Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

Unfortunately, the world needs to take firm action about the threat of manmade climate change within the next decade….   Realistically, there may be no chance to educate the general public in depth about the science so quickly. Meanwhile, a well-funded and effective professional disinformation campaign has been successful in sowing confusion, and many people mistakenly think climate change science is unreliable or is controversial within the expert community. Thus, the more urgent task for us scientists may well be to give the public guidelines for recognizing and rejecting junk science and disinformation. If students today, who will be adults tomorrow, can understand and apply these guidelines, they may not need a detailed knowledge of climate change science. To that end, I offer the following six principles.

Climatologist Richard C. J. Somerville is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.  Although I did my thesis research at Scripps, we’ve never formally met.

Somerville helped organize the must-read 2007 Bali Climate Declaration, in which more than 200 of the world’s leading climate scientist explained why we must limit total warming to no more than 2°C.

He sent me a new essay published online with open access in Climatic Change, “How much should the public know about climate science?“  He notes that recent research shows “global emissions of greenhouse gases must peak and decline within the next decade if global warming is to be limited to a level that avoids severe climate disruption” (see figure below).

Given the success of the most effective, immoral, and self-destructive disinformation campaign in US history, scientists need to focus their messaging on a handful of key points.  Somerville offers six:

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“Southern sea ice is increasing”

Antarctic sea ice has grown in recent decades despite the Southern Ocean warming at the same time.

Progressives should know the most commonly used arguments by the disinformers and doubters — and how to rebut them.

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Here is an update of my review of the best papers on climate science in the past year.  If you want a broader overview of the literature in the past few years, focusing specifically on how unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas emissions are projected to impact the United States, try “An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water.”

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Warning:  Please put your head in a vise before reading further.

Andy Revkin has just written the most illogical climate post on Earth.  Or maybe he’s written the most logical climate post on the Bizarro World Htrae.

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According to the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (2007):
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A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems….

Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.

The National Academy released three reports today on “America’s Climate Choices.”

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Progressives should know the most commonly used arguments by the disinformers and doubters — and how to answer them.

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From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books….

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts….

– George Orwell, “Why I write”

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts (see here).

What I have learned most from the success of my blog, from the rapid growth in subscribers and visitors and comments, along with the increasing number of websites that link to or reprint my posts, is that there is in fact a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk. It is a hunger to learn the truth about the dire nature of our energy and climate situation, about the grave threat to our children and future generations, about the vast but still achievable scale of the solutions, about the forces in politics and media that impede action—a hunger to face unpleasant facts head on.

Unlike Orwell, I knew from a very early age, certainly by the age of five or six, that I would be a physicist, like my uncle, and I announced that proudly to all who asked.

I knew I did not want to be a professional writer since I saw how hopeless it was to make a living that way.  My father was the editor of a small newspaper (circulation under 10,000) that he turned into a medium-sized newspaper (70,000) but was paid dirt, even though he managed the equivalent of a large manufacturing enterprise — while simultaneously writing three editorials a day — that in any other industry would pay five times as much.  My mother pursued freelance writing for many years, an even more difficult way to earn a living (see also “This could not possibly be more off topic“).

Why share this?  Orwell, who shares far, far more in his many brilliant essays, argues in “Why I write“:

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The amount of warming we are going to subject our children  and countless future generations to depends primarily on three factors:

1. The sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks like sea ice and water vapor (how much warming you get if  we only double CO2 emissions to 560 ppm and there are no major “slow” feedbacks).  We know the fast feedbacks are strong by themselves (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius” and detailed analysis below).
2. The real-world slower (decadal) feedbacks, such as tundra melt (see Science: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting and links at the end).
3. The actual CO2 concentration level we are likely to hit, which is far beyond 550 ppm (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised” — 1000 ppm).

Given that the anti-science, pro-pollution forces  seem to be  succeeding in their fight to keep us on our current emissions path, it’s no surprise that multiple recent analyses conclude that we face a temperature rise that is far, far beyond dangerous:

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There are now more studies that show recent warming is unprecedented –  in magnitude and speed and cause — than you can shake a stick at!

As with a pride of lions, and a conspiracy of disinformers [or is that a delusion of disinformers?], perhaps the grouping should get its own name, like “a team of hockey sticks” (see “The Curious Case of the Hockey Stick that Didn’t Disappear“).

1. GRL:  “We conclude that the 20th century warming of the incoming intermediate North Atlantic water has had no equivalent during the last thousand years.“
2. JGR:  “The last decades of the past millennium are characterized again by warm temperatures that seem to be unprecedented in the context of the last 1600 years.” [figure below]

Reconstructed tropical South American temperature anomalies (normalized to the 1961–1990AD average) for the last ∼1600 years (red curve, smoothed with a 39‐year Gaussian filter). The shaded region envelops the ±2s uncertainty as derived from the validation period. Poor core quality precluded any chemical analysis for the time interval between 1580 and 1640 AD.

Yes, the 39‐year Gaussian filter appears to wipe out over half of the warming since 1950 as this NASA chart makes clear:

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A study by GISS climate scientists recently published in the journal Science shows that atmospheric CO₂ operates as a thermostat to control the temperature of Earth….

CO₂ is the key atmospheric gas that exerts principal control (80% of the non-condensing GHG forcing) over the strength of the terrestrial greenhouse effect. Water vapor and clouds are fast-acting feedback effects, and as such, they are controlled by the radiative forcing supplied by the non-condensing GHGs….

There is no viable alternative to counteract global warming except through direct human effort to reduce the atmospheric CO₂ level.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has posted three articles on their website explaining two important new studies, “Atmospheric CO₂: Principal control knob governing Earth’s temperature” (subs. req’d) in Science by Andrew Lacis et al. and “The attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect” (subs. req’d) in JGR by Gavin Schmidt et al.  Together they make a terrific tutorial on the critical role human-caused CO2 plays in climate change.

Schmidt is best known as a key contributor to the must-read blog, Real Climate.  Lacis may be best known as the NASA climatologist whose 2005 critique of the IPCC Fourth Assessment draft — “There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary” — was embraced by the anti-science disinformers until it was revealed he thought the IPCC consensus was in fact some watered down, least-common denominator piece of wishy-washiness that understates our scientific understanding, which it is (see “Disputing the ‘consensus’ on global warming“).

It may be obvious to CP readers and all those who follow the science, but the core conclusion of the Science article bears repeating again and again by all of us who communicate on global warming:

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Extended drought and Dust-Bowlification over large swaths of the habited Earth may be the most dangerous impact of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions, as I’ve discussed many times (see Intro to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water).

That’s especially true since such impacts could well last centuries, whereas the actual Dust Bowl itself only lasted seven to ten years — see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe.

A must-read new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “Drought under global warming: a review,” is the best review and analysis on the subject I’ve seen.  It spells out for the lukewarmers and the delayers just what we risk if we continue to listen to the Siren song of “more energy R&D plus adapatation.”

The NCAR study is the source of the top figure (click to enlarge), which shows that in a half century, much of the United States (and large parts of the rest of the world) could experience devastating levels of drought — far worse than the 1930s Dust Bowl, especially since the conditions would only get worse and worse and worse and worse, while potentially affecting 10 to 100 times as many people.  And this study merely models the IPCC’s “moderate” A1B scenario — atmospheric concentrations of CO2 around 520 ppm in 2050 and 700 in 2100.  We’re currently on the A1F1 pathway, which would takes us to 1000 ppm by century’s end, but I’m sure with an aggressive program of energy R&D we could keep that to, say 900 ppm.

Indeed, the study itself notes that it has ignored well understood climate impacts that could worsen the situation:

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The headline quote is over a month old, but, according to Google, it hasn’t been reprinted anywhere beyond the story on the official website of Denmark.  That article opened:

New calculations show that the amount of melted inland ice in Greenland is 25-50% higher in 2010 than normally.

The big Arctic story this month has been NOAA’s 2010 Arctic Report Card, which found that, thanks to human-caused global warming, “Arctic of old is gone, experts warn,” as MNSBC put it.   One NOAA scientist explained the importance of the Arctic as the canary in the coal mine: “Whatever is going to happen in the rest of the world happens first, and to the greatest extent, in the Arctic.”

But the rapid Arctic warming is important to our climate in its own right.  It can directly alter our weather.  It threatens to release vast quantities of carbon locked away in the previously frozen tundra (see Science stunner: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting:  NSF issues world a wake-up call: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming”).

The rapid warming also threatens to accelerate sea level rise.  The Report Card’s section on Greenland, written by an international team of experts, concludes:

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