Monthly Archives: March 2010

O.J. and the climate change deniers: guilty as charged

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This awesome essay is by Bill McKibben.  It originally appeared here and is being widely circulated. It is from his forthcoming book “Eaarth: Making a life on a tough new planet”.  I was in LA (doing my masters degree at CSUN) during the infamous OJ trials. Like everyone else around the world, I was shocked that a jury of peers could find him innocent given the overwhelming evidence against him. (and this is especially jarring given his recent quasi-confession). It was a stunning display of cognitive dissonance. The facts, more or less clearly presented, could not penetrate preconceived ideas and hardened socio-political biases. Doesn’t that pretty much sum up what is going on in the climate change “debate”?

The attack on climate science is the O.J. moment of the 21st century

by Bill McKibben

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from The Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal. “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.” And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet. Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil,” and last week the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning “a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome” on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin. If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.

Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: Fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet. At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress toward any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.

Climate-change denial as an O.J. moment

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: It was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning.  So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack theprocess, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.

If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: In closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated — a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: Virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.

Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climategate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made — that’s what Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) did, insisting the emails proved “scientific fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents “Hitler youth.” Such language filters down. I’m now used to a daily diet of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: “Nazi Moron Scumbag.”

If you’re smart, you can also take advantage of lucky breaks that cross your path. Say a record set of snowstorms hit Washington, D.C.  It won’t even matter that such a record is just the kind of thing scientists have been predicting, given the extra water vapor global warming is adding to the atmosphere. It’s enough that it’s super-snowy in what everyone swore was a warming world.

For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website, the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred posts poking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believe in, you know, physics. Morano, who really is good, posted a link to a live webcam so readers could watch snow coming down; his former boss, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had his grandchildren build an igloo on the Capitol grounds, with a sign that read: “Al Gore’s New Home.” These are the things that stick in people’s heads. If the winter glove won’t fit, you must acquit.

Why we don’t want to believe in climate change

The climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks to ExxonMobil and others with a vested interest in debunking climate-change research, their “think tanks” have plenty of money, none of which gets wasted doing actual research to disprove climate change. It’s also useful for a movement to have its own TV network, Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a few right-wing British tabloids that validate each new “scandal” and put it into media play.

That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February when even The New York Times ran a front page story, “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel,” which recycled most of the accusations of the past few months. What made it such a glorious testament to their success was the chief source cited by the Times: one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be called since he is some kind of British viscount.  He is also identified as a “former advisor to Margaret Thatcher,” and he did write a piece for the American Spectator during her term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for “the only way to stop AIDS”:

… screen the entire population regularly and … quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month … all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic — and now from above the fold in the paper of record.

Access to money and the media is not the only, or even the main, reason for the success of the climate deniers, though. They’re not actually spending all that much cash and they’ve got legions of eager volunteers doing much of the internet lobbying entirely for free. Their success can be credited significantly to the way they tap into the main currents of our politics of the moment with far more savvy and power than most environmentalists can muster. They’ve understood the popular rage at elites. They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control.

Some of that is, of course, purely partisan. The columnist David Brooks, for instance, recently said: “On the one hand, I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and it is manmade. On the other hand, I feel a frisson of pleasure when I come across evidence that contradicts the models … [in part] because I relish any fact that might make Al Gore look silly.” But the passion with which people attack Gore more often seems focused on the charge that he’s making large sums of money from green investments, and that the whole idea is little more than a scam designed to enrich everyone involved. This may be wrong — Gore has testified under oath that he donates his green profits to the cause — and scientists are not getting rich researching climate change (constant blog comments to the contrary), but it resonates with lots of people. I get many emails a day on the same theme: “The game is up. We’re on to you.”

When I say it resonates with lots of people, I mean lots of people. O.J.’s lawyers had to convince a jury made up mostly of black women from central city L.A., five of whom reported that they or their families had had “negative experiences” with the police. For them, it was a reasonably easy sell. When it comes to global warming, we’re pretty much all easy sells because we live the life that produces the carbon dioxide that’s at the heart of the crisis, and because we like that life.

Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, and given half a chance to think they don’t need to, they’ll take it. Especially when it sounds expensive, and especially when the economy stinks.Here’s David Harsanyi, a columnist for The Denver Post: “If they’re going to ask a nation — a world — to fundamentally alter its economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers’ credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.”

“Unassailable” sets the bar impossibly high when there is a dedicated corps of assailants out there hard at work. It is true that those of us who want to see some national and international effort to fight global warming need to keep making the case that the science is strong. That’s starting to happen.  There are new websites and iPhone apps to provide clear and powerful answers to the skeptic trash-talking, and strangely enough, the denier effort may, in some ways, be making the case itself: If you go over the multi-volume IPCC report with a fine-tooth comb and come up with three or four lousy citations, that’s pretty strong testimony to its essential accuracy.

Clearly, however, the antiseptic attempt to hide behind the magisterium of Science in an effort to avoid the rough-and-tumble of Politics is a mistake. It’s a mistake because science can be — and, in fact, should be — infinitely argued about. Science is, in fact, nothing but an ongoing argument, which is one reason why it sounds so disingenuous to most people when someone insists that the science is “settled.” That’s especially true of people who have been told at various times in their lives that some food is good for you, only to be told later that it might increase your likelihood of dying.

Why data isn’t enough

I work at Middlebury College, a topflight liberal arts school, so I’m surrounded by people who argue constantly. It’s fun. One of the better skeptical takes on global warming that I know about is a weekly radio broadcast on our campus radio station run by a pair of undergraduates. They’re skeptics, but not cynics. Anyone who works seriously on the science soon realizes that we know more than enough to start taking action, but less than we someday will. There will always be controversy over exactly what we can now say with any certainty. That’s life on the cutting edge. I certainly don’t turn my back on the research — we’ve spent the last two years at 350.org building what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally” around a previously obscure data point, the amount of atmospheric carbon that scientists say is safe, measured in parts per million.

But it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

So let’s figure out how to talk about it. Let’s look at ExxonMobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn’t pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.

Right now, there’s a bill in the Congress — cap-and-dividend, it’s called — that would charge Exxon for that right, and send a check to everyone in the country every month. Yes, the company would pass on the charge at the pump, but 80 percent of Americans (all except the top-income energy hogs) would still make money off the deal. That represents good science, because it starts to send a signal that we should park that SUV, but it’s also good politics.

By the way, if you think there’s a scam underway, you’re right — and to figure it out just track the money going in campaign contributions to the politicians doing the bidding of the energy companies. Inhofe, the igloo guy? Over a million dollars from energy and utility companies and executives in the last two election cycles. You think Al Gore is going to make money from green energy? Check out what you get for running an oil company.

Worried that someone is going to wreck your future? You’re right about that, too. Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They’re making the investments that mean future windmills and solar panels, even ones installed in this country, will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not Chicago.

Coal companies have already eliminated most good mining jobs, simply by automating them in the search for ever higher profits. Now, they’re using their political power to make sure that miners’ kids won’t get to build wind turbines instead. Everyone should be mighty pissed — just not at climate-change scientists.

But keep in mind as well that fear and rage aren’t the only feelings around. They’re powerful feelings, to be sure, but they’re not all we feel. And they are not us at our best.

There’s also love, a force that has often helped motivate large-scale change, and one that cynics in particular have little power to rouse. Love for poor people around the world, for instance. If you think it’s not real, you haven’t been to church recently, especially evangelical churches across the country. People who take the Gospel seriously also take seriously indeed the injunction to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless.

It’s becoming patently obvious that nothing challenges that goal quite like the rising seas and spreading deserts of climate change. That’s why religious environmentalism is one of the most effective emerging parts of the global warming movement; that’s why we were able to get thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times last October to signify what scientists say is the safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere; that’s why Bartholomew, patriarch of the Orthodox church and leader of 400 million eastern Christians, said, “Global warming is a sin and 350 is an act of redemption.”

There’s also the deep love for creation, for the natural world. We were born to be in contact with the world around us and, though much of modernity is designed to insulate us from nature, it doesn’t really work. Any time the natural world breaks through — a sunset, an hour in the garden — we’re suddenly vulnerable to the realization that we care about things beyond ourselves. That’s why, for instance, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are so important: Get someone out in the woods at an impressionable age and you’ve accomplished something powerful. That’s why art and music need to be part of the story, right alongside bar graphs and pie charts. When we campaign about climate change at 350.org, we make sure to do it in the most beautiful places we know, the iconic spots that conjure up people’s connection to their history, their identity, their hope.

The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re not completely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove every possible doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocent man in a jail cell is a scandal, but outside of it we should act more conservatively.

In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they’ll be a footnote to history. (Hey, even O.J. is finally in jail.) But they’ll lose because we’ll all lose, because by delaying action, they will have helped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while there’s still time. If we’re going to make real change while it matters, it’s important to remember that their skepticism isn’t the root of the problem. It simply plays on our deep-seated resistance to change. That’s what gives the climate cynics ground to operate. That’s what we need to overcome, and at bottom that’s a battle as much about courage and hope as about data.

Marine noise pollution and seamount destruction highlighted at AAAS meeting

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Science magazine’s awesome blog, ScienceNow, just held a contest for the best bloggers covering the 2010 AAAS meeting.  The third place winner Daniel Stolte, a science writer at the University of Arizona, made two excellent posts on two very depressing aspects of ocean degradation.  The first, “Blinded by the Noise”, is on marine noise pollution interfering with whale communication and the second, Oases of Life in Perpetual Darkness”, is about the destruction of ocean seamounts via bottom trawling. Ill excerpt them below, but both are worth reading in full.

Blinded by the Noise

A new visualization reveals the dramatic impact of shipping traffic on Right Whales in New England

Before the invention of the Diesel engine, life was good for the Right Whales living off the coast of Boston. For thousands of years, the calls and songs they produced to keep track of each other over great distances were the only sounds probing the murky depths.

“The place in which these animals live is defined not only in terms of space, but in terms of sound – they live in an acoustic habitat,” says Christopher Clark from Cornell University, who has been listening in on the whales to get a better understanding of how noise impacts their acoustic habitat. “Imagine living in a village where people can’t see each other or where they’re going. They have to rely on sounds and calls to keep track of each other and go about their lives.”

Once a shire shrouded in peace and quiet, the Right Whales’ village has since been drowning in the cacophony of cargo ships’ and ocean liners’ propellers that churn the waters

Using an array of underwater listening devices installed on the sea floor, Clark and his research team have been able to record and monitor the sounds that define the Right Whales’ acoustic seascape over long periods of time.

What the researchers found is alarming: Just like terrestrial habitats shrink in space, the whales’ acoustic habitat is being destroyed.

“Each time a ship passes through the area, the acoustic habitat around the whales basically collapses,” Clark says.

And see our post on the effects of ocean acidification on marine acoustics here

Oases of Life in Perpetual Darkness: Seamounts are being destroyed faster than they are discovered

Unlike on land, where every peak, every mountain, every hill and every valley has been discovered, described and mapped, the deep ocean floor, which makes up the largest portion of the earth’s crust, is mostly terra incognita. Exactly how many seamounts there are and where, nobody knows.

“We estimate there are fifty thousand or more seamounts out there,” says Hall-Spencer, a lecturer at the University of Plymouth in the U.K and a member of the project CenSeam, a census exploring seamounts and the marine life associated with the newly discovered oases beneath the sea. “But less than 0.1 percent of them have been surveyed.”

Only problem: even faster than seamounts are being discovered, they are being destroyed, and with them entire ecosystems that we hardly know anything about.

big threat comes from destructive fishing practices. In the 1970s, fishing fleets struck unexpected riches below their hulls. Whenever they hauled their nets near the slopes of a seamount, chances were they came back on board bursting at the seams, spilling hundreds of tons of deep-sea fish across the deck. Because of their stark topography, seamounts attract large numbers and unusually diverse arrays of marine life.

“Some seamounts are so big that they divert ocean currents upward and send them swirling over the top,” says Hall-Spencer. The resulting vortices trap plankton and other drifting organic matter and concentrate it on the mountain.

“One trawl bulldozes deep-sea coral forests that took more than 4,000 years to grow in some cases,” says Hall-Spencer. “Since most known seamounts are being trawled we have to ask ourselves whether the catches are worth the destruction of seamount habitats?”

His next slide, in the brief and factual language of science states what should give us the only necessary clue to find the answer: “Worldwide catches landed each year: 80 million tons. Estimated total seamounts catch (read: ALL seamount catches EVER MADE, taken together) 2 – 2.5 million tons, a fraction that seems meaningless in the big picture.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rb5HzR26OM&w=640&h=385]

LA sushi bars busted for serving whale

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Shock!  Somehow that Sei whale meat from Japan’s “scientific” whale hunt has found its way onto the plates of an LA sushi bar!  And giving this story an odd twist is the fact that the bust was initiated by hollywood activists that produced The Cove.

From the NYT: Oscar winners try to keep whale off sushi plates

with video cameras and tiny microphones, the team behind Sunday’s Oscar-winning documentary film “The Cove” orchestrated a Hollywood-meets-Greenpeace-style covert operation to ferret out what the authorities say is illegal whale meat at one of this town’s most highly regarded sushi destinations.

Their work, undertaken in large part here last week as the filmmakers gathered for the Academy Awards ceremony, was coordinated with law enforcement officials, who said Monday that they were likely to bring charges against the restaurant, the Hump, for violating federal laws against selling marine mammals.

The sushi sting actually began in October, when the documentary’s associate producer and “director of clandestine operations,” Charles Hambleton, heard from friends in the music industry that the Hump, a highly rated sushi restaurant next to the runway at the Santa Monica airport, was serving whale.

Mr. Hambleton, who has worked as a water safety consultant on Hollywood movies like “Pirates of the Caribbean,” created a tiny camera for two animal-activist associates to wear during a monster session of omakase — a sushi meal in which the chef picks all the dishes.

Video of their meal shows the two activists, both vegan, being served what the waitress can be heard calling “whale” — thick pink slices — that they take squeamish bites of before tossing into a Ziploc bag in a purse.

The samples were sent to Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. Professor Baker said DNA testing there revealed that the samples sent to him were from a Sei whale, which are found worldwide and are endangered but are sometimes hunted in the North Pacific under a controversial Japanese scientific program. “I’ve been doing this for years,” Professor Baker said. “I was pretty shocked.”

Serving unusual fish imported from Japan is the hallmark of many high-end sushi restaurants here, and whale meat is often found in Japanese markets, Professor Baker said. But he said he had never heard of it being served in an American restaurant.

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More on those Siberian methane seeps

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Last week I made a post about a new paper on methane seeping from the Arctic seafloor.  Since then, there have been several new posts on other sites about the work, putting it into a broader perspective and also taking somewhat contradictory views of the implications of the finding. The fear is that rapid methane release is considered one plausible mechanism that could lead to abrupt climate change via various positive feedbacks in the climate system.  As Nick Sundt points out (here)

A report released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Abrupt Climate Change, said in December 2008 (during the Bush Administration) that warming in the Arctic could cause sea levels to rise substantially beyond scientists’ previous predictions and could result in massive releases of methane.  The report said that the “rapid release to the atmosphere of methane trapped in permafrost and on continental margins” was among “four types of abrupt change in the paleoclimatic record that stand out as being so rapid and large in their impact that if they were to recur, they would pose clear risks to society in terms of our ability to adapt.”

Also see lead author, Natalia Shakhova, explain the work in this video:

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First, Skeptical Science has a brief but clear explanation of the study (here).

Second, Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a long and very nice post putting the study into the broader context of methane-AGW research and also nicely summarizing the related issue of terrestrial Arctic permafrost thawing.

Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane.  Methane is  is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!

The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“).  Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below).  No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.

Third, David Archer made a post at Real Climate about the work, poking at the idea that rapidly increasing methane concentration could be a game changer, arguing that CO2 is still the big kahuna.

Methane is like the radical wing of the carbon cycle, in today’s atmosphere a stronger greenhouse gas per molecule than CO2, and an atmospheric concentration that can change more quickly than CO2 can. There has been a lot of press coverage of a new paper in Science this week called “Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”, which comes on the heels of a handful of interrelated methane papers in the last year or so. Is now the time to get frightened?

No. CO2 is plenty to be frightened of, while methane is frosting on the cake. Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the brake pedal is broken. This is CO2. Then you figure out that the accelerator has also jammed, so that by the time you hit the truck in front of you, you will be going 90 miles per hour instead of 60. This is methane. Is now the time to get worried? No, you should already have been worried by the broken brake pedal. Methane sells newspapers, but it’s not the big story, nor does it look to be a game changer to the big story, which is CO2.

All three posts point out correctly that lacking time series data, there is no way to know whether the this methane flux is new and/or a result of global warming:

What’s missing from these studies themselves is evidence that the Siberian shelf degassing is new, a climate feedback, rather than simply nature-as-usual, driven by the retreat of submerged permafrost left over from the last ice age. However, other recent papers speak to this question. – David Archer

Finally, the National Science Foundation issued a press release and a fact sheet on the paper.

“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center. “Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”

Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova’s research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.

“Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already,” she said. “If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.”

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters (164 feet) or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth’s history. During the Earth’s coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.

“It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen,” Shakhova said. “Nobody considered this huge area.”

The fact sheet is a nice intro to the role of methane in global warming;

What is methane?

Methane is a naturally-occurring compound that is created when organic material, such as the remains of plants and animals, rot or otherwise break down. Bacteria and other microbes play a large role in processes that produce methane. These methane-producing processes may, for example, occur in landfills as their contents age. And some animals release methane as their bodies digest their food.

Vast stores of methane are trapped in the permafrost of the Arctic–large swaths of land where the ground stays frozen. Because of climate change, some Arctic permafrost is showing signs of thawing. This thawed Arctic permafrost may release methane into the atmosphere.

Why does methane cause so much concern?

Like carbon dioxide, methane is a greenhouse gas. The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere inhibits the Earth’s heat from being released into space. Therefore, increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may cause the Earth’s temperature to increase over time.

Methane may be “stored” underground or under the seafloor as methane gas or methane hydrate; methane hydrate is a crystalline solid combining methane and water, which is stable at low temperatures and high pressure–conditions commonly found in marine sediments. When methane stores are released relatively quickly into the atmosphere, levels of atmospheric methane may rapidly spike.

As a greenhouse gas, methane is 30 times more potent (gram for gram) than carbon dioxide. This means that adding relatively modest amounts of methane to the atmosphere may yield relatively large impacts on climate.

How much methane does it take to increase warming?

There’s no clear answer to that question. However, the Earth’s geologic record indicates that atmospheric concentrations of methane have varied from about 0.3 to 0.4 parts per million during cold periods to about 0.6 to 0.7 parts per million during warm periods.

No Andrew, the Arctic is still melting.

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Professor David Karoly (one of Australia’s esteemed ARC Federation Fellows) wrote to several of us recently in frustration over the recent misinformation in the Courier Mail and on Andrew Bolt’s blog. As usual, Andrew and the News Ltd papers have cherry-picked their way through the truth. Here is what David wrote:

“I don’t like responding to all, and saturating others’ email inboxes, but the misinformation in John’s emails and the Andrew Bolt’s blog is as bad as ever.

Yes, there is more ice in winter than in summer (no surprise).
The long term trend of decreasing Artic sea ice amounts in winter and in summer, as described in the Wilkinson documentary, is continuing (see image below from NSIDC).”

Enough said. The data speak for themselves.

Climate emails inquiry: Fossil fuel industry consultant linked to physics body’s submission

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Evidence from Institute of Physics drawn from energy industry consultant who argues global warming is a religion
David Adams, Guardian , Thursday 4 March 2010 21.00 GMT

Evidence from a respected scientific body to a parliamentary inquiry examining the behaviour of climate-change scientists, was drawn from an energy industry consultant who argues that global warming is a religion, the Guardian can reveal.

The submission, from the Institute of Physics (IOP), suggested that scientists at the University of East Anglia had cherry-picked data to support conclusions and that key reconstructions of past temperature could not be relied upon.

The evidence was given to the select committee on science and technology, which is investigating emails from climate experts at the University of East Anglia that were released online last year.

The committee interviewed witnesses on Monday, including Phil Jones, the scientist from the university’s climatic research unit (CRU), who is at the heart of the controversy.

The Guardian has established that the institute prepared its evidence, which was highly critical of the CRU scientists, after inviting views from Peter Gill, an IOP official who is head of a company in Surrey called Crestport Services.

According to Gill, Crestport offers “consultancy and management support services … particularly within the energy and energy intensive industries worldwide”, and says that it has worked with “oil and gas production companies including Shell, British Gas, and Petroleum Development Oman”.

In an article in the newsletter of the IOP south central branch in April 2008, which attempted to downplay the role carbon dioxide plays in global warming, Gill wrote: “If you don’t ‘believe’ in anthropogenic climate change, you risk at best ridicule, but more likely vitriolic comments or even character assassination. Unfortunately, for many people the subject has become a religion, so facts and analysis have become largely irrelevant.”

In November Gill commented, on the Times Higher Education website: “Poor old CRU have been seriously hacked. The emails and other files are all over the internet and include how to hide atmospheric cooling.”

The institute submission accused the East Anglia university scientists of “apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements”. This appears to refer to an email sent by Jones in which he said he had used a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a temperature series derived from tree-ring data, but which refers to a widely known feature of that data.

The IOP evidence concluded that the emails had “worrying implications for the integrity of scientific research in this field”. That was used by climate sceptics to bolster claims that the email affair, dubbed “climategate”, showed the scientists did not behave properly and that the problem of global warming was exaggerated.

The IOP has already been forced to issue a clarification that the evidence does not undermine the scientific basis for climate change. But many experts think this does not go far enough.

In an open letter to the institute, Andy Russell, an IOP member who works on climate at the University of Manchester, says: “If the IOP continues to stand by this statement then I will have no other option but to reconsider my membership.” He says the allegation of data suppression is “incorrect and irresponsible”.

The institute says its evidence was based on suggestions from the energy subcommittee of its science board. It would not reveal who sat on this sub-commitee, but confirmed that Gill was a member.

A spokeswoman for the institute said Gill was not the main source of information nor did the evidence primarily reflect his views; other members of the sub-commitee were also critical of CRU. However the IOP would not reveal names because they would get “dragged into a very public and highly politicised debate”.

Gill told the Guardian he helped prepare the submission but many of his suggestions were not in the final document.

The IOP added that the submission was approved by three members of its science board, but would not reveal their names. The Guardian contacted several members of the board, including its chairman, Denis Weaire, a physicist at Trinity College Dublin. All said that they had little direct role in the submission.

The institute supplied a statement from an anonymous member of its science board, which said: “The institute should feel relaxed about the process by which it generated what is, anyway, a statement of the obvious.” It added: “The points [the submission] makes are ones which we continue to support, that science should be practised openly and in an unbiased way. However much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information, we believe the case for openness remains just as strong.”

Evan Harris, a member of the science and technology select committee, said: “Members of the Institute of Physics … may be concerned that the IOP is not as transparent as those it wishes to criticise.”

NOW he tells us: Andrew Bolt, changes position, admits planet is indeed warming

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No, it isn’t yet April 1.  See here.  You gotta love the bit about this all being a “long post-mini-ice-age warming”. But still, I admire his (partial) intellectual honesty. Well, maybe that is overly generous since there never actually was a “break” in the warming.

The post includes this figure (from here):

A few things are worth noting:

1) Even accepting the faulty logic of a short-term lack of change in the global temperature measurements being a “break in the warming”, looking at the graphic above, it doesn’t look like a decade-long break to me.  As even Bolt admits, 98 was really warm due to a strong El Nino.  The only recent cool period, is 2008.

2) I also noted that the figure helpfully labels excessively warming periods driven by a volcanic eruption and EL Nino, but fails to point out that the cooling in 2008 was caused by a strong La Nina.  Hence Hermits question (see below).

3) Finally, this exercise of tracking monthly temperatures is silly and unscientific.  I am ashamed to have partaken. It is like following daily polls in a election race. I need to be more rationale about all this!

Anything else?

As usual, the comments on Bolt’s blog are telling:

How can El Nino be a warming event? My understanding of El Nino is that it is the re-distribution of head from one part of the globe to another. Surely the net effect of El Nino should be zero globally!

I’ve always thought it was a grave tactical error for AGW skeptics to continually point to an apparent arrest in the temperature’s upwards trend.  It is always going to fluctuate up and down into the future.  Climate has always changed and will continue to do so.  This sort of data will be used by alarmists to shout “we wuz right all along yah yah”.

Sketics would be better advised to continue to chip away at the total lack of evidence that is it is increased CO2 in the atmosphere that is causing climate to change.

So what ,they cant change it ,and warm is way better than cold ,take a look at the march figures ,looks like its down again.

Very interesting. The question which comes to mind is why is the pattern so erratic.

Is there something inherently random in what the satellites are measuring? Are the satellites measuring the same part of the atmosphere each time?

If a known el nino and the mt pinataubo eruption produced displacements from the norm, then what has happening on the globe in the last year and a bit?

Hermit of Hermit Park
Sat 06 Mar 10 (08:23am)

Anybody want to tackle some of these?  Maybe someone with nothing better to do this weekend?  I love the ones about El Nino and the measured variability.

It is also telling that, so far, not one of the Boltites has questioned the new position their leader has handed down to the clan. Where are the free thinkers and radicals in this rebellion!

Update 1

I am proven wrong; several clan members are rebelling and blaming it all on El Nino. (see Bolts updates)

Update 2

See this comment from Marrcus of Perth:

How can it be warming with record amounts of snow and ice? Something odd is going on here. Has there been tampering with the data? Just wondering. It doesn’t add up.

Just amazing…

Even more:

I thought the the US, Canada, and Europe just had their coldest winters in 30 years.  Maybe temperature measuring devices were not working because they were frozen. Has this data been fudged?

Mike of Charters Towers (Reply)
Sat 06 Mar 10 (09:34am)

The Earth is doing what it normally does, we have had years of no change, then we have had years of a slight cooling, now we are seeing a bit of warming. It’s all natural.

LH of Brisbane (Reply)
Sat 06 Mar 10 (09:34am)

The Climate Change Gamble – or what happened to the precautionary principle?

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The words “climate change” are now on the lips of almost every Australian. Plug these words into Google and you get 3.3 million hits for Australian pages, nearly a million more hits than for “health care”.  Australians talk about climate change, but for a variety of reasons. Some of us are concerned, some are skeptical, some of us don’t care and some don’t know what information to believe. The issue is enormous and the challenge seems insurmountable. To make a bad thing worse, the topic has recently been blurred by email scandals involving a tricky scientist and anti-science campaigns. As a result, most Australians are left feeling confused and helpless on the topic of climate change. And I don’t blame you.  Rather than being a real environmental issue, global climate change has become something most Australians have chosen to either believe in or not believe in, almost as if it were a new religion. Taking appropriate action on climate change is hard given the conflicting information.

The purpose of this column is to look beyond the climate change debate and help you appreciate the problem at its core, and to let you draw some conclusions yourself independently of the confusion. First, let’s take a quick look at the evidence, and although I am a scientist I will not need to use science predictions, just three simple facts.  Fact 1 – we are currently pumping 8-9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere per year. This is an accounting exercise – not science.  Fact 2 – since 1960, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by more than 30%. Again, this is a simple observation. Fact 3 – the recent decade is the warmest ever measured by instruments from more than a thousand stations around the globe. Note, simple measurements with thermometers – not complicated science that can be argued with. So, based on these three facts, I pose the question:  is it likely that the activity of people is changing the world’s atmosphere?  And perhaps a more important question – if we are likely to be the cause of this trend do we have a responsibility to do something about it?  Even if there is some doubt about just how much our carbon dioxide emissions will heat up the atmosphere and how that will affect weather, bush fires and sea level rise (the science of climate change predictions I have spared you here), should we choose to listen to the climate-change skeptics and deniers when they tell us to go pump that oil, mine that coal, drive that big car and crank up that air con?  Or should we adopt the precautionary principle?  We are good at taking precautions at the scale of individuals, families or small communities but less so on global environmental issues. Say there‘s a chance your kids will get sun burnt on a trip to the beach, you slip slap slop them with +30 and buy them hats. It’s an expense, but a good investment in the kid’s future health. If the sparky says an electrical installation needs to be repaired or else your house might burn down, you’re likely to get it fixed or you’ll be deemed irresponsible. Responsible mums and dads would not choose to listen to people who say that slip-slap-slopping is a waste of time and that the science of sun-related skin cancer may have uncertainties. We don’t gamble with our kid’s health and future. Since there’s no aggressive anti-sunscreen movement out there keeping the sunscreen experts on their toes, then why all this deep passion for defaming the climate change science?  The reason is big $$. I am not asking you to pick a side in this so-called debate, but consider another simple fact:  There is far more short-term profit to be gained from climate-change denial than from climate-change science and acceptance. Human-made climate change has its roots in the burning of fossil fuels, and multi-billion dollar industries would benefit from the continued burning of oil and coal. If individuals and governments are to adopt the precautionary principle on global climate change and not gamble with our future, then we need to be more critical about our sources and quality of information. The scientific evidence pointing to likely severe climate change during this century is overwhelming. Although there is uncertainty in the predictions of just how bad things are going to get if we don’t cut emissions, that uncertainty is not greater than the uncertainty of the health risks associated with smoking. In this analogy the World is a chain smoker. As the body of climate change evidence grows stronger, so does the ferocity and intensity of the anti-science smear campaigns. Their purpose is to prevent a clear and unanimous call for action that would result in the rapid phasing out of fossil-fuel dependent industries. As long as the climate change issue is something we can choose to believe in or not believe in, it is as real as Santa Clause, UFOs and Fairies, and people are unable to make informed choices or take guided actions. We listen to doctors when we get sick, go to dentists when our teeth fall out, take our car to the mechanic when it breaks down and call lawyers when we need legal help. Some doctors and lawyers might be dodgy, but we don’t dismiss the medical and legal systems on that account. When the global climate is showing signs of trouble, responsible governments and individuals should adopt the precautionary principle as they do at home and be guided by the clear evidence and the odds rather than by the she’ll-be-right skepticism.

Methane seeps rise from Siberian sea shelves

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From today’s LA Times, by Margot Roosevelt, original story is posted here

Carbon dioxide (C02) is the most prevalent greenhouse gas that is trapping heat in the atmosphere, warming the planet to what most climate scientists consider dangerous levels. But methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more powerful than CO2, has also been growing at an alarming rate, with concentrations more than doubling since pre-industrial times.

A paper published Thursday in the journal Science reveals that parts of the East Siberian continental shelf, which extends up to 1000 miles out into Arctic waters, show concentrations of methane in surface waters that are 100 times higher than expected. And in the air, more than 5,000 measurements taken by scientists on Russian icebreakers and on helicopters document methane levels more than four times higher than elsewhere in the Arctic basin.

The researchers, led by Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska, along with Swedish and Russian colleagues, found that the amount of methane seeping into the atmosphere from below the Arctic Ocean is comparable to previous emissions estimates for all the world’s oceans. The Arctic is warming faster than any other part of the planet, and scientists fear that methane emissions could rise even more dramatically in a feedback loop: As the atmosphere warms, the permafrost that has locked in methane gas in wetlands and beneath continental shelves melts, releasing more methane, which then warms the planet more.

“Wetlands and permafrost soils, including the subsea permafrost under the Arctic Ocean, contain at least twice the amount of carbon that is currently in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide,” Martin Heimann wrote in an article accompanying the paper. “Release of a sizeable fraction of this carbon as carbon dioxide and/or methane would lead to warmer atmospheric temperatures, causing yet more methane to be released.” The researchers recommend that their data be immediately incorporated into current assessments of how fast the Arctic is likely to warm in the near future.

And a  perspectives piece in Science by Martin Heimann us partially reprinted below:

Methane is, after water vapor and carbon dioxide, the third most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Its concentration in the atmosphere has more than doubled since preindustrial times. Human energy production and use, landfills and waste, cattle raising, rice agriculture, and biomass burning are considered responsible for this increase (1). However, 40% of current global methane sources are natural. Most natural emissions come from anaerobic decomposition of organic carbon in wetlands, with poorly known smaller contributions from the ocean, termites, wild animals, wildfires, and geological sources. Two observational studies now shed light on how these natural sources are changing in today’s changing climate (2, 3).

Ice core studies have shown that the natural methane sources must have changed substantially during the glacial cycles. How stable are they under global warming? Wetlands and permafrost soils, including the sub-sea permafrost under the Arctic Ocean, contain at least twice the amount of carbon that is currently in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Release of a sizable fraction of this carbon as carbon dioxide and/or methane would lead to warmer atmospheric temperatures, causing yet more methane to be released. It would thus create a positive feedback loop that amplifies global warming. However, observational evidence for such release on regional and global scales has been elusive.

On page 1246 of this issue, Shakhova et al. (2) report convincing evidence of methane outgassing from the Arctic continental shelf off northeastern Siberia (Laptev and East Siberian Sea), based on painstaking repeated surveys using Russian ice breakers between 2003 and 2008. In this region, the relatively shallow continental shelf extends up to 1000 km north of the coastline. The seabed consists of relict permafrost from the last glaciation (4), when sea levels were considerably lower than today. The permafrost layer contains substantial amounts of organic carbon and also traps methane seeping up from underneath. In the permafrost, the methane forms relatively stable methane hydrates, but warming of the seawater or a decrease in pressure by a reduction in sea level will destabilize the hydrates, releasing methane into the ocean waters (5).

Shakhova et al. now document large areas with surface waters that are highly supersaturated in methane; in some places, methane concentrations are more than 100 times as high as expected in equilibrium with the ambient atmosphere. Based on their extensive data set, the authors estimate an annual outgassing to the atmosphere of 8 x 1012 grams of carbon (8 Tg C) as methane from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf waters. Consistent with this, concurrent atmospheric concentration measurements on the ship and with a helicopter document methane levels up to four times as high as recorded elsewhere in the Arctic basin.