Author Archive for audreyl

From Bryan Walsh, Time

There are storms and then there is what happened to the town of Sanford, North Carolina on the night of April 16. A boisterous storm system had begun in Oklahoma on April 14, bringing flash floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms from the Midwest through the Southeast, part of a massive weather system that could be felt as far as the New York City area over the weekend. But North Carolina took the brunt—on April 16, the state experienced a record 92 tornadoes, killing at least 22 people and injuring at least 80 others. Sanford, a town of 29,000 in the center of the state, was one of the hardest-hit areas, with one tornado completely destroying a Lowe’s big-box store. The outlet’s manager moved quickly to corral an estimated 70 customers and staff in the building’s windowless storeroom, just before the tornado hit. “We’re beginning to recover from what we believe is the most widespread tornadoes we’ve seen since the mid-80s,” North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue told reporters after the storms had passed.

So now the question I’m all but contractually obligated to ask after a major weather disaster: did climate change play a role in this violent outbreak of tornadoes? The answer is maybe—but that’s not the right question to ask. Tornadoes—even more than other severe weather events like hurricanes or floods—are inherent unstable and difficult for forecasters to predict. That’s part of what makes cyclones so dangerous and so frightening—while meterologists can identify the conditions that lead to tornadoes, there’s still no way to pinpoint exactly when and where one will touch down. And that uncertainty also makes it harder to gauge what impact warming temperatures might have on tornado frequency and intensity. After all, while there’s fairly robust science on the connection between climate change and hurricanes—the short version seems to suggest that warming might make storms stronger, if not necessarily more common—there’s still plenty of room for vigorous disagreement on that score.

To Read More…

From Paul Krugman, The New York Times

So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.

But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.

Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”

The deniers’ response was both predictable and revealing; more on that shortly. But first, let’s talk a bit more about that list of witnesses, which raised the same question I and others have had about a number of committee hearings held since the G.O.P. retook control of the House — namely, where do they find these people?

To Read More…

From The Economist

On Thursday March 31st Richard Muller of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory gave evidence to the energy and commerce committee of America’s House of Representatives on the surface temperature record. Without having yet bothered to check, Babbage can say with some certainty that this event will be much discussed in the blogosphere—as, oddly enough, it should be.

Here’s the short version of the reason why: a new and methodologically interesting study, carried out by people some of whom might have been expected to take a somewhat sceptical view on the issue, seems essentially to have confirmed the results of earlier work on the rate at which the earth’s temperature is rising. This makes suggestions that this rise is an artefact of bad measurement, or indeed a conspiracy of climatologists, even less credible than they were before.

Now here’s the much longer version.

There are two topics which, more than any other, can be guaranteed to set off arguments between those convinced of the reality and importance of humanity’s impact on the climate and those not so convinced. One revolves around the question of how reliable, if at all, statements about average global temperatures before about 1500 AD are. This is the so-called “hockey stick” debate. The amount of computer processing power and data storage capacity devoted to endless online discussions of the hockey stick— the subject featured in a great deal of the brouhaha over the “climategate” e-mails—must, by now, have the carbon footprint of a fair-sized Canadian city, which of course would worry one side of the argument not a whit.

To Read More…

From George Sugihara, Seed Magazine

At a closed meeting held in Boston in October 2009, the room was packed with high-flyers in foreign policy and finance: Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker, Andy Haldane, and Joseph Stiglitz, among others, as well as representatives of sovereign wealth funds, pensions, and endowments worth more than a trillion dollars—a significant slice of the world’s wealth. The session opened with the following telling question: “Have the last couple of years shown that our traditional finance/risk models are irretrievably broken and that models and approaches from other fields (for example, ecology) may offer a better understanding of the interconnectedness and fragility of complex financial systems?”

Science is a creative human enterprise. Discoveries are made in the context of our creations: our models and hypotheses about how the world works. Big failures, however, can be a wake-up call about entrenched views, and nothing
produces humility or gains attention faster than an event that blindsides so many so immediately.

Examples of catastrophic and systemic changes have been gathering in a variety of fields, typically in specialized contexts with little cross-connection. Only recently have we begun to look for generic patterns in the web of linked causes and effects that puts disparate events into a common framework—a framework that operates on a sufficiently high level to include geologic climate shifts, epileptic seizures, market and fishery crashes, and rapid shifts from healthy ecosystems to biological deserts.

To Read More…

From Matt Kaplan, naturenews

The use of dire predictions to encourage action on climate change may be backfiring and increasing doubt that greenhouse gases from human activities are causing global warming.

Although scientific evidence that anthropogenic activities are behind global warming continues to mount, belief in the phenomenon has stagnated in recent years. “When I was a pollster, I was detecting that many dire messages seemed to be counterproductive, we really needed someone to determine why,” says Ted Nordhaus at the Breakthrough Institute, a Californian think-tank for energy and climate issues.

Matthew Feinberg at the University of California, Berkeley, wondered whether presenting children as the main victims of climate change, a common feature of warning messages, might be viewed as unfair because children have not caused global warming. He speculated that this, along with the apocalyptic descriptions of global warming’s possible consequences, might threaten people’s natural tendency to believe that the world is a fundamentally fair and stable place¹. Undermining that belief has been shown to increase the likelihood that people will ignore reality and allow events to unfold around them without intervening.

To Read More…