Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

A study by GISS climate scientists recently published in the journal Science shows that atmospheric CO₂ operates as a thermostat to control the temperature of Earth….

CO₂ is the key atmospheric gas that exerts principal control (80% of the non-condensing GHG forcing) over the strength of the terrestrial greenhouse effect. Water vapor and clouds are fast-acting feedback effects, and as such, they are controlled by the radiative forcing supplied by the non-condensing GHGs….

There is no viable alternative to counteract global warming except through direct human effort to reduce the atmospheric CO₂ level.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has posted three articles on their website explaining two important new studies, “Atmospheric CO₂: Principal control knob governing Earth’s temperature” (subs. req’d) in Science by Andrew Lacis et al. and “The attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect” (subs. req’d) in JGR by Gavin Schmidt et al.  Together they make a terrific tutorial on the critical role human-caused CO2 plays in climate change.

Schmidt is best known as a key contributor to the must-read blog, Real Climate.  Lacis may be best known as the NASA climatologist whose 2005 critique of the IPCC Fourth Assessment draft — “There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary” — was embraced by the anti-science disinformers until it was revealed he thought the IPCC consensus was in fact some watered down, least-common denominator piece of wishy-washiness that understates our scientific understanding, which it is (see “Disputing the ‘consensus’ on global warming“).

It may be obvious to CP readers and all those who follow the science, but the core conclusion of the Science article bears repeating again and again by all of us who communicate on global warming:

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Here is an update of my review of the best papers on climate science in the past year.  If you want a broader overview of the literature in the past few years, focusing specifically on how unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas emissions are projected to impact the United States, try “An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water.”

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Warning:  Please put your head in a vise before reading further.

Andy Revkin has just written the most illogical climate post on Earth.  Or maybe he’s written the most logical climate post on the Bizarro World Htrae.

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According to the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (2007):
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A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems….

Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.

The National Academy released three reports today on “America’s Climate Choices.”

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Progressives should know the most commonly used arguments by the disinformers and doubters — and how to answer them.

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From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books….

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts….

– George Orwell, “Why I write”

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts (see here).

What I have learned most from the success of my blog, from the rapid growth in subscribers and visitors and comments, along with the increasing number of websites that link to or reprint my posts, is that there is in fact a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk. It is a hunger to learn the truth about the dire nature of our energy and climate situation, about the grave threat to our children and future generations, about the vast but still achievable scale of the solutions, about the forces in politics and media that impede action—a hunger to face unpleasant facts head on.

Unlike Orwell, I knew from a very early age, certainly by the age of five or six, that I would be a physicist, like my uncle, and I announced that proudly to all who asked.

I knew I did not want to be a professional writer since I saw how hopeless it was to make a living that way.  My father was the editor of a small newspaper (circulation under 10,000) that he turned into a medium-sized newspaper (70,000) but was paid dirt, even though he managed the equivalent of a large manufacturing enterprise — while simultaneously writing three editorials a day — that in any other industry would pay five times as much.  My mother pursued freelance writing for many years, an even more difficult way to earn a living (see also “This could not possibly be more off topic“).

Why share this?  Orwell, who shares far, far more in his many brilliant essays, argues in “Why I write“:

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The amount of warming we are going to subject our children  and countless future generations to depends primarily on three factors:

1. The sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks like sea ice and water vapor (how much warming you get if  we only double CO2 emissions to 560 ppm and there are no major “slow” feedbacks).  We know the fast feedbacks are strong by themselves (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius” and detailed analysis below).
2. The real-world slower (decadal) feedbacks, such as tundra melt (see Science: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting and links at the end).
3. The actual CO2 concentration level we are likely to hit, which is far beyond 550 ppm (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised” — 1000 ppm).

Given that the anti-science, pro-pollution forces  seem to be  succeeding in their fight to keep us on our current emissions path, it’s no surprise that multiple recent analyses conclude that we face a temperature rise that is far, far beyond dangerous:

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There are now more studies that show recent warming is unprecedented –  in magnitude and speed and cause — than you can shake a stick at!

As with a pride of lions, and a conspiracy of disinformers [or is that a delusion of disinformers?], perhaps the grouping should get its own name, like “a team of hockey sticks” (see “The Curious Case of the Hockey Stick that Didn’t Disappear“).

1. GRL:  “We conclude that the 20th century warming of the incoming intermediate North Atlantic water has had no equivalent during the last thousand years.“
2. JGR:  “The last decades of the past millennium are characterized again by warm temperatures that seem to be unprecedented in the context of the last 1600 years.” [figure below]

Reconstructed tropical South American temperature anomalies (normalized to the 1961–1990AD average) for the last ∼1600 years (red curve, smoothed with a 39‐year Gaussian filter). The shaded region envelops the ±2s uncertainty as derived from the validation period. Poor core quality precluded any chemical analysis for the time interval between 1580 and 1640 AD.

Yes, the 39‐year Gaussian filter appears to wipe out over half of the warming since 1950 as this NASA chart makes clear:

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Here’s a key point that the media has failed to explain and the the anti-science disinformers refuse to accept: The Earth’s overall temperature does not change randomly on a decadal scale — it changes when it is driven to do so by an external forcing.

The Little Ice Age is a case in point, as Skeptical Science explains in this repost:

The argument that we’re simply “coming out of the Little Ice Age (LIA)” makes one of two assumptions:

1. The planet oscillates around some natural equilibrium temperature such that after it cools, it must warm to return to this temperature, and vice-versa.
2. Whatever caused the LIA cooling has reversed phase and is now causing global warming.

The first assumption demonstrates a lack of understanding regarding what causes planetary temperature changes.  The second does not hold up under scrutiny of the empirical data.

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A physicist named Hal Lewis who doesn’t know the first thing about climate science has resigned from the American Physical Society because he doesn’t know the first thing about climate science.

The anti-science crowd has, with unintentional irony, compared his words of resignation to “a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door.”  That laughable assertion might be a half-truth, I suppose, if scientific views were no different from religious ones, which, I suppose, for the disinformers they are.  And it might even be a quarter truth if Luther hadn’t actually included any theses in his letter but instead cited, say, the work of Nostradamus in defending his critique of the Catholic Church.  But it isn’t even be a semi-hemi-demi truth because it won’t be leading to a major new science religion of Lewisism, since, of course, that’s not how science works.

As we’ll see, Lewis couldn’t even bother himself to learn the basics of climate science and he apparently doesn’t know or talk to very many if any climate scientists.  Indeed, this whole story isn’t terribly newsworthy:  Lewis isn’t even the first physicist born in 1923 who was a longtime member of the JASON defense advisory group, who studied nuclear winter, and who has said absurdly unscientific things about climate science.  That honor belongs to Freeman Dyson.

But it did inspire me to break out my copy of Thomas Kuhn’s landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which is marked up from my MIT undergraduate physics days and still has some amazingly relevant insights for today, as we’ll see.  It was Kuhn, after all, who originated the term “normal science,” a term confusionists and Tea Party extremists like Viriginia AG Ken Cuccinelli are, well, confused about.

If you want some backstory on Lewis and the APS, read our good bunny friend at Rabett Run, “Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society.”

Lewis’s letter itself is almost a satire of one of those “when I was a kid” reminisces of how great things used to be when people (physicists, in this case) were pure and poor:

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