Miklos Zagoni Wants Off Heartland Institute Expert List

Mr. Zagoni, a physicist and science historian at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, sent me the following email this morning:

Dear Mr Muprhy,

I got no connection to the HI since four years, and do not want to have.
I am happy if being removed from their list.

Yours sincerely:
Miklos Zagoni


I have forwarded this email to James Lakely at the Heartland Institute.  As an aside, it looks as though I number of people that I have not been in touch with have recently been removed from the list.  They include Benny Peiser, Roger Pielke Jr., Oliver Frauenfeld and David Henderson.  Roger definitely de-listed over the billboard fiasco; Benny probably did (he would have heard about it from the Climate Skeptic Mailing List).  The other two I don't know about.

The Pope Weighs In: Climate Change, The Himalayas, And Everything

The Vatican, more particularly the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, has issued a new report on global warming entitled Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene: A Report by the Working Group Commissioned by the Pontifical Academy of Science.  It strikes me as rather well done. Not so much for the original scientific content--what's happening to the world's glaciers under AGW has been pretty thoroughly documented.  However, as a vehicle designed to communicate that knowledge, and to promote an action plan based on that knowledge, it is exemplary, and should be read  by anyone who has spent time engaging in the often tedious back and forth re "How should scientists speak to the public about Climate Change?".  Well, here's how.  Look and learn.

From the introduction:

We call on all people and nations to recognise the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, and by changes in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other land uses. We appeal to all nations to develop and implement, without delay, effective and fair policies to reduce the causes and impacts of climate change on communities and ecosystems, including mountain glaciers and their watersheds, aware that we all live in the same home. By acting now, in the spirit of common but differentiated responsibility, we accept our duty to one another and to the stewardship of a planet blessed with the gift of life.

I encourage people to read the whole thing. A couple of particularly good things about it.

1) It seems to me that the focus on mountain glaciers is a brilliant move, rhetorically.  The Alps wind their way across much of Europe; runoff from the rapidly shrinking Himalayan glaciers supply water to significant parts of Asia; North and South American glaciers are also in retreat.  And everywhere their decline is likely to bring deleterious consequences. If you are issuing a call for global collective action, and that's what the Pontifical Academy's report appears to be doing, then you want to find an effect of AGW that is truly global in nature.  For example, Tornados, Pine Beetle infestations (assuming the Vatican even has expertise in these areas) have effects too regionalized to serve the report's symbolic requirements.  Glaciers work wonderfully.  I do not think the specific subject matter of the document, upon which it hangs its more general conclusions and recommendations, was chosen randomly.

2) The report contains beautifully written scientific prose (or at least has been translated into such).  Francis Bacon, who invented the style, would have nodded in approval.  The writing is austere, authoritative, and yet not terribly difficult to parse.  In other words, if you've got half a brain in your head, you can understand it.  This bit outlines states quite elegantly the breakdown in responsibility for the AGW  problem as it applies to developed vs. developing countries:

By acting now, in the spirit of common but differentiated responsibility, we accept our duty to one another and to the stewardship of a planet blessed with the gift of life.

If you want to call the Pope a socialist bent on transferring first world wealth to the third world, go ahead, but you will seem diminished in the face of such fine writing.

3)  One interesting feature of the report is the employment of the phrase  "The Anthropocene Age", which is

...a recent and informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems.

Some have argued that this is a misappropriation of the vocabulary of "ages" for what is in geological terms a short-term event.  But I am more interested in the fact that the report is not afraid of this kind of openly rhetorical flourish (as noted in the wiki article above, the term is not a formal part of the geological vocabulary).  In fact, I would argue that it stomps royally all over the  framework of roles and poses, designed to separate explanations of science from science advocacy, laid out by  Roger Pielke Jr. in his Honest Broker.  Which suggests to me that such anatomies of good vs. bad scientific discourse are pointless abstractions that are simply not relevant to any actual debate at the interface of climate science and climate policy.  In other words: feel free to ignore Roger Pielke Jr.  The Pope does.

Do Investors Follow The Warming Wars?

Interesting post from FT's Energy Source. Chart below shows how the HSBC Global Climate Change Index responded to the various "climategates" of the past six months or so:
As Pielke Jr. notes, the CRU hack itself didn't move the index much, but on the other hand the IPCC related mini-scandals did seem to have an effect. There also seems to have been a mild rebound as various reviews of CRU's behavior have come back giving the unit a more-or-less clean bill of health. This doesn't really fit Pielke's thesis, as the inquiries relate to Phil Jones and the UEA rather than the IPCC. And Pielke misses one possibly important date--March 29th (see the arrow right that I've added to the graphic), when Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC climate change panel, was cleared of allegations that he was receiving payments from private companies.

Anyway, HSBC expects the CCI recovery to continue as the science reasserts itself. It will be interesting to see if public polls tracking belief in AGW and support for action against it show similar movement.

Pachauri Cleared

One of the side-stories that grew out of Climategate were accusations of financial impropriety by Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC. These have now been put to rest:

London, Mar 29 (PTI) Rajendra Pachauri, the embattled head of the UN's climate change panel who was under scrutiny for receiving alleged payments from private companies, has been cleared of the allegations by an independently conducted review, a media report has said.

Professional services company KPMG examined personal finances of Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, following allegations that he received money for advising several private sector companies, including Toyota and Credit Suisse.

I suspect Pielke Jr. is working on his most fulsome apology even now.

PS. Pachauri's climate science friends apparently call him "patchy".

Roger Pielke Jr. Does Jesus

Roger Pielke Jr. has assumed his familiar martyr's pose, and accuses me (as well as others) of issuing threats against him. The occasion is his An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower Troposphere, co-authored with Pielke Sr. and several others, which purports to explain differences in long-term temperature trends as reported by satellite vs. surface readings. Now, a number of issues have already come up with respect to the paper (see, for example, here and here). At a more basic level, though, Pielke Jr. seems more than a little bit unclear of what the paper is supposed to be about. For example, Pielke Sr. has written a blog-post entitled New Paper Documents A Warm Bias In The Calculation Of A Multi-Decadal Global Average Surface Temperature Trend, and yet here Pielke Jr. appears to be contradicting his co-author:

No. The title of the post is "Evidence that Global Temperature Trends Have Been Overstated". It might have been more accurate to write "global atmospheric temperature trends" but it clearly does not say "surface temperature trend"...

What this starts to remind me of is the recent De Freitas and Co. paper, in which the co-authors began recanting their own result before other climate scientists while at the same time pushing that result to folks like Watts, Morano, and others of the same ilk.

In other words, is the purpose of the paper the paper, or is the paper merely a trigger for a dustup in the blog world, leading (hopefully?) to another "Global Warming is Enviro/Nazi Garbage" piece on the Glenn Beck show and in other friendly media outlets?

Which brings us to the so called "threats". I would not speak for Michael Tobis (whose a bit ticked at me this morning), but his point, that there should exist

...a mechanism to prevent authors from promoting public misinterpretations of their publications. That sort of behavior should have consequences.

...is well taken, although the odds of creating a rule that would prevent an author from publishing junk and selling it through the blogosphere as diamonds is vanishingly small. America has no law against bullshit, and will not for the foreseeable future.

My point, though, is that such behavior already does have consequences. If Pielke Jr. insists on treating the real actors in the scientific debate as mere walk-on players in a drama in which he is the star and the audience includes the Limbaughs and Beck's of the world, then he will find, if he has not already, that this stage will soon be the only one upon which he can play. His work will be ignored by the scientific community while simultaneously embraced by birthers, truthers, Ron Paul supporters, young earth creationists, people that think Jesus is coming in a UFO, and the like--America's right-wing fringe, in other words. Barring a catastrophe during next year's mid-term elections, this will be a impoverished and lonely place for scientists for a long, long time to come. Mr. Pielke risks consigning himself to the dust-bin of history.

And that's my advice to Mr. Pielke. If he thinks its a threat, then he is incorrect.

Oh, and Mark Bahner asks me in the comments: What do you see as scientifically incorrect about their paper?

Well, for one thing, even if the analysis proposed is 100% accurate, the use of the term "bias" is hugely misleading, and assumes that satellite readings are the gold standard to which surface readings must conform (or else be dismissed). But if you reverse that assumption without changing a single other thing in the paper, you could just as easily argue that that the satellite readings show a cool bias. In fact, neither line of reasoning is valid. If the paper explains anything--and it may not--it shows why the two sets of readings are different. No more or less than that.

Roger Pielke Jr.: Honest Broker Or Home Town Ref (For The Other Side)?

If you've ever wondered why the vast majority of Climate Scientists distrust Roger Pielke Jr. in his self-proclaimed role as "Voice of Moderation' or "Honest Broker" for the climate change debate, look here. Attempting to find media bias in the reception of Michael Mann's new paper re. historical hurricane numbers vs. Landea's paper on (roughly) the same topic, he runs a google search and finds 1,264 citations for Mann vs. 1 for Landsea, and insinuates that the press is biased towards AGO alarmist results.

Of course, Michael Mann is also the name of a well-known film director (fittingly enough, he directed Heat back in 1995), and when you strain those references from the Google search, you get about 11 vs 5, a result that is probably due to one paper being published in Nature and the other in The Journal of Climate.

Hottest July Ever?

Though Dr. Spencer tells us, via Roger Pielke Sr., that the readings might be skewed a tad high by satellite drift, nevertheless it looks very much as though July 2009 will go into the record books as the hottest July ever recorded on a worldwide basis. Note that the yellow line represents July 2005, and that the deep red line for July 1998 remains buried in the pack. These two years, depending on where the numbers come from, are generally considered to be the hottest on record.

Whatever the final July ranking, it seems pretty clear (as Roger Pielke Jr. suggests here) that the notion that the planet is going through a phase of global cooling is no longer sustainable.