Climate Change Study Of Scientific Consensus

February 25, 2010

Sealevelrisegate...

David Adam

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 21 February 2010 18.00 GMT

Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels.

Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report's author now says true estimate is still unknown.

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study "strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results". The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.

Siddall said that he did not know whether the retracted paper's estimate of sea level rise was an overestimate or an underestimate.

Announcing the formal retraction of the paper from the journal, Siddall said: "It's one of those things that happens. People make mistakes and mistakes happen in science." He said there were two separate technical mistakes in the paper, which were pointed out by other scientists after it was published. A formal retraction was required, rather than a correction, because the errors undermined the study's conclusion.

"Retraction is a regular part of the publication process," he said. "Science is a complicated game and there are set procedures in place that act as checks and balances."

Nature Publishing Group, which publishes Nature Geoscience, said this was the first paper retracted from the journal since it was launched in 2007.

The paper – entitled "Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change" – used fossil coral data and temperature records derived from ice-core measurements to reconstruct how sea level has fluctuated with temperature since the peak of the last ice age, and to project how it would rise with warming over the next few decades.

In a statement the authors of the paper said: "Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.

"One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes."

In the Nature Geoscience retraction, in which Siddall and his colleagues explain their errors, Vermeer and Rahmstorf are thanked for "bringing these issues to our attention".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010...retract-siddall

February 25, 2010

Where is the common sense. It is not the energy industry that needs to change but rather the consumers. WE NEED TO ATTACK THE CONSUMERS...should be the headlines.

We need Pamela Anderson out paint bombing Lexuses, SUV's and Minivans instead of furs. We need to be sitting outside shopping centers shouting insults at moms with toddlers buying disposable diapers or non local produce or even more important screaming at her for getting pregnant and adding another carbon based lifeform carbon using methane expelling baby to the planet. We need to be sitting outside the mega toy stores protesting selling anything plastic. We need to protest at the local furniture store protesting building furniture out of carbon using trees.

This total fixation with oil and gas companies, coal companies, tropical hydroelectric companies etc. has got to stop. People that are fanatics unite! Stand up against your neighbours using gas lawn mowers, cutting grass to short, using too much water, painting homes, running air conditioners. All air conditioners in vehicles should be outlawed in Vancouver and elsewhere.

Then don't get me started about all the fuel it takes to catch and transport bait, fishing tackle, boats, cars, fishing tackle manufacturing etc. Next time you see someone NOT using a bamboo rod...shout at them and demand they throw it away as a protest against global warming.

At the very least people. How about more models doing nude protests. That stops traffic! and pollution so long as they don't idle.

Sun

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Is the climate change movement splintering?

Climate change activists are regrouping post-Copenhagen – and some are reasserting their radical roots

Posted by

Bibi van der Zee Thursday 25 February 2010 12.31 GMT

guardian.co.uk

Activists reflected in a police riot shield at the Climate Camp near Kingsnorth power station in Kent, August 4, 2008. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

The climate change movement is dead, long live the climate change movement! was the proclamation made last week by Rising Tide North America, as green campaigners around the world begin coming to terms with the switchback ride of the last three months.

"A particular model of dealing with climate change is dying. It is revealing itself before the world as nothing more than a final scramble for the remaining resources of a planet in peril," states a quote from Naomi Klein at the beginning of the document, before stating:

Many in the climate movement have grown all too cosy with the status quo. The 'bold' action they call for will result in the privatisation of the air, to be divided up by mega-polluters. Their demands for carbon neutrality seek to offset our problems onto poor countries while the rich keep burning and consuming. Those who still cling to the old climate movement have committed themselves to a sinking ship.

It comes out against a backdrop of restlessness, as activists take stock of where they have been and where they are going. Now that the climate talks in Copenhagen have failed, the activists who campaigned inside and outside the Bella Centre are subsiding naturally into two groups – those who didn't want a deal in the first place, and those who did.

People in the latter group, which includes campaign groups such as UK Youth Climate Coalition and the umbrella group tck tck tck, are devastated. As Gemma Bone, one of UKYCC's members puts it; "I didn't expect that there would be a final agreement, but I did think that we would make some kind of progress, and that this year would be all about finalising details. Now it's not clear how the UN process will even go forward. It's absolutely knocked me for six."

But activists in the former group – including Climate Camp, Rising Tide and Climate Justice Network – are more positive. A spokesman for Rising Tide said: "To be honest we never expected a deal at Copenhagen. We don't want an international agreement." Like many activists he is profoundly sceptical about the ability of a carbon trading market – one of the central mechanism of any international agreement – to deliver real reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide.

In fact Copenhagen and the failure of the meeting has in some ways liberated activists. Climate Campers, for example, have been discussing being more upfront about their anarchist and anti-capitalist roots. In the Climate Camp reader which was circulated in January, writers suggested that the camp had been "hijacked by a hardcore of liberals" and asked if it might be time to be more open about the anarchist, anti-capitalist core to the camp.

In many cases the focus is shifting from global action to local issues, such as fossil-fuel power plants or mines. Rising Tide North America's document calls for "an asymmetrical assault on the fossil fuel industry" while in the UK and in Europe campaigners are also planning to focus more on local grassroots campaigns, "to start from the bottom" as the Rising Tide spokesman put it.

The global network that was formed in Copenhagen, as activist groups from around the world worked together to organise the giant march and the Step Up the Resistance demonstration outside the Bella Centre, will also be in correspondence. Nicola Bullard of Focus on the Global South and Climate Justice Network, will be attending the People's World Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia this Easter, along with representatives from Climate Camp, Via Campesina and Jubilee South.

But there is no plan to return to the old summit-hopping ways of the anti-capitalist movement, following the G20 and the WTO from conference to conference. "We need to carry on building on the simple principles that we've established, which held us together in Copenhagen," says Bullard. She agrees that the main focus now has to be getting on with what is already happening. "Sometimes the issue is just too big, too contingent on everything else going on around you. Sometimes, to be honest, you just have to start to do the work."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog...change-movement

February 25, 2010

University of East Anglia rejects lost climate data claims

Submission ahead of next week's parliamentary inquiry 'strongly rejects' accusations university lost or manipulated climate data.

Press Association

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 February 2010 11.53 GMT

The university at the centre of the row over emails sent by climate scientists today rejected accusations that it had lost or manipulated scientific research.

The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has been under fire since hacked emails, which sceptics claimed showed scientists manipulating climate data, were leaked online last year.

In a submission to parliament's science and technology committee, which is investigating the disclosure of climate data from the unit, the university said it "strongly rejected" accusations that it had manipulated or selected figures to exaggerate global warming.

The university also denied suggestions that it had breached Freedom of Information rules by refusing to release raw data.

And it insisted the CRU had not lost any primary data gathered from monitoring stations around the world.

According to the submission, allegations that scientists hid flaws and research findings were the result of misunderstandings of technical jargon or statistical analysis.

And it said the often-cited email which refers to a "trick" to "hide the decline" in a discussion of temperature measurements had been "richly misinterpreted and quoted out of context".

The submission sets out science-based responses to a number of allegations that researchers attempted to mislead, misrepresent or did not effectively manage the data held at the CRU.

And it said leaked emails expressing doubts about the scientific rigour of research papers by climate sceptics "appear to have been justified" in their concerns.

The University of East Anglia has launched two independent investigations into the controversy. Onewill look at the key allegations prompted by the leaking of the emails and a second review of the climate science produced by the unit.

UEA's vice-chancellor, Professor Edward Acton, said the university was looking forward to the results of the two reviews.

In the submission, he said: "Given that the stakes for humanity are so high in correctly interpreting the evidence of global warming, we would meanwhile urge scientists, academics, journalists and public servants to resist the distortions of hearsay evidence or orchestrated campaigns of misinformation, and instead to encourage open, intelligent debate."

A number of witnesses, including the head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, will appear before the committee on Monday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010...ost-data-claims

February 25, 2010

Scientists examine causes for lull in warming

25 Feb 2010, 2204 hrs IST, REUTERS

LONDON/OSLO: Climate scientists must do more to work out how exceptionally cold winters or a dip in world temperatures fit their theories of global warming, if they are to persuade an increasingly sceptical public.

At stake is public belief that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, and political momentum to act as governments struggle to agree a climate treaty which could direct trillions of dollars into renewable energy, away from fossil fuels.

Public conviction of global warming's risks may have been undermined by an error in a UN panel report exaggerating the pace of melt of Himalayan glaciers and by the disclosure of hacked emails revealing scientists sniping at sceptics, who leapt on these as evidence of data fixing.

Scientists said they must explain better how a freezing winter this year in parts of the northern hemisphere and a break in a rising trend in global temperatures since 1998 can happen when heat-trapping gases are pouring into the atmosphere.

"There is a lack of consensus," said Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, on why global temperatures have not matched a peak set in 1998, or in 2005 according to one US analysis. For a table of world temperatures:

Part of the explanation could be a failure to account for rapid warming in parts of the Arctic, where sea ice had melted, and where there were fewer monitoring stations, he said.

"I think we need better analysis of what's going on on a routine basis so that everyone, politicians and the general public, are informed about our current understanding of what is happening, more statements in a much quicker fashion instead of waiting for another six years for the next IPCC report."

The latest, fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was published in 2007 and the next is due in 2014.

The proportion of British adults who had no doubt climate change was happening had dropped in January to 31 percent from 44 percent in January 2009, an Ipsos MORI poll showed this week.

HOTTEST DECADE ON RECORD

The decade 2000-2009 was the hottest since 1850 as a result of warming through the 1980s and 1990s which has since peaked, says the World Meteorological Organisation.

British Hadley Centre scientists said last year that there was no warming from 1999-2008, after allowing for extreme, natural weather patterns. Temperatures should have risen by a widely estimated 0.2 degrees Centigrade, given a build up of manmade greenhouse gases.

"Solar might be one part of it," said the Hadley's Jeff Knight, adding that changes in the way data was gathered could be a factor, as well as shifts in the heat stored by oceans.

The sun goes through phases in activity, and since 2001 has been in a downturn meaning it may have heated the earth a little less, scientists say.

"We've not put our finger precisely on what has changed," Knight said. "(But) If you add all these things together ... there's nothing really there to challenge the idea that there's going to be large warming in the 21st century."

Melting Arctic ice was evidence for continuing change, regardless of observed temperatures, said Stein Sandven, head of the Nansen Environmental

and Remote Sensing Center in Norway.

"The long-term change for the Arctic sea ice has been very consistent. It shows a decline over these (past) three decades especially in the summer. In the past 3-4 years Arctic sea ice has been below the average for the last 30 years."

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, told Reuters that the IPCC stood by its 2007 findings that it is more than 90 percent certain that human activities are the main cause of global warming in the past 50 years.

"I think the findings are overall very robust. We've made one stupid error on the Himalayan glaciers. I think that there is otherwise so much solid science." The IPCC wrongly predicted that Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035.

NATURAL CAUSES?

One long-running doubter of the threat of climate change, Richard Lindzen, meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said a lull in warming was unsurprising, given an earlier "obsessing about tenths of a degree" in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The world warmed 0.7-0.8 degrees Celsius over the last century. Lindzen expected analysis to show in a few years' time that recent warming had natural causes. "It just fluctuates. I think the best explanation is the ocean. The timescale for ocean circulations can be decades."

He dismissed recent ice melt over a short, 30-year record.

Pachauri said that scientists had to unpick manmade global warming from natural influences -- such as the sun and cyclical weather patterns -- also dubbed "natural variability".

"Natural variability is not magic, there is movement of energy around the climate system and we should be able to track it," said Trenberth.

Trenberth attributed the cold winter to an extraordinary weather pattern not seen since 1977 which had curbed prevailing westerly winds across the northern hemisphere, and said that the underlying cause was "one we don't have answers to."

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ET-Cet...how/5616841.cms

February 25, 2010

Is is really a scientific re-examination if the person in charge is going into this saying nothing will change?

Sad...

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Met Office to look again at global warming records

The Met Office is to re-examine 160 years of global temperature records following the 'climategate' scandal.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent

Published: 7:00AM GMT 25 Feb 2010

The project, in partnership with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), will gather the original temperature records from thousands of weather stations around the world. The readings will be double-checked and new information that has become available, such as improved understanding of atmospheric change, will be added. The data will then be independently analysed to assess how the temperature has changed over different regions.

The new analysis, that will take three years, will not only provide a more detailed picture of global warming but boost public confidence in the science of climate change.

Climate change sceptics claim that emails stolen from the University of East Anglia show scientists were willing to manipulate global warming data in a scandal known as 'climategate'.

In another scandal known as 'glaciergate' the UN body in charge of climate change science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was forced to retract a claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

However leading scientists, including the Royal Society, insist the case for man-made global warming is convincing and it remains a threat to the world.

Vicky Pope, Head of Climate Change Advice, at the Met Office, said the new global temperature analyses would not change the trend of global warming.

But she said it would verify the existing data and provide more information so the world can better adapt to climate change.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews...ng-records.html

February 26, 2010

David Adam

guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 February 2010 12.21 GMT

UN to commission independent scientific inquiry into IPCC

UN climate body to appoint scientists to review climate change panel as UK climate change secretary writes to Rajendra Pachauri to express concern over 'damaging mistakes'

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in January that earlier predictions of glacial melting through climate change were wrong. Photograph: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images

The UN is to commission an independent group of top scientists to review its climate change panel, which has been under fire since it admitted a mistake over melting Himalayan glaciers.

The experts will look at the way the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) operates and will recommend where they think changes are needed. The panel will be part of a broader review of the IPCC, full details of which will be announced by the UN next week.

Nick Nuttall, of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) told Reuters: "It will be [made up of] senior scientific figures. I can't name who they are right now. It should do a review of the IPCC, produce a report by, say, August and there is a plenary of the IPCC in South Korea in October. The report will go there for adoption."

He added: "There's no review panel at the moment. Yesterday, it was clear from the member states roughly how they would like this panel to be – fully independent and not appointed by the IPCC, but appointed by an independent group of scientists themselves."

The terms of references for the panel would be announced next week, he said. "I think we are bringing some level of closure to this issue."

The IPCC reviews climate change science on behalf of the world's governments. Its most recent report, in 2007, concluded that there was a 90% certainty that human activities are causing global warming.

Nuttall said the broader review of the IPCC would examine its use of reports from outside conventional academic journals, so-called 'grey literature'. A report from campaign group WWF is blamed for introducing the false statement that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 into the IPCC's 2007 report.

Achim Steiner, executive director of UNEP, said he did not support a ban on the use of grey literature and that the media had exaggerated the IPCC's mistakes.

In a separate move, Ed Miliband, climate secretary, has written to the head of the IPCC to express UK concern over the mistake.

In a letter to IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, Miliband says: "Mistakes such as the IPCC statements on Himalayan glaciers are inevitably damaging. This is a matter of concern because the reliability and good name of the IPCC is vital to ensuring all countries recognise the dangers of climate change."

Miliband said the IPCC needed to thoroughly review its procedures and the way it responded to media criticism. It should also find a way to correct errors and to minimise future problems, particularly with reports drawn from grey literature.

"Clearly this is only the outline of a strategy," the letter says. "There is a great deal of work to do in turning it into a detailed plan for change. The British government is happy to assist you in that process."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010...ientific-review

February 26, 2010

Seemingly...many mistakes were made in analysing the raw data of which has been admitted. This only occurred because of the climateagate controversy.

Openness is so key to science.

So now we add

Datagate and Sealevelgate to climategate, glaciergate, africagate and so on. NO kidding there has to be openness to prevent more damaging errors to scientific integrity!

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From Times Online February 24, 2010

Analysis: reaping what was sown

Hannah Devlin

The Met Office’s decision to overhaul their climate data is not an admission of doubt over the bigger picture on climate change. Independent data from NASA clearly confirm that the global-average temperature has increased over the past century and this warming has been particularly rapid since the 1970s.

The basic laws of physics also dictate that increasing greenhouse gases is likely to cause global warming and that the more we emit, the stronger the effect will be.

But the overhaul is an acknowledgement that public confidence in climate science is at an all-time low and that scientists are at least in part to blame.

The 'climategate' email row and mistakes by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — in particular a claim that Himalayan glaciers were melting so fast that they would vanish by 2035 — have left the impression of a community in which misconduct is rife and transparency is undervalued.

The consensus over global warming, which is as strong as ever among scientists, now appears unstable in the eyes of the public.

The Met Office could have taken a more superficial, cosmetic approach to dealing with the issue — encouraging its scientists to engage more enthusiastically with the media, museums and schools, for instance.

What they are undertaking — a thorough re-evaluation of their data — goes much further revealing the depth of their concern over the current confidence crisis. Their ambition is to develop a dataset and analysis that is virtually watertight against damaging criticisms by sceptics.

Undertaking such an exercise is unlikely to prove an easy ride. Reacting quickly to the climategate row in December, the Met Office made land-based temperature records publicly available on its website for the first time. Soon afterwards, it had to make corrections to the temperature record after science bloggers uncovered a raft of flaws. These mistakes are unlikely to be the only ones.

It is right that the science underpinning trillion-pound decisions is subject to this degree of scrutiny. And a pristine record, in which every possibly error is ironed out, will be of significant value to the climate science community as well as of PR value to the Met Office.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/scie...icle7039324.ece

February 26, 2010

FEBRUARY 26, 2010

Push to Oversimplify at Climate Panel

By JEFFREY BALL And KEITH JOHNSON

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The group expressed 'regret' last month for an erroneous projection in its influential 2007 climate report that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

In the next few days, the world's leading authority on global warming plans to roll out a strategy to tackle a tough problem: restoring its own bruised reputation.

A months-long crisis at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has upended the world's perception of global warming, after hacked emails and other disclosures revealed deep divisions among scientists working with the United Nation-sponsored group. That has raised questions about the panel's objectivity in assessing one of today's most hotly debated scientific fields.

The problem stems from the IPCC's thorny mission: Take sophisticated and sometimes inconclusive science, and boil it down to usable advice for lawmakers. To meet that goal, scientists working with the IPCC say they sometimes faced institutional bias toward oversimplification, a Wall Street Journal examination shows.

Richard Alley, a geoscientist who helped write the IPCC's latest report, issued in 2007, described a trip that summer to Greenland's ice sheet with senators who urged him to be as specific as possible about the potential for sea-level rise. The point many of them made, he said: Give more explicit advice—because, if the sea rises, "the levee has to be built some height."

The tension within the IPCC stretches back a decade or more, according to interviews with scientists and a review of hundreds of IPCC documents and emails. It has complicated the panel's work on matters ranging from the study of tree rings to the proper use of massively complex climate computer models.

The IPCC has faced withering criticism. Emails hacked from a U.K. climate lab and posted online late last year appear to show scientists trying to squelch researchers who disagreed with their conclusion that humans are largely responsible for climate change. And last month, the IPCC admitted its celebrated 2007 report contained an error: a false claim that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. The IPCC report got the date from a World Wildlife Fund report.

Even some who agree with the IPCC conclusion that humans are significantly contributing to climate change say the IPCC has morphed from a scientific analyst to a political actor. "It's very much an advocacy organization that's couched in the role of advice," says Roger Pielke, a University of Colorado political scientist. He says many IPCC participants want "to compel action" instead of "just summarizing science."

To restore its credibility, the IPCC will focus on enforcing rules already on the books, IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri and other officials said in interviews. Scientific claims must be checked with several experts before being published. IPCC reports must reflect disagreements when consensus can't be reached. And people who write reports must refrain from advocating specific environmental actions—a political line the IPCC isn't supposed to cross.

Mr. Pachauri describes the IPCC's record as "impeccable." Still, he said, the IPCC's reforms will aim to "ensure that even the slightest possibility of someone not adhering to procedures is eliminated completely. We just have to act like monitors at every stage."

The IPCC shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore in 2007 for its report that year declaring climate change "unequivocal" and "very likely" caused by emissions of greenhouse gases due to human activity. Formed in 1988, the group doesn't conduct or fund research, but filters the work of researchers world-wide.

About 30 paid staffers help thousands of scientists who volunteer to assemble voluminous "assessment reports" every five or six years. The goal is to be "policy-relevant" but "never policy-prescriptive," the IPCC says.

The IPCC's budget, about $7 million this year, comes mainly from contributions from the U.S. and other industrialized nations.

Critics also allege a conflict of interest by Mr. Pachauri, the IPCC's chairman, who heads an energy-research institute in India and has done consulting work for multinationals.

Taken together, the organization's troubles raise questions about its quality control in summarizing science. But many scientists say the crisis doesn't undermine independent research demonstrating man's influence on the climate.

"There is a very broad and deep consensus that I buy into that we're producing too much CO2 and it's going to cause problems eventually," said John H. Marburger III, former science adviser to President George W. Bush. Many details remain uncertain, he said, but "I think it's unequivocal that there is a human component."

IPCC leaders including Mr. Pachauri say the IPCC is rigorous and transparent. The IPCC last month expressed "regret" for the erroneous Himalayan statement, traced originally to a magazine article. "The organization has an impeccable record of having performed," Mr. Pachauri said, and its work "always includes the quantifications of uncertainties."

Regarding conflict of interest, Mr. Pachauri said, "I don't take a single penny" from the consulting work. Proceeds go to his energy institute and not to him personally, he said.

As climate change gained public attention in recent decades, some IPCC-affiliated scientists privately expressed concerns that conclusions were risked getting oversimplified. Keith Briffa, a climate scientist at East Anglia, expressed this worry in emails to colleagues in 1999, as work intensified on the IPCC's third major report, published in 2001. Mr. Briffa's particular concern: tree rings.

Scientists use tree rings and other proxies to assess temperatures thousands of years ago, before thermometers existed. Wider rings indicate greater growth, generally suggesting warmer temperatures, or higher precipitation, or both. Mr. Briffa pioneered the technique.

"I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more,' " he wrote to other researchers in the email, among those hacked at East Anglia. "In reality the situation is not quite so simple," Mr. Briffa wrote.

He didn't identify the source of the pressure. A university spokesman said Mr. Briffa wouldn't comment.

The problem: Using Mr. Briffa's tree-ring techniques, researchers in the '90s built charts suggesting temperatures in the late 20th century were the highest in a millennium. The charts were dubbed "hockey sticks" because they showed temperatures relatively flat for centuries, then angling higher recently.

But Mr. Briffa fretted about a potential issue. Thermometers show temperatures have risen since the '60s, but tree-ring data don't move in tandem, and sometimes show the opposite. (Average annual temperatures reached the highest on record in 2005, according to U.S. government data. They fell the next three years, and rose in 2009. All those years remain among the warmest on record.)

In his same 1999 email, Mr. Briffa said tree-ring data overall did show "unusually warm" conditions in recent decades. But, he added, "I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago."

In other words, maybe the chart shouldn't resemble a hockey stick.

The data were the subject of heated back-and-forth before the IPCC's 2001 report. John Christy, one of the section's lead authors, said at the time that he tried in vain to make sure the report reflected the uncertainty.

Mr. Christy said in an interview that some of the pressure to downplay the uncertainty came from Michael Mann, a fellow lead author of that chapter, a scientist at Pennsylvania State University, and a developer of the original hockey-stick chart.

The "very prominent" use of the hockey-stick chart "overrules what tentativeness some of us actually intended," Mr. Christy wrote to the National Research Council in the U.S. a month after the report was published. Mr. Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, provided that email.

"I was suspicious of the hockey stick," Mr. Christy said in an interview. Had Mr. Briffa's concerns been more widely known, "The story coming out of the [report] may have been different in tone and confidence."

Mr. Mann said in an email interview, "I was not pushing 'hard' for anything of the sort." The chapter's authors, he said, "engaged in a robust, good faith discussion of what the level of certainty was." Mr. Mann also noted that his original 1998 hockey-stick paper stressed the uncertainties involved in reconstructing past temperatures.

Complicating matters, a simplified version of the hockey-stick chart appeared prominently in the 2001 report's "summary for policy makers"—a 34-page distillation of the full report. Thomas Stocker, a climate scientist at the University of Bern and member of the team that wrote the summary, said the team wrestled with how to make the summary "faithful to the full report and yet still comprehensible" to policy makers.

The hockey-stick chart is "the textbook example" of "how difficult the job really is" to summarize the full report, said Mr. Stocker, one of the top scientists overseeing the IPCC's next report, due in 2013 and 2014.

In retrospect, he said, the simplified version should have had more detail. It could suggest a clearer conclusion than the actual chart appearing deeper in the full report. "I think that was part of the problem—that we simplified it," he said. "It's not suppressing information, but it's making it harder for the rapid reader to have the full picture."

Another big issue: The accuracy of complex computer models that underpin the science. Run on supercomputers, these models try to predict how greenhouse-gas emissions might affect temperatures, and how temperatures might affect everything from glaciers to hurricanes.

In September 2000, Filippo Giorgi of the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, wrote a worried email. He said he felt pressure to cite simulations that hadn't yet been published in a scientific journal. He worried it showed a relaxation of standards.

The IPCC's rules "have been softened to the point that in this way the IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science (which is its proclaimed goal)," he wrote in the email. Mr. Giorgi added: "At this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes. I think this will set a dangerous precedent."

In an interview, Mr. Giorgi said the pressure he felt came from the panel overseeing his part of the report. The panel was co-chaired by Sir John Houghton, a scientist who previously had chaired the IPCC as a whole.

Mr. Houghton defended his panel's oversight. "Nobody was arguing for 'anything goes,'" he said this week. "Nobody was arguing for making choices that selected anything more dramatic or with a particular message," he said. "Everybody wanted to present the results in the most helpful as well as honest way."

Mr. Giorgi said that including the data ultimately did no harm, because the IPCC report included a disclaimer noting it hadn't appeared in a scientific journal. Eventually, he added, the work appeared in a journal.

Journal Communitydiscuss“ Skeptics grab on to one overstatement (or, in the case of Himalayan glaciers, one blatant mistake) and try to paint the IPCC as propaganda-driven fear-mongers. Most of the IPCC scientists work very hard and are very good at what they do. And they do not feel the need to go out on a limb, as they don't want to be wrong. ”

—Buzz Belleville Some researchers continued to feel pressure to boil down science as work began on the IPCC's fourth major report, published in 2007. Things that are "very difficult to quantify must be quantified to keep the policy makers happy," Mr. Alley, the geoscientist, who teaches at Penn State, said in an interview. "It's a very frustrating thing."

Mr. Alley walked that tightrope in helping write the chapter covering his specialty: the degree to which massive Greenland and antarctic ice sheets might melt, raising sea levels. The problem, he said: "Ice-sheet models are not very good."

Many conversations with policy makers—including Mr. Gore, the senators in Greenland and Christian Gaudin, a French senator—left the clear impression that "we scientists had better get better numbers," said Mr. Alley, adding that he understands their desire for detail.

So the scientists put numbers into the 2007 study, along with a big caveat—what Mr. Alley calls a "punt." The study took into account things like glacier melt in most of the world, but it noted that it excluded what's happening in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which "we can't predict," Mr. Alley said.

Inevitably, Mr. Alley said, some people have cited the numbers without that caveat.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Gore said he understands the uncertainties, and that he pointed out in statements "that there was essentially an asterisk" on the 2007 report's sea-level projections. "As he understands the situation from the ice-science community, the uncertainty in sea level applies in both directions," meaning sea-level rise could be greater or smaller than projected, her statement said.

In an interview, Mr. Gaudin, the French senator, recalled having lunch with Mr. Alley on a visit to Penn State where they discussed the interplay between scientists and politicians on the "big questions that interest society," notably climate change. Scientific reports, including the IPCC's, "need to have more precision," Mr. Gaudin said. It is "difficult for politicians to make a decision" otherwise.

Mr. Marburger, the former Bush science adviser, said he frequently heard policy makers express frustration at the lack of certainty in many areas of science, including climate. "'Why can't we get better numbers?' Everybody asks that," he said. "But science rarely gives you the right answer. Science tells you what the situation is, but it doesn't tell you what to do."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405...;s_Most_Popular

You should click the link and look at the pictures as well.

February 28, 2010

Warming panel, under attack, seeks outside review

By SETH BORENSTEIN (AP) – 3 hours ago

WASHINGTON — The Nobel Prize-winning international scientific panel studying global warming is seeking independent outside review for how it makes major reports.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it's seeking some kind of independent review because of recent criticism about its four 2007 reports.

Critics have found a few unsettling errors, including projections of retreats in Himalayan glaciers, in the thousands of pages of the reports.

Scientists say the problems are minor and have nothing to do with the major conclusions about man-made global warming and how it will harm people and ecosystems. But researchers acknowledge that they have been too slow to respond to a drip-drip-drip of criticisms in the past three months. And those criticisms seem to have resonated in poll results and media coverage that has put climate scientists on the defensive.

"The IPCC clearly has suffered a loss in public confidence," Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, a chairman of one of the IPCC's four main research groups told The Associated Press on Saturday. "And one of the things that I think the world deserves is a clear understanding of what aspects the IPCC does well and what aspects of the IPCC can be improved."

An independent review "is much needed," said University of Colorado environmental studies scientist Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime critic of the IPCC.

"The IPCC has a long road ahead to regain trust," Pielke said by e-mail.

In a statement issued Saturday by overall IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri the group of volunteer scientists said it tries to be accurate and follow procedures.

"But we recognize the criticism that has been leveled at us and the need to respond," Pachauri said in the statement.

One example of the criticism was a Senate speech earlier this month when Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., called problems with the IPCC "the makings of a major scientific scandal."

"There is a crisis of confidence in the IPCC," Inhofe said Feb. 11. "The challenges to the integrity and credibility of the IPCC merit a closer examination by the US Congress."

The panel shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with former Vice President Al Gore. The panel was created by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization.

Pachauri's statement said the panel consulted with the United Nations and plans to find "distinguished experts" to review how it write its reports.

There were no details on how the review would be done. They will come sometime in early March, according to Pachauri's statement.

But one of the troubles is that the IPCC is written by most of the world's top experts in climate science. And the experts who don't write it, often review it, so it's hard to find someone both independent and knowledgeable.

That's why the IPCC is most likely to find an outside organization or group — such as a scientific society of a national academy of science — to run the review, Field said.

That panel would then make the decision on who should be part of the review and if former IPCC authors should be part of it. Scientists who write or review the panel's reports say they do not get paid, but sometimes get reimbursed for travel expense and in the end often lose money on the deal.

University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who has been an IPCC author in the past, called the IPCC plan and statement "an appropriate and measured response."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...IjxkuwD9E4Q9Q00

February 28, 2010

From The Times

February 27, 2010

University ‘tried to mislead MPs on climate change e-mails’

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

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The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails has been accused of making a misleading statement to Parliament.

The University of East Anglia wrote this week to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee giving the impression that it had been exonerated by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). However, the university failed to disclose that the ICO had expressed serious concerns that one of its professors had proposed deleting information to avoid complying with the Freedom of Information Act.

Professor Phil Jones, director of the university’s Climatic Research Unit, has stepped down while an inquiry takes place into allegations that he manipulated data to avoid scrutiny of his claims that manmade emissions were causing global warming. Professor Edward Acton, the university’s vice-chancellor, published a statement he sent to the committee before giving evidence to MPs at a public hearing on Monday. He said a letter from the ICO “indicated that no breach of the law has been established [and] that the evidence the ICO had in mind about whether there was a breach was no more than prima facie”.

But the ICO’s letter said: “The prima facie evidence from the published e-mails indicate an attempt to defeat disclosure by deleting information. It is hard to imagine more cogent prima facie evidence.”

Related Links

* Sceptics publish stolen climate e-mails

* Climate change: an apocalyptic vision of Britain

The letter also confirmed the ICO’s previous statement that the university had failed in its duties under the Freedom of Information Act by rejecting requests for data. The university had demanded that the ICO withdraw this statement.

The ICO letter, signed by Graham Smith, the deputy commissioner, said: “I can confirm that the ICO will not be retracting the statement ...The fact that the elements of a section 77 offence may have been found here, but cannot be acted on because of the elapsed time, is a very serious matter.

“The ICO is not resiling from its position on this.”

The ICO cannot prosecute the university because the complaint about its rejection of the information request was made too late. The ICO is seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach of the act.

Dr Evan Harris, Liberal Democrat member of the Science and Technology Committee, said: “It seems unwise, at best, for the University of East Anglia to attempt to portray a letter from the Information Commissioner’s Office in a good light, in evidence to the select committee, because it is inevitable that the Committee will find that letter, and notice any discrepancy.

“It would be a wiser course for the university not to provide any suspicion that they might be seeking to enable the wrong impression to be gained.”

An ICO spokesman said: “The commissioner has provided the select committee with a copy of the January 29 letter to which the university referred in a press statement.

“This is so that the committee can be aware of the full contents. The commissioner has not been invited to give evidence to the committee but stands ready to assist the inquiry.”

A spokeswoman for the university said: “The point Professor Acton was making is that there has been no investigation so no decision, as was widely reported. The ICO read e-mails and came to assumptions but has not investigated or demonstrated any evidence that what may have been said in emails was actually carried out.”

The university last night published its correspondence with the ICO on its website .

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/envi...icle7043566.ece

February 28, 2010

Hurricane predictions in doubt...the question has to be asked. Did they try to get both sides of the science when awarding research grants and putting scare stories into the media?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/envi...t=12&page=2

From The Sunday Times

February 28, 2010

UN's climate link to hurricanes in doubt

Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

Research by hurricane scientists may force the UN’s climate panel to reconsider its claims that greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the number of tropical storms.

The benchmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that a worldwide increase in hurricane-force storms since 1970 was probably linked to global warming.

It followed some of the most damaging storms in history such as Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and Hurricane Dennis which hit Cuba, both in 2005.

The IPCC added that humanity could expect a big increase in such storms over the 21st century unless greenhouse gas emissions were controlled.

The warning helped turn hurricanes into one of the most iconic threats of global warming, with politicians including Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, and Al Gore citing them as a growing threat to humanity.

The cover of Gore’s newest book, Our Choice, even depicts an artist's impression of a world beset by a series of huge super-hurricanes as a warning of what might happen if carbon emissions continue to rise.

However, the latest research, just published in Nature Geoscience, paints a very different picture.

It suggests that the rise in hurricane frequency since 1995 was just part of a natural cycle, and that several similar previous increases have been recorded, each followed by a decline.

Looking to the future, it also draws on computer modelling to predict that the most likely impact of global warming will be to decrease the frequency of tropical storms, by up to 34% by 2100.

It does, however, suggest that when tropical storms do occur they could get slightly stronger, with average windspeeds rising by 2-11% by 2100. A storm is termed a hurricane when wind speeds exceed 74mph, but most are much stronger. A category 4 or 5 hurricane such as Katrina generates speeds in excess of 150mph.

“We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said Chris Landsea, a lead scientist at the American government’s National Hurricane Center, who co-authored the report.

He added: ”There are a lot of legitimate concerns about climate change but, in my opinion, hurricanes are not among them. We are looking at a decrease in frequency and a small increase in severity.” Landsea said he regarded the use of hurricane icons on the cover of Gore's book as "misleading".

Although the new report appears to criticise the IPCC it could mark a new start, showing that the beleagured body can recognise its mistakes and correct them as mistakes or new science emerge.

The Nature Geosciences study was actually commissioned by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), a UN agency which helps oversee the IPCC, in an attempt to resolve the bitter scientific row that had emerged over the relationship between global warming and tropical storms.

That row dates back to the hurricane season of 2004 when four major hurricanes hit north and central America.

It prompted senior IPCC scientists to give a press conference at Harvard University warning that global warming would cause many more such storms.

The claims attracted worldwide attention but Landsea pointed out there was no science so substantiate them and was so angry that he resigned his post as a senior IPCC author in January 2005, issuing a letter accusing the IPCC of having become “politicised”.

He added in the letter : “All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones.”

The following year seemed to have proved him wrong when North and Central America were hit by a series of tropical storms plus seven major hurricanes, including Katrina, which devastated New Orleans.

However he and other researchers have spent the years since then gathering historical evidence showing that hurricane frequency and intensity vary according to an entirely natural cycle, each lasting around 50-80 years.

The last such surge began around 1925 and lasted until about 1955. Conversely there were declines in frequency between both 1910-1925 and from 1955-1995.

Such findings have generated continuing tension among storm researchers and criticism of the IPCC’s stance, so the WMO brought together 10 leading scientists from all sides of the argument to try to resolve it.

Led by Thomas Knutson, a renowned hurricane researcher at Princeton University, the group also included Landsea and Kerry Emanuel, professor of meteorology at MIT. Kerry was a leading proponent of the idea that global warming meant more severe hurricanes.

Julian Heming, an expert in tropical storms at the Met Office, said: “Several of the authors have clashed in the past so the fact that they have co-authored this paper shows they have been prepared to adjust their stance on the basis of the recent research. ”

The IPCC’s reaction to the paper is uncertain but the organisation has confirmed it is reviewing several recent questions raised over its research and considering corrections where appropriate. One senior IPCC scientist, Professor Chris Field, has said he wants the IPCC to bring in new systems for checking and correcting its reports as important mistakes and new findings emerge.

Last Friday environment and climate ministers meeting in Bali also ordered a separate independent review of the IPCC’s leadership under Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

It followed articles in The Sunday Times highlighting the IPCC’s false claim that climate change could melt most Himalayan glaciers by 2035.

The ministers — led by Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, and his counterparts from Germany, Norway, Algeria and Antigua and Barbuda — said they were not questioning the basic science behind global warming.

Instead, they were concerned with the “aggressive” way in which Dr Pachauri had responded to criticism, including denouncing Indian research suggesting that the glaciers were not melting so rapidly as “voodoo science”.

A spokesman for Gore said the cover of Our Choice was not a scientific diagram but "an artist's rendering of an earth where unchecked global warming has wreaked havoc."

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n3/abs/ngeo779.html

February 28, 2010

It is very important that the climategate inquiry is impartial.

******************************************************

Sceptics seek second Climategate panel casualty

By Channel 4 News

Updated on 27 February 2010

Climate sceptics look to take another scalp from the panel investigating the conduct of scientists researching climate change, following leaked emails from the University of East Anglia, writes Nick Scott-Plummer.

(credit:Reuters)

Two weeks ago one member of a panel charged with reviewing the conduct of scientists at the centre of the so-called climategate email row resigned after Channel 4 News revealed comments which called into question his claim to impartiality.

Now climate sceptics are raising questions about another member of the review, although their evidence has been challenged by the scientist concerned.

The audio of an interview that forced Philip Campbell's resignation first emerged on one of the leading climate sceptic blogs.

Now that loose-knit community has turned up another internet link which they claim shows another panellist, Professor Boulton, may not have been honest about links to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (PICC) potentially compromising his independence.

The website for the Independent Climate Change Email Review emphasises that none of its panel "have any links to the Climatic Research Unit, or the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)".

At its launch press conference the head of the inquiry, former civil servant Sir Muir Russell, emphasised: "We are completely independent. We're free to reach any conclusions that we wish. We are free to follow questions wherever they take us."

But Steve McIntyre, a Canada-based sceptic deeply involved in challenging the climate change consensus, has unearthed an apparent copy of Professor Boulton's CV from 2007 in which the last line says he [boulton] was a "contributor to G8 preparatory groups and Intergovernmental Panels on climate change".

It is not clear whether this is meant to refer to the IPCC itself but the curious case of the purported CV has been leapt upon by many in the sceptic blogosphere who are convinced Professor Boulton has something to hide.

In a statement, the email review panel said: "Professor Boulton has had no formal contact with the IPCC. He has not been a member of the panel nor made any submissions to it".

And when Channel 4 News asked about the claim on the CV, we received this puzzling reply: "The CV published online today is not correct. Professor Boulton has no idea where the final statement referring to the G8 and IPCC comes from, or where/when it has been added. The statement has not featured in his previous CVs."

Professor Boulton sent Channel 4 News a copy of his 2007 CV which did not have the final line. Asked whether he was implying dirty tricks we received another email: "Professor Boulton has no CV with that line on it, because there is no reason for it", adding: "people are free to draw their own conclusions as to why it seems to have appeared now".

Channel 4 News has contacted the IPCC - which confirmed Professor Boulton had no involvement with the latest report. But the UN body also admitted that record keeping about scientists' involvement with the IPCC and earlier reports was not very complete.

So stalemate in another skirmish between the climate change sceptics in the blogosphere and what they regard as the climate science establishment.

Whilst comments made by Philip Campbell to the Chinese radio station proved potentially sufficiently partial for him to feel his position had been compromised, here the sceptics appear not have found the smoking gun.

But this episode is another example of the way the internet is dominating every aspect of the hacked emails saga.

A driven community of bloggers analysing and communicating about the smallest details, unearthing from the darkest corners of the web snippets of information about climate scientists that in some cases might just come back to haunt them.

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/scie...asualty/3564682

March 1, 2010

MARCH 1, 2010

Climate Group Plans Review

By JEFFREY BALL

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's announcement over the weekend that it will seek independent experts to investigate how factual errors were published in its latest report is a key aspect of the organization's effort to understand and divulge its institutional problems, officials there say.

The announcement by the United Nations-sponsored organization Saturday comes as it gears up to produce another big report on global warming.

The IPCC, which won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for a report that called climate change "unequivocal" and "very likely" caused by human activity, now says it will ask a committee of independent experts to assess why the report contained some factual errors, and to make recommendations as to how the IPCC can prevent such mistakes in the future.

Among the incidents that have cast doubt on the organization's credibility: More than 1,000 emails hacked from an influential U.K. climate-research lab whose research has figured in IPCC reports suggested that scientists there were trying to squelch other researchers who challenged research linking climate change with human activity; and the IPCC expressed "regret" last month that its 2007 report erroneously claimed that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

"We know that there were some problems" with the IPCC's 2007 report, which ran to about 3,000 pages, said Chris Field, a scientist and a leader of the IPCC's next report, due out in 2013 and 2014, in an interview on Sunday. "All the evidence so far is that the problems were relatively minor, but there were problems."

Some scientists who have long criticized the IPCC said an independent review won't be enough to fix what they see as systemic problems in the process by which the IPCC produces voluminous climate-science reports every five or six years.

"The IPCC has had 20 years in this and has become entrenched with a particular view of climate change," said John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He said IPCC reports end up minimizing discussion of dissenting views, a situation he attributes in part to the fact that national governments are involved in selecting which scientists will help write IPCC reports.

Mr. Field said the process by which scientists are chosen to help write IPCC reports "provides a balanced reflection of what's in the scientific literature. If one individual brings strong opinions one way or the other, the process is designed to keep those out."

IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri said in a statement Saturday that the IPCC hopes to have the details of the independent probe figured out by early March. He said IPCC leaders stand firmly behind the "rigour and robustness" of the 2007 report, whose "key conclusions are based on an overwhelming body of evidence from thousands of peer-reviewed and independent scientific studies." But, he said, they "recognize the criticism that has been leveled at us, and the need to respond."

The IPCC's review is likely to be done by a group of respected scientists from various countries, though who will conduct it is still being worked out, said Mr. Field, director of the Carnegie Institution for Science's department of global ecology, in Stanford, Calif. Among the options IPCC leaders are discussing is asking either an international scientific body or a handful of national scientific groups to conduct the review, he said.

"We're going to be incredibly open and quick in releasing further information as it becomes available," Mr. Field said.

The IPCC's 2007 report helped push climate change to the top of the political agenda in much of the world, including in the U.S., where it intensified discussion in Washington about potential legislation to cap greenhouse-gas emissions. But since late last year, several revelations have raised questions about the IPCC's objectiveness and accuracy in producing its reports. In addition to the questions raised by the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., and by the 2007 report's Himalayan glacier error, the 2007 report also said that about half of the Netherlands sits below sea level, which Mr. Field said is an error. That error would appear to overstate concern about flooding in the Netherlands. In fact, the portion of the Netherlands below sea level is lower, Mr. Field said; about half the country is believed at risk for flooding.

An important part of the independent review, Mr. Field said, will be coming up with a way for the IPCC to quickly and accurately correct errors in its reports—a procedure it now lacks.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405...=googlenews_wsj

March 1, 2010

Seriously. Global warming causes earthquakes. How can the media print this?

This one will be a must watch for study.

Seriously...connecting earthquakes to global warming? Wow... Firstly they can't predict weather 1 or 2 or 3 days in advance let alone 10 days or 100 years. They can't predict with any scientific certainty any pending earthquakes. So now they are going to somehow show a causal link? Please can anyone say "desperate"? That is desperate to take peoples minds off the errors that keep coming up. Trying to say this definitely takes away any credibility the scientists have.

****************************************

Robin McKie

The Observer, Sunday 6 September 2009

Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters

Scientists at a London conference next week will warn of earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered. Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis

Scientists are to outline dramatic evidence that global warming threatens the planet in a new and unexpected way – by triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions.

Reports by international groups of researchers – to be presented at a London conference next week – will show that climate change, caused by rising outputs of carbon dioxide from vehicles, factories and power stations, will not only affect the atmosphere and the sea but will alter the geology of the Earth.

Melting glaciers will set off avalanches, floods and mud flows in the Alps and other mountain ranges; torrential rainfall in the UK is likely to cause widespread erosion; while disappearing Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets threaten to let loose underwater landslides, triggering tsunamis that could even strike the seas around Britain.

At the same time the disappearance of ice caps will change the pressures acting on the Earth's crust and set off volcanic eruptions across the globe. Life on Earth faces a warm future – and a fiery one.

"Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too," said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London (UCL).

"Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something," added McGuire, who is one of the organisers of UCL's Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards conference, which will open on 15 September. Some of the key evidence to be presented at the conference will come from studies of past volcanic activity. These indicate that when ice sheets disappear the number of eruptions increases, said Professor David Pyle, of Oxford University's earth sciences department.

"The last ice age came to an end between 12,000 to 15,000 years ago and the ice sheets that once covered central Europe shrank dramatically," added Pyle. "The impact on the continent's geology can by measured by the jump in volcanic activity that occurred at this time."

In the Eiffel region of western Germany a huge eruption created a vast caldera, or basin-shaped crater, 12,900 years ago, for example. This has since flooded to form the Laacher See, near Koblenz. Scientists are now studying volcanic regions in Chile and Alaska – where glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking rapidly as the planet heats up – in an effort to anticipate the eruptions that might be set off.

Last week scientists from Northern Arizona University reported in the journal Science that temperatures in the Arctic were now higher than at any time in the past 2,000 years. Ice sheets are disappearing at a dramatic rate – and these could have other, unexpected impacts on the planet's geology.

According to Professor Mark Maslin of UCL, one is likely to be the release of the planet's methane hydrate deposits. These ice-like deposits are found on the seabed and in the permafrost regions of Siberia and the far north.

"These permafrost deposits are now melting and releasing their methane," said Maslin. "You can see the methane bubbling out of lakes in Siberia. And that is a concern, for the impact of methane in the atmosphere is considerable. It is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas."

A build-up of permafrost methane in the atmosphere would produce a further jump in global warming and accelerate the process of climate change. Even more worrying, however, is the impact of rising sea temperatures on the far greater reserves of methane hydrates that are found on the sea floor.

It was not just the warming of the sea that was the problem, added Maslin. As the ice around Greenland and Antarctica melted, sediments would pour off land masses and cliffs would crumble, triggering underwater landslides that would break open more hydrate reserves on the sea-bed. Again there would be a jump in global warming. "These are key issues that we will have to investigate over the next few years," he said.

There is also a danger of earthquakes, triggered by disintegrating glaciers, causing tsunamis off Chile, New Zealand and Newfoundland in Canada, Nasa scientist Tony Song will tell the conference. The last on this list could even send a tsunami across the Atlantic, one that might reach British shores.

The conference will also hear from other experts of the risk posed by melting ice in mountain regions, which would pose significant dangers to local people and tourists. The Alps, in particular, face a worryingly uncertain future, said Jasper Knight of Exeter University. "Rock walls resting against glaciers will become unstable as the ice disappears and so set off avalanches. In addition, increasing meltwaters will trigger more floods and mud flows."

For the Alps this is a serious problem. Tourism is growing there, while the region's population is rising. Managing and protecting these people was now an issue that needed to be addressed as a matter of urgency, Knight said.

"Global warming is not just a matter of warmer weather, more floods or stronger hurricanes. It is a wake-up call to Terra Firma," McGuire said.

March 1, 2010

Climate scientists quizzed by British lawmakers

By SYLVIA HUI (AP) – 46 minutes ago

LONDON — Academics at a British climate research center at the center of a controversy about the science of global warming defended their work during cross-examination at Parliament on Monday, rejecting allegations that they manipulated climate data.

But a former researcher at the University of East Anglia's prestigious Climatic Research Unit admitted he had withheld some scientific data about global temperatures collected from around the world and written some "awful" e-mails to critics who asked to see his data.

The academics were questioned by lawmakers because a cache of e-mails stolen from the research center and leaked online last year appeared to show that scientists stonewalled climate skeptics, tried to pervert the scientific peer review process, and discussed ways to dodge Freedom of Information requests.

Their disclosure energized skeptics of man-made global warming, who seized on the e-mails as proof that scientists were conspiring to overstate the extent to which the earth was warming or making up the phenomenon entirely.

Questioned Monday by parliament's science committee on why the center did not make its raw climate data and methodology public, former UEA climate researcher Phil Jones said the data was withheld because it wasn't "standard practice" to release it.

He also said a small number of countries which supplied the information had refused to let his center publish it. But he insisted that similar data is publicly available from other sources, such as NASA.

Jones — who stepped down from his position as the head of the center after the e-mail scandal broke — admitted that he was wrong to refuse requests from critics to share his data.

"I've obviously written some really awful e-mails, I fully admit that," he said, referring to one e-mail in which he told a skeptic he didn't want to give him data because "people just wanted to find something wrong with it."

Edward Acton, the university's vice chancellor, argued that the e-mails did not undermine the science of global warming.

"There's absolutely nothing hidden ... it's so overly endorsed by scientists, I'm puzzled we should be working on a savoring of doubt when in fact there is no doubt," he told lawmakers and global warming skeptics.

The scientific community appears to agree with Acton — more than 1,700 researchers signed a statement defending the evidence for climate change late last year.

But some scientists said they were concerned the e-mails showed that the climate research center was intolerant to challenges and raised questions about its integrity.

"The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the (temperature) reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented," the Institute of Physics said.

The university has launched two parallel investigations into the climate center and its work, and police are still working to trace the source of the leak.

Associated Press writer Raphael G. Satter contributed to this report

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...ONVtIgD9E63SI00

March 2, 2010

From The Times

March 2, 2010

Prof Phil Jones, climate scientist, admits sending ‘awful’ e-mails

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The integrity of climate change research is in doubt after the disclosure of e-mails that attempt to suppress data, a leading scientific institute has said.

The Institute of Physics said that e-mails sent by Professor Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, had broken “honourable scientific traditions” about disclosing raw data and methods and allowing them to be checked by critics.

Professor Jones admitted to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee yesterday that he had “written some very awful e-mails”, including one in which he rejected a request for information on the ground that the person receiving it might criticise his work.

In a written submission to the committee, the institute said that, assuming the e-mails were genuine, “worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context”.

The e-mails contained “prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law”, it added.

The institute said that it was concerned by suggestions in the e-mails that Professor Jones and other scientists had worked together to prevent alternative views on global warming from being published. It said: “The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers.”

The institute said that doubts about the veracity of climate science could be overcome if scientists were required to make all their data “electronically accessible for all at the time of publication [of their reports]”.

Professor Jones stood down from his post during an independent inquiry into allegations that he manipulated data and attempted to evade legitimate requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.

The committee did not ask him about several of the most damaging e-mails he had sent, including one in which he asked a colleague to delete information that had been requested. The committee had been asked not to press him too closely because he was close to a nervous breakdown.

Professor Jones denied that he had tried to prevent alternative views being published by influencing the process of peer review under which scientific papers are scrutinised.

He said: “I don’t think there is anything in those e-mails that supports any view that I have been trying to pervert the peer review process . . .” He added that it “hasn’t been standard practice” in climate science for all data to be disclosed.

Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former Conservative Chancellor and a leading climate sceptic, said that those who wanted to check the university’s research should not have been forced to resort to making requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

He said: “Proper scientists, scientists of integrity, wish to reveal all of their data and all of their methods. They don’t need freedom of information requests to force it out of them.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/envi...icle7046036.ece

March 2, 2010

Updated March 02, 2010

Al's Latest Global-Warming Whopper

NYPost.com

Al Gore's defense of global-warming hysteria in Sunday's New York Times has many flaws, but I'll focus on just one whopper -- where the "Inconvenient Truth" man states the opposite of scientific fact.

Gore wrote, "The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere -- thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States."

It's an interesting theory, but where are the facts?

According to "State of the Climate" from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "Global precipitation in 2009 was near the 1961-1990 average." And there was certainly no pattern of increasing rain and snow on America's East Coast during the post-1976 years, when NOAA says the globe began to heat up.

So what was it, exactly, that Gore's nameless scientists "have long pointed out"? A 2008 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Climate Change and Water," says climate models "project precipitation increases in high latitudes and part of the tropics." In other areas, the IPCC reports only "substantial uncertainty in precipitation forecasts."

In other words, the IPCC said that its models predicted some increases in rain or snow -- not observed them. And only in high latitudes or the tropics, which hardly describes New York or Washington, DC.

In fact, recent research actually contradicts Gore's claims about "significantly more water moisture in the atmosphere."

In late January, Scientific American reported: "A mysterious drop in water vapor in the lower stratosphere might be slowing climate change," and noted that "an apparent increase in water vapor in this region in the 1980s and 1990s exacerbated global warming."

The new study came from a group of scientists, mainly from the NOAA lab in Boulder. The scientists found: "Stratospheric water-vapor concentrations decreased by about 10 percent after the year 2000 . . . This acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000 to 2009 by about 25 percent."

Specifically, the study found that water vapor rising from the tropics has been reduced, because it has gotten cooler there (another inconvenient truth). A Wall Street Journal headline summed it up: "Slowdown in Warming Linked to Water Vapor."

Moisture in the lower stratosphere (about 8 miles above the earth's surface) has been going down, not up.

Aside from clouds, water vapor accounts for as much as two-thirds of the earth's greenhouse-gas effect. Water vapor traps heat from escaping the atmosphere -- but clouds have the opposite effect (called "albedo") by reflecting the sun's energy back into space. And snow on the ground from the IPCC's predicted precipitation in high latitudes would have the same cooling effect as clouds.

What the new research suggests is that changes in water vapor may well trump the effect of carbon dioxide (only a fraction of which is man-made) and methane (which has mysteriously slowed since about 1990).

This raises an intriguing question: Since the Environmental Protection Agency declared that it has the authority to regulation carbon emissions because of their presumed effect on the global climate, why hasn't the EPA also attempted to regulate mist and fog?

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/02/...arming-whopper/

March 2, 2010

OPINION EUROPE MARCH 2, 2010, 5:16 P.M. ET

A Climate of Inquiry

U.N.-appointed experts to probe the failures of the original U.N.-appointed experts.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's weekend announcement that it would establish "an independent committee of distinguished experts" to evaluate its own procedures was intended to stem the tide of criticism washing over the U.N.'s arbiter of global-warming science. In practice, what this means is that another U.N.-appointed panel of "experts" will convene to review the failures of the original experts. This is less than reassuring.

So far, the climate-change establishment's efforts at damage control in the wake of the climategate email leak have left much to be desired. Take the "independent Climate Change Email Review" that the University of East Anglia is funding to look into its own Climatic Research Unit, which was at the center of the climategate controversy in November. The CRU panel's original team of six has already lost one member, Nature Editor-in-Chief Philip Campbell, who withdrew last month over challenges to his impartiality based on a December 2009 interview in which he said "The scientists [involved in the CRU emails] have not hidden the data. . . . they have behaved as researchers should."

Critics have also questioned Geoffrey Boulton's place on that CRU review panel. Mr. Boulton, today a professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, has in the past worked at the University of East Anglia's School of Environmental Science, which established CRU in 1972. More recently, Mr. Boulton signed a December 2009 petition, orchestrated by the U.K. Meteorological Office that has collaborated with CRU, declaring "the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities." The petition adds that "we uphold the findings of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report," which many of the Climategate scientists helped author. Mr. Boulton told us in an email that his ties to East Anglia were old enough for "any contacts or residual allegiance to have been long since severed," and stressed that his position on global warming was "irrelevant," given that the inquiry in which he's participating is meant to evaluate CRU's work, not the overarching hypothesis of man-made warming.

Prof. Boulton's defense, however, serves only to reveal his bias, which is that the scandal has nothing to say about the underlying science. Any thorough-going investigation, whether of the CRU and its fellow-travelers or of the IPCC process itself, would of necessity start with the question: How has what we've learned about how the science was done affected what we know about how the climate system works?

Some scientists have started to ask that question. The U.K.-based Institute of Physics recently told the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee that "unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context." It added that its concerns go "well beyond the CRU itself—most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change."

There's little evidence, alas, that these "worrying implications" are being followed up within the climate-change establishment, and no sign that Mr. Pachauri's inquiry will come within a country mile of them. In announcing the probe, Mr. Pachauri explained its necessity thus: "We recognize the criticism that has been leveled at us and the need to respond." In other words, Mr. Pachauri appreciates the need to appear to be doing something about the PR beating the global warming consensus has taken.

Two paragraphs down, Mr. Pachauri adds: "Meanwhile, we stand firmly behind the rigor and robustness of the 4th Assessment Report's conclusions. . . . based on an overwhelming body of evidence from thousands of peer-reviewed and independent scientific studies." That is to say, the outcome of Mr. Pachauri's inquiry has already been determined—the science will be found to be sound. Too bad for him that the IPCC is likely past the point where it can salvage its tattered reputation.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405...latestheadlines

Smitty · March 2, 2010

Wow, you are relentless Sundance. Not a bad thing.

I can tell you though, for the avg layperson, here's what we need:

I need a summary. I need a book condensing your position into, like 100 pages or less.

Then, I need the Sundancefisher - whomever that is - of the pro side - someone who is in complete opposite of your position, to give me the same book from the opposing point of view, without prejudice, a dispassionate look at the evidence.

Then I can read both and weigh in my mind.

Whatever it comes down too, humans need to reduce their footprint, no matter what. Even if there is no basis to this (human made global warming) right now, if the human pop. is expected to go from 6B to 9B in the next 40-70 years, we have to find a viable alternative energy.

This century will certainly be a turning point in human history, and that turning point - for good or ill - will come at a very real cost. Only so much time can be spent on certain tasks.

Smitty

Yes, I am dreaming. I hate to admit such ignorance, and perhaps its disgraceful, but I have merely scanned at least 90% of what you've written.

Did you ever see the documentary "Collapse". Roger Ebert called it "terrifying", and further said his BS meter never got past zero. Interesting. It was being shown at an arts theatre in downtown Edmonton, and I have to say, it was disturbing. But I am guilty of mixing in two concepts here: peak oil with glabl warming issue. But they are not mutually exclusive, IMHO.

March 3, 2010

Wow, you are relentless Sundance. Not a bad thing.

I can tell you though, for the avg layperson, here's what we need:

I need a summary. I need a book condensing your position into, like 100 pages or less.

Then, I need the Sundancefisher - whomever that is - of the pro side - someone who is in complete opposite of your position, to give me the same book from the opposing point of view, without prejudice, a dispassionate look at the evidence.

Then I can read both and weigh in my mind.

I find the whole media thing fascinating. About a year and a half ago...every single article I saw spelled doom and gloom. Everything bad was linked to global warming.

Now the media is swinging and reporting on the scientific ops that have occurred. I am tracking this hoping that there is some closure on the whole climate gate fiasco but more so...hopefully seeing more actual reporting and less blogging of personal bias and ideology...from one side or the other.

Cheers

Sun

P.S. It has been kept civil which is nice and also we have kept it locked to one thread. Maybe someone with time could track down recent pro warming point of view articles. I am not finding many and have put some in here.

March 3, 2010

Global warming may be normal at this point in glacial cycle

Happened last time (followed by Glacier UK), say profs

By Lewis Page

Posted in Environment,

3rd March 2010 10:59 GMT

German and Russian scientists say that it is normal for an interglacial period like the one just ending to finish with one or more brief - in geological terms - spells of warming before the glaciers return.

According to boffins based at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung (UFZ) and at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the Earth's history thus far there have been eras where the glaciers covered much of Europe, lasting about 100,000 years. These are separated by warmer interglacial periods lasting around 10,000 years. We are currently at the end of an interglacial era called the Holocene.

The scientists, looking into the last interglacial period - the Eemian - which ended around 115,000 years ago, say they have found that that it ended with "significant climate fluctuations" before the rule of the glaciers returned.

The scientists got their results by examining ancient lake sediments exposed by modern open-cast mining in Russia and Germany. They believe that the end of the Eemian interglacial epoch saw "possibly at least two" warming events, according to a statement issued by the UFZ.

"The observed instability with the proven occurrence of short warming events during the transition from the last interglacial to the last glacial epoch could be, when viewed carefully, a general, naturally occurring characteristic of such transition phases," concludes UFZ boffin Dr Tatjana Boettger.

Boettger and her fellow researchers say that the Eemian ice-free period wound up with sudden - in these terms - warming spells and serious changes in vegetation. Then the glaciers surged south, at their high tide 21,000 years ago reaching as far as Berlin.

This Weichselian Glacial era ended around 15,000 years ago, leading to the conditions which have been seen for all of human history with the ice caps confined to the polar regions. The UFZ says that this Holocene era reached its "highest point so far around 6000 years ago" and that we might now expect to see sudden warmings and changes as at the end of the Eemian - followed by a slow descent into another freezing glacial era.

"Detailed studies of these phenomena are important for understanding the current controversial discussed climate trend so that we can assess the human contribution to climate change with more certainty," comments Dr Frank W Junge of the Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Saxon Academy of Sciences, SAW) in Leipzig.

The profs' paper Instability of climate and vegetation dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe during the final stage of the Last Interglacial (Eemian, Mikulino) and Early Glaciation can be read here. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/03/gl...ng_seen_before/

March 3, 2010

Climate Fluctuations 115,000 Years Ago: Were Short Warm Periods Typical for Transitions to Glacial Epochs?

ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2010) — At the end of the last interglacial epoch, around 115,000 years ago, there were significant climate fluctuations. In Central and Eastern Europe, the slow transition from the Eemian Interglacial to the Weichselian Glacial was marked by a growing instability in vegetation trends with possibly at least two warming events. This is the finding of German and Russian climate researchers who have evaluated geochemical and pollen analyses of lake sediments in Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Russia.

Writing in Quaternary International, scientists from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), the Saxon Academy of Sciences (SAW) in Leipzig and the Russian Academy of Sciences say that a short warming event at the very end of the last interglacial period marked the final transition to the ice age.

The Eemian Interglacial was the last interglacial epoch before the current one, the Holocene. It began around 126,000 years ago, ended around 115,000 years ago and is named after the river Eem in the Netherlands. The followed Weichselian Glacial ended around 15,000 years ago is the most recent glacial epoch named after the Polish river Weichsel. At its peak around 21,000 years ago, the glaciers stretched as far as the south of Berlin (Brandenburg Stadium).

The researchers studied lake sediments to reconstruct the climate history of the Eemian Interglacial, since deposits on river and lake beds can build up a climate archive over the years. The sediment samples came from lakes that existed at the time, but which have since silted up and been uncovered in the former open cast mines at Gröbern near Bitterfeld, Neumark-Nord in the Geiseltal valley near Merseburg, and Klinge near Cottbus and at Ples on the upper reaches of the Volga, around 400 kilometres north-east of Moscow. Gröbern in Saxony-Anhalt is now seen by experts as one of the most studied places for Eemian Interglacial climate history in Germany. As well as pollen concentrations, the researchers analysed the level and ratios of stable carbon (13C/12C) and oxygen isotopes (18O/16O) in carbonates and organic matter from sediment layers, since these provide information about the vegetation development and an indication of the climate.

The results show a relatively stable climate over most of the time, but with instabilities at the beginning and end of the Eemian Interglacial. "The observed instability with the proven occurrence of short warming events during the transition from the last interglacial to the last glacial epoch could be, when viewed carefully, a general, naturally occurring characteristic of such transition phases," concludes Dr Tatjana Boettger of the UFZ, who analysed the sediment profiles at the UFZ's isotope laboratory in Halle. "Detailed studies of these phenomena are important for understanding the current controversial discussed climate trend so that we can assess the human contribution to climate change with more certainty," explains Dr Frank W. Junge of the SAW.

From reconstructions of climate history, we know that in the Earth's recent history, interglacial epochs occurred only once every 100,000 years or so and lasted for an average of around 10,000 years. The current interglacial epoch -- the Holocene -- has already lasted more than 10,000 years and reached its highest point so far around 6000 years ago. From a climate history perspective, we are currently at the end of the Holocene and could therefore expect to see a cooling-down in a few thousand years if there had been no human influence on the atmosphere and the resulting global warming.

With its expertise, the UFZ plays a part in researching the consequences of climate change and in developing adaptation strategies. You can find more on this in the special issue of the UFZ newsletter entitled "On the case of climate change" at http://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=10690

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/...00302111912.htm

March 3, 2010

Mass Loss from Alaskan Glaciers Overestimated? Previous Melt Contributed a Third Less to Sea-Level Rise Than Estimated

ScienceDaily (Mar. 3, 2010)

The melting of glaciers is well documented, but when looking at the rate at which they have been retreating, a team of international researchers steps back and says not so fast.

Previous studies have largely overestimated mass loss from Alaskan glaciers over the past 40-plus years, according to Erik Schiefer, a Northern Arizona University geographer who coauthored a paper in the February issue of Nature Geoscience that recalculates glacier melt in Alaska.

The research team, led by Étienne Berthier of the Laboratory for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography at the Université de Toulouse in France, says that glacier melt in Alaska between 1962 and 2006 contributed about one-third less to sea-level rise than previously estimated.

Schiefer said melting glaciers in Alaska originally were thought to contribute about .0067 inches to sea-level rise per year. The team's new calculations put that number closer to .0047 inches per year. The numbers sound small, but as Schiefer said, "It adds up over the decades."

While the team looked at three-fourths of all the ice in Alaska, Schiefer noted, "We're also talking about a small proportion of ice on the planet. When massive ice sheets (such as in the Antarctic and Greenland) are added in, you're looking at significantly greater rates of sea-level rise."

Schiefer said the team plans to use the same methodologies from the Alaskan study in other glacial regions to determine if further recalibrations of ice melt are in order. These techniques use satellite imagery that spans vast areas of ice cover.

Previous methods estimated melt for a smaller subset of individual glaciers. The most comprehensive technique previously available used planes that flew along the centerlines of selected glaciers to measure ice surface elevations. These elevations were then compared to those mapped in the 1950s and 1960s. From this, researchers inferred elevation changes and then extrapolated this to other glaciers.

Two factors led to the original overestimation of ice loss with this method, Schiefer said. One is the impact of thick deposits of rock debris that offer protection from solar radiation and, thus, melting. The other was not accounting for the thinner ice along the edges of glaciers that also resulted in less ice melt.

Schiefer and his colleagues used data from the SPOT 5 French satellite and the NASA/Japanese ASTER satellite and converted the optical imagery to elevation information. They then compared this information to the topographical series maps of glacial elevations dating back to the 1950s.

While the team determined a lower rate of glacial melt during a greater than 40-year span, Schiefer said other studies have demonstrated the rate of ice loss has more than doubled in just the last two decades.

"With current projections of climate change, we expect that acceleration to continue," Schiefer said. This substantial increase in ice loss since the 1990s is now pushing up the rise in sea level to between .0098 inches and .0118 inches per year -- more than double the average rate for the last 40 years.

Working on the Alaskan glacial melt revision with Schiefer and Berthier were Garry Clarke of the University of British Columbia, Brian Menounos of the University of Northern British Columbia and Frédérique Rémy of the Université de Toulouse.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/...00302123124.htm

March 3, 2010

El Niño and a Pathogen, Not Global Warming, Killed Costa Rican Toad

ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2010)

Scientists broadly agree that global warming may threaten the survival of many plant and animal species; but global warming did not kill the Monteverde golden toad, an often cited example of climate-triggered extinction, says a new study. The toad vanished from Costa Rica's Pacific coastal-mountain cloud forest in the late 1980s, the apparent victim of a pathogen outbreak that has wiped out dozens of other amphibians in the Americas.

Many researchers have linked outbreaks of the deadly chytrid fungus to climate change, but the new study asserts that the weather patterns, at Monteverde at least, were not out of the ordinary.

The role that climate change played in the toad's demise has been fiercely debated in recent years. The new paper, in the March 1 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the latest to weigh in. In the study, researchers used old-growth trees from the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve to reconstruct moisture levels in that region over the last century. They expected to see global warming manifested in the form of a long-term warming or drying trend, but instead discovered that the forest's dry spells closely tracked El Niño, the periodic and natural warming of waters off South America that brings drought to some places and added rainfall and snow to others.

The golden toad vanished after an exceptionally dry season following the 1986-1987 El Niño, probably not long after the chytrid fungus was introduced. Scientists speculate that dry conditions caused the toads to congregate in a small number of puddles to reproduce, prompting the disease to spread rapidly. Some have linked the dry spell to global warming, arguing that warmer temperatures allowed the chytrid pathogen to flourish and weakened the toad's defenses. The new study finds that Monteverde was the driest it's been in a hundred years following the 1986-1987 El Niño, but that those dry conditions were still within the range of normal climate variability. The study does not address amphibian declines elsewhere, nor do the authors suggest that global warming is not a serious threat to biodiversity.

"There's no comfort in knowing that the golden toad's extinction was the result of El Niño and an introduced pathogen, because climate change will no doubt play a role in future extinctions," said study lead author Kevin Anchukaitis, a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Average global temperatures have climbed about 0.8 degrees (1.4 degrees F) in the past hundred years, and some studies suggest that mountain regions are warming even more. In search of favorable conditions, alpine plants and animals are creeping to higher altitudes -- not always with success.

In a 2006 paper in Nature, a team of U.S. and Latin American scientists linked rising tropical temperatures to the disappearance of 64 amphibian species in Central and South America. They proposed that warmer temperatures, associated with greater cloud cover, had led to cooler days and warmer nights, creating conditions that allowed the chytrid fungus to grow and spread. The fungus kills frogs and toads by releasing poison and attacking their skin and teeth. "Disease is the bullet killing frogs, but climate change is pulling the trigger," the lead author of the Nature study and a research scientist at the Monteverde reserve, J. Alan Pounds, said at the time.

The new study in PNAS suggests that it was El Niño -- not climate change -- that caused the fungus to thrive, killing the golden toad. "El Niño pulled the trigger," said Anchukaitis

Proving a link between climate change and biodiversity loss is difficult because so many overlapping factors may be at play, including habitat destruction, introduction of disease, pollution and normal weather variability. This is especially true in the tropics, because written weather records may go back only a few decades, preventing researchers from spotting long-term trends.

In the last decade, scientists have improved techniques for reconstructing past climate from tiny samples of wood drilled from tropical trees. Unlike trees in northern latitudes, tropical trees may grow year round, and often do not form the sharply defined growth rings that help scientists differentiate wet years from dry years in many temperate-region species. But even in the tropics, weather can leave an imprint on growing trees. During the dry season, trees take up water with more of the heavy isotope, oxygen-18, than oxygen-16. By analyzing the isotope ratio of the tree's wood, scientists can reconstruct the periods of rainfall and relative humidity throughout its life.

On two field trips to Costa Rica, Anchukaitis sampled nearly 30 trees, looking for specimens old enough, and with enough annual growth, to be studied. Back in the lab, he and study co-author Michael Evans, a climate scientist at University of Maryland, analyzed thousands of samples of wood trimmed to the size of pencil shavings.

Their results are only the latest challenge to the theory that climate change is driving the deadly chytrid outbreaks in the Americas. In a 2008 paper in the journal PLoS Biology, University of Maryland biologist Karen Lips mapped the loss of harlequin frogs from Costa Rica to Panama. She found that their decline followed the step-by-step pattern of an emerging infectious disease, affecting frogs in the mountains but not the lowlands. Had the outbreak been climate-induced, she said, the decline should have moved up and down the mountains over time.

Reached by e-mail, Pounds said he disagreed with the PNAS study. He said that his own 40-year rainfall and mist-cover measurements at Monteverde show a drying trend that the authors missed because they were unable to analyze moisture variations day to day or week to week. The weather is becoming more variable and extreme, he added, favoring some pathogens and making some animals more susceptible to disease.

"Anyone paying close attention to living systems in the wild is aware that our planet is in serious trouble," he said. "It's just a matter of time before this becomes painfully obvious to everyone."

Scientists think climate change may drive plants and animals to extinction by changing their habitats too quickly for them to adapt, shrinking water supplies, or by providing optimal conditions for diseases. Researchers have established links between population declines and global warming, from sea-ice dependent Adelie and emperor penguins, to corals threatened by ocean acidification and warming sea temperatures.

Warming ocean temperatures are likely to have some effect on El Niño, but scientists are still unsure what they will be, said Henry Diaz, an El Niño expert at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency. He said the paper offers strong evidence that climate change was not a factor in the El Niño dry season that coincided with the golden toad's extinction. "Climate change is best visualized as large-scale averages," he said. "Getting down to specific regions, Costa Rica, or the Monteverde cloud forest, it's hard to ascribe extinctions to climate change."

That does not mean humans are off the hook, said Evans. "Extinctions happen for reasons that are independent of human-caused climate change, but that does not mean human-caused climate change can't cause extinctions," he said.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/...00301151925.htm

March 3, 2010

Global Warming May Hurt Some Poor Populations, Benefit Others

ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2010)

The impact of global warming on food prices and hunger could be large over the next 20 years, according to a new Stanford University study. Researchers say that higher temperatures could significantly reduce yields of wheat, rice and maize -- dietary staples for tens of millions of poor people who subsist on less than $1 a day. The resulting crop shortages would likely cause food prices to rise and drive many into poverty.

But even as some people are hurt, others would be helped out of poverty, says Stanford agricultural scientist David Lobell.

"Poverty impacts depend not only on food prices but also on the earnings of the poor," said Lobell, a center fellow at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). "Most projections assume that if prices go up, the amount of poverty in the world also will go up, because poor people spend a lot of their money on food. But poor people are pretty diverse. There are those who farm their own land and would actually benefit from higher crop prices, and there are rural wage laborers and people that live in cities who definitely will be hurt."

Lobell and his colleagues recently conducted the first in-depth study showing how different climate change scenarios could affect incomes of farmers and laborers in developing countries. He presented the results on Feb. 20 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

Household incomes

In the study, Lobell, former FSE researcher Marshall Burke and Purdue University agricultural economist Thomas Hertel focused on 15 developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Hertel has developed a global trade model that closely tracks the consumption and production of rice, wheat and maize on a country-by-country basis. The model was used to project the effects of climate change on agriculture within 20 years and the resulting impact on prices and poverty.

Using a range of global warming forecasts, the researchers were able to project three different crop-yield scenarios by 2030:

"Low-yield" -- crop production is toward the low end of expectations.

"Most likely" -- projected yields are consistent with expectations.

"High-yield" -- production is higher than expected.

"One of the limitations of previous forecasts is that they don't consider the full range of uncertainties -- that is, the chance that things could be better or worse than we expect," Lobell said. "We provided Tom those three scenarios of what climate change could mean for agricultural productivity. Then he used the trade model to project how each scenario would affect prices and poverty over the next 20 years.

"The impacts we're talking about are mainly driven by warmer temperatures, which dry up the soil, speed up crop development and shut down biological processes, like photosynthesis, that plants rely on," he added. "Plants in general don't like it hotter, and in many climate forecasts, the temperatures projected for 2030 would be outside the range that crops prefer."

Results

The study revealed a surprising mix of winners and losers depending on the projected global temperature. The "most likely" scenario projected by the International Panel on Climate Change is that global temperatures will rise 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) by 2030. In that scenario, the trade model projected relatively little change in crop yields, food prices and poverty rates.

But under the "low-yield" scenario, in which temperatures increase by 2.7 F (1.5 C), the model projects a 10 to 20 percent drop in agricultural productivity, which results in a 10 to 60 percent rise in the price of rice, wheat and maize. Because of these higher prices, the overall poverty rate in the 15 countries surveyed was expected to rise by 3 percent.

However, an analysis of individual countries revealed a far more complicated picture. In 11 of the 15 countries, poor people who owned their own land and raised their own crops actually benefitted from higher food prices, according to the model. In Thailand, for example, the poverty rate for people in the non-agricultural sector was projected to rise 5 percent, while the rate for self-employed farmers dropped more than 30 percent -- in part because, as food supplies dwindled, the global demand for higher-priced crops increased.

"If prices go up and you're tied to international markets, you could be lifted out of poverty quite considerably," Lobell explained. "But there are a lot of countries, like Bangladesh, where poor people are either in urban areas or in rural areas but don't own their own land. Countries like that could be hurt quite a lot. Then there are semi-arid countries -- like Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi -- where even if prices go up and people own land, productivity will go down so much that it can't make up for those price increases. In the 'low-yield' scenario, those countries would see higher poverty rates across all sectors."

Under the "high-yield" scenario, in which global temperatures rise just 0.9 F (0.5 C), crop productivity increased. The resulting food surplus led to a 16 percent drop in prices, which could be detrimental to farm owners. In Thailand, the poverty rate among self-employed farmers was projected to rise 60 percent, while those in the non-agriculture sector saw a slight drop in poverty. In Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi and Uganda, poverty in the non-farming sector was projected to decline as much as 5 percent.

Risk management

Lobell said that, although the likelihood of the "low-yield" or "high-yield" scenario occurring is only 5 percent, it is important for policymakers to consider the full range of possibilities if they want to help countries adapt to climate change and ultimately prevent an increase in poverty and hunger.

"It's like any sort of risk management or insurance program," he said. "You have to have some idea of the probability of events that have a big consequence. It's also important to keep in mind that any change, no matter how extreme, will benefit some households and hurt others."

The Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford is an interdisciplinary research and teaching program that generates policy solutions to the persistent problems of global hunger and environmental damage from agricultural practices worldwide. The program is jointly run by Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Relevant Web URLs

Program on Food Security and the Environment http://foodsecurity.stanford.edu/

Woods Institute for the Environment http://woods.stanford.edu/

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/...00220184329.htm

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