It is very flattering that Andrew Bolt takes a special interest in my scientific research.  In his latest posting, his whipped his fan club into a frenzy over some graphics from my 1999 paper.  I gave a copy of this paper to him when I met him last year hoping that he would understand it.

But, surprise surprise, my good friend Andrew Bolt has stuffed up again.  I guess he stuffs up when it comes to political predictions, his understanding of complex issues like the stolen generation, as well as his ability to understand science.  Whilst I don’t hold the above against him (pedalling disinformation seems to be quite profitable for him!), but I do think we need to clarify the details:

Andrew has made a meal out of the fact that we have not seen bleaching every second year, as might be predicted from this figure.  The predictions were made by taking the known thresholds to coral bleaching (which are hard and fast, and are the basis for very successful satellite tools that can predict coral bleaching) and combining it with the best climate modelling available at the time.  The net conclusion is that mass coral bleaching will increase over the next few decades until it becomes a yearly event (well, as long as coral lasts!). This is a logical conclusion of the two data sets.

The details of exactly when and where this occurs, is associated by a huge amount of variability which is otherwise known as the weather.  In response to him on his Blog, I wrote to him (I don’t think he is going to post it because it runs counter to the opinions of his sycophantic fan club!):

“At this point in the research, we know that coral bleaching will occur at a particular temperature within a particular region.  We also have the predictions of how the sea temperature will change, and hence the only at this point is that, round about 2015 or so (give or take 5-10 years), we will start to see the risk of coral bleaching increase until every second year as a bleaching event and so on.

I suspect because of the variability that an unambiguous resolution of this will not occur until you and I are celebrating our 61st birthdays on September 26, 2020.  I personally do not look forward to that day because all of the evidence suggests that the scientific community is correct in this assessment and conclusion.  At that point, we will be mourning the significant features of the Great Barrier Reef.”

A few days ago a journalist from one of the major British newspapers contacted me for my opinion on the IPCC review process, and I thought that i’d post my response here for a bit of clarity:

1.      Do you have concerns about science, data or claims presented in the final draft of the IPCC AR4 report? If so, please detail.

I do not have any major concerns except to point out that the IPCC AR4 is probably a little behind the latest science due to its careful review process and it requires the consensus of the wide array of experts involved.   The other major reason for saying this lies in the fact that the assessment reports of the IPCC are only published every 5 years or so.  The science of climate change is continuously and rapidly changing, hence reports get out of date very quickly.

Perhaps the best example of the fact that the IPCC is conservative in its predictions with the fact that AR4 failed to predict the sudden and precipitous drop of the Arctic summer sea ice.  This was not the fault of the highly qualified scientists involved, but a consequence of the fact that predictions like this are often highly controversial and, despite being true, require greater scientific investigation before all members of the IPCC expert teams involved are willing to sign on to them.  Hence, the IPCC process is an inherently conservative one, which has enormous significance to our understanding of the risk of a rapidly changing climate.

2.      Clearly the recent revelations and apology have dented public confidence in the IPCC’s process, what can the IPCC do to restore confidence in its findings for future reports?

Whereas the recent cherry-picking by a well supported denialist movement may have dented the public’s confidence in the IPCC process, the scientific community still stands behind the IPCC process.   I think that it would be very useful for journalists such as yourself to outline the process of coming to a conclusion on both sides of the debate.  On one side, you have well supported consensus science while on the other, you have non-peer-reviewed conclusions, bias and conjecture. Personally, if the public did actually see this, I don’t think they would be so much confusion.

One of the last points that make in response to your question, is that the IPCC is continuously reviewing the way that it goes about its processes.  This is a good strategy, whether you are making aircraft, manufacturing kitchen equipment or reviewing the latest science from the IPCC.  In the next few months, there are a number of documents that will be released from the IPCC (the result of review committees since AR4) that will recommend improvements to the IPCC process as we move towards AR5.  Clearly an organisation that is serious about quality and excellence undergoes such adaptive self improving reviews and procedures on a regular basis – the result being consistent with the IPCC’s mission statement of transparency, objectivity and honesty in reporting the latest science.

3.      Do you still have confidence in the chair and vice-chairs of the IPCC or should they stand down from their positions? Please also give a short explanation for your answer?

Personally, I have the utmost confidence in Dr Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC vice chairs.  The sustained attack by the denialist movement have done nothing to demonstrate that Dr. Pachauri or the vice chairs have not fulfilled their IPCC duties to a high level of excellence. Attempts to undermine a couple of statements within the AR4 of the IPCC do not constitute reasons for not taking the other 99.99% of the carefully reviewed and supported science extremely seriously.

Perhaps it is useful to look at the standards on the other side of the ‘debate’.  The recent book by the denialist Ian Plimer from the University of Adelaide (“Heaven and Earth) had so many errors and falsely supported references that one university professor commented that the book would fail outright if it had been submitted as a Ph.D. thesis.

4.       Should the AR4 be reviewed in detail to check for other errors, particularly given that it is a document designed to help governments and officials make policy decisions that can impact both the environment and on people’s lives?

It is important to already realise that the IPCC is already a review document – its role already is to bring together the conclusions of thousands of scientific studies.  It also has a clear and transparent process and a excellent track record of reporting the latest scientific consensus accurately (see above).  This is unparalleled by any other source of information (compare it to the convicted felon and chief scientist Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute for example).   In my opinion, as someone who knows the IPCC process and its outputs well, I don’t think a detailed review would find more than vanishingly small number of poorly supported or erroneous statements, among thousands of scientific statements that are robustly supported.

However, given the extreme importance of climate change to government decision-making, it would be important in my opinion for any government or decision-making body using the IPCC process to apply due diligence – to explore it and be satisfied with its accuracy, objectivity and thoroughness.

According to a report from the Nature Conservancy, the coral reefs are suffering this winter in the Florida Keys following a cold snap:

Sustained cold water temperatures in South Florida and the Florida Keys triggered severe coral bleaching and even coral death, alerting resource managers and prompting a coordinated assessment response from the science community. Temperatures in some nearshore areas of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary dropped to 52 degrees Fahrenheit for several days — well below average for this time of year — with fatal results for some corals.

A cold-water bleaching and die-off hasn’t occurred in Florida since the late 1970s.

“The Keys have not seen a cold-water bleaching event like this since the winter of 1977-78, when acres of staghorn coral perished,” said Dr. Billy Causey, southeast regional director of NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. “But today we are better prepared to document and assess the impacts of stress thanks to numerous partners.” Causey has lived and worked in the Keys since 1971.

On Coral List, Lew Gramer from the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory suggests that the cold snap might have lasting impacts:

Recent reports have surfaced among scientists, resource managers, and the media of large-scale, multi-species fish kills that have been primarily limited to shallow-water environments in Florida and Biscayne Bay.

Coral mortality has been reported from south Florida when water temperatures previously declined to 14 degrees Celsius, or below. While temperatures on offshore reef environments have been > 17-18 deg C (likely due to oceanic influence from the Florida Current), shallow-water and nearshore environments have fallen well below 14 deg C (e.g., 10-11 deg C near Long Key). It is expected that there will be some cold-water bleaching and potential for mortality in shallow-water corals and other reef organisms.

Tom Opishinski from Interactive Oceanographics posted a followup:

Our station at the Smithsonian Marine Lab in Ft. Pierce recorded a low of ~9.25 deg C in the IRL on 1/11.  A bit away from the corals but the record nicely shows the cooling trend corresponding to a 10 deg C drop occurring over a 2 week period.  Data can be accessed/viewed at http://nmnhmp.riocean.com/fp_raw.php – the plot will default to show water temperature then select “2 weeks” for the time period.

I thought this was worth posting (via ABC News): Professor Andy Pitman (lead author on the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports and co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales) thoughts on the ongoing efforts of climate denialists to derail the IPCC:

“Climate scientists are losing the fight with the sceptics”

“The sceptics are so well funded, so well organised. “They have nothing else to do. They don’t have day jobs so they can put all their efforts into misinforming and miscommunicating climate science to the general public, whereas the climate scientists have day jobs and [managing publicity] actually isn’t one of them.

“All of the efforts you do in an IPCC report is done out of hours, voluntarily, for no funding and no pay, whereas the sceptics are being funded to put out full-scale misinformation campaigns and are doing a damn good job, I think.

“They are doing a superb job at misinforming and miscommunicating the general public, state and federal governments.”

And he says if scientists lose the climate change debate, it would be “potentially catastrophic”.

“If this was academic debate over some trivial issue [it wouldn’t matter],” he said.

“But this isn’t. This is absolutely a fundamental problem for the Earth that we desperately needed full-scale international action on a decade ago.

“We are now 10 years too late to stop some of the major impacts that we will see and have seen as a consequence of global warming. It is not a future problem, it is a problem here today, around us.”

Professor Pitman has accused sceptics of failing to base their arguments on the facts.

“Most of the climate sceptics, particularly those that are wandering around publicly at the moment, don’t base their arguments on science,” he said.

“They have probably never read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report; they aren’t writing papers in peer-reviewed literature.

“They don’t update their arguments when their arguments are shown to be false, so they’ll have no problem at all using this ammunition inappropriately and out of context to further their aims in exactly the same way as people did when they were trying to disprove the relationship between smoking and human health.

Professor Pitman has also played down the significance of the error in the IPCC’s report.

“There are two paragraphs that have been questioned in a 1600-page document,” he said.

“After two years, people have been going over that report with considerable care and have found a couple of errors of fact in a 1600-page document.

“I mean, we ought to be talking about the other 1599 pages that no one has found any problems with.”

Professor Pitman says he has no concerns about the IPCC’s reviewing process.

“We should be very clear on what the IPCC does. It writes a report that is fully open to external review. [Anybody] can each read over individual sections of the report and send in credible comments,” he said.

“So each government tries to pore over each of the statements to find fault with them and at the end of that process, future drafts are produced, again with opportunities for external examination and feedback.

“And you end up with a final report, which in this case some people have found one or two errors with after two years.

“I reckon that is a standard that most organisations would absolutely celebrate.”

The latest slandering of climate science in the press has been dubbed ‘glaciergate‘ – about the Himalayan glacial melt issue (see David Spratt’s response here). I don’t get quite why the denialist crowd seem to revel in non-issues, when there is much else to criticise about the IPCC, and much more obvious knowledge gaps in our understanding of climate as a whole.  Nature has a very detailed discussion of these ‘holes’ in climate science (regional climate forecasts, precipitation forecasts, aerosols and palaeoclimate data). It’s refreshing to see such a well written and open article discussing these gaps and ‘problem areas’ – as one scientist warned recently:

“This climate of suspicion we’re working in is insane. It’s drowning our ability to soberly communicate gaps in our science.”

Ever laughed at the deniers who claim that climate scientists are in it for the money? Why not ask this: to what extent are the climate change deniers profiting from pedaling their anti-science spin? Just ask Lord Monckton, when his industry disinformation campaign hits the Australian shores this month:

Mr Smit said getting Lord Monckton to Australia came at a substantial cost and he was appealing to supporters for donations. “We have to fly Lord Monkton to Australia, cover all his domestic travel and accommodation and provide a stipend of $20,000 [£11,500],” he said. “Our aim is to cover these costs from donations from individuals, appropriate associations and corporations. We expect the required total to be about $100,000. We would like to keep the cost of admission to Monckton’s lectures to around $20 to maximise the number of people that will come to hear him. We have already had a number of offers of $1,000 and would prefer donations to be of that order, but of course any amount is very welcome. Should there be a surplus, this, depending on the amount, will be given to Lord Monckton and/or the Climate Sceptics Party which is assisting with this project.” (Read more from the Noosa Journal)

A stipend of $20k? For 14 days work? Profitable! Not bad for a man according to Crikey proclaims to:

… be a member of the House of Lords (well, he once tried to become one), to be a Nobel Laureate (he wrote a letter to the IPCC which won a Nobel Prize, a connection close enough for him to commission his own gold Nobel prize pin), to have single-handedly won the Falklands War (he persuaded the British Army to use germ warfare on the Argies), and to have invented a cure for Graves’ disease, multiple sclerosis, influenza, food poisoning, and HIV.

Here’s betting that Andrew Bolt will pen a column proclaiming Monckton as Australia’s saviour by the end of January! See Tim Lambert’s blog for a skillful deconstruction of Monckton’s previous climate nonsense.