The Warring Climate Tribes

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An Aug. 23 article by Andrew Revkin in the New York Times set the stage this week for one of the most crystalline examples I’ve seen of the tribal nature of the climate wars.

Revkin’s piece was about Roger Pielke Sr.’s resignation from a panel set up to try to help sort out confusion over tropospheric climate trends. Here’s how Revkin launched into the subject:

A scientist who has long disagreed with the dominant view that global warming stems mainly from human activity has resigned from a panel that is completing a report for the Bush administration on temperature trends in the atmosphere. (emphasis added)

That’s tribal talk, placing Pielke Sr. firmly in the camp of those labeled “Skeptics,” and the Colorado scientist clearly didn’t like it. On his blog, he fired back, denying that he held any such tribal affiliation:

To state that I have “long disagreed..that global warming stems from human activity” is a completely erroneous characterization of my perspective.

Point taken, evil MSM wrong again, etc. etc. But then, in the comments, it got just plain weird when William Connolley, a guy I usually respect on this stuff, all but demanded that Pielke Sr. take a sort of tribal loyalty oath:

To clear this up, I?d be interested to know if you accept the IPCC conclusion most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities?

Pielke Sr., a veteran climate researcher, holds a nuanced view – that, while greenhouse gas emissions are an important contributor to human effects on climate, land use changes are even more important. In a series of posts that followed, he laid it out in brief, including a link to a 2001 piece in EOS arguing that the land use work he and others have done “suggest(s) that humans have an even greater effect on climate than is suggested by the IPCC.”

Once Pielke Sr. had shown sufficient fealty, Connolley welcomed him back to a seat around the tribal fire, and I was again left wondering why we spend so much time trying to define who’s a member of which tribe rather than talking about the climate.

(Update 8/26 10 a.m. – fixed a stray “Jr.” in there.)
(Update II 8/26 6:30 p.m. – the disagreement between Revkin and Pielke Sr. seems worked out, and the comments have been deleted)

Drought?

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The latest Southwest Climate Outlook from the CLIMAS project has some interesting tidbits:

  • 2005 was the worst fire year in recorded history in Arizona
  • despite the wet early part of the year, significant parts of the southwest are still in drought
  • the monsoon has favored Arizona, but been weak across New Mexico
  • there’s more water in the reservoirs than last year at this time, but they’re still well behind “normal” for this time of year
  • El Ni?o isn’t offering any promise of relief in the coming winter

(click through for my attempt to ‘splain some more about the El Ni?o stuff)
Continue reading ‘Drought?’ »

The Climate Ratchet

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What made us human is one of the great questions. “Climate” provides an interesting possible answer, and there’s new evidence to bolster the case

A new paper in Science last week(1) identifies strong climatic variability in eastern Africa during the time hominid evolution was lurching toward humanity.

In the long run, eastern Africa was getting drier. But superimposed on that trend, according to the research by Martin Trauth and his colleagues, were a series of pronounced wet spells. Trauth et al. looked at lake sediments, and were able to identify “humid periods” – periods of on order 100,000 years when the lakes got big.

The idea here – it’s called the “variability hypothesis” – is that varying climatic conditions favored more adaptable proto-humans, clever enough perhaps to survive under changing environmental conditions.

More at Scientific American and the BBC. Also, Peter deMenocal, a climate researcher at Lamont Doherty, had a nice review last year in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

1. M. H. Trauth, M. A. Maslin, A. Deino, M. R. Strecker, Science, 1112964 (August 18, 2005, 2005).

New Mexico Moment

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It was one of those New Mexico-I-wish-I-had-a-camera moments. Just as well I didnt, come to think of it, what with the fact that I was driving in heavy traffic and stuff. Plus I’m not much of a photographer, so it likely wouldn’t have lived up to itself.

I spent the early evening yesterday out on the west mesa, by the volcanoes, at the Double Eagle Time Trial. It’s a summer bike racing series that goes back 20 years. I wasn’t racing, but went to help out and hang with my bike buds.

The site, out on Paseo del Volcan by the new mattress factory, is beautiful, one of those wonderful New Mexico vistas where you get pretty close to a 360-degree horizon – Sandias, Manzanos, the volcanoes to the north. It was cloudy and windy and cool, stormy all around, but it didn’t really rain on us.

As I was driving home, the freeway was closed so they detoured us onto Central – old Route 66 for you romantics. Just as I was crossing the Rio Grande, the sun slipped under the cloud deck and lit up the bosque with a rich sunset yellow beneath a grey cloud sky. It was magnificent.

As I headed up into the heights, the same sun was lighting up the whole of the Sandias. I broke my “no cell phone in the car” rule – just this once – and called Mom to make sure she and Dad weren’t missing it out their big picture window.

They weren’t.

Daybook

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books/computers: As part of my struggle to become more conversant with statistics, I’m working my way through Data Analysis and Graphics Using R. The cool kids (the ClimateAudit crew and Amman and Wahl) have been publishing their paleoclimate code in R. It’s free software, which I like for both political and practical reasons. It’s relatively straightforward to use. It’s a full-up programming language, which for me works better as a learning tool than the pointy-and-clickly JMP, with which I’d also been playing. The R Project.

movies: Kasparov and the Machine, a retrospective documentary about Garry Kasparov’s 1997 loss to Deep Blue. I’ve also thought the whole “humanity versus machine” angle of the match overblown. There are all sorts of tasks where the speed of computers makes them better suited for tasks than the human brain. (See statistics, above.) Chess as played by humans has long seemed ill-suited because of the importance of pattern recognition and the resistance of chess to brute forcing. But sooner or later someone will/is gonna come up with hardware and software that finally overcomes the barrier and uses brute forcing cleverly enough. I assumed that had happened in 1997 with Deep Blue. Kasparov and his people suggest that may not be what happened, that the evil IBM may have cheated. Whatever. Fun film.

cycling: Rode for an hour yesterday morning in the cool moist monsoon morning air, out the bike trail from my neighborhood, where I’ve ridden a couple of times a week for time immemorial. It was lovely. It’s still not normal bike riding at all. As with walking, I’m hyper aware of my right leg, because it doesn’t feel right. But day by day it feels less wrong. One of the interesting things I’ve noticed is how much I use my feet, clipped into the pedals, as one point of contact in holding onto the bike itself.

evolution: The little finches are back, a bird small enough to sit on the sunflower stalks and reach over to eat the seeds. L and I sat in the backyard with lunch today watching the bigger birds – sparrows and the like – can’t pull off this trick, which means the sunflower feast is largely left for the little finches. I’m pretty sure it’s the lesser goldfinch.

Some Park Math

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Walking the dog around my park this evening around sunset, I was struck by the number of people out enjoying it. So I started counting:

  • two soccer games (including one on the tennis courts)
  • two volleyball games
  • one rugby game (match?)
  • something like 70 people

It’s a well-used park.

Satellites and Stuff

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As an inadvertent card-carrying climate blogger (or maybe it was advertent) I feel some obligation to make note of the trio of papers published today in Science that attempt to settle nagging discrepencies between the satellite temperature record and the models. The fact that the satellite data disagrees with climate models, showing less warming in the lower troposphere than at the surface, has been one of the key arrows in the climate skeptics quiver, so this is an important bit of climate wars science.

The RealClimate people have taken a crack at it, and the LiveScience story on MSNBC captures the key climate wars significance in its headline: “Key claim against global warming evaporates.” Andrew Revkin at the New York Times also has a good explanation.

But – credit where credit is due – the most useful explanation I read this evening came from Roy Spencer at Tech Central Station. Just when I’d finished savaging Spencer over on my work blog, he’s come through with a relatively straightforward and easy-to-digest explanation. It praises papers that offer strong disagreement with Spencer’s own previous work.

It’s worth pointing out that Spencer was not so charitable last time someone questioned his reading of the satellite data. When Qiang Fu published a paper last year in Nature suggesting a problem in the satellite numbers, Spencer savaged him: “Is the quality of peer review in the popular science journals getting worse? (The answer is ‘yes.’)” Now that the new papers suggest Fu was probably right, Spencer seems to have learned his lesson. This is refreshing. I was frankly dreading my bloggerly duty reading the back and forth on the new papers, because I expected them to stake out tiresomely familiar climate wars turf, but Spencer showed me wrong.

Spencer and John Christy, his University of Alabama colleague, seem to be sticking to their line that the warming detected is nothing to worry about. Christy, in Revkin’s story, calls it “modest.” But the argument that the satellite data shows little or no warming at all should now be a thing of the past.

Come Hear Me Yammer On

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Y’all in Albuquerque are invited to a talk next Tuesday evening by yours truly at Southwest Writers (click through for the when and where). It’s entitled “A Spectator to the Grand Adventure of our Time: Writing About Science.” The title’s based on a quote from Richard Feynman, except that I was doing it off the top of my head when I emailed the title of my talk to the organizer, and I got it wrong:

The work is not done for the sake of an application. It is done for the excitement of what is found out…. You cannot understand science and its relation to anything else unless you understand and appreciate the great adventure of our time. You do not live in your time unless you understand that this is a tremendous adventure and a wild and exciting thing.

(That’s Feynman from a series of lectures he gave in 1963 at the University of Washington, collected in the book The Meaning of it All.)

I’m having fun with this. I hope it works out. There’ll be some newspapering nuts and bolts in the talk, which is important context for a group of writers who will need to understand the constraints. But mostly I’m going to try to talk about the aesthetic of science – the great privilege I have to be paid to watch science happen, and the grist that provides.

As a bonus, for those who don’t fall asleep, I promise a Picasso reference. Watch and be amazed as I draw a thread through Galileo to Picasso and Voyager at Neptune (or fall on my rhetorical face trying – that may be the real fun).