Guest post by Indur M. Goklany
The latest Science magazine has an extended interview with Dr. Phil Jones. In this post, I’ll keep away from issues related to Climategate, whether this was a softball interview (given that, for example, there is no discussion of deletion of files, if any) or whether, by refusing to share data with skeptics, Professor Jones was undermining the scientific method (because the scientific method relies, among other things, on giving one’s skeptics the opportunity to disprove one’s conclusions). Instead I will focus on phenological arguments that have been advanced to argue that global warming indeed exists.
These arguments are the subject of the second question posed to Dr. Jones:
”Q: Let’s pretend for a second that we threw out the CRU dataset. What other data are available that corroborate your findings about temperature rise?
“P.J.: There’s the two other datasets produced in the U.S. [at NASA and NOAA]. But there’s also a lot of other evidence showing that the world’s warming, by just looking outside and seeing glaciers retreating, the reduction of sea ice … overall, the reduction of snow areas in the northern hemisphere, the earlier [annual] breakup of sea ice and some land ice and river ice around the world, and the fact that spring seems to be coming earlier in many parts of the world.”
I am very sympathetic to PJ’s argument, because, in the past, I have made the same argument. However, over time I have become more skeptical about the extent to which higher temperatures are the sole determinants of either (a) melting of glaciers and sea ice and (b) earlier springs. Accordingly, these phenological arguments have, in my opinion, become less compelling. I would, therefore, add caveats to PJ’s response.
Melting of glaciers and sea ice. It’s possible that higher levels of soot could have contributed to greater melting (see paper by James Hansen, also see here). On the other hand, ice core measurements in Greenland indicate that soot peaked around 1910 (with minor peaks occurring later), consistent with my claim that air pollution from combustion sources in industrialized countries was being reduced long before any Clean Air Act. In addition, a reduction in precipitation would also be manifested as a net reduction in glacier and ice extent, but it is hard to imagine that precipitation changes will only occur in one direction.
Earlier Springs. This suggests that temperatures might have increased, at least around springtime. This, however, is complicated by the fact that human activities have pumped out CO2, and various forms of sulfur and nitrogen into the atmosphere. Each of these acts as a plant fertilizer. This ought to affect the onset of spring. [If anyone has or knows of empirical information on fertilizers and earlier spring, I would appreciate getting details.] Moreover, while there are numerous studies (see, e.g. here) that indicate that spring has advanced, there is a recent satellite based study that indicates no consistent trends in the starat of spring in North America. This paper, Intercomparison, interpretation, and assessment of spring phenology in North America estimated from remote sensing for 1982–2006, notes in its abstract:
”We found no evidence for time trends in spring arrival from ground- or model-based data; using an ensemble estimate from two methods that were more closely related to ground observations than other methods, SOS [start of spring] trends could be detected for only 12% of North America and were divided between trends towards both earlier and later spring.”
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When I look out my window, Phil, and I see snow and more snow, which year should I compare this year’s view to? Some years there is lots of snow and some years not. I do note however that the daffodils and forsythia don’t like persistent snow and cold–and they are a pretty hardy bunch.
If that is a scientific assessment, my advisors were all wrong.
If PJ has become a confirmed phenologist, how does he now hide away the medieval warm period?
PJ is now a big figure, which he himself probably did never imagine three months ago.
Excellent post, A. Jones. One might also add that ‘climate’ represents a good deal more that just temperature. Not only are the self-titled ‘climate scientists’ guilty of severe reductionism, by claiming to see global ‘climate change’ in a few decades, but they reduce the complex atmospheric and oceanic phenomena of the Earth (solar irradiance, ocean gradients and currents, tides, winds, storms, etc., etc.) to a collection of temperature readings (and enormously problematic ones at that) as prime desiderata.
From an outsider’s point of view, does it make sense to speak of a global ‘climate’ at all? Clearly over rather long spans of time (tens of millenia) there have been gross changes like ice ages and interglacials, that affected much of the planet, but short of such profound events it would appear that the Earth is a collection of many ‘climates’, varying in relation to and in conjunction with each other. Maybe ‘climatology’ (not ‘climate science’) is better understood as the study of how the various forces and other phenomena interact (systematically or not) over time, rather than as the pursuit of a few key variables that might or might not affect an abstract concept of ‘global temperature’.
But of course the ‘climate scientists’ had other reasons for pursuing the will-o’-the-wisp of global temperature and reducing it to the effect of one variable, and those reasons were not scientific.
/Mr Lynn
If anybody is a creative type, here are the lyrics to a Climate Change song. (lyrics copyright by Roger Sowell 2010) Tune is to “Chains” by The Beatles. To be sung by a female.
“Cold…my Baby tells me it’s not getting Cold…
That’s a big lie…anyone can see….
Snow’s getting deeper, and ice is forming ’round me!
Baby told me ’bout the hockey stick…
That’s a big fat lie…
Said the data doesn’t use no “trick”
But they did to hide the decline!
Cold…my Baby tells me it’s not getting Cold…
That’s a big lie…anyone can see….
Snow’s getting deeper, and ice is forming ’round me!
Cold….it’s getting so cold…
Cold…it’s getting so cold….”
Earlier Spring? Not indicated by planting zones, I know a different measure, but one not modeled, based on the real world. This compares 1960 to 1990, an alleged change to warmer times, yet the zones seem to move south. Do plants lie?
http://i47.tinypic.com/23ixh5l.jpg
Goklany is an excellent thinker. His analysis several months ago about how inflated the cost estimates are of global warming was excellent, even seminal.
I think we do have global warming, and that GHGs are part of the cause, but a major question in my mind is “how much?” This is consistent with the idea of earlier springs, and at least some loss of ice in most glaciers around the world. But if a doubling of CO2 only brings 1.5 degrees net temperature change, that isn’t the catastrophe we have been let to fear. And if spring starts earlier, which around the world I think it has, what’s the problem with a longer growing season?
I would ask Goklany one question, however. I don’t understand why fertilization from human emitted nitrogen and sulfur species would lead to an earlier spring. I would have thought that plants can’t start growing until temperatures reach a certain minimum; if this is correct, then early springs have to do with somewhat warmer temperatures, not more nitrate.
To answer Goklany’s question, there is plenty of evidence that nitrate from human emissions is fertilizing northern hemisphere forests, for example. Mr. Google can find you some of those papers. Even the US government NAPAP reports (at least the ones from the early 1990s) stated that sulfate had a modest fertilizing effect on midwestern US farms.
Back to glaciers: one last point. I reread a 2005 article in Der Spiegel where a researcher is discovering trees that have been brought down Swiss mountains about 7000 years ago. The claim is that at that time (the “Holocene Optimum,” is what I think it is called), there were far fewer glaciers in the Alps than now, and that pine trees lived to long age far higher up the mountains than the glaciers now exist. The point isn’t that CO2 doesn’t have an effect, but rather than — once again — other forces may be far stronger, and also that a little bit of warmth as we head toward the next ice age might not be such a bad thing.
Tom P (00:51:23) :
[…]
Of course there are other publications on seasonal onset not that won’t be found under these search terms, but it is extremely unlikely that the overall balance would be much different.
Jones can therefore rely on an overwhelming weight of published observations to support his statement that spring is coming earlier.
*allintitle: “earlier spring”
Trap, Tom, you, head first.
Here’s the consequence of climategate. The database of “published observations” no longer has any assumed credibilty. While PJ may think he can rely, no one else any longer does. Its all going to have to be reviewed, independently. Even as a lowly biologist, I can pick big holes in a number of the assumed “observations”, especially the proxies. Phil Jones et al have wrought a huge mess. Your unwavering defence is only perpetuating it.
Hey Phil, read this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/15/dalton-minimum-repeat-goes-mainstream/#more-16442
Is it responsible to keep quoting Warmers´mantras while a Dalton or Maunder like minimum is developing?.
What about all that innocent people who still believe in these carbon trade business promoters?
Are you promoting banana plantations in Alaska?
Al Baby and Mr.Jones:
♪ ♪ ♪ Me and Mr. Jones
We got a thing goin’on
We both know that it’s wrong
But it’s much too strong
To let it go now ♪ ♪ ♪
Tom P,
Your suggestion to use GoogleScholar certainly provides strong evidence that “Jones can therefore rely on an overwhelming weight of published observations to support his statement that spring is coming earlier.”
However, I don’t think that this in any way contradicts Indur M. Goklany’s point nor do I think it a particularly meaningful test. First, Indur clearly acknowledges that numerous studies show that spring has advanced. Second there will be a clear selection bias in the published literature to studies that show an early spring. If we look at the publications that are produced when we perform your suggested search and eliminate the duplicates and non-responsive items, we are left with a series of papers each predominantly looking at a narrow geographical area. If we assume that on average spring phenology has not changed, there will still be some areas that show an earlier spring from natural variability. Researchers will naturally be attracted to these areas. What is a journal more likely to publish – a paper showing a significant change in the timing of spring in the Northern Rockies forests or a paper showing that in Dallas nothing has happened? This is not an overt pro-AGW bias, it is simply that journal editors are more interested in papers that show something as opposed to nothing. The only “show nothing” papers that are likely to be published are those that do not deal with a narrow geographical area but have broad scope. An example being the paper that Indur references (Though his link seems to be another unrelated paper. The correct paper can be found through Google Scholar and seems quite persuasive).
Jones is a funny guy. Palin can see Russia from her window & Phil can see Alaska & Greenland from his.
I was struck by “”We found no evidence for time trends in spring arrival from ground- or model-based data; using an ensemble estimate from two methods that were more closely related to ground observations than other methods, SOS [start of spring] trends could be detected for only 12% of North America and were divided between trends towards both earlier and later spring.”
We just had an article on WUWT which implied that the tree growing season in the Mid-Atlantic US region was increasing (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/02/forests-in-the-eastern-united-states-are-growing-faster-than-they-have-in-the-past-225-years/) as well as this article saying essentially the same thing (https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/mds/www/Schwartz_etal_2006.pdf). Is the Mid-Atlantic an outlier? Can anyone comment on the different methods for measuring the onset of “growing season”. I was very skeptical of these articles.
Tenuc,
“I find it amazing that Jones appears to have no intuition about how climate works.”
That’s ’cause he’s an ecologist, not a climate scientists. His PhD had something to do with a study of the Humber estuary.
There aren’t “two other datasets” and there is no “raw” temperature data in electronic format. If you want raw, you have to compile the data yourself from the reports. I can’t believe that Phil thinks that he can get away with these kinds of whoppers (sins of omission). The guy has a doctorate for crying out loud. Can he really be that stupid?
When you say “early spring”, it kinda raises the question – early compared to what?
I don’t think anyone doubts that temperatures have risen since the seventies. Indeed, the whole fifities, sixties and seventies were characterised by cooling temperatures. No doubt, if folk then were the worrying kind, they would have been worrying about late springs.
However, go back a couple more decades, and you have the warmer decades of the thirties and forties, and no doubt, springs came earlier then than they did in the following decades.
What does all this mean? The climate is variable. People fret over springs that come earlier than they did in the sixties without realising that springs aren’t coming earlier than they did in the thirties. Of course, not many people remember that far back, and they probably never kept records of when exactly spring arrived – probably had more important things to do, like coping with the terrible droughts and heat waves in the wheat basis instead of worrying about possible futures.
That’s it????
This is the best that Phil can do?
The evidence for AGW is:
A. The CRU dataset “adjusted” and the original data missing
B. Two similar and/or overlapping “adjusted” datasets with many uncontrolled variables.
C. Look out the window.
When proles look out the window they see meaningless weather. When self defined climate scientists look out the window they see human caused climate change?
On that basis we are supposed to:
1. Believe that the future climate 100 years hence can be reliably predicted by computer models when the complexity of predicting weather two days hence or short term (year, decade) trends are beyond the capability of current science.
2. Re orient the entire world economy to target reduction of one greenhouse gas costing trillions of dollars and impacting quality of life (and life itself) for billions of people.
I have said this before but it bears repeating:
I think it is entirely possible the earth is warming.
It is likely that human activities have some effect on any warming or cooling behaviour and that the growth of human population and expansion of industrial society would significantly expand this over the past 150 years.
It is unlikely that human activity is the sole or even most significant driver, and dismissing bigger and more complex drivers (the Sun, the Oceans, natural variability, non-human sources of greenhouse gases) is arrogant and unhelpful.
It is therefore even less likely that human produced greenhouse gases are the sole or even most significant driver of change.
It is therefore even less likely that human produced CO2 is the sole or even most significant greenhouse gas within this subset of drivers of climate change.
It is therefore even less likely that the circa 2035 or 2100 disaster scenarios portrayed by the AGW lobby are likely.
Even if those disaster scenarios are likely and were caused primarily by human generated CO2 (to the exclusion of other significant factors) the cost benefit analysis would need to be done. eg is it worth $20 trillion dollars over the next 100 years to make sure that 30% of Bangladesh is not flooded even if it starves 5 million Bangladeshis as a result if for $50 billion over 10 years we could drag the economy into the 21st century, save lives, move settlements inland and build dikes?
This is not denial. And to be treated as a Luddite because “Phil looking out the window” is not robust enough science is truly lame.
I am baffled by the emphasis on soot. Yeah, soot will melt glaciers faster, but isn’t soot a minor player compared to dust? I have never seen soot on a satellite photo. I HAVE seen dust on a satellite photo. I have seen dust and volcanic ash affect the color of sunsets. Soot seems to be a local phenomenon. I have seen the loess washed into glacial mountain streams. In Tajikistan, there is so much loess silt in the municipal water it comes out of the faucets brown. (No hint of the color of soot) I see the geology of bedrock mesas with 50 feet of dirt on top, deposited by the wind. why the emphasis on soot, when it is inconsequential compared to dust? Could it be because dust isn’t man made?
If we truly want to stop anthropogenic changes to the environment, then we need to stop putting out forest fires, and let them burn from one end of a continent to the other, like they did before mankind learned to stop forest fires. Let the soot return to a natural level. Let the dust from barren land return to a natural level.
>> JonesII (06:41:12) :
Al Baby and Mr.Jones:
♪ ♪ ♪ Me and Mr. Jones
We got a thing goin’on
We both know that it’s wrong
But it’s much too strong
To let it go now ♪ ♪ ♪ <<
OT, but a must see:
Somebody needs to tell Phil Jones that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Cheers
Tom_R (05:43:44) :
“… 29 biologists have noticed that some plants in some places have started blooming earlier?”
The GoogleScholar search was not designed to find all the papers, just to produce a reasonable sample. I’m sure there are many more than 29 publications, and many more scientists who have studied seasonal onset.
Paul Coppin (06:27:27) :
“Here’s the consequence of climategate. The database of “published observations” no longer has any assumed credibilty.”
That’s a little drastic, and certainly not a view Indur Goklany must hold. He cites the published observations to indicate that at least one of these concludes no early spring. Is this not credible either?
HGI (06:46:15) :
“This is not an overt pro-AGW bias, it is simply that journal editors are more interested in papers that show something as opposed to nothing.”
I’m sure you’re right, and of course my narrow search terms were not selected to pick up such papers. They were designed to pick up publications where a clear conclusion was at least indicated in the title. Discounting duplicates there were at least fifteen publications concluding spring was occurring earlier compared to none concluding a later start.
Such a balance of published observations is certainly significant. Many people might conclude that this balance supports an earlier onset of spring. Some, including perhaps Paul Coppin, might conclude that this just shows the power of AGW-biased journal editors who have so far succeeded in keeping any mention of a later spring out of the titles of any publications.
““just looking outside and seeing glaciers retreating, the reduction of sea ice … overall, the reduction of snow areas in the northern hemisphere, the earlier [annual] breakup of sea ice and some land ice and river ice around the world, and the fact that spring seems to be coming earlier in many parts of the world””
No wonder the poor guy is suicidal…..
…….someone get him a new mercury light bulb.
Cherry Blossoms and spring blooming dates:
I’m familiar with this work as I once thought I had spotted an error in their methodology which invalidated it and spent considerable effort trying to prove it. I failed miserably. There are various researcher, but the main one is Aono. The last publication I know of is:
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/MiyaharaHiroko08-d/AonoKazui07-Aug23-KyotoSpring.pdf
The methodology is pretty sound and the correlation to actual temperature readings for month of March amazing, so I have a lot of faith in their reconstruction which goes back to 1000AD. That said, their are a couple of things to keep in mind. The first is that Kyoto has ocean on both sides, so the amplitude of variation is muted by the ocean. The second is that Aono did a separate study (the link to which I cannot locate right now) to determine how much urban warming affected results. He never adjusted the results in the first paper to show the affects of the second, the two papers stand alone. If memory serves correctly, he concluded that urban warming was skewing spring bloom date by about 6 days (earlier) compared to rural sites which translated to 1.4 degrees.
Fascinating methodology and the only phenological method I have looked at that doesn’t have obvious flaws.
As long as there are big budgets that reward GW ‘research’, we will have ‘researchers’ who find GW under every tree stump, rock, and snowflake.
Lots of Loons are heavily invested in this modern day, Lysenko ism. They have no choice, but to continue. Remember the teachings of Machiavelli. “Never admit mistakes.” Or the wisdom of Tim Rice expressed in ‘Evita’, as we sing with Peron “…that all mistakes were Planned…”.
http://www.envi.osakafu-u.ac.jp/atmenv/aono/Aono1998.pdf
Here’s the paper Aono did on understanding the effects of urban warming on his over all studies of spring time temps.
>> Tom P (07:30:44) :
Such a balance of published observations is certainly significant. Many people might conclude that this balance supports an earlier onset of spring. Some, including perhaps Paul Coppin, might conclude that this just shows the power of AGW-biased journal editors who have so far succeeded in keeping any mention of a later spring out of the titles of any publications. <<
There are several layers of selection effects at play here.
To publish a paper, one must not only get past the editor, but the reviewers who are mostly in the AGW camp.
These days, to keep a faculty* position (get tenure) one must bring in grants. After (perhaps) medical research funding, by far the largest source of funding is in climate research. A biologist is much more likely to get a grant funded if it's related to the effect of climate change on [insert species]. This already presupposes climte change, and any papers published based on the grant research will reflect that. Note that besides faculty bias, the one-sided grant funding limits publications just by denying a way for a nonbeliever to pay for the research, or even just the publication costs.
*The non-faculty research institutes have been formed specifically to gather in climate change grants, so there's not a snowball's chance in AGW model land that a non-believer could get such a position. Even if you bough the idea that such an institute could exist solely on 'big oil' funding, 'big oil' would want to emphasize climatology, not biology.