The best of the worst

John Mashey asks

Maybe the Rabett has this list stuffed in his burrow:

is there a nice list somewhere of truly awful climate papers published in otherwise-plausible-looking journals? (I.e., not E&E, or JSE, or things like that.)

The main use of this is to know where peer review seems to be failing.

But friend Cohenite already delivered and Eli blogged on it. Still, there is a fair amount of E&E in there, so here are Eli's top four.

Thomas Palm adds (see comments)

5. "Thermal pollution causes global warming" Bo Nordell, Global and Planetary Change 38 (2003) 305–312.

and another under review
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4. G. V. Chilingar, L. F. Khilyuk, O. G. Sorokhtin. Cooling of Atmosphere Due to CO₂ Emission, Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 30(1), 1 - 9 (2008). Actually anything by this trio. Brings incoherence to new heights.

3. Christopher Essex, Ross McKitrick, Bjorne Andresen; Does a Global Temperature Exist? Journal of Non-EquilibriumThermodynamics, 32(1) 1-27.

2. Ferenc Misckolczi; Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary Atmospheres. Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological 111(1), January–March 2007, 1–40.
Cohenite's favorite and a hot contender

1. Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheushner, Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of PhysicsInternational Journal of Modern Physics B, 23(3), 275-364 (2009). Get close and feel the spittle

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Winter at Summit Camp

The Earth Observer, a NASA newsletter on the Earth Observation Program has been running Lora Koenigs diary describing winter at Summit Camp on the top of Greenland. Definitely worth reading.

Hello! My name is Lora Koenig and I am a remote sensing glaciologist and a new hire in the Cryospheric Sciences Branch at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. My research uses satellites to monitor the ice sheets and I am always interested in how well measurements from space compare to those taken on the ground.

My interest in ground truth data and learning more about ice sheets has lead me to spend this winter at Summit, Greenland (Latitude 72.5 N Longitude 38.5 W). Over the course of this weekly blog I will tell you about my life and science, in the middle of the Greenland Ice Sheet, in the middle of the winter. I will start with a quick introduction and explain how I ended up in the dark on an ice sheet.

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Say it ain't so Rudy

Rudy Baum, editor in chief of C&E News (ACS's membership magazine) had a stemwinder of an editorial in the June 22 issue which will, without a doubt, encounter much snorting in the near future to be featured in Rabett Run. He starts by summarizing the situation

The science of anthropogenic climate change is becoming increasingly well established. The scientific consensus on the reality of climate change has become increasingly difficult to challenge, despite the efforts of diehard climate-change deniers (for brevity’s sake, CCDs).

and then points to recent major reports which strengthen the case for human driven climate change, the US Global Change Research Program report, a joint statement from the Presidents of the G8+5 national academies on climate change

Climate change and sustainable energy supply are crucial challenges for the future of humanity. It is essential that world leaders agree on the emission reductions needed to combat negative consequences of anthropogenic climate change at the UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009. At the same time, agreement is needed on actions to ensure basic energy services are available to all of the world’s people.

Baum's close nailed it

We see here the same tactics used by other purveyors of nonsense rejected by the mainstream scientific community. Creationists, for example, only want to expose students to “both sides of the debate over origins,” ignoring the fact that there is no debate over evolution. And, of course, it’s always useful to attack the “mainstream media.”

Heartland and its ally AmericanEnergySecurity.com are also flogging an 800-plus-page report, “Climate Change Reconsidered,” from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)—kind of an anti-IPCC, get it?—which, of course, proves conclusively that global warming probably isn’t happening; if it is happening, it’s not due to human activity; and, besides, a “warmer world will be a safer and healthier world for humans and wildlife alike.”

Sow doubt, make up statistics, call for an “open debate,” claim that you are being “silenced and ignored by the media and politicians,” claim that your opponents are just a “few bureaucrats and environmental activists,” not real scientists—those are the tactics that will be brought to bear in the coming months by the CCDs in their attempt to derail meaningful efforts to respond to global climate change.

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Reality Check

Werner Aeschbach-Hertig brings interesting news about Rabett Run's friend S. Fred Singer and the Chilingar.

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As the world wobbles

The issue of increased damage from extreme weather driven disasters as a result of climate change is attracts the same polemic that the gallery previously observed about climate change and global warming.

1. Starting Position: It ain't happening
2. Fallback Position: It has noting to do with the enhanced greenhouse effect
3. Fallfurtherback Position: There is no scientific proof, we need more research
   
4. Fallmuchfurtherback Position: If the local left (relatively) party didn't insist on building on the coast or in flood planes there would not be a problem.
5. Fallwayfurtherback Position: What have the Bangladeshi's ever done for us?

In many ways this resembles the progression we have seen throughout the history of climate change, and the answers given by the IPCC (and previous reports).

FAR: The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect is not likely for a decade or more.

SAR: The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate (considerable progress since the 1990 report in distinguishing between natural and anthropogenic influences on climate, because of: including aerosols; coupled models; pattern-based studies)

TAR: There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities

AR4: Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (> 90% certainty) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.

The state of the art can be found in a new paper by Schmidt, Klemper and Hoeppe that was previously commented on at Rabett Run. Particularly interesting is the correlation between sea surface temperature and tropical cyclone damage.

The bars in the figure to the right shows adjusted losses for tropical cyclones that made landfall in the US. The adjustments take account of socio-economic changes. The black line is a ten year smoothed average. The red line is the smoothed North Atlantic sea surface temperature. The good correlation of the losses with the sea surface temperature provide a cleft stick to hoist DenialCON 2 position holders on, leaving them the oxymoric position of asserting that sea surface temperature is independent of global warming. Eli is confident that they will be up to it tho.

As Chris pointed out, the conclusion brings us pretty close to having to invoke DenialCon 4.

annual adjusted losses since the beginning of the last cold phase (1971) show a positive trend, with an average annual rise of 4% that cannot be explained by socio-economic components. This increase can at least be interpreted as a climate variability impact. There is no evidence yet of any trend in tropical cyclone losses that can be attributed directly to anthropogenic climate change. But we advance the premise that if losses are affected by natural climate fluctuations, they are also likely to be affected by additional global warming due to anthropogenic climate change. This premise is supported by indications that the intensity of tropical cyclones is affected by anthropogenic climate change."

An objection to this has been raised on the basis that the trends do not extend back to the 1950s. File that one in the wishful thinking category given the physical correlation between global warming, sea surface temperature, and tropical cyclone intensity.

See Harold, not once was the name of the The Talented mentioned or even linked to.

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Science lurches forward again

About two years ago Stan Sanders group at JPL tossed a bombshell into our understanding of stratospheric ozone depletion, with a new, and much lower measurement of the chlorine peroxide (ClOOCl) absorption cross-section. This was a bombshell because it meant that there would be a lot less free chlorine in the stratosphere available for ozone depletion. Drew Shindell blogged on it at Real Climate, there was a bit of triumphalism on the denial beat.

The basic idea is that Cl catalyzes conversion of ozone, O3 to molecular oxygen, O2

(1) Cl + O3 --> ClO + O2
(2) ClO + O3 --> Cl + 2O2

ClO can dimerize

(3) ClO + ClO --> ClOOCl

which removes it from the catalytic cycle (1) and (2), but it can also be photolyzed

(4) ClOOCl + hv --> ClO + ClO

so the rate of photolysis, which is proportional to the absorption cross-section, determines how much ClO is available for the cycle. Because O3 absorbs most of the light above 305 nm, for all practical purposes, only the absorption cross-section of ClOOCl above ~305 nm is important.

The rub, of course, is that to measure the absorption cross-section of a molecule, the lab bunnies need to know how much of the molecule is in the light path. This is not easy. As a matter of fact it is very tough, especially for ClOOCl because you cannot prepare a pure sample, there will always be Cl2, O2, and maybe other stuff hanging around. Before Pope, Hansen, Bayes, Friedl and Sander, others had tried to figure out the amount of ClOOCl in the light path by mass balance, starting from the initial reactant concentrations and using absorption spectroscopy in various regions of the spectrum to assign concentrations of the stable species where known. Sanders group did a spectral subtraction of the know Cl2 spectrum from the observed spectrum in the UV, which they assumed was a combination of ClOOCl and Cl2 (O2 does not absorb much until 200 nm).

The Academica Sinica group (H. Y. Chen, C. Y. Lien, W. Y. Lin, Y. T. Lee and J. J. Lin) chose a different path. They created a molecular beam containing the equilibrium mixture of ClOOCl and Cl2 and used a laser to photodisocciate (shoot out) each. Because they knew the absorption coefficient of Cl2 at the laser wavelengths, they could get the ratio of the ClOOCl to Cl2 cross-sections at each wavelength. The results are shown in the figure and agree well with earlier measurements. As they point out all three methods have their difficulties. They think that Pope, et al, overcorrected for Cl2, but that really is speculation.

This is the way that science auditing works. Comments?
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Wither Twitter?

After distributed computing efforts such as SETI at home, and Climate Project came GLOBE, a world wide effort to involve students in gathering ground truth for environmental and climate studies and Weather Bug, a distributed set of weather stations available to classes, media, and on your Blackberry. Motivated by early efforts to gather climate and weather data over new media Eli asks, wither Twitter and is not very optimistic. From the Urban Dictionary

freep: To slew or cheat an online poll by repeatedly voting (clearing cookies, using proxies) or to make a blog appear to be commented by numerous posters by the same means. (From the practices of the Free Republic or "freepers")

The results of the CNN question of the day were running 70:30 in favor until an hour ago when it got freeped.

Alas, without enforced automatic quality control or restricting the contributors to trusted sources, something like this is doomed which is too bad, because involving the public in climate and weather sciences would be a valuable thing. Not only would coverage increase, but feedback could be used to provide a valuable introduction to science, mathematical and statistical concepts and ways of posing questions and answering them.

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Kiss Hubble Goodbye

Into Eli's mailbox floated this

NASA is placing RFI NNH09ZDA010L ("Feasibility of using Constellation Architecture for Servicing Existing and Future Observatory-Class Scientific Spacecraft") on hold. The August 10 due date for information in the form of a white paper is cancelled; no new due date is announced at this time. The "Workshop I" described in NNH09ZDA010L will not occur in June; a new date has not been established at this time. Updates will be made available at http://ServicingStudy.gsfc.nasa.gov/ regarding revised study plans and opportunities for community involvement. Any new workshop or white paper opportunities will be announced through a new RFI.

The bunnies will gather at 17:00 in the usual place for the wake. Comments?
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The Catastrophist

Elizabeth Kolbert has an article about the cap and trade legislation and Jim Hansen. It's behind a paywall, but the New Yorker is one of those things you should subscribe to ($50/yr) so don't expect sympathy. Particularly interesting is Kolbert's description of how Hansen moved from space science (modeling Venus) to Earth science. After the discovery that CFC were killing off the ozone layer Hansen

"realized that we had a planet that was changing before our eyes, and that's more interesting," Hansen told me. The topic attracted him for much the same reason that Venus's coulds had: there were new research questions to be answered. He decided to try to adapt a computer program that had been designed to forecast the weather to see if it could be used to look further into the future. What would happen to the earth if, for example, greenhouse gas levels were to double.

"He never worked on any topic thinking it might be any use for the world," Anniek told me. "He just wanted to figure out the scientific meaning of it."

When Hansen began his modeling work, there were good theoretical reasons for blieving that increasing CO2 levels would cause the world to warm, but little empirical evidence. Average global temperatures had risen in the nineteen thirties and forties; then they had declined in some regions, in the nineteen fifties and sixties. A few years into his project, Hansen concluded that a new pattern was about to emerge. In 1981, he became the director of GISS. In a paper published that year in Science, he forecast that the following decade would be unusually warm. (That turned out to be the case). In the same paper, he predicted that the nineteen nineties would be warmer still. (That also turned out to be true.) Finally he forecast that by the end of the twentieth century a global warming signal would emerge from the "noise" of natural climate variability. (This too proved to be correct.)

Later, Hansen became even more specific. In 1990, he bet a roomful of scientists that that year, or one of the following two, would be the warmest on record. (Within nine months, he had won the bet. ) In 1991, he predicted that, owing to the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, average global temperatures would drop, and then, a few years later, recommence their upward climb, which was precisely what happened.

From early on, the significance of Hansen's insights was recognized by the scientific community. "The work that he did in the seventies, eighties and nineties was absolutely groundbreaking," Spencer Weart, a physicist turned historian who has studies the efforts to understand climate change told me. He added, "It does help to be right."

"I have a whole folder in my drawer labelled 'Canonical Papers,' Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton, said. "About half of them are Jim's"

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Ms Rabett on GM

Eli was wondering why GM (and Chrysler) killed off particular dealerships. Ms. Rabett pointed out that for the last fifty years, the US automakers have been concentrating on the high end of the market, esp. large cars with fins and machine gun mounts. They allowed, or at least turned a blind eye when their dealers opened up foreign car dealerships because they saw that as the entry level for customers who would later move up to the domestic brands. Of course , Toyota, BMW et al., had other ideas, filling out their own lines. Today, the US manufacturers are going to have to downsize their offerings. She speculates (and Eli is damned if he is going to check this out) that at least in part, they divested dealerships which also sold imports which would be in competition with the US brands. You go argue with her.

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