A Message from Cockermouth to Copenhagen

Dear, oh dear. The issue of the CRU hack is simply not going to go away.

BBC Radio 4 gave some of its Today programme airtime to Nigel Lawson this morning. It’s not very clear to the casual listener exactly what Lawson’s position is, since he seemed to claim he wasn’t denying the science, just the policy, perhaps in a similar fashion to Bjorn Lomborg. But (it seemed to me whilst having breakfast) Lawson then went on to question the science.

Annoyingly, Lawson, an experienced politician (though disastrous economic policy-maker – stoking back in the 1980s the sort of boom-bust his party, the Tories are ironically criticising Labour for – so his track record doesn’t suggest a lot of faith should be put in his judgement of complex issues) and therefore used to media appearances, came across rather better than the scientist (whose name I didn’t catch) up against him.

I picked up a couple of points:

1. 1998 still warmest year

Lawson kept insisting it hasn’t warmed since 1998.

The problem here is that the scientists have picked the wrong weapon for the duel. The average surface temperature is highly variable. It varies by much more than the average annual temperature increase, so is bound to vary erratically over relatively short time periods.

The point is that the ocean will take many centuries – possibly millennia – to completely warm up. It only takes a larger than average amount (or strictly area) of cold water coming to the surface one year to reduce the average surface temperature of the planet compared to the previous year.

But the ocean gains heat (and ice melts) every year that the planet is out of thermal equilibrium (radiating less heat away than it receives from the Sun, because GHGs capture the energy). Perhaps the scientists should develop tools for measuring the total heat gain of the planet – or at least the oceans – rather than the average surface temperature. They could then tell us how many PWh (maybe the next up EWh, exawatt hours) we’ve gained each year.

But what really gets me is how much the scientists downplay another major prediction of their theory – that there will be more extreme weather. The rhetoric they use is bizarre. Normally you hear (and Hilary Benn the UK Government Minister said this sort of thing on Sunday) something along the lines of “you can’t attribute a single event to climate change” and “this is the sort of thing we can expect more of in future”.

I’d like to make a philosophical point here. I’d like to dispense with this ridiculous “can’t attribute a single event to climate change” business. Because you can’t not attribute it to climate change either! We do not have the luxury of what scientists would call a “control”. We have no other planet where we haven’t put GHGs into the atmosphere. When someone says “you can’t attribute a single event to climate change” people hear “it might have happened anyway”. No, it might not have happened anyway, because there is no “anyway”.

What I really don’t understand is why the scientists don’t make more of events that confirm their theory. Because that’s how science progresses. The prediction is “there will be more extreme weather events, such as flooding”. In the UK this week we’ve had such an extreme event. We’ve had the heaviest rainfall ever experienced in 24 hours.

Let’s just consider how big a record this is. The UK has been recording weather for a long time – centuries. And in all that time there’s never been as much rain in a 24 hour period. In fact, I’ve heard the previous record – the Martinstown Deluge of 1955 – doubted because of its implausibility!

If it was me I’d be crowing. The theory predicted this sort of thing. The Cockermouth event is strong support for global warming.

Consider other complex systems, the financial markets, say. You might hear predictions along the lines of “continued loose monetary policy will lead to further rises in the price of gold”. When the gold price rises do you think those who predicted it um and ah about how “it might have happened anyway”? You bet you don’t.

2. Datasets not in the public domain

Another point came out of the discussion on Today this morning. If I gathered correctly what was being said, the point was that the hacked emails included cases of data being wiped. And apparently it turns out this is because some of those who supplied the data considered it to be a valuable asset (in fact, it presumably is a valuable asset in that it can be sold). This is unacceptable.

It’s a fundamental tenet that scientific findings must be reproducible. And if the finding is an analysis of certain data, then others are unable to reproduce the findings. Perhaps the Copenhagen participants should spend a little of the $bns they’re throwing at the problem on paying data owners (meteorological offices) to put their data in the public domain. Scientific conclusions shouldn’t have to rely on the integrity of those with privileged access to measurements!

Part of the problem is the science seems so arcane to the general public. It needn’t be. We can all look at weather records and perhaps should be encouraged to do so.

You can, for example, download various historical records from the UK Met Office website and do your own analysis. Basically anyone can put together this sort of thing, from Joe Romm’s site.

My irritation should not, I suppose, be with “the scientists”. I know that’s what I’ve written. But it’s an oversimplification. The problem is partly the way science works. Detailed work is rewarded much more highly, in general, than high level explanation. We need more generalists who can bridge the gap between the nitty-gritty science and the public.

Here, again from Joe Romm’s blog is how the issue should be presented. K.I.S.S. Keep it simple, stupid.

(G)Aga

I’m sure that, like me, you woke on Tuesday, turned on BBC Radio 4, and heard the sensational news broadcast between 07:43 and 07:46 on the Today programme (please podify the paper review segment, Mr BBC!).  Yes,  George Monbiot had used his Tuesday Guardian column to start a campaign against the Aga!  The crusade was even flagged on the paper’s front page.

Actually, the Aga is only mentioned in passing in George’s column, mainly to make a rhetorical point, it seems.  The article is a bit of a ramble about class and green politics, and is more about flying than heating/cooking.  Perhaps it was the Guardian’s editor who decided to emphasise the Aga point.  Nevertheless, George claimed that:

“A large Aga running on coal turns out nine tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: five and a half times the total CO2 production of the average UK home…  So where is the campaign against  Agas?”

What made George’s article stick in my mind was that I happened to notice a couple of hours later on Yahoo! Finance that Aga’s shares were one of the day’s biggest fallers at that point.  Wow!, I thought, Monbiot is verily the Heineken of eco-babblers: he reaches parts other green commentators simply cannot get near.

But then I read in Wednesday’s Guardian that Aga had – coincidentally, or is George monitoring the company’s financial calendar?, is he a share-holder?, or maybe a short-seller? – announced poor results on Tuesday morning. The Guardian’s report (the online version, which apparently appeared first, has been edited in several places to produce the Wednesday print version) – supplemented by an amusing cartoon – drew heavily on George’s piece.  Graeme Wearden wrote:

“In a column in today’s Guardian, he [Monbiot] declared the start of a campaign against the Aga. ‘A large Aga running on coal turns out nine tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: five and a half times the total CO₂ production of the average UK home,’ he [Monbiot] wrote. ‘To match that, the patio heater would have to burn for nine months.’ “

The numbers didn’t stick in my head, but I was mulling over whether an Aga is really an inefficient way to heat a home.

First off, I reasoned that if the Aga runs on oil or coal (apparently these beasts can run on practically any form of energy – I’ve just put myself on the waiting list for the nuclear-powered model) then it could be more efficient than some other forms of heating.  Virtually all the heat would be captured, which would not be the case for electricity generated in coal- or oil-fuelled power stations, which would suffer from energy losses, first, because not all the fossil-fuel energy would be converted to electricity (waste heat is lost at the power station, but useful at the Aga) and, second, during electricity transmission.

On the other hand, I understand we have to move away entirely from fossil fuels.  George mentions that Agas can run on electricity as well.  Great!  This can be generated renewably.

Would Agas be less efficient than any other form of electric heating?  No, of course not, since in both cases all the electrical energy converted goes into heat – normally when considering efficiency you worry about waste heat, but this doesn’t apply when heat is what you want!  OK, heat pumps would of course be more efficient as they use energy to extract heat from the environment, but we’re comparing the heating habits of different social classes in the UK today, and hardly at the moment anyone has a heat-pump.

With any conventional form of space heating the energy required doesn’t depend on the muscle of the heating system.  What it depends on is the rate at which energy is lost from the building.  Assuming the system has some kind of thermostat, and doesn’t stay on until the occupants of the house have died of heat exhaustion and turned to dust, what is important is the insulation of the property.  We only have to worry about the heat losses.  These might, of course, be higher than otherwise if heat escapes up a chimney, if the thermostat is turned up or if a heater is left on 24/7, as Agas tend to be.  But Agas cannot possibly be in themselves any less efficient than other heaters using the same energy inputs.

Sure enough, today’s Guardian bashfully includes a correction:

“A Comment article said that a large Aga running on coal turned out nine tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: five and a half times the total CO2 production of the average UK home. It is 35% more than the total produced by the average home (This is indeed a class war, and the campaign against the Aga starts here, 13 January, page 27).”

The text of the online version of Monbiot’s column has been amended, so no longer makes sense (in this case it might have been better to asterisk the text and put the error in a footnote).

We still have what appears to be a misleading statistic.  A “large Aga running on coal” is likely to be in a big, detached house.  It’s not that surprising such a heater/cooker produces 35% more CO2 than the average home, which must include much smaller properties, some of whose occupants perhaps can’t afford to keep themselves as warm as they’d like.   

George asks why there is a campaign against patio heaters and not Agas.  The point, of course, is that patio heaters heat the outside, which is a bad idea.

Bit of a bad day at the office for Monbiot, but what bothers me most about the issue is that, according to the Guardian:

“Aga said it had seen a shift of interest away from oil-powered cookers into wood-fuelled models over the last year, a time when the oil price soared to its record high of over $147 a barrel.”

Using wood, of course, is even worse than using oil, coal or fossil-fuel electricity.  The arguments against the supposed sustainability of biofuels apply to a biomass energy source like wood.

It turns out that the UK is already importing wood for stoves.  According to the SocietyGuardian Environment article:

“Britain grows up to 1m tonnes of domestic firewood per year, according to the Forestry Commission, but we also import up to 180,000 tonnes of wood and wood products. The 25% to 30% increase in demand for logs year-on-year is proving hard to satisfy, says Vince Thurkettle, a forestry and woodland consultant.”

Nevertheless, Thurkettle is optimistic:

” ‘The dramatic upturn in demand for firewood is fantastic news in many senses because, in theory, we have so much of this resource that it is hard to see it ever running out,’ Thurkettle says.”

The numbers must stack up then, mustn’t they?

“Convinced that the new love affair with wood is a long-term phenomenon rather than a temporary dalliance, the government’s current woodfuel strategy for England aims to bring another 2m green tonnes of wood to the market by 2020 – enough to heat around 250,000 homes.  …this represents less than 50% of the potential unharvested firewood already available in privately owned English woodlands.”

Adding the 2m tonnes to the 1m we already have and that’s 375,000 homes that could be heated by wood in Agas or otherwise.

Let’s be generous and double the amount of firewood we can produce.  That would get us to 750,000 homes.  Wow! , that’s a lot.

Trouble is, there are something like 20 million, that’s 20,000,000 homes in the country.  750,000 is less than 4% of 20 million.

So we’re already shipping logs in from eastern Europe, where, unlike the UK, there are still some decent forests.  Not for long, I fear.

Maybe George could let us know what he thinks about forests here and abroad being turned into ecologically barren tree-farms on behalf of the UK middle classes…

Shock! 2008 to be 10th Warmest Year on Record Horror

I was struck a few days ago by a story reporting a preliminary calculation of the global average temperature for 2008.  It began:

“2008 will be coolest year of the decade
Global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, but cooler temperature is not evidence that global warming is slowing, say climate scientists

This year is set to be the coolest since 2000, according to a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that is due to be released next week by the Met Office. The global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, which is 0.14C below the average temperature for 2001-07.”

It continues with speculation that sceptics will seize on the data, before noting that in fact 2008 is historically warm by historical standards: ‘ “Even in the 80s [this year] would have felt like a warm year” ‘, noted Myles Allen. The article discusses some of the reasons for variation around a steadily warming trend.

Only towards the end of the article do we learn that: “Assuming the final figure is close to 14.3C then 2008 will be the tenth hottest year on record.”  This should be the headline.  Nearly every year for the last couple of decades has been significantly warmer than every year in earlier decades of the 20th century, as shown by the chart in the online version of the Guardian’s article.

This is pathetic.

It struck me that the coalition of those concerned about GW are practically in acceptance of an abusive relationship with the denialists.  They’re like a housewife terrified of what will happen if she doesn’t have dinner on the table the minute her tormentor returns home.  The Guardian article may have been spun to provoke “debate”, or the line may have been taken unconciously.  But, if editorial policy is to warn of the dangers of GW, then the paper adopts the mindset of the abusee by accepting that an unreasoning response is even on the agenda.  The article (or the press release it is based on) can practically be paraphrased as: “I’ve let you down, beat me up”.  I’ve probably taken the analogy too far already and upset someone, but at the risk of keeping digging when in a hole, maybe, in the case of the GW “debate”, the relationship can at least be redefined.

Having accepted the denialist agenda, the good guys find themselves on the defensive.  This week George Monbiot has devoted yet another column to tackling the denialists.   He notes that:

“The most popular article on the Guardian’s website last week was the report showing that 2008 is likely to be the coolest year since 2000. As the Met Office predicted, global temperatures have been held down by the La Niña event in the Pacific Ocean. This news prompted a race on the Guardian’s comment thread to reach the outer limits of idiocy. Of the 440 responses posted by lunchtime yesterday, about 80% insisted that manmade climate change is a hoax.”

Totally predictable, since the ball was teed up for the nutters.

George uses the title: “Cyberspace has buried its head in a cesspit of climate change gibberish”.  Well cyberspace is a cesspit of porn as well, but people have long-since given up on banging on about it.

Look, don’t give the denialists the attention they want.  Let them shout themselves hoarse.  And especially don’t anticipate their “argument” and then profess surprise when it is expressed in a thousand tedious blog postings. You don’t hear Gordon Brown saying: “The PSBR is about to break all records, but…”, because no-one would be listening, as the perhaps unfairly treated Lynford Christie would have put it, after the “b” of “but”.

Make your case, not your opponents’.

Even More Planely Stupid

In yesterday’s post, I forgot one aspect of the idiocy of the Invasion of Stansted Airport.  The demo was timed – presumably deliberately – to coincide with the start of the climate change talks in Poznan, Poland.  Indeed, one delayed passenger interviewed on the radio had been trying to fly to the conference.  (Listening to this, I was a little bemused as I thought good form was to travel to these shindigs by train, however inconvenient, let alone admit, on national radio, to contributing to high altitude emissions).

Far from drawing attention to the underlying global warming issues, Plane Stupid have distracted us all.  They’ve put people’s backs up at a time when there was an opportunity to educate them a little on the GW disaster.  The attention of the media has drifted over the last year or so away from climate change and on to the economic crisis.  It’s as if a background theme is required for the news.  Now, every story refers to the economy, often when it is irrelevant (“especially in a recession”), whereas a couple of years ago there would have been a comment about rising temperatures or sea levels.

I admit I’ve read the reports in yesterday’s Guardian (prominent on pages 4 & 5) on the fun and games at Stansted, but not (until now) their other Poznan-synchronised articles.  A shame, because the paper included a fascinating “carbon atlas” (p.20-1 – the print version includes tabulated data, the online version is impressively interactive), showing the worldwide distribution of emissions, and growth over the period 1996-2006.  Looking at these sorts of charts, I’m always struck by how much work there is to do: stopping global warming is basically a European project at the moment and our blobs are only around a fifth of the total.  And most of the circles representing other countries are growing faster…

… a visual impression reinforced by the Guardian’s commentary on the next page (we’re at 22 now).  Focusing on “climate scientist Kevin Anderson”, the article notes that far from reducing our emissions, globally they are increasing rapidly.  But the mantra that the damage can be limited (to 650ppm and a “4C average rise” – I see we’ve dispensed with the annoying little degree symbol), “only… if rich countries [adopt] ‘draconian emission reductions within a decade’ ” no longer makes any sense.  What has to be done is persuade the rest of the world (the biggest blobs are China, US, Russia and India, and of these, only blob no.2 is “rich”) to make “draconian reductions” as well.

The idea of Kyoto was that the “rich” world led the way.  I suggest that, now, though, it’s clear that we have to decarbonise the entire global economy at the same time.  To put it another way for those who don’t think in terms of just one global economy, “we” have to persuade developing countries to do something “we” have only just started doing.  This logic happens to be true even if, as is the case, a large proportion of the emissions of some developing countries (China, in particular, of course) is attributable to the manufacture of export goods.

As usual, emotion overwhelms reason.

Global Warming and the Nature of Science, or, The Ofcom has Spoken!

Yes, finally the Ofcom has spoken. Not very loudly, it seems. It’s really just a rap on the knuckles for “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, largely because:

“…whilst Ofcom is required by the 2003 Act to set standards to ensure that news programmes are reported with ‘due accuracy’ there is no such requirement for other types of programming, including factual programmes of this type.”

Unbelievable. What planet are they (or rather the legislators responsible for this insanity) on? One that is going to get a hell of a lot warmer, it seems, if we can’t work out how to make rational, science-based decisions. How can the category “factual programmes” even exist without “standards [of] due accuracy”? Has anyone thought about what the word “factual” actually means??

Remind me if I don’t return to this argument later on, but to state the thesis briefly, in complex domains, problems – whether big ones (like GW itself), or small ones, like “Swindle” – almost always have many causes. Dealing just with the immediate cause may be futile. In the case of “Swindle” it may be most effective putting effort into changing the rules of the media game, rather than engaging in trench warfare. Because, if the ultimate arbiter of truth is not factual accuracy then we just end up with a popularity contest. Hey, why not incorporate audience votes in science programmes? Phone-in to vote for your favourite theory of gravity!

Luckily, in the case of “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, the programme:

“…broke rules on impartiality and misrepresented the views of the government’s former chief scientist…” even though it “was ‘on balance’ cleared of ‘materially misleading the audience so as to cause harm or offence’”. (Quotes from the Guardian’s news story on the findings).

But what if they hadn’t broken any rules?

And at least in this case George Monbiot got his retaliation in first, with a comment (and CiF) piece in today’s Guardian, as well as an essay in G2. [Illustrated with the usual photographs, incidentally: someone should devise a market instrument for investors in pictures of power stations, melting ice and - my personal tip - pictures of solar panels and photogenic children in Africa. Oh, sorry, it slipped my mind for the minute that markets are in the dog-house right now.]

George does an excellent job, as usual, in his forensic G2 piece (though there’s a touch of conspiracy theory in his analysis of Channel 4) but in the very last column it all falls to pieces. [See yesterday's post for my views on conspiracy theories and the need to read the detail - in this case right to the end - to avoid Taleb's randomness illusion]. Even so, I urge you to read George’s dissection of “Swindle”: you may be surprised. I recollect that I had moreorless bought into the idea (which Monbiot debunks) that Thatcher’s espousal of GW science was partly due to her search for weapons to use against the UK’s coal-mining industry.

Remember, though, that, as well as the particular pathology – in this case the way “Swindle” was given a platform – we also need to look at the underlying causes.

This is where a major problem lies in George’s piece:

“[Channel 4] says [its scheduling of "Swindle" and other programmes] ‘is against the background of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] stating that there is a 90% certainty that the causes of global warming are man-made, it follows that there is a 10% uncertainty. Yet this 10% uncertainty receives a disproportionately small amount of airtime.’ I [George continues] find this argument extraordinary. A 90% level of confidence does not mean that 10% of the evidence suggests that an effect is not occurring — in fact, there is no reliable evidence showing that man-made global warming is not taking place. It is expressed in this way because there is no absolute certainty in science. The ‘very high confidence’ the IPCC expresses in the global warming thesis is the strongest statement any reputable scientist would make about his area of study. It is legitimate and right to stress that there can be no absolute certainty about global warming.” [my italics stress].

90% is not in fact a very high probability when we are discussing scientific findings. In my opinion, it would be more than justified to say that we’re “virtually certain” that “man-made global warming is [...] taking place”, and by virtually certain I mean at least 99%. A 99.9% claim would be perfectly reasonable. So why does the IPCC not say this? Saying 90% gives the green light to people like Martin Durkin (the maker of “Swindle”).

I’ve just done a bit of weight-training and consulted the IPCC’s latest massive report (The Fourth Assessment Report, or “AR4″). If we look at Table 1 on pages 120-1 of the Scientific Basis (there are 3 parts to the overall report) we see that, although the IPCC is happy to use the words “virtually certain”, it only does this when a result “can be estimated probabilistically”. For example, a particular set of data may have a definable probability of indicating a trend.

[Note that our ability to calculate such statistics requires us to make assumptions about randomness - i.e. a bell-shaped curve or Gaussian distribution. This implies that we have a theory about the causes of variation in the data in the first place! For example, if we say we're 99% certain that the glaciers are melting this finding must have been calculated against a null hypothesis that changes in glacier volume are subject to random fluctuations. This may not be true. There could be reasons we are entirely unaware of for all the world's glaciers to either melt or grow at the same time (on top of reasons for correlation between glaciers in the same region which have presumably already been taken into account). Such "unknown unknown" correlation would invalidate the null hypothesis and hence the 99% "virtual certainty". If we're 99% sure what the data tells us, then surely we must be at least 99% sure of our theoretical understanding. I'm sure Taleb would agree with me! It's entirely illogical to have more faith in data-driven findings than in any aspect of the underlying theory explaining them! But this is not my main point today.].

No, what baffles me is why the IPCC restricts itself to a maximum of “very high”, that is, 90%, confidence when it comes to “scientific understanding”.

Politics may have played a part in the IPCC process. Some governments may have lobbied for 90% rather than 99% as the maximum possible confidence. But let’s put that to one side. I want to argue that a critical factor is widespread misunderstanding of the scientific process.

Practising scientists often cite the philosopher Karl Popper. They understand that theories can be “falsified”. Some may even have heard of Thomas Kuhn and appreciate that such “falsification” takes place in “scientific revolutions”.

But what happens in such revolutions? In fact, scientific theories are superseded rather than “falsified”. Let’s consider one or two examples very briefly. When Einstein “overturned” Newton’s theory of gravity he didn’t demonstrate that Newton’s equations were wrong. Rather, he showed the limitations of Newton’s theory. Crucial experiments (where the difference was large enough to be measurable) showed that Einstein’s theory made more accurate predictions than Newton’s. In effect, Einstein incorporated Newton’s findings in his own theory of gravity. Albert never said: “Silly old Isaac’s made a mistake there.”

A case closer to the topic in question is the oft-cited theory of the 1970s that we were about to enter a new ice age. Now this theory hasn’t gone away. The Earth would be cooling (though there is debate as to when the next ice age would occur), if it weren’t for global warming. The current theory of global warming includes the ice age cycle as well as all other prior theories for the variation in the Earth’s climate, such as the effect of volcanic eruptions. Quantitative statements about man-made global warming take into account numerous other causes of climate variation.

Now, it’s possible to imagine reasons why the Earth might not warm as much as projected. For example, the solar system could enter some as yet undetected dust cloud. But any quantitative estimates of the effect of such a dust cloud would have to include the effects of man-made GW. And if the planet cooled dramatically as we entered the dust cloud we’d still have to worry about its temperature rising beyond today’s level because of our greenhouse gas emissions when we came out again. Just the same as, if we solve the problem of global warming and get the climate back to something resembling its pre-industrial state, we will – over the longer timescale of millennia rather than decades – need to take account of the Earth’s ice age cycle which was apparently of such concern in the 1970s.

There are examples in science of theories that are (or could be) flat wrong. But these are theories for which there is no evidence or for which the evidence has been misinterpreted due to problems inherent in the data-gathering process. This is most likely when observations are difficult, such as at the frontiers of physics. For example, the infamous string theory could be wrong because it makes no new predictions.

Any replacement for a theory with lots of firm data, such as global warming, would have to provide explanations for all that data. Clearly this is easiest if the new theory explains the old theory as a special case, rather than by invalidating it entirely.  In the history of science theories are almost always shown to be incomplete rather than “wrong”.  In my opinion, Imre Lakatos understands this process most clearly, even though this aspect of his ideas is rarely stressed.

The probability of the theory of global warming actually being wrong is therefore vanishingly small.  Our level of certainty is, in fact, far more than 99%.

So one of the underlying causes of programmes like “Swindle” is that even the scientific establishment is unclear as to the nature of its theory. Even if there are unknown unknowns and the planet does not end up warming over the 21st century and beyond this would not in itself invalidate the theory of global warming.