One of the posters on David Appell's blog is Tom Rees, who I realized today is the guy behind this terrific climate science site.
Follow the yellow brick road. I don't want to feed the troll directly. (Let's just say that Mr. Fumento continues to demonstrate his journalistic integrity via, uh, "creative interpretation" of original texts.)
Postmodernism is one of those things, like pornography, that's difficult to define, but you know it when you see it.
Today's example: The Real Gilligan's Island, a "reality" show based on a sitcom. And then, on network TV news, an interview with an original cast member from the "real" Gilligan's Island.
Disentangling the strands of reality is left as an exercise for the reader.
All in all, we just need to be paid for helping put another brick in the wall.
Lissa and I finally made the pilgrimage this afternoon to the new Trader Joe's in Santa Fe.
When people ask where we're from, we typically say "L.A.," but we actually lived for many years in South Pasadena, a little bit of old-school suburbia between Los Angeles and Pasadena. It's the home of Joe Coulombe's first Trader Joe's, and we did a lot of shopping at the second, a crowded little cheese and wine emporium on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena. The stuff was cheap and good and, most important, a bit odd. Workers wore Hawaiian shirts, stuff was stacked around in wooden crates like it had just come off the boat. And did I mention that it was cheap?
The first TJ's in New Mexico has been greeted with almost religious fervor, but to be honest I was a bit nervous about making the pilgrimage. In this age of Wild Whole Oat Foods markets, with their colored concrete floors and beautiful produce and oh-so-hiply-pierced staff, I was worried about what TJ's might have become. But I was pleasantly surprised. There was Joe's low-sodium V8 knockoff vegetable juice - cheaper than V8 at the regular supermarket. Intriguing frozen vegetables. Frozen salmon patties. Stuff stacked around like it had just come off the boat. And did I mention that it was cheap?
My colleague Tania Soussan has a delightful story in this morning's paper about the question of whether prairie dogs have language:
Some of those words or calls were created by the prairie dogs when they saw something for the first time. Four prairie dogs in Slobodchikoff's lab were shown a great-horned owl and European ferret, two animals they had likely not seen before, if only because the owls are mostly nocturnal and this kind of ferret is foreign. The prairie dogs independently came up with the same new calls.In the field, black plywood cutouts showing the silhouette of a coyote, a skunk and an oval shape were randomly run along a wire through the prairie dog colony.
"There are no black ovals running around out there and yet they all had the same word for black oval," Slobodchikoff said.
He guesses the prairie dogs are genetically programmed with some vocabulary and the ability to describe things.
More on that wacky RS 2477 from Property Owners for Sensible Roads Policy.
The Hypothetical Wren, on standing in line at the computer lab to use Windows machines when the Macs are free:
I was dithering whether or not to stay in line or just sit down at one of the lonely computers, since no one at the head of the line seemed compelled to use any of them, when someone else came up, someone really loud, willing to ask the questions out loud that I am not, and, half-asking, half-yelling, said, "YOU PEOPLE ARE ALL IN LINE FOR THE WINDOWS THINGIES, RIGHT?"They were.
"I always felt that science as the preserve of people from Oxbridge or Ivy League universities - and not for the common mortal - was a very bad idea."
- Benoit Mandelbrot, in last week's New Scientist, on seeing his fractals on T-shirts
A friend of mine began noticing New Mexico's drought a couple of years ago when he realized he hadn't needed chains or snow tires on his pickup truck in a while. He lives up a hilly dirt road, where snow can make it tough coming and going. But he realized he hadn't been having problems in recent years.
I thought of my friend this afternoon when, while at the library, I stumbled by happenstance across an intriguing paper in the journal Climate Research by a Norwegian researcher named Elisabeth Meze-Hausken on how people perceive climate change in northern Ethiopia(1).
(More below the fold.)
Drought here in the industrialized world is a funny thing. We notice it, and it effects us. Some people suffer economic dislocations. Crops fail, ski areas go belly up, recreational boating is in the tank. But no one in New Mexico is going to die because of what is, statewide, the driest five-year stretch in half a century. Africa is different. Droughts can lead to wholesale migrations of populations, coups, famine and death.(2)
But how do we define drought? And how do we know when we're in it? The folks in Ethiopia that Meze-Hausken writes about offer a perfect case study in what I've made my seat-of-the-pants definition of drought - "less precipitation than you've come to depend on."
Ethiopians do not have the luxury of being buffered from climatic changes by the industrialized built environment. More than 50 million Ethiopians live a subsistence agricultural life, many of them in arid regions. These are the people who are vulnerable to climate variability. These are the people who go hungry when there's not enough rain. And Meze-Hausken found they believe there is no longer enough rain - that their climate is changing.
Northern Ethiopia's year is dominated by two linked rain regimes - spring rains they call "Belg" and summer rains they call "Kiremt." Belg is critical to the herders, providing the forage for their cattle. Kiremt is critical to the farmers, watering their crops. When Meze-Hausken interviewed residents, she found a widespread belief that there was less rain than there used to be:
The local people gave a clear impression that they have lost one rainy season (Belg) since their fathers' times. Additionally, they stated the main summer rains have shortened in duration and concluded that some kind of climatic change must be underway.
In response, the farmers have shifted their crops, planting lower-risk varieties that have less yield but are less vulnerable to drought. They plant later and harvest earlier.
But when Meze-Hausken looked at the rainfall records, she found no detectable change in the climate. There is variability, but no significant trend. The year 2002, perceived by some as "the worst in human memory" was actually unexceptional as measured at the rain gauge. So what's going on?
This is the tricky issue about defining drought, and about understanding more broadly the effect of climate change on human populations.
The droughts in the 1100s and 1200s that led to the collapse of the Anasazi were, in long-term climatologic terms, unexceptional. Earlier human cultures in the region rode out worse. But the Anasazi had taken advantage of favorable climatic conditions to max out the land, growing big and spreading wide. When the drought hit, they had nowhere to turn, no flexibility.
Meze-Hausken describes a similar situation in Ethiopia. Population tripled between 1960 and 2000. People need more food, and they've spread out onto marginal land, with the result that per-acre food output has declined. In addition, many farmers migrated into the North Afar area during an unusually wet period in the 1950s and '60s:
They started to plant maize, sorghum and teff as they used to in their former homesteads in the highlands. At that time people may not have taken into consideration that these rainfall conditions were exceptionally good.
So it may not be that "drought" for these people means "less precipitation than average." It really seems to mean "less precipitation than we need."
1. Meze-Hausken, E. (2004) Climate Research 27, 19-31.
2. Glantz, M. H. (2003) Climate affairs : a primer (Island Press, Washington, DC).
In the wake of the release of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, arguing that anthropogenic warming is heating up the arctic faster than expected and faster than other parts of the globe, a familiar counter-argument has resurfaced - that Greenland is actually getting colder. Given the currency of the argument (it was prominently feature in a Tech Central Station-sponsored letter signed by a group of climate scientists to Sen. John McCain, R-AZ), it's worth reviewing a rather straightforward bit of Global Climate Science 101:
The anthropogenic warming hypothesis does not predict the same sort of warming everywhere. The hypothesis predicts that some places would warm a lot, some less, some might even cool. That's why "global climate change" is a more accurate way of describing it. From the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment:
You can see how citing Greenland's cooling provides something of a misleading picture of the overall situation.
The American Family Association is warning its members away from the animated Shark Tale. Apparently there's a vegetarian shark whose "mannerisms and voice tend toward the effeminate." This shark also dresses as a dolphin. But that's not the worst part. Oh no. Before the film is over, the cross-dressing vegetarian shark's macho father comes to accept him. "I love you son," the dad says, "no matter what you eat or how you dress." Quel horreur! A cross-dressing vegetarian shark whose dad loves him!
"Shark Tale," the AFA's Ed Vitagliano writes, "comes far too close to taking a bite out of traditional moral and spiritual beliefs."
You can't make up stuff this good. (Hat tip Andrew Sullivan.)
Carl Zimmer points out the error in our science journalism ways when we try to coax scientists to say their latest apish find is a "missing link":
Now, if you learned about human origins 50 years ago, you might well have read things by scientists referring to a missing link in our evolution. The great paleoanthropologist Robert Broom even published a book in 1951 called Finding the Missing Link. But this was a time when so few fossils were known from human evolution that many researchers thought that our ancestry was pretty much linear until you got back to our common ancestor with other living apes. But fifty years later, it's abundantly clear now that human evolution has produced many branches, all but one of which have ended in extinction. Some are close to our own ancestry, others are further away. Paleoanthropologists don't get excited about a fossil because they think they've found the missing link (whatever that is), but because a fossil can show how early a trait such as a big brain evolved, and sometimes can even reveal traits that have evolved independently several times in evolution. That's what gets them fired up about Pierolapithecus catalaunicus. So why shouldn't journalists get fired up as well, rather than trotting out old cliches?
(That's the award-winning Carl Zimmer, whose writing is so gentle and effortless that when you read him you feel like you're sitting down for a cup of coffee with an old friend. Well deserved.)
The journalist's instinct, as Chris Mooney noted in his recent CJR piece, is to provide balance by quoting someone from each side of a debate. But this has the potential to result in a distortion if, as for example in the case of evolution and creationism/intelligent design, one side is representative of the mainstream of responsible science and the other side is representative of a fringe outlier.
When you have two relatively balanced political forces, as when we're moving from the science to the policy response, however, the "one from each side" model is probably a responsible way to handle the thing. But what of the case where we've moved into the political/policy arena, and we then call on the politicians to explain the science?
Earlier Tuesday, Sen. John McCain called on President Bush to do more to fight global warming. McCain, R-Ariz., pointed to a study on rising Arctic temperatures as further evidence that changes in the earth's climate aren't being addressed seriously enough."Some of us believe that the accumulation of knowledge argues that we act, rather than continue to accumulate knowledge," McCain said in criticizing the Bush administration's climate strategy as research-heavy. Until then, McCain had been playing down his policy differences with Bush to support the president's re-election.
McCain said the study "clearly demonstrates that climate change is real and has far-reaching implications for society."
Not so, said Sen. James Inhofe, chairman of the environment committee, who has described global warming as a hoax. In a statement, Inhofe called the study yet another scare tactic.
"Alarmists continue to pursue doomsday scenarios about global warming, but without releasing the basis for their claims," said Inhofe, R-Okla.
I think we're back to an unfortunate "one from each side" formulation here, with McCain simply acting as the surrogate for the mainstream scientific view and Inhofe as the surrogate for the outlier. It'd be different if each was arguing the political/policy response, but they're not. I think the author of this story should have applied "the Mooney test."
But it's a problem because of the underlying nature of the debate. As Daniel Sarewitz argues, the scientific contention allows each side to try to grab the high ground in the scientific debate, and we never end up getting to the politics/policy:
Science supplies contesting parties with their own bodies of relevant, legitimated facts about nature, chosen in part because they help make sense of, and are made sensible by, particular interests and normative frameworks.
As a result, journalists are frequently left with nothing to do but cover McCain/Inhofe-style debates over the science itself.
Just finished Charles Wohlforth's The Whale and the Supercomputer, a terrific read on a number of levels.
It is the story of climate change from the point of view of the people along the arctic who are living in its midst, woven with the research community trying to understand climate change as current fact and future implication.
Wohlforth straddles well the worlds of the native whalers, the global climate modelers and the armies of climate researchers trying to gather the data needed to stitch the whole climate story together.
To me, the most interesting thing was the way, like Norman Maclean in Young Men and Fire, Wohlforth leads us along on his own journey to understand and explain.
There's a marvelous moment when he's trying to sort out the complexities of federal funding for arctic research - Wohlforth frankly admits, "I didn't hope to know the truth of the matter. As a machine for spending money, Washington was as complex and inscrutable as an ecological system." Intellectual humility - a characteristic to be prized.
Doing some reading this week for a piece about the inevitable decline in the availability of oil supplies, I ran across a lot of interesting literature in geophysics and energy economics suggesting the same line of argument applies to a wide range of societal goods. This has been widely discussed with respect to coal and natural gas as well, for example.
But perhaps the most interesting example I found was a little-known paper written in the early 1970s by a then-graduate student in film studies named Roger Ebert. Ebert, now famous as the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, argued that the supply of easy-to-make, quality films would reach an apex, leaving only lower-quality movies that could only be produced at significantly higher cost.
(click through for more)
Ebert's analysis, which quantified the problem using his Modified Thumb Index (MTI) as a measure of the number of quality films produced per year, proved remarkably successful in predicting the peak of quality film production in the United States. Scholars generally agree that came in 1975, the year that produced such classics as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sexual Ecstasy of the Macumba. In the decades since, filmmakers have been forced to spend increasingly large sums of money in search of quality cinema, with decreasing marginal returns.
But like the analyses of energy resource production on which the work was loosely patterned, Ebert's analysis was unable to cope with a number of uncertainties that still plague efforts to quantify when the worldwide peak of quality film production will be reached.
The first uncertainty involves the discovery of untapped filmmaking talent in other parts of the world. As U.S. cinema declined in the latter half of the twentieth century, we saw a clear rise in European film. And Ebert was completely unprepared for the rise in Hong Kong action cinema (often called the "Jackie Chan effect") and the tremendous body of quality work produced in Bollywood.
Film scholars today still debate what we can expect in the coming decade. One school of thought, often referred to as the "cornucopians," argues that new discoveries of film talent, (as evidenced by the continuing success of Saturday Night Live alumni) and new development of new technology (see for example the rise of computer animation) will inevitably push out Ebert's peak.
Others (see the graph above) suggest that we may now be reaching a global Ebert's Peak, and that a decline in world cinema is inevitable.
Michael Fumento has shown up again on the radar, this time on the stem cell debate, once again basing one of his op-ed pieces on a misprepresentation.
In it, Fumento accuses Chris Mooney of making "the illogical argument that since some people prefer adult stem cells for non-scientific reasons, they must therefore have little scientific value." Once again, thanks to the Internet, you can read Mooney's Washington Monthly piece yourself and decided whether Fumento has accurately characterized Mooney's argument. Hint: think straw man. Mooney argues that opponents of embryonic stem cell research have improperly hyped adult stem cells as an alternative. But Mooney never argues that adult stem cells "have little scientific value." Read it for yourself.
The MIchael Fumento/Bowie Poag analogy that David noted seems so apt. You just can't make up stuff this good.
Fumento has had a change of heart. After piling onto the Lancet researchers for pumping up the Iraqi death toll by using data from deadly Falluja, now he's accusing those pro-terrorist medical researchers of not including the Falluja data.
If you'll recall when last we met, our hero was taking down those evil bounders from the British medical journal Lancet ("Al-Jazeera on the Thames," as he so daringly put it) for their study on deaths in Iraq. It seems that, by including data gathered in Falluja, the evil Lancetteers had biased their study, like "determining how much of a nation's population wears dentures by surveying only nursing homes."
When any number of people helpfully pointed out to Lambert that he was wrong, and that the Lancetteers had excluded the Falluja data as an outlier - they apparently didn't want the equivalent of a nursing home full of denture wearers throwing off their data - Fumento dug in his heels. "Find in the paper where they provide an equivalent to the 100,000 figure but exclude Falluja deaths," (emphasis added) our Superhero of the New Science-Based Right thundered.
Several people showed him. Again. So Fumento changed tack, now accusing the Lancetthajadeen of not including numbers based on the Falluja data.
As Lambert points out, we now have this nicely summed up in a single comment thread over on Eye Doc's blog.
Fumento I: "The authors claimed to have come up with one set of numbers including Falluja, another without. But strangely, they never present the 'without numbers.'"
Fumento II: "The study did not present numbers that included Falluja, either in the abstract or text. Yet they accuse ME of not reading it."
Here's the full pertinent paragraph from the Lancet study (emphasis added):
Evidence suggests that the mortality rate was higher across Iraq after the war than before, even excluding Falluja. We estimate that there were 98 000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000 194 000) during the post-war period in the 97% of Iraq represented by all the clusters except Falluja. In our Falluja sample, we recorded 53 deaths when only 1·4 were expected under the national pre-war rate. This indicates a point estimate of about 200 000 excess deaths in the 3% of Iraq represented by this cluster. However, the uncertainty in this value is substantial and implies additional deaths above those measured in the rest of the country.
In other words, they did the with-Falluja calculation - "200,000 excess deaths" - but responsibly threw it out as an outlier, because they didn't want the equivalent of a nursing home biasing their data on how many people wear dentures.
There was a provocative piece in New Scientist in the spring (sorry, can't give you a citation, it doesn't seem to be on line) discussing the way in which scientists tend to evaluate new evidence based on their preconceived notions, giving stronger weight to evidence that is supportive and discounting evidence that is in conflict. This should in some sense be obvious, though it tends to rub scientists, with their belief in the purity of their own effort, the wrong way.
There's a marvelous demonstration of this principle in action today from our friends at Tech Central Station on potential meteorological effects of wind farms. The authors are Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, whose names will be well known to those who follow the climate wars:
A new simulation finds serious and previously unrecognized environmental threats from massive wind farms in the American Great Plains.A recent study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research by scientists from Princeton and Duke Universities indicates massive wind farms would significantly increase local surface drying and soil heating, which in turn would impact agricultural or range use on or near the wind farm.
Soon and Baliunas are well known skeptics of results of computer climate simulations suggesting that fossil fuel burning could negatively affect climate, frequently saying such things as:
The answers must come from the application of the scientific method, which requires testing the models against good measurements from the real world. A model can make correct predictions if accurate observations validate it. (emphasis added)
The JGR wind farm study (which, as an aside, looks like a good and interesting study - I'm not trying to criticize it here) is entirely based on model runs, with no attempt made to empirically verify it against real-world data. It's not really possible, given that the size of wind farm they're trying to model does not exist. While that kind of science really seems to cheese off Soon and Baliunas when model results are used to criticize fossil fuels, that apparently is not the case in the wind farm study, where they are quick to conclude:
Wind farms may not be as benign to the environment and weather as its (sic) promoters say.
Chris Mooney, in his excellent CJR piece on media coverage of political/science controversies, quotes from a study by Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff of the coverage of climate controversies in major newspapers:
The Boykoffs analyzed a random sample of 636 articles. They found that a majority — 52.7 percent — gave “roughly equal attention” to the scientific consensus view that humans contribute to climate change and to the energy-industry-supported view that natural fluctuations suffice to explain the observed warming. By comparison, just 35.3 percent of articles emphasized the scientific consensus view while still presenting the other side in a subordinate fashion. Finally, 6.2 percent emphasized the industry-supported view, and a mere 5.9 percent focused on the consensus view without bothering to provide the industry/skeptic counterpoint.
Not to be outdone, the Media Research Center’s Free Market Project has done a study of its own:
No Science Debate Allowed: Broadcast news programs presented the claims of liberal environmentalists that global warming is a given, that mankind is to blame for it, or both, 55 percent of the time (77 stories). That’s six times more often than they showed valid scientific objection to global warming theories.
"Claims of liberal environmentalists?" That's a bit of a giveway.
One of my frustrations with the climate change debate is the way both sides misuse the science. I've brought this up before with respect to hurricanes, and Roger Pielke Jr. today notes that it's happening again:
On occasion here at Prometheus we've observed that within the scientific community proponents of action to mitigate climate change have an increasing tendency to misjustify, overstate, or misuse science in support of their agenda. By engaging in such hyperbole, the scientist-advocates are, ironically enough, adopting some of the exact same tactics that opponents of action to mitigate climate change have been criticized for by many of the exact same proponents of action.
Paul Weyrich thinks God stepped in during the election "to keep His hand on America one more time despite our national sins," among which is "ignoring the Biblical injunction against acts which are an abomination unto the Lord." No doubt he meant eating shellfish. Or riding in the big chain ring during the off-season.
Getting ready for a talk I'm giving Wednesday to the New Mexico Open Source Users Group, I googled and found my very first free software contribution.
There's this ethos in the blogword where you've gotta be snap snap now, blogging at the speed of light the coolest things that you've heard about right this instant. But one of my favorite reads is Rich Burridge, who cheerfully does the exact opposite (that's Rich on articles he found in the January 1989 Omni).
Another favorite, from the August 1992 Smithsonian - fish that don't look like fish.
I imagine Rich with a big stack of old magazines in the den - maybe he's picking them up at garage sales, or even better, maybe he's saved them the whole time.
It's a great antidote to the hubris of the now.
The back story: On my other blog, I also discussed the whole Fumento/Lambert/Lancet thing, observing that "We're left with two possibilities here, neither of them pleasant. Fumento, who styles himself a journalist, either misrepresented the study's conclusions, or he hadn't read it."
The thoughtful Mr. Fumento responds, via email:
First, it seems to me that any nationally syndicated columnist, including those I can't stand, is a journalist -- whether John Fleck acknowledges it or not. Second, I dropped one of my arguments from the TCS piece only because it confused people with simple minds. Like you. As it happens, I also had to cut 200 words even as I added in new information. So we are faced with two possibilities here, neither pleasant. A) You're not particularly bright; B) You're not particularly bright.
This guy's great! He should get a blog!
I got an email today from the ever-thoughtful Michael Fumento:
Earth to Inkstain and Lambert: Other than Inkstain caring what Lambert says and Lambert caring about what Inkstain says (perhaps), nobody cares what either of you says. Not only are you fully contained in the blogosphere, you're actually in a much tinier realm than that. Meanwhile of the many places my piece on the Lancet trash appeared is today's Daily News, weekend population above 500,000. You attack not out of a sense that injustice has been done regarding the Lancet report, but out of jealousy. But if you cleaned up your act, you might just find that somebody somewhere, even with a circulation of ten, would occassionally print you. Alas, you will not. You are a lost cause.
I am of course chastened and humbled by Mr. Fumento's obviously superior intellect and publishing prowess. Maybe, if I clean up my act, I might just find that somebody, somewhere, even with a circulation of 110,000, might regularly publish my work. Wouldn't that be cool!
Saw my first Sandhill cranes of the season, picking through a plowed-under chile field along the river in the South Valley. They're big birds, the biggest you see 'round here, tall with a six-plus-foot wingspan. Their bodies are a drab grey, which makes their red crest all the more striking. They migrate here for the winter, making a healthy living picking through the bits the farmers leave behind.
A friend points out Malcolm Gladwell's latest, on our remarkable resiliency, as opposed to our 21st century commitment to long-term suffering:
We suffer from what Wilson and Gilbert call an impact bias: we always assume that our emotional states will last much longer than they do. We forget that other experiences will compete for our attention and emotions. We forget that our psychological immune system will kick in and take away the sting of adversity. “When I talk about our research, I say to people, ‘I’m not telling you that bad things don’t hurt,’” Gilbert says. “Of course they do. It would be perverse to say that having a child or a spouse die is not a big deal. All I’m saying is that the reality doesn’t meet the expectation.”
What was it the Merry Pranksters used to say? "You're either on the bus or you're off the bus."
Daughter Nora sends along this:
So, yesterday, i was feeling a little dejected from the results of the election as I stepped on the bus. Following me, was a class of small children around first or second grade. This entire class took up most of the bus, so I sat at the back with a few of the kids. There were two boys who were back there, and one of the boys was taunting the other one "You like boys, you like boys!" The boy who was being taunted pouted and then glared, "My GRAMMA says it's okay to like BOYS."What? Way to go, Gramma!
And then a bunch of other kids got caught up in the conversation. I thought they were going to be picking on the boy too, but no, they joined his side! "My uncle likes boys!" "My sister likes girls." "My uncle likes boys and his boyfriend brings me COOKIES!" and so on and so on. The teacher just smiled and sat back, letting them handle it.
At that moment, even if just for a moment, i realized that Life really isn't -that- bad.
This almost gets tiresome, but someone's got to do it and it won't take but a moment. Let's just get this on the record, OK, so that if it comes up again it'll be in Google.
Duane Freese, in a Tech Central Station piece on the Kyoto Protocol, tries to help his readers by quoting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But he so botches the job, either by not reading the surrounding context or choosing to ignore it, as to render the quote completely out of its useful context and using it to mean something rather different than a careful reading shows the IPCC intended. To whit:
Their "consensus" opinion, stated in the first chapter of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2001, was:
"The fact that the global mean temperature has increased since the late 19th Century and that other trends have been observed does not necessarily mean that the anthropogenic (human-induced) effect on the climate has been identified. Climate has always varied on all time-scales, so the observed change may be natural."
But wait! I thought the IPCC, scourge of the climate skeptics, had concluded, famously, that "Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations." Could the IPCC be speaking with forked tongue?
Well, no, Freese has merely quoted them - rather egregiously, frankly - out of context. And, not surprisingly, if you Google the quote, you'll find that others have repeatedly done the same thing with this little bit of business - including Tech Central Station.
I invite you to read for yourself the full section of the IPCC report, but I'll summarize it for you here. The quote in question is the beginning of a section that starts with a resonable premise - that warming since the 19th century does not, by itself, prove people are messing up the climate. More evidence is required. And then what does the IPCC do? It goes on to look at the available evidence. This is the part the TCS people, and the other climate skeptics, don't like to quote for you. I guess they just assume y'all won't go read it yourself. With that as background, I'll offer you the full quote:
The fact that the global mean temperature has increased since the late 19th century and that other trends have been observed does not necessarily mean that an anthropogenic effect on the climate system has been identified. Climate has always varied on all time-scales, so the observed change may be natural. A more detailed analysis is required to provide evidence of a human impact.
Freese, and every other case I found in the skeptics' literature leaves off that last sentence. Because what the IPCC then proceeds to do, is to conduct that "more detailed analysis," using it to support the conclusion that the detected climate change is "likely" (their carefully defined term of art) anthropogenic in nature.
Yesterday, we noted Tim Lambert's take on Michael Fumento and his less-than-accurate assessment of the Lancet study on deaths in Iraq.
Fumento's at it again, and Lambert is back on Fumento's case.
A couple of months ago I wrote about a new paper linking warming temperatures and more extreme forest fire danger.
At the time, the paper drew criticism because its data was drawn from the 20th century, when the climate signal in the trend of increasing wildfire might be confounded by fire management policies. Are we having more and larger fires now because it's a warmer world, or because we've so mucked up the forests through fire suppression and overgrazing that they're now tinderboxes ready to go up?
It's likely that both variables are involved, but teasing them apart is difficult.
Enter Jennifer Pierce and Grant Meyer (sub. req.), with a paper today in Nature that reaches far back in time to overcome that problem. Using burn debris in alluvial deposits, Pierce and Meyer were able to distinguish and date different fire regime environments. And, no surprise, they found that in the days before our land use practices began altering the system, large, stand-replacing fires were prevalent during warmer climate periods while more frequent but far less destructive surface fires - essentially burning the grass off - were common during cool periods.
Tim Lambert debunks Michael Fumento's attempt to debunk the Lancet Iraq death toll paper.
From Andrew Sullivan:
We have seen, and not for the first time, how using fear of a minority can be so effective a tool in building a political movement. The single most important issue for Republican voters, according to exit polls, was not the war on terror or Iraq or the economy. It was "moral values." Karl Rove understood the American psyche better than I did. By demonizing gay couples, the Republicans were able to bring in whole swathes of new anti-gay believers into their party. With new senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn, two of the most anti-gay politicians in America, we can only brace ourselves for what is now coming.
The homeland security threat level applet.
After all the sturm und drang, there was quiet today at the neighborhood church where we vote - quiet and this:
A guy in line - a middle-aged biker with black leather jacket and long grey-blond pony tail - stepped out of line to go outside to smoke a cigarette. When he was done, he went politely to the back of the line. But the young guy who'd been standing right behind him went and got him, led him back to his old spot in the line.
Jaime and I both have to work tonight (one of the things I most look forward to when I retire is the chance to watch election returns with my wife), so we went on a long ride in the mountains this morning, up old Route 66 through Tijeras canyon. It was dry and crisp - we saw icicles on the plants at a couple of houses where they'd run the sprinklers overnight - perfect winter riding weather. The snow line was high and east, and the air had a sparkle. We were off-season lollygagging, which was good because I've clearly "lost some form," as they say. It's not exactly quiet in the canyon, because you're never far from the freeway, but you're not on it, so it always seems quiet and peaceful anyway up there. It's a favorite ride. The piñon and the cholla - spindly cactus that look like motionless arms and legs all akimbo - look so patient. They are so patient.
Andrew Revkin broke the details Saturday of the Arctic Council's new report on global warming in the arctic, which is official due out Nov. 9:
A comprehensive four-year study of warming in the Arctic shows that heat-trapping gases from tailpipes and smokestacks around the world are contributing to profound environmental changes, including sharp retreats of glaciers and sea ice, thawing of permafrost and shifts in the weather, the oceans and the atmosphere.The study, commissioned by eight nations with Arctic territory, including the United States, says the changes are likely to harm native communities, wildlife and economic activity but also to offer some benefits, like longer growing seasons. The report is due to be released on Nov. 9, but portions were provided yesterday to The New York Times by European participants in the project.
As it happens, I'm in the midst of reading The Whale and the Supercomputer, Charles Wohlforth's terrific new book on climate change in the arctic. Wohlforth spends time both with the natives who have lived along the arctic circle for millennia and the scientists new to the region trying to understand climate change from the view of both. I highly recommend it.