A

In the next few posts, I'll try to cover some of the most difficult questions. These are:

• What am I called? Stephen or Steve?
• What energy sources should we use? Is nuclear in or out?
• What are appropriate design principles for economic systems or policy changes?
• What theories of ethics and politics should we use?
• What is 'realism' when applied to politics?

I'm going to try to 'tie off' a few things.

Two items of interest this week. First, there is an atrocious paper that has just been published in JGR by McLean, de Freitas and Carter that is doing the rounds of the denialosphere. These authors make the completely unsurprising point that that there is a correlation between ENSO indices and global mean temperature – something that has been well known for decades – and then go on to claim that that all trends are explained by this correlation as well. This is somewhat surprising since their method of analysis (which involves taking the first derivative of any changes) eliminates the influence of any trends in the correlation. Tamino has an excellent demonstration of the fatuity of the statements in their hyped press-release and Michael Tobis deconstructs the details. For reference, we showed last year that the long term trends are still basically the same after you account for ENSO. Nevermore let it be said that you can’t get any old rubbish published in a peer-reviewed journal!

Second (and much more interestingly) there is an open call for anyone interested to contribute to setting the agenda for Earth System Science for the next couple of decades at the Visioning Earth Science website of the International Council for Science (ICS). This is one of the umbrella organisations that runs a network of committees and programs that prioritise research directions and international programs and they are looking for ideas. Let them know what your priorities are.

One of the interesting things about being a scientist is seeing how unexpected observations can galvanize the community into looking at a problem in a different way than before. A good example of this is the unexpectedly low Arctic sea ice minimum in 2007 and the near-repeat in 2008. What was unexpected was not the long term decline of summer ice (this has long been a robust prediction), but the size of 2007 and 2008 decreases which were much larger than any model had hinted at. This model-data mismatch raises a number of obvious questions – were the data reliable? are the models missing some key physics? is the comparison being done appropriately? – and some less obvious ones – to what extent is the summer sea ice minimum even predictable? what is the role of pre-conditioning from the previous year vs. the stochastic nature of the weather patterns in any particular summer?

The concentration of polar expertise on the last couple of questions has increased enormously in the last couple of years, and the summer minimum of 2009 will be a good test of some of the ideas that are being discussed. The point is that whether 2009 is or is not a record-setting or near-record setting minimum, the science behind what happens is going to be a lot more interesting than the September headline.

In the wake of the 2007 minimum, a lot of energy went in to discussing what this meant for 2008. Had the Arctic moved into a different regime where such minima would become normal or was this an outlier caused by exceptional weather patterns? Actually this is a bit of false dichotomy since they aren’t exclusive. Exceptional patterns of winds are always going to be the proximate cause of any extreme ice extent, but the regime provides a background upon which those patterns act. For instance, in the paper by Nghiem et al, they showed the influence of wind patterns in moving a lot of thick ice out of the Arctic in early 2007, but also showed that similar patterns had not had the same impact in other years with higher background amounts of ice.

This ‘background’ influence implies that there might indeed be the possibility of forecasting the sea ice minimum a few months ahead of time. And anytime there is the potential to make and test predictions in seasonal forecasting, scientists usually jump at the chance. So it proved for 2008.

Some forecasting efforts were organised through the SEARCH group of polar researchers, and I am aware of at least two informal betting pools that were set up. Another group of forecasts can be found from the Arctic ice forecasting center at the University of Colorado. I personally don’t think that the intrinsic worth of a successful prediction of overall sea ice extent or area is that societally relevant – interest in open shipping lanes that might be commercially important need much more fine-grained information for instance – but I think the predictions are interesting for improving understanding of Arctic processes themselves (and hopefully that improved understanding will eventually feed into the models and provide better tests and targets for their simulations).

What was particularly interesting about last years forecasts was the vast range of forecasting strategies. Some were just expert guestimates, some people used linear regression on past data, some were simply based on persistence, or persistence of the trend. In more mature forecasting endeavours, the methods tend to be more clustered around one or two proven strategies, but in this case the background work is still underway.

Estimates made in June 2008 for the September minimum extent showed a wide range – from around 2.9 to 5.6 M km². One of the lowest estimates assumed that the key criteria was the survivability of first year ice. If one took that to be a fixed percentage based on past behaviour, then because there was so much first year ice around in early 2008, the minimum would be very low (see also Drobot et al, 2008). This turned out not to be a great approach – much more first year ice survived than was predicted by this method. The key difference was the much greater amount of first year ice there was near the pole. Some of the higher values assumed a simple reversion to trend (i.e. extrapolation forward from the long-term trend to 2008).

Only a couple of the forecasts used physics-based models to make the prediction (for instance, Zhang et al, 2008). This is somewhat surprising until one realises how much work is needed to do this properly. You need real time data to initialise the models, you need to do multiple realisations to average over any sensitivity to the weather, and even then you might not get a range of values that was tight enough to provide useful information.

So how did people do? The actual 2008 September minimum was 4.7 M km², which was close to the median of the June forecasts (4.4 M km²) – and remember that the 2007 minimum was 4.3 M km². However, the spread was quite wide. The best estimates used both numerical models and statistical predictors (for instance the amount of ice thicker than 1m). But have these approaches matured this time around?

In this year’s June outlook, there is significantly more clustering around the median, and a smaller spread (3.2 to 5.0 M km²) than last year. As with last year, the lowest forecast is based on a low survivability criteria for first year ice and I expect that this (as with last year) will not pan out – things have changed too much for previous decades’ statistical fits on this metric to be applicable. However, the group with the low forecast have put in a ‘less aggressive’ forecast (4.7 M km²) which is right at the median. That would be equal to last year’s minimum, but not a new record. It would still be well below the sea ice trend expected by the IPCC AR4 models (Stroeve et al, 2008).

There is an obvious excitement related to how this will pan out, but it’s important that the thrill of getting a prediction right doesn’t translate into actually wanting the situation to get worse. Arctic ice cover is not just a number, but rather a metric of a profound and disruptive change in an important ecosystem and element of the climate. While it doesn’t look at all likely, the best outcome would be for all the estimates to be too low.

"...tis a cause that hath no mean dependance
Upon our joint and several dignities."

(William Shakespeare, 'Troilus and Cressida', Act II, Scene 2)

A friend of mine wishes me to comment on moral matters. I'm extremely reluctant to do so, partly because, at least until recently, I have been a young man "...whom Aristotle thought / Unfit to hear moral philosophy" (ibid.). I have flaws, and think those more skilled at the art of life may have more to say. Perhaps also, there is some truth to Lao Tzu's aphorism, "Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know". However, time waits for no man. Those who devote much time to theoretical thought and words may lack balance, unless they set aside some thoughts and words to moral matters, difficult and hard to demonstrate as these subjects may be.

The scientific method, our best guide to the how the world is; needs at the very least some care if applied to questions of value and of action. For example, I am conscious personal experimentation may be a poor guide to living well. Experimentation always delays the point of choice to some future time when we have 'found ourselves'; and the act of experimentation itself has moral implications. It is too late once we have experimented to know in advance what one should experiment on. In the case of the atmospheric experiment that humanity is carrying out at present, decisions over what to do now cannot wait until we have a full physical demonstration what the true consequences of our possible paths of action could be.

Given that a young man knows nothing about morality except that which he has instinctively or been taught, but that some sort of guidance seems to be essential when living in society - and given that at least those who think long and hard about life can be influenced by those thoughts -it seems necessary to adopt some sort of 'defensive' theory of morality - one that is not novel or new, but is guided by those who have come before. A theory of morality may require at least some experience of living; and since the young have not had much such experience; a mid sympathetic to empirical demonstration may argue in favour of granting the experienced at least some authority over such matters.

Such a defensive theory should not be over theoretical; it should deal with the common sense wisdom over how to live one's life, and with perhaps justified agnosticism over the sources of such wisdom.

Such a theory should not over extend itself by asking too much; we have justified skepticism over those who invent new laws to bind others in society. We are well aware that some people are powerful that lack certain virtues and some people with many virtues are not powerful. Our minimalist conception will focus on those virtues that are common to both parties.
The ancient concept of virtue (Arete in Ancient Greek; there is a possibly similar concept De in Chinese philosophy) tend to have the connotation of 'excellence' and 'power' in addition to our modern sense of personal goodness. Living a good life is good for the individual and is good for society; and we will focus on those principles that are in the intersection of the individual and the society good, leaving it to judgment where there may be a conflict.

Ancient Greek philosophers distinguished between moral laws specific to certain societies, and those that tend to be shared by all. In our minimalism we deal with only those that are shared by most successful civilizations.

I think such a defensive, minimalist, common-sense, practical, theory exists, and has been outlined by C.S.Lewis, for example. This outline is from Lewis and the notes in brackets are from here:

I. The Law of General Beneficence: (Golden Rule, help the community)

• A. Negative (Do no harm, Golden Rule)
• B. Positive (Preserve society, make people happy)

II. The Law of Special Beneficence (Put own family and friends first)

III. Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors (Respect and care for elders)

IV. Duties to Children and Posterity (Protect and care for children)

V. The Law of Justice:

• A. Sexual Justice (No adultery)
• B. Honesty (Re property, money)
• C. Justice in Court (No bribes, no favoritism)

VI. The Law of Good Faith and Veracity (Tell truth, keep promises)

VII. The Law of Mercy (Be tender-hearted)

VIII. The Law of Magnanimity: (Soul should rule the body)

• A. (Courage, defense against attacks)
• B. (Death before dishonor)
• C. ("Is not the love of Wisdom a practice of death? [Ancient Greek]")

The point of this post is not to outline anything new, of course, but the opposite. These are laws shared by many societies and successful civilizations around the world.

In order to slim down our obligations a little more (so as to preserve the core), we could examine the consistency of modern norms with these. The main way that modern Western man differs is in the concept of adultery (we have different norms below that of marriage) maybe a pragmatic response would be that conduct in such fields should be governed by 'good judgment' rather than moral stricture. But even we replace a moral stricture with 'good judgment' in that case, the spirit of the law and its justice still applies. Keeping promises is also sometimes difficult for our politicians; perhaps it is good to promise less in order to deliver more. It's helpful not to make inconsistent promises and to deliver upon them mechanically. We don't need to think about everything.

Our obligations in regard to climate change seem to be a case both of "Positive General Beneficence" and "Duties to Children and Posterity". So, even though we were careful to not over extend our idea of morality, we still have obligations to the future. Let us then proceed; strengthened by moral vigour of the principles of all successful and well-respected individuals and societies.

sustainable, adj.

1. Capable of being borne or endured; supportable, bearable. Obs. rare.

2. Capable of being upheld or defended; maintainable.

3. Capable of being maintained at a certain rate or level.

4. Ecol. Of, relating to, or designating forms of human economic activity and culture that do not lead to environmental degradation, esp. avoiding the long-term depletion of natural resources.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

There are two problems with burning fossil fuels. The first problem is that fossil fuels are running out; the second is that fossil fuels are not running out. The first problem is often called 'peak oil' and the second is known as 'climate change'. If either the first problem or the second is accurate, then we can say that burning fossil fuels is 'not sustainable'. This amounts to arguing that if either A or not-A is true, burning fossil fuels is unsustainable. It seems to be that we can determine sustainability from pure logic. But to get such important results from a tautology, appears to be suspicious at the very least.

Perhaps the problem with our line of reasoning is that we have failed to distinguish between positive and negative effects of an activity. A natural resource running out would not be problem if the use of the resource only imposed costs on society; nor would inexhaustibility be a problem when an activity only provides benefits. So we can rephrase our criterion. If an activity provides benefits and the capability to continue the activity is limited, or if the activity imposes costs and the capability to continue it is not limited, then the activity is not sustainable. From this it can be shown by simple logic that any activity that has both positive and negative effects is not sustainable.

Well at best it seems that sustainability is a pretty hard thing to achieve; and at worst the whole concept looks a little incoherent. Sustainability is, however, an idea to which we often are encouraged to pay homage, despite (or perhaps because of) these problems of definition and coherence.

I think the widespread use of this notion of sustainability explains quite a lot of the religious claptrap surrounding environmental issues. When I say 'religious'; what I mean, broadly, is the tendency of some environmentalists to think about environmental issues in somewhat 'moralistic' terms - 'wind turbines are good', 'cooling towers bad' etc. But such black and white terms may be misleading. The primary concept of value here, "sustainability", is one that, strictly speaking, almost no activities satisfy. This leads, inevitably to a sense of guilt at having to engage in so many activities that seem immoral, and the psychological need for at least some redeeming activities that can make us feel virtuous again. When some such positive activities turn up, there is a great temptation to cover up any negative features (remember any activity with both negative and positive features is unsustainable), even if such downsides actually do exist. So wind turbines may be lovely despite them having some quite serious downsides both in terms of the opinions of those nearby and the reliability of the output they produce. For others nuclear power stations are lovely and wind turbines unlovely. Such distinctions, unless they can be justified by some more fundamental principle, appear somewhat arbitrary.

As an aside, actions with purely negative consequences could be included as 'sustainable' too, if they are exhausted quickly. Perhaps one example is the extra expense in buying a more expensive product (say shampoo) which differs from the standard one by the eco-friendly blurb on the side (say the shampoo is kind to hedgehogs for example). Presumably, your wallet is finite and so limits the damage that your efforts to do the right thing can do.

Some activities fail to be sustainable on both levels. Presumably they both have positive effects and are limited and negative effects and are unlimited. How bad can you get? It's in these cases that the concept of sustainability appear to have serious self-consistency problems. To assert A and not-A is inconsistent; to assert A and B at the same time as not-A and not-B is doubly so. Either fossil fuels are running out or they are not. What should we do? Are wind turbines actually sustainable? What about burning fossil fuels?

A related problem with the categorical notion of sustainability is to do with the idea of criticality. Put bluntly, some aspects of sustainability matter more than others. If my sofa is on fire, then this constitutes a sustainability issue to living in a house. Imagine too that my wooden walls are, over decades, rotting, due to damp and occasional flooding. If I use a fire extinguisher it may well be an unsustainable act, because it causes flooding in the house, and makes my rotting problem worse. But if I don't put out my fire, my house would burn to the ground anyhow. Some may argue that I should instead use a sustainable method to put out the fire; such as finding a blanket in my loft. Rather than use the 'unsustainable' fire-extinguisher; I should use the 'sustainable' fire blanket in my loft. But what if the problem has grown so big by the time I get my fire blanket that the fire is then unmanageable? Failure to focus on our critical problems may lead to undesirable outcomes.

I therefore propose that rather as looking at sustainability as some sort of idol in which we invest all of our scarce hopes, we recognize that all of the activities of humanity are unsustainable. We need to be more precise about things. Instead we need to focus on critical unsustainability of activities that are akin to our house burning down.

I suggest two principles: first, an overall civilization-focus on tackling critical issues and risks, particularly climate change; Secondly the principle that we should do activities only if they add to overall (natural and human) wealth [n759hv]. The notion of wealth may be as difficult to define operationally as sustainability, since it requires some method of valuation over and above that of the market, when dealing with environmental concerns. But it least may well be internally consistent and able to sanely direct those with inflammable furniture.

As seen on Parliament TV

Watch the interview, from Oslo, on YouTube

The costs of adaptation will force governments to redefine what they mean by progress, argues Professor Adger’s 'Adapting to Climate Change', published this week by Cambridge University Press.

Adapting to Climate Change is the latest science of how the risks of climate change will impact water availability, biodiversity, flooding, land inundation and health, and how those impacts might be handled by society. The book comes in the same week that the UK’s Environment Agency called for a doubling of funding to protect the UK from flood damage resulting from future climate change.

These are the most detailed UK projections to date and include a probabilistic component

Our latest Briefing Note is an opinion piece from Professor Kevin Anderson

The EU-funded ADAM project (Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies) last week delivered its key findings in Brussels

The final report highlights the key findings of the research. The final section summarizes the findings of two internal evaluations of the researchers' learning experiences within the project

The final report is available below and Cambridge University Press will be publishing a series of four edited books that will discuss in more detail the ADAM project findings

A guest commentary by Kyle Swanson – University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

I am quite humbled by the interest that has been generated by our paper “Has the climate recently shifted?” (Swanson and Tsonis, 2009), and would like the thank the RealClimate editors for the opportunity to give my perspective on this piece.

Before delving into the paper itself, a few words about the place of our work in the global warming “debate” are in order. A quote from the early 20th century Viennese polymath Egon Friedell (which I ran across in the wonderful book Cultural Amnesia by Clive James) captures the situation better than any words I could ever weave;

Electricity and magnetism are those forces of nature by which people who know nothing about electricity and magnetism can explain everything.

Substitute the words “modes of natural climate variability” for “electricity and magnetism,” and well…, hopefully the point is made.

It first needs to be emphasized that natural variability and radiatively forced warming are not competing in some no-holds barred scientific smack down as explanations for the behavior of the global mean temperature over the past century. Both certainly played a role in the evolution of the temperature trajectory over the 20th century, and significant issues remain to be resolved about their relative importance. However, the salient point, one that is oftentimes not clear in arguments about variability in the climate system, is that all else being equal, climate variability and climate sensitivity are flip sides of the same coin. (see also the post Natural Variability and Climate Sensitivity)

A climate that is highly sensitive to radiative forcing (i.e., responds very strongly to increasing greenhouse gas forcing) by definition will be unable to quickly dissipate global mean temperature anomalies arising from either purely natural dynamical processes or stochastic radiative forcing, and hence will have significant internal variability. The opposite also holds. It’s painfully easy to paint oneself logically into a corner by arguing that either (i) vigorous natural variability caused 20th century climate change, but the climate is insensitive to radiative forcing by greenhouse gases; or (ii) the climate is very sensitive to greenhouse gases, but we still are able to attribute details of inter-decadal wiggles in the global mean temperature to a specific forcing cause. Of course, both could be wrong if the climate is not behaving as a linear forced (stochastic + GHG) system.

With that in mind, our paper is fundamentally about inter-decadal variability in the climate system and its role in the evolution of the 20th century climate trajectory, as well as in near-future climate change. The climate system has well known modes of variability, such as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), that are active on inter-annual time scales. We are interested in how this short time-scale (from the climate perspective!) variability impacts climate anomalies over multi-decadal time periods.

What we find is that when interannual modes of variability in the climate system have what I’ll refer to as an “episode,” shifts in the multi-decadal global mean temperature trend appear to occur. I’ll leave the details of these episodes to interested readers (here and here), as things get pretty technical. It’s sufficient to note that we have an objective criteria for what defines an episode; we aren’t just eyeballing curves. The climate system appears to have had three distinct “episodes” during the 20th century (during the 1910’s, 1940’s, and 1970’s), and all three marked shifts in the trend of the global mean temperature, along with changes in the qualitative character of ENSO variability. We have also found similar types of shifts in a number of model simulations (both forced and unforced) that were run in support of the IPCC AR4 report.

The contentious part of our paper is that the climate system appears to have had another “episode” around the turn of the 21st century, coinciding with the much discussed “halt” in global warming. Whether or not such a halt has really occurred is of course controversial (it appears quite marked in the HadCRUT3 data, less so in GISTEMP); only time will tell if it’s real. Regardless, it’s important to note that we are not talking about global cooling, just a pause in warming.

What’s our perspective on how the climate will behave in the near future? The HadCRUT3 global mean temperature to the right shows the post-1980 warming, along with the “plateau” in global mean temperature post-1998. Also shown is a linear trend using temperatures over the period 1979-1997 (no cherry picking here; pick any trend that doesn’t include the period 1998-2008). We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal, and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020. Of course, this contrasts sharply with other forecasts of the climate system; the purple line roughly indicates the model-based forecast of Smith et al. (2007) , suggesting with a warming of roughly 0.3 deg C over the 2005-2015 period.

Why would anyone in their right mind believe what I’ve just outlined? Everything hinges on the idea that something extraordinary happened to the climate system in response to the 1997/98 super-El Niño event (an idea that has its roots in the wavelet analysis by Park and Mann (2000)). The figure to the left shows the spatial mean temperature over all grid boxes in the HadCRUT3 data set that have continuous monthly coverage over the 1901-2008 period. While this provides a skewed view of the global mean, as it is heavily weighted toward North America, Europe and coastal areas, unlike the global mean temperature it has the cardinal virtue of being a consistent record with respect to time. The sole exclusion in the figure is the line connecting the 1997 and 1998 temperatures.

Now, anomalous behavior is always in the eye of the beholder. However, the jump in temperature between 1997 and 1998 in this record certainly appears to pass the “smell test” (better than 3 standard deviations of interannual variability) for something out of the ordinary. Nor is this behavior dependent on the underlying time interval chosen, as the same basic picture emerges for any starting time up until the 1980’s, provided you look at locations that have continuous coverage over your interval. Again, as the temperature anomaly associated with this jump dissipates, we hypothesize that the climate system will return to its signal as defined by its pre-1998 behavior in roughly 2020 and resume warming.

What do our results have to do with Global Warming, i.e., the century-scale response to greenhouse gas emissions? VERY LITTLE, contrary to claims that others have made on our behalf. Nature (with hopefully some constructive input from humans) will decide the global warming question based upon climate sensitivity, net radiative forcing, and oceanic storage of heat, not on the type of multi-decadal time scale variability we are discussing here. However, this apparent impulsive behavior explicitly highlights the fact that humanity is poking a complex, nonlinear system with GHG forcing – and that there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond.

References:

Park, J. and M.E. Mann, 2000: Interannual Temperature Events and Shifts in Global Temperature: A Multiple Wavelet Correlation Approach. Earth Interactions, 4-001, 1-36.

Swanson, K.L. and A.A. Tsonis, 2009: Has the climate recently shifted? Geophysical Research Letters, 36, doi:10.1029/2008GL037022.

As seen on Parliament TV

» Further information: http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=4388

The costs of adaptation will force governments to redefine what they mean by progress, argues Professor Adger’s 'Adapting to Climate Change', published this week by Cambridge University Press.

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These are the most detailed UK projections to date and include a probabilistic component

» Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8106104.stm

» Further information: http://ukclimateprojections.defra.gov.uk

CommonFuture: Dicussion on organizational development next Sunday 5 pm GMT

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