The American Physical Society Throws Down

One of the joys about having a publishing or public relations office is that news is not judgement, indeed to believe Andy Revkin, that would be evil issue advocacy.  The APS AIP (APS is a majore part of AIP) publishing office just threw down for Steve Koonin (yes, John M, Eli has WebCited, but comments can be left at the AIP APS)

In January, when Steven E. Koonin welcomed participants to the Climate Change Statement Review Workshop that he was chairing for the American Physical Society, he made a point of acknowledging “experts who credibly take significant issue with several aspects of the consensus picture.” Participating, and fitting that description, were climate scientists Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen, and John Christy. Now Koonin has published a high-visibility commentary in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “Climate science is not settled.” In the paper version, the editors italicized the word not.

Ben Santer, Isaac Held and William Collins have now been officially declared chopped liver.

It can be added that Koonin has a long past in investigating and pronouncing on physics questions of special public importance. A quarter century ago, the article“Physicists debunk claim of a new kind of fusion” included this: “Dr. Steven E. Koonin of Caltech called the Utah report a result of ‘the incompetence and delusion of Pons and Fleischmann.’ The audience of scientists sat in stunned silence for a moment before bursting into applause.”. . .

Koonin’s 2000-word WSJ commentary dominates the front page of the Saturday Review section, with a jump to an interior page. The editors signposted it in several ways. The subhead says, “Climate change is real and affected by human activity, writes a former top science official of the Obama administration. But we are very far from having the knowledge needed to make good policy.” A call-out line in boldface on the front page says, “Our best climate models still fail to explain the actual climate data.” Another, after the jump to p. C2, says, “The discussion should not be about ‘denying’ or ‘believing’ the science.” A photo caption on the jump page says, in part, “Today’s best estimate of climate sensitivity is no more certain than it was 30 years ago.” A caption on the front page says, “While Arctic ice has been shrinking, Antarctic sea ice is at a record high.” (Although that photo plainly shows only the extraction of an ice-core sample, the caption adds, “Above, scientists measure the sea level in Antarctica.”)

Now Eli, Eli wonders who wrote this press release.  Not really, but implausible deniability is always useful.  Suspicions are that something wonderful will come from NYU

UPDATE:  It turns out that the author of this piece has a track record.  In the comments, Pinko Punko answers Eli's question.

I'd like to note that the author of the piece, Steven T. Corneliussen, also authored this nice write-up of the National Review attacking Neil deGrasse Tyson. It includes some nice notes about the Discovery Institute and Ann Coulter and reports these opinions as if they were just news. Not clear why this was deemed newsworthy to the Physics community. See how oddly it reads.

Denunciations from Roger Jr. and Andy of such obvious issue advocacy are a bit late tody

A Dog's Dinner

There is considerable unhoppiness about the APS.  The arrogance of physicists was the obvious driver in setting the stage for the now appearing Steve Koonin cluster fuck.  As Eli pointed out the members of the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) drafting sub-committee were several courses short of a clue on climate science, even the physics parts of it.  Ankh commented on how life imitates xkcd.

One would think that since the review of the APS statement on climate change was scheduled for this year, that the APS would appoint at least one or two physicists who specialized in climate science and could leaven the nuclear complex refugees who were on it.  But no.  That would not be physicist like.

When Eli suggested that what has been drafted was almost certainly a dog's dinner, Ethon's friend who had seen it replied that "while not at liberty to say anything about the statement as drafted, but let's just say I had to change my socks because Rover is drooling so much in anticipation of supper."

Ethon has read some letters to the APS and the Wall Street Journal and various blog comments. It turns out that Koonin lobbied to be in charge of the process, got input from climate scientists and then refused to acknowledge what he had been given, simply walking away.  Eli has it now from three sources (although they may overlap) that he has resigned from POPA.  Given that he was/is still listed the chair elect, take this as it is, but the WSJ article is a sure sign that the statement he ramrodded through has met considerable opposition.  The APS response will be indicative.

Ben Santer, who was one of those talking with the sub-committee is unhappy about the outcome, the waste of time and the possibility that he was simply set up by someone with an agenda and no intent to learn.  By permission Eli quotes him

Another source of real frustration is that Dr. Koonin had a real opportunity to listen. To consult experts in many different aspects of climate science. To do a deep dive into the science. To seek understanding of complex scientific issues. He did not make use of this opportunity. His op-Ed is not a deep dive - it is a superficial toe-dip into a shallow puddle, rehashing the same tired memes (the "warming hiatus" points toward fundamental model errors, climate scientists suppress uncertainties, there's a lack of transparency in the IPCC process, climate always varies naturally, etc.) 

We don't know everything, but we know enough!

In his recent WSJ piece, Steven Koonin makes the following claim:

Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century.

What are the facts?

In the period 1870-1924, the rate of sea-level rise was 0.8 mm/yr.

In 1925-1992, the rate was 1.9 mm/yr, and in 1993 -2014 the rate was 3.2 mm/y. So the rate has quadrupled in the last century, from 0.8 mm/yr to 3.2 mm/yr.

The rate data can be found here, from Sato and Hansen. (Data were last updated in May 2014).

Basic climate really is settled. While we don't know everything, we know enough. The rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing problems now,and will cause bigger problems in the future.

Koonin doesn't think we know enough to set good climate policy.

He's wrong: policy should be on the supply side, phase out fossil fuels (petroleum, coal, natural gas) and substitute solar, wind, hydro and nuclear instead.

On the demand side, greater energy efficiency.

We don't know everything, but we know enough.

Sea-level rise was important in the $65B damages inflicted by Hurricane Sandy on the tri-state NY metro area (NY, NJ, CT) in 2012. Koonin is now at NYU, whose whose Langone Medical Center sustained $1.13B in damages, and the patients had to be evacuated.

Before NYU, Koonin was chief scientist at the oil company BP.

Words

Shaun Donovan is the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, without whose approval not a dime gets spent by Washington.  Today he gave a speech at the Center for American Progress.  It was. . .interesting and not aimed to please the Inhofes, Lonborgs, and Currys of the world but the actions not being taken suit them perfectly.  Speech took about 20 minutes, followed by an interview by former Senator Ted Strickland.

Climate action is tremendously important to me. As OMB Director, due to the wide-ranging effects that climate change is having – and will continue to have – it’s critical to our ability to operate and fund the government in a responsible manner.

From where I sit, climate action is a must do; climate inaction is a can’t do; and climate denial scores – and I don’t mean scoring points on the board. I mean that it scores in the budget – climate denial will cost us billions of dollars. The failure to invest in climate solutions and climate preparedness doesn’t get you membership in a Fiscal Conservatives’ Caucus – it makes you a member of the Flat Earth Society. Climate denial doesn’t just fly in the face of the overwhelming judgment of science – it is fiscally foolish. And while we cannot say with certainty that any individual event is caused by climate change, it is clearly increasing the frequency and intensity of several kinds of extreme weather events. The costs of climate change add up and ignoring the problem only makes it worse.

 and as we all know, no hurricane has hit the US in like thousands of days

Today-2014 Atlantic hurricane is half over Streak without intense hurricane landfall now 3244 days Long-term trends: http://t.co/6TmPhcQuvT
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) September 10, 2014

But it’s also personal – as a native New Yorker, Superstorm Sandy brought home the impact of extreme weather. New York is where I grew up. It’s where I got married. And it’s where my children were born and raised for most of their lives.

But after Superstorm Sandy, it was where hundreds of homes were turned into piles of debris; mom and pop businesses were left submerged in water; and roads – including the one I had taken my driving test on – were wiped out. One hundred sixty people lost their lives. One of them was a daughter of a family friend. She was just 24 years old.<

As we all know, the storm also carried a hefty price tag: it caused $65 billion in damages and economic losses. Nine million homes and businesses lost power. Over 650,000 homes were damaged or completely destroyed. To help recover and rebuild, the Federal Government provided over $60 billion in much needed relief funding to affected areas.

and Aunt Judy tells us that the pause is in the stadium wave pudding

#stadiumwave? MT @curryja: New post @ Climate Etc. - Trust, and don't bother to verify http://t.co/YlzAGXa5uW
— O. Bothe (@geschichtenpost) October 18, 2013

But, let’s get some facts straight about the continued costs if we don’t act.

Thirteen of the 14 warmest years since good records became available in the late 19th century have occurred since 2000.

Still, the future is bright

Watts Up With That? http://t.co/EgkDjPYk9B Excerpt: So what harm does it do if Tyson makes up stories to fit h... http://t.co/dJmu0aGH7u
— Weather Goddess 7 (@Channel7Weather) September 19, 2014

Looking ahead, leading estimates suggest that if we see warming of 3° Celsius above preindustrial levels, instead of 2°, we could see additional economic damages of approximately 0.9 percent of global output per. Our Council of Economic Advisers puts this figure into perspective – 0.9 percent of estimated 2014 U.S. GDP is approximately $150 billion.

Within the next 15 years, higher sea levels combined with storm surge and potential changes in hurricane activity are projected to increase the average annual cost of coastal storms along the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico by $7 billion, bringing the total price tag for coastal storms to $35 billion each year.

According to the National Climate Assessment, climate change has made the fire season in the United States longer, and on average, more intense. Funding needed for federal wildland fire management has tripled since 1999—averaging over $3 billion annually. In a world of finite budgets, greater fire suppression costs have left less money available for forest management and fire preparedness. So we spend what we have to in order to put out the fires, and underinvest in the tools that can help mitigate them – only leading to higher costs in the future.

And then there’s the devastating impact of drought in recent years. In 2012, we experienced what NOAA has called the country’s most extensive drought in more than 50 years, racking up $30 billion in damages. This year, California has been facing its third worst drought in recorded history, with a projected cost to the State’s economy of $2.2 billion and more than 17,000 jobs.

The bill to all of us, as taxpayers, is going up too: For example, in January, when the 2014 Farm Bill passed, CBO estimated that agricultural disaster assistance payments would total just under $900 million this year. But due to the severity of the drought, USDA has already spent $2.6 billion this year—three times what the CBO estimated would occur in a more typical year. And crop insurance payouts in the aftermath of the 2012 drought totaled more than $17 billion.

Now, when you consider the impact of climate change on the Federal Budget, it’s bad news for everyone. Even a small reduction in real GDP growth can dramatically reduce Federal revenue, drive up our deficits, and impact the government’s ability to serve the public.

Now, I’ve painted a pretty grim picture. But we are not powerless.

Well, Shaun, you could cut the pipeline off at the knees.  

Koonin Hits the Fan

Eli, not a long time ago, posted on the utter cluelessness of the sub-committee putting together a new APS statement on climate change. Like lambs to the slaughter he said, but sadly, one of the lambs was not a sheep but a wolf, lying in wait.  Steve Koonin, the former (Ethon reports) chair of the subcommittee has outed himself in the Wall Street Journal.  

He reprises the expected

• No such thing as settled science.
• Scientific and policy discussions have been inhibited
• I am a physicist and I know
• It could be bad, but you can't prove it will be bad in my backyard.
• People are itty bitty things, how could they affect the Earth
• Climate models are not to be trusted
• The Pause, The Pause
• and the models missed The Pause.

Well, if you want more go read Rupert's Rag but sadly damage may have been done.  Ethon has heard that having steered the APS committee in the direction he intended Koonin has resigned in the Hal Lewis manner.  Noisily and nastily.  Confirmation awaited, but there should be blood on the floor. 

The APS has been arrogantly negligent in  its handling of the coming Climate Change position statement.

This sucks.

On Current Affairs Past and Future

Eli Explains It All

ATTP is talking a pause, from blogging that is.  He is depressed by the futility of it all, trying to have a discussion with people, who are blathering from bad faith or ignorance

Here’s maybe the crucial point : if you think what the other person says is absurd, just stop. There’s no way you can have a good faith discussion with someone who you think is talking nonsense.

No one said it better than Barney Frank

 

Still Eli will miss the conversations over there with the likes of Steve Bloom, Pekka and some (not all) of the regulars to be dissed later.

Nevada gambles on Tesla gigafactory

Electric vehicles, if they are charged by green electricity, can reduce carbon emissions. Battery technology is a key factor holding back electric cars. Physics Nobel laureate Burton Richter in his admirable 2010 book, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Climate change and Energy in the 21st Century, recommends more research into battery technology.

Accordingly, there were national as well as local issues at stake this week, when the Nevada Legislature met in special session. They voted unanimously to give the Tesla company $1.3 B in tax breaks as incentive to build a $5B Gigafactory (battery factory) near Reno. Tesla claims the factory will create 6,500 new jobs, which works out to $200,000 per job.

I hope they got some of that in writing, because verbal promises are worthless. If Tesla ends up creating only half the number of jobs that it touted, are the tax breaks cut in half also?

Nevada's governor, Brian Sandoval, kept the legislature in the dark until the special session met, and presented it to the legislature as a take-it-or-leave-it deal.

Tesla was negotiating with other states besides Nevada, and was in a position to drive a hard bargain. It took a stupendous mount of bribery ($1.3 B works out to $471 per Nevada resident) to get the factory in Nevada.

Skeptics think that Tesla stock is the latest bubble stock. Insiders at Panasonic, VW, and Daimler have expressed skepticism. Analysts say that the factory will only be profitable if it can reduce battery manufacturing costs by 30% from present levels, and must sell 500,000 cars per year. Last year, Tesla sold under 25,000 cars. The company is not currently profitable.

Critics of the deal came from the right and left. The right was represented by the NPRI , Nevada Policy Research Institute, which claims it supports government "transparency". However, NPRI refuses to disclose its funders, so their funding sources remain officially secret (but widely viewed as a front group for at least one big casino.) NPRI thought the governor's calculations of the benefits of the factor were too optimistic. The left was represented by the NPLA, Nevada Progressive Leadership Alliance, which was concerned with funding vital government services. In the short run at least, the result will be a demand for government services for schools, police, fire, roads, etc, but without any additional tax revenues.

Governor Sandoval claims that Nevada will benefit by $100 Billion over the next 20 years, even after the tax breaks. Even if it doesn't happen, he'll still be OK. The factory won't be running before 2017 at the earliest, and Sandoval is widely touted as a potential vice-presidential Republican candidate for the 2016 election cycle.

I wrote to my state legislators, pointing out the price tag of $200,000 per job. I asked politely if I form a company and create five jobs, do I get a million dollars in tax breaks? I will let my faithful readers at Rabett Run when and if I hear anything. Don't hold your breath.

A Note About Roger Revelle, Justin Lancaster and Fred Singer

As somebunnies may remember, S. Fred Singer is quite proud of an article in the magazine of the Cosmos Club (a club for movers and shakers in DC) written by Fred Singer and Chauncey Starr that had Roger Revelle's name on it. How Revelle's name got there beyond the fact that Fred Singer put it there is a matter of interest that is explained by Justin Lancaster, Revelle's student and last assistant. Lancaster, to put it softly, was quite skeptical that Revelle was in any meaningful sense an author of that paper and said so.  Singer SLAPPED and got a statement from Lancaster as a settlement

Eli has written about this where you can get up to speed on the whole thing. Of course since Al Gore learned about climate change from Roger Revelle, this has become a stick to beat Gore with. 

Today, Justin Lancaster left a note at Rabett Run, that needs to be repeated
----------------------------------------------
I would have skipped weighing in further on this topic, except (1) it seems to never recede into history (it's surfacing in Climate Change discussions on Facebook in September 2014), and (2) my dear cousin Walter, for whom I hold sincere respect, clearly needs an update (I wish he'd contacted me directly before adding to this slog).

So let's be clear:

1. Fred Singer is the most unethical scientist, in my opinion, that I have ever met. I said so in the early 1990s, publicly, and I am still confident in the truth of this statement.

2. The worst decision I ever made in my life was to provide a retraction of my statements in the early 1990s about Singer's nastiness. The retraction was coerced. It was required to stop the SLAPP suit brought against me by a conservative think-tank in Washington that wanted to keep Fred Singer in action.

3. I was 95% certain that I would win my case in court. But my wife was terrified. In fact, she was terrorized by this lawsuit. We had three young children. I was a Harvard postdoc now needing to find a next academic posting. She was a graduate student at Harvard. My wife was worried about that 5% risk. She was scared we could lose our house and all our assets. We new it would be a 2-3 year ordeal that would drain our resources and attention. The folks at NRDC and EDF chose to not step in; we couldn't afford the $100k+ that the lawsuit would cost. Defending for a year took an enormous amount of my time. That is the meanness and force of a SLAPP suit.

4. Singer distorted my words in his legal complaint and then even more so in his publication in the Hoover Institution volume. Singer flat out lied in that text about my role (and his wife, Candace Crandall contributed to this smear campaign). This chapter is not a sworn statement.

5. My testimony about what happened is sworn under oath, under penalty of perjury. I am an officer of the courts of VT, MA, CA and CO.

6. Everything I said was true. In my negotiations with the 8 lawyers from two national law firms, in which we scripted the retraction, I refused to state that anything I said was untrue. I never admitted to lying, because I never lied.

7. In the coerced retraction, I allowed that my remarks were "unwarranted," because my mother had commonly used that word when conveying to us that we need not have behaved the way we did. I realized that I could have proceeded more carefully and privately with Singer (which I initially had tried to do) and that I need not have made the issue so public. I also realized that because I was not in Revelle's office during the key session between Singer and Revelle, that I could have let Christa's affidavit and the galley proofs themselves speak the story. (Of course that was already hindsight, as Singer would not provide the galley proofs; I only got them from the Scripps archivist the night before my deposition of Singer).

8. I regret allowing the word "unwarranted" in the coerced retraction, because in fact my charges were fully justified when made. It was a three-hour negotiation, because Singer's lawyers wanted me to admit that I made false statements, but I refused. When my lawyer and I stood to quit the negotiation, saying "We'll be happy to see you in court in MA," there was a flurry of "Wait, wait," across the table. Eventually we settled on the word "unwarranted."

9. I never worked for Al Gore, I was not in any way involved in his political campaign and I had nothing to do with Gore's office other than getting a clip from him for a film on Roger's career that was shown in a film at the Rio Earth Summit. My entire focus was on a wrong being done to Roger Revelle's career and Roger's concern for the Earth environment and for humanity.

10. I had formed, in 1987, a non-profit named: "Environmental Science & Policy Institute (ESPI)," ESPI was the only non-governmental organization presenting scientific results at the 2nd World Climate Conference in Geneva, where I served on the Synthesis Committee. ESPI was an NGO registered at the Earth Summit. I was speaking widely at Dartmouth, Harvard, UC and other fora on the science and policy related to the carbon dioxide problem. I served on the NOAA Citizen Advisory Panel and was the first Chair of the Global Change Working Group within the Society for Risk Assessment.

11. Fred Singer started his "Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)" in the early 1990s, practically in direct opposition to ESPI.

12. Singer was associated with an energy-industry-backed cabal, comprising of at least Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling, and loosely coupling Hugh Ellsaesser, Richard Lindzen and some others. I was known to most or all of these folks through face-to-face encounters academically and in governmental meetings.

13. I had hoped that, after having been found with his hand in the cookie jar, Singer would have the good grace to leave this sordid issue in the historical dust bin. Giving him the retraction and apology I hoped would be sufficient. But it was not and he did not put it down. Instead he raised this issue prominently in the public eye, publishing my retraction in newspapers and blatantly misrepresenting the history in the Hoover chapter. And his cabal echoed it all widely to their key blogging network. And that has continued to cascade through many blogging layers, for now more than twenty years!

14. In 2006, when Gore has published his "An Inconvenient Truth," this all erupted again, and I determined that enough is enough. I publicly and unequivocally repudiated and retracted the earlier "Retraction" that had been coerced, and I published the court documents and supporting affidavits and documentation so that people could read it for themselves.

15. The documentation is available online at Cosmos Myth

16. Singer and his supporters did not respond to my 2006 publication because they have no case. AGW is an issue of public concern. Singer is a celebrity in this field, perhaps the leading contrarian, skeptic, denier at the head of the pack for almost two decades. There are no objective canons of ethics in science (unlike for lawyers), so my charge of unethical can only mean "in my opinion" and "based on my standards." Not only do I believe my statements to be true, I have substantial evidence backing them up. And, we now have anti-SLAPP legislation in Massachusetts.

17. This entire episode has been investigated by journalists, described in chapters in two books, become the subject of a play and other media. Despite the bloggers who seem to continue to enjoy piling on the smear while ignoring the factual evidence, I'm comfortable with the outcome of the former more careful and thorough inspections.
-------------------------------------

Eli is grateful for Justin Lancaster's courage and setting the record straight. 

Willard Tony Plays Dr. Who

One of the advantages of the Tardis is that it allows going back in time and ignoring the present or even the more recent past.  This really is an advantage when you are pretending that the last word on proxy reconstructions of climate is Mann, Bradley and Hughes 1998 like Aunt Judy in the Climate Etc attic or Steve McIntyre reliving past cherry picks.  Willard Tony does a nice jig on ozone republishing on Watts Up what he bleated over at PJMedia (are they still alive?).  There is much to giggle about in WT's attempt to appear profound, Sou is on the case, but allow Eli to start from near the end.

Eli, being a fair bunny, can quote WT

Or does it? Adding to the madness, now there is scientific uncertainty about the actual extent of the ozone problem as it relates to CFCs. More recent science has shown that the sensitivity of the Earth’s ozone layer might very well be 10 times less than was originally believed back in the 1980s when the alarm was first sounded. As reported in the prestigious science journal Nature, Markus Rex, an atmospheric scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, found that the breakdown rate of a crucial CFC-related molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2), is almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate:

“This must have far-reaching consequences,” Rex says. “If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being.” What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.

before, well, before.  That link goes back to 2007, almost a pause ago, and is not to a scientific paper, but a news report, one which quotes Rex.  What this is all about is a claim by Pope et al from JPL that the absorption cross-section of ClO-OCl (aka the ClO dimer or Cl2O2) was much smaller than had previously been measured.  This would mean that the rate at which broke apart (photolyzed or photodissociated) after absorbing a UV photon was much slower.  Thus there would be much less ClO and Cl available to participate in the catalytic destruction of ozone.

ClOOCl + hv --> Cl + ClOO
ClOO + M --> Cl + O2+M
and two of the Cl atoms react with two ozone molecules
Cl + O3 --> ClO + O2

To understand how blogscience works just read some of the comments in that Nature news item

Other groups have yet to confirm the new photolysis rate, but the conundrum is already causing much debate and uncertainty in the ozone research community. “Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart,” says John Crowley, an ozone researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

and of course, some of the debate and uncertainty lead to new experimental measurement, but that takes a while, and a short while longer to get published.  In 2009, Eli commented on a paper from the Academica Sinica in Taiwan that conclusively showed Pope et al to be wrong.  Of course there was more, most importantly a paper by Burkholder's group (Papanastasiou, et al) at the NOAA Boulder lab (open version sort of).

The UV photolysis of Cl2O2 (dichlorineperoxide) is a key step in the catalytic destruction of polar stratospheric ozone. In this study, the gas-phase UV absorption spectrum of Cl2O2 was measured using diode array spectroscopy and absolute cross sections, σ, are reported for the wavelength range 200-420 nm. Pulsed laser photolysis of Cl2O at 248 nm or Cl2/Cl2O mixtures at 351 nm at low temperature (200-228 K) and high pressure (∼700 Torr, He) was used to produce ClO radicals and subsequently Cl2O2 via the termolecular ClO self-reaction. The Cl2O2 spectrum was obtained from spectra recorded following the completion of the gas phase ClO radical chemistry. The spectral analysis used observed isosbestic points at 271, 312.9, and 408.5 nm combined with reaction stoichiometry and chlorine mass balance to determine the Cl2O2 spectrum. The where the quoted error limits are 2σ and include estimated systematic errors. The Cl2O2 absorption cross sections obtained for wavelengths in the range 300-420 nm are in good agreement with the Cl2O2 spectrum reported previously by Burkholder et al. (J. Phys. Chem. A 1990, 94, 687) and significantly higher than the values reported by Pope et al. (J. Phys. Chem. A 2007, 1, 4322). A possible explanation for the discrepancy in the Cl2O2  cross section values with the Pope et al. study is discussed. Representative,atmospheric photolysis rate coefficients are calculated and a range of uncertainty estimated based on the determination of σCl2O2(λ) in this work. Although improvements in our fundamental understanding of the photochemistry of Cl2O2 are still desired, this work indicates that major revisions in current atmospheric chemical mechanisms are not required to simulate observed polar ozone depletion.

And what is the possible problem with the Pope study, well, turns out that they were measuring the absorption of ClO dimer in the same region where Cl2 absorbs (btw 300 and 400 nm, kind of bell shaped).  As the abstract discusses, the method of production ClO dimer also produces Cl2 as a by product, and thus you have to know how much Cl2 there is in the mixture you are measuring. Papanastasiou, et al think that Pope et al got this slightly wrong (4.5%).

Also in 2009, there was a nice paper by the Anderson group at Harvard showing that the amount of Cl produced in the photolysis of ClOOCl was exactly what had been pre-Pope expected.

And finally, Pope, now at the University of Birmingham has a new paper (2013) extending the spectral measurements into the visible using cavity ring-down.  Perhaps another post

Eli tried to be nice, pointing this out to WT's fans, but you know. . .

A Kaya Festival

Somebunny has pointed Eli to a presentation on the Kaya identity from the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.  Not that Eli agrees with everything said, but it provides a basis for discussion, and as several have pointed (Dikran, palindrome and Marion) out this draws out the usefulness of such things.  Anyhow, you can go to the Pacific Institute  site and see the presentation full screen.  You can move through the sections using the menu on the left, or of course, as Eli recommends, you can alternate listening to Wynton Marsalas with the Kaya identity.

Oh yeah, the thing needs a minute or so to load and is set to start at the discussion of the identity, so just click yes. Take your time and beverage of pleasure. Eli will have a Carrot Cola.

Not that Eli Was Ever A Wynton Marsalas Fan

but this is good stuff to listen to before or during the serious in life . . . .

On the Kaya Identity

Now that two of the three bunnies Eli considers most annoying on the INTERNET have spit the dummy on the Kaya identity, Eli thinks he might have a word.



Dr Roy sees nothing wrong with , but really does not see why it is useful, Willis E says it's an identity, CO2 emissions equal CO2 emissions, who cares?  Roger Jr. says the mathematics are simple, therefore all is good.  Eli will take his word on that.  Oh yes, Roger doesn't like Paul Krugman's take.  Perhaps the math was too complicated?

But, dear bunnies, Eli is here to defend the Kaya identity.  Measuring current, past or future CO2 emissions is not trivial.  The Kaya identity allows one to look at four different factors which may be more easily and perhaps exactly estimated and/or measured.  Three of the factors are ratios.  While we may not be able to measure or estimate the numerators or denominators exactly, we can perhaps get a handle on the ratios. For the last two terms estimates can be gotten by looking at a range of known component systems and trends.

The Kaya identity is useful in that it provides a handle on something we cannot necessarily measure directly, future CO2 emissions (and to an extent past ones).  In this it is very much like engineering thermodynamics which allows us to quantify things we cannot directly measure by providing relationships with things that we can.  Maxwell's equations are useful for other things than bedeviling junior chemistry majors.

Eli was a most peculiar child

The Kind of Press Release Eli Likes

W/O much further comment

September 1, 2014 

Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego today announced that Wendy and Eric Schmidt have provided a grant that will support continued operation of the renowned Keeling Curve measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. The grant provides $500,000 over five years to support the operations of the Scripps CO2 Group, which maintains the Keeling Curve. 

CO2 Group Director Ralph Keeling said the grant will make it possible for his team to restore atmospheric measurements that had been discontinued because of a lack of funding, address a three-year backlog of samples that have been collected but not analyzed, and enhance outreach efforts that educate the public about the role carbon dioxide plays in climate. 

"I'm very grateful to be able to return to doing science and being attentive to these records. When it comes to tracking the rise in carbon dioxide, every year is a new milestone.  We are still learning what the rise really means for humanity and the rest of the planet,” said Keeling.

Wendy Schmidt, co-founder with her husband of The Schmidt Family Foundation and The Schmidt Ocean Institute, said “The Scripps CO2 Project is critical to documenting the atmospheric changes on our planet and the Keeling Curve is an essential part of that tracking process. As government funding for science in general is decreasing, Eric and I are delighted to work with Scripps to help it continue its benchmark CO2 Project.” 

The Schmidt Family Foundation advances the development of renewable energy and the wiser use of natural resources and houses its grant-making operation in The 11th Hour Project, which supports more than 150 nonprofit organizations in program areas including climate and energy, ecological agriculture, human rights, and our maritime connection.

In 2009, the Schmidts created the Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI), and in 2012 launched the research vessel Falkor as a mobile platform to advance ocean exploration, discovery, and knowledge, and catalyze sharing of information about the oceans. 

In keeping with the couple’s commitment to ocean health issues, Wendy Schmidt has partnered with XPRIZE to sponsor the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup XCHALLENGE, awarded in 2011, and the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE, a prize that will respond to the global need for better information about the process of ocean acidification. It will be awarded in 2015. 

The Keeling Curve has made measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a flagship station on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa since 1958. In addition, the Scripps CO2 Group measures carbon dioxide levels at several other locations around the world from Antarctica to Alaska. The measurement series established that global levels of CO2, a heat-trapping gas that raises atmospheric and ocean temperatures as it accumulates, have risen substantially in the past century. From a concentration that had never risen above 280 parts per million (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution, CO2 concentrations had risen to 315 ppm when the first Keeling Curve measurements were made. In 2013, concentrations at Mauna Loa rose above 400 ppm for the first time in human history and likely for the first time in 3-5 million years. Multiple lines of scientific research have attributed the rise to the use of fossil fuels in everyday activities. 

The measurement series has become an icon of science with its steadily rising seasonal sawtooth representation of CO2 levels now a familiar image alongside Watson and Crick’s double helix representation of DNA and Charles Darwin’s finch sketches. Keeling Curve creator Charles David Keeling, Ralph Keeling’s father, received several honors for his work before his death in 2005, including the National Medal of Science from then-President George W. Bush. 

The value of the Keeling Curve has increased over time, making possible discoveries about Earth processes that would have been extremely difficult to observe over short time periods or with only sporadic measurements. For instance, in 2013, researchers discovered that the annual range of CO2 levels is increasing. This finding may point to an increase in photosynthetic activity in response to a greater availability of a key nutrient for plant life. 

Nuances in Keeling Curve measurements have similarly identified the global effects of events like volcanic eruptions, influences that would have been difficult to discern if measurements were made infrequently or periodically suspended. In addition, the Keeling Curve helps researchers understand the proportion of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the oceans, which in turn helps them estimate the pace of phenomena such as ocean acidification. In the past decade, scientists have come to widely study the ecological effects of acidification, which happens as carbon dioxide reacts chemically with seawater. 

The Keeling Curve could eventually serve as a bellwether revealing the progress of efforts to diminish fossil fuel use. Save for seasonal variations, the measurement has not trended downward at any point in its history.
- Robert Monroe

This is indeed good news and praise is due the Schmidts, but $500K for 5 years is about one NSF grant, and Scripps and Ralph Keeling still deserve the bunnies support.

Higher CCl4 emissions? Eli is shocked, shocked

About a week ago, maybe a bit more, NASA, nay Goddard Space Flight Center released a breathless press release which spread near and far even unto our buddies on the other side of reality and some on our side.

Eli is here to tell you that just about everyone missed the real discoveries in the paper and underlying work, and the paper itself let alone the press release did not tell the whole story.  According to everybunny else the take home was

However, the new research shows worldwide emissions of CCl4 average 39 kilotons per year, approximately 30 percent of peak emissions prior to the international treaty going into effect.

It has been long known that there are significant fugitive emissions of just about all CFCs and ilk and that bottom up inventories of atmospheric emissions always fall short of reality.  This has consequences for our understanding.  It should be no real surprise that the emissions are higher than officially reported.  Of course, the issue is quantifying the amount of emissions and tracing them back to their source and here the Liang paper makes an important contribution.  Yes, IF the Montreal Protocols (MP) were being rigidly enforced globally we would not be seeing such emissions, and we would be seeing a faster decline, but  the best of times has not yet arrived.  OTOH, it is vitally important to know if the fugitive emissions themselves are decreasing.

Buried down at the bottom of the press release is this afterthought

In addition to unexplained sources of CCl4, the model results showed the chemical stays in the atmosphere 40 percent longer than previously thought. The research was published online in the Aug. 18 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

Geez, even tho it is a press release they could have provided a link.  To Eli this is the most important of the results in the paper.  If one simplistically looks at the problem as a one box model, to explain the slower than expected falls in CCl4 there are two possibilities, either the destruction rate is slower than expected or the emissions rate is higher or some combination of the two.  The problem with deciding which is which, is that the two interact.  If your lifetime is too short it will look like the amount of emissions are high, and if the lifetime is too long the amount of emissions will look too low.  Liang et al have a nice way of showing this

Figure 2. CCl4 global mean trend (ppt/yr) as a function of total lifetime and emissions from the two-box model (gray contours). Purple contours indicate the emissions and τCCl4 ranges that yield IHGs within the observed 1.1–2.0 ppt range (2-σ) between 2000 and 2012, using the current best estimate EFn of 0.94. Red (Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE)-based) and blue (GMD-based) numbers show emissions and lifetimes derived using the observed IHG and trend for individual years (2000–2012). The dark (light) gray shading outlines the range of emissions and τCCl4 that can be reconciled with the observations for EFn of 0.94 (0.88–1.00). The black diamond symbol shows our current best estimate for τ (thick and thin red bars indicate 1-σ and 2-σ uncertainties, respectively) and the upper limit bottom-up potential emissions for 2007–2012 (thick blue bar shows 1-σ variance) with 1-σ uncertainty shown in black-hatched shading.

IHG- Inter hemispherical gradient   EFn - fraction of emissions in the Northern Hemisphere.  

The black diamond indicates the results one would get using a bottoms up (reported emissions) estimate of emissions and the previous best estimate of the Total removal lifetime of 25 years.  Eli has added the purple dot showing the estimates of Liang, et al for 2007-2012 emissions with a 35 year CCl4 total lifetime. The green dot is the result of an earlier study of Xiao, et al on emissions between 1996 and 2004 that used a lifetime which is too short.   Xiao's estimate of emission rates was 74 Gg/yr on average between 1996 and 2004 using a total lifetime of 25 + ~5 years, which is shown by the green dot far to the right.  OTOH, moving up the 0.9 ppm/year contour to the new inferred lifetime of Liang et al., 35 years, brings that estimate of emissions down to ~ 40 Gg/year.

Liang et al divide the world into two boxes, the Northern and Southern hemisphere.  Since most of the emission is in the Northern Hemisphere, there is an inter hemispherical gradient which can be used to calculate the total emissions and lifetime.

Cx is the concentration in each hemisphere, τns the time for inter-hemispheric mixing,  the αs are deposition losses in the oceans and soils and the STE represents dilution of tropospheric air with down moving stratospheric air with CCl4 diminished by photolysis.  f is a factor to convert emissions to concentrations.  The prevalence of land in the Northern Hemisphere and oceans in the Southern has to be taken into account as well as various issues about global circulation.  Liang, et al, then make a number of simplifications to yield

From which with various hocus pocus, they produce the graph above.  Surprisingly the latest evaluation of stratospheric ozone depleting molecules has some surprising reappraisals, including raising the photochemical lifetime of CCl4 from 35 to 44 years, perhaps another post.  In a straight-forward way this would explain part of the unexpectedly slow decrease in atmospheric carbon tet. Liang and other authors on Liang et al were part of that revaluation.  With reasonable values for ocean and soil deposition, the 35 year total lifetime that Liang, et al find is, well, reasonable.  FWIW soil deposition looks really slow, like about 1000 years.  Eli and maybe the Weasel remember arguments about that.

Prominent in the abstract and the press release is that the average emissions over the 2000-2012 time period were 3934⁴⁵ Gg/yr.  Somewhat less, well a lot less, prominent, you have to read the paper, is that emissions have been decreasing.  Between 2007 and 2012 they decreased to between 31 and 45 Gg/yr.  Simply taking the average of these gives an average of 35.5 Gg/yr.  Simple math tells us that the average emissions between 2000 and 2007 would then be an average of 41.5 Gg/yr which is consistent with the numbers shown in Liang's Figure 2 above, with the earlier years clustering to the right of the graph in the 40 Gg.year area and the later ones to the left.  Emissions are decreasing.  Not as fast as we would like, but they are decreasing.

Where is of course the question all bunnies want to know.  Several jumped to the conclusion that all the fugitive emissions are from China and India.  

Inverse 3D modeling is IEHO the best choice for quantifying sources total emissions, reported and unreported, and in 2010, X. Xiao and about 20 friends took a shot  in Atmos. Chem. Phys. 10, 10421, for the period 1996-2004.  As with all such things, that paper was not perfect, and with the passage of time, some of the problems with it have become clearer, but taken together with the new Liang paper there are a number of take homes.  By looking at the time history of CCl4 at stations around the globe Xiao et al was able to infer the location and average carbon tet emissions from various locations during the study period.  By comparison, if you simply want global emissions, the advantage of the Liang, et al method is that the two box model is robust at the price of resolution

For convenience, Xiao et al divided the world up into eight boxes and tried to trace emissions geographically on a finer 64 x 128 point grid

Group I:  Europe, NW Asia (Russia and the stans), and N. America

In this group emission fell rapidly (factor of 5) from the pre-Montreal Protocol estimates.  

Group II Australia/NZ (very small), S. America and Africa

Substantial percentage increases but still minor contributors in the period.  Interestingly African emissions at 6.7 Gg/yr were three times that of S. America.  The regions of major emissions in Africa were South Africa and the Mediterranean coast (think oil production and maybe petrochemicals) but not Nigeria and Angola.  In S. America, the Atlantic coast of an industrializing Brazil was the major source

Group III:  So. Asia (the Mid-East oil patch, India and Pakistan), SE Asia (China and Indo-China, Japan and S. Korea)

Major increases above the pre-MP baseline.  Not very surprising, but note that Japan and S. Korea were bright red as are areas associated with oil production.  

Bottom line is that Xiao et al find that the yearly global emissions fell from ~130 Gg/yr pre-MP to about 65 Gg/yr in 2004 with a slight downward trend.  In addition to estimating the source term, Xiao et al estimated the ocean sink loss.  Using Liang's Figure 2, and tracing up the contour to a global lifetime of 35 years, this is not out of line with Liang, et al for a similar period, ~42 Gg/yr.

So yes, CCl4 in the atmosphere is decreasing ~1% per year, slower than bunnies expected, due to nature (a longer atmospheric lifetime) and fugitive emissions (which are also decreasing).

What Part of Hot Air Rises Do You Not Understand

Dr Roy is having a mid life crisis.  He writes:

"But what if (I’m NOT necessarily advocating this) most of the CO2 humans produce, which is near the land surface, is absorbed by vegetation, and the observed global increase is partly or mostly due to outgassing of the oceans?"

Most of the CO2 humans produce is created by combustion of fossil fuels.

What part of hot air rises doesn't Dr. Roy understand?

There are more sophisticated answers to this from a whole bunch of atmospheric transport studies

Water district election update from a guileless heavyweight

The title above refers to a San Jose newspaper article. I've mentioned a while back that I'm running for re-election, and it turns out it's going to be interesting.

People seem to have differing reactions to the column, so read it for yourself and I won't try to bias your view.

What I have been thinking for a while though in this runup to the election is to actually acknowledge the mistakes I've made. I've got one general category, and then one specific issue. The general category is dividing my attention on too many things. Here's an incomplete list of the memos I've written:  too many subjects. Obviously we do a lot more work than can be measured by memos, but those memos should usually be priority items. If I had chosen fewer subjects and put more time into them, we could have progressed further. (I'll still defend our progress overall, though.)

The other, specific issue is pretty technical but involves the best approach to resolving legal and environmental issues under both state and federal law for the protection of endangered steelhead salmon. We'd been attempting to get simultaneous state and federal permits but had been held up on the federal level. Some local environmental groups wanted to split the process to speed up actions to help steelhead under state law; our staff resisted this approach. A few months ago, our staff changed their minds. Maybe that could have happened two years ago instead - the split approach was the right one. Now we have to make up for that lost time.

Anyway, I think you can acknowledge mistakes while still doing a good job, and that's what I hope to do in this election. 

And to be a good politician (or less guileless one), I'll also add that help is greatly appreciated.

All this has happened before

So Microsoft has decided to ditch the lobbying group ALEC because of ALEC's opposition to renewable energy. As the link says, the lobbying group is facing increasing problems with its corporate members. This is obviously good news and it parallels something that happened years earlier, where a conservative corporate coalition (the Global Climate Coalition) mobilized against climate change was gradually picked apart. In the earlier case, the demise of the conservative coalition received a helping hand from a moderate alternative established by the Pew Foundation. I am not aware of any behind-the-scenes nudging of Microsoft, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Despite this, I stand behind my original admiration for ALEC and think it should be imitated on the progressive side of politics. Maybe we can skip the unsavory stuff though, especially the secrecy that is getting it into trouble.

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Annus Horribilis

As Ethon points out this has been a very difficult year for Roger Jr. who, poor lad, has been exposed to the love that others have for him.  Roger has not taken this well, and his tried and true tactics of lashing out and expecting bunnies to back away have been tried and truly just did not work this time.

Of course the 538 comedy was difficult enough.  Before that there was his challenging John Holdren and having his teeth handed to him (indirectly of course).

The pushback is the result of going to the well too often.  The first rule of life, and academic life is that enemies accumulate.  Roger has any number and some of them now have bigger megaphones than he does.

Brad Johnson put together a fine collection of Roger's best for Grist in honor of Nate Silver shooting himself in the head by giving Roger a forum (a mistake soon rectified).

Pielke's response to criticism at the time was typical, demanding apologies from those who criticized him.

Trenberth said he considered Pielke's email "a threat to me.” “He was very accusatory and threatened me if I did not respond,” Trenberth told HuffPost. 

Trenberth forwarded the text of the email to HuffPost. Pielke wrote that Trenberth had "made some pretty coarse and perhaps even libelous comments" in the ThinkProgress article. Pielke requested that Trenberth correct his public claims and noted that "an apology would be nice also."  

Kevin is, of course, a long standing critic of Pielke Jr., no more clearly put than his review of Roger's The Climate Fix but Roger has never stood by idly when the opportunity beckoned and not loathe to give it a helping hand.

It is indeed a difficult thing to be exposed to the lack of respect others have for you. Given the past, bunnies could only expect the typical victim bully response

Unlike simple passive-aggression, victim bullies use accusations as weapons, and ramp up the accusations over time. Unlike a normal person, who would slink away in shame as the initial accusations are discredited, a victim bully lacks either guilt or shame, honestly believing that s/he has been so egregiously wronged in some cosmic way that anything s/he does or says is justified in the larger scheme of things. So when the initial accusations are dismissed, the victim bully's first move is a sort of double-or-nothing, raising the absurdity and the stakes even more

The absurdity stakes could not be any higher than the denouement of a panel on which both Roger and Kevin Trenberth had at each other last week.

I debated Trenberth last week. From Kevin there was yelling, spittle & an apology. I stuck to IPCC AR5 which he called totally wrong. Weird.
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) August 10, 2014

Roger is playing no limit absurdity

Delicate Flowers

Eli, contrary to rumor, has been following the comings and goings here and abouts.  Even twittering back and forth with Ethon.  As some bunnies may have noticed, this being summer, it is time for delicate flowering, and indeed there have been outbreaks at the usual places, for example, Judith Curry wondering about the road to scientific hell, and then missing all the turn signs.  ATTP tried to play nice (Eli pointed out that she had not a clue about ethics, it got sin binned).

In any case, which always goes around in the best circles, Eli was wandered over to an interview of Robert Bindschadler by Dahr Jamal.  Bindschadler a ice mass specialist now emeritus at NASA is one of the ones in the corner screaming bloody murder.  He is very pessimistic about ice on the planet, looking at major losses to the ice sheets in the 100-200 year time frame.

To reinforce your sense of well being, Eli would point you to the final report of the Dark Snow Project,

In the interview he describes how at the time of the first IPCC report, 1991, significant losses from Antarctica and Greenland were not even considered because it was assumed that the time frame for such would be well outside the next century horizon of the report.  As SAR, TAR, AR4 and now AR5 followed, and the weakening of the ice sheets became clear, the issue crept into the IPCC reports, but often in strange ways

Then we get up to the fourth IPCC report in 2007, and we were starting to get some models that incorporated our best understanding of the ice sheets that were showing that there might be some dramatic impact in terms of contribution to sea level. They were acknowledged, with verbiage like, ice sheet dynamics can change rapidly and contribute large amounts of water to cause excess sea level rise, but the dynamics are not well enough understood for predictive capability. The sea level numbers were pretty low, and the words around said they didn't really know how high they might go. So the story at that time was that we didn't really know what the numbers were. 

I asked the head of Working Group I on that report which had ultimate responsibility for everything that was in the Working Group I report, I said, "All the words say don't trust the numbers; why are there numbers there at all?" She told me that governments insisted that there be numbers, that they gave them the table and said you put the numbers in this table. Thus, she felt compelled to do that because the report was not going to be accepted by the government until there were numbers in the table.

Bindschadler was and is alarmed by this and, as he says, he started to engage

The shortening of the time scale that glaciers can now contribute to sea level rise and climate change drew me into the debate. And the science is solid. There's no question about it. Even in the early days it was solid. So I came down hard on the side of yes, it is happening, and I can speak to that when it comes to sea level going up as a result of shrinking ice sheets. That is going to happen.
 That gave me my entrance onto the stage where these nasty debates are going on. I wasn't that far away from the general expectation within the scientific community that said that as long as we spoke from the facts, and stayed secure with our caveats that have to be there, we will be listened to and it will have a positive effect on necessary policies that need to start being put in place. It was that naïve expectation that we're the experts, and scientists are usually pretty well regarded as credible, and that's never changed.

But there was such a strong blowback from climate change skeptics and deniers, using their bad science, and we felt there was a failing in the reporting of that, and even though the vast majority of the scientists, and back in those days it was 90 to 10 percent, it would still be reported as an equal debate.

But the dagger, was of course from the delicate flowers

The other thing that led me into a retreat is you would go out there and try to limit your emphasis on caveats and speak more crisply or without the caveats and with more black and white and you would be shot in the back by your colleagues. So I would be quoted in the paper making a rather bold statement and a colleague would call me out and say, well you didn't mention the uncertainty factor, and sounds like you know more than you know you do. But you have to consider the audience. If all you do is lace it with uncertainty, it gives them reason to do nothing. 

But there was not uniform agreement within the scientific community that that was the way to go. So I retreated.

Sorely Missed Already - het

Coby Beck reports that Harold Elmer Taylor has died at the age of 68.  het compiled a graceful and humorous weekly summary of climate news and blog posts at A Few Things Ill Considered.   It was, however, not short of concern for what we are doing to the Earth.

"Harvey E. Taylor, aka het, died Monday, July 14, 2014 at his home in Portage la Prairie, a small town in Manitoba, Canada.  All I know of it is from one brief online obituary and one more detailed one at the website of a funeral home. It says he died peacefully and in his home."

He was also working on a novel called "The Bottleneck Years" parts of which were published on the blog over time.

Short memory candles   can be left at the funeral home site.  Longer one's at A Few Things.

We need a wake to ease the loss.

Chait gets it

The focus on per-capita emissions, the obligation to look at total emissions that have brought us to this point instead of ignoring the disparate emission levels between nations in the last decades, and the completely ignored commitment (okay, something of a commitment) by India and China not to reach American levels of per capita emissions.

Best paragraph:

The United States has emitted far more carbon into the atmosphere than India or China — indeed, more than India and China combined. The United States continues to emit several times more carbon per person than either China or India. Since China and India have vastly more people and are industrializing, they are likely to increase their per-capita emissions over time. I have seen no morally cogent explanation as to why the entire burden of sparing the world from runaway global warming should fall on the countries that have contributed the least to its existence. Developing countries have already made the significant concession that they will not be allowed to follow the cheap dirty-energy developmental path used by the West.

Read the whole thing.


UPDATE:  from the comments, Raypierre has a well-developed paper on the whole issue. I'll quibble with one point:

Perhaps there should be a statute of limitations for carbon emission. This cannot be justified on the basis of ignorance of consequences of carbon emissions, since that has been known for well over a century,

I can understand a start date of responsibility for past emissions in 1896, but I think the stronger argument is that the scientific notice given to the public and policymakers of a substantial risk from GHG emissions was insufficient prior to the 1960s or 1970s. The latest start date could even be the Rio Declaration, when you transfer from a risk of a problem to a near-certainty of a problem. I think the better argument is that a realistic and reasonably understood possibility of risk, communicated to the broader community, should be the start date of responsibility.

This part nails down the overall issue:

Some forms of unequal circumstances at birth (being born black, or female, or poor) are clearly irrelevant to the question of access to something like education or adequate health care, and need unconditional redress. The question of whether a person should suffer a reduced share of the Carbon Commons simply because she was born African or Indian falls naturally into the same category.

The Morally Confused

Judith Curry has wandered into ethics, without much of an understanding about such things.  She enjoys going on about how she is the protector of research integrity, without really understanding scientific ethics, perhaps first investigated by Max Weber, although Eli is sure that Willard may know of earlier sources.  There are many interesting things about this, first, that scientific ethics as distinct from ethics could not have been a subject much earlier, because science as a stand along thing really only blossomed at about the same time as global instrumental temperature measurements started in the late 1900s.

Second, that separating ethical behavior as a scientist from ethical behavior in general is not something that your average bunny in the street holds in high regard and is one reason that many people distrust science and scientists, as in Godless Scientists, etc. which is really a belief that science and scientists would gladly sell everybunny down the river for a Nature pub.  

Be that as it may, Weber pointed out that the distinction must be between facts and value judgements.  Since as has been mentioned here a few times, we have no data from the future, value judgements about the future must condition our views of how what we are doing now will affect the future.  Stephan Gardiner explains how this can easily lead to moral corruption

In conclusion, the presence of the problem of moral corruption reveals another sense in which climate change may be a perfect moral storm. This is that its complexity may turn out to be perfectly convenient for us, the current generation, and indeed for each successor generation as it comes to occupy our position. For one thing, it provides each generation with the cover under which it can seem to be taking the issue seriously – by negotiating weak and largely substanceless global accords, for example, and then heralding them as great achievements – when really it is simply exploiting its temporal position. For another, all of this can occur without the exploitative generation actually having to acknowledge that this is what it is doing. By avoiding overtly selfish behaviour, earlier generations can take advantage of the future without the unpleasantness of admitting it – either to others, or, perhaps more importantly, to itself

In discussing the House of Parliament Committee on Energy and Climate Change report Judith Curry shows how only valuing the things of today leads to such corruption

If people are concerned about the adverse impacts of extreme weather events, reducing CO2 emissions are not going to have any impact on policy relevant time scales, even if you accept the IPCC analyses.  Resources expended on energy policy are in direct conflict with reducing vulnerability to extreme events.

Oh yeah, that and as Gardiner call out, the full Lomborg, that you can't spend resources on both.

The first is the threat of a false dichotomy. Arguments from opportunity cost crucially rely on the idea that if a given project is chosen, then that choice forecloses some other option. But this is not the case in Lomborg's version. Helping the poor and mitigating climate change are not obviously mutually exclusive. . .

Second it is not clear even that the two projects are independent of each other, in the sense that they are fully separable opportunities rather than necessarily linked and perhaps mutually supporting policies. . . .

Third, it is not clear that the opportunity that Lomborg wants to emphasize is really available.

The good Lord protect the future from the defender of research integrity.

Tip of the ears to Matt at the Weasel's for pointing to this

Color Blind

The National Review, through its lawyers has filed a new pleading in Mann vs. Steyn as it has popularly been labelled.  Now Eli, not being a lawyer is not going to go through the lawyerly stuff, e.g.

Dr. Mann Cannot Demonstrate Actual Malice By Clear and Convincing Evidence Because National Review Sincerely Believes In The Truth Of The Statements

or

Read in context, Steyn’s commentary was protected rhetorical hyperbole, not a literal accusation of fraud or data falsification

Lowry’s phrase “intellectually bogus and wrong” is not actionable

which appear to be somewhat in contradiction, but one thing in the brief, emphasized by Willard Tony struck Eli as world class

 Third, critics have argued that the hockey stick is misleading because it splices together two different types of data without highlighting the change: For roughly the first nine centuries after the year 1000 A.D., the graph shows temperature levels that have been inferred solely from tree-ring samples and other “proxy” data. But from about 1900 onward, the graph relies on readings from modern instruments such as thermometers. In the words of one review conducted by a panel of independent scientists, many consider it “regrettable” that temperature reconstructions “by the IPCC and others” neglected to emphasize “the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century.” 

 Eli, being a RTFR type of bunny went and read Watts Up With That.

Eli has a copy of a figure from Tom Fuller guesting as the local expert on WUWT showing the MBH99 reconstruction as featured in the TAR together with the Lamb BON (back of napkin) sketch that John Mashey has had such fun with

for the colorblind in the IPCC TAR featured figure on the right, the black is the smoothed proxy reconstruction, the red the instrumental data.  Don't believe everything you read over there.