Climate Science in Context

As world leaders and NGOs gather this week in Copenhagen for what many of us hope (with increasingly cautious optimism) to be a turning point in climate negotiations, an excellent recapitulation of some key milestones was published in the New York Times today. I retraces the physical origins of greenhouse effect theories and experimental demonstrations, and the long and  inexorable rise of global warming to the top of the international political agenda.

The recent Climate Gate is featured there, and put properly into context. One can’t help but marvel at the exquisite timing of this questionably legitimate release of private information – and of the underlying motivations behind it – but in truth i doubt this will affect the negotiations much. Few people were optimistic about their outcome before the ’scandal’, and for reasons having very little to do with the denial of the unequivocal nature of global warming, which is, as you well know, due to human activities with very high probability (>90%).

My own personal opinion is that April showers bring May flowers, and that once the dust settles, the Climate Gate uproar may have the positive outcome of forcing more transparency in our community, which will be excellent for both scientists and the public. In the age of  the Web 2.0, open source code sharing, crowd computing,  and decentralized information traveling at the speed of light, hoarding data like it’s the Dark Ages simply doesn’t make any sense. I think the hackneyed argument that releasing the raw data would lead to more bogus studies from ‘independent scientists” (i.e. fossil fuel-funded think tanks), is moot: the bogus machine is already alive and well (cf Soon and Baliunas, Allègre, Courtillot and the French refusards, Vice-Count Monckton, the Cato Institute, etc), and the obfuscation of data and code only gives fodder to the blood-thirsty crowd of armchair skeptics, who are always looking at our slightest mistakes to run to the nearest hill and shout that “Global Warming is a hoax”, or some other Inhofery of that ilk. The answer to this is not more secrecy, but better work ethics and complete transparency.
An excellent discussion of the issues raised by the hack can be found here.
In the meanwhile I’ll be watching closely what happens in Copenhagen, and i’ve been staying very calm while talking to climate skeptics.

Speaking of putting things in context, I’m quite fond of this video, even if i think the Beavis &Butthead running theme is needlessly inflamatory.

But it’s a pretty different impression that one gets from watching Fox News, innit ?

Wake up

A clear, arresting and entertaining exposition of why we can’t afford to sit on our hands. Very nicely done, and im my professional opinion, very accurate. Some skeptics like Lindzen will scream that we’ve forgotten many negative feedbacks while exaggerating the positive ones. While they’re  scrambling to find more imaginative negative feedbacks, we’ll have a few decades to watch videos, starting witth this little piece of art :

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

While the exact position of the tipping point mentioned isn’t known, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we will hit it sometime in the near future, and once we do it will be very hard -if not impossible – to come back to livable conditions for a very long time. My personal advice, however, is to take the “Freak Out ” part out of the equation, because fear has never helped anyone – but awareness does.

While I’m at it, here’s another another video that I think every skeptic should watch :

I am curious to hear insightful counter-arguments.

Wake up !

In the Land of the Dry

It’s time for an update long overdue : I have moved to Los Angeles to take a position at the University of Southern California. After a few months of getting odds and ends worked out, writing grants, papers, ordering furniture and other highly intellectual tasks, I am finally writing from a beautiful, ergonomic office where I could see myself spending way too much time.

Here is my new webpage. Please have a look, your feedback would be much appreciated.

As an Earth Scientist, it’s interesting to live in a place like this : between seismic activity, air pollution and very dry conditions (projected to worsen), LA combines some of the worst environmental risks you can imagine. But hey, isn’t sunlight worth a few sacrifices ?

I don’t know if that’s an “entropic principle” of sorts, but the pollution in my life has kept increasing since I left my quiet and wooded hometown of Le Vésinet (France), first for Paris, then New York, Atlanta, and now Los Angeles. As my environmental awareness grew, so have my environmental problems. Perhaps it would be all too easy to give lessons about a sustainable lifestyle if I did not have to fight very hard to design and improve mine. Which is far from perfect, but it is essential that I experience the problems I aim to solve.

Since I am often asked about droughts in Southern California, here is a recent explanation of both medieval and (projected) XXIst century droughts by none other than my former advisor Richard Seager. Those suffering from  information-thirst may quench it here.

What does clean coal buy us?

Some pretty cheap laugh, but not much else. It’s a well-known fallacy that there is no such thing as “clean” coal.

Yet our friends from the coal industry would rather have us believe otherwise, and go to great lengths of ridiculousness to convince the less discerning among us of the undying virtues of Carboniferous deposits in our energy infrastructure.  As done here :

Fortunately, our friends from This Is Reality are not sitting on their hands, and we owe them a pretty hilarious counter-offensive, crafted by no less than my favorite movie directors, the Coen Brothers :

Enjoy without moderation, and don’t breathe the black stuff if you can advoid it (you can in the US, just call up your representative if they try to shove it down your throat).

Waits in Atlanta

No climate shenanigans today. Just some great Tom Waits news.

Mr Waits was closing his Glitter and Doom tour in Atlanta on July 5th. This I had known for a while from a very special press conference.

So on July 5th I was lucky enough to be in the beautiful Fox Theater for the event, together with a few thousand fans very stoked to be the A in Pehdtsckjmba.

http://www.publicimagephotography.com/

I hear today from a friend that the concert was recorded in integrality on NPR, and can be accessed here . As Phil Gallo said it felt very much like “a reunion of oddballs, crackpots and believers telling their stories through a series of wheezes, harrumphs and shouts”. It is fantastic to be able to share it.

Its greatness will speak for itself, but here are some very preceptive reviews to delve into it, as well as a setlist and videos here and here.

Enjoy !

The improbable environmentalists

I would like to tell you today about 2 renowned Texas oil billionaires who have recently taken public stances to move away from fossil fuels, oil in particular.

The first is T Boone Pickens Jr, a legendary oil man, who recently lauched the so-called Pickens plan, an initiative to free the US from foreign oil imports. His plan is focused on wind, solar and natural gas, the latter being scarcely carbon-free – and clearly that’s not his concern. There’s nothing revolutionary in the technologies he is advocating – but his business model and PR seem to push the envelope. An interesting fact is that he has heavily contributed to George W Bush’s campaigns, so can scarcely be accused of being a communist, like the Marietta nitwits I was mentioning in the previous post.

The second is Matthew Simmons, also a leader in the oil industry. Simmons is a pundit on Peak Oil, which he believes was reached some time in 2005. You can read more about his conversion here, and look at his very informative speeches here. I heard about Simmons in an interview in GOOD Magazine, which makes clear that he is also a confessed Republican, and one not too concerned about the urgency of global warming.

Power quote :

“If we don’t create a solution to the enormous potential gap between our inherent demand for energy, and the availability of energy we will have the nastiest and last war we’ll ever fight. I mean a literal war.”

As a potential solution, Simmons is advocating an unlikely alchemy : Oil to Seawater. He is spearheading the Ocean Energy Institute, which aims at assessing the electricity generation potential of ocean currents. A little science here from yours truly : if you can make wind turbines, you can make water turbines. There are plenty of steady currents in the ocean, whose power dwarf almost anything we can think of. Cyclical currents like those due to tides have also been recognized for a long time (tidal mills were used by the Romans), albeit never developed to a significant extent. As a French kid, I heard about tidal energy generation  because of a pilot project started in our oil-poor land  in the 60’s on the La Rance river. Given that there are only 2 other plants like this in the world, the principle can hardly be said to have gone viral, but it could be because the field of ocean power generation is still in its infancy. Interesting readers can learn about tidal power here.

The oceans, due to their inertia, are an inherently more steady source of mechanical energy than the atmosphere for us humans. So the upside is that ocean power is much more predictable than wind power. The downside, has every seaman will tell you, is that the ocean eats everything : seawater is extremely corrosive, hence sea-worthy equipment is very expensive.  There is still much that we don’t know about the feasibility and scalability of ocean energy generation for our power-hungry civilization,  and I will be extremely keen on seeing what Simmon’s institute comes up with. It is especially interesting to be looking above the low-hanging fruits and trying to tap into the ~3.7 TW of gravitational potential energy that the Moon and the Sun give to our fluid envelopes, ocean and atmosphere [source].

I think both examples are remarkable in that neither man is remotely close to a Greenie Hippie, yet has understood the economic and national security implications of the current oil crisis. As entrepreneurs, they are wasting no time in finding solutions, because their is tremendous economic incentive to do so. Since they have a few horses in the race, it would be easy to claim that they are merely advertising their latests investments, but I believe the story runs deeper.

I hope it gives food for thought to everyone, irrespective of political leanings.

El Niño

PS : Since i am not an expert on peak oil, and for the sake of offering a balanced outlook, I hereby refer readers to this excellent blog on Peak Oil.

Repower America

Aloha.
After a long absence, I am back blogging for a minute. Essentially, I have refrained from participating in the blogosphere, in favor of the postdoctoral research I am actually employed for, writing a book on week-ends, and visiting family in Europe. I have also looked at Climate Audit a few times, only to be shocked that the herd of barking dogs has gotten way out of hand to be worthy of my time. Until the next idiocy calls for a spanking…

I was tempted to blog a few weeks ago about an utterly gruesome article that was the front page of a newspaper I would be reluctant to wipe my bottoms with, The sunday paper. The front page touted “Is Gore wrong ?”, while the story was largely about a tiny rally of anti-AGW nuts still stuck in 50’s McCarthyist rhetorics. Essentially, trying to curb greenhouse emissions was a “socialist” move, and the wackos celebrated their inalienable right to use to incandescent light bulbs by flying a hot air balloon : swift, to say the least. The offensive part wasn’t so much the tone of the article, which actually also gives space to the pro-AGW side (albeit not to its most credible defender, IMHP) ; the offensive part indeed was the editorial spin of the front page headline, insidiously suggesting that all of the climate crisis is bogus because of an insignificant event that gathered a few misguided armchair skeptics.

I clearly have a long way to go on the road to climate communication, because just re-reading this article heated my blood a tad too high, and made me wish I had a few nitwit ballooners around, just to strangle them à la Bart Simpson. That is why I stayed silent then. Yet, the Sunday Paper mishap did not go unnoticed, and a moderate commentary of it can be found here. I would certainly have been way more incisive, but preferred to calm down in the face of some obvious facts :

1. Anger never solves anything.
2. Too few people read the Sunday Paper for this to be of importance.

So I waited until something more positive came along, which happened just a few days ago.

On July 17, the inevitable Al Gore delivered an inspiring address at D.A.R. Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C, hosted by the WE campaign. Gore challenged U.S. policymakers, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens to change their entire approach to energy use. He proposed that the U.S. produce all of its electricity using carbon-free energy sources by 2018.

To those afflicted by the Gore Derangement Syndrome : this will be extremely offensive material. To others, I think it gives an excellent example of a forward step out of the triple crisis we are currently in : economic, energetic, environmental.

Power quote :

“We are borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian gulf, to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change”.

Since nothing seems to happen these days without McCain’s or Obama’s commentary, no one should be surprised that they reacted to it ; what’s more surprising is that they agreed about it. McCain apparently said, “If the vice president says it’s doable, I believe it’s doable.” [Source: Associated Press]. Obama’s praise was even higher.

As I have said before, I am not here to endorse a party, but I am pleased that both presidential candidates can hear the voice of reason. It makes me hopeful that this is not a lost cause, whichever the outcome of the November election.

It remains to be seen how many key players do get on board. I surely hope not too many of them are flying hot air balloons instead of getting busy, because that would be grounds for practicing slingshot in Marietta, GA.

El Niño and the end of the world

Aloha,

it’s has been a while… I have been traveling relentlessly (New York, Paris, London, Los Angeles, Vienna) and haven’t found much time for blogging. I have a few posts on the back burner, which need more research (what doesn’t, really ?).

Of course I don’t have any more time today, but I just remembered this student paper on El Niño, sent by a friend some time ago. (see gif file)

I have no idea where it came from and could not trace it back, but I could not resist posting it. I hope “Jeremy” won’t mind that his prose gets to the WWW – it is utterly priceless . It is given here just for laughs, to find at least some comfort amidst the current food crisis.

To those who think journalists can be overzealous in their climate alarmism, beware of the next generation !

MIT’s Susan Hockfield on the Global Energy Challenge

I thought I would share some opening remarks of MIT president’s Susan Hockfield, given last week at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

With all the fossil fuel denialism out there, it’s sometimes good to remember that some world science leaders have their priorities straight : free access to knowledge, research in renewable (and scalable) energy, efficiency and sustainable development.

Her address can be found here in RealVideo format. (< 15 min)

The Heisenberg Principle of Climatology

OK, I have to admit this is a pretty eccentric idea . It occurred to me around New Year’s time. Please read this as entertainment, not science – or at best, entertaining science. I assume the esteemed reader to be familiar with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle .

These days, even small-time lawyers are using the concept – as we were reminded by the Coen brothers in the magnificently quirky “The Man who wasn’t there” :

Forgetting the Coen twist, the uncertainty principle states that there is a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which you can jointly determine the position () and the momentum () of a particle in quantum world. Which one can write :

wherein is the root mean square operator and is the familiar Planck’s constant.

This has pretty deep philosophical implications because it means that we must abandon utopias of ever knowing those quantities simultaneously with arbitrary accuracy. Most sobering is that it is a direct consequence of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics.

It occurred to me the other day while having a shower (which is a well-known fountain of ideas), that one could formalize a similar principle in climatology. Indeed, the basic curse of paleoclimatology is that the farther back in time you try to estimate temperatures, the more uncertain they become. We think we know last year’s globally average temperature pretty well (say within 0.05 C ). Last decade might have similar or even lower uncertainties because of the central limit theorem knocking down some measurement errors for you… but try going back 100 years and the measurement error and sampling bias become so large you’ll be lucky to have an accuracy of 0.5 C. And that is during a period broadly known in the field as “instrumental”, that is to say the one over which we have a reasonable number of physical measurements of temperature. As you can see on the following graph from Brohan et al, 2006, this uncertainty grows back in time rather quickly already.

Before about 1850 A.D., we no longer have enough direct measurements, so we have to rely instead on proxy indicators. All of them (corals, tree rings, ice cores, sediments, documentary evidence) have their pros and cons, but even if they can give a surprisingly coherent view of past climates, they are necessarily approximate. Hence, go back 1000 years and arguably, we don’t know this within 0.7 C, perhaps even 1 C (this is a very controversial number and I’d be surprised if no one picks up on it… With wacky ideas come rather loose numbers that one should not take too literally). Go back 10,000 years and a degree C or two might be all that you could hope for. And so on and so forth : the more time elapses and eons pass by, the more water flows under bridges, the more overprinted, worn and tired is the geologic record – and so grows the uncertainty in the estimated temperature.

Say you are trying to estimate said temperature, , over some period (or equivalently, the frequency ). The longer the period (i.e., the smaller the frequency), the more uncertain the estimate, so one could write something of the form :

.

Which is pretty naive and assumes an inverse relationship between the two variables, and is by no means a “universal” constant. More generally one could write :

where the subscript denotes a reference period (say, the last decade), and and are a positive constants, whose precise values are as yet undetermined. So one could play games with that and try to estimate them from a linear fit in log-log space… I’m not sure they would mean much, but who knows ? Perhaps one day we’ll have enough reliable data to be able to characterize this and it won’t seem so quirky. In any case, it’s now pretty far from Heisenberg, who must be shifting in his grave and the mere idea that I am using is august name for such silliness. Nevertheless, it is an uncertainty principle of sorts. And for no more fundamental reason that the degradation of geological records over time, which I guess one could view as a broad consequence of disequilibrium thermodynamics. But only loosely so, because bioturbation holds a large part of the blame, and darned if we have a consistent theory of living organisms that’s grounded in statistical mechanics. But I digresss.

In my defense, I would like to declare that this nonsense was scribbled on a piece of paper while leaning on a garbage can outside the Metropolitan Avenue subway station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Which we all know to be home to some pretty crazy stuff.

Now here’s the truly insane part of the story. The next day was my adoptive bigger sister’s birthday. ( If you happen to live far from home, I highly recommend you adopt, or get adopted by, a bigger sister. It’s loads of fun, especially when they have the same linguistic schizophrenia as yours). I was working from the Columbia University library that day, and decided to drop by to bring her a gift (she lives around the corner). I had no sooner entered her building and stepped into the elevator that a white-haired gentleman nimbly entering the lobby asked me to hold the doors. I happily obliged, and he promptly jumped into the cage a few seconds afterwards, with a mischievous smile on his face.

- “Piso cuatro, por favor “, he said with a distinguished Spanglish accent.

- “Si señor”, I replied, and pushed button 4.

He looked at me from top to bottom and asked in a spotless New England English (I must have looked really freaky) :

- “Are you a physicist ?”

- “Almost”, I replied, “I’m a geophysicist”.

– “Ah well, I am a physicist”, he went on. “And I recently had a very interesting epiphany about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.”

 

Before I could pick up my jaw from the floor, Mr Heisenberg Jr had disappeared into the depths of the 4th floor, only perceptible through the rustling of his raincoat as his walked down the corridor. And so it was decided that even though my Heisenberg idea might not pass into posterity past breakfast, it should at least be worthy of a little post.