Google search basis undermines sunspot-winter coldness link

Franck Sirocko’s 2012 study incorrectly dated this 1929 postcard identifying a year that the Rhine froze as being from 1963, which is one of many problems Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and his colleagues found with it. Image from van Oldenborgh et al, used under Creative Commons license, see citation below.

European researchers have strongly criticised a recent study linking cold winters in the continent to cycles affecting the sun for relying on a shallow internet search. In August 2012, Franck Sirocko at University of Mainz, Germany, and his teammates linked cold years to sunspot activity lows using historical reports of when the river Rhine froze. But their results disagree with previous research, and previously unpublished findings from Geert Jan van Oldenborgh from KNMI, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, in De Bilt. And when Geert Jan looked into why this was, he found problems common in research on this topic over 50 years ago, updated for the internet age.

“These problems are fundamental – all the results that they claimed are spurious,” Geert Jan told me. “It is simply an incorrect paper. Usually incorrect results are just ignored, they do not get cited much and are quickly forgotten. However, this time we took the unusual step to write a comment on the paper. This decision was based on the low quality and the wide publicity it was given.”

That publicity came largely because the American Geophysical Union, which published the 2012 paper, put out a press release about it that the media reported widely. It tells how Franck’s team used historical documents to find that the Rhine froze in multiple places fourteen different times between 1780 and 1963. 10 of the 14 freeze years occurred close to the point in an 11 year cycle when there are fewest sunspots. “We provide, for the first time, statistically robust evidence that the succession of cold winters during the last 230 years in Central Europe has a common cause,” Franck said in the press release.

Sunspot cycles had been linked to weather throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries, until Barrie Pittock started going over the evidence in the 1970s. Barrie, who led the Climate Impact Group at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia until his retirement in 1999, found no link beyond day-to-day weather effects. He also found many studies had used bad or incomplete data to say otherwise.

Australians overestimate climate change rejection

CSIRO’s Zoe Leviston has run a survey that found Australians’ actual opinions on climate change are very different from what they estimate other people think. Credit: CSIRO

People in Australia overestimate how many of their fellow citizens don’t think climate change is happening, but still think their own opinion is the most common. That’s according to a survey run by Zoe Leviston from Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), in Perth and her teammates. Roughly one person in 20 surveyed fell in the ‘not happening’ group, but on average people thought that one person in five did. That’s partly down to a well-known effect called ‘false consensus bias’, where we tend to think more people agree with us than really do. However, how politicians and the media in Australia discuss climate change could be making the effect stronger than usual.

“There is a mis-estimation of community sentiment,” Zoe told me. “Our perception of what others think is a dynamic process, and if we have these misperceptions, they can actually reinforce our own patterns of thinking. Other research has shown that people can be hesitant to speak out if they think their opinion is on the decline, because they think that they risk social censure. It’s important to communicate accurately what the consensus is, otherwise you can needlessly propagate this myth of widespread denial.”

As part of a major CSIRO research program, known as the Climate Adaptation Flagship, Zoe surveyed more than 5,000 Australians in both 2010 and 2011, 1,355 of whom completed both surveys. Among other questions, they were asked which of four statements best described their view. They could choose: climate change is not happening; don’t know whether it’s happening or not; it’s happening but natural fluctuations; or it’s happening and caused by humans.

But Zoe and her fellow CSIRO scientist Iain Walker wanted to look beyond this basic opinion. “In Australia the media and political debate surrounding climate change have often rested on these competing claims about what Australians support and what they think,” Zoe said. “We knew that people are very bad estimators of what others are thinking, so we decided to ask about that as well.” So straight after the first question, Zoe and Iain asked what proportion of Australians would choose each of the four answers.

Scientists move closer to resolving missing heat “travesty”

Sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean, 300 metres below which heat may have been stored during pause in warming during the 2000s, new models indicate. Credit:NCAR/Carlye Calvin

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” When that admission of climate science’s limitations was made public, it was seized upon as an important failing by the discipline’s critics. But actually the author of the “Climategate” email leaked from the University of East Anglia and printed worldwide in November 2009, was identifying a problem that needed to be fixed. Kevin Trenberth from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, was really complaining about the fact that scientists couldn’t track energy flows linked to short-term variations in climate well enough. That shortcoming meant that they were stumped by a particularly relevant question at the time: why temperatures hadn’t risen enough in response to the overall amount of energy flowing into the planet since 2003. Now, in a letter published in the research journal Nature Climate Change last week, he and his colleagues have come a step nearer to revealing the reason why.

Before 2003, Trenberth had found, satellite measurements of the balance of energy flowing in and out at the top of Earth’s atmosphere matched the amount of heat that could be measured in the land, atmosphere and sea. After that, though the satellites showed greenhouse gases are continuing to trap more heat from the sun’s energy, only about half that heat could be measured. Consequently, though the 2000s were Earth’s warmest decade in over a century of records the rapid temperature rises that brought this about ground to a standstill from 2002-2009. During that period average global temperatures decreased, although this trend fails the key scientific “statistical significance” test, and 2010 was again the warmest year on record.

This prompted Trenberth and his fellow researcher John Fasullo to ask in top journal Science “Where has this energy gone?” in April 2010. Yet, Trenberth and Fasullo did have an idea what the answer might be, their colleague Gerald Meehl underlined. “Following Kevin and John’s work on this topic using observations, it seemed like heat had to be going into the deep ocean when the surface temperature trend was flat for a decade or so,” he told Simple Climate. “But we don’t have adequate observations of deep ocean temperatures to quantify that. So we decided to look at a climate model to see if it could answer that question.”

Climate researchers warn of food and forest tinderbox

In January, food prices reached their highest levels since the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation began monitoring them in 1990. Credit: UN Food and Agricultural Organisation.

More frequent droughts are set to pose challenges to food supplies, and could worsen global warming still further. That’s a message that’s emerged over the past week, which has seen world food prices reach record highs, while researchers unveiled stark messages about drought in Africa and the Amazon forest.

Eastern Africa is seeing decreased rainfall due to warming in the Indian Ocean warn University of California, Santa Barbara, scientists Chris Funk and Park Williams. Over the past 60 years the Indian Ocean has warmed two to three times faster than the central tropical Pacific, they note in a paper published in the journal Climate Dynamics online ahead of print. This has driven increased rain and cycling of air through the atmosphere in the tropical Indian Ocean region. This has extended part of the air flow system known as the Walker circulation westwards, sending dry air towards eastern Africa.

When climate becomes a problem too far

University of New South Wales associate psychology professor Ben Newell. Credit: University of New South Wales

If you can face the sheer volume of evidence for global warming and not become too numbed and overwhelmed to act, you are probably quite an unusual person. That’s one warning offered by University of New South Wales psychologist Ben Newell, who published research back in August discussing how we think about climate change. “We can only worry about a limited set of issues, Newell emphasised in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. That means that when people like me try and communicate the evidence, we must be careful how we do it.

Research at the Centre for Environmental Decision Making at Columbia University has shown that “people remember more and report more willingness to take action when shown vivid imagery, like receding glaciers, than when just given facts and figures,” Newell told Simple Climate. “I think this emphasises the need to engage people with images that they can relate to and easily understand. However, we should avoid inducing ‘despair’ by showing “Day After Tomorrow” type catastrophes. A good method might be to show images of real impacts on local regions that have changed over a specified time period rather than artists’ impressions of what could be.” Interestingly, these findings are also shared by University of California, Berkeley, researchers in the journal Psychological Science set to be published in January.

This is just one small element of the wide range of insights that Newell’s work provides, another aspect of which has already been covered on this blog, and which are summarised overall in the following video:

Seeds of doubt flourish as climate debate hots up

George Mason University's Edward Maibach

Edward Maibach, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, thinks that much of the US has the wrong idea on climate change. While a large majority think that global warming is happening, he points out that they are too uncertain about the underlying evidence.

“The majority of the American public, our TV weathercasters, and our TV news directors have all reached an erroneous conclusion suggested by industries with a vested interest in the status quo,” Maibach told Simple Climate. “Namely, the majority believe that there is considerable disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening. A number of studies have shown that over 95 percent of the leading experts on climate science – active climate science researchers – have concluded that global warming – an increase in the global mean temperature relative to a pre-industrial era baseline – is real and that it is largely human-caused.”

Maibach’s “4C” centre published its third survey of US public opinion on climate change in June and July, conducted jointly with Yale University  to get over 1000 people’s outlook. It found that twelve out of every twenty people surveyed think that global warming is happening, compared to just four out of twenty that don’t. By contrast only seven out of twenty thought scientists agreed that it is happening, while nine out of twenty thought that there was a lot of disagreement.

I don’t care what the weatherman says, when the weatherman puts politics ahead of science

Temperatures have risen in the debate between the different US political parties over climate change in recent years - and now the country's weathercasters appear to be more influenced by that than their professional qualifications in their opinions of global warming. Credit: Weather Central

Many US TV weathercasters responded to last November’s “Climategate” scandal more on the basis of political beliefs than meteorology, scientists have claimed. That’s important, Edward Maibach of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, notes, because of their comparatively high profile and large audiences. “TV meteorologists are potentially an important source of informal climate change education in that most American adults watch local TV news and consider TV weather reporters a trusted source of global warming information,” Maibach and colleagues write. “At least temporarily, Climategate has likely impeded efforts to encourage some weathercasters to embrace the role of climate change educator.”

“Climategate” refers to the publication of hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – which is jointly responsible for one of just three global temperature records. Among these were statements that suggested climate researchers may have inappropriately tampered with and illegally avoided sharing data, and tried to suppress other scientists’ work. Since then a series of enquiries found that the conclusions of their research are not in doubt, although they did fail to display the proper degree of openness.

But, how do we know this is right?

While many reporters cover climate issues - like this one taking notes during a demonstration for the enforcement of Kyoto Protocol - some of them only confuse the issue. Credit: ItzaFineDay

Be careful – the people you trust may be leading you astray. Are they worthy of your faith in them? Does what they say really represent reality?

These may sound like strange ramblings, but if we all answered truthfully we might better understand the major causes of the current debate on climate change. Everyone in the world depends on their own set of sources of information. We share many of them, like television programs and newspapers, with others. We also have some sources that others don’t, like our friends, or maybe an obscure little website. But, as Australian psychologist Ben Newell and climate change researcher Andrew Pitman warned earlier this month, we often don’t realise when these sources are biased.

Saturday round-up: Humanity’s upper warming limit

This map shows the maximum wet-bulb temperatures reached in a climate model from a high carbon dioxide emissions future climate scenario with a global-mean temperature 12 degrees Celsius warmer than 2007. The white land areas exceed the wet-bulb limit at which researchers calculated humans would experience a potentially lethal level of heat stress. Credit: Purdue University graphic/Matthew Huber

Global warming of 12°C would make most areas of the world uninhabitable, and burning all the fossil fuels on the planet could get us to this level. That’s what Steven Sherwood of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and Matthew Huber of Purdue University, USA, claim.

Writing in a paper published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science this week, the scientists examine the heat stress that humans and mammals can bear. This is assessed through a measure known as wet bulb temperature, which combines the effect of heat and humidity. The world’s hottest areas normally have low humidity, referred to as “dry heat”, Huber explained. “When it is dry, we are able to cool our bodies through perspiration and can remain fairly comfortable,” he said.

They say that currently wet bulb temperatures on the planet never exceed 31°C, while humans and other mammals would die if exposed to levels above 35°C for extended periods. They predict that conventional temperature rises of 7°C would begin to see wet bulb temperatures above 35°C in some regions, while 11-12°C rises would force humans out of most areas where they currently live .

While media coverage confuses, oceans suffer

Some of the creatures studied by Huw Griffiths of the British Antarctic Survey, that may be impacted by warming oceans.

A lack of context in media reports has given some arguments against climate change a higher profile than is justified, a University of Colorado, Boulder, professor has claimed. Max Boykoff made his comments as the Annual Meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego drew to a close on February 22. The event, one of the largest in world science, saw Boykoff’s presentation accompanied by numerous other researchers reporting the latest on how rising temperatures have been impacting the environment.

Boykoff has analysed media coverage of global warming in 20 countries since 2004, finding that potentially fair criticisms of climate research have been gathered together with less justified claims. Mixing both groups means that flawed arguments are set against solid climate change research. “This has been detrimental both in terms of dismissing legitimate critiques of climate science or policy, as well as amplifying extreme and tenuous claims,” Boykoff said.

The arguments that follow are then easier and more familiar for journalists to report, although Boykoff sees this as a distraction from the important questions. “Reducing climate science and policy considerations to a tit-for-tat between dueling personalities comes at the expense of appraising fundamental challenges regarding the necessary de-carbonization of industry and society,” he said.

Also reporting in San Diego was Huw Griffiths of the British Antarctic Survey, who studies the vast range of creatures who live in the very southernmost regions of the planet. He has found that populations of krill, small shrimp-like sea creatures eaten by penguins, whales and seals, has fallen because of decreased sea-ice cover. They are being replaced by smaller crustaceans called copepods, a food source that favours smaller predators like jellyfish. In some regions the reduced area of ice is also affecting penguins, which need it to breed on.

“The Polar Regions are amongst the fastest warming places on Earth,” Griffiths said. “Predictions suggest that in the future we’ll see warming sea surface temperatures, rising ocean acidification and decreasing winter sea ice – all of which have a direct effect on marine life.”

Meanwhile, Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia explained how global warming’s impact on coral could also impact the food chain for millions of people. Corals gets their colour and much of their energy from algae living within them. When environmental conditions move outside of the normal range, the coral forces the algae out, losing its colour and eventually dying.

Donner says that 30 years ago these bleaching events were thought extremely rare, but they have been increasingly common since, and are set to become even more so in future. “Even if we froze emissions today, the planet still has some warming left in it,” he said. “That’s enough to make bleaching dangerously frequent in reefs worldwide.”

While coral will not be completely wiped out, Donner expects that the areas in which they do survive will diminish. The impact on the environment will hit home as the ecosystem around the coral reefs is disrupted, and fishing and tourism suffer thereafter. “There are hundreds of millions of people who depend on them for their livelihood,” he explained.