JoNova

Weekend Unthreaded

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7.6 out of 10 based on 28 ratings

Songbirds detecting tornadoes two days ahead and fleeing?

These birds weigh only 9 grams, but they can apparently tell that the weather is going to get really nasty. Is it infrasound? And how often do thousands of birds split the scene for a false negative scare…

Songbirds fly coop long before tornadoes arrive in Tennessee

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – You might want to be careful about who you call a birdbrain. Some of our feathered friends exhibit powers of perception that put humans to shame.

Scientists said on Thursday that little songbirds known as golden-winged warblers fled their nesting grounds in Tennessee up to two days before the arrival of a fierce storm system that unleashed 84 tornadoes in southern U.S. states in April. The researchers said the birds were apparently alerted to the danger by sounds at frequencies below the range of human hearing

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7.8 out of 10 based on 50 ratings

Is the Sun driving ozone and changing the climate?

In 2015 the hunt for clues continues…

The central mystery in climate science is the Sun. The direct energy from the 1.4 million-kilometer-wide flaming ball stays remarkably constant. The radiation pours down on us but the relentless sameness of the watts can’t be causing of the swings in temperature on Earth. Something else is going on with the Sun. For one thing, the total light energy coming off the Sun stays almost the same but the type of light changes — the spectrum shifts — with more shorter wavelengths at one point in the cycle and longer wavelengths at the opposite part of the cycle. These have different effects. Shorter wavelengths (UV) generate ozone in the stratosphere and penetrate the ocean. Longer wavelengths don’t. But the Sun is also sending out charged particles and driving a massive fluctuating magnetic field, both of which affect Earth’s atmosphere.

But the tiny changes in total sunlight (TSI) may still be leaving us clues about other things going on with the Sun. David Evans’ notch-delay theory is that TSI is a leading indicator, and after solar TSI peaks, the temperatures on Earth follows with a peak roughly 11 years or so later (or one solar cycle). But what’s the mechanism? Stephen Wilde has a theory. Plug in your brain, and follow this chain of potential influence:

The Sun —-> UV or charged particles —- > ozone —-> polar jet streams —–> clouds —–> surface temperatures.

Stephen Wilde put forward the first version of this hypothesis in 2010. It is long past time to get into those details.

Summary of the Stephen Wilde Hypothesis

In essence: The Sun affects the ozone layer through changes in UV or charged particles. When the Sun is more active there is more ozone above the equator and less over the poles, and vice versa. An increase in ozone warms the stratosphere or mesosphere, which pushes the tropopause lower. There is thus a solar induced see-saw effect on the height of the tropopause, which causes the climate zones to shift towards then away from the equator, moving the jet streams and changing them from “zonal” jet streams to “meridonal” ones. When meridonal, the jet streams wander in loops further north and south, resulting in longer lines of air mass mixing at climate zone boundaries, which creates more clouds. Clouds reflect sunlight back out to space, determining how much the climate system is heated by the near-constant incoming solar radiation. Thus the Sun’s UV and charged particles modulate the solar heating of the Earth.

Figure 1: When the Sun is less active there is more ozone at the poles but less over the equator. Less ozone above the tropopause causes less stratospheric warming, allowing the tropopause up, which pushes the climate zones towards the equator. This causes the jet streams to be more meridonal, so more clouds are formed. Clouds reflect sunlight, so less solar radiation warms the Earth.

An active Sun increases ozone in the stratosphere:

“Changes in solar ultraviolet spectral irradiance directly modify the production rate of ozone in the upper stratosphere (e.g. Brasseur, 1993), and hence it is reasonable to expect a solar cycle variation in ozone amount. The global satellite ozone records since 1979 show evidence for a decadal oscillation of total ozone with maximum amplitude (~2%) at low latitudes (Hood and McCormack, 1992; Chandra and McPeters, 1994; Hood, 1997).

wilde, ozone, UV, sun, climate, tropopause

Figure 2: When the Sun is more active there is less ozone at the poles but more over the equator. More ozone above the tropopause causes more stratospheric warming, forcing the tropopause down, which pushes the climate zones away from the equator. This causes the jet streams to be more zonal, so fewer clouds are formed. Clouds reflect sunlight, so more solar radiation warms the Earth.

New research reports a missing driver — energetic electrons

In October 2014 a paper by Andersson et al suggests another layer of action, again on ozone. Described as the missing driver in the Sun-Earth connection, energetic electron precipitation (EEP) dramatically affects ozone — but above the poles, not the equator. The EEP in the mesosphere is directed preferentially towards the poles along the magnetic field lines because the electrons are charged particles, which explains why the effect is strongest at the poles.When the Sun is active the energetic electron rain decreases ozone preferentially above the poles and in the mesosphere.

At the poles, the rules get strained through a singularity

At the north and south poles the magnetic field lines converge, the Earth drags the atmosphere around a single point, the tropopause is lower, and temperature inversions are common. Polar vortices occur when an area of low pressure sits at the rotation pole of a planet. This causes air to spiral down from higher in the atmosphere, like water going down a drain. (Polar vortices should not be confused with the circumpolar jet around the poles, which is often given the same name in the media.)

All this remarkable action means that above the poles even the high mesosphere affects the height of the tropopause. In the polar vortices the descending flow draws air down from the mesosphere, right through the stratosphere to the tropopause.

The presence of a layer of ozone in the stratosphere is the cause of the temperature inversion that forms at the tropopause. That layer of ozone is warmed directly by incoming solar radiation. It is warmer than the rising air coming up from the surface below, so it effectively puts a lid on convection.

Ozone variations affect the temperature of the stratosphere, which in turn affects the height of the tropopause. From page 14 of Zangl and Hoinka:

“Suppose, for example, that the surface temperature and the tropospheric temperature gradient are given and that the temperature of the stratosphere varies. Then, a cold stratosphere will be associated with a high tropopause (low tropopause pressure), and a warm stratosphere will correspond to a low tropopause (high tropopause pressure).”

If the tropopause rises or falls, it causes a change in the gradient of tropopause height between equator and poles. This in turn causes the jet streams to shift north or south, because it pushes around the climate zones beneath the tropopause. A lower tropopause restricts the available space for free movement of air horizontally beneath it. So a lowering of the tropopause above the poles when the Sun is less active (as implied in the Andersson et al paper) squeezes the air in the tropospheric climate zones towards the equator. We have seen that happen in the form of increased jet stream meridionality since about 2000, as the level of solar activity declined in the transition from active solar cycle 23 to much less active solar cycle 24. That is the reason for the observation of more frequent and intense incursions of polar air across middle latitudes in recent years.

The world is divided up into permanent climate zones, which align along the lines of latitude due to the Earth’s rotation. These zones can move poleward or equatorward, in response to changes in the Earth’s energy budget. Poleward shifting was observed during the late 20^th century warming, and it is well know that the zones shifted equatorward during the Little Ice Age.

Figure 3: A Jetstream can be more zonal (left) or meridonal (right).

Source.

The jet streams are high-level rivers of fast moving air threading between the climate zones, and are driven by temperature, humidity and density differentials between the different types of air mass:

An equatorward shift of the climate zones gives the jets more room to loop north and south, and that gives more meridonal jets (the north-south components of the jets).
A poleward shift of the zones pushes the jets poleward, forcing them to more closely following the lines of latitude, that is, more zonal jets (the east-west components).
Such shifts are also associated with the Arctic Oscillation, wherein a positive phase results in the climate zones being pulled poleward and the jets adopting a more zonal (straighter) pattern. A negative phase results in the opposite. A more frequent positive phase is associated with a more active Sun due to cooling of the polar stratosphere (less mesospheric ozone descending through the polar vortex) and consequent lifting of the polar tropopause. A more frequent or more pronounced negative phase (as observed to a record extent during the very low solar minimum between cycles 23 and 24) is associated with a less active Sun due to warming of the polar stratosphere (more mesospheric ozone descending through the polar vortex).

Wandering jets means more clouds

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9.1 out of 10 based on 130 ratings

Carbon tax cost $5310 a ton. $15 billion to abate almost nothing and cool the world by even less.

If the Greens cared about the environment, they’d call this scheme “a ghastly waste”.

The “price” of carbon was advertised as $24 (per ton emitted) but real price of reducing emissions by one ton was $5,000. It could only happen when people are playing with other people’s money. That’s the soft left idea of good maths and good business.

That the Labor-Greens boast that this spectacular failure was a success shows the carbon tax was never about the climate, nor about CO2 or the environment. Follow the money. The purpose of the tax was to reward friends and punish competitors. Anyone dependent on Big-Government is a “friend”, and anyone who can stand on their own two feet is a “polluter” or a “denier”.

If the Greens cared about the environment, they’d call this scheme “a ghastly waste”.

The $15 billion price tag is $670 per Australian, or $2,700 per household of four. The real total is much more (when will the government add up the real bill?), because that tally doesn’t include the money wasted on solar panels, windpower, or the whole “Department of Weather Change”. It doesn’t include millions in scientific research money poured down the sinkhole of climate models that don’t model our climate, nor the advertising, promotion and propaganda of all of the above.

A smart conservative government would add up the whole bill, then spend 0.1% (something like $20 million) paying skeptical scientists to audit, and check the evidence trail. They would trumpet their green credentials. This source of the river of gravy starts with the science. People who care about the poor and the planet would want to get that right.

Sid Maher, The Australian

THE carbon tax cost $5,310 for every tonne of emissions abated during its two years of operation, new government analysis shows.

The release of the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory last week shows emissions for the economy, excluding the land sector, fell 1.4 per cent in 2013-14 and 0.8 per cent in 2012-13. When the land sector is included, as is the case under Kyoto accounting, Australia’s emissions fell from 567.1mt in 2012-13 to 563.5mt, a drop of 3.6mt. Between 2011-12 and 2013-14, emissions fell 0.5 per cent or 2.9mt (there was a small rise the previous year).

No one can call this a success. Australian emissions were falling before the carbon tax came in. The big 1.4% fall only came after the figures of the year before were adjusted up. The 0.8% reduction they talk about for the previous 12 months does not exist after the figures were changed, yet they are still citing it. The current count of emissions will most likely be adjusted up itself, and the 1.4% figure is mere noise in the data — in past years the post hoc adjustments have been larger.

Opposition climate change spokesman Mark Butler told the ABC the report proved Labor’s policies were working. “The National Greenhouse Gas Inventory — dropped by the government in the lead-up to Christmas in an effort to bury the report — showed that the emissions count for the overall year of Labor’s climate policies reduced by 1.4 per cent,” he said.

“That compares to a decline in emissions of 0.8 per cent for the previous 12 months, which shows that Labor policies to reduce emissions were working — to say otherwise is laughable.

Shame the Greens hate the environment.

Edit April 2015: First sentence changed to make it clearer and more useful. Was “It takes skill to figure out a scheme where you set the price at $24 for something and end up paying $5,000.”

9.3 out of 10 based on 104 ratings

Happy New Year

That date line is rolling around the world. May 2015 bring you happiness and good health.

Cheers!

9.6 out of 10 based on 48 ratings

High risk for a heart attack? Might be better if your cardiologist is away at a conference

Researchers at Harvard wondered if high risk heart patients were more likely to die if they turned up at the hospital during national cardiology meetings when most of the experts are not around. Instead, it turns out that mortality rates during the conferences fell from 70% to 60%. Oops.

Who do you want to see if you’re sick? In this situation, possibly not your specialist.

High-risk patients with certain acute heart conditions are more likely to survive than other similar patients if they are admitted to the hospital during national cardiology meetings, when many cardiologists are away from their regular practices.

Sixty percent of patients with cardiac arrest who were admitted to a teaching hospital during the days when cardiologists were at scientific meetings died within 30 days, compared to 70 percent of patients who were admitted on non-meeting days.

“That’s a tremendous reduction in mortality, better than most of the medical interventions that exist to treat these conditions,” said study senior author Anupam Jena, assistant professor of health care policy at HMS, internist at Massachusetts General Hospital and faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. There is substantial ambiguity in how medical care is practiced, particularly for these complex patients, he said. “This study may help illuminate some of those gray areas and suggest ways we can provide better care for those high-risk patients.”

To be fair, this only applies to one very specific subgroup of patients, and hopefully this red flag will help us figure out what needs to change. Possibly expert cardiologists are doing a bit too much to try to help their patients. But don’t feed me that line that experts are always right:

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9 out of 10 based on 29 ratings

Australia has had megadroughts for the last thousand years says ice core study

A new study of Law Dome Ice cores tells us that droughts are common in Australia, and that there appears to be eight mega-droughts over the last thousand years, including one that lasted a whopping 39 years from 1174- 1212AD. By their reckoning the 12th Century in Australia was a shocker with 80% of it spent in drought conditions. Things weren’t so bad from 1260 – 1860, at least, as far as they can tell. The researchers are convinced theirs is the first millennial-length Australian drought record. It does seem significant.

The researchers, sensibly, think we might want to pay attention to the Pacific cycles and store a bit more water. Without fanfare the paper also suggests that droughts were worse in medieval times.

“this work suggests Australia may also have experienced mega-droughts during the Medieval period that have no modern analog. Therefore, management of water infrastructure in eastern Australia needs to account for decadal-scale droughts being a normal feature of the hydrological cycle.”

h/t to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat

The ABC reported this largely as a water management story, without asking whether their past stories that blamed CO2 for droughts were less likely to be true. They also didn’t talk about how natural climate change could be worse than the current “man-made” variety. Nor did they discuss the uncomfortable idea that if there were naturally more droughts when CO2 was ideal, perhaps the droughts now might be natural ones too? At least The Australian and Graham Lloyd put the emphasis on the idea that current droughts are par for the course.

Figure 4 (see Caption in footnote to blog).

So how does a study find droughts in Australia with a hole drilled in Antarctic ice?

A very good question — and though the study is corroborated with historic studies, and instruments in Australia as much as it can be, the bottom line is that we really need millenial proxies from Australia, but at the moment, this is the best we have. Law Dome is a spot in East Antarctica that is almost due south of Perth, Western Australia. Researchers looked at sea salt in the ice to estimate wind speed, and in this case, it means specifically winds from the Indian Ocean sector of the Southern Ocean. Those winds correlate with the strength and position of the Antarctic High and circumpolar trough (among other things). Law Dome has such good resolution they can even identify summer patterns from winter ones. The age uncertainty is ±1 y at 1000AD. It’s just flat out remarkable. Other researchers have used these sea salts as a proxy for Eastern Australia rain.

The paper also reconstructs the IPO — the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (the big cousin of the PDO*) and also talks about the effect of Antarctic Rossby waves on rainfall in Australia. They used a combination of annual snowfall and sea salt to reconstruct the IPO. They combine the sea-salt rainfall proxy with the reconstructed IPO cycles to estimate when the droughts hit, and confirmed as many of these as they could with other studies.

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9.1 out of 10 based on 74 ratings

The carbon tax figures are in: Australians paid $14b to reduce global emissions by 0.004%!

We can finally assess (sort of) the carbon tax in Australia. It ran for two years from July 2012 to July 2014 and cost Australians nearly $14 billion. The National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office released Australian emissions statistics for the June Quarter of 2014. The headlines hitting the press this week are saying we reduced our emissions by 1.4%. The Greens are excited, but neither the journalists or the Greens have looked at the numbers. Not only is this reduction pathetically small on a global scale, but it’s smaller than the “noise” in the adjustments. Like most official statistics the emissions data gets adjusted year after year, and often by 1 – 2%. We won’t really know what our emissions were, or what the fall was, for years to come… (if ever).

Spot the effect of the Australian carbon tax in the graph of emissions by sector below. It operated for the last two years. The falls in electricity emissions started long before the carbon tax (and probably have more to do with the global financial crisis, a government unfriendly to small business, and the wild subsidies offered for solar power).

australian greenhouse emissions drop by sector electricity, industrial, agricultural

(Click to enlarge)

Did Australian industry “reduce” their emissions a year ahead of the carbon tax? Maybe. In anticipation of the pointless expense and increased sovereign risk, they may have shut down or moved overseas. Should we celebrate?

The cost-benefits of using a tax to change the weather

During the carbon tax period we “saved” something like 17Mt of CO2. That’s how much less we theoretically emitted compared to what we would have been produced if our emissions had stayed at the annual level they were at in June 2012 (subject to adjustment). Australia’s emissions are 1.5% of total human emissions, which are 4% of global emissions*. Those global emissions from all sources during the two years of the tax were roughly 416 Gt. Thus the carbon tax may have reduced global CO2 emissions by 0.004% and global temperatures by less.

The carbon tax is often framed as “revenue” or money raised, as if the government created some wealth. It should always be called a cost. And it’s not money from “polluters” — it’s money from Australians.

The carbon tax cost Australians $6.6 billion in 2012-2013 and cost $7.2 billion (projected) in 2013-14.
Over the two year period, that’s $13.8b for an average reduction of 0.004%.
The carbon tax was projected to cost $7.6 billion in 2014-15 if it had not been repealed.

The story of shifting data

Despite the headlines of “record falls” in Australian emissions, the data keeps changing, and the fall was about the same size as the adjustments. Each quarter, the numbers may be revised by up to 2%. In four of the last six years the annual emissions were announced and then were later raised. In two years the original estimate was similar to the last.

In other words, any 1% change is mere noise (in so many ways). Some of the time the headlines will have announced a fall in emissions that later vanished with data revision.

According to the most recent Excel data statistics I can find (subject to change), over the two years of the carbon tax our emissions started at 555Mt, fell to 550Mt and fell again to 542 Mt. As you can see by reading across the rows, the emissions may be adjusted for years after the fact. Who knows what Australia’s emissions of 2014 will be listed as 10 years from now.

Table 1: Running adjustments

As reported in June Q reports	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012x	2013x	2014x
Emissions in year to June 2008	544	551	549.5^	…	548.9	545.5	552.4
Emissions in year to June 2009	…	544	548	…	547.9	541.3	554.2
Emissions in year to June 2010	…	…	548	548	545.4	540.1	548.3
Emissions in year to June 2011	…	…	…	546	551.2	541.2	552.8
Emissions in year to June 2012	…	…	…	…	550.9	546.2	554.9
Emissions in year to June 2013	…	…	…	…	…	545.9	550.2
Emissions in year to June 2014							542.6

These figures don’t count land use changes and forestry.

2014x, 2013x and 2012x are the Excel figures released with their respective June Quarterly reports – these are original emissions, not adjusted for seasonal effects or weather normalized. The other figures are “preliminary estimates” (like the 2014 figure) and come from the summaries and overviews issued each year. If they are adjusted for the weather or seasonality, I couldn’t find the note telling us so.

The Greens Leader Christine Milne thinks this 1.4% fall in emissions is embarrassing for the Abbott government. She looks at this graph and sees “success”. Its just as likely the cause of any flattening in our emissions is due to the Labor Party and Greens, or simply the GFC.

Spot the difference Australia’s Carbon tax made. Anyone?

Other quarters may look different but for the June Quarter this is what “success” looks like:

….

Figures from the Dept of Environment.

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8.7 out of 10 based on 78 ratings

IPCC competition? Dr Xargles Book of Earth Weather

Reader William York points out that Dr Xargle’s Book of Earth Weather (published 1992) is a similar vintage to the IPCC FAR report. Xargle’s job was to explain Earth’s climate to the Planet of Queeqians. Like the FAR report, Dr Xargle was turned into a fictional TV series.

Perfect fodder really for a Holiday Unthreaded. – Jo

——————————————————————————————–

From William York,

The following work, first published in 1992 is arguably one of the best interpretations of the 1990 IPCC First Assessment Report.

The book appears to be based on the earlier work of Mark Twain who wisely said “climate is what you want and weather is what you get”.

Dr Xargle from another planet should be well aligned with our climate modelers.

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8.3 out of 10 based on 50 ratings

Look out, a soil model says more plants means massive carbon stores might be freed

The Doom message version 48.2a (subclause i) has been released.

Forget methane clathrate pits, now extra plant growth (blame CO2) could cause global soil to unleash massive amounts of carbon.

Carbon dioxide (aka “pollution”) feeds plants. This is now bad (didn’t you know?). An all new “first” computer model with plants, soil, and fungus, warns us that more plants could get soil microbes excited which might break down more soil carbon and release it into the air. Disaster! It’s a could-be-might-be-catastrophe. (At least until paragraph 6 — see that caveat below.)

In the meantime this is is so big, it’s practically nuclear — the model reports that it could set off a “chain reaction”:

An increase in human-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could initiate a chain reaction between plants and microorganisms that would unsettle one of the largest carbon reservoirs on the planet — soil.

Did you know there is twice as much ~~CO2,~~ carbon in the soil as there is in Earth’s whole atmosphere?

Researchers based at Princeton University report in the journal Nature Climate Change that the carbon in soil — which contains twice the amount of carbon in all plants and Earth’s atmosphere combined — could become increasingly volatile as people add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, largely because of increased plant growth. The researchers developed the first computer model to show at a global scale the complex interaction between carbon, plants and soil, which includes numerous bacteria, fungi, minerals and carbon compounds that respond in complex ways to temperature, moisture and the carbon that plants contribute to soil.

(The “first”? Dr David Evans tells me that FullCAM — the Australian carbon accounting model he helped develop — did this on an Australian scale years ago, and that they weren’t the first then.)

Note the politically-correct permitted phrasing next:

Although a greenhouse gas and pollutant, carbon dioxide also supports plant growth.

So after 500 million years of evolution of carbon based life-forms, carbon dioxide is first and foremost a greenhouse gas, secondly it’s a pollutant, but but… it does… “support” plant growth. (Could we make that weaker? Plants need CO2 so desperately that they suck out all the stuff they can get before morning tea, then they stop growing — and the way to describe this is that CO2 “supports” them — like a tomato stake, right?)

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9.3 out of 10 based on 83 ratings

Merry Christmas and Thank you. Site traffic up 20% to 600,000 people

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and a safe and happy holiday period.

Thanks especially to all of you who support independent science research and commentary. Somehow both earners in this household have been drawn full time into this strange pursuit. (Just doing our best to fill some gaping holes left by monopolistic government driven research and public broadcasting.) We are reliant on your generosity, and very grateful. It’s a team effort.

Dr David Evans, my other half, the Stanford Fourier man, has continued his research. The notch-delay theory is healthy and well. Updating the solar model has been delayed while an unexpected gem gets extracted and tested. David ended up spending most of the last six months digging deep into one corner of an appendix where an unpredicted contradiction revealed itself. Potentially this is a key part of the jigsaw, intrinsic to all climate models. It was too tempting to ignore. Unlike most of the climate debate, this gem does not rely on any arguments about datasets. And it is not diabolically complex either, for the most part. We’ll be releasing news of that sometime early in 2015. We’ll also be going through the empirical evidence that supports the notch delay theory in more detail soon.

I also want to thank all the contributors, the commenters for their advice and ideas, and of course, the moderators — who work behind the scenes to help the conversation flow (and get paid nothing but thank-yous from me!)

Site traffic up 20%

Such is the power of the Internet. In the last 12 months the site has been visited by 600,567 unique users, who have looked at 3.4 million pages. Traffic is growing. Twenty seven percent of visitors were new. When I add up the data, collectively in the last 365 days the site has occupied 101,300 hours of human attention among people from 224 countries.

Some personal messages to people I can’t email:

To Peter in SA – a note is coming your way. Thank-you! To the person who sent a letter to the PO Box in mid Dec from NSW, thank-you, too, – can you email me? (joanne At joannenova.com.au).

9.4 out of 10 based on 105 ratings

Nature admits peer review filters out controversial “champion” papers

How to separate creative genius from creative mistakes? Not with peer-review. It is a consensus filter.

Classical peer review is a form of scientific gatekeeping (it’s good to see that term recognized in official literature). Unpaid anonymous peer review is useful at filtering out some low quality papers, it is also effective at blocking the controversial ones which later go on to be accepted elsewhere and become cited many times, the paradigm changers.

And the more controversial the topic, presumably, the worse the bias is. What chance would anyone have of getting published if, hypothetically, they found a consequential mathematical error underlying the theory of man-made global warming? Which editors would be brave enough to even send it out for review and risk being called a “denier”? Humans are gregarious social beings, and being in with the herd affects your financial rewards, as well as your social standing. Even high ranking science journal editors are afraid of being called names.

Mark Peplow discusses a new PNAS paper in Nature:

Using subsequent citations as a proxy for quality, the team found that the journals were good at weeding out dross and publishing solid research. But they failed — quite spectacularly — to pick up the papers that went to on to garner the most citations.

“The shocking thing to me was that the top 14 papers had all been rejected, one of them twice,” says Kyle Siler, a sociologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, who led the study¹. The work was published on 22 December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

There is no formalized sure-fire system to find and reward the creative genius needed for the big leaps in science. Their work must be impeccable logical, but it is an art to cut through human biases to recognise that genius. And art cannot be mandated or controlled. We should never place much confidence in a formalized process, especially one that’s unpaid and anonymous, to spot the papers that will be the most cited 50 years from now.

But the team also found that 772 of the manuscripts were ‘desk rejected’ by at least one of the journals — meaning they were not even sent out for peer review — and that 12 out of the 15 most-cited papers suffered this fate. “This raises the question: are they scared of unconventional research?” says Siler. Given the time and resources involved in peer review, he suggests, top journals that accept just a small percentage of the papers they receive can afford to be risk averse.

For the record:

Siler and his team tapped into a database of manuscripts and reviewer reports held by the University of California, San Francisco, that had been used in previous studies of the peer-review process.

Anyone who thinks “peer review” is somehow part of the scientific method does not know what science is.

h/t to the brilliant Matthew.

REFERENCES

Peplow, Mark (2014) Peer review — reviewed, Top medical journals filter out poor papers but often reject future citation champions. Nature,doi:10.1038/nature.2014.16629 [Discussion of Siler et al]

Siler, K., Lee, K. & Bero, L. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1418218112 (2014).

9.3 out of 10 based on 89 ratings

Laws, Prosecution, Tax: Not for The UN Green Climate Fund?

The more we give the UN, the more it wants.

The UN Green Climate will get more than $10 billion of other people’s money to spend, but are arguing that they shouldn’t need to obey the laws and taxes that other people do. The Chosen Ones are above all that.

Potentially this could include organizations that are not part of the UN but “working” with it and thus more of the global economy and financial system would come under complete UN control. We could get a whole separate economic and legal system that operates far beyond any voter control. Fun, Fun, Fun. Global parasites anyone?

Another reason to shut down the UN.

Fox News (via GWPF)

If the GCF succeeds in its broader negotiations, not only billions but eventually trillions of dollars in climate funding activities could fall outside the scope of criminal and civilian legal actions, as well as outside examination, as the Fund, which currently holds $10 billion in funding and pledges, expands its ambitions.

The shield would cover all documentation as well as the words and actions of officials and consultants involved in the activity documentation—even after they move on to other jobs. As a tasty side-benefit, the “privileges” attached to such “privileges and immunities,” as they are known in diplomatic parlance, mean that employees get their salaries tax-free.

Just why the GCF needs the sweeping protections is not exactly clear. In response to questions from Fox News, Michel Smitall, a Fund spokesman, provided mostly opaque answers.

“Privileges and immunities are intended to facilitate GCF activities in countries in which it operates and the GCF’s ability to use contributions by donor countries in an effective and efficient manner that serves the objectives agreed by its member countries,” he said.

If they succeed, the tax benefits alone make the $10b effectively twice as much.

The UN is seeking bilateral agreements with each country. Can you imagine how many UN workers it takes full time to negotiate that and how many special deals can be done?

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9.4 out of 10 based on 88 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

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8.3 out of 10 based on 21 ratings

Who needs to update the HockeyStick graph – it’s only the fate of the planet at stake?

Two weeks ago on the HockeyStick Update post we discussed the miracle of how the Bristlecones used in HockeyStick graphs had finally (sort of) been updated. I marvelled that 800 year old tree rings were easier to find than ones from 2002. Now 16 years after the MBH98 “seminal” (well, popular) paper was published, Salzer et al had finally found some rare modern trees and updated the temperatures after 1980, but gosh, the tree rings didn’t proxy for the red-hot rising trends of the modern era, instead they recorded a fall. That particular hockeystick collapsed (again).

It took a while, but Greg Laden bravely dropped in here on Thursday to share a link to his post on how skeptics are misunderstanding the update with “mind numbing” arguments. My reply to him on the old thread may have gone unnoticed. So I’ll repeat it here (with slight edits). Perhaps Greg missed my reply?

Steve McIntyre has also taken Laden to task on his blog.

Greg Laden December 19, 2014 at 12:54 am

A post on one of the studies you refer to here: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/12/17/new-research-on-tree-rings-as-indicators-of-past-climate/

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Joanne Nova December 19, 2014 at 1:41 am

Greg, thanks for popping in, thumbs up from me. Lets share your arguments with everyone here. Quoting from your link:

“More recently, climate science denialist JoNova took the new paper by Salzer et al to task using equally mind numbing arguments.”

What’s the scientific definition of a “denialist” Greg, or are you just namecalling? [I am still hoping Greg would answer this.]

JoNova notes that “after decades of studying 800 year old tree rings, someone has finally found some trees living as long ago as 2005. These rarest-of-rare tree rings have been difficult to find … The US government may have spent $30 billion on climate research, but that apparently wasn’t enough to find trees on SheepMountain living between the vast treeless years of 1980 to now.”
I’m sure the scientists involved in tree ring research would like to know where their $30 billion dollars went, but that’s another story.

The $30 billion went here. It’s out of date now, the real number is much higher.

I asked Malcolm Hughes about JoNova’s implication that there has been next to zero research on or with bristlecone pines over these many years. He said, “This post makes a big deal about the lack of updating of bristlecone pine chronologies since 1980. This is simply wrong. She fails to acknowledge that in 2009 we published on bristlecone pine growth rates in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and put tree-ring data from Sheep Mountain out to the year 2005 in a publicly accessible archive.”

OK, so pushing multiple hockey-stick papers, and repeats and iterations in the IPCC reports plus press conferences is equivalent to quietly putting the data in a “publicly accessible archive”. As if listeners of MSNBC are trawling PNAS for loosely connected “growth rate” studies and hunting down the datasets while they drive to work. Good luck with convincing people that climate scientists are working just as hard to update their scary graphs as they did to create them.

JoNova also implies that the lack of tree ring proxy use for periods after 1980 is somehow suspicious, but as detailed at length above, the divergence problem is, well, a problem. Also, further work such as that reported here is likely to revive some of that data and allow it to be used, eventually. At the very least, future work with high altitude/latitude tree ring data will be improved by these methodological and ecological studies.

Yes, the divergence problem is real. Congratulations. And “one day” the data might be improved enough to “allow it to be used”. Or then again, we might turn it into a logo for the IPCC and put it on hats, banners, and posters all over the world instead. What would a scientist do, I wonder?

Climate science denialist Steve McIntyre has also weighed in on Salzer et all’s research. His post is truly mind numbing, as he treats Salzer et al as a climate reconstruction paper, and critiques it as such, but the paper examines the methodology of tree ring proxy use and the ecology of tree rings. McIntyre shows the same figure I show above (Figure 5 from that paper) and critiques the researchers for failing to integrate that figure or its data with Mann et al’s climate reconstructions. But they shouldn’t have. That is not what the paper is about. Another very recent paper by the same team is in fact a climate reconstruction study (published in Climate Dynamics) but McIntyre manages to ignore that.

Of course, Mann et al should not rush to integrate the new data with their 1998 Hockeystick. It’s only been 16 years that it’s been in the headlines, and there are only global agreements, billions of dollars and the fate of the planet at stake. Why hurry?

This is Green B-lobby science at work.

As I said then:

More important than the details of one proxy, is the message that the modern bureaucratized monopolistic version of “science” doesn’t work. Real scientists, who were really interested in the climate, would have published updates years ago.

The screaming absence of this obvious update for so long is an example of what I call the “rachet effect” in science — where only the right experiments, or the right data, gets published. It’s not that there is a conspiracy, it’s just that no one is paid to find the holes in the theory and the awkward results sit buried at the bottom of a drawer for a decade.

To this evidently Laden, and Malcolm Hughes (of Mann Bradley Hughes fame) who corresponded with Laden about the post had little to say.

9.7 out of 10 based on 140 ratings

The Green Blob and the Green B-Lobby

It’s time to pin down the definition of the Green Blob

Owen Paterson gets the credit for setting this phrase into popular use (as far as I can tell). Here is his definition:

Owen Paterson: I’m proud of standing up to the green lobby

By this I mean the mutually supportive network of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and some public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape. This tangled triangle of unelected busybodies claims to have the interests of the planet and the countryside at heart, but it is increasingly clear that it is focusing on the wrong issues and doing real harm while profiting handsomely.

Local conservationists on the ground do wonderful work to protect and improve wild landscapes, as do farmers, rural businesses and ordinary people. They are a world away from the highly paid globe-trotters of the Green Blob who besieged me with their self-serving demands, many of which would have harmed the natural environment.

Pressed in Fenbeagle’s hand the Green Blob became The Green B-Lobby. Which adds that edge — the amorphous blob becomes a Lobby blob.

The Green Blob

…

Forgive me, Fenbeagle, for rendering the cartoon in gif which uses less memory but destroys the gradients. (To see the original art, which is even better, visit his site ). Published with permission.

Exactly what kind of Blob and Blobby do we mean?

James Murry edits BusinessGreen and, not surprisingly, isn’t too keen on the “Green Blob” term. He argued in July that it’s so broadly defined it is meaningless, or rather, dangerous, in that it combines sensible questioners with eco-anarchists:

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9.6 out of 10 based on 79 ratings

Kill the squirrel to save the planet

And you thought humans were special because they can control the climate. Move over Big-Coal, make way for the squirrels and beavers. They’ve been stirring up the soil releasing CO2, or damning up streams and producing methane.

Daily Mail — Richard Gray

Forget humans, RODENTS are the climate villains: Squirrels and beavers are contributing to global warming far more than previously thought

Arctic ground squirrels churn up and warm soil in the Tundra, allowing carbon dioxide gas trapped in the ice to escape into the atmosphere

Methane released from ponds created by beavers estimated to contribute 200 times more greenhouse gas to atmosphere than they did 100 years ago

Climate scientists will have to tweak their models to include role of rodents

Scientists insist that rodents role in global warming does not let humans off the hook but shows animals play more of a role than previously thought

Wake up climate simulators, it’s time to add rodent-forcings to the models. Along with anthropogenic forcing (and beaver-effects), that’s three vertebrate families down, and only 181 to go.

Squirrels have been around in some form for 40 million years, but in the last 100 they’ve become dangerous climate movers. Freaky timing that.

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9.1 out of 10 based on 81 ratings

Naomi Klein runs amok, calls skeptics white supremacists

Naomi Klein is still throwing rocks, and these rocks are hairier than ever. Try this: if you disagree about climate sensitivity you are not just an unconvinced mind, but a white supremacist. It’s racism, racism all the way down, I tell you!

Lucky Naomi is here to unpack the sinister World Order of evil white men who control the climate. Who knew? In her world, man-made climate change will kill more non-whites than whites, but the white guys who run everything just don’t care. So there! (Is she saying that white men can control the weather but black men can’t?)

The namecalling reaches a new level of absurdity in “Why #BlackLivesMatter Should Transform the Climate Debate“. Forget money, power and sex, the world is run on racism:

“What would governments do if black and brown lives counted as much as white lives?”

Taken together, the picture is clear. Thinly veiled notions of racial superiority have informed every aspect of the non-response to climate change so far. Racism is what has made it possible to systematically look away from the climate threat for more than two decades. It is also what has allowed the worst health impacts of digging up, processing and burning fossil fuels—from cancer clusters to asthma—to be systematically dumped on indigenous communities and on the neighborhoods where people of colour live, work and play.

Hmmm. The IPCC warned that the biggest temperature rises would be at the poles. If this was about the “intersection of climate and race”, as she calls it, the worst hit nations would be those dark skinned nations like Canada, Finland and Norway, eh?!

The truth is that the temperatures will always be most stable in the tropics — where the evaporation rates and humidity keep things from heating or cooling too rapidly.

She whips out every red flag she can find – it’s not just superstorms and rising seas, but police killing blacks, and asthma, and healthcare.

She mentions “Ferguson” but not “poverty”.

What Klein has spotted, spun and turned into fairy floss, is that any bad weather hurts the poor more than the wealthy. This is the unfortunate, banal truth. Some of us evil people think the answer is to solve the poverty, not to change the global climate. Those who care about the poor want to improve their economies, reduce corruption, and create more wealth. With wealth comes more freedom from the ravages of storms and floods.

Klein is seeing very big monsters under the bed:

The grossly unequal distribution of climate impacts is not some little-understood consequence of the failure to control carbon emissions. It is the result of a series of policy decisions the governments of wealthy countries have made—and continue to make—with full knowledge of the facts and in the face of strenuous objections.

I vividly remember the moment when the racism barely under the surface of international climate talks burst onto the world stage. It was exactly five years ago this week, on the second day of the now-infamous United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen. Up until that point, the conference had been a stultifying affair, with the fates of nations discussed in the bloodless jargon of climate “adaptation and mitigation.” All of that changed when a document was leaked showing that governments were on the verge of setting a target that would cap the global temperature rise at 2 degrees Celsius

Naomi thinks it’s policy-by-racism, as if old white men sit in dark smoky rooms putting racism before profit and power. There are some greedy psycho bastards at the top of some corporates and in politics, I don’t think they care as much about the color of their victims as they do about the size of the pay-off.

If she paid attention to the numbers she’d know the big profits are in carbon exchanges, not pie-in-the-sky planetary tinkering. I’ve written about her crippling problem with numbers before. Only someone who can’t add up would predict that the old white men are hankering to do geoengineering, rather than broker carbon credit deals and derivatives and cream off the fee.

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9.3 out of 10 based on 128 ratings

Hot New Book: Steyn, Delingpole, Bolt, Carter, Plimer, Lindzen, Lawson, Watts, Nova

Too many big names too list, and all in one book, edited by Alan Moran and published by the IPA. I’m am just tickled, delighted to be one of the authors.

The proper headline should include Ross McKitrick, Willie Soon, Pat Michaels, Garth Paltridge, Kesten Green, Stewart Franks, Christopher Essex, Jennifer Marohasy and John Abbott. Not to forget the great writers Rupert Darwall, and Donna LaFramboise.

— Jo

An excerpt:

Shh, don’t mention the water

To state the bleeding obvious, Earth is a Water Planet. Water dominates everything and it’s infernally complicated. Water holds 90% of all the energy on the surface,[1] and both NASA [2] and the IPCC[3] admit water is the most important greenhouse gas there is, they just don’t seem inclined to produce posters telling us this is a humidity crisis, or that water is pollution.

I get right into the Dada-science, foggy-text, Klingon plots and zombies. I went right over the word limit… :- )

There are briefings in February as well, see below for details!

From John Roskam at the IPA

Climate Change: The Facts 2014, a new book from the Institute of Public Affairs is now available. It couldn’t come at a more important time. You can buy your copy here.

The carbon tax might be gone and the planet might not have warmed since 1998 (as even the IPCC acknowledged last month in its Fifth Assessment Report) but the climate change debate is far from over. Tony Abbott is still going to give $200 million to the United Nations’ ‘Green Climate Fund’. This is after he called the Fund the ‘Bob Brown bank on an international scale’. The federal government says it “accepts the climate change science” – but the government never says exactly what the ‘science’ is that it accepts. The science is clear. There’s been no warming since 1998.

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8.9 out of 10 based on 110 ratings

In Lima, success IS the junket, the headlines, the “voluntary” soft option

So Lima produced another “accord” of late night unenforeceable nothingness. They pumped out gloom and doom, and trumpeted the $12 billion in funds pledged to the Green Climate Fund. But only a few years ago in Cancun they were aiming for $100 billion. A grand failure as the world grows more skeptical.

But as long as these UNFCCC mega-junkets occur at all, it is still a win for the Green Blobby. Blob-science and the renewables industry still got $12 billion more than skeptical scientists. And 11,000 potential lobbyists got a two week junket in South America, mixing with friends, and hearing how virtuous and important they are. That’s bound to pump up the science-activists — at the very least, they’ll be motivated to make sure they don’t miss out on next year’s two-week junket, or the year after that…

For scientists, this is rock star treatment. Is there any other branch of science which gets a regular paid two-week long international trip to an exotic location year after year? In what other career could B-grade researchers — whose computer simulations fail on every measure — get the red carpet rolled out and lauded as people “trying to save the world”?

Meanwhile the headlines rolled around the world, repeated variations of the last 20 years of pro-forma alarm. How much did each western government spend to make this glorious Olympic junket occur? No one seems to be able to tell us, but it’s pretty clear the amount of private money is negligible and all dollars were involuntarily given. Time to shut down the UNFCCC.

Beware the voluntary soft option

Obama is aiming for a “politically binding” agreement instead of a legally binding one, which he cannot do because US voters didn’t vote for representatives like Obama. So he promised in August that he would try to get around Congress to get a global Climate Accord in Lima. Voluntary agreements sound so pointless, but in the end there is no global police force to enforce a legal agreement (and we pray there never will be), so all agreements legal or not, are subject to the political will of the players. Is there much difference between political and legal deals on this international scale?

What are the options if Spain owes Russia billions at the end of the day and won’t pay? That depends on who has the biggest army and willingness to use it, and the most friends, just like international treaties, deals and agreements always have. Will a country support trade embargoes as a punishment? That depends on political will.

So the soft option is to ask everyone to agree to something voluntary, which seems fairly easy to agree too, then ramp up the political pressure after the deal is done. In its wildest dreams the UN would prefer the legal type of deal, but a “voluntary” deal is still worth a lot of PR, scores headlines, and provides leverage for hounding and hassling weak nations later.

If the citizens of the free world hate the deal, it’ll be ignored and all that political pressure will amount to nothing in the face of the vote-killing potential. But PR like this softens up the citizens; if they are not paying attention it helps create the belief that global carbon deals are inevitable. If domestic politics is distracted by other issues (and that’s the case in nearly every opinion poll in the West) then voters may elect soft governments who use the voluntary deals to justify their moves.

Obama’s plans are shamefully undemocratic

NY Times Aug 26, 2014 WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

Note the punishment is to “name and shame”:

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions.

Naming and shaming only works if people buy into it. It falls apart if people laugh at the labels.

But it has already begun:

A Climate Accord Based on Global Peer Pressure

NY Times

… the driving force behind the new deal was not the threat of sanctions or other legal consequences. It was global peer pressure. And over the coming months, it will start to become evident whether the scrutiny of the rest of the world is enough to pressure world leaders to push through new global warming laws from New Delhi to Moscow or if, as a political force, international reproach is impotent.

“If a country doesn’t submit a plan, there will be no punishment, no fine, no black U.N. helicopters showing up,” said Jennifer Morgan, an expert on climate negotiations with the World Resources Institute, a research organization.

Instead the architects of the plan, including top White House officials, hope that the agreement will compel countries to act to avoid international condemnation.

“It relies on a lot of peer pressure,” Ms. Morgan said.

The structure of the deal is what political scientists often call a “name-and-shame” plan.

Under the Lima Accord all countries must submit plans that would be posted on a United Nations website and made available to the public

What do we take from this? We have to keep up the information campaign direct to voters and politicians. We need to name and shame the unskeptical scientists and the freeloader financials and industrialists who profit from the scare. But we especially need to name and shame the gullible journalists — the media IS the problem. If we had a better media we’d have better policies and better politicians.

It makes the new media and channels of communication all the more important. We need the blogs, letter to editors, and emails to representatives. Peer group pressure works. The difference between skeptics and unskeptics is that the one side has logic and data, and the other has billions of reasons.

9.5 out of 10 based on 100 ratings

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REFERENCES

It’s time to pin down the definition of the Green Blob

Owen Paterson: I’m proud of standing up to the green lobby

Exactly what kind of Blob and Blobby do we mean?

Shh, don’t mention the water

From John Roskam at the IPA

Beware the voluntary soft option

Obama’s plans are shamefully undemocratic

JoNova

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