Monday, October 19, 2009

Climate Progress

Climate Progress


Error-riddled Superfreakonomics, Part 5: Stephen Dubner, who says "Romm has done a great job" in his critiques, makes another cleverly worded but unfact-checked and untrue statement.

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 08:48 AM PDT

The well-known Berkeley economics professor and blogger J. Bradford DeLong has begun his multiple takedowns of SuperFreakonomics. In one headline, he echoes a query from TNR's Brad Plummer, Does "Superfreakonomics" Need A Do-Over?

DeLong also prints an email from Dubner, which I excerpt:

It is amazing to see how quickly and thoroughly Romm's extremely misleading attack has spread, to the point where even independent thinkers like you accept it on face value…  He makes it sound as if we somehow twisted and abused Caldeira's research; nothing could be further from the truth…. This is politics that's being played now, nothing else. Also: yes, Romm posted a PDF of the chapter on his website, which the publisher, in its routine effort to pull pirated copies of its copyrighted material off the web, asked him to take down. As far as I know, it was never on Amazon; there's been no censoring; we are talking about a book that hasn't yet been published (when it is, I assume Amazon will post the searchable pages, as is typical), but Romm has done a great job of getting people to believe that a book they haven't read is full of errors.

Wait.  Did my headline take Dubner's quote out of context?  Was his actual meaning the opposite of what my 100% accurate excerpt suggests?  Oops.  What was I thinking?  You're not allowed to do that in a blog or a book, are you?

I noted in Part 1 that the primary climatologist Superfreakonomics relies on, Ken Caldeira, wrote me last weekend:

If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do. The standard way to protect against this, of course, is to give short interviews.

Another thing they said that was misleading (out of many) is that….

Oh, you'll have to tune in later for that mistake.  For now, I just wanted to make clear that Caldeira does think these guys misrepresented him and made many misleading statements.  He also wrote me:

So, yes, my representation in the Superfreakonomics book is damaging to me because it is an inaccurate portrayal of me. The problem is the inaccurate portrayal, not my actions or statements.

As but one example, the Superfreaks write of Caldeira, "Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight," whereas what he really believes, as he wrote me, is:

I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies … It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.

So, no, Dubner and Levitt didn't quite get that right.

So that's why I thought I'd tweak Dubner by (partially) quoting him in my headline out of context.

For the record, I don't support such journalism — I will, however, mock people who regularly and egregiously do.  Indeed, on complex matters I try to run quotes by the person I'm interviewing, which, frankly about half the journalists who quote me also do.  I asked Caldeira if I could quote his emails and he wrote me, "I assume when I send you things, you can quote them unless I specifically say otherwise."

This episode is a cautionary tale for all scientists.  By the way, I think the standard of practice should be much higher for a book because the production process is much slower.  I can understand why a blogger or even a print reporter might not always feel he or she has time to check with the original source.  You're writing at such a fast clip.  But you have weeks if not months to run an entire book chapter by an original source.

Finally, to get to the rest of my headline, you'll note that Dubner whines that people are criticizing his book without having read it.  Well, let's see, his publisher made me take down the PDF of the chapter — which is certainly fully within its rights.  And then, yes, the book was searchable on Amazon for a number of days.  I checked many of the pages in the chapter I was sent against the online version and twice told readers they could search the book to check my claim.  So this statement by Dubner is false:

As far as I know, it was never on Amazon; there's been no censoring; we are talking about a book that hasn't yet been published (when it is, I assume Amazon will post the searchable pages, as is typical)

Yes, "As far as I know" is a great Nixonian hedge, like "to the best of my knowledge."  Thing is, Dubner could have checked this.

If I had ever imagined that Amazon would take down the book's searchability, I would have done a screen capture.  If any readers searched it last week, let me know.

DeLong replied to Dubner:

Brad DeLong to Stephen

Re: "It is amazing to see how quickly and thoroughly Romm's extremely misleading attack has spread, to the point where even independent thinkers like you accept it on face value…"

As I said, I can't read your chapter–by your publisher's choice.

That's very bad for you: Romm's posting your chapter and a link to it is a way for him to establish credibility–"see for yourself"; your publisher's pulling it down is a way to diminish yours.

Now that DeLong can read parts of it, he ain't thrilled.

I hope some other journalists interview Caldeira, so he can directly set the record straight, but you wouldn't blame him if he were a bit gun shy with reporters right now, would you?  I'll publish more of my so far exclusive interview with him in a day or two.

Related Posts:

Science: CO2 levels haven't been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — "We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm."

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 07:24 AM PDT

Miocene big

You would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on Earth as high as they are today, a UCLA scientist and colleagues report Oct. 8 in the online edition of the journal Science.

"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

"Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth's history," she said.

Yes, pumping more and more CO2 into the air is a very bad idea, as this news release from UCLA on a major new study makes clear.  The study itself, "Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years," (subs. req'd) was released by Science earlier this month.

The study notes importantly, "This work may support a relatively high climate sensitivity to pCO2" [the partial pressure of CO2], which is the same conclusion that a number of major studies looking at paleoclimate data have come to:

Scientists analyzed data from a major expedition to retrieve deep marine sediments beneath the Arctic to understand the Paleocene Eocene thermal maximum, a brief period some 55 million years ago of "widespread, extreme climatic warming that was associated with massive atmospheric greenhouse gas input." This 2006 study, published in Nature (subs. req'd), found Artic temperatures almost beyond imagination–above 23°C (74°F)–temperatures more than 18°F warmer than current climate models had predicted when applied to this period. The three dozen authors conclude that existing climate models are missing crucial feedbacks that can significantly amplify polar warming.

A second study, published in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req'd), looked at temperature and atmospheric changes during the Middle Ages. This 2006 study found that the effect of amplifying feedbacks in the climate system–where global warming boosts atmospheric CO2 levels–"will promote warming by an extra 15 percent to 78 percent on a century-scale" compared to typical estimates by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The study notes these results may even be "conservative" because they ignore other greenhouse gases such as methane, whose levels will likely be boosted as temperatures warm.

The third study, published in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req'd), looked at temperature and atmospheric changes during the past 400,000 years. This study found evidence for significant increases in both CO2 and methane (CH4) levels as temperatures rise. The conclusion: If our current climate models correctly accounted for such "missing feedbacks," then "we would be predicting a significantly greater increase in global warming than is currently forecast over the next century and beyond"–as much as 1.5°C warmer this century alone.

So we need to keep atmospheric concentrations of CO2 as low as possible — and if we do go above 450 ppm, we need to get back to under 350 ppm as rapidly as possible, preferably by century's end, though that would be no easy feat.

Here's more on this important study:

Tripati, before joining UCLA's faculty, was part of a research team at England's University of Cambridge that developed a new technique to assess carbon dioxide levels in the much more distant past — by studying the ratio of the chemical element boron to calcium in the shells of ancient single-celled marine algae. Tripati has now used this method to determine the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere as far back as 20 million years ago.

"We are able, for the first time, to accurately reproduce the ice-core record for the last 800,000 years — the record of atmospheric C02 based on measurements of carbon dioxide in gas bubbles in ice," Tripati said. "This suggests that the technique we are using is valid.

"We then applied this technique to study the history of carbon dioxide from 800,000 years ago to 20 million years ago," she said. "We report evidence for a very close coupling between carbon dioxide levels and climate. When there is evidence for the growth of a large ice sheet on Antarctica or on Greenland or the growth of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, we see evidence for a dramatic change in carbon dioxide levels over the last 20 million years.

"A slightly shocking finding," Tripati said, "is that the only time in the last 20 million years that we find evidence for carbon dioxide levels similar to the modern level of 387 parts per million was 15 to 20 million years ago, when the planet was dramatically different."

Levels of carbon dioxide have varied only between 180 and 300 parts per million over the last 800,000 years — until recent decades, said Tripati, who is also a member of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. It has been known that modern-day levels of carbon dioxide are unprecedented over the last 800,000 years, but the finding that modern levels have not been reached in the last 15 million years is new.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the carbon dioxide level was about 280 parts per million, Tripati said. That figure had changed very little over the previous 1,000 years. But since the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide level has been rising and is likely to soar unless action is taken to reverse the trend, Tripati said.

"During the Middle Miocene (the time period approximately 14 to 20 million years ago), carbon dioxide levels were sustained at about 400 parts per million, which is about where we are today," Tripati said. "Globally, temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, a huge amount."

Tripati's new chemical technique has an average uncertainty rate of only 14 parts per million.

"We can now have confidence in making statements about how carbon dioxide has varied throughout history," Tripati said.

In the last 20 million years, key features of the climate record include the sudden appearance of ice on Antarctica about 14 million years ago and a rise in sea level of approximately 75 to 120 feet.

"We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in carbon dioxide levels of about 100 parts per million, a huge change," Tripati said. "This record is the first evidence that carbon dioxide may be linked with environmental changes, such as changes in the terrestrial ecosystem, distribution of ice, sea level and monsoon intensity."

Today, the Arctic Ocean is covered with frozen ice all year long, an ice cap that has been there for about 14 million years.

"Prior to that, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic," Tripati said.

Some projections show carbon dioxide levels rising as high as 600 or even 900 parts per million in the next century if no action is taken to reduce carbon dioxide, Tripati said. Such levels may have been reached on Earth 50 million years ago or earlier, said Tripati, who is working to push her data back much farther than 20 million years and to study the last 20 million years in detail.

More than 50 million years ago, there were no ice sheets on Earth, and there were expanded deserts in the subtropics, Tripati noted. The planet was radically different.

It was Hell and High Water. We really ought to avoid that, no?

Related Posts:

Error-riddled Superfreakonomics, Part 4: They get the economics dead wrong, too, and their response to critics is full of misrepresentations, just like their book

Posted: 17 Oct 2009 12:44 PM PDT

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjlEvocVBlIVhE0rDNm4uDyDtCQZzcUjlHpRmUAh1dnZH7yrqKiOciAaQMGINiltvZe3MEKpzmpm3AWeSGdxZr-pLS4ZPXUzayLnL0vPK5_An7CvqsKbe_2bgpkSG1_CiwDlIkjFleLmyh/s320/superfreakonomics.jpgThis post looks at Nobelist Krugman's first take-down of the single most stunning economic error in SuperFreakonomics.  I'll also take on the authors disingenuous response to the critics (including me), "The Rumors of Our Global-Warming Denial Are Greatly Exaggerated."

No, I don't know any critics who called them global warming "deniers" — I don't use the word in my critiques.  The authors are disingenuously trying to take the high ground by misrepresenting their opponents and creating strawmen, which is their modus operandi in the book.  The primary climatologist the book relies on, Ken Caldeira, said in an extended email interview with me "it is an inaccurate portrayal of me" and "misleading" in "many" places. Levitt and Dubner use the far-far-out James Lovelock as the primary scientific foil in their discussion in order to make their nonsensical views seem plausible (see "Lovelock still makes me look like Paula Abdul, warns climate war could kill nearly all of us, leaving survivors in the Stone Age").

Still, it's worth remembering, the book contains these two inane sentences (among many, many others as I've shown in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3):

  1. "Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception."
  2. "In other words:  it's illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions."

The authors aren't deniers per se, but the book is staggeringly anti-scientific and illogical.

And the economics, what little of it there is in the chapter, is utterly wrong.  Krugman just savaged them this morning on their biggest howler.  The Superfreaks write:

Do the future benefits from cutting emissions outweigh the costs of doing so? Or are we better off waiting to cut emissions later — or even, perhaps, polluting at will and just learning to live in a hotter world?

The economist Martin Weitzman analyzed the best available climate models and concluded that the future holds a 5 percent chance of a terrible-case scenario — a rise of more than 10 degrees Celsius.

Amazing.  In one sentence, which they never ran by Weitzman, they get his entire thesis ass backwards (and misquote him, too).  As Krugman explains:

Yikes. I read Weitzman's paper, and have corresponded with him on the subject — and it's making exactly the opposite of the point they're implying it makes. Weitzman's argument is that uncertainty about the extent of global warming makes the case for drastic action stronger, not weaker. And here's what he says about the timing of action:

The conventional economic advice of spending modestly on abatement now but gradually ramping up expenditures over time is an extreme lower bound on what is reasonable rather than a best estimate of what is reasonable.

Again, we're not even getting into substance — just the basic issue of representing correctly what other people said.

I correspond with Weitzman also.  While I don't agree with him 100%, I am of fan of his work (see Harvard economist: Climate cost-benefit analyses are "unusually misleading," warns colleagues "we may be deluding ourselves and others").  And that's how I know that Weitzman has NOT "analyzed the best available climate models and concluded that the future holds a 5 percent chance of a terrible-case scenario — a rise of more than 10 degrees Celsius." If you read his published paper in Review of Economics and Statistics (February 2009), "On modeling and interpreting the economics of catastrophic climate change," you'll see he writes:

The upper 5% probability level averaged over all 22 climate-sensitivity studies cited in IPCC-AR4 (2007) is 7°C.

Also for Weitzman 10 C isn't the "terrible-case scenario" — it's "terra incognita," a "worldwide catastrophe."  In a new draft of his analysis, which he just sent me, he suggests two possible damage functions whereby a 10 C warming would lead to a loss of social welfare of 83% to 99%!!!  He writes "A temperature increase of 4C is likely to have some very serious consequences."  In his published paper he writes:

As a recent Science commentary put it: "Once the world has warmed by 4°C, conditions will be so different from anything we can observe today (and still more different from the last ice age) that it is inherently hard to say where the warming will stop."

When I sent the one sentence from Superfreakonomics to Weitzman — writing, "I thought 6C warming was the 'terrible' case you consider and that's what had a 5% chance" — he wrote back:

You are right.  Is their book already out, or is there still a chance to clarify this?

Needless to say, had the Superfreaks run their statement by Weitzman — or had even the slightest clue what he was arguing — they never would have written what they did.  It is an amateurish mistake.

Let me end with some comments on Levitt's recent blog post, "The Rumors of Our Global-Warming Denial Are Greatly Exaggerated."  First, he whines:

SuperFreakonomics isn't even on sale yet, and the attacks on our chapter about global warming are already underway.

A prominent environmental blogger has attacked us. A well-known environmental-advocacy group pressured NPR into reading a statement critical of the book at the end of an interview I had given on Scott Simon's Weekend Edition show. Even Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong got in on the action before they'd even read the book.

Laughable — and disingenuous.

The book isn't even on sale yet — and Levitt is already misleading the public on NPR!  I'll deal with that interview tomorrow.  But if Levitt can spread disinformation on the airwaves before his book is out, then he can hardly complain that people are attacking him.

Second, you'll see how he characterizes me as an "environmental blogger" and "The Union of Concerned Scientists" as an environmental-advocacy group.  That's because he's trying to frame this debate as the scientists he talked to versus environmentalists (like Gore, their other whipping boy in the book).  In fact, the truth is that we have a whole bunch of scientists — including the primary climatologist he talked — versus two non-scientists who don't know what they are talking about on climate science, climate solutions, or climate economics.

We are working on a thorough response to these critics, which we hope to post on the blog in the next day or two. The bottom line is that the foundation of these attacks is essentially fraudulent, as we'll spell out in detail. In the meantime, let us just say the following….

The critics are implying that we dismiss any threats from global warming; but the entire point of our chapter is to discuss global-warming solutions, so obviously that's not the case.The statements being circulated create the false impression that our analysis of the global-warming crisis is ideological and unscientific. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It their analysis that is "essentially fraudulent" as I and many others have shown.  Nobody is saying or "implying" they "dismiss any threats from global warming."  That's another strawman.

Their analysis is clearly unscientific, but again I don't know anyone who has claimed it is "ideological," except in the sense that they know how to make a lot of money and get a lot of media coverage by pushing a contrarian viewpoint.  Now if contrarianism wholly overwhelms one's rationality to the point where a person is contrarian despite the facts but merely for the sake of being contrarian, then I suppose that is an ideology.

I'll blog more on the Superfreaks tomorrow.  Yes, I'm blogging a great deal on this, but besides the obvious interest that my posts have generated — Part 1 is already easily the most widely read post I've written this year — I think are having an impact and, as Part 5 will make clear, these guys are about to launch a major media/disinformation blitz.