2010 retrospective 4: the theme of climate change

This is one of two major themes that have emerged on this blog in the course of 2010. Look at all the posts. Here are the last five:

• It’s cool and wet this summer in Wollongong…

• November has gone and summer is supposedly here…

• Talking about the weather

• Other people’s ideas – from today’s Google Reader crop

• BHP boss dumps on future of coal

Of course with such amazing weather events here and overseas just lately, people are wondering whether there is any global warming. Europe and North America are freezing, and here in Australia we’ve been having a drenching, especially just now in Queensland. Hence this cartoon.

I can sympathise, but go along with the article that accompanied that cartoon: Climate change: the black, white and grey in the science by Professor Kurt Lambeck, a climate scientist and immediate past president of the Australian Academy of Science.

Recognising that the consequences of climate change are potentially global, serious and irreversible on human time scales, the Australian Academy of Science has published such an assessment, The Science of Climate Change: Questions and Answers.

In the past few months several other national science academies have produced statements detailing the extent of consensus and uncertainty about climate change science too. These include the Royal Society in Britain, the US National Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Sciences. In addition, other science bodies, including the Geological Society of London, have expressed their views.

A scientist is not usually elected to a national academy for doing consensus science. These recent academy statements express views that have been robustly debated both by experts in areas of climate science and by eminent scientists with extensive research experience in related fields.

The independent messages from the four academies and the geological society are consistent and urgent. They include that the role of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is well understood, and that increasing the atmospheric concentration of the principal anthropogenic greenhouse gas, CO2, leads to higher mean global surface temperatures…

While it is foolish to link a particular weather event as certainly a result of climate change, it remains true that extreme weather events are among the predicted results of global warming, and these can include paradoxical extremes such as we see in Europe and North America.

See Warming and Winter Storming.

t’s a typical blog comment for this time of year. “I hope,” wrote one of my ‘skeptic’ readers, “the folks in the NE USA and Europe didn’t hurt their backs when shoveling all that global warming.”

Har har.

This common insinuation–that somehow, human-caused climate change is refuted by the perennial occurrence of bad winter weather–puts us scientific rationalists in a bind. The problem is that unlike many denier talking points, there isn’t really even an argument being put forward here that might be refuted. It’s more of a “nyah nyah,” followed by, “I  never believed you to begin with, but this time of year, I just feel sorry for you.”  …

Another resource I have just lately found, though I knew of part of it, is The American Geophysical Union Blogosphere. See especially NOAA: January-November 2010- Hottest On Record.

Update

See Peter Sinclair’s excellent (and darkly funny) post 2010 Climate B.S. of the Year Award. For a very persuasive account of the origins of denialism in ideology rather than science, see Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes.

In this public lecture at the Global Change Institute (UQ), Naomi Oreskes sheds light on a dark corner of the American scientific community. She tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective and highly influential campaigns to mislead the public on the science of several major issues – beginning with a defence of tobacco, moving on to acid rain, CFC’s and most recently climate change.  ‘Doubt is our product,’ wrote one tobacco executive. These ‘experts’ supplied it.

See too Adam Morton, The deadly decade.

In the US, there was a concerted attack from the resurgent Republican Party and influential parts of the media claiming climate science was a hoax and conspiracy. A University of Maryland study published this month found Fox News viewers were 30 percentage points more likely to incorrectly believe that most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring, or that views are split…

Not everyone working in the area is comfortable with linking the current shift in extreme events with greenhouse gases. There is disagreement in the scientific literature over whether extreme weather disasters have started to worsen. According to one view, there is little to no change in the proportions of people affected once population growth is factored in.

What does not remain a contested area in the scientific literature is that the planet is getting hotter. Analysing the data from the world’s three temperature datasets, the World Meteorological Organisation last month reported that the past decade was the warmest since instrumental measurement began in 1850, and 2010 was on track to be the hottest year, and certainly in the top three, regardless of the extraordinary snow dumps clogging European and US cities over Christmas. (There is significant evidence to suggest that global warming is responsible for the extreme northern winters of the past two years. An increase in air pressure in the Arctic atmosphere caused by warmer heat coming off a relatively ice-free ocean is pushing cold air south.)…

8 January update

Note the videos added to the comment thread today.

Also, a post on that chestnut that climate scientists only “believe” to get big fat grants.

…Given that there are far more good ideas proposed than can ever be funded, there is inevitably some subjectivity and different panels would have different discussions and a different emphasis. I’m confident however that almost any panel, given the same input, will have a reasonable overlap among the highly rated (and therefore most fundable) proposals. Clearly, these methods work best when the proposals are similar or in a similar field, and will not work quite as well when there is a lot of diversity (because the judgements in those cases can be more subjective, and thus more easily swayed by random contingencies). There could always be improvements (shorter proposals might be easier to get reviewed by outside specialists, calls can be clearer about what they want etc.) but none of the problems are anything like the contrarian imaginings of hysterical climatologists trying to outbid each other in who can come up with the worst case scenario.

Buddha’s vegetarian delight-ful

This is my version, minus tofu. Just didn’t have any… Click for a recipe.

I joined the Steelers Club

For $5 for three years, why not?

Members only exclusive benefits:

• Take part in the members Cash Chamber draw. $500 to be won!
• $2000 to be won every Thursday night in the Steelers members Cash Bonus! Drawn at 7pm, 8pm, 9pm and 10pm.
  Simply swipe your members card to enter.
• Every Friday night your chance to win $750 worth of vouchers from specialty stores in the Steelers Chamber Of Mystery!
• Saturday night Vacation Vacation promotion. $500 travel voucher to be won as well as 5 $50 Woolies vouchers!
  Draw starts at 7pm.
• Members Sunday Meat Raffle. 50 meat trays to be won!

• Earn Players Points which can be redeemed for a variety of goods and services. Purchase Steelers meals, drinks,
  raffle tickets, bingo books, gifts from our showcase, Woolworths cards, pay for your membership or even pay for your
  household bills (excludes credit cards), purchase any voucher of you choice- you choose the store, or purchase a Car,
  Boat, TV- any item of your choice
• Steelers Club members receive a discount at the bar when showing their members card. Available 7 days a week.

• Bingo Club membership. Join the fun and be included in the draw to win up to $300 Players Points!
• 5% Discount at Rebel Sport Wollongong. Just show your membership card at the counter on purchase.

Plus a Vietnamese Restaurant.

2010 retrospective 3: my top reads of the year

I have been slack in the book reviewing department, having posted on just some of what I have read. But then I read around 5 or 6 books every week!

You can follow the best of tag to see what has really taken my fancy.  I did pick a winner earlier this year with Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy. A March choice, Justin Sheedy’s delightful Goodbye Crackernight, delivered me a new Facebook friend – the author.

I really should add two recent reads.

Sadakat Kadri, The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O.J. Simpson (2005).

For as long as accuser and accused have faced each other in public, criminal trials have been establishing more than who did what to whom, and in The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O.J. Simpson, Sadakat Kadri explores just what humanity has spent the last four thousand years trying to prove. Published by HarperCollins in the United Kingdomand Random House in the United States, The Trial situates today’s judicial circuses and moral panics squarely within the history of fear, superstition and idealism that brought them into being.

The Trial was shortlisted by the U.K. Crime Writers Association for its Gold Dagger Award for Non-Fiction in 2005, and Sadakat Kadri’s book was one of three included in the almanac of exemplary legal writing published by the Green Bag law journal in January 2006. Translation rights have recently been sold to publishers in China, Taiwan, and Brazil.

Alexander McCall Smith, The Double Comfort Safari Club (2009) is, as always with McCall Smith, a delight.

Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi are called to a safari lodge in Botswana’s Okavango Delta to carry out a delicate mission on behalf of a former guest.

The Okavango makes Precious appreciate once again the beauty of her homeland: it is a paradise of teeming wildlife, majestic grasslands and sparkling water. However, it is also home to rival safari operators, fearsome crocodiles and disgruntled hippopotamuses. What’s more, Mma Makutsi still does not have a date for her wedding to Phuti Radiphuti and is feeling rather tetchy herself. But Precious knows that with a little patience, just as the wide river will gently make its way round any obstacle, so will everything work out for the best in the end . . .

2010 retrospective 2: posts most visited on this blog

Here are the posts to score 100+ reads in 2010.

1. Nostalgia and the globalising world — from Thomas Hardy to 2010 629
2. Has school bullying increased? 351
3. The Rainbow Warrior 304
4. A very personal Australia Day 26 January – my family 261
5. SBY’s speech in the Australian parliament 257
6. Climate change 225
7. About 218
8. Claims that refugees and asylum seekers in Australia are living it up 209
9. Neil agrees with Miranda Devine 195
10. Know your friends 172
11. Sport and multicultural Australia 171
12. Can we know that global warming is behind Pakistan’s and Russia’s recent catastrophes? 158
13. Various finds and ruminations on … 4 158
14. Pathetic performance by Tony Abbott last night 151
15. Election 2010 again: why you should vote for anyone except Tony Abbott 146
16. Ghosts and other tales of Kiama and district 141
17. Asylum seeker debate and the need for Olympian calm 140
18. Past lives, past contexts: Daisy Bates – and H G Wells on ABC last night 139
19. Open Letter from U.S. Scientists on the IPCC 138
20. Contemplating climate change on a frosty June morning 137
21. SameSame’s "10 gay films you must see" 132
22. Martin Rees: 2010 Reith Lectures 130
23. Election 2010 next Saturday 129
24. Cool thoughts on a hot topic 120
25. Goodbye Cracker Night! 119
26. Do you have a favourite poem? 118
27. Monckton: this has to be a joke… 117
28. Monckton — the follow-up 114
29. Fact and fiction and climate change 109
30. Where is Denford Magora? 104
31. Ben Eltham on Who killed the climate bills? 103
32. Teachers’ Unions should have kept their powder dry 102
33. John Leonard, “The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry” (2009) 100

At last–shelving at The Bates Motel

Thanks to Sirdan and The Reject Shop. Total, including the white one which was already there, $45. Plus my unskilled labour.

2010 retrospective 1: my journalism

Here are the stories I wrote during 2010 for The South Sydney Herald.

January: Apology and Intervention – do they mix?

March: Check the toilets and staff rooms

May: Question Time

June:

July: Waiting for Godot in Wolloomooloo

August:

December: David Hicks