Skeptico

Upper Stratosphere Cooling

After a couple of months absence, I decided to take a look again at the pit of denialism and logical fallacies that is this thread on Joanne Nova’s “global warming isn’t caused by humans” blog. If you scroll down to comment #110 you’ll see I responded to someone who had asked, “Can you name a single piece of empirical evidence that man-made carbon raises temperatures?” Note, a “single piece of empirical evidence” – not numerous pieces, not proof, but just one thing.  You’ll see that I replied with, “…the cooling of the upper stratosphere.  And no, that’s not due to ozone.” Follow the link and you’ll see that cooling of the upper stratosphere is a prediction of global warming caused by increased carbon dioxide. If such a prediction were found to be true, then this would be one piece of evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Now, Joanne Nova has a sleazy little habit, which is to wait several weeks after a comment is made, and then go in and edit in her replies/rebuttals to comments such as the one I made. I was following this discussion for at least three weeks after I made that comment, with no response from Nova. But if you look now, at some later point she edited in the following undated reply:

Yes Sceptico [sic], still waiting for you to cite any evidence that it's not due to ozone, and here's the real kicker - even if it isn't all due to ozone, that doesn't prove it's due to carbon. Argument from Ignorance rears it's head again. Just because you can rule out other things proves nothing about carbon. For someone who points out logical errors, you sure make a lot of them yourself.

I’ll come to the evidence it’s not ozone in a minute. First, though, Nova demonstrates again her total cluelessness regarding logical fallacies.  My comment was not argument from ignorance because my claim included positive evidence that the stratospheric cooling was due to CO2. By rebutting Nova’s claim that this cooling is due to ozone, I am not saying just because it’s not ozone it must be CO2; I’m just saying it’s not ozone. I had already said that cooling of the upper stratosphere is a prediction of global warming due to increased CO2. A prediction that is confirmed cannot possibly be argument from ignorance.

Ozone?

So why did I say the cooling in the upper stratosphere is not due to ozone depletion?  From the Stratospheric cooling page I linked before:

The impact of decreasing ozone concentrations is largest in the lower stratosphere, at an altitude of around 20 km, whereas increases in carbon dioxide lead to highest cooling at altitudes between 40 and 50 km (Figure 3).  All these different effects mean that some parts of the stratosphere are cooling more than others.

And they produce these graphs of cooling rates from 1980 to 1994 at different altitudes:

4. Cooling trends at different altitudes in the stratosphere.  source: Ramaswamy et al., Reviews of Geophysics, Feb. 2001.

You’ll note that actual cooling noted is confined to altitudes of 45 and 50 kilometers. I see no cooling trend on the 22 kilometer graph.  This is exactly what is predicted by AGW caused by increased CO2, but not what would be predicted by warming due to ozone depletion.  It’s not ozone. Nova still says it’s ozone.

This Is Funny

So that’s my response.  I’m not going to respond on Nova’s blog – I’m simply not going to engage with someone who will edit in her replies to my comments weeks later to make it appear that my comment was refuted and I couldn’t respond. But here’s something funny.  I had signed up at Nova’s blog to receive email notification of comments made, so I would know if I needed to reply to anyone. Somehow, that meant that (unbeknownst to her) I had gotten onto one of Nova’s email lists where she sends out desperate appeals for help from her friends when she’s out of her depth.  I know this because I received (undoubtedly by accident) the following email that Nova sent to her group on March 3rd:

Help. Sceptico and Chris are taking over. I'm chopping. I've cut out half his post so far, because it's boring me rigid that I have to explain everything to him yet again.

This is the long long long stuff below.

I'm going away for a week - flying tomorrow night. I don't want to advertise that or chris and scepticet might think they have free run. But they will unless I ban them. They are scaring off other people.

Joanne
________________________
Joanne Nova - Director
http://www.goldnerds.com.au

(“Chris” is commenter Chris Noble, who was also attempting to educate Nova’s followers.)

I called Nova on that email, and she presumably thought better of “chopping” my post or banning me, although it didn’t stop her editing in her “rebuttals” once she realized I wasn’t reading the thread any more. It did result in an uptick in the number of lame responses to my comments, including the one I replied to as detailed above.

I will have a response to Nova’s “hotspot not found” posts at some time in the future.

Fake Experts

In my recent post on global warming denial, I included a list of denier tactics, of which # 3 was “fake experts”.  Right on cue, I can report that today is the start of the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change" – the “world’s largest-ever gathering of global warming skeptics”.  Their list of speakers claims:

More than 70 of the world’s elite scientists, economists and others specializing in climate issues will confront the subject of global warming.

Grist is less than impressed with the speakers, and debunks the idea that many of them are actual experts in the subject:

So, Heartland says to the unsuspecting, the experts are all coming to this event, and they all say there is nothing to worry about. That actually makes the whole charade pretty easy to unmask.

We don't have to examine every particular scientific or pseudo-scientific argument that will be advanced during the conference (that's been done repeatedly), because the whole thrust of this conference is about who is attending, not what they are saying.

Click the Grist link for an examination of the main speakers.  You may not be surprised to learn that most of them are clearly in the “fake expert” category – people mostly with credentials, but not in climate science.  Exceptions to the “wrong credentials” list would be Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer, who are both actual climate scientists.  Well, fair enough, but a couple of qualified contrarians is hardly “70 of the world’s elite scientists”.  In any case, it seems these two may not be totally in the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) isn’t happening camp anyway:

While these two legitimate climate scientists express doubt about the dangers of climate change, they both acknowledge that the world is warming and that it is due to human activity, primarily greenhouse gas emissions. Actually, this puts them at odds with most of their fellow panelists.

I have to say, that was news to me.  I haven’t really been following Lindzen’s work recently. 

Incidentally, if you scroll down the list of speakers, you’ll see that our old friend Joanne Nova is there.  Talk about fake experts.  Her bit is entitled “The Great Global Fawning: How Science Journalists Pay Homage to Non-Science and Un-Reason”.  Imagine having paid money to listen to that. 

And for those determined to misunderstand anything written on this subject (and you know who you are), the above is not ad hominem – is is merely a rebuttal to the “more than 70 of the world’s elite scientists” appeal to authority claimed by the conference. 

While writing on this subject, a quick response to “the IPCC is a political organization” ad hominem, favorite dismissal if the IPCC by the AGW skeptics.  Here is a list of all 619 authors Working Group I of the recent IPCC report.  This group's section covers the scientific basis, and lays the foundation for the rest of the report.  Included are links to the authors’ personal homepages, a link to a Google Scholar search for their research, citation counts, degree information, Wikipedia links, affiliations and notes about declarations or petitions they have signed.  Hat tip for this to A Few things Ill Considered.  And again, for those determined to misunderstand anything written on this subject (and you still know who you are), this list is not an appeal to authority, I present it merely to debunk the “the IPCC is a political organization” ad hominem canard.

Global Warming Denial

Sometimes I worry that I’ve run out of new things to blog about, but then out of the blue up pops something that proves me wrong.  I recently received an email from Joanne Nova, who writes a blog where she claims global warming isn’t caused by human created greenhouse gas emissions.  In her first email to me she wrote “there is no empirical evidence left that supports the theory that man made CO2 makes much difference to the climate.”  Note, “no empirical evidence”, not “I disagree with the evidence”, or “there is contrary evidence” – but there is no evidence.  None!  She emailed me to ask why I had come to a different conclusion from her.

Why do I accept global warming science as being true? Well, it’s partly because I followed the many claims of the global warming “skeptics,” and although their arguments had been debunked numerous times by experts (for example, read RealClimate’s Responses to common contrarian arguments), the so-called skeptics kept repeating the already debunked arguments.  After a while you just start thinking, “but that’s been explained already,” and stop taking those people seriously.  So that would be my initial reason.  But the other main reason would have been the thousands of articles published every year in peer reviewed scientific journals, virtually all of them supporting the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis.  And it’s also because of the denier tactics employed by the “skeptics”. (More on this later.) Nova writes back that this is argument from authority, and that it’s intellectually lazy to argue this way. Well, I disagree.

Argument From Authority

It isn’t necessarily fallacious to consider that thousands of climate scientists writing in peer reviewed journals might know more than you do about such a complex subject. Of course, this one is a little tricky for newbies, and I’m sure I got it wrong myself initially. Nizkor is one of the many sites that tries to explain it:

…a person who is a legitimate expert is more likely to be right than wrong when making considered claims within her area of expertise. In a sense, the claim is being accepted because it is reasonable to believe that the expert has tested the claim and found it to be reliable. So, if the expert has found it to be reliable, then it is reasonable to accept it as being true.

What we have here is trust in the scientific method. And we trust it because we have reason to believe it works – just look around you. (You’re reading this on a computer aren’t you?) And on a blog that promotes science and the scientific method, I’d have to be pretty perverse, or have a very good reason, to oppose thousands of peer reviewed scientific papers.

Note that what we should have is trust in science. This is not the same as faith, which is what Nova claimed I have. Faith is belief without evidence, while trust is acceptance of something based on what we have experienced before – ie what has worked and what has been right. In other words, trust of the scientific method is based on evidence that it works.  Claiming that trust and faith are the same thing is the fallacy of equivocation that I have written about before. The fallacy is to use the same word in different meanings in an argument, implying that the word means the same each time.  Implying that trust is the same as faith is actually the classic example I gave two years ago to explain the fallacy.  Hilariously, Nova responded to this point with dictionary definitions of trust, that I think were supposed to show that trust can be defined in the same way as faith. But duh, that’s the point. They can be defined in the same way. But they can also be defined differently.  And employing these ambiguous definitions s how they can be used to make a fallacious argument. Just because a dictionary gives definitions of the two words, and some of the definitions are similar, that doesn’t mean that trust in the scientific method is the same as faith. Nova even debunked her own point by writing “Planes don't fly on "trust". They fly on physics.” Yes.  But I don’t need to understand the physics to get on a plane. I get on a plane because I trust that planes fly – and that trust is based on what we see in the real world (all those planes in the sky) not on faith.

Of course, trusting experts isn’t the same as Michael Egnor listing dead philosophers and scientists who he claims agreed with his views on Dualism.  Science has moved on since the days of Galileo and Newton, and who knows what they might think now?  It also isn’t the same as a certain commenter we all remember suggesting that since he studied plant breeding 30 years ago, his arguments on genetic engineering must be correct and everyone else’s wrong now.  Those were fallacious appeals to authority because the people quoted were not necessarily experts.  That would be the actual argument from authority fallacy.

It’s not intellectually lazy either to accept the majority peer reviewed science on a topic in which I’m not an expert.  I don’t have any obligation to research and become an expert on every subject under the sun to determine whether to accept or reject a claim; I’ll study in detail only the subjects I feel an interest or a need to study, and no more.  So sometimes I will rely on experts.  Of course, relying on experts is weaker than understanding the evidence in detail, no one would deny that.  And this would be a problem if I were writing a blog on global warming, or even writing posts on the details of global warming.  But I’m not.

Nova replies that in that case, I shouldn’t refer to the AGW “Skeptics” as “deniers.”  Again, I disagree.  I refer to them as deniers because they also rely on denier tactics.

Denier Tactics

As I said, one reason I gave up with the global warming (so called) skeptics, was because of the denier tactics they clearly relied on.  Here I think it would be useful to refer to Denialism Blog and their explanation of What is Denialism, because why reinvent the wheel?  They talk about five general tactics used by denialists, namely:

1. Conspiracy
2. Selectivity (cherry-picking)
3. Fake experts
4. Impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts)
5. General fallacies of logic.

I would add a sixth, namely continuing to repeat arguments long after they have been debunked.  Climate denialists like Nova rely on many of these techniques, as I will show using this email exchange and her own web page. 

Selectivity (Cherry Picking)

Denialism Blog explains Selectivity (Cherry Picking):

Denialists tend to cite single papers supporting their idea

Bingo.  Nova claimed AGW had been “falsified” by David Evans’s The Missing Greenhouse Signature paper (which is not a peer reviewed paper as far as I can tell, despite what Nova claimed).  This paper starts with:

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hotspot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics.

Read the second sentence in that piece again.  It’s presented as a fact that, if falsified, falsifies the whole of AGW.  The problem is, as far as I can tell, it’s not true.  For example, Tim Lambert writes:

This couldn't be more wrong. Study the graphs below (from RealClimate). The left one shows the pattern predicted for doubling CO2, while the right one shows the pattern for a 2% increase in solar output.

Both patterns include a hot spot. The difference between the two graphs is that the CO2 one shows cooling in the stratosphere, while the right one does not, so the "greenhouse signature" is stratospheric cooling. And guess what, that's what's been happening.

Then there is Chris Colose at Climate Change:

Tropospheric warming in the tropics is a signature of greenhouse warming, but it is more accurate to say that it is not a unique signature (i.e., you get this “hotspot” with all types of forcings).   

And :

Based on many recent papers, such as Tropical vertical temperature trends: A real discrepancy? by Thorne et al, Robust tropospheric warming revealed by iteratively homogenized radiosonde data, by Sherwood et al, and the recent Santer et al. paper, it is not obvious a real model-observation discrepancy exists, so to ignore these papers and the uncertainty in the data is not going to get Evans very far. Realclimate has a much more thorough discussion of those, and more papers on this topic here, Part 2, and Part 3

It looks to me as though experts disagree with Evans.  Certainly few if any of them take seriously this unpublished and non peer reviewed essay.  Of course, experts can be wrong, but clearly this paper does not “falsify” AGW as Nova claimed.  The point is, Nova citing this paper as “showing that the theory has been falsified” is as clear an example of cherry picking as it is possible to make.  The idea that the whole of AGW – thousands of peer reviewed scientific papers and evidence – is falsified by this one article on a web site, is just absurd.  And a standard denialist / crank tactic.

Fake Experts

In Denialism Blog’s section on Fake Experts, they state that:

[real] experts have experience in their field, and they can provide answers that are consistent with the state of knowledge in that field

And that:

…a fake expert is usually somebody who is relied upon for their credentials rather than any real experience in the field at issue, who will promote arguments that are inconsistent with the literature, aren't generally accepted by those who study the field in question, and/or whose theories aren't consistent with established epistemological requirements for scientific inquiry.

So who does Nova write about excitedly on her blog?  John Theon, who was supposedly James Hansen’s supervisor at NASA but who now disagrees that global warming is man made.  Of course we know that Theon wasn’t actually Hansen’s “boss”, and that he retired from NASA in 1994.  Theon seems like the archetypal fake expert – someone with credentials but who hasn’t worked in the field for a long while – too long to be taken seriously over current experts to be sure.  Nova adopts standard denialist tactics by writing about this as though it is meaningful, just as she also appeals to this list of 650 supposed experts who dispute AGW, although we know this list is padded with TV weathermen, economists, non-climate experts, and a number who are actually not AGW “skeptics” anyway.  In fact 58% of the "experts" quoted have no credentials in climate research and only 16% have top-notch credentials.  Also see another debunking of this list.  Compare these 650 (really less than 100) "skeptics" with the American Geophysical Union (AGU) which has 50,000 members, most of whom really are earth scientists.  Only a few dozen AGU members are on this latest denier list.  Again, standard denier techniques from Nova. 

Impossible Expectations and Moving Goalposts

Denialism Blog defines Impossible expectations (and moving goalposts) as “the use, by denialists, of the absence of complete and absolute knowledge of a subject to prevent implementation of sound policies, or acceptance of an idea or a theory.”  And guess what, the example they give is of global warming deniers:

One finds that they harp endlessly about models, how much models suck, how you can't model anything, on and on and on. True, models are hard, anything designed to prognosticate such a large set of variables as those involved in climate is going to be highly complex, and I'll admit, I don't understand them worth a damn. Climate science in general is beyond me, and I read the papers in Science and Nature that come out, blink a few times, and then read the editors description to see why I should care. But with or without models, which I do trust the scientists and peer-reviewers involved to test adequately, that doesn't change the fact that actual measurement of global mean temperature is possible, and is showing an alarmingly steep increase post-industrialization.

I don’t need to add much to that, except to state that (unsurprisingly) Nova doesn’t believe climate models are empirical evidence. 

Add the list of debunked AGW skeptic arguments that the AGW “skeptics” keep repeating, and you have quite a litany of denialism.  Cherry picking one non peer reviewed and unpublished paper that few if any climate scientists take seriously and claiming in all seriousness that it falsifies the whole of AGW.  Reporting on lists of “skeptics” as though this actually means anything.  Claiming models aren’t science.  Calling logical fallacies that aren’t while relying on them herself.  After this exchange I’m even more convinced of the science behind AGW.  I describe the AGW skeptics as deniers because they employ denier tactics.  Employ denier tactics, you’re a denier.

Evidence for AGW

Nova claims there is none.  For those interested, here is some.  The links are not direct to peer reviewed papers (although there are links in some of the articles to peer reviewed work).  Obviously it’s not comprehensive.  But it’s a good place to start and you certainly can’t claim there is “none.”  Unless you’re a denier.

RealClimate is a good place to start.  Also see their site index.

Coby on The Models are Unproven which includes a list of significant predictions of enhanced greenhouse gas warming that have been made and confirmed.   Also How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic which also explains denier tactics.

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.  Note: the IPCC collates research published by scientists and institutions across the world – that’s thousands of peer reviewed climate science papers. 

Scientific opinion on climate change – an article that documents scientific opinion as given by synthesis reports, scientific bodies of national or international standing, and surveys of opinion among climate scientists.  Agreed it’s a Wikipedia page, but there are 90 links to follow.

February 18, 2009 – edited to add:

Joanne Nova just responded on her blog.  I’m underwhelmed.  If you want to read my reply, please scroll down to comment 105 below.  (I’m sorry but links don’t work to comments on page 2 of TypePad blogs.  I apologize – this has only been an open ticket with TypePad for a year or so with no resolution yet.)

Bio Fools

The world's population is forecast to rise to 9 billion by 2050. As I wrote nearly three years ago, one challenge will be to feed these extra people, but a bigger challenge will perhaps be to feed these extra 3 billion people without destroying forests and wildlands to grow the additional food. With the growth of biofuels – using the land to grow fuel as well as food – that challenge will be even greater. And increasingly, studies are showing that higher prices and subsidies of biofuels worldwide have resulted in forests and wildlands being destroyed to grow fuel, while actually increasing, not decreasing, greenhouse emissions.

From a recent study in the journal Science Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change:

Most prior studies have found that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gases because biofuels sequester carbon through the growth of the feedstock. These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%. This result raises concerns about large biofuel mandates and highlights the value of using waste products.

How is it that the old studies didn't report this? For years, studies have attempted to determine if the energy obtained from biofuels was greater or less that the energy required to grow and process them. Some researchers concluded that biofuels were greener than fossil fuels; others disagreed. But as Time Magazine recently reported, all these studies – both pro and anti-biofuels – seem to have ignored one major factor:

There was just one flaw in the calculation: the studies all credited fuel crops for sequestering carbon, but no one checked whether the crops would ultimately replace vegetation and soils that sucked up even more carbon. It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. The deforestation of Indonesia has shown that's not the case. It turns out that the carbon lost when wilderness is razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels.

See the picture on the right from the Time article, that perfectly illustrates what is happening. This all used to be Brazilian rain forest, but now only a sliver of wild forest is left. That can't be good.  I’m not really in a position to evaluate the green (or otherwise) credentials of biofuels in detail, and in any case the answers you get depend on what assumptions you start off with and which biofuels you are talking about. But it seems clear to me that it makes no sense to sacrifice wild land to grow fuel when we need to feed an increasing population and maintain our wild land. It was obvious this would result in an undesirable increase in monocultures, fertilizer run-off, higher food costs etc, even before we considered the additional cost of releasing more carbon into the atmosphere as the land is cleared. Studies like these recent ones just make the case against biofuels even stronger.

We’re only producing a small amount of our fuel requirements now via biofuels, but government subsidies and regulations are set to increase this considerably in the future. Fortunately the US congress has acted quickly to remove subsidies for biofuels as well as to rescind future requirements for increased biofuel production. Just kidding. The subsidies and requirements to increase biofuel production are still in place.