unfortunately, climate science has become very politicized and views that differ at all from those in control of the climate assessment process are either ignored or ridiculed. From my experience, I agree 100 percent with the allegations made by the very distinguished Lennart Bengtsson."
But who is doing the politicizing? Knutti says that it is pretty easy to tell. "If you are on the left politically, you believe in global warming," he says. "If you are on the right, that is much less likely." He adds that the line between opinion and fact is often blurred, even among scientists.
'Dirty, Nasty, Destructive'
"Each side maintains the other is politicizing the debate," explains Werner Krauss, an environmental ethnologist at the Helmholtz Center for Materials and Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany. He says climate research is dominated by "strongmen" who know how to exploit the media whenever they like. Krauss claims Bengtsson stage managed his move to GWPF in the media and alleges that climate research has fallen into the throes of the scientific equivalent of religious fervor. He says it is no wonder Bengtsson came under heavy fire for his decision.
At the same time, Heinrich Miller of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research says, "I find the way his colleagues reacted shocking. Apparently there is now pervasive disappointment because a shining scientific example is making his scientific doubts public," he says. Miller adds that the Bengtsson case reminds him about how politicians use "dirty tricks" to muzzle opponents.
Pielke Jr. confirms that climate research is a tough business. "We see hardball politics," he says. "I have personally seen very strong social and professional pressures over the years. These include threats to my job, professional ostracism, public misrepresentations of my research and views, efforts to prevent me from speaking publicly and personal threats, many of which have been publicly documented." He advises that "anyone who wishes to participate in the public debate on climate change should do so knowing how the politics are played today -- dirty, nasty, destructive."
'Global Warming Is Taken as Dogma'

Climatologist Michael Mann even speaks of "climate wars." For years, he says he was the subject of attacks by conservative groups skeptical of climate change, especially after the "Climategate" scandal, when his e-mail correspondence was published illegally. The other side is not pulling any punches either -- at least when it comes to vitriol. One Austrian professor has gone so far as calling for the death penalty for climate skeptics.Miller says that scientists were politicized more than anything else by having to seek a consensus on results for the 5th IPCC report. "Global warming is taken as dogma. Anyone who doubts it is bad," says the renowned researcher, who was branded a "climate skeptic" after questioning the scientific validity of computer simulations.
Knutti, by contrast, warns about overemphasizing the lack of certainty about the evidence. He says Bengtsson's stringent criticism of climate change forecasts is misleading, explaining that the models provided useable results that were tested on historical climate change. The 5th IPCC Report that took hundreds of scientists years to produce, says Knutti, comprehensively documents the range of results. He says that sitting back and waiting until all the questions are answered is not an alternative, and describes a large portion of what has come to be called skepticism as deliberate deception.
Translated from the German by Taryn Toro

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Lennart bengtsson: My view on climate research

• Date: 22/05/14
• Lennart Bengtsson, Uppsalainitiativet

As a result of chaos theory, weather and climate cannot be predicted, and how future climate will turn out will not be known until future is upon us.

During the last weeks there has been a lot of speculation regarding my views and my scientific standpoint on climate research. I have never really sought publicity and it was with a great deal of reluctance that I began writing articles for public media. A large part of my unwillingness to partake in public debate is connected to my friend Sven Öhman, a linguist who wrote about semantics and not least about the difficulties specialists run into when attempting to communicate with the public. Words and concepts have different meanings and are interpreted differently depending on one’s background and knowledge. Sometimes such misunderstanding can be disastrous.
This is also true for concepts such as climate and climate forecasts. Climate is nothing but the sum of all weather events during some representative period of time. The length of this period cannot be strictly specified, but ought to encompass at least 100 years. Nonetheless, for practical purposes meteorologists have used 30 years. For this reason alone it can be hard to determine whether the climate is changing or not, as data series that are both long enough and homogenous are often lacking. An inspection of the weather in Uppsala since 1722 exemplifies this. Because of chaos theory it is practically impossible to make climate forecasts, since weather cannot be predicted more than one or several weeks. For this reason, climate calculations are uncertain even if all model equations would be perfect.
Despite all these issues, climate research has progressed greatly, above all through new revolutionary observations from space, such as the possibility to measure both volume and mass of the oceans. Temperature and water vapor content of the atmosphere are measured by occultation with GPS satellites. Our knowledge of earlier climate has increased substantially.
It is not surprising that the public is impressed by this and that this trust transfers to climate forecasts and the possibility to predict the earth’s future climate. That all this occurs within a context of international cooperation under the supervision of the UN, and with an apparent unity among the scientists involved has created a robust confidence in IPCC’s climate simulations, in Sweden not the least. SMHI’s [Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute] down-scaled climate simulations for 100 years are impressive and show in detail and with splendid graphics how the climate will turn out both in Östergötland [the Swedish province of East Gothland] and in Västerbotten [West Bothnia]. This is invaluable for municipality climate experts and planners who are working feverishly to avoid future floods and forest fires. The public is in good hands in the benevolent society.
Unfortunately, things are not as splendid as they seem. As a result of chaos theory, weather and climate cannot be predicted, and how future climate will turn out will not be known until future is upon us. It would not help even if we knew the exact amount of greenhouse gases. Add to this the uncertainty about the future of the world. This should be clear to anyone, simply by moving back in time and contemplating what has unfolded from that viewpoint. As Daniel Boorstin put it: “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge”.
I’m concerned that this is the problem of the present, and the real reason for me to choose to partake in the climate debate over the last couple of years. I don’t think anyone disputes that I have been highly critical of those who completely reject the effects of greenhouse gases on the earth’s climate. This is however not the problem, but rather how much, how soon and to what extent “climate change” will happen. There is no 97% consensus about this, and even less concerning how weather and climate will turn out in Västerbotten [West Bothnia] in 80 years. This is why it unfortunately is misleading of SMHI to show their beautiful maps, because people may actually believe that this is the way the climate will turn out. The climate scientists of SMHI know this, of course, but for the users this is not clear. My colleague in Hamburg, Guy Brasseur, told me the other day that an insignificant change on about 70 km height in a climate model’s mesosphere, made the weather systems relocate from north Germany to the Alps, consequently with radical regional climate change as a result.
Even more alarming is the tendency of giving people the impression that weather events are becoming more extreme, and that this has actually already occurred. Apart from a possible increase in precipitation and a possible intensification of tropical hurricanes that has not yet been detected, there are no indications of extreme weather in the model simulations, and even less so in current observations.
This has convincingly been demonstrated and also held up by the IPCC. Damages are increasing, as are damages from earth quakes, but this due to the growing economy. It is also important to stress that injuries suffered by humans during extreme weather has decreased substantially due to better weather forecasts.
What is perhaps most worrying is the increased tendency of pseudo-science in climate research. This is revealed through the bias in publication records towards only reporting results that support one climate hypothesis, while refraining from publishing results that deviate. Even extremely cold weather, as this year’s winter in north Eastern USA and Canada, is regarded as a consequence of the greenhouse effect.
Were Karl Popper alive today we would certainly have met with fierce critique of this behavior. It is also demonstrated in journals’ reluctance to address issues contradicting simplified climate assessments, such as the long period during the last 17 years with insignificant or no warming over the oceans, and the increase in sea-ice cover around the Antarctic. My colleagues and I have been met with scant understanding when trying to point out that observations indicate lower climate sensitivity than model calculations indicate. Such behavior may not even be intentional but rather attributed to an effect that my colleague Hans von Storch calls a social construct.
That I have taken a stand trying to put the climate debate onto new tracks has resulted in rather violent protests. I have not only been labeled a sceptic but even a denier, and faced harsh criticism from colleagues. Even contemplating my connections with GWPF was deemed unheard of and scandalous.
I find it difficult to believe that the prominent Jewish scientists in the GWPF council appreciate being labeled deniers. The low-point is probably having been labeled “world criminal” by a representative of the English wind power-industry. I want to stress that I am a sworn enemy of the social construction of natural science that has garnered so much traction in the last years. For example, German scientists have attempted to launch what they call “good” science to ensure that natural science shouldn’t be driven by what they view as anti-social curiosity-research by researching things that might not be “good”. Einstein’s “anti-social behavior”, when he besides his responsible work as a patent office clerk in Bern also researched on the theory of relativity and the photoelectric effect, was of course reprehensible, and to do this during work-time! Even current labor unions would have strongly condemned this.

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Climate models that accidentally got El Niño right also show warming slowdown

Spend any amount of time reading climate arguments on the Internet, and you'll undoubtedly hear some version of the following argument: the Earth hasn't warmed in 17 years, and none of the climate models predicted that. Although there are a lot of problems with that statement (including the fact that it has warmed a bit), it's probably safe to say that the warming hasn't been as intense as many scientists expected.
Of course, to a scientist, unmet expectations are an opportunity, so a variety of papers have looked into why this has happened. They've found that, while volcanic eruptions seem to have contributed to the relatively slow rise in temperatures, a major player has been the El Niño/Southern Oscillation(ENSO), which has been stuck in a cool, La Niña state for most of the last decade. And, since climate models aren't expected to accurately forecast each El Niño, there would be no reason to expect that they would match the actual atmospheric record... more

 

Strong La Niñas recently? Blame the Atlantic—and a volcano

An eruption over 20 years ago may have shifted warming trends around the globe.

Chaos theory is sometimes described with an exaggerated story about the flapping of a butterfly’s wings affecting the formation of a hurricane thousands of miles away. Some “butterflies” flap harder than others, of course—a volcanic eruption can be one hell of a butterfly. According to a new study, the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, which made a dent in the average global temperature for a couple of years, may also have a lot to do with the slower surface warming more than a decade after its eruption... more

 

That’s some weather we’re having. Is it climate change?

In the public's mind, it's impossible to separate the climate from the weather. Each significant weather event seems to be accompanied by discussions of its implications for climate change; is it an example of what to expect, or clear indications that climate change isn't happening?
Often lost in the public discussion is that determining the role of climate change in a specific weather event is a challenging but interesting scientific problem. It's also one with immense practical implications. As regions rebuild after a damaging event, it's important that these efforts be informed by what we should expect in the future.
This month's edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society tackles this problem, termed "attribution," in a big way: 22 different studies of weather events rolled into a single report entitled "Explaining Extreme Events of 2013."
There's no one single agreed upon method of doing attribution studies, and several studies often look at the same event from different perspectives. The link between climate change and the events varies from strong to non-existent, as well. Both of these factors ensure that the issue provides an excellent perspective on the challenges of attribution, as well as the sort of information it produces.

Dry in California

A handful of studies focus on California's 2013 drought, which was the most severe dry period in the historic record. From a weather perspective, the dryness had been linked to a persistent ridge of low pressure air over the northwest Pacific—it even picked up the nickname “the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” in the popular press. The ridge blocked the normal storm track out of Alaska that brings winter rains to the US West Coast, and it appears to have been the immediate cause of the drought.
One of the papers that looks at the drought shows that the event truly was rare. It estimates that, were the climate stable, events like it would only come along every 420 years, and we'd be unlikely to see another for at least 285 years. Another paper fed climate models the sea surface temperatures that prevailed at the time, showing that they reproduce the ridge and the lack of rainfall. Since the sea surface has been warming along with the climate, you might think that would point a finger at climate change. And, to an extent, it does.
But things aren't quite that certain. It turns out that the warming oceans also pump humidity into the atmosphere, and some of that ultimately ends up falling as rain in California. When both factors are considered, "The above two effects appear to counteract each other," one of the papers concludes. In other words, if you look at an average year, the extremes might be larger, but there's no obvious trend toward drought due to the warming Pacific in this region.

Hot across the Pacific

Australia suffered through a difficult heat wave last year, but it wasn't the only country to do so; Japan and Korea did as well. Here, the link with climate change is obvious. When the average temperature goes up, it shifts the entire bell curve of expected temperatures with it. As a result, extremely rare hot events become more likely. A number of papers use different means of showing that this simple, neat explanation actually does work for these heat waves. "CMIP5 simulations suggest that the extremely warm year observed over Australia and the far western Pacific during 2013 was largely attributable to human forcing of the climate system," reads one example. "Anthropogenic climate change has caused a very large increase in the likelihood of extreme events such as the record Australia-wide average temperatures," reads another.
The same thing is true of a drought that occurred across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand. Extreme heat of the sort that Korea experienced last year is now 10 times more likely due to climate change. Heat waves in Europe and Japan are approached in a similar way.
But it's important to note that almost all of these studies simply said that we should expect more extreme events like this due to climate change, not that this particular weather event can be traced to a specific change in the climate. So, this is less a specific attribution and more a recognition of increased probabilities. The one exception seems to be a study that looked at what happened in China, which assigned about 60 percent of the increased risk to human influences.

Not everything is our doing

But the exact converse of these results also makes an appearance. Central Europe experienced heavy spring rains last year, but a study suggests that the warming climate doesn't make these events any more likely—it's occurrence can be ascribed to random chance. In the same way, "Natural climatic variability was apparently the main driver in the extreme cumulative snowfall that fell in the Pyrenees in 2013."
In other cases, like the heavy rains experienced in Northern India, the evidence for a human fingerprint is ambiguous. We'd need either a longer climate record or better models to disentangle our influence from natural factors. Extreme rains in the Northeast US seem to have been driven both by natural randomness and human influences.
In a number of cases where the evidence is less ambiguous, it's clear that climate change is having no influence whatsoever. South Dakota experienced an early fall blizzard last year, but those events are actually made less likely in a warming planet. The same thing is true for an unusually cold spring experienced in the UK.
But in that latter case, the authors suggest that climate change is shaping the public discussion anyway. In the currently warmed-up world, the probability of the cool spring is only two percent. But had we retained preindustrial conditions, the odds are somewhere between 30 and 60 percent that we'd have a spring like that. In other words, the only reason it attracted anyone's attention is because climate change has made it rare.

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