Boston Environmental Policy ExaminerThomas Richard
President Obama, speaking in Pittsburgh June 2, vowed to find the votes to pass the dead-on-arrival cap-and-tax bill first introduced by Sens. Kerry and Lieberman. The Gulf Coast oil spill, he said, has shown us the need to “aggressively” seek a clean energy future.
Tying the catastrophic oil spill to possible future climate change falls under the dictum of not letting a good crisis go to waste. Even though oil drilling is one of the safest forms of oil extraction, and that deepwater oil drilling is still relatively new and on a continual learning curve, Obama is determined to rip the country off our oil addiction and put everyone in a wind-powered vehicle.
Reiterating his almost obsessive desire to tax us from cradle to grave, Obama stated, “The only way to do that is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution.” This despite that the cap-and-tax bill is stuck in the Senate and will remain there as long as public opinion is firmly rooted in reality and keeps saying no to further energy increases.
Realizing he has until November 2010 to get this done, when a mass-exodus of Democrats will likely be leaving Congress by choice or design, Obama is ready to pull a rabbit from his magical hat by reinterpreting the constitution and ramming legislation through. He noted that the House of Representatives had already “passed a climate change bill”, which sounds eerily familiar for it was his one-note prelude before passing the Healthcare bill into law.
“The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century,” said Obama. As survey after survey has shown, no one is in the throes of Stockholm syndrome or inclined to pay more for unreliable “clean” energy. The combustion engine brought many in the world out of poverty and ushered in an age of unfathomable invention and non-linear thinking.
The only persons whining about our use of fossil fuel, and doing it loudly and unsparingly, are narrow-minded politicians, Pollyanna-ish green-gooders, and environmental religious groups. Dogma has now replaced science; rhetorical flourishes have now replaced sound judgment.
Sadly, Obama is already saying that the Gulf oil disaster could be the result of “human error—or corporations taking dangerous shortcuts that compromised safety.” If this sounds like the TV show Jeopardy, it’s because Obama created a presidential commission to find the answer. Will anyone be surprised if the commission’s results are an Obama-styled self-fulfilling prophesy?
Keep in mind that this disaster happened under Obama’s watch. The people in charge of the Minerals Management Service (MMS), which oversees offshore oil drilling and royalties, is run by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, an Obama appointee. If Salazar was unable to clean up the MMS’s cozy relationship with the oil companies, and do it in a timely fashion since he was appointed, then Salazar should be quickly dispersed.
Blaming the Bush/Cheney administration is getting tiresome and people can see right through the charade. Anyone who has ever worked in any kind of company knows that personnel changes take a month or two, not a year and a half. That’s just being lazy and overlooking the obvious problems of your underlings and policies.
Cleaning up the MMS doesn’t need an act of Congress. It needed a Secretary of the Interior who knew what he was doing from the get-go. And a president who didn’t wait two weeks to actually visit the Gulf Coast. Who has their boot on the neck of Salazar?
“We also have to acknowledge that an America run solely on fossil fuels should not be the vision we have for our children and grandchildren,” said Obama. This amazing statement of hubris, telling the American people what their vision should be, is nothing new. He used the same rationale with healthcare reform and illegal immigration. Now he’s prepping us again for climate change taxation. Read more here.
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Pacific islands growing, not sinking
By Philippa McDonald in Auckland
Climate scientists have expressed surprise at findings that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking. Islands in Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia are among those which have grown, largely due to coral debris, land reclamation and sediment.
The findings, published in the magazine New Scientist, were gathered by comparing changes to 27 Pacific islands over the last 20 to 60 years using historical aerial photos and satellite images. Auckland University’s Associate Professor Paul Kench, a member of the team of scientists, says the results challenge the view that Pacific islands are sinking due to rising sea levels associated with climate change. “Eighty per cent of the islands we’ve looked at have either remained about the same or, in fact, gotten larger,” he said. “Some of those islands have gotten dramatically larger, by 20 or 30 per cent.
“We’ve now got evidence the physical foundations of these islands will still be there in 100 years.”
Dr Kench says the growth of the islands can keep pace with rising sea levels. “The reason for this is these islands are so low lying that in extreme events waves crash straight over the top of them,” he said. “In doing that they transport sediment from the beach or adjacent reef platform and they throw it onto the top of the island.”
But Dr Kench says this does not mean climate change does not pose dangers. “The land may still be there but will they still be able to support human habitation?” he asked.
Adelaide University climate scientist Professor Barry Brook says he is surprised by the findings. “Sea levels are obviously rising - I think in the short term [the study] suggests that there’s maybe more time to do something about the problem than we’d first anticipated,” he said. “But the key problem is that sea level rise is likely to accelerate much beyond what we’ve seen in the 20th century.”
Naomi Thirobaux, from Kiribati, has studied the shape of Pacific islands for her PhD and says no-one should be lulled into thinking erosion and inundation is not taking its toll and displacing people from their land. “In a populated area what would happen was that if it’s eroding, a few metres would actually displace people,” she said. “In a populated place people can’t move back or inland because there’s hardly any place to move into, so that’s quite dramatic.”
Both Dr Kench and Dr Brook and scientists agree further rises in sea levels pose a significant danger to the livelihoods of people living in Tuvalu, Kirabati and the Federated States of Micronesia. See post here.
ICECAP Note: When data doesn’t fit the models or projections it is either wrong or misleading. Again faith is placed unwarrantedly in the models for the future. See another view from a realist without blinders on, here.
By Paul Chesser
As has been reported here regularly, global warming alarmists have been losing to their opponents on the facts, on their credibility, in the public’s eyes. Now there’s the possibility they could actually lose a Congressional seat to a climate realist, and that really scares them.
Dr. Art Robinson, co-founder of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine and director of the Global Warming Petition Project which has collected the signatures of more than 31,000 scientists who dissent from climate catastrophism, is the Republican nominee to challenge Rep. Peter DeFazio in Oregon’s 4th District. The prospect of a Robinson victory in this year of Tea Party momentum has the state’s official climatologist (and data-fudger) Philip Mote in a tizzy, as he expressed in an email from his Oregon State University account to a listserv of other academics and students. The Oregon Politico reports:
Mote began the e-mail by acknowledging that Art Robinson was chosen during last week’s Republican primary race to run against incumbent Democrat Congressman Peter DeFazio, who represents the Eugene area. Robinson gained fame with his work on the Oregon Petition Project, a list of scientists worldwide who disagree with the premise that climate change is caused by humans.
“A Robinson [sic] victory would put us in the tragic ranks of our climate colleagues at University of Oklahoma (Senator ‘global warming is a hoax’ Inhofe) and Univ of Alaska (Rep. ‘scientists have their opinion, I have mine’ Young),” wrote Mote.
ICECAP explains a bit of Mote’s history, which fits nicely with the Climategate narrative:
Phil Mote...published a cherry picked data analysis allegedly linking western snowpack to global warming....Mote’s paper while state climatologist for Washington State was published readily by the sadly advocacy driven [American Meteorological Society]. The much more qualified Oregon state climatologist he subsequently replaced, George Taylor, and the Assistant Washington State Climatologist Mark Albright (who Mote stripped of his title for questioning Mote’s hypothesis)—and even UWA warmist Professor Cliff Mass—published papers that showed by analyzing the entire record you see no trend but a cyclical change related clearly to the [Pacific Decadal Oscillation]. See how with the recent change to the negative PDO, heavy snow has returned to the Pacific Northwest. Given the imminent return to La Nina and forecast for deepening of the negative PDO stage, another wild winter with deep snowpack is likely.
Mote apparently received a wrist-slap from OSU, as he wrote a later email to the listserv to apologize and calling the original one “a mistake.”
How is it so many of these activist climate scientists are so gaffe-prone?
Update 12:18 p.m.: My friend Todd Myers at the Washington Policy Center calls attention to another instance two years ago, when Mote had to recant incorrect testimony he gave to the state legislature.
Read more here.
By The Washington Times
Former Vice President Al Gore was at his peak when the film “An Inconvenient Truth” made its initial Hollywood splash. Faith in man-made global warming had never been more widespread, with liberal academics and media subjecting to ridicule any who dared question the “settled science.” Only a fool could deny that elevated carbon-dioxide levels had melted ice caps and stranded polar bears on rapidly diminishing ice floes.
How the tables have turned in a short time. On May 20, Oxford Union, the prestigious 187-year-old English debating society, formally considered the question of whether it was more important to focus on growing the economy or solving global warming. Climate realism won the day, 135 to 110. It’s no wonder, considering how the purportedly scientific arguments advanced in support of the scaremongering conclusions have fallen apart since the Climategate scandal invited verification of the left’s previously unexamined claims.
During the debate, Lord Whitty, former environment minister under the Labor government, claimed 95 percent of scientists were in agreement that man was responsible for a coming climatic cataclysm. Lord Monckton, representing climate realists, asked him to provide a reference backing up the claim. The audience jeered Lord Whitty for having none beyond, “Everyone knows it’s true.”
When the best the warmists can come up with is an appeal to authority, their case is lost for good. That’s why, just a few days earlier, climate realists gathered in triumph on this side of the pondat a Heartland Institute climate-change conference in Chicago. Eminent scientists presented a wealth of evidence suggesting nature is, in fact, a much more powerful factor affecting the climate than man. That realism suggests the need for moderation when it comes to political action based on climate data.
“We think we need public policy that’s based in facts, rather than facts that are based on a public agenda,” Colorado State University professor Scott Denning said.
Once outcasts on the fringe of the scientific community, these individuals braved the ridicule of the self-appointed “enlightened” members of society to dismantle systematically the hockey sticks and other frauds crafted by leftists over the years.
In 1895, the New York Times suggested the Earth was headed toward a “second glacial period” in which “countries now basking in the fostering warmth of the tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.” By 1923, the Gray Lady had decided, “The Arctic seems to be warming up” as “so little ice has never before been noted.” By the 1970s, schoolchildren were indoctrinated by textbooks blaming a new ice age on man’s Earth abuse.
All this begs the question of how long it will take the warmist crew to readjust their scare story to win back the public. The majority firmly rejects their socialist prescription to solve an imaginary problem.
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Treasury and CSIRO both have breached trust
Terry McCrann From: The Australian
FEDERAL Treasury and the CSIRO are supposed to be among the most trusted institutions in Australia. They are both supposed to be founded in objective rationalism.
The Treasury building in Canberra houses the greatest collection of economic analytical and policymaking brainpower in Australia. The same, in the fields of science, goes for the CSIRO in Melbourne. Together they should form the rock-solid foundation of policymaking in Australia.
We need to be able to trust Treasury to advise the government based on the best possible economic analysis. Arguably its most important task is to deploy its economic heft against usually well-intentioned “good ideas at the time”, or failing that to at least limit their damage.
From the CSIRO we need, very simply, good science. As its own strategic plan puts it: “We are committed to scientific excellence and working ethically and with integrity in everything we do.”
Both have, in their separate ways, breached that trust. This is a very serious matter for the governance of Australia. If we can’t trust Treasury to give us rational economics and we can’t trust the CSIRO to give us good, or even just honest, science—as in both cases they have generally done for a good three-quarters of a century or more—we are adrift in a sea of irrationalism.
For that, indeed, is what links the two failures: in each case an apparent triumph of theology over reason. First the CSIRO.
In March, it joined with the Bureau of Meteorology to produce a “snapshot of the state of the climate to update Australians about how their climate has changed and what it means”. Although the pamphlet had a neutral title, “State of the Climate”, it was clearly designed to bring the great weight of the apparent credibility of these two organisations to bear against, and hopefully crush, those pesky climate change sceptics.
But as one of the peskier of them, Tom Quirk—our version of Canada’s even peskier Stephen McIntyre—discovered, there was a very curious omission in one of the CSIRO graphs. It showed the rise and rise of concentrations in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and its fellow greenhouse gas methane. It was an almost perfect replica of the infamous (Michael) Mann Hockey Stick. After being virtually stable for 900 years, concentrations of both CO2 and methane went almost vertical through the 20th century. But as the eagle-eyed Quirk noticed and wrote about on Quadrant Online, methane was plotted only up to 1990, while the plots for CO2 continued to 2000. Why so, when the CSIRO measures methane concentrations and has data up to last year?
Did the answer lie in the inconvenient truth that methane concentrations have plateaued since the mid-1990s? Yet here is the CSIRO, the organisation dedicated to scientific truth, pretending—even stating—that they’re still going up, Climategate style. This is bad enough, but just as with Treasury, real policies are built on this sort of “analysis”. The first version of the so-called carbon pollution reduction scheme included farming to address the methane question. But as Quirk has shown in a peer-reviewed paper, atmospheric methane is driven by a combination of volcanos, El Ninos and pipeline (mostly dodgy old Soviet) leakage.
A second curious, and even dodgier, thing happened after Quirk’s Quadrant report. CSIRO “updated” its main graph to include the more recent methane data. No admission was made and the graph’s scale made it all but invisible and did not show the plateauing. Further, the CSIRO published a more detailed second graph showing what has happened in the past 30 years, as opposed to the first graph’s 1000 years. But only for CO2, despite the fact that it had exactly the same data for methane.
In short, the CSIRO is a fully signed-up member of the climate change club. It wanted to project the horror story of continually rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. So it simply disappeared inconvenient evidence to the contrary, in the process announcing it cannot be trusted ever again to deliver objective scientific evidence.
Read more here.
Newsweek
Bickering and defensive, climate researchers have lost the public’s trust.
Blame economic worries, another freezing winter, or the cascade of scandals emerging from the world’s leading climate-research body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But concern over global warming has cooled down dramatically. In uber-green Germany, only 42 percent of citizens worry about global warming now, down from 62 percent in 2006. In Britain, just 26 percent believe climate change is man-made, down from 41 percent as recently as November 2009. And Americans rank global warming dead last in a list of 21 problems that concern them, according to a January Pew poll.
The shift has left many once celebrated climate researchers feeling like the used-car salesmen of the science world. In Britain, one leading scientist told an interviewer he is taking anti-anxiety pills and considered suicide following the leak of thousands of IPCC-related e-mails and documents suggesting that researchers cherry-picked data and suppressed rival studies to play up global warming. In the U.S., another researcher is under investigation for allegedly using exaggerated climate data to obtain public funds. In an open letter published in the May issue of Science magazine, 255 American climate researchers decry “political assaults” on their work by “deniers” and followers of “dogma” and “special interests.”
This is no dispute between objective scientists and crazed flat-earthers. The lines cut through the profession itself. Very few scientists dispute a link between man-made CO2 and global warming. Where it gets fuzzy is the extent and time frame of the effect. One crucial point of contention is climate “sensitivity” - the mathematical formula that translates changes in CO2 production to changes in temperature. In addition, scientists are not sure how to explain a slowdown in the rise of global temperatures that began about a decade ago.
The backlash against climate science is also about the way in which leading scientists allied themselves with politicians and activists to promote their cause. Some of the IPCC’s most-quoted data and recommendations were taken straight out of unchecked activist brochures, newspaper articles, and corporate reports - including claims of plummeting crop yields in Africa and the rising costs of warming-related natural disasters, both of which have been refuted by academic studies.
Just as damaging, many climate scientists have responded to critiques by questioning the integrity of their critics, rather than by supplying data and reasoned arguments. When other researchers aired doubt about the IPCC’s prediction that Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, the IPCC’s powerful chief, Rajendra Pachauri, trashed their work as “voodoo science.” Even today, after dozens of IPCC exaggerations have surfaced, leading climate officials like U.N. Environment Program chief Achim Steiner and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research head Joachim Schellnhuber continue to tar-brush critics as “anti-Enlightenment” and engaging in “witch hunts.”
None of this means we should burn fossil fuels with abandon. There are excellent reasons to limit emissions and switch to cleaner fuels - including an estimated 750,000 annual pollution deaths in China, the potential to create jobs at home instead of enriching nasty regimes sitting on oil wells, the need to provide cheap sources of power to the world’s poorest regions, and the still-probable threat that global warming is underway. At the moment, however, certainty about how fast - and how much - global warming changes the earth’s climate does not appear to be one of those reasons.
Ben Webster, Environment Editor
Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.
The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.
The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect - there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.”
The admission that the society needs to conduct the review is a blow to attempts by the UN to reach a global deal on cutting emissions. The Royal Society is viewed as one of the leading authorities on the topic and it nominated the panel that investigated and endorsed the climate science of the University of East Anglia.
Sir Alan Rudge, a society Fellow and former member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee, is one of the leaders of the rebellion who gathered signatures on a petition sent to Lord Rees, the society president.
He told The Times that the society had adopted an “unnecessarily alarmist position” on climate change.
Sir Alan, 72, an electrical engineer, is a member of the advisory council of the climate sceptic think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
He said: “I think the Royal Society should be more neutral and welcome credible contributions from both sceptics and alarmists alike. There is a lot of science to be done before we can be certain about climate change and before we impose upon ourselves the huge economic burden of cutting emissions.”
He refused to name the other signatories but admitted that few of them had worked directly in climate science and many were retired.
“One of the reasons people like myself are willing to put our heads above the parapet is that our careers are not at risk from being labelled a denier or flat-Earther because we say the science is not settled. The bullying of people into silence has unfortunately been effective.”
Only a fraction of the society’s 1,300 Fellows were approached and a third of those declined to sign the petition.
The rebels are concerned by a document entitled Climate Change Controversies, published by the society in 2007. The document attempts to refute what it describes as the misleading arguments employed by sceptics.
The document, which the society has used to influence media coverage of climate change, concludes: “The science clearly points to the need for nations to take urgent steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, as much and as fast as possible, to reduce the more severe aspects of climate change.”
Lord Rees admitted that there were differing views among Fellows but said that the new guide would be “based on expert views backed up by sound scientific evidence”.
Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at LSE, urged the other signatories to come forward. “If these scientists have doubts about the science on climate change, they should come out and speak about it.”
He said that the petition would fuel public doubt about climate change and that it was important to know how many of the signatories had professional knowledge of the topic.
By Robert Lee Hotz
WEST ANTARCTICA—At a camp here on Earth’s remotest continent, American researchers have constructed a towering drill that, like a biopsy needle, periodically plunges thousands of feet into the ice to extract an exotic marrow of frozen gases and isotopes.
Their work could settle a central question in the dispute over climate change, by documenting how greenhouse gases influenced temperatures in the past. Only then can researchers accurately analyze climate changes that may be under way today.
Until now, that information was hidden in Antarctica’s ancient ice.
Scientists agree that global temperatures are rising, and so are levels of carbon dioxide. But the immediate impact of human activity on natural climate cycles—from ice-sheet dynamics to wind and ocean currents—remains unclear. The Antarctica research could, for the first time, teach scientists how global warming developed when humankind had no hand in it.
“One of the questions that everybody is interested in with greenhouse gases is, did the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations occur before or after the increase in temperatures in the past climate changes?” says glaciologist Kendrick Taylor, chief scientist of the $30 million U.S. National Science Foundation project. “Ice cores are the only way we can answer that question.”
Ten times a day, scientists here recently winched up a 10-foot cylinder of compacted ice crystals containing the unsullied air and chemicals trapped by snowfall for the past 100,000 years.
Each cylinder preserves bubbles of ancient air and layers of elements swept here by global winds. The ice records the annual rise and fall of greenhouse gases and temperatures every year since before the last Ice Age, laminated by the cold in a parfait of time two miles thick.
In March, a shipment of this rare ice completed an 8,000-mile journey to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, where it will be parceled out for analysis. Only Antarctica offers such a detailed calendar of climate change, the scientists say.
Since November, revelations of errors in reports by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have sapped public confidence in climate predictions. The scientists in Antarctica are excavating the ice as a reality check on computer climate models at the heart of today’s regulatory debates.
Much of the current controversy over climate change centers on efforts to reconstruct past temperatures using what is known as “proxy” data from tree rings, harvest records, sea beds and lake sediments. Unlike ice cores, which contain telltale gases and particles from ages ago, the proxy data offer only indirect or fragmentary evidence of climate trends.
“Unfortunately many of our proxies have significant errors and are prone to be a slave to assumptions,” says climatologist John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who has often criticized the IPCC. His research, using temperature readings from NOAA and NASA satellites, has undermined arguments that the atmosphere is warming at an unusual rate.
The ice-core data from Antarctica is “terribly important,” Dr. Christy says. “We really need to know what the climate did before we can answer why it did what it did. If it happened before, it will happen again, and probably worse.”
The camp here, 600 miles from the South Pole, is called WAIS Divide, named for its place atop a regional divide of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. In January, 45 scientists, technicians and support staffers labored here at a cost of about $3 million for the season. They worked around the clock, inside an icehouse, probing a plateau of ice so thick that the continent sags beneath its weight.
The first samples already reveal intriguing evidence of climate complexity. In ice layers attributed to the Middle Ages, when Europe was unusually warm, the team found surprisingly high levels of carbon black particles, or soot. Levels were found to be twice as high as during the more heavily populated and industrialized 20th century, says geochemist Ross Edwards at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev.
Overlooked in climate projections until recently, carbon black is a powerful warming agent. The soot, scientists speculate, came from giant wildfires that likely occurred in Australia and South America. So much soot could have raised temperatures.
Preliminary tests also showed that soot levels dropped during the cooler centuries after the Middle Ages, a period known as the Little Ice Age.
With more ice data, scientists hope to pin down the role of carbon dioxide in past global-warming episodes. Rising levels of greenhouse gases like CO2 in the atmosphere today are attributed to fossil-fuel emissions, land-use changes, cement production and agriculture. But no one is certain what made greenhouse gases fluctuate in the past.
During Ice Age cycles of cooling and warming, temperatures often rose before levels of carbon dioxide changed—sometimes 800 years or so before—according to previous evidence of ice from Antarctica.
“You don’t expect the cause to follow the effect,” says atmospheric scientist Richard S. Lindzen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a frequent IPCC critic. “That’s become an important issue.”
Skeptics of carbon dioxide’s role in global warming have made much of this discrepancy. They don’t question the reliability of the data, but its interpretation, Dr. Lindzen says.
Climate scientists offer explanations for the lag, from periodic variations in solar radiation due to Earth’s orbit and changing ocean currents, to problems with the dating of the data itself. But they lack enough information to prove them.
The ice may hold the answer. “This ice core is going to allow us to really look at the cause-and-effect relationship between CO2 [carbon dioxide] and climate and temperature change,” says Julie Palais, head of the NSF’s Antarctica glaciology program, which is funding the project. “That should give us the smoking gun.”
To ensure accuracy, 27 independent laboratories will analyze the ice cores during the next three years. They expect to analyze 40 different trace chemicals related to climate, some in levels down to parts per quadrillion.
At every stage, the scientists must be able to prove that the ice cores haven’t been contaminated. They must also make sure the samples stay at minus-20 degrees Celsius or so throughout their 8,000-mile journey to Colorado. Otherwise, the key gases will dissipate.
“Its credibility is of crucial importance,” said Thomas Stocker at the University of Bern in Switzerland, a co-chairman of the United Nations working group that assesses data for the IPCC.
Antarctica is a vast climate-science laboratory. For millennia, each new storm here captured the dust and chemicals brought by high-altitude winds from warmer latitudes and concentrated them at the bottom of the earth as the snow piled up and compressed into ice.
Gradually, the snow pack became a periodic table of elements and temperatures 11,365 feet deep. “Because it never melts, they are perfectly preserved,” says hydrologist Ray Banta from the Desert Research Institute, who is analyzing the ice.
Dr. Taylor and his colleagues chose the remote drilling site in part because the snow and ice here accumulates about 10 times faster than most places in Antarctica. That means the annual layers are thicker and easier to tell apart.
Winter snowflakes are usually smaller and more densely packed, easily distinguished from the looser summer snow. By testing differences in acidity and electrical conductivity, researchers can also distinguish one year from the next.
Ice cores excavated elsewhere before in Antarctica have tapped into even more ancient ice. But none of these ice cores offered such well-defined annual layers as those here at the WAIS Divide.
Scientists here expect to harvest extremely detailed data for each of the past 40,000 years, plus another 60,000 years of data using both proven and experimental measuring techniques. Modern records of carbon dioxide levels go back a mere 50 years, and reliable temperature readings cover only the last 150 years or so.
By measuring oxygen isotopes, the scientists can track the rise and fall of seasonal temperatures. Sulfates and ash reveal volcanic eruptions, which can help determine the age of the ice.
Light isotopes of carbon in the ice can suggest the extent of vegetation elsewhere in the world. Calcium and a rare earth element called cerium hint at the extent of the world’s deserts, while sodium is a measure of ocean storminess and sea spray. Soot and ammonium record wildfires. Methane is a clue to distant rainfall. Beryllium indicates changes in solar radiation.
The snow also traps air. “In between snowflakes, there are holes,” says Anais Orsi, a climate researcher from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “As they get compacted into ice, it seals in the air.”
Each ice core is about 10% ancient air—a time capsule of the atmosphere unchanged from the year it formed. “It is as if you opened a flask of air sampled 100,000 years ago or so,” says Dr. Stocker in Bern. “It gives you direct, unbiased, unchanged access to its physical and chemical properties.”
Spinning at 80 revolutions per minute, the $8 million drill chewed through the ice with four hardened tool-steel cutters, boring ever deeper into ice that bottoms out a mile below sea level.
Every few hours, technicians from the University of Wisconsin in Madison put a narrow log of ice taken from the drill barrel into a frigid work room, where, bundled in red government-issue parkas, researchers inspected it, measured it and cut it into 3-foot sections for easier handling.
Their cheeks were blushed from frost; their eyes reddened by the glare of polar ultra-violet light. Stiff wisps of hair whitened by frost framed their faces. As they handled the ice, they kept an extra pair of gloves warming in an oven, to don when their work gloves froze and fingers stiffened.
They slept in unheated tents on a snowfield smooth as a starched shirt. They were allocated one bucket of snow to melt for a shower once a week and three buckets of snow for laundry. In blizzard winds, crews slung guide ropes so that people could safely feel their way to the nearest outhouse.
Working conditions are so harsh the researchers consider themselves lucky to run the drill 35 days a year. By the end of January they had drilled 1.5 miles into the ice. They packaged 4,500 feet of ice cores in individual three-foot tubes, padded with snow. Then, they packed up the entire camp onto 68 wooden pallets for storage on the open ice cap until they can return next season. It may be another year or so before they can reach the bottom of the ice cap.
The New York Air National Guard flew the year’s shipment of ice to McMurdo Station, the main U.S. supply base in Antarctica.
There it was put into three refrigerated containers for shipment aboard a freighter across the tropics to Port Hueneme, Calif., where it arrived March 8. Then, the ice was driven across the desert to Denver.
The refrigerated containers each have a back-up power generator and a back-up compressor, which are triggered automatically if the temperature drops. A refrigeration technician accompanies the units. The temperature of the containers is also logged via satellite.
“If it warms past minus 15 degrees C, it is worthless,” says Geoffrey Hargreaves, curator of the National Ice Core Laboratory.
There are four back-up systems to make sure everything stays safely frozen. In the worst case, technicians can flood the facility with liquid carbon dioxide.
Sometime this summer, technicians will start sawing the ice up into small samples and shipping them to laboratories around the country, often via overnight mail. The samples then will be vaporized to free the air and elements within for analysis.
At the peak of activity earlier this year, the crew guided the drill 100 feet deeper into the ice sheet every 24 hours, and another 365 years further into the past.
“The drill is basically a time machine,” said planetary geologist Maria Banks from the Smithsonian’s Center for Earth & Planetary Studies. As she spoke, she carefully wiped down a cylinder of ice that had fallen as snow 15,800 years ago.
By Roger Harrabin, BBC
The UK’s Royal Society is reviewing its public statements on climate change after 43 Fellows complained that it had oversimplified its messages.
They said the communications did not properly distinguish between what was widely agreed on climate science and what is not fully understood.
The society’s ruling council has responded by setting up a panel to produce a consensus document.
The panel should report in July and the report is to be published in September.
It is chaired by physicist John Pethica, vice-president of the Royal Society.
Its deliberations are reviewed by two critical sub-groups, each believed to comprise seven members.
Each of these groups contains a number of society Fellows who are doubtful in some way about the received view of the risks of rising CO2 levels.
Continue reading the main story It’s not clear to me how we are going to get precise agreement on the wording
Review member
One panel member told me: “The timetable is very tough - one draft has already been rejected as completely inadequate.”
The review member said it might not be possible for the document to be agreed at all. “This is a very serious challenge to the way the society operates,” I was told. “In the past we have been able to give advice to governments as a society without having to seek consensus of all the members.
“There is very clear evidence that governments are right to be very worried about climate change. But in any society like this there will inevitably be people who disagree about anything - and my fear is that the society may become paralysed on this issue.”
Another review member told me: “The sceptics have been very strident and well-organised. It’s not clear to me how we are going to get precise agreement on the wording - we are scientists and we’re being asked to do a job of public communication that is more like journalism.”
But both members said they agreed that some of the previous communications of the organisation in the past were poorly judged.
Question everything
A Royal Society pamphlet Climate Change Controversies is the main focus of the criticism. A version of it is on the organisation’s website. It was written in response to attacks on mainstream science which the Royal Society considered scurrilous.
It reads: “This is not intended to provide exhaustive answers to every contentious argument that has been put forward by those who seek to distort and undermine the science of climate change…”
One Fellow who said he was not absolutely convinced of the dangers of CO2 told me: “This appears to suggest that anyone who questions climate science is malicious. But in science everything is there to be questioned - that should be the very essence of the Royal Society. Some of us were very upset about that.
“I can understand why this has happened - there is so much politically and economically riding on climate science that the society would find it very hard to say ‘well, we are still fairly sure that greenhouse gases are changing the climate’ but the politicians simply wouldn’t accept that level of honest doubt.”
Another society protester said he wanted to be called a climate agnostic rather than a sceptic. He said he wanted the society’s website to “do more to question the accuracy of the science on climate feedbacks” (in which a warming world is believed to make itself warmer still through natural processes).
“We sent an e-mail round our friends, mainly in physical sciences,” he said.
“Then when we had got 43 names we approached the council in January asking for the website entry on climate to be re-written. I don’t think they were very pleased. I don’t think this sort of thing has been done before in the history of the society.
“But we won the day, and the work is underway to re-write it. I am very hopeful that we will find a form of words on which we can agree.
“I know it looks like a tiny fraction of the total membership (1,314) but remember we only emailed our friends - we didn’t raise a general petition.”
Precautionary principle
He said the agnostics were also demanding a “more even-handed” bibliography.
The first “climate agnostic” also said he was angry at previous comments from the previous president Lord May who declared: “The debate on climate change is over.”
Lord May was once quoted as saying: “‘On one hand, you have the entire scientific community and on the other you have a handful of people, half of them crackpots.”
One source strongly criticised the remarks.
Lord May’s comments were made at a time when world scientists were reaching a consensus (not unanimity) that CO2 had warmed the planet and would probably warm it more - maybe dangerously so.
Lobbyists funded by the fossil fuel industry were fighting to undermine that consensus and science academies were concerned that public doubt might deter governments from taking precautionary action to reduce emissions of CO2.
Climate change doubters among the society’s Fellows say that in their anxiety to support government action, the academies failed to distinguish between “hired guns” and genuine scientific agnostics wanting to explore other potential causes of climate change.
The remit of the society panel is to produce a new public-facing document on what scientists know, what they think they know and which aspects they do not fully understand. The task is to make the document strong and robust.
It should answer the complaint that previous communications have failed to properly explain uncertainties in climate science.
Language of risk
At the Heartland Institute climate sceptics conference in Chicago, Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), criticised the current society president Lord Rees for what he described as exaggerating the certainty in a joint public letter with Ralph Cicerone, president of the US National Academy of Sciences.
The letter, published by the Financial Times newspaper, states: “Something unprecedented is now happening. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising and climate change is occurring, both due to human actions…. Uncertainties in the future rate of (temperature) rise, stemming largely from the ‘feedback’ effects on water vapour and clouds, are topics of current research.”
Professor Lindzen says the “unprecedented” statement is misleading because neither the current warming nor the CO2 level are unprecedented. He complains that the statement on uncertainties is also misleading because it does not reveal that uncertainties about future climate projections are, in his view, immense.
A spokesman for the society defended the letter, saying that the rise in man-made CO2 was indeed unprecedented. But Professor Lindzen told me: “This is part of an inflation of a scientific position which has sadly become rather routine for spokesmen for scientific bodies.”
The forthcoming Royal Society publication - if it can be agreed by the review panel - will be scrutinised closely because the society carries huge weight in global science. Under Lord May it was prime mover of a joint letter of international academies stating that climate change was a major concern.
The comments from the current president Lord Rees in his first Reith lecture next week are rather carefully measured and couched in the language of risk rather than certainty - but even in this speech, critics are likely to say that in some particulars he does not sufficiently distinguish between what is certain and what is very widely believed. See post here.
Too late. The Royal Society like the National Academy under Ralph Cicerone have lost credibility by abusing the science and taking an advocacy position supporting politically-driven,, ecologically-driven agendas.
By Stephen Dinan
The man battling NASA for access to potential “Climategate” e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.
Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.
Mr. Horner said he expects the documents, primarily e-mails from scientists involved with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), will be yet another blow to the science behind global warming, which has come under fire in recent months after e-mails from a leading British research unit indicated scientists had manipulated some data.
“What we’ve got is the third leg of the stool here, which is the U.S.-led, NASA-run effort to defend what proved to be indefensible, and that was a manufactured record of aberrant warming,” Mr. Horner said. “We assume that we will also see through these e-mails, as we’ve seen through others, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws like FOIA.”
He said with a global warming debate looming in the Senate, NASA may be trying to avoid having embarrassing documents come out at this time, but eventually the e-mails will be released.
“They know time is our friend,” said Mr. Horner, author of “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.”
Mark S. Hess, a spokesman for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which overseas the climate program, said the agency is working as fast as it can, and that Mr. Horner should expect some answers any day.
“It looks like the response to his appeal is probably going to happen very soon. I can’t tell you it’s going to be tomorrow or the next day, but it’s just a matter of days,” Mr. Hess said.
He said he hasn’t seen the response, and doesn’t know whether it will authorize any more information to be released.
The science behind global warming has come under question since e-mails leaked from one of the key sources for global temperature data, the Climatic Research Unit in Britain, seemed to show scientists manipulated data. It became known in the press as “Climategate.”
An investigation has cleared the scientists of deliberate malpractice and declared the basic science credible.
The British investigation also sympathized with scientists being reluctant to share all of their data, but investigators said the science needed to be above reproach and so the more that is shared, the better.
In the case of NASA’s FOIA situation, The Washington Times first reported on the agency’s delinquency in December. At that time, the agency was more than two years overdue on one request and nearing the two-year mark on another request - far longer than the 20 business days allowed under FOIA law for a first response.
After that report, the agency released about 2,000 pages, many of them heavily redacted, to CEI. Mr. Horner said among those pages was evidence he said proves NASA data is based on the British records that have come under fire.
But CEI said the agency withheld e-mails NASA scientists sent from nongovernment e-mails, even though they were doing government science work.
Mr. Horner said he has evidence one scientist went back and deleted time stamps on his Internet postings to his private website, which Mr. Horner said shows the scientist was doing that work on government time.
CEI’s lawsuit, which is expected to be filed in federal district court in Washington, also says that e-mails leaked from the British research unit include documents that should have been released by NASA, but haven’t been.
Mr. Hess said they are fielding more than just CEI’s inquiries, and they are taking them all in order.
“We all understand the statute is 20 days, and we work really hard to comply with that as much as humanly possible, but for the most part, especially for a request where you may have to search thousands of documents, sometimes 20 days is just a herculean task,” he said.
Some of the NASA scientists Mr. Horner targeted with requests have spoken out against the recent FOIA inquiries, calling them an effort to try to intimidate scientists into not publishing their work.
Gavin Schmidt said information requests have ballooned in recent months and that he thinks those making the inquiries are trying “to put a chilling effect on scientists speaking out in public.”
And James E. Hansen, director of GISS, said in a March memo that responding to FOIAs takes away from his time to do research.
He called it “a waste of taxpayer money” and questioned the motives of those filing FOIA requests.
“It seems that a primary objective of the FOIA requesters and the ‘harvesters’ is discussions that they can snip and quote out of context,” he said, warning that could confuse the public and that might delay the pressure Mr. Hansen said will be needed to force policymakers to combat global warming.
The document fight comes as the Senate is preparing for two global warming debates.
One will be on a Republican move to try to overturn Obama administration rules that would let the Environmental Protection Agency regulate carbon emissions, even without specific new authorization from Congress. The second is expected to be a full-blown debate on Democrats’ bill to combat global warming.
On Wednesday, President Obama said he wants to see action.
“I’m going to keep fighting to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation in Washington,” he said at an event in California. “We’re going to try to get it done this year, because what we want to do is create incentives that will fully unleash the potential for jobs and growth in this sector.”
See full post and comments here. See post in Legal times here.