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A op-ed published in the Boston Globe by Barack Obama’s new science advisor John Holdren:

By John P. Holdren, August 4, 2008

Convincing the climate-change skeptics

THE FEW climate-change “skeptics” with any sort of scientific credentials continue to receive attention in the media out of all proportion to their numbers, their qualifications, or the merit of their arguments. And this muddying of the waters of public discourse is being magnified by the parroting of these arguments by a larger population of amateur skeptics with no scientific credentials at all.

Long-time observers of public debates about environmental threats know that skeptics about such matters tend to move, over time, through three stages. First, they tell you you’re wrong and they can prove it. (In this case, “Climate isn’t changing in unusual ways or, if it is, human activities are not the cause.”)

Then they tell you you’re right but it doesn’t matter. (“OK, it’s changing and humans are playing a role, but it won’t do much harm.”) Finally, they tell you it matters but it’s too late to do anything about it. (“Yes, climate disruption is going to do some real damage, but it’s too late, too difficult, or too costly to avoid that, so we’ll just have to hunker down and suffer.”)

All three positions are represented among the climate-change skeptics who infest talk shows, Internet blogs, letters to the editor, op-ed pieces, and cocktail-party conversations. The few with credentials in climate-change science have nearly all shifted in the past few years from the first category to the second, however, and jumps from the second to the third are becoming more frequent.

All three factions are wrong, but the first is the worst. Their arguments, such as they are, suffer from two huge deficiencies.

First, they have not come up with any plausible alternative culprit for the disruption of global climate that is being observed, for example, a culprit other than the greenhouse-gas buildups in the atmosphere that have been measured and tied beyond doubt to human activities. (The argument that variations in the sun’s output might be responsible fails a number of elementary scientific tests.)

Second, having not succeeded in finding an alternative, they haven’t even tried to do what would be logically necessary if they had one, which is to explain how it can be that everything modern science tells us about the interactions of greenhouse gases with energy flow in the atmosphere is wrong.

Members of the public who are tempted to be swayed by the denier fringe should ask themselves how it is possible, if human-caused climate change is just a hoax, that:

The leaderships of the national academies of sciences of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Russia, China, and India, among others, are on record saying that global climate change is real, caused mainly by humans, and reason for early, concerted action.
This is also the overwhelming majority view among the faculty members of the earth sciences departments at every first-rank university in the world.
All three of holders of the one Nobel prize in science that has been awarded for studies of the atmosphere (the 1995 chemistry prize to Paul Crutzen, Sherwood Rowland, and Mario Molina, for figuring out what was happening to stratospheric ozone) are leaders in the climate-change scientific mainstream.
US polls indicate that most of the amateur skeptics are Republicans. These Republican skeptics should wonder how presidential candidate John McCain could have been taken in. He has castigated the Bush administration for wasting eight years in inaction on climate change, and the policies he says he would implement as president include early and deep cuts in US greenhouse-gas emissions. (Senator Barack Obama’s position is similar.)

The extent of unfounded skepticism about the disruption of global climate by human-produced greenhouse gases is not just regrettable, it is dangerous. It has delayed – and continues to delay – the development of the political consensus that will be needed if society is to embrace remedies commensurate with the challenge. The science of climate change is telling us that we need to get going. Those who still think this is all a mistake or a hoax need to think again.

John P. Holdren is a professor in the Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard and the director of the Woods Hole Research Center.

Update:  You can download a nice lecture with lots of great graphics that Dr. Holdren gave at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
November 6, 2007 here

For such a small population, Australia seems to have it’s share of climate change skeptics.

Just this morning Bob Carter (an adjacent research fellow at JCU) writes in an op-ed in the Australian “global temperature warmed slightly in the late 20th century and has been cooling since 2002. Neither the warming nor the cooling were of unusual rate or magnitude”.

And Andrew Bolt asks on his blog “just how anyone can detect a human signal in the “warming” of the Great Barrier Reef” in regard to this graph, purportedly based on NOAA satellite imagery (which I assume he thinks proves his point):

My guess is that Bolt’s confusion lies in his misunderstanding of the causes of coral bleaching and the patterns of ocean warming.  Most of the public and many climate skeptics envision ocean warming as a gradual, linear increase, like water in a pot on the stove.  If they don’t see an increasing average trend line, they conclude the warming described by scientists hasn’t occurred.  Yet this GBR temperature graphic shows exactly what all the reef scientists I know have been saying; most summers over the last decade have seen especially high maximum temps, generally above 29C.  Whereas before 1998, this was quite rare and the anomalies lasted for only a few days, rather than a few weeks.

Some of the many comments in response to Bolt’s post are even more telling (and really emphasize how much work we have to do educating the public):

At this time with absolutely no evidence of global warming, or of carbons effect upon climate, we have environmental and green dupes hysterically demanding the closure of power stations, and even higher carbon taxes on industries.

RAI Italian TV news on SBS Thursday morning showed Alpine towns near Turin under metres of snow with one local (young) saying…never seen snow like this…

I think you will find that if you inspect an uncontaminated source of temperature data such as the satellite record, that 2008 was actually the coldest year since 1980.

Other peer reviewed studies have shown that by analysing raw data numbers from some weather reporting stations, they find a slight cooling trend operating over the last 100+ years, rather than the supposed warming trend of 0.6 C.

The graph below is based on the four major global compilations of temperature records: NASA’s GISStemp, the Hadley Center’s HadCRU, Remote Sensing Systems’ RSS, and the University of Alabama, Huntsville’s UAH.  (See an article about the concordance of these analyses here)

This graph essentially represents the state of our knowledge about recent anthropogenic climate change.  The world is clearly warming, not cooling.  Unless you spuriously compare the last 8 years with 1998.  The first half of 2008 was relatively cool (but as noted by Andrew Revkin, 2008 was between the 7th and 12th warmest since meteorological record keeping began in 1880 and  the 9 warmest years in the record have occurred since 1998).  Nobody said that EVERY year is going to be progressively warmer.  The argument is that over the next several decades and centuries we will see a general warming trend (but certainly not ever year or everywhere).

This morning, one of the world’s leading coral reef scientists, Dr. Terry Hughes, spoke on the AM about the threats to the reef this summer with warmer than usual temperatures:

JENNIFER MACEY: It’s only the start of summer but satellite images show sea surface temperatures in the Coral Sea are already higher than average. The Bureau of Meteorology and the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have both forecast a high risk of coral bleaching this summer.

Dr Russell Reichelt is the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

RUSSELL REICHELT: They’re likening the conditions that we’re looking at this summer now to be same as they were in 1998 when a very large global event occurred where 16 per cent of world’s coral reefs died from coral bleaching.

JENNIFER MACEY: Ten years ago, half of the Great Barrier Reef was affected by coral bleaching but only five per cent suffered permanent damage.   Dr Reichelt says reefs can recover from bleaching if they don’t face further stresses from pollution, over-fishing or repeated hot weather events.

JENNIFER MACEY: Professor Terry Hughes is the director of the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. He says if the warmer temperatures last for more than two months there’s a serious risk of coral dying.

TERRY HUGHES: If you lose the structure that the corals provide through their skeleton then fish populations inevitably decline as well.  It’s important to remember that for coral reefs, global warming is not some distant threat that might or might not happen in the future. It’s already happening. So the Great Barrier Reef has already bleached twice and there’s a very good chance that this year will be the third major bleaching event to impact on the Great Barrier Reef.

See a related post on current GBR temperature here

Highly acclaimed environmental author Bill McKibben will lead a mass civil disobedience action against coal-fired power plants in Washington DC on March 2.  McKibben, famed for his book The End of Nature and numerous other best-sellers, writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering.

His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages.

The protest march is being organized by several international NGOs including the Energy Action Coalition (which is bringing thousands of young people to Washington that weekend), Greenpeace, the Ruckus Society, and the Rainforest Action Network.

Dear Friends,

There are moments in a nation’s and a planet’s history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

We will be there to make several points:
• Coal-fired power is driving climate change. Our foremost climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level below 350 parts per million co2 lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity.

• Even if climate change were not the urgent crisis that it is, we would still be burning our fossil fuels too fast, wasting too much energy and releasing too much poison into the air and water. We would still need to slow down, and to restore thrift to its old place as an economic virtue.
•Coal is filthy at its source. Much of the coal used in this country comes from West Virginia and Kentucky, where companies engage in “mountaintop removal” to get at the stuff; they leave behind a leveled wasteland, and impoverished human communities. No technology better exemplifies the out-of-control relationship between humans and the rest of creation.
•Coal smoke makes children sick. Asthma rates in urban areas near coal-fired power plants are high. Air pollution from burning coal is harmful to the health of grown-ups too, and to the health of everything that breathes, including forests.

The industry claim that there is something called “clean coal” is, put simply, a lie. But it’s a lie told with tens of millions of dollars, which we do not have. We have our bodies, and we are willing to use them to make our point. We don’t come to such a step lightly. We have written and testified and organized politically to make this point for many years, and while in recent months there has been real progress against new coal-fired power plants, the daily business of providing half our electricity from coal continues unabated. It’s time to make clear that we can’t safely run this planet on coal at all. So we feel the time has come to do more–we hear President Barack Obama’s call for a movement for change that continues past election day, and we hear Nobel Laureate Al Gore’s call for creative non-violence outside coal plants. As part of the international negotiations now underway on global warming, our nation will be asking China, India, and others to limit their use of coal in the future to help save the planet’s atmosphere. This is a hard thing to ask, because it’s their cheapest fuel. Part of our witness in March will be to say that we’re willing to make some sacrifices ourselves, even if it’s only a trip to the jail.

With any luck, this will be the largest such protest yet, large enough that it may provide a real spark. If you want to participate with us, you need to go through a short course of non-violence training. This will be, to the extent it depends on us, an entirely peaceful demonstration, carried out in a spirit of hope and not rancor. We will be there in our dress clothes, and ask the same of you. There will be young people, people from faith communities, people from the coal fields of Appalachia, and from the neighborhoods in Washington that get to breathe the smoke from the plant.

We will cross the legal boundary of the power plant, and we expect to be arrested. After that we have no certainty what will happen, but lawyers and such will be on hand. Our goal is not to shut the plant down for the day—it is but  one of many, and anyway its operation for a day is not the point. The worldwide daily reliance on coal is the danger; this is one small step to raise awareness of that ruinous habit and hence help to break it.

Thank you,

Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben