Science, Art, Litt, Science based Art & Science Communication
Climate science and its relevance
Recently we saw the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 5th report on climate change ( http://www.ipcc.ch/ ). While some agree with it - most scientists do (1) - others - like the industry lobby- completely rubbishes it like this one:
http://www.naturalnews.com/042304_UN_climate_change_report_selectiv...
Some scientists - supported by the industrial lobby too don't agree with it. They say: The UN-promoted theory about the missing warming being hidden somewhere in the ocean is really an admission that its climate models do not accurately simulate natural internal variability in the system.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/16643-top-scien... ( this report is definitely written by the Industry lobby and the Republican lobby).
It is known that 'dark money' supports climate change denial effort. A Drexel University study finds that a large slice of donations to organizations that deny global warming are funneled through third-party pass-through organizations that conceal the original funder.
( http://drexel.edu/~/media/Files/now/pdfs/Institutionalizing%20Delay...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dark-money-funds-c... )
An interesting blog by a science communicator says scientists have been framed and global warming hasn't been slowed down like the skeptics and deniers say! Read it here: http://talkingscience.weebly.com/1/post/2013/12/you-have-been-frame...!
The author of this blog made some very good points.
And this blog on SA
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-risks-as-conclusi...
says:
Climate Risks as Conclusive as Link between Smoking and Lung Cancer
Climate Deniers Intimidate Journal into Retracting Paper that Finds They Believe Conspiracy Theories
The paper was sound but a libel threat apparently exerted pressure on management at Frontiers in Psychology, suggesting a blow to academic freedomHowever, this topic really is all confusing to a layman with so much of contradictory news making the rounds.
Well, who should we believe when so many reports and articles flooding the media with contradictory arguments?
The studies are still going on and nobody knows for sure the real causes for the climate change at the global level. But still local changes can effect you!
I will try to help you in coming to your own conclusion
Okay, imagine these two situations:
(1)You are on a holiday and go to a forest. You feel happy and relieved for getting out of the smoke you are inhaling in your city. You can breathe easily now, feel relaxed and more energetic. Your young son and old mother get relief from their asthmatic conditions. You can see the pollution markers - lichens- growing everywhere. You don't see them in your city! You see several unknown birds singing and chirping in a forest. The water tastes so different and sweet. This is a fact. I myself faced this situation and most of you must have been too. Now want to know the reason why? Because you get clean and fresh natural air in this place. You get pure water in the forest. The Nature is untouched by human beings here. Well, almost!
(2) Now you return back from your holiday tour. You are in your home city. You definitely feel the heat difference, the air quality, and the resultant mood difference. You don't see several birds here. You will notice the smog, the thick black water flowing down the road after a spell of rain different as compared to the brown or transparent water you saw in the forest or a water fall you loved there. You feel breathless and you again start hearing the wheezing sound while your mother tries to breathe. Your water tastes rancid! Why? Because we are interfering with Nature and polluting it in the city! You can smell some chemicals in the air while rain starts coming down slowly? Acid rain? Exactly!
So?! Do you think I am lying when I say climate science is relevant or scientists are lying when they say climate change is happening?
Climate change is not only happening at the global level, but also at the local level, effecting each and every living being on this planet.
It is happening alright and the proof is before you! Forget about the IPCC report or what others say contradicting it. Feel the difference for yourself and come to your conclusions. And then help save the planet.
"Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."
- Cree proverb
What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions, if in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true? - Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland ( On climate science predictions) - just because the models are not very accurate?--
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Replies to This Discussion
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Big Climate Danger Could Arrive as Soon as 2036
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/03/27/big-cli... -
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Arctic Warming Theory So Cutting Edge, It's Hard to Prove
Is the meltdown in the north weakening the jet stream and causing weird weather, or not?http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/arctic-warming-theory-so-...
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Climate change: UN experts see options to limit threat
BERLIN: A week after publishing the starkest warning yet on the risks of climate change, UN experts meet in Berlin from Monday to assess options for limiting the threat.
A draft of the report, seen by AFP, suggests there is a 15-year window for feasible and affordable action to safely reach the UN-targeted global warming limit.But deep, swift curbs in carbon emissions will be needed, with a revolution in energy use, it says.
The report is the third chapter in the Fifth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Six years in the making, it provides policymakers with the latest science on global warming, to feed into national planning and the struggling effort to forge a worldwide pact by next year on curbing Earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
"I hope that this report will help to revitalise... climate politics and a sense of urgency from governments," Bill Hare of the think tank Climate Analytics told AFP.
The meeting comes eight days after the second volume of the report, on the likely impacts of climate change, was unveiled in Yokohama, Japan.
It issued unprecedented warnings that the risk of conflict, hunger, floods and mass displacement increased with every upward creep of the mercury.
The draft of the new 29-page summary, which will be hammered out in Berlin over five days before it is publicly released on Sunday, expresses no preferences for how to tame the problem, nor does it say what a safe level of warming would be.
2030 window
But it says the UN target, to limit average warming to 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels, remains feasible.
There is a "likely" chance of meeting it if greenhouse-gas concentrations by 2100 are 430-480 particles per million of carbon dioxide equivalent (ppm CO2eq), according to the draft.
But this meant "all countries" will have act quickly to mitigate, or ease, carbon emissions.
"Delaying mitigation through 2030 will increase the challenges," cautions the document.
In raw terms, global carbon emissions of 49 billion tonnes of CO2eq in 2010 will have to be pegged to 30-50 billion tonnes in 2030.
Emissions have maintained an upward curve despite a small dip after the 2007-08 global economic crisis, and will be hard to contain as developing economies consume ever more fossil fuel and the global population expands.
Greenhouse-gas levels are on track to bust 450 ppm CO2eq by 2030 and reach 750-1,300 ppm CO2eq by 2100 if nothing is done, the document points out.
The summary points to a wide range of policy options, but notes that the most successful scenarios assume a stable, global carbon price.
Mitigation options include capturing and storing fossil-fuel emissions, switching to low-carbon alternatives, halting the thinning of carbon-capturing forests and boosting low-emission public transport schemes.
The draft turns the spotlight on energy -- the need for low-carbon sources and ending waste.
Energy production emitted 14.4 billion tonnes of CO2, the chief greenhouse gas, in 2010. That figure could double or even triple by 2050, according to the report.
On the consumption side, buildings spewed 8.8 billion tonnes in 2010 and industry 13 billion, both figures set to increase by 50-150 percent by mid-century.
Transport's 6.7 billion tonnes of CO2 could double over the same period.
Most scenarios that meet the 2 C target will entail a "tripling to nearly a quadrupling" in the share of energy from renewable and nuclear sources or fossil-fuel plants whose carbon gas is captured and stored.
This would require investment in conventional fossil fuels to fall by $30 billion (22 billion euros) annually by 2029, and in low-carbon power supply to rise by $147 billion per year.
"Climate change is already clearly happening and is likely to become much more severe in future without strong mitigation actions to keep temperatures below 2 C," Saleemul Huq of the International Institute for Environment and Development, commented ahead of the meeting.
"The costs of inaction will be many more times the cost of action."
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/... -
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Scientists unmask the climate uncertainty monster
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/04/05/scientists.unmask.clima...
Scientific uncertainty has been described as a 'monster' that prevents understanding and delays mitigative action in response to climate change. New research by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol, and international colleagues, shows that uncertainty should make us more rather than less concerned about climate change. In two companion papers, published today in Climatic Change, the researchers investigated the mathematics of uncertainty in the climate system and showed that increased scientific uncertainty necessitates even greater action to mitigate climate change.The scientists used an ordinal approach -- a range of mathematical methods that address the question: 'What would the consequences be if uncertainty is even greater than we think it is?'
They show that as uncertainty in the temperature increase expected with a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels rises, so do the economic damages of increased climate change. Greater uncertainty also increases the likelihood of exceeding 'safe' temperature limits and the probability of failing to reach mitigation targets. The authors highlight this with the case of future sea level, as larger uncertainty in sea level rise requires greater precautionary action to manage flood risk.
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair in Cognitive Psychology and member of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol, said: "We can understand the implications of uncertainty, and in the case of the climate system, it is very clear that greater uncertainty will make things even worse. This means that we can never say that there is too much uncertainty for us to act. If you appeal to uncertainty to make a policy decision the legitimate conclusion is to increase the urgency of mitigation."
Co-author, Dr James Risbey of Australia's CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, said: "Some point to uncertainty as a way to minimize the climate change problem, when in fact it means that the problem is more likely to be worse than expected in the absence of that uncertainty. This result is robust to a range of assumptions and shows that uncertainty does not excuse inaction."
These new findings challenge the frequent public misinterpretation of uncertainty as a reason to delay action. Arguing against mitigation by appealing to uncertainty is therefore misplaced: any appeal to uncertainty should provoke a greater, rather than weaker, concern about climate change than in the absence of uncertainty.
Source: University of Bristol -
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Scare tactics fail climate science, planet
Why aren’t climate scientists winning the argument on climate policy? It sure isn’t for lack of effort.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just published another vast pile of material, this time focused on “impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.” The IPCC says that the new report’s “30 chapters, supported by a number of annexes and supplementary material” were produced by a “total of 243 Coordinating and Lead Authors and 66 review editors from 70 countries and 436 Contributing Authors from 54 countries.” And that refers to just one of three working groups engaged in producing the IPCC’s fifth assessment report.
Yet this staggering outlay of time and trouble has failed to move public opinion and public policy very far. Climate-change activists are exasperated beyond endurance by the gullibility of the people, the willful stupidity of climate-change “deniers,” the cynicism of energy producers and other corporate interests, and the dithering incapacity of our democratic institutions.
Doubtless there’s some truth in those complaints, but I’d give more weight to another theory. The main reason for the disconnect between the science and the public is the gross tactical incompetence of the climate-science community, as it’s called, and its political champions.
Consider this latest installment of the IPCC’s survey of the science. It’s more carefully hedged than its predecessors — and rightly so. There are fewer specific claims about the future that the science can’t fully support or that might turn out to be simply wrong. The emphasis is more on prudent actions to avoid risks, and less on precise predictions about what’s coming if those actions aren’t taken. That’s the approach that the unsettled science of climate change dictates.
Yet look at how Secretary of State John Kerry, for instance, responded to the new publication: “Read this report and you can’t deny the reality. Unless we act dramatically and quickly, science tells us our climate and our way of life are literally in jeopardy. Denial of the science is malpractice. ... The costs of inaction are catastrophic.”
The new report doesn’t say any of that. The science doesn’t predict a catastrophe that would threaten the American way of life. The most cost-effective responses to the risks of climate change are measured and gradual, not dramatic and quick. And denying the wisdom of Kerry’s call for action isn’t “denial of the science” — because the science by itself can’t say how much to spend on mitigation of, or adaptation to, climate change. That’s a political question.
I take seriously the harms that man-made climate change might cause. Action does make sense: It’s a question of insuring against risk. I’m for a gradually escalating carbon tax and for ample public support for other mitigation and adaptation efforts — including more nuclear power and research and development on cheap alternative fuels. But this cause isn’t advanced by exaggerating what is known in order to scare people into action, nor by denouncing everybody who disagrees with such proposals as evil or idiotic.
The scientists themselves — some of them, at least — are partly to blame. They chose to become political advocates, no doubt out of a sincere belief that policies needed to change a lot and at once. But scientist-advocates can’t expect to be seen as objective or disinterested. Once they’re suspected of spinning the science or opining on questions outside their area of expertise, as political advocacy is bound to require, they lose authority. And it doesn’t help when scientists who express such reservations are cast out of the mainstream. You expect “you’re either with us or against us” from politicians, but not from scientists.
The rules for politicians are different. They’re expected to spin: It goes with the job. Still, is it too much to ask that they spin to good effect? You don’t persuade the uncommitted middle of the electorate to support more deliberate action on climate change by telling them that they’re too stupid to be trusted with uncertainty and that if they refuse to go along with fast dramatic action (details to follow) they’re science deniers and willful destroyers of the planet.
Maybe that strategy was worth a try in the 1990s. It’s had a good run, and the results speak for themselves.
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2014/apr/06/clive-crook-scare-... -
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Do U.N. Climate Change Reports Need to Change?
After the latest round of IPCC climate reports, some scientists are calling for a more streamlined process
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-un-climate-change-repo... -
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Carbon cuts possible for manageable warming: Experts
BERLIN: The world, acting urgently, can curb carbon emissions enough to avert worst-case scenarios for climate change, UN experts said on Monday as envoys met in Berlin to weigh the options for action."The literature here shows that deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to limit warming to 2 C... remain possible," said Ottmar Edenhofer, who helped oversee the latest volume in a report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But achieving this goal, Edenhofer warned, will require a break from today's relentlessly upward trend in emissions.
It will entail "challenging technological, economic, institutional and behaviour change," he said.
Envoys and scientists from the panel's 195 member countries are meeting after the IPCC issued its starkest-ever warning about the perils of a ravaged climate system for future generations.
The risk of conflict, hunger, floods and mass displacement increase with every upward creep of the mercury, the IPCC said.
"The impacts of climate change will leave no part of the world untouched and unaffected," IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri told Monday's opening session.
The upcoming volume is the last major piece of the Fifth Assessment Report -- the first overview by the Nobel-winning climate panel since 2007.
The product of four years' work by over 200 experts, it aims at providing governments with the latest scientific knowledge and informing the struggling effort to forge a worldwide pact on climate change by the end of next year.
A draft summary of the report, seen by AFP, expresses no preferences for how to tame the problem, nor does it state what a safe level of warming would be.
But it says there is a 15-year window for affordable action to safely reach the UN's target of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times.
The goal remains attainable if "all countries" act quickly to ease carbon emissions, it says. "Delaying mitigation through 2030 will increase the challenges."
In raw terms, global carbon emissions of 49 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2010 will have to be pegged to 30-50 billion tonnes in 2030.
Most scenarios that meet the 2 C target entail a "tripling to nearly a quadrupling" in the share of energy from renewable and nuclear sources and the capture and storage of emissions from fossil fuel plants, according to the draft.
Government representatives and scientists will go through the summary line by line over the next few days.
"In the plenary, all countries can voice their concerns and all of them are heard," said co-chairman Youba Sokona.
"In the end, it is scientific accuracy that decides." The summary will be publicly released in the German capital on Sunday, and the full 2,000-page report -- authored by scientists and not subject to this week's scrutiny -- will be released shortly afterwards.
Green group Friends of the Earth International said the science demanded a reduction in the use of fossil fuels, coupled to a massive investment in renewable alternatives.
"So far, world leaders have sorely lacked the political will to make the shift to low-carbon societies," it said.
Oxfam, for its part, said climate change would have a severe impact on hunger.
"It is estimated there could be 25 million more malnourished children under the age of five in 2050 compared to a world without climate change - the number of all under-fives in the US and Canada combined," it said.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/... -
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Slowdown of global warming fleeting
The recent slowdown in the warming rate of the Northern Hemisphere may be a result of internal variability of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation -- a natural phenomenon related to sea surface temperatures, according to Penn State researchers. "Some researchers have in the past attributed a portion of Northern Hemispheric warming to a warm phase of the AMO," said Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology. "The true AMO signal, instead, appears likely to have been in a cooling phase in recent decades, offsetting some of the anthropogenic warming temporarily."According to Mann, the problem with the earlier estimates stems from having defined the AMO as the low frequency component that is left after statistically accounting for the long-term temperature trends, referred to as detrending.
"Initial investigations into the multidecadal climate oscillation in the North Atlantic were hampered by the short length of the instrumental climate record which was only about a century long," said Mann. "And some of the calculations were contaminated by long-term climate trends driven or forced by human factors such as greenhouse gases as well as pollutants known as sulfate aerosols. These trends masqueraded as an apparent oscillation."
Mann and his colleagues took a different approach in defining the AMO, which they report online in a special "Frontier" paper in Geophysical Research Letters. They compared observed temperature variation with a variety of historic model simulations to create a model for internal variability of the AMO that minimizes the influence of external forcing -- including greenhouse gases and aerosols. They call this the differenced-AMO because the internal variability comes from the difference between observations and the models' estimates of the forced component of North Atlantic temperature change. They found that their results for the most recent decade fall within expected multidecadal variability.
They also constructed plausible synthetic Northern Hemispheric mean temperature histories against which to test the differenced-AMO approaches. Because the researchers know the true AMO signal for their synthetic data from the beginning, they could demonstrate that the differenced-AMO approach yielded the correct signal. They also tested the detrended-AMO approach and found that it did not come up with the known internal variability.
The detrended approach produced an AMO signal with increased amplitude -- both high and low peaks were larger than in the differenced-AMO signal and in the synthetic data. They also found that the peaks and troughs of the oscillation were skewed using the detrending approach, causing the maximums and minimums to occur at different times than in the differenced-AMO results. While the detrended-AMO approach produces a spurious temperature increase in recent decades, the differenced approach instead shows a warm peak in the 1990s and a steady cooling since.
Past researchers have consequently attributed too much of the recent North Atlantic warming to the AMO and too little to the forced hemispheric warming, according to the researchers.
Mann and his team also looked at supposed "stadium waves" suggested by some researchers to explain recent climate trends. The putative climate stadium wave is likened to the waves that go through a sports stadium with whole sections of fans rising and sitting together, propagating a wave around the oval. Random motion of individuals suddenly becomes unified action.
The climate stadium wave supposedly occurs when the AMO and other related climate indicators synchronize, peaking and waning together. Mann and his team show that this apparent synchronicity is likely a statistical artifact of using the problematic detrended-AMO approach.
"We conclude that the AMO played at least a modest role in the apparent slowing of warming during the past decade," said Mann. "As the AMO is an oscillation, this cooling effect is likely fleeting, and when it reverses, the rate of warming increases." Others working on this project were Byron A. Steinman, postdoctoral fellow in meteorology, and Sonya K. Miller, programmer/analyst, meteorology, Penn State.
Source: Penn State -
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The tiniest greenhouse gas emitters
Climate feedbacks from decomposition by soil microbes are one of the biggest uncertainties facing climate modelers. A new study from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the University of Vienna shows that these feedbacks may be less dire than previously thought. The dynamics among soil microbes allow them to work more efficiently and flexibly as they break down organic matter -- spewing less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than previously thought, according to a new study published in the journal Ecology Letters."Previous climate models had simply looked at soil microbes as a black box," says Christina Kaiser, lead author of the study who conducted the work as a post-doctoral researcher at IIASA. Kaiser, now an assistant professor at the University of Vienna, developed an innovative model that helps bring these microbial processes to light.
Microbes and the climate
"Soil microbes are responsible for one of the largest carbon dioxide emissions on the planet, about six times higher than from fossil fuel burning," says IIASA researcher Oskar Franklin, one of the study co-authors. These microbes release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as they decompose organic matter. At the same time, Earth's trees and other plants remove about the same amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.
As long as these two fluxes remain balanced, everything is fine.
But as the temperature warms, soil conditions change and decomposition may change. And previous models of soil decomposition suggest that nutrient imbalances such as nitrogen deficiency would lead to increased carbon emissions. "This is such a big flux that even small changes could have a large effect," says Kaiser. "The potential feedback effects are considerably high and difficult to predict."
Diversity does the trick
How exactly microorganisms in the soil and litter react to changing conditions, however, remains unclear. One reason is that soil microbes live in diverse, complex communities, where they interact with each other and rely on one another for breaking down organic matter.
"One microbe species by itself might not be able to break down a complex substrate like a dead leaf," says Kaiser. "How this system reacts to changes in the environment doesn't depend just on the individual microbes, but rather on the changes to the numbers and interactions of microbe species within the soil community."
To understand these community processes, Kaiser and colleagues developed a computer model that can simulate complex soil dynamics. The model simulates the interactions between 10,000 individual microbes within a 1mm by 1mm square. It shows how nutrients, which influence microbial metabolism, affect these interactions, and change the soil community and thereby the decomposition process.
Previous models had viewed soil decomposition as a single process, and assumed that nutrient imbalances would lead to less efficient decomposition and hence greater greenhouse gas emissions. But the new study shows that, in fact, microbial communities reorganize themselves and continue operating efficiently -- emitting far less carbon dioxide than previously predicted.
"This model is a huge step forward in our understanding of microbial decomposition, and provides us with a much clearer picture of the soil system," says University of Vienna ecologist Andreas Richter, another study co-author.
Source: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis -
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What Can Scientists Say about Ethics and Economics of Combating Climate Change?
Ethics and costs are contentious issues tackled by the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-can-scientists-say-a...--
Climate Deniers Intimidate Journal into Retracting Paper that Finds They Believe Conspiracy Theories
The paper was sound but a libel threat apparently exerted pressure on management at Frontiers in Psychology, suggesting a blow to academic freedom -
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Behavioural impairment in reef fishes caused by ocean acidification at CO2 seeps
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2... -
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