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The Environment / Is “Scaremongering” a mandatory module for science postgradutes?

« on: 19/04/2011 09:34:07 »

As a bit of light relief after the heavy stuff in Another Hockey Stick Illusion?  (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=38675.msg352889#msg352889) and What does Iain Stewart's "CO2 experiment" Demonstrate?  (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=38723.msg352651#msg352651) I thought that it might be nice to post up a few examples of climate science “scaremongering”. Here’s a starter that I have just had E-mailed to me.

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Alarming Report - Greenland Melting
There is a lot of water in this world -323,722,000 cubic miles of it in the oceans alone-and there is more coming.
According to Dr. Hans Ahlmann, a Swedish geophysicist, a mysterious warming of the Arctic climate is melting the Arctic ice, including the vast Greenland ice-cap. As this ice melts, water is pouring into the ocean and raising the sea level at what geologists regard as a dizzy rate.

Dr. Ahlmann told the Geophysical Institute of the University of California that the ocean level in the Spitzbergen area had risen one inch in thc last 25 years. He said that if the ice areas continued melting at the present rate, the ocean surface would rise to catastrophic proportions and peoples living in lowlands bordering the seashores would be inundated.
"The Arctic change is so serious that I hope an international agency can speedily be formed to study conditions on a global basis," he said

This report is from the Perth Sunday Times, Sunday 22 June, 1947.   [] http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/page/4517333?zoomLevel=1

Here’s the link to the source of this comment http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/1947-greenland-melting-sea-level-rising-at-a-dizzying-rate-speedy-international-intervention-needed/ .


Enjoy the comments there too.

Best regards, Pete Ridley

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The Environment / What does Iain Stewart's "CO2 experiment" Demonstrate

« on: 15/04/2011 15:15:56 »

I am bringing this question over from my "Another Hockey Stick Illusion"? post (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=38675.new#new) in order to minimise clutter from that much more important issue, which remains there unanswered by The Naked Scientists.

The BBC’s BBC science presenter Iain Stewart offered an experiment (

attempting to show us that CO2 traps a lot of IR energy. I do not challenge the fact that CO2 absorbs rather a small part of the IR band compared with the other greenhouse gases, particularly H2O but I puzzled over the manner in which Stewart chose to demonstrate it.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermographic_camera ) advises that the colour picture from an infrared camera is not true but pseudo colour, where the colours represent intensity. So, when Stewart shows us that candle turning more and more blue my question was what is he really demonstrating. Is he simply verifying that the candle gets colder and colder as the CO2 that he is pouring into the tube replaces the O2 upon which the candle depends to keep burning brightly (highest intensity). My argument was that, as most of us would expect, the O2 in the tube is depleted and the candle glows less and less brightly (getting cooler) until it goes out. Stewart’s presentation was cut short to ensure that we didn’t see it go out. Well, that was my theory and I wondered what would be seen if the experiment was repeated but using N2 instead of CO2.

The answer given by BenV, as a member of that “ .. media-savvy group of physicians and researchers from Cambridge University .. ” is, in my lay opinion, misleading in some important aspects but it did make me look more closely at the details of the experiment. First, I now have no disagreement with Ben that I was “ .. wrong about replicating the experiment with nitrogen .. I doubt there would be any colour change .. ”. I also agree that  “ .. It being a false colour image is irrelevant unless someone is changing the colours throughout the experiment, or is set up to give automatically changing contrast.  It may make a small change look large, or vice versa - we can't know without the details .. ”.

What is important is how those false images are interpreted and if we try hard enough even lay people like me can, witht the help of Google, find out those details that Ben appeared not to know about. (Here’s a hint “I built the apparatus for the program”. I leave that as an exercise for Ben and others but if you can’t manage to track it down by tomorrow I can give you the URL, as well as one much closer to home.)

Ben was wrong to assume that I envisaged  “ .. the candle inside the tube .. ” because it was quite clearly placed outside, albeit very close to what I mistook for an open end of it. If you look carefully at both 6s and 1m 1s into the demonstration the end next to the camera is clearly sealed by a very thin sheet of plastic (cling-film perhaps). Moving on to 20s it is unclear whether the other end is sealed or not, however, if you look closely at 1m 3s it appears from the distorted view that the end where the candle is held is also sealed and the pressure inside the tube is causing the thin plastic seal to bulge. My original impression that the candle was “ .. exposed to the CO2 he's releasing .. ” was clearly mistaken. Like Ben “ .. I don't know where the air is venting out .. ” either.  

Iain Stewart is indeed “.. showing radiation from a candle traveling through a sealed and separated tube of CO2 .. ” but he claims from 50s – 1m 8s that “ .. What is happening is that the carbon dioxide in the tube is effectively trapping the heat. The candle’s warmth no longer reaches the camera. Instead it is absorbed by the carbon dioxide inside the tube .. ”. This is misleading and he should have made absolutely clear that it is only a small proportion of the IR energy from the candle that is absorbed by the CO2. I’m not nit-picking here because it is the extent and impact of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere (from whatever cause) that is debated so vigorously between deniers and disciples of the CACC doctrine.

As Ben said “ .. there's every chance that this still doesn't really show us anything useful .. ” but he demonstrated my point perfectly with his “ .. but it does seem to be a good demonstration of CO2 being opaque to IR radiation .. ”. Stewart claims in his introduction before describing his apparatus “I can show you how carbon dioxide affects the earth’s climate using this .. ”. His experiment does nothing to show what he claims that it does, because CO2 is only opaque to a small portion of the IR band, as clearly shown in “Absorption Spectra .. ” (http://www.iitap.iastate.edu/gccourse/forcing/images/image7.gif). Stewart’s set-up and explanation of what is happening gives the false impression that a significant amount of IR from the candle is absorbed. This is not the case and the pretty pictures of the sky from 1m 10s onwards do nothing to improve the credibility of his original claim.

The point that I am really making behind this question and my  other about “Another Hockey Stick Illusion?” is that The Naked Scientists and others who use the media in order to present their own interpretation of the science to a lay audience can give the unwary a totally incorrect understanding, whether deliberately or accidentally, of how Mother Nature controls the different global climates.

There are those who support the view which Professor Steven Schneider expressed in 1989 about the manner in which climate science should be presented. He said "To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest" (http://www.john-daly.com/schneidr.htm). My interpretation of that statement is that it is up to each of us to decide whether to lie or not. This is expected of politicians and those who earn their living through the media but not of those in a position of trust like physicians and researchers.

As for Ben’s QUOTE: .. I don't think you should worry about bias at the BBC, it's a huge organisation and not everyone involved cares about pensions .. UNQUOTE – perhaps not everyone but I suspect that the vast majority do indeed care as much as a senior manager with whom I recently discussed this. I suspect that Ben hasen’t looked at the amount the BBC Pension Fund has invested in renewable. Although The Naked Scientists and similar teams may not have QUOTE: .. had any editorial instruction from above, .. UNQUOTE I, being a sceptic, suspect that this is probably due to the fact that nothing that they have produced to date conflicts with the BBC’s objectives.

Best regards, Pete Ridley

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The Environment / "Another Hockey Stick Illusion"?

« on: 13/04/2011 10:25:00 »

I came across this blog while searching for detailed pictures of ice extracted from deep down an ice sheet. I have a question that has been puzzling me for over a year now and remains unanswered despite asking it of experts in the subject. My question in a nut shell to the scientists here is “why do paleo-climatologists use collision diameter in preference to kinetic diameter when considering the migration of air molecules through firn and ice”? Here is some background.

The photo shown on your “Climate Change and Ice Cores” thread (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/643/) is a beauty as a starter because it clearly shows the air pockets which are claimed to hold air having the same composition as when it was captured from the atmosphere thousands of years ago. This sounds like a wonderful natural archive which simply has to be emptied of air which can then be analysed to provide what Professor Richard Alley refers to as “the gold standard” for exposing the ancient atmospheric make-up to – but is it?

Dr Eric Wolff from the British Antarctic Survey thinks so. When discussing the natural global warming that has occurred since the Little Ice Age (it always warms between ice ages, then cools again towards another one) he says “ .. the arguments about whether global warming is real hinge on four aspects. The first one is the physics that tells us to expect that when we get more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it should get warmer. The second one is whether carbon dioxide has actually increased in the atmosphere, and that's what I'm best at because that's what we can see from ice cores. The third one is whether in the past that's caused climate change. And we can see in the ice cores that at least every time carbon dioxide's changed in the past, then it has warmed. So there's no counter evidence .. ”.

Let’s look at each in turn:
- physics tells us that if everything else that controls the mean global temperature remains unchanged then increasing CO2 will cause an insignificant amount of warming amounting  to about 1C for a doubling in concentration from 300 to 600ppm. The present atmospheric CO2 content is estimated (from readings on top of an extinct volcano in the “ .. exhaust plume of massive oceanic outgassing in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific .. ” - http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/26/agreeing/#) to be about 400ppm, having risen from an estimated 300ppm in 1850,
- the ice cores are only able to show us that the concentration of residual CO2 in the air bubbles reduces the lower the bubble is in the ice sheet until a depth is reached when the residual level changes relatively little around a mean value of about 280ppm (Fig 2 in http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap01/icecore.html)
- an important piece of information about this has been withheld.   “ .. On the basis of atmospheric CO2 data obtained from the Antarctic Taylor Dome ice core and temperature data obtained from the Vostok ice core, Indermuhle et al. (2000) studied the relationship between these two parameters over the period 60,000-20,000 years BP (Before Present).  One statistical test performed on the data suggested that shifts in the air's CO2 content lagged shifts in air temperature by approximately 900 years, while a second statistical test yielded a mean lag-time of 1200 years.  Similarly, in a study of air temperature and CO2 data obtained from Dome Concordia, Antarctica for the period 22,000-9,000 BP -- which time interval includes the most recent glacial-to-interglacial transition -- Monnin et al. (2001) found that the start of the CO2 increase lagged the start of the temperature increase by 800 years.  Then, in another study of the 420,000-year Vostok ice-core record, Mudelsee (2001)  concluded that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lagged variations in air temperature by 1,300 to 5,000 years.  .. ” (http://www.co2science.org/articles/V6/N26/EDIT.php).

I have been researching the second of Dr. Wolff’s points for over a year now, exchanging opinions with experts in relevant fields such as Professor Alley, Professor Jeff Severinghaus, Professor Michael Bender, Professor Hartmut Frank, Professor Zbiniew Jaworowski, Dr. William Connolley (you may know him), etc. I think that is quite a balanced selection of experts and my conclusion, after reading lots and lots of relevant papers, is this. Due to its much smaller kinetic diameter, CO2 is preferentially fractionated out of the air pockets when the escape routes have reduced to a size in the lowest levels of the firn that prevents the escape of the larger N2, O2 and CH4 molecules. This results in the residual air “trapped” in pockets after close-off are depleted in CO2 while the air above is enriched. I say “trapped” because even after close-off it is still possible for further depletion in CO2 to take place due to H-bond breaking through the ice crystal lattice.

If you are interested in more of this you’ll find some on the Climate Conversation blog (http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/2011/03/fallen-snow/#comment-46211 and http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/2011/03/its-not-warming-you-nitwit-its-cooling/#comment-45360.

As I said before, trying to simplify science that is poorly understood is fraught with danger and the processes and drivers of the different global climates. Professor Barry Brook, previously Professor but now Director of Climate Change at Adelaide University said a couple of years ago “ .. There are a lot of uncertainties in science, and it is indeed likely that the current consensus on some points of climate science is wrong, or at least sufficiently uncertain that we don’t know anything much useful about processes or drivers. But EVERYTHING? Or even most things? Take 100 lines of evidence, discard 5 of them, and you’re still left with 95 and large risk management problem .. ” (http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/04/23/ian-plimer-heaven-and-earth/). The significant part of that comment is “we don’t know anything much useful about processes or drivers” (Please read the full comment as Professor Brook gets rather upset when readers are unable to ascertain the full context of what he said.)

It strikes me as being perhaps disingenuous to try to imply that only 5% of the science is uncertain by plucking those 100, 95 and 5 lines of evidence out of the air, but it’s a bit like what the IPCC does when trying to quantify “expert opinion”. Maybe Brook has the same attitude as Professor Stephen Schneider "To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest" (http://www.john-daly.com/schneidr.htm).

I’d be very interested to know what your opinion is of scientists being what is, in my opinion, simply dishonest. It is scientists like Schneider who make lay people like myself trust scientists even less than we trust politicians and used-car salespersons. Talking about politicians (and other power-hungry individuals), isn’t that where all of this CACC propaganda is coming from?

Best regards, Pete Ridley