Friday, October 16, 2009

Climate Progress


Climate Progress

Climate Progress


Gawker: The Washington Post Has the Worst Opinion Section in America

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 09:36 AM PDT

Okay, this isn't news to CP readers:

But for the wider world, it's nice that the uber-popular website Gawker has weighed in with, "The Washington Post Has the Worst Opinion Section in America," which I reprint below:

On the occasion of this wonderful op-ed on how Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is a violation of our nation's founding document, let us examine the recent crimes of the Washington Post opinion section.  Under editor Fred Hiatt, the Post op-ed page has gone completely off the rails. They picked up Bill Kristol after the Times dumped him for being not just wrong but boring and lazy. They openly allow George Will to lie, to straight-up lie, without fact-checking or corrections, because we all know reality is open to different "interpretations" and if a prominent columnist writes something patently untrue the best response is to then publish a "true" column by someone else as a counterpoint, because that doesn't just represent everything misleading and terrible about the moden political press. They still publish Richard Cohen. The regular columnists are, for the most part, interchangeable ancient "moderate" liberals who haven't written or thought anything vaguely interesting since 1974. Anne Applebaum was allowed to publish a blog post in support of Roman Polanski without disclosing that her husband is Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who opposes extradition. Richard Cohen, again.

And on October 10, the Post published an insane editorial on how the Nobel Prize should've been awarded to a murdered Iranian protester. This suggests that either the entire editorial board doesn't know that Nobel Peace Prizes are never awarded posthumously or they simply don't give a shit. The piece is still not corrected, because presumably any "correction" would have to read "the entire premise of this editorial is bullshit, sorry."

So how do you follow that up? How about by running an op-ed by a law professor and a right-wing think tank goon about how Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was… unconstitutional, maybe? Who knows! Who cares! They acknowledge that two other sitting presidents have received the award, but they do not even do the meaningless-but-intellectually defensible thing of arguing that those awards were also unconstitutional, they just say this time it's different because Obama got it so therefore Congress should forbid him from accepting it, because of the House of Saud.

In conclusion, blogs are killing newspapers by being irresponsible and not caring about "the truth."

NOAA: Second hottest September on record and virtual tie for hottest in lower troposphere from satellite data

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 07:59 AM PDT

NOAA's National Climatic Data Center has issued its latest monthly, "State of the Climate: Global Analysis," which found:

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for September 2009 was 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20th Century average of 15.0°C (59.0°F). This was the second warmest September on record, behind 2005, and the 33rd consecutive September with a global temperature above the 20th Century average. The last below-average September occurred in 1976.

Significantly, September was only 0.04°C (0.07°F) off the 2005 record.

This near-record September comes fast on the heels of the second warmest August on record and warmest June-July-August for the oceans.  I previously noted that NASA reported hottest June to September on record.

What is most interesting about this report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is the temperature report from the lower troposphere ("the lowest 8 km (5 miles) of the atmosphere") — the satellite data that began in 1979 analyzed by the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS).

UAH and RSS say September was also the second warmest in their records — a mere 0.01°C off the 1998 record.  NOAA reports that the lower troposphere warming trend for September is

  • +0.13°C/decade (UAH)
  • +0.18°C/decade (UAH

So yes, the satellite data also shows that the lower atmosphere is warming, contrary to what you may have heard.

In fact, the mid-troposphere (about 2 to 6 miles above the Earth, which includes a portion of the lower stratosphere) is also warming, according to both UAH and RSS.  It's not warming quite as fast because as the lower troposphere in part "because the stratosphere has cooled due to increasing greenhouse gases in the troposphere and losses of ozone in the stratosphere."

The global temperature anomaly for the month looked like this:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/get-file.php?report=global&file=map-blended-mntp&year=2009&month=9&ext=gif

Although the United States as a whole was "1.0°F above the 20th Century average," with record-tying temperatures in California, as usual the deniers had a few seemingly cool places in the country on which to feast.

We are still seeing staggering warming in some of the worst places from the perspective of the planet as a whole, the land of the the permafrost permamelt, which currently contains contains more carbon than the atmosphere (see here).

Again, what makes these record temps especially impressive is that we're only in a weak El Niño, and we're at "the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century," according to NASA.

Stay tuned.  The heat is on — or, rather, it's never been off.

EPA analysis for Feingold appears doubly flawed: Climate bill allocations are not unfair to the Midwest

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 03:00 PM PDT

Bradley small

Midwesterners are operating under the misimpression that the allocation formula in the House bill is unfair to them.  It doesn't, although a new, flawed EPA "analysis" ("here") suggests otherwise.

Certainly the formula is a tad ambiguous and that will no doubt be fixed in the Senate.  The figure above shows the results of analysis by MJ Bradley (click to enlarge, methodology here).

I would note that the Bradley analysis does not appear to include the energy efficiency provisions in the bill, which are projected by independent analysts and EPA to deliver major savings (see "Waxman-Markey could save $3,900 per household and create 650,000 jobs by 2030").  So even the small increase in bills that you see in 2012 would in reality be lower if the House bill became law.  But I digress.

The analysis is tricky for two reasons that the EPA appears to get wrong:

  • First, the House bill forbids a utility from getting more allowances than are required to offset their increased costs, but doesn't quite spell out how to account for that.  The obvious thing to do is what MJ Bradley does:  "Excess allowances are withheld from states that receive more allowances than their delivered electricity related emissions. These withheld allowances are redistributed to the remaining states on the basis of their emissions."

The EPA offers a long explanation for why the prohibition against excess distributions would be tricky to implement in practice — and then it seems like they just ignore the provision entirely.  So, as you can see, they claim California would get more allowances than it needs to cover its emissions.  But preventing that outcome is precisely why that provision was put in the House bill in the first place.

  • Second, states import power — sometimes power that is more carbon-intense than the importing state as a whole.  An analysis must take into account.  It does not seem that EPA's calculations of emissions of a state like California included its imported coal-fired electricity.

So I just think EPA got this is doubly wrong in a way that happens to fit the misperception of the Midwesterners.  I have also spoken to other independent utility modelers who say their results do not match EPA's.

Bottom Line:  The allocation formula appears to be pretty fair, if a tad ambiguous.  EPA needs to spell out exactly how they did their analysis, and explain if they made one or both of these two major analytical errors.  The Senate needs to be clearer on how the prohibition-against-excess-distributions provision works.

For more background, here are some excerpts from Tuesday Climate Wire (subs. req'd) story:

A new U.S. EPA analysis requested by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) is spawning a lobbying frenzy among Midwestern utilities that claim the document shows they will be treated unfairly under federal climate legislation.

They say the assessment reveals that states like California will receive a financial windfall under a global warming bill, while states like Wisconsin will not get enough help and will have to spike electricity rates as a result.

"The EPA document just confirms the formula will disadvantage Midwest states for decades to come while the coastal states will hit a 'federal jackpot' every year over the life of the new program," said Zachary Hill, senior manager of federal government affairs at Alliant Energy, a Wisconsin-based utility.

Some environmentalists are counterattacking that the three-page report is flawed because its author relied on questionable methodology and analyzed only one part of a bill that passed the House earlier this year. They also say a Senate version of climate legislation is still being drafted and could make EPA's statements moot.

"I have not been particularly impressed of certain aspects of EPA modeling," said Joe Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "It looks to me like they've done what is easy for them to do, but isn't accurate."

At issue is the document's focus on a section of the House legislation prohibiting utilities from receiving more carbon allowances than what is "necessary to offset any increased electricity costs" to consumers. The text was added as part of a late compromise in the House to help bring more coal-state lawmakers from states like Missouri and Indiana on board.

Under a mandatory cap on greenhouse gases like the one called for by the House measure, businesses would have to hold a limited number of allowances matching their annual greenhouse gas output.

Green groups claim EPA analysis is incomplete

Yet the EPA analysis argues that enactment of the bill's ban against overallocation of allowances could be difficult because of the complexities in estimating electricity costs, among other things.

"The prohibition provision would be very difficult to implement because it would require a great deal of speculation," the EPA document states.

Many Midwestern utilities and their supporters jumped on the data and argued that companies in some states like California would get an unfair financial boost with climate legislation. Kirk Johnson, vice president of environmental policy at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), pointed to a chart created by EPA showing that coastal states fare far better than other ones in a mandatory climate regime.

A slew of utilities in the country's interior have been protesting the House bill since its passage. Recently, the Edison Electric Institute, which represents large investor-owned utilities and helped draft parts of the House bill, called for more free allowances to flow to these small generators in states like Ohio to bring them on board.

But Romm and supporters of congressional action on climate are questioning whether the EPA data are valid in the first place.

Romm said it was not clear, for example, whether the calculations of emissions of a state like California included imported electricity from coal-fired power plants in Arizona. The EPA assessment simply states that estimates were based on 2006-2007 "retail sales" of electricity.

Dan Lashof, director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council, made the same argument and added that the analysis appeared to have been put together rapidly.

Others noted that a prior analysis from M.J. Bradley & Associates LLC, an environmental consulting firm, found costs to Midwestern consumers would be minuscule under the House bill sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.).

At the same time, Lashof said the document might be EPA's way of saying "it's nervous about the language" and needs clarity. He suggested the Senate could "go a long way" toward resolving confusion on the issue by adding specific wording that no utility can get more allowances than its emissions….

EPA did not respond to criticisms from environmentalists about the document's methodology yesterday. But in an earlier statement, spokeswoman Adora Andy questioned the idea that the new document shows the House bill would take money from interior states and give it to coastal states. She pointed to a larger investigation of the House bill performed by the agency earlier this year.

"In fact, EPA's comprehensive analysis of the House-passed bill — an analysis that has been public since June — indicates that the bill would not impose hardship on any state," Andy said.

The lobbying push started after Feingold's office released the document to utilities in Wisconsin, which then began a mass e-mail chain. Feingold's office provided the original EPA analysis to E&E after variations of the text with attached commentary starting circulating among lobbyists last Friday.

"I have heard concerns from my constituents about how the climate change bill could unfairly impact Wisconsin. The data from the EPA was requested as part of my effort to learn as much as possible about the bill and ways to improve it. I look forward to working with the administration and my colleagues in the Senate to ensure we address the serious problem of climate change without unfairly hurting Wisconsin," Feingold said in a statement.

Santer, Jones, and Schneider respond to CEI's phony attack on the temperature record

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 02:33 PM PDT

When we last left the Competitive Enterprise Institute, they were going ape for the Scopes climate trial that the Chamber of Commerce had proposed for the EPA.  The deniers just stick their fingers and their ears and scream whenever they hear any science-based finding that GHGs harm human health.  What else can you expect from a group that which actually runs ad campaigns aimed at destroying the climate for centuries?

Now CEI is trying to go after the UK temperature record because the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, used by the Hadley/Met Office, has abandoned some bad data.  Climate Science Watch (CSW) has the background, "CEI global warming denialists try another gambit seeking to derail EPA endangerment finding."  Ironically, as Prof. Phil Jones, CRU's Director explains below:

Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center [see here and here].  The original raw data are not "lost."

A small amount of data, which could be easily reconstructed if one wanted to waste a lot of time, was abandoned for reasons such as the following:

Station series for sites that in the 1980s we deemed then to be affected by either urban biases or by numerous site moves, that were either not correctable or not worth doing as there were other series in the region.

Yes, for years the deniers have been claiming that the temperature record is corrupted by the urban heat island effect or bad locations.  In fact, we know that it isn't (see Must-read NOAA paper smacks down the deniers: Q: "Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?" A: "None at all.")  But when CRU actually tries to abandon such data, the deniers cry foul.

CEI:  Can't live with them, future generations could live with out them.

To compound the irony, the only meaningful hole in the Hadley data is the "hole in the Arctic," as RealClimate puts it (see here).  The Hadley record simply excludes the part of the world "just where recent warming has been greatest."  Because of that gap, the Hadley data almost certainly underestimates recent warming.

CSW asked three prominent scientists to comment on CEI's bogus data-shredding charge and posted them here and here.  I'm reprinting them below, starting with Stanford's Stephen Schneider, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and author of Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate, coming out next month:

Pat Michaels and the Competitive Enterprise Institute continue to obfuscate well-established scientific conclusions by counting on most non-specialists to be unaware of the vast preponderance of multiple lines of evidence for anthropogenic climate warming. Their technique is to raise minor objections that don't remotely refute the preponderance, and use this scientific trivia to claim that until all points of debate are resolved the mainstream case isn't "proven."

This was the tried and true tactic of the tobacco industry for 35 years. Now that industry suffers losses of billions of dollars in lawsuits for hiding the truth and obscuring it with minutiae that most people are not technically trained enough to recognize for the deceptions embedded in what seems to be serious scientific debate.

Why should they not do it given their ideology? They support the ideology of few controls on entrepreneurial activity and thus want to weaken government regulation. In the case of climate change they do this by falsely claiming they have found a new "smoking gun" of refutation of well-established science. Science of complex systems is never finished.  That is why we have assessments like those of the IPCC—to assess where the preponderances are.

What Michaels and the CEI are selling comes from the north end of a south bound horse.

Here's Benjamin Santer, Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, winner of the Department of Energy Distinguished Scientist Fellowship, the E.O. Lawrence Award, and the "Genius Award" by the MacArthur Foundation:

As I see it, there are two key issues here.

First, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Pat Michaels are arguing that Phil Jones and colleagues at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU) willfully, intentionally, and suspiciously "destroyed" some of the raw surface temperature data used in the construction of the gridded surface temperature datasets.

Second, the CEI and Pat Michaels contend that the CRU surface temperature datasets provided the sole basis for IPCC "discernible human influence" conclusions.

Both of these arguments are incorrect. First, there was no intentional destruction of the primary source data. I am sure that, over 20 years ago, the CRU could not have foreseen that the raw station data might be the subject of legal proceedings by the CEI and Pat Michaels. Raw data were NOT secretly destroyed to avoid efforts by other scientists to replicate the CRU and Hadley Centre-based estimates of global-scale changes in near-surface temperature. In fact, a key point here is that other groups—primarily at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), but also in Russia—WERE able to replicate the major findings of the CRU and UK Hadley Centre groups. The NCDC and GISS groups performed this replication completely independently. They made different choices in the complex process of choosing input data, adjusting raw station data for known inhomogeneities (such as urbanization effects, changes in instrumentation, site location, and observation time), and gridding procedures. NCDC and GISS-based estimates of global surface temperature changes are in good accord with the HadCRUT data results.

The second argument—that "discernible human influence" findings are like a house of cards, resting solely on one observational dataset—is also invalid. The IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) considers MULTIPLE observational estimates of global-scale near-surface temperature changes. It does not rely on HadCRUT data alone—as is immediately obvious from Figure 2.1b of the TAR, which shows CRU, NCDC, and GISS global-mean temperature changes.

As pointed out in numerous scientific assessments (e.g., the IPCC TAR and Fourth Assessment Reports, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Report 1.1 (Temperature trends in the lower atmosphere: Steps for understanding and reconciling differences), and the state of knowledge report, Global Climate Change Impacts on the United States, rigorous statistical fingerprint studies have now been performed with a whole range of climate variables—and not with surface temperature only. Examples include variables like ocean heat content, atmospheric water vapor, surface specific humidity, continental river runoff, sea-level pressure patterns, stratospheric and tropospheric temperature, tropopause height, zonal-mean precipitation over land, and Arctic sea-ice extent. The bottom-line message from this body of work is that natural causes alone CANNOT plausibly explain the climate changes we have actually observed. The climate system is telling us an internally- and physically-consistent story. The integrity and reliability of this story does NOT rest on a single observational dataset, as Michaels and the CEI incorrectly claim.

I have known Phil for most of my scientific career. He is the antithesis of the secretive, "data destroying" character the CEI and Michaels are trying to portray to the outside world. Phil and Tom Wigley have devoted significant portions of their scientific careers to the construction of the land surface temperature component of the HadCRUT dataset. They have conducted this research in a very open and transparent manner—examining sensitivities to different gridding algorithms, different ways of adjusting for urbanization effects, use of various subsets of data, different ways of dealing with changes in spatial coverage over time, etc. They have thoroughly and comprehensively documented all of their dataset construction choices. They have done a tremendous service to the scientific community—and to the planet—by making gridded surface temperature datasets available for scientific research. They deserve medals—not the kind of deliberately misleading treatment they are receiving from Pat Michaels and the CEI.

Finaly, here's Jones:

No one, it seems, cares to read what we put up on the CRU web page. These people just make up motives for what we might or might not have done.

Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center [see here and here].

The original raw data are not "lost."  I could reconstruct what we had from U.S. Department of Energy reports we published in the mid-1980s. I would start with the GHCN data. I know that the effort would be a complete waste of time, though. I may get around to it some time. The documentation of what we've done is all in the literature.

If we have "lost" any data it is the following:

1. Station series for sites that in the 1980s we deemed then to be affected by either urban biases or by numerous site moves, that were either not correctable or not worth doing as there were other series in the region.

2. The original data for sites for which we made appropriate adjustments in the temperature data in the 1980s. We still have our adjusted data, of course, and these along with all other sites that didn't need adjusting.

3. Since the 1980s as colleagues and National Meteorological Services (NMSs) have produced adjusted series for regions and or countries, then we replaced the data we had with the better series.

In the papers, I've always said that homogeneity adjustments are best produced by NMSs. A good example of this is the work by Lucie Vincent in Canada. Here we just replaced what data we had for the 200+ sites she sorted out.

The CRUTEM3 data for land look much like the GHCN and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies data for the same domains.

Apart from a figure in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) showing this, there is also this paper from Geophysical Research Letters in 2005 by Russ Vose et al. Figure 2 is similar to the AR4 plot.

I think if it hadn't been this issue, the Competitive Enterprise Institute would have dreamt up something else!

As CSW Rick Piltz said last week

You do not need to reopen the IPCC reports and the technical support document on the EPA endangerment finding because of something having to do with the raw data from the temperature record from East Anglia University in the 1980s.

No amount of data will ever satisfy the deniers.  They'll plug their ears and shout until the planet is reduced to Hell and High Water.  The only question is how long the media and politicians will keep listening to their shrieks.