Snuffing Copenhagen

"If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. -- Dick Cheney

I got hooked on Politico during the Presidential election. They tried, usually succeeding, to balance the rants and raves of political and polemical characters of all shades. Sometimes they tried too hard.

That seems to be the case with their Copenhagen Connection special, which tries to keep us up to snuff on the climate change conference. Their summary of Sarah Palin's Washington Post Op-Ed sounded so reasonable that I had to read the original:

“Copenhagen’s political science”: “[G]ood environmental policymaking is about weighing real-world costs and benefits -- not pursuing a political agenda. That's not to say I deny the reality of some changes in climate -- far from it. I saw the impact of changing weather patterns firsthand while serving as governor of our only Arctic state. … But … we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes. … What Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats' cap-and-tax proposal. This is a political move. … The president should boycott Copenhagen.”

Boy, was I wrong. Those Politicos should be editing Coming Attraction trailers: I felt like I was fooled into watching a very bad summer movie. The excerpts suggest some degree of thoughtfulness, not a demagogic lead paragraph that refers to "so-called climate change experts".

Downhill from there, Palin polemically claims that "I've always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics," and then proceeds to ignore science and wallow in the politics of the devout denier. I have never bought the story line that she is stupid, rather I think she is George Will-fully ignorant. Like that partisan political pissant, she stuffs a straw man full of distortions, adds some outright lies and proceeds to argue with her creation. They think that they can make words like "experts" and "consensus" lose their meaning just because they sarcastically put them in quotes.

Their concern about the East Anglian emails threatening the sanctity of science is refreshing. Maybe they're compensating for their silence when Environmental Protection Agency documents were altered for political purposes. Also, I'd expect Palin to be front-and-center in denouncing criminals who hack into email accounts.

Al made me do it

Al Gore will tell you he's no scientist: just ask him. He's still too certain for my taste. Yes, probability is on his side, enough so that I believe action is necessary, but it's tough for me to travel down that fellow's road.

So, I was willing to read Palin, even that twit Will, because coal and oil aren't going away soon and because I profoundly distrust Gore's pet Cap and Trade (S)shell game. I should have known better. Evidently they don't think we need solutions, or at most the 'Just Say No' policy former President George Bush smirkingly proposed at earlier climate conferences.

What are the answers? The U.S. still has tremendous oil reserves, huge gas and coal deposits. Our dependence on those energy sources is unavoidable in the short term. Many poorer countries are even more dependent on dirty fuels. This Danish probably won't be very filling.

I expect carbon credit trading to win out and be increased, and it will end up in the greedy maw of the people who brought you last year's Wall Street meltdown. Keep saying they've learned their lesson when you see carbon credit futures and carbon credit hedges. If we're lucky, there can be a carbon credit bubble complete with carbon credit derivatives.

Banking on disaster

An example: Deutsche Bank has just put up a carbon (actually 24 assorted greenhouse gases) counter up in New York City. A fine thing, and I was happy to track down a widget I could put up on this site showing the same figures. The license is free but the terms include this ominous sentence: "You will treat the existence of the terms of this Agreement as confidential, and you agree that any information relating to the Application Tool is confidential to Deutsche Bank and/or its licensors and that you will refrain from disclosing such information to any third party." My first reaction was 'how Germanic', in the old pejorative sense of the word. My second was 'bugger off', why can't I even tell someone that there is an agreement? Of course, I could use it and tell you anyway, but I'm generally an honorable sort of guy.

Yes, the widget seems to be a good thing. Gore is probably quoting scientists when he claims we're pumping 90 million tons of Carbon into the atmosphere every day. The atmosphere, like the ocean, is huge, but neither can be our dumping ground forever. What can I say? I climbed on my high-horse when I read the terms and I'm still there.

The article that pointed me to the widget helpfully tells us that Deutsche Bank is managing about $6 billion in climate change investments. That appears to be less than one percent of the total assets they manage, but it seems to be a good thing. I just don't trust them. Why should I?

The snuff picture

In other news, the Marlboro Man has seen the writing on the wall -- it says No Smoking -- and is going green, in a way. Marlboro has been test marketing smokeless tobacco and snus (!?).

Not very well, according to analysts. Altria, the parent company of Marlboro and Philip Morris, is hedging its bets by buying Copenhagen and Skoal maker UST.

Yes, it's a stretch to include this. Hey, I got in a mention of Copenhagen and more than a billion smokers lighting up is nothing to sneeze at.

See scientist, see scientist squirm

MoveOn.org doctored this photograph*, which makes it the perfect illustration for this piece. It's hilarious, too, which didn't hurt. After we stop climate change, maybe we can stop time.

Climate is a murky subject. Do we really need True Believers roiling the water even more? What do they mean by climate anyway? Not weather; that can change for a year-- or two or three. Pick your time scale: it's some sort of average, a composite of what the weather usually is like.

The climate in any place will change over time. Somebody just over the hill might have a different climate than yours, and theirs might change in a different way.

All right, they're talking about global climate, especially temperatures. I knew that. Supposedly, the figures everyone is arguing about are based on 517 temperature-monitoring stations. There are a lot more weather stations, ships at sea and satellites to supplement that data. Still, in any given year, one place may be warmer and another cooler. How do you sum up all this information?

Climatologists have made some pretty sophisticated models using that data. They make predictions based on those models and then refine them when they miss the mark. Basically, with my limited knowledge, I trust them-- the models anyway.

Starting in the 70's, "global temperatures" started a slow, steady rise. Carbon dioxide was identified as the major culprit. I was convinced. I still am.

A funny thing happened on the way to the millenium

Why, then, did "global warming" stop at about the time we looked away to obsess about Y2K? And why did some scientists start talking about fudging their data like a butcher with his thumb on the scale?

Somebody hacked the Hadley Climatic Research Unit's emails and found that there had at least been talk of fiddling with the facts. Bad scientists. Expect funding cuts, ridicule and humiliation. Global warming skeptics are having a field day. (I balance True Believers like the Yes Men with TB's on the Net Right. Sorry, NASA and the NSF trump them both.)

What's going on here? Did these people have so much of their egos invested in their work that they wanted to make the data fit? Or, had Global Warming become a religion so the facts had to be changed to conform to the dogma?

Most of their peers seem to have coughed politely and looked the other way. Others, like Professor Peter Kelemen were openly dismayed. (Yeah, it's Popular Mechanics, but that's probably one of the audiences a Columbia University professor should be reaching) His article is actually a pretty good summary, from my point of view, if you've got the time to read it. I particularly agree with his conclusion:

We're in an unprecedented situation, with regard to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the rate at which it is rising. Because this is unprecedented, we are not sure what is going to happen. But global warming is very likely, and reasonably probable outcomes could be fatal. Ignoring it would be like Russian roulette. Want to play? I do not.

Speaking of inconvenient truths

It's time to Gore Al a bit, because the earth stopped cooperating at just about the time he started popularizing the idea of global warming. Not that he's necessarily wrong, but he's too wide-eyed, gosh-darned certain for my taste. Besides, you'd almost think he was some sort of mainstream politician with all of this gobbledygook about carbon offsets. Yeah, Al. So can I pee in your reservoir if I build a treatment plant somewhere else?

Professor Keleman pointed me to the very good Der Spiegel story, Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out. I'd recommend any article that quotes Mojib Latif, who is quickly becoming my favorite climatologist.

Maybe it's the sunspot cycle, says one scientist. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is Latif's choice. (The PDO gives me a headache when I try to wade through some of the papers describing it, but that hasn't stopped me yet. It's like El Nino and La Nina, only different.) Their disagreements don't bother me a bit; in fact they're healthy. That's what science is supposed to be. Try a hypothesis; try another if that doesn't fit the data.

Whatever the cause of the current plateau, there seems to be a lot of agreement that it is indeed just a pause in the warming trend.

I've lost the link, but a scientist (Latif, I think) pointed out that there has already been substantial warming, and its effects are still working their way around a very complex planet. The oceans are warmer, mixing has changed somewhat; frankly we don't know how all of these systems interact and what changes are already irreversible.

As an example, I read one obscure paper that tried to quantify how much swarms of jellyfish contributed to mixing of warm and cold water. You see, warmer water generally means more jellyfish, but if they then cause more mixing....

* If you follow the link and watch the slide show, you will see that her poster actually reads "stop global warming". I checked-- don't know why, really. Maybe because she didn't seem that dumb.

Post no pranks

Oh, you guys.

The Yes Men are at it again, putting 100,000 fake copies of the New York Post on the streets of that city the day before a United Nations climate change summit. It's full of some very un-Post-like stories on the subject.

I'm always amused by their shenanigans: posing as business or government officials and/or creating phony websites to get their points across. My personal favorites are the fake stories about Dow Chemical and the Bhopal disaster as well as the "National Petroleum Council rep" who revealed secret plans for converting victims of any global disaster into oil ('Vivoleum'). Out of laziness, I'll just point you at their Wikipedia page --which has already been updated to reflect their latest theater.

I have to admit that I'm a sucker for pranks like this. They have more wit and panache than a treefull of your usual activists, which also guarantees at least 15 minutes of fame for each stunt.

Here's their press release and home page. The real NY Post carried an Associated Press Story quoting the company statement "Witless Spoof in Flawless Format,"

The faux Post is actually an entertaining read, and essentially factual as far as I can tell (I like the one about the carbon footprint of U-2's world tour). It just loads soooo darned slooow. Maybe their website doesn't have the bandwidth to handle as much attention as they've probably gotten.

I was about to say...

The National Snow and Ice Center tells us they think the Arctic sea ice melted about as much as it's going to this year on Sept. 12, 2009, and NASA's Earth Observatory kindly sent me this image. That's the third lowest ice coverage on record they tell us (topped by 2007 and 2008). One of the reasons I'm not a flat-earther about climate change, though I think some of the advocates get a bit extreme.

It looked like the Northwest Passage might be open (I droned on about that last year), and I was looking for stories on the subject. Somehow I got detoured on the information highway and ended up with the Yes Men.

The Northwest Passage? Didn't see anything official, though evidently a few people made it through on the less favored southern route. I'm sure NASA will remind me again next year at about this time.

Butterfly tracks

I'm hooked on stories about how we change our climate and on photos from space. Today there was a new one from NASA's Earth Observatory: clouds along shipping lines, or ship tracks.

Oh, joy! An excuse to mount a Search on their website. I've read about jet contrails for years, and how there's a near-permanent band of clouds along popular routes. It seems ships have the same effect. Some of our smarter monkeys are trying to plug all these influences into the climate models on their supercomputers to see the net effect.

I actually doubt if they'll ever get there, even secretly hope they won't. The Butterfly Effect: roughly, that a bug flying or landing on a leaf has an effect which causes something else, affecting something else... Eventually, half a world away a coconut is blown onto your car. Something like that. There's just too much data, no matter how big the computer.

Still, they're getting closer. From another NASA article: "The brighter clouds that result from man-made aerosols reflect more of the Sun’s light back into space, decreasing the amount of light that reaches the Earth’s surface. This interaction of man-made aerosols with clouds has cooled the Earth, offsetting global warming, though scientists are still not sure by how much."

It all gives me a headache, but scientists say the net effect is still a warming climate. I'm not George Bush, so I'll take their word for it. For now.

That burning sensation

What about the fires we set? The second photo is of field sterilization in northwestern India. It kills some pests and fertilizes the fields, but at what price? Another butterfly to track.

There are only a few contrails in this photo of fires in the Southern U.S., but I snatched the link because of a matter-of-fact statement I found droll and scary at the same time: "At the southeastern tip, a strip of cement-colored terrain marks the location of West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami."

Which is reflective and causes what? We're too smart, and not smart enough. I've wondered for years what effect a hydrogen economy would have on climate. Imagine a city with millions of people pumping water vapor into the air. Then plug that guess into your climate model.

Melting the ice

I see that Benigno Sablan has been reappointed to the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council. I assume Marine Monument supporters wouldn't be pleased because members are nominated by the Governor, but I've liked Ben since he was my Congressman.

Really, I wouldn't even bring it up, except that the press release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (This is the Saipan Tribune after all) states that "NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages the nation's coastal and marine resources." You might guess from my added emphasis that I consider that a boldface, um, overstatement. How about understanding and predicting the Arctic Icecap?

North by Northwest

The Northwest Passage is open for business. Dust off your history books and you'll recall that a passage to the Far East drove generations of early American exploration. Even Columbus was aiming for the "Indies".

So far, I've only run across an Australian who sailed West-to-East, but if it continues to open, and for a longer season, shippers are sure to follow. A beefed up oil tanker was tested before the decision was made to build the Alaska Pipeline.

The extent of sea-ice is approaching last year's record low. Global warming? Probably, maybe, but that's irrelevant in the near-term. The icecap has been shrinking for the 30 years we've had satellites to peep at it and for the last 10 years particularly.

We can argue about where the Highs and Lows park during summer and winds pushing the pack ice in the 'wrong' direction, even throw in global currents and post-ice-age isostatic recovery. We know that the 'new ice' from last year melts more easily and that open ocean absorbs more sunlight than ice, but we're ignorant puppies about events on this scale and our supercomputers will be happily humming for years. Climate change is about decades or centuries, not years.

Chill out

Why should I care way off in Saipan? Well aside from living near sea level and liking to think about ice when I'm sweltering in the dark, Russia has been pretty assertive lately.

There are bound to be disputes; Russia has tried to claim the North Pole and is building nuclear-powered icebreakers, Canada is still trying to assert control over their sea-lanes, and we're stumbling along with three aged icebreakers (one's for research and one's in the shop).

Yep, you got it: the icebreaker gap. It's not just military/political; ice-free doesn't mean, well, free of ice. Depending on who's defining, it means less than 15% ice. So ships can get stuck, they can get holed, they can sink. Big ships. Tankers. Enforcement and clean-up crews are going to have to function in that environment.

Also, submarine cousins from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are going to be increasingly likely to meet, and to invade each other's territory.