Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[garbon]

Article falls apart when it starts discussing McConnell.

[Valmy]

Now I really do miss him. 

It is, of course, dead wrong. We had far more discussions about religion back when Viking made every thread about religion. We are having them again because Berkut is trying to fill in for him

[Brazen]

Storm Desmond has swept the Northwest of the UK bringing power cuts and school and hospitals closures. At least one person has died. There was record-breaking rainfall of more than 340mm in a 24-hour period.

On a lighter note, apparently US celebrity fans saw "Storm Desmond" trending and thought it was Kim and Kanye's name for their new baby 

[The Larch]

Apparently Greenpeace has caught two US academics willing to write for hire pieces against climate change on behalf of fake fossil fuel companies.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/08/greenpeace-exposes-sceptics-cast-doubt-climate-science

Greenpeace exposes sceptics hired to cast doubt on climate science
Sting operation uncovers two prominent climate sceptics available for hire by the hour to write reports on the benefits of rising CO2 levels and coal

An undercover sting by Greenpeace has revealed that two prominent climate sceptics were available for hire by the hour to write reports casting doubt on the dangers posed by global warming.

Posing as consultants to fossil fuel companies, Greenpeace approached professors at leading US universities to commission reports touting the benefits of rising carbon dioxide levels and the benefits of coal. The views of both academics are well outside mainstream climate science.

The findings point to how paid-for information challenging the consensus on climate science could be placed into the public domain without the ultimate source of funding being revealed.

They come as government ministers meet in Paris this week to try to reach an agreement to fight climate change, and one month after it emerged that ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy were under investigation in the state of New York over claims of misleading the public and investors about climate change.

Over the course of their investigation, Greenpeace posed as the representative of a Middle Eastern oil and gas company and an Indonesian coal company. In the guise of a Beirut-based business consultant they asked William Ha pper , the Cyrus Fogg Brackett professor of physics at Princeton University, to write a report touting the benefits of rising carbon emissions, according to email exchanges between the professor and the fake company.

Happer is one of the most prominent climate sceptics in the US and on Tuesday was called to testify at a congressional hearing into climate "dogma" convened by Ted Cruz, the Republican presidential candidate and chair of the Senate science committee. He is also chairman of the George Marshal Institute in the US and an adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK.

Reacting to the sting at the UN climate talks in Paris, US secretary of state John Kerry was dismissive of the impact of such paid-for work. "One professor or one scientist is not going to negate peer-reviewed scientists by the thousands over many years and 97% of the scientists on the planet," he said.

The proposed report for the fake consultant was intended to highlight the negative aspects of the climate agreement being negotiated in Paris, he was told in the email approach. The physicist was receptive to the commission, and asked to donate his fee to the CO2 Coalition, a group founded this year to "shift the debate from the unjustified criticism of CO2 and fossil fuels".

"My activities to push back against climate extremism are a labor of love, to defend the cherished ideals of science that have been so corrupted by the climate change cult," he wrote in an email. He did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.

The campaign group assumed another false identity, posing as an Indonesian energy consultancy, to approach Frank Clemente, a retired sociologist formerly at Pennsylvania State University, to commission a report countering damaging studies on Indonesian coal deaths and promoting the benefits of coal, according to the email exchanges.

In both cases, the professors discussed ways to obscure the funding for the reports, at the request of the fake companies. In Happer's case, the CO2 Coalition which was to receive the fee suggested he reach out to a secretive funding channel called Donors Trust, in response to a request from the fake Greenpeace entity to keep the source of funds secret. Not disclosing funding in this way is not unlawful under US law.

Also, in an email exchange with the fake business representative, Happer acknowledges that his report would probably not pass peer-review with a scientific journal – the gold-standard process for quality scientific publication whereby work is assessed by anonymous expert reviewers. "I could submit the article to a peer-reviewed journal, but that might greatly delay publication and might require such major changes in response to referees and to the journal editor that the article would no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly as your client would also like," he wrote.

He suggested an alternative process whereby the article could be passed around handpicked reviewers. "Purists might object that the process did not qualify as a peer review," he said. "I think it would be fine to call it a peer review."

Greenpeace said its investigation demonstrated how, unbeknownst to the public, the fossil fuel industry could inject paid-for views about climate change into the international debate, confusing the public and blocking prospects for strong action to avoid dangerous warming.

"Our research reveals that professors at prestigious universities can be sponsored by foreign fossil fuel companies to write reports that sow doubt about climate change and that this sponsorship will then be kept secret," said John Sauven, the director of Greenpeace UK. "Down the years, how many scientific reports that sowed public doubt on climate change were actually funded by oil, coal and gas companies? This investigation shows how they do it, now we need to know when and where they did it."

Such practices are receiving greater scrutiny in academic circles after it emerged that Dr Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who rejects mainstream climate science, was financed almost entirely by fossil fuel companies and lobby groups and a foundation run by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers. The Smithsonian launched an investigation.

In Happer's case, the physicist declined any personal remuneration for his work but wanted his fee donated to the CO2 Coalition. Happer wrote in an email that his fee was $250 an hour and that it would require four days of work – a total of $8,000. "Depending on how extensive a document you have in mind, the time required or cost could be more or less, but I hope this gives you some idea of what I would expect if we were to proceed on some mutually agreeable course," he wrote.

Clemente, who was approached by the sham Indonesian firm to produce a report countering findings linking coal to high rates of premature death, said such a project fell within his skill set. He estimated a fee of about $15,000 for an eight-to-10-page paper, according to email correspondence released by Greenpeace. The professor said he charged $6,000 for writing newspaper opinion pieces.

He said there was no problem quoting him as professor emeritus at Penn State, or obscuring the funding for the research. "There is no requirement to declare source funding in the US. My research and writing has been supported by government agencies, trade associations, the university and private companies and all has been published under the rubric of me as an independent scholar – which I am."

Clemente told the Guardian that he acted as a consultant to "many industries that improve the human quality of life".

He added: "I fully stand behind every single statement I made in my emails. I am very proud of my research and believe that clean coal technologies are the pathway to reliable and affordable electricity, reduction of global energy poverty and a cleaner environment."

"I write is an independent scholar and University is not responsible for any of my work. This is called academic freedom in the United States," he said.

Greenpeace said it had approached a total of seven prominent figures in the US and UK climate denial movement. The other five declined, either citing time pressures and area of expertise, or just did not respond.

Greenpeace argues its investigation offered a rare glimpse into the practice of clandestine industry funding of reports casting doubts about the threat of climate change. The campaign group argues that obscuring funding in this way dupes the public into thinking the reports are produced by the scholars independently with no financial interests at stake.

Happer, who served as an energy adviser for former president George HW Bush, has long argued that rising carbon emissions are a net benefit for humanity.

He returned to the point in his email exchanges with the fake entity, saying: "The Paris climate talks are based on the premise that CO2 itself is a pollutant. This is completely false. More CO2 will benefit the world."

Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University and author of Merchants of Doubt, a book about the climate denial movement, said Happer had been deploying the same arguments that CO2 is good for agriculture for about 20 years – even though such claims have, she said, been thoroughly debunked. "He has been recycling refuted arguments for quite some time now," she said.

"Happer sits in the profile of people we wrote about in Merchants of Doubt," she said. "I've always argued that for this group of people, cold war physicists, it's not about money, it's ideologically driven."

Meanwhile, Peabody Energy regularly cites Clemente's research to make its case that expanding coal use to developing countries would help eliminate global poverty. That argument runs counter to the thinking of financial institutions such as the World Bank which has rejected the notion of coal as a poverty cure.

Happer noted he had also donated an $8,000 fee from Peabody for testimony in a Minnesota state hearing on the impacts of carbon dioxide to the CO2 Coalition.

Happer did not dispute the veracity of the emails, but refused to address questions.

[The Brain]

"I've always argued that for this group of people, cold war physicists, it's not about money, it's ideologically driven."

Damn straight. That and the pussy.

[The Minsky Moment]

Good question: why won't they?

Because the GOP is not Exxon.
Exxon is a private corporation that pursues profit, but at the end of the day they have to operate a complex business that involves a lot of engineering and geology, and requires long-term planning.  They can't afford to indulge in political fantasy, if for no other reason than phenomena like higher storm intensity or sea level rise has significant ramifications for their very substantial investments in offshore drilling, or Gulf Coast refineries.

Exxon has no choice but to remain a member of the reality-based community, but large swaths of the GOP have no such compulsion - on the contrary they may face pressures from their base to depart from it.

[mongers]

Good question: why won't they?

Because the GOP is not Exxon.
Exxon is a private corporation that pursues profit, but at the end of the day they have to operate a complex business that involves a lot of engineering and geology, and requires long-term planning.  They can't afford to indulge in political fantasy, if for no other reason than phenomena like higher storm intensity or sea level rise has significant ramifications for their very substantial investments in offshore drilling, or Gulf Coast refineries.

Exxon has no choice but to remain a member of the reality-based community, but large swaths of the GOP have no such compulsion - on the contrary they may face pressures from their base to depart from it.

Makes me want to go back to working for B.P.*






* what's left of it, after those hurricane force legal cases hit it.

[Syt]

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/senate-science-committee-hearing-challenges-dogma-of-climate-science/

Senate Science Committee hearing challenges "dogma" of climate science

While the eyes of the world are on Paris, where nations are hammering out an agreement to do something about the reality of climate change, the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness once again held a hearing on Tuesday to debate whether climate change is for real. Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who is running for his party's presidential nomination, convened the hearing titled "Data or dogma? Promoting open inquiry in the debate over the magnitude of human impact on Earth's climate."

Senator Cruz brought in four witnesses to testify, mostly chosen from the usual suspects that have participated in similar hearings in the past. There were two of the very small handful of climate scientists who express doubts about human responsibility for climate change—Georgia Tech professor and blogger Judith Curry and John Christy from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. William Happer, a retired Princeton physicist and chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think-tank, was also invited to speak. The fourth person brought in to talk climate science was conservative radio host and columnist Mark Steyn. (The last two were keynote speakers at this year's Heartland Institute conference for climate "skeptics.")

Senator Cruz opened the hearing with some ironic remarks. "This is a hearing on the science behind the claims of global warming. Now, this is the Science Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, and we're hearing from distinguished scientists, sharing their views, their interpretations, their analysis of the data and the evidence. Now, I am the son of two mathematicians—two computer programmers and scientists—and I believe that public policy should follow the actual science, and the actual data and evidence, and not political and partisan claims that run contrary to the science and data and evidence."

John Christy, who has helped develop the UAH satellite temperature dataset favored by climate "skeptics" because it shows slower warming in portions of the troposphere than we see in surface records, made his pitch for why we just don't know what has caused recent warming. That explanation involved highlighting his graph of tropical mid-troposphere (rather than global surface) model projections and observations that frequently appears in the comments on stories like this one—a graph other climate scientists take issue with—and claiming that emissions cuts would have a minimal impact on climate change. While claiming that research funding is biased, he proposed setting aside five to 10 percent of federal climate research funding for a "Red Team" like the CIA section tasked with outside-the-box analyses that challenge the status quo. This Red Team would "produce an assessment that expresses legitimate, alternative hypotheses" for climate change.

Judith Curry echoed Christy's complaints, claiming that climate science has fallen victim to "groupthink"—a conclusion she says she reached after reading the quote-mined "Climategate" e-mails between scientists in 2009. (A pile of subsequent independent investigations found no evidence of scientific misconduct.) The rest of Curry's testimony entailed claims that the science of anthropogenic climate change is unsettled, which she has spoken and written about at length over the years.

Mark Steyn's testimony focused on his accusations that climate science is fraudulent and oppresses contrarians. Steyn's claim to climate fame is that he's being sued for defamation by Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, whom Steyn has repeatedly accused of fraud.

William Happer used most of his time to argue that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are good for the planet, claiming that there is "not much dispute" that there is too little CO2 and too much oxygen for plants right now. He also seemed to like Christy's "Red Team" idea, as he said climate science lacks an "adversarial process" to check if the science is right. (Of course, "an adversarial process" isn't a bad description of peer review or the work of thousands of independent researchers.) "I would like to argue very strongly that we set aside some fraction of funding for climate research that is designed to be for the other side," Happer said. That would run counter to the way funding is granted today, which is based on the hypothesis and the quality of the test rather than what the resulting conclusion is going to be.

Happer became a story in his own right earlier in the day, when Greenpeace released e-mails with Happer in which they had pretended to represent a foreign energy company. They asked Happer if he would produce a report extolling the virtues of CO2 but without disclosing their financial support, and Happer agreed this was something he could do. Happer explained that Peabody Coal Company had paid him $8,000 to testify at regulatory hearings in Minnesota. That fee went to the tax-exempt CO­­2 Coalition, which he said pays his travel expenses but no salary. Just before Tuesday's hearing, someone from Greenpeace filmed a heated exchange with Happer asking whether he had been paid to testify. Happer seemed to indicate that the CO2 Coalition "took some of my fee" before rising out of his chair and angrily replying, "I haven't taken a dime, you son of a bitch."

Finally, there was testimony from a witness invited by committee Democrats—former Navy Rear Admiral and current Penn State meteorology professor David Titley. Titley calmly attempted to explain the basics of climate science, highlighting the fact that nothing is ever 100 percent certain in science, yet we understand how to act on risks despite imperfect knowledge.

A question-and-answer portion followed this testimony, which at one point devolved to Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Steyn, and Curry pretty much shouting at each other. But there was also some discussion about satellite temperature data sets. (Curiously, this involved no questions for John Christy, who helps run one.) Senator Cruz is fond of claiming that one of the satellite data sets shows "no warming for 18 years" while ignoring longer-term trends and the fact that all surface temperature data sets show warming over that period.

After Senator Cruz pushed Titley to answer a question about the satellite records, which he claimed "the global warming alarmists don't want to talk about," Titley let loose. "Let's talk about the satellite measurements," Titley said. "Let's talk about orbital decay. Let's talk about overlapping satellite records. Let's talk about stratospheric temperature contamination. I think Dr. Christy and Dr. [Roy] Spencer, when they've put this out, they have been wrong, I think, at least four consecutive times. Each time the data record has had to be adjusted upward. There have been several sign errors. So, with all due respect, sir, I don't know which data, exactly, your staff has, whether it's the first or second or third or fourth correction to Dr. Christy's data. We used to have a negative trend, and then we had no trend, and now we begrudgingly have an upward trend."

To be fair, Senator Cruz was pointing to a competing data set run by Remote Sensing Systems in California that, until recently, showed an even smaller 18-year warming trend than the University of Alabama in Huntsville data set. And the latest version of that UAH data set, which is in beta, reduces that trend once again.

In a curious moment, William Happer chimed in to state that these satellites measure temperatures "the same way as hospitals do today," with devices that measure infrared radiation. In fact, these satellites measure microwave radiation, and doctors aren't trying to simultaneously determine temperatures of various layers inside you when they pop a thermometer in your ear.

Senator Cruz also accused scientists of deliberately manipulating land surface temperature data to create the appearance of warming over the 20th Century. (Quality-control adjustments to sea surface temperature data, which obviously involve a much larger portion of the globe, actually make the overall effect a decrease in global 20th Century warming.) When asked about this, Judith Curry didn't quite support Senator Cruz's accusation but did comment, "To me, the error bars should really be much bigger if they're making such a large adjustment, so we really don't know too much about what's going on."

In contrast to this talk of uncertainty and scientific skullduggery, Senator Gary Peters (D-Mich.) opted for some remedial physics in his opening comments. "By burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon into the atmosphere that would have otherwise remained locked away. This process creates carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat that otherwise would have been radiated off into space. We know that by the law of conservation of energy, that additional heat can't just magically disappear. Instead, it causes our planet to get warmer."

[Berkut]

That article is just a case study in why voting for any of these Republicans is not just foolish - it is actively dangerous.

It is the intentional and willful denial of evidence in favor of faith.

[Grey Fox]

I don't understand, or can forsee, what is the republicans end game here. What are they trying to achieve?

[Syt]

I don't understand, or can forsee, what is the republicans end game here. What are they trying to achieve?

Imposing limits and rules on businesses or freedom (e.g. cars) = bad.

[Valmy]

I don't understand, or can forsee, what is the republicans end game here. What are they trying to achieve?

Re-election.

[Syt]

A little quiz: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/10/science/paris-climate-change-talks-quiz.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

I got 3/8 right. 

[Valmy]

Heh. I only got one right.

[grumbler]

I could have developed a quiz even more trivial than that one.