Thanks to Al Gore’s blog for this one:

Thin Antractic sea ice will eventually melt as snow turns to rain due to global warming, putting at risk many of the area’s unique species.

Climate deniers often cite the expanding sea ice in the Southern Ocean as evidence that the climate crisis is not occurring. It turns out the opposite is true:

“Unlike the Arctic, where much of the sea ice is — at least for now — year-round, the Southern Ocean’s sea ice is thin and seasonal. And during the latter half of the 20th century, its winter surface area has increased. Climatologists say the expansion doesn’t change long-term projections of Antarctic melt, but skeptics have used it to attack their forecasts.”

Thin Antractic sea ice will eventually melt as snow turns to rain due to global warming, putting at risk many of the area's unique species.

“Ice is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap,” read one Fox News story on the expansion.”

“Indeed, global warming appears to have been protective. By combining temperature and precipitation records with simulations of Southern Ocean climate, Curry and Liu linked the 20th-century warming of .36 degrees Fahrenheit in the Southern Ocean’s upper waters to increased regional snowfall. The finding makes intuitive sense: Rising temperatures increase the amount of moisture in the air, which eventually becomes snow. And for the last few decades, that snow kept surface waters from warming even more, added bulk to sea ice, and reflected sunlight.”

“But as the Antarctic continues to warm, Curry and Liu’s models show snow becoming rain (see image below), even as total precipitation rises (see image above). By the century’s end, they predict snowfall retreating to the Antarctic continent’s edge. The Southern Ocean at large will be rainy. Sea ice will contract. Continental ice will continue to melt.”

Original Source: Wired Science

Image Credit: Flickr / WisconsinKow

I’ve just about finished reading a great new book on climate change by Australian thinker and university professor Clive Hamilton. The book, Requiem For A Species, is an interesting but disconcerting read.

[ReviewAZON asin="1849710813" display="inlinepost"]

The starting point is an admission that (as many climate change activists know) our goose is well and truly cooked. Hamilton reviews the now conclusive science that we will experience up to four degrees of warming this century – on our way there we will cross several major tipping points (such as an ice-free Arctic, and loss of much of the Amazon Basin through drought and fire) that will produce positive feedback and accelerate global warming.

The main focus of the book is why our civilisation can’t accept the scientific evidence that major warming-induced changes have already occurred, and that such changes are at or above the worst case IPCC scenario from the 2007 report. He blames our consumerist society for much of the problem, and goes to some length to explain why green is the new red (from the conservative’s point of view).

He discusses what a +4 degree world could be like, and ends with some ideas about what we can still do to mitigate the most extreme manifestations of climate instability.

This is a copy of a letter to the editor that I sent to Australia’s weekly Medical Observer mag in response to a letter they published denying the existence of climate change. As far as I know the letter wasn’t published (please let me know if it was), so I publish it here for your information…..

EDITOR: It was with fascination and increasing disbelief that I read the letter by Dr XXXXX XXXXXX titled “Climate change action misguided” (Medical Observer 7 August 2009).

I was fascinated that a highly-trained medical professional could dismiss the mass of rapidly accumulating, peer-reviewed data about the effects of anthropogenic climate change so easily. I was in disbelief that a publication like yours, with an obvious focus on climate change mitigation, could publish such a letter without investigating its claims.

Denying climate change is incredibly dangerous for our planet and society

The letter’s main claim is that there is a seemingly large group of experts (the so-called ‘Oregon Petition’) that have signed a document expressing their “disbelief” in the idea of catastrophic human-induced climate change. Based on current evidence, that is clearly not so.

The petition has been widely criticised, by organisations including the US National Academies of Science, and publications such as Scientific American. There are several reasons for this:

Only 2100 (of a claimed total of over 31,000) petition-signers identified themselves as climatologists, physicists or geophysiscists. Scientific American estimates that of those, there are only around 200 actual climate scientists.

The other signees required a science-related degree to be eligible to sign the petition. Sign-up was initially conducted by a mass mailing, and later one could also opt-in via the internet. Both methods appear to have been unregulated, and there has never been independent verification of signee names, academic affiliations or qualifications – in fact in more than one instance a fake name (such as ex-Spice Girl Gerri Halliwell) has been used.

The initial mail-out included a pseudo-scientific paper formatted to appear as though it had been published in a peer-reviewed journal by the US National Academy Of Science. In fact the paper had not been (and apparently has never been) subjected to peer-review or published. The mailing of the paper prompted the Academy Of Science to strongly denounce the paper, stating that:

Another point raised by Dr Allen is that mean global temperature has dropped over the last decade. Figure 1 shows that it is the global trend over decades that shows strong warming: not every year will be warmer than the last, but over time there will be a clustering of hotter years (as happened in the last 15 years). Note also that warming began relatively soon after coal started to be burned in large amounts during the Industrial Revolution.

Global temperatures have been increasing since the Industrial Revolution started pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

Climate change deniers often emphasise events that have not appeared as modeled as evidence that climate change is not occurring – this is akin to denying the diagnosis of Raynaud’s phenomenon if only nine fingers are affected, and the tenth is not.

In the same class of faulty logic is pointing to somewhere on the globe that is not melting, warming or drying as evidence that global warming is not occurring. It is easy (but invalid) to do this because the effects of climate change are heterogenous, much like many other biological and pathological processes – for instance, evidence shows that the Northern Hemisphere is warming faster than the Southern; that the poles are showing more effects than the tropics, and that land-masses are warming faster than the oceans.

Additionally, climate change has progressed to the point where there is adequate evidence from the physical world of its effects – unfortunately we no longer need to rely on climate models to determine its existence. Consider the following evidence, published in peer-reviewed journals since the last IPCC Assessment (2007):

Finally, I would like to appeal to medical professionals to make up their own minds on climate change, based on the best available science rather than propaganda from various self-serving lobby groups. There is ample evidence on government websites (www.epa.gov and www.climatechange.gov.au) and respected scientific publications (for example www.newscientist.com). Information about the Oregon Petition can be found at wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition) and Source Watch*.

While debate about any issue is healthy and welcomed as a way of finding consensus and generating new ideas, I suggest that denying the existence and effects of climate change at this point in time exposes humanity to even more danger and cost from its largely negative health and economic effects (McMichael et al 2006) as it delays the formulation and implementation of effective mitigation and adaptation strategies.

McMichael AJ, Woodruff RE and Hales S. Climate change and human health: present and future risks. Lancet 2006; 367: 859-869.

* http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine#Case_Study:_The_Oregon_Petition

By Michael Ashcroft

What is the Petition Project?

The Petition Project is presented as a list of people who do not “believe” (for want of a better word) in global warming:

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

We are also told, that “31,072 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,021 with PhDs”. That all seems to be in order, right? Well no, actually. There are some fundamental problems with the very concept behind the Petition, not to mention various other controversies surrounding it.

You can view this on the Petition Project’s website.

Appeal to Authority

The first problem with the Petition Project is that the concept behind it is a fallacy, known as an appeal to authority. The idea is that “these people are very clever, therefore they have authority which makes what they are saying worth something” (to paraphrase). When you read that there are 31,000 or so scientists who oppose global warming, you are supposed to think that because there are so many of them, and they are “scientists”, they must be right.

Presenting an argument based on how many people supposedly agree with it as evidence is flawed, but it does get worse…

Appeal to False Authority

If you look more closely at the qualifications of signers of the petition, you will see that:

The Petition Project classifies petition signers on the basis of their formal academic training, as summarized below. Scientists often pursue specialized fields of endeavor that are different from their formal education, but their underlying training can be applied to any scientific field in which they become interested.

Essentially, the majority of the signers have some kind of qualification in a scientific field, be it a Bachelor’s, Master’s or PhD. The problem is that, as science is such a vast field, you can spend your entire life studying one branch of science and still know absolutely nothing about another. For example, I am a physics student, and I can honestly say that I know nothing about medicine. I also wouldn’t expect an ecologist to understand the processes behind the formation of stars, for example.

This is precisely what the Petition Project does assume, though. If we look at the qualifications of the signers, we see that even medical doctors are eligible to sign. Take a look. Some of the more amusing backgrounds, that supposedly give these people enough special knowledge about global warming to deny its existence, include:

Mathematics – without a special interest in the climate, this is worthless in the field.
Physics – I have almost finished a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and there has been only one, optional course about “Environmental Physics”, so I can argue from experience that a degree in Physics does not necessarily equip someone with the information they may need to decry global warming.

Biology – unless there’s a large degree of specialisation of the effects of climate change on some biological variable (growth, change of ecosystems etc), this has no bearing on the subject.

Medicine – What?!

Aerospace Engineering – I happen to live with an Aeronautical Engineering student, who has had no training in any environmental subjects whatsoever.
Computer Science – see Aerospace Engineering

It is like asking celebrities what they think of the economy of Chad. They may be famous, and therefore carry some weight, but their opinions are nothing more than opinion. Asking “Dr X” what he thinks of the manufacture of steel may be all well and good, except that “Dr X” has a PhD in ancient history. He may be qualified in something, but it is misleading to assume that because he is a doctor of something, he must know everything about everything.

Controversy

In a previous incarnation of the petition, many fake names were discovered to have been added with the aim of showing the dubious methods by which the Petition Project gathered names. These have included an actor, a senator, a fictional character and a spice girl. It would appear that a number of names are duplicates, or belong to people who have died or have since changed their minds.

When the first petition was circulated to many American scientists, it contained a wad of paper claiming to be a research paper, which I would encourage you to look at. It was formatted in such a way as to resemble a paper published by the National Academy of Science (or so says my source. I have seen this claim elsewhere, also) which was misleading as the paper was not peer reviewed or even published.

The content of the paper itself is highly misleading (and, from what I’ve seen of it, quite amusing). For example, they show a graph showing a flat horizontal line, which shows that the number of hurricanes has not increased over the past however many years. This may be true, but as I have discussed, we wouldn’t expect it to. We expect the strength of the average hurricane to increase, but the number of them would stay approximately the same.

What they’ve done in this case, is argue something that was never in contention in the first place, and then use that argument to claim that their opposition are wrong.

To Sum Up

As I said before, the Petition Project is used very frequently on the internet by “climate change deniers”. I would of course encourage you to have an open mind to everything you read, but please don’t be taken in by this one. Its methodology is flawed, its motives are highly biased and its conclusions are misleading.

Michael Ashcroft is a Physics student at Imperial College London, with a passion for Environmental and Energy issues. He plans to go into a career in the Environmental and Energy fields after further study He’s also a keen musician and photographer, and writes articles on Environmental topics for his website. For more articles, please visit at http://www.howtopowertheworld.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Ashcroft
http://EzineArticles.com/?Debunking-the-Oregon-Petition-Project&id=1675285

An interesting article that highlights how money and other motives gets in the way of conservation, the environment, and just plain old common sense when it comes to climate change.

This article chronicles recent events in the plight of the polar bears, who are unfortunately pretty well screwed when it comes to finding somewhere else to hunt seals when the Arctic completely melts.

As summer sea ice disappears, polar bears are increasingly likely to den on land because sea ice is not as stable as it once was.

A sample:

“What most concerns Canadian polar bear experts is that by failing to acknowledge the threat, the Canadian government has not adopted a management plan to help polar bears adjust to a warming world. That plan could include controls on Arctic development, reduced hunting of polar bears, and pollution reduction.

No one is disputing that polar bears have survived periods of warming that occurred during the last interglacial period, about 120,000 years ago. The issue, however, is a red herring. The maximum temperatures of the last interglacial were roughly 2 degrees F warmer than now. Given the rate at which greenhouse gas emissions and temperatures are currently rising, the Earth could easily undergo 3 to 4 degrees F of warming by the end of this century — significantly greater than anything polar bears have experienced during their evolutionary history.

Derocher also noted that the current situation is much different.“There were no people back then hunting bears,” he says. “There was no oil and gas development, no shipping or pollution. People weren’t pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like they are today. You can’t compare the situation today to the one 125,000 or 250,000 years ago and suggest that bears will do just fine.”

Said Stirling, “Given all the controversy, it might sound complicated, but it isn’t: Without sea ice to hunt seals, polar bears are in big trouble.”

Related article about forecast Arctic ecosystem productivity.

Interesting piece in this week’s New Scientist magazine by climate activist George Marshall on why people don’t believe in climate change despite overwhelming scientific evidence. Excerpt follows:

“Another key to achieving a widely held belief in climate change is collective imagination. We will never fully appreciate the risks unless we can project ourselves into the future – and that requires an appeal to the collective emotional imagination. In the past years I have been delighted to observe a growing partnership between scientists and the creative arts, such as retreats for scientists, artists and writers.

It is clear that the cautious language of science is now inadequate to inspire concerted change, even among scientists. We need a fundamentally different approach. Only then will scientists be in a position to throw down the ultimate challenge to the public: “We’ve done the work, we believe the results, now when the hell will you wake up?”

Climate Change Denial

I’m working on an article about climate change denial, and why one might choose to ignore, or outright disbelieve, the (to me) incontrovertible evidence that anthropogenic global warming is real.

Here’s a few sources for back ground reading:
1. Talking Philosophy -An interesting discussion from earlier this year. In particular, look for the comments made by the post’s author, James Garvey (one of the bloggers featured in my blogroll).

2. An article by James Lovelock (excerpt at the bottom of this post).

3. The Hot Spot, written by a mother and journalist from a social science perspective.

4. Climate Change Denial. A cracker of a website and another one that’s made it into my blogroll. Some of the worthwhile entries include:

Geo-engineering as a sign of denial

What makes climate deniers tick (George Marshall)

Postcard from Israel – Written by a woman living on a kibbutz, explains in detail Israeli views on climate change and reasons for denial.

5. The earth blog – good article on denial.

6. ABC Radio (Australia) – A conversation about the challenge of shifting peoples behaviour in response to the threat of climate change. Discusses the different psychological motivations for change and how well they are understood by governments and opinion leaders.

7.  Australian Psychological Society – Lots of info on the psychological effects of climate change.

I’ll add more as time permits.

From James Lovelock’s article:

Remember, the “I” in IPCC stands for Intergovernmental. That is, the scientific results are subject to political editing before the IPCC reports are published. As to the science, James Lovelock says: It’s a complex story, really; most of one’s thinking that’s worth anything comes not from reason but from intuition. Many of my scientist friends don’t like that – they’re still back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where you did everything rationally and the word “irrationally” implied loose or bad thinking. I’m afraid it isn’t like that; all the things that really matter are intuitive. Understanding the Earth’s system is one of those things you cannot express in mathematical terms easily. The climate scientists tried to do it – there was a man called Lorenz, many years ago, who discovered that if you try to model a system containing more than two differential equations – and you need hundreds, thousands of them to look at the Earth’s system – it goes chaotic, as soon as you put real world data into it. So what they tend to do, because they have to model it that way, with hundreds of thousands of equations, they either fudge the equations with linearizing modifications, so that the model never goes chaotic, or they never run it beyond what they call equilibrium conditions, that is they never allow it to behave dynamically as a living thing. Now this is absolutely fatal as far as modelling goes and it applies both to biology and to climate science (geophysiology) and this is why we are finding now that the great gathering of scientists that formed the IPCC – some of the best climate scientists in the world – with the very best of intentions and the most modern and expensive equipment, are failing to predict the climate that is with us today. The most glaring error is that the sea level is rising nearly twice as fast as they were predicting; now this is a serious matter if you live [here] in London and you get an error that big. So to understand the Earth’s system, you can’t avoid approaching the whole problem to a certain extent intuitively and this is where I think Gaia came in because most of the first part of it was intuitive rather than rational. And I think it has some deeper significance in that one of my reasons for being somewhat pessimistic about the future of the present generation of humans is that I think the problem is right beyond us: we do not have the intellectual capacity to solve the problem of living successfully with our planet.