A few months back, I posted a critique titled: Gavin Schmidt’s new climate picture book: Anti-Science?
I found it ironic that Dr. Schmidt used photos to depict climate change, while at the same time promoting open criticism of my surfacestations.org project on realclimate.org. That project also uses photography, combined with measurements and a NOAA sanctioned rating system, to gauge thermometer siting issues. Oddly, there seems to be no complaints from the usual suspects when Dr. Schmidt uses artistic composition photography to illustrate climate change issues.
It is only fair then that since Dr. Schmidt has responded to the original author of that critical piece, Harold Ambler, that I repost Dr. Schmidt’s response here. Harold has invited me to republish that piece here.
A note to readers, Harold is going through a rough patch financially while waiting for his new book, Don’t Sell Your Coat, is to be published in November 2009. Royalties from it won’t come in until mid-2010. So if anyone is so inclined, please visit his web page and give him a boost in the tip jar. – Anthony
Guest post by Harold Ambler
As most of my readers know, I posted a critique of Gavin Schmidt’s book, Climate Change: Picturing the Science, not quite three months ago. Dr. Schmidt has responded in the last few days:
The point of a photo is always the context in which it’s seen. Lake Powell is a long way below it’s 1990’s peak, and that is due to a combination of reductions in rainfall upstream and additional demands on it’s water downstream. The last two years have seen a small rise in water level, and as you state correctly, it is important not to read too much into a short term record.
However, the real point of the photo (and as we discuss in the chapter that uses it), is that climate change is really only an issue because of the impacts – whether on human society or ecosystems. Areas that are already under water stress, such as the American South West are very vulnerable to changes in rainfall regime. And in fact, there is some evidence that long-term trends in precipitation in this region are already being affected by ongoing changes.
We have a long discussion in the book about being careful with the problem of attribution in imagery and we try to make that clear in the captions.”
The science concurs:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0213/p25s05-usgn.html
“Last week, Dr. Barnett published additional work in the journal Science attributing 60 percent of the reduction in snowpack, rising temperatures, and reduced river flows over the past 50 years to global warming.
The latest work “not only shows that climate change is a real problem. It also shows it has direct implications for humans – and not just in the third world,” says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, Calif.”
So yes, it’s a combination of things, as stated in the book (if you bother to read past the cover photo) and in the scientific literature.
My Response to Dr. Schmidt (Plus a Note to Readers):
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and lived through a few droughts, including the very serious one of 1976 to 1978. Again and again, my family and I saw water levels in the local reservoirs (and others in the state) decline to worrisome levels before they were, thankfully, replenished. One perspective on the phenomenon of alternating drought and wet in the West is that it is terrifying, and should be brought to as many people’s consciousness as possible as a new menace, part of global warming, etc. Another, more like my own, would point out that the astonishing agricultural productivity and explosion of population throughout the Southwest are proofs of humanity’s ability to adapt to its natural surroundings in very effective ways.
=====
Please read the remainder of the story at Talking About the Weather and don’t forget the tip jar 😉 – Anthony
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Jeff (19:04:37) :
“GHG’s are a well proven component of the climate that effect all of life on earth.”
Shurely shome shecond mishtake. I think you meant ‘affect’.
“Gavin Schmidt is a well thought out person …”
Shurely…
Jeff (19:04:37) :
We are converting food to fuel.Already it is frosting in Canadian harvest areas.The US
Northeast, and predictions of a nasty winter for the Northern Hemisphere are at hand.
Give me warmth over cold any day.I do not care if NE Oregon turns into Northern Arizona!-Hmm wait a mintue….
Snow capped mountain ranges,lots of Ponderosa pines,high desert, large Native American population-
“Never Mind”-Emily Lattella…
GT: If someone from here reviews his book on Amazon, he should include a link to the WUWT threads on it. (Indeed, a link could be the only review needed.)
Gore’s disciples, the chosen few eating tofu and refusing to blink, are touring Australia as we speak, scaring old people and young children with power-point presentations of then and now photographs. Evidently a poor old white possum has been turned brown by man made CO2.
Why wasting time reading Batman vs The Joker, or Spider-Man vs Green Goblin, or Superman vs Lex Luthor, or Wolverine vs Sabertooth or The X-Men vs The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, or Fantastic Four vs Dr. Doom, or Spider-Man vs Venom, or The Green Lantern vs Sinestro, or Captain America vs The Red Skullwhen, or Teen Titans vs Deathstroke, when you can have Watts vs Schmidt?
I think the best book on the South West/west water was “Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water” by Marc Reisner
“The US Media had an “unwritten agreement” to not let us know that the Viet Cong being EXECUTED (Yes!) had killed 4 members of the Col.’s FAMILY a few weeks before.”
As I recall, it was a few hours or less before – it was the height of the Tet
He is an Englishman and therefore simply did not know that Lake Powell is man made.
Many thanks to Anthony, the commenters, and the donors at my site. As I say at the bottom of the piece, anyone who has had a science-based comment deleted by Dr. Schmidt is welcome to copy (or recreate) it and add it to http://talkingabouttheweather.com
Regards
squidly very funny and warped and cool but not quite as funny as Jeff his beat em all Gavin Schmidt is a well thought out person some of the funniest stuff I’ve seen but the sad part is I don’t think he meant it as a joke
As long as we are talking about photos that depict climate change, we can recall the tourist shots we have all seen of the quint Native American cliff dwellings in the Southwest. These communities once were viable because the climate at the time supported “sustainable” agricultural practices. Sadly the climate changed, and that was that.
Then we have the quaint winter scenes depicted in art and popular prints from Europe showing winter scenes of people ice skating where they cannot do that today.
All these forms of evidence only document that the climate is always changing. But that is all they show. A snapshot does not in anyway become proof of AGW, let alone the reason we must tax our economies to a halt.
Re:Jeff (19:04:37) :
“What seems to allude some people is that its just plain old physics being applied to the climate. GHG’s are a well proven component of the climate that effect all of life on earth. Gavin Schmidt is a well thought out person that sits in the middle of data coming in from our instruments around the world. Co2 will be our undoing over time.”
I am sorry to see that most of the responses to your post are not very helpful if your intention was to improve your understanding by provocative comment. Your first sentence seems naive to anyone who has scratched the surface of the subject. There is a piece of “plain old physics” – namely that CO2 is an effective absorber and emitter of infra-red in certain bandwidths. Everything else is extrapolated and largely untested. Attempts at validation against real-world data have generally proved ambiguous at best. Having said that, there is fairly strong concensus among the scientifically literate, including sceptics, that if all else is held equal, a doubling of CO2 should have the effect of increasing average surface temperature by about 1.2 deg C (plus or minus 0.5). You can see this roughly from Anthony’s graph. Since the pre-industrial level of CO2 was estimated to be about 285ppm and we are currently measuring around 387ppm, and since the relationship is logarithmic, then we have already seen most of the temperature rise associated with a doubling from 285 to 570 that can be directly attributed to a change in atmospheric CO2.
In order to predict much higher rises in temperature, it is necessary to postulate the existence of a positive feedback effect. The models (called Global Circulation Models or GCMs) used by the IPCC incorporate a strong positive feedback in the way that they parameterise and model the changes in water vapour, clouds and precipitation. There are numerous serious studies which suggest that the GCMs have not got this right yet (including some by the IPCC itself), and some which suggest that they have it seriously wrong. These studies suggest that the GCMs are not yet validated against real-world data – a necessary but not sufficient condition for developing a predictive skill. My main point is that this is not “plain old physics”. If you seriously want to pursue the question, I will happily provide you with a list of peer-reviewed papers in support of the above. I wish you well in your search for enlightenment.
Miles (15:49:24) :
Gavin Schmidt is in a new class of people who practice science in that they are 1/2 scientists, 1/2 politicians – I call them poly-scientists.
How about “scienticians?”
I just had to say that it was so cold last night here in Toronto that I had to turn on the furnace. This I cannot recall doing in any August. It was 10C when I walked out the door this morning, with sweater on under my jacket. I am aware that parts of S. California are yet again up in flames. I am aware that parts of Arizona and N. Mexico have had record breaking hots…..but damn, it has been such a total right-off non-summer in Southern Ontario this year I could just punch someone silly if they talk about the world warming up. I want a refund on this past summer….got to Georgian Bay twice, once the water was ice cold, second time it was pleasant enough. Then it got too cold to go back up again. I now fear that the upcoming winter will be a real killer. And the loons will be howling that the ice cap is melting and the NW Passage is going to stay open. Imbeciles.
Speaking as a photographer, it is wise to remember that a photograph, any photograph, tells the story that the photographer chose to convey.
By it’s nature, a photograph includes or excludes items in the environment. For example, the cover photo may have cropped out a 7-11 store just out of frame. The observer of the photo just doesn’t know.
Also a photo is an instant in time. I have photographs of places that no longer look anything like the image I took several years ago. Just as a photo tells you nothing about the environment as a whole, it tells you nothing about what came before or since. The observer has no way of knowing if the scene has looked the same for the last hundred years, or has never looked like that before. Even if you had photos of the same scene over time, it will likely not tell you why the scene changed, unless someone built a dam or planted a refinery in the middle of the scene.
Is it me? or does there seem to be a shift in attitudes lately from the GW crowd toward talking about “climate change” in relation to global warming, but an intentional straying from blaming global warming on man-made causes? It just seems as of late that I don’t read much about anthropogenic contributions to global warming.. just discussions of global warming itself. No one doubts that there are periods of global warming… the questions is in relation to whether CO2 production (primarily) is the major contributor to global warming. I think the writing on the sun seems to worry the “old” AGW crowd that maybe it’s not the CO2, but solar output, that’s determining global temperature. Hence the sudden shift in attitude and terminology to cover their collective butts.
So that was lake Powell then? I would have sworn it was lake Ontario after the hottest July on record.
Photography has been used for political or social ends since . Likewise, the ability of a photographer to capture ‘change’ in a still image is quite remarkable. However, the authors book demonstrates that he is blinded by his ideals; the images, while quite interesting to look at, do not capture ‘change’ more than an armless man stemming the flow of coins after winning a jackpot on a one-armed bandit.
I’m sure there may be some bright photographer out there who will at some point find a source of inspiration that demonstrates mans effect on the climate, but this book isn’t it.
Simply, this is a book of nice photographs (coffee table book, as already mentioned) with the misguided tag line of ‘climate change’.
superDBA (08:31:42) :
Speaking as a photographer, it is wise to remember that a photograph, any photograph, tells the story that the photographer chose to convey.
By it’s nature, a photograph includes or excludes items in the environment. For example, the cover photo may have cropped out a 7-11 store just out of frame. The observer of the photo just doesn’t know.
Also a photo is an instant in time. I have photographs of places that no longer look anything like the image I took several years ago. Just as a photo tells you nothing about the environment as a whole, it tells you nothing about what came before or since. The observer has no way of knowing if the scene has looked the same for the last hundred years, or has never looked like that before. Even if you had photos of the same scene over time, it will likely not tell you why the scene changed, unless someone built a dam or planted a refinery in the middle of the scene.
Beautiful photos and excellent explanation! 🙂
Here’s a picture. Today’s US temperature map. I know, I know, weather is not climate …
Jeff (19:04:37) :
What seems to allude some people is that its just plain old physics being applied to the climate.
What seems to ELUDE you is a command of English. Pardon me if I doubt your ability to identify whether IT’S “just plain old physics” or not, but IT’S pretty apparent that this has also ELUDED you.
My wife has done me the favor of pointing out that the original post was overly long and “inside baseball.” Some of us are fortunate enough to marry people who can tell us such things. She also suggested that I split it into a pair of entries, and that is just what I have done.
The first about the book is here:
http://talkingabouttheweather.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/more-about-anti-science/
The second, about realclimate.org, is here:
http://talkingabouttheweather.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/real-dialogue-with-realclimate/
In retrospect, I am even more grateful to Anthony (and everyone else) for bearing with me.
rbateman (16:08:25) :
Where was Global Warming in the 1840’s?
That was where the Columbia River basin in the “West” nearly dried up for 10 years. Flows in the Klamath and Trinity in place went underground. In the late 1860’s to late 1870’s another 10 year drought hit the “West” in California drying up the Mokolumne and Consumnes Rivers, taking the rest of the Sierra Runoff to record low levels, far exceeding the brief 1976-77 event. Where was Global Warming then?
Where was Global Warming in the SouthWest to Mexico when the MegaDroughts struck the area in the late 15th century?
I’ve seen the answer you’re looking for in several places..it’s like a mantra:
“We don’t what the forces were that caused the earlier droughts(fill in your favorite past problem, like the MWP, higher sea levels, or LIA), but we know that it’s CO2 today.”
Nogw (10:53:11) :
It would be advisable to send all these “new age” scientist back to elementary school, to take the third grade again.
Repeat after me:
“Sun heats water of the oceans, then water evaporates, clouds form and rain falls” This is called, kids, the “water cycle”.
Warming does not produce drought, cold sea waters does it.
Or is it more likely that Schmidt’s book is in the third grade curriculum now as we speak? That would explain a lot, and make his book what they call “age appropriate”!
I know that the Feds have a lot of interesting global warming coloring pages they give to children at National Parks, which would curl all fair scientific toenails.
Jeff,
it would better for your cause if you just didn’t comment anymore. Seriously. It may be unfair, but often it seems possible to judge one’s intelligence by one’s ability to write clearly. Maybe it is just prejudice, IDK.