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Today is the northern hemisphere winter solstice  and we’ve already seen a year with many climatic records broken and numerous record-breaking disasters, especially with all the tornadoes and droughts and heat waves. Already the global average temperature estimates for 2011 are coming in, and it looks like it will once again break all previous records for the warmest year in history (which was previously broken by 2010, and before that by 2009). The reports we’re hearing from the media about even more rapidly melting polar ice caps and the vanishing of glaciers around the world are not reassuring.

But in the southern hemisphere, it is summer solstice today, and there the signs are even more ominous. Australia has just gone through years of one climatic disaster after another, capped by 2011 with record flooding, wildfires, drought, and even an gigantic typhoon named Yasi. As this article points out, or an article in the December 2011 issue of Discover magazine discussed, many climate scientists view Australia as a harbinger of the future. It is far more vulnerable to changes in climate than most other regions, since it is a small continent located in the southern high-pressure belt of deserts, with only limited wet areas along the coast and the tropical north. It has few mountains or other topographic features that modify climate or trap rain and snow compared to most other continents, so it can be whipsawed through climate changes much faster than other regions. As the article’s author quoted in an email he received from an Aussie friend, “Welcome to Australia, the petri dish of climate change. Stay safe.” Or as David Karoly, the leading climate researcher at the University of Melbourne, put it, “Australia is the canary in the coal mine. What is happening in Australia now is similar to what can expect in other places in the future. One of the effects of increasing greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere is to amplify existing climate signals. Regions that are dry get drier, and regions that are wet get wetter. If you have a place like Australia that is already extreme, those extremes just get more pronounced.”

Australia has seen more extreme climatic events in the past decades than in all of its previous recorded history. It has gone through decades-long drought, and heat waves of 115° for weeks, leading to historic wildfires in 2009 and each year since then which have wiped out millions of acres and killed 173 people. Its topsoil built over generations is blowing away, causing record dust storms reminiscent of the “Dust Bowl” years in the U.S. in the 1930s.  Its groundwater supply has nearly vanished, leading to nationwide water shortages, and severely damaging the crops that were developed when it had enough water to irrigate them. When the drought finally broke last summer, the region suffered through record flooding instead, which was even more destructive of farmlands and cities. Even the Great Barrier Reef, Australia’s great gem of biodiversity (and an important magnet for tourist dollars as well as science) is rapidly dying from bleaching caused by warmer, more acidic oceans. With the loss of the Great Barrier Reef (and many other reefs around the world), scientists predict a collapse of the food chain and mass extinction in the oceans (including important fisheries) that will dwarf any of the geologic past.

As the article’s author, Jeff Goodell, explains:

Adding to Australia’s vulnerability is its close connection with the sea. Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here.

How bad could it get? A recent study by MIT projects that without “rapid and massive action” to cut carbon pollution, the Earth’s temperature could soar by nine degrees this century. “There are no analogies in human history for a temperature jump of that size in such a short time period,” says Tony McMichael, an epidemiologist at Australian National University. The few times in human history when temperatures fell by seven degrees, he points out, the sudden shift likely triggered a bubonic plague in Europe, caused the abrupt collapse of the Moche civilization in Peru and reduced the entire human race to as few as 1,000 breeding pairs after a volcanic eruption blocked out the sun some 73,000 years ago. “We think that because we are a technologically sophisticated society, we are less vulnerable to these kinds of dramatic shifts in climate,” McMichael says. “But in some ways, because of the interconnectedness of our world, we are more vulnerable.”

With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production. Rising sea levels will wipe out large parts of major cities and cause hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to coastal homes and roads. The Great Barrier Reef will be reduced to a pile of purple bacterial slime. Thousands of people will die from heat waves and other extreme weather events, as well as mosquito-borne infections like dengue fever. Depression and suicide will become even more common among displaced farmers and Aborigines. Dr. James Ross, medical director for Australia’s Remote Area Health Corps, calls climate change “the number-one challenge for human health in the 21st century.”

And all this doesn’t even hint at the political complexities Australia will face in a hotter world, including an influx of refugees from poorer climate-ravaged nations. (“If you want to understand Australian politics,” says Anthony Kitchener, an Australian entrepreneur, “the first thing you have to understand is our fear of yellow hordes from the north.”) Then there are the economic costs. The Queensland floods earlier this year caused $30 billion in damage and forced the government to implement a $1.8 billion “flood tax” to help pay for reconstruction. As temperatures rise, so will the price tag. “We can’t afford to spend 10 percent of our GDP building sea walls and trying to adapt to climate change,” says Ian Goodwin, a climate scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney.

The strangest irony of the whole situation is that politically, Australia is in a bind. The right wingers in Australia are very powerful, with huge financial backing from the powerful coal companies, and many of them deny the scientific evidence  of the global climate change, even as the warning signs are occurring all around them. With all its vast deserts, one would expect Australia to be at the forefront of solar energy, and moving quickly to ameliorate the climate problems that it has produced. And yet the opposite is the case: energy conservation efforts have had little traction in Australia, since coal is still cheaper. As Goodell writes:

Australia remains deeply addicted to coal, which not only provides 80 percent of its electricity but serves as its leading export. Perhaps more than any other nation on earth, Australia is trapped by the devil’s bargain of fossil fuels: In the short term, the health of the nation’s economy depends on burning coal. But in the long term, the survival of its people depends on quitting coal. Australia’s year of extreme weather has reawakened calls for a tax on carbon pollution, but it is far from clear that the initiative will pass, or, in the big picture, whether it will matter much. “What we are ultimately talking about is how climate change is destabilizing one of the most advanced nations on the planet,” says Paul Gilding, an Australian climate adviser and author of The Great Disruption. “If Australia is vulnerable, everyone is vulnerable.”

And the saddest part of this irony is that even if Australia could switch from coal to solar and reduce its own carbon footprint, it would still need to sell its coal to China and the rest of Asia. In short, there are no easy solutions.  As Goodell describes it:

“Living on the beach is pretty much the Australian dream,” he says as we pass beach town after beach town. At Narrabeen Beach, a broad sweep of sand 15 miles north of Sydney, Goodwin points out where residents have been forced to truck in sand in an expensive and hopeless effort to keep the beach – and the homes along it – from being washed away by increasingly strong storm surges. If the seas rise by at least three feet this century, as the current scientific consensus expects them to, every one of the structures along the beach will vanish. “In fact,” Goodwin says, “the way things are going, they could be gone within a decade or two.”

“Do the people who live there know that?” I ask.

“Some of them do, but they don’t care,” he says. “Or they don’t think about it. Australians have a hard time imagining the future will be any different than the present.”

Australians aren’t alone in their denial, of course. But there is a sense of fatalism here that is absent in America, a feeling borne by having lived for long years in a harsh climate, of being able to take whatever nature dishes out. It is why Australians don’t leave their houses during raging wildfires, and why they build cites in landscapes where no cities should be built. When it comes to dealing with Mother Nature’s nasty moods, Australians have a kind of outback machismo, a justifiable sense of pride for having built a nation in one of the most extreme climates on the planet. But as the catastrophes multiply, so too do the psychic costs of living with it. As a recent report by Australia’s Climate Institute concluded, “Higher rates of drug and alcohol misuse, violence, family dissolution and suicide are more likely to follow more extreme weather events.” In 2006, during the prolonged drought in the Murray-Darling Basin, the government estimated that an Australian farmer committed suicide every four days.

It’s too soon to say for sure, but it may be that the deadly weather of the past few years will open people’s eyes to the risks of living on a superheated planet. In July, Prime Minister Julia Gillard introduced her proposal for a carbon tax in Australia. The plan would levy a modest price of $25 a ton on carbon for several years, then morph into a carbon-trading scheme in 2015. It’s a complicated proposal, full of loopholes and subsidies for Big Coal, but if it passes, it would be a big step in the right direction. “It’s a critical time,” Ross Garnaut, the government’s key climate adviser, told reporters. “Each year, the growth in emissions makes it less likely that we’ll be able to avoid severe damage from climate change. So the requirement to take action is urgent.”

It’s not just floods and drought and wildfires that are spurring action to cut carbon pollution. It’s also the fear of being left out of the economic benefits of clean technology. “With its deserts and sunshine, Australia should be the solar-energy capital of the world,” one California entrepreneur tells me. “Instead, they are still passing out subsidies to the coal industry.” Or as one Australian blogger put it, “Australia is currently exporting typewriters to a global economy moving quickly toward computers.”

But as the demand to take action grows, so too does the corporate and political push-back. The coal industry is a powerful force in Australia, and it is rolling out the usual tired arguments that a tax on carbon would devastate the economy and send jobs scurrying overseas. The country’s opposition leader, echoing the language of right-wing deniers in Congress, dismisses climate change as “absolute crap.” But as befits the Australian psyche, the scare tactics here are even bigger and nastier than in America. The rhetoric over global warming has grown so heated, in fact, that climate scientists at the Australian National University have been assigned security protection after several weeks of abusive e-mails and phone calls. For their work in understanding what is happening to their country, some scientists have even received death threats.

Let’s hope that the Australian “canary in the coal mine” can help us better understand and prepare for what is already happening in the U.S. and around the world.

Today Reuters reported that Canada has stated that the Kyoto Protocol is a “thing of the past” but has not yet confirmed whether it will formally pull out of the pact. Russia and Japan also said that they will not renew their commitment to the protocol unless it binds on the world’s greatest polluters.

The United States, which was the world’s largest emitter at the time of the Kyoto Protocol, refused to sign the treaty as it clearly had more to do with politics than with science. Since then, China and India have both probably surpassed US emissions, and have been producing sharply increasing emissions every year while wealthier nations have been striving to reduce CO₂.

As China and India are both in periods of extreme economic growth as they struggle to catch up to the rest of the world’s standards of living, it’s unlikely that either will bother to meet any CO₂ restrictions. There is just not enough immediate incentive to do so, and no immediate drawback in continuing to pollute their way to economic growth.

Most nations that did ratify the Kyoto Protocol have failed to meet its targets, and failed by huge margins. There is a really simple reason for this: as China and India discovered, there’s just no compelling reason to bother.

My opinion is that the only way any nation will truly change their CO₂ emitting ways (and I’m talking to you, United States, China, India, Brazil, Russia, etc.) is if we make it cheaper and more profitable to use clean energy. Not artificially so, through the use of penalties and incentives, but genuinely so. This means investment in clean energy sources, namely Generation IV nuclear technologies.

Discuss and flame.

The analysis was designed to be what can be called a consensus study – an independent group is taking a thorough analysis of the data, accounting for prior criticisms, to arrive at a result that everyone can agree on. Prior to announcing the results, in fact, some global warming skeptics stated publicly that they welcome the independent analysis and would stand by the results. PZ Myers reports on Anthony Watts response – initially saying he would accept the study results, but now considering the study to be fatally flawed.

The point of a consensus study is to bring all sides of a scientific controversy together, account for all criticisms of existing data, and then try to specifically address those criticisms so that everyone can agree on the results. This actually does happen at times, although it does seem that there remain holdouts for the view that “loses” when the new data comes out. The consensus data, however, does tend to marginalize the holdouts.

This is the way science is supposed to work – people can argue vehemently about how to interpret the data, with renewed vigor as each new piece of data comes out. But in the end everyone should be basing their opinions on the evidence, or should at least be able to agree that the evidence will ultimately determine the outcome of controversy. Part of the goal of a consensus study is to get all sides to agree on the protocol before hand, that way they cannot legitimately complain once the data comes in. Everyone, in short, has to go all-in and bet their position on the data.

James Randi has learned the value of this procedure – he always gets applicants to the JREF challenge to agree to the protocol prior to obtaining the results. Of course, once the results show they are not psychic, only then do they find flaws in the protocol. We saw the same thing with a large CDC trial on vaccines and adverse neurological outcomes. Sallie Bernard, a believer in the mercury-autism hypothesis, was consulted on the design of the study and agreed to the protocol – until the results came out. When the results were negative (no correlation between vaccines and adverse neurological outcomes) she backpedaled and distanced herself from the study.

Let’s get back to the new climate change data. Prior analysis by NASA, the NOAA, and the UK Climate Research Unit, using different but overlapping data sets, all found the same thing – the famous hockey stick of recent temperature increase. However there has been a lot of criticism of the data – that there are artifacts in the ways in which they adjusted temperatures for time of day and other variables, and accounted for the urban heat island effect – that cities are warmer and are getting bigger. Statistical analysis of the data is complex, creating legitimate concern about the introduction of artifacts into the analysis, but also creating the opportunity to deny the results if you don’t like them.

So a completely independent analysis was in order – part of the replication that is demanding by good science. Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, undertook the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study. They looked at a more complete data set, essentially combining all the data of the three previous analyses, and also devised their own statistical analysis. What they found pretty much exactly matches the prior three studies. They confirmed the hockey stick of temperature rise. As you can see from the chart – the lines overlap almost completely.

This analysis not only confirms that global warming is happening, it confirms the legitimacy of the three prior analyses. Despite all the criticism, the methods used were apparently accurate.

I need to point out that the analysis still has to be peer-reviewed. In addition the researchers are making their methods and data public and more easily accessible than the previous data sets, so we should expect a great of picking over these results. That’s all good. Science needs to be transparent. We will see what the result of peer-review is. If the analysis survives peer-review, then we can also expect that this will strengthen the consensus among scientists that global warming is a real phenomenon.

But we know that this is an ideologically hot topic, and there are those who deny that global warming is happening (while there are others that acknowledge global warming and just deny the degree to which it is man-made, or that current proposals can do anything about it). I don’t expect this data to convert many dissidents – we’ll see. However (again – if it holds up) it will marginalize their view. It will strengthen the consensus. To the degree that science is used to inform political action, a strong consensus on the science is very helpful.

This replication will likely have that effect. How it is translated into political action remains to be seen.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

—Richard Feynman

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another.

—John Burroughs

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

—Philip K. Dick, author

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

—Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 2003

What’s real is what’s real, and, like it or not, no one can change the nature of reality. Except, of course, with mushrooms.

—Bill Maher

It happens so often that we are inured and desensitized to it. Creationists spout lies and distortions about science and reality, and no one disputes them (except an occasional high school student who challenged Michele Bachmann’s assertion that Nobelists denied evolution). Politicians like Rick Perry and Bachmann get up and brag about their doubts about the reality of global climate change and evolution, and they become the darlings of the GOP. Partisan media like Fox News and their parent company NewsCorp admit that they are receiving money from GOP candidates, or funneling it to them, and no one seems to care. News Corp and Rupert Murdoch get away with all sorts of outrages in their tabloids, yet they are so powerful that British politicians and cops dare not cross them—until their actions are so extreme that all of the UK is disgusted with them. But every once in a while, the cat is let out of the bag, and someone says something that reveals how these people are either abysmally ignorant of reality because of deluded ideology, or they are smart enough to recognize it but play along in a cynical grab for power over those who are ignorant or ill informed.

The latest incident occurred when two pundits on Fox News were discussing the GOP candidates. They point to Jon Huntsman as the sole candidate who would admit that global warming is real (Romney, Gingrich, and others who also once admitted it are now backtracking to kowtow to the extremists who vote in GOP primaries and caucuses). They comment that he’s losing ground to Rick Perry, who made false claims not only about global warming but also about how scientists were allegedly committing fraud. One of the Fox anchors, Clayton Morris, says it it in no uncertain terms:

Certainly, if you dive into the weeds a little bit on this global warming thing, you see that it seems the facts are certainly on Huntsman’s side on all of this and fact checkers have come out, and we’re actually having our own brain room look at this right now, that any of Perry’s comments don’t seem to hold a lot of water. But it doesn’t matter, because what’s resonating right now in South Carolina is helping Governor Perry tremendously. He fired back at Huntsman on global warming and gaining traction, facts or not.

There it is, in black and white. Pundits on Fox News admitting global warming is real, that it is supported by the scientific community—yet it matters not to Perry or others in the GOP craving power because their base doesn’t believe in reality. Political strategy aside, is this not among the most cynical things one could hear in the media? That facts are clear but don’t matter, since the GOP candidate must tell the extremists in their party what they want to hear, not tell the truth?

None of this is surprising to those of us in the scientific community who have followed politics since 2000. As Chris Mooney showed in his book The Republican War on Science, the GOP during the 8 years of Dubya pursued policies that were strongly in favor of big corporations, and ignored or rewrote the recommendations of their own science advisors whenever science and reality got in the way of their ideology. These incidents ranged from the subtle (rewriting EPA rules to favor big corporations) to the outrageous, such as the Bush official and  former oil company lobbyist Philip Cooney tampering with and toning down a scientific report on global warming, even though he had no science background and was clearly doing the bidding of the Administration and the oil lobby.

Indeed, the conflict goes back to the early Bush years, when Dubya backtracked on campaign pledges to curb global warming, and soon pursued policies that favored polluters, even while he was bragging to the media that he was in favor of creationism. The most revealing quote of all came when New York Times Magazine columnist Ron Suskind interviewed Karl Rove on Oct. 17, 2004:

he said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Once again, possibly without realizing it, they let the cat out of the bag. They know what is real, but they are cynical enough to play whatever political games they must play, and deny what they know to be real, all in the quest to gain and keep power. Machiavelli would not be surprised, but it is a pretty shameful admission nonetheless.

There were some in the media who have noticed it and commented, but now that the media are so polarized, you won’t hear anyone on the right wing commenting on it (with the exception of Morris above). One of the more measured and non-partisan analyses came from Nobelist Paul Krugman. As he puts it in his recent column:

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind: Mr. Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe, and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.

So how has Mr. Romney, the other leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination, responded to Mr. Perry’s challenge? In trademark fashion: By running away. In the past, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But, last week, he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but “I don’t know that” and “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.” Moral courage!

Of course, we know what’s motivating Mr. Romney’s sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

I concur that those prospects are truly terrifying, especially as we saw the consequences of eight  years of Bush policies that ignored reality and played cynical power games. Fortunately, there is still time for voters to come around and recognize this manipulation of ignorant right-wingers.

In the meantime, I proudly wear a badge which proclaims my allegiance to the “reality-based community”.

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The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray

—Robert Burns
To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, 1785

Last week I was in New York City, working on the incredible fossils stored at the American Museum of Natural History, as part of a long-planned museum-hopping tour to see important specimens in New York, Philadelphia, Yale, Harvard, Amherst, and then down to the University of Florida Museum before returning home. I’m on sabbatical, and this research reviewing the evolution of North American peccaries or javelinas (pig-like creatures mainly found in Latin America, but only distantly related to true pigs of the Old World) is the focus of my sabbatical this fall. The trip itself was scheduled over six months ago, since it was the only time I could get away before the kids go back to school and my wife resumes teaching on Labor Day weekend. I flew in on Sunday night, Aug. 21, and was filled with flashbacks of my wonderful six years there as a Ph.D. student at Columbia University and the American Museum (1976-1982). Back then, as a young grad student,  I was footloose and fancy free (although poor) and enjoyed the opera (day of performance standing-room ticket was all I could afford), jazz in the Village, half-price Broadway show tickets at TKTS, all the while working like a maniac on those incredible fossils to publish enough research before I finished my doctorate, in order to have a small chance at a job. (Fewer than 20% of Ph.D.’s in vertebrate paleontology get a decent job in a related field).

For the first four days, the weather was great (low 80s and not too humid, very unusual for New York in August), and I was getting a lot of research done. I was also reveling in the sounds and sights and smells of Manhattan, and even the steam-bath humidity of the subway tunnels and the frequent arguments that break out in the subways didn’t bother me. I’d seen a lot of them in 6 years of living there, especially in the pre-Guiliani days when the city was a lot dirtier and more dangerous, and bums harassed you much more aggressively. It was great to see the amazing exhibits at the American Museum again, stroll around the Park and seeing the sights of Downtown again, or go people-watching along Broadway or Columbus on the Upper West Side. I visited my old building on West 87th just off Riverside (I once had a tiny rent-controlled fourth-floor walkup in a brownstone that cost me only $160/month in 1978, now worth many thousands a month), hung out at Lincoln Center (no time for a concert, and they’re not performing in August anyway), and walked past my favorite haunts on Broadway. It was fun to rediscover the foods, too: a Nathan’s Famous hot dog or a REAL New York bagel and schmear in a genuine Jewish deli, savor the delicious smells at Zabars, or have a slice or two at Ray’s Pizzeria. I walked past the Dakota building where John Lennon was murdered (I was just a few blocks away that night in 1980). I tried to find the Blarney Castle, an Irish bar on 72nd St. where I once took a final exam over pitchers of beer in a seminar taught by Niles Eldredge, but it had changed names and ownership.

High above the Earth from aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Ron Garan snapped this image of Hurricane Irene as it passed over the Caribbean on Aug. 22, 2011. Even though it was only a Category 1 storm, it covered an area the size of Europe (Photo credit: NASA)

But by Wednesday I was getting worried about the reports of Hurricane Irene and what it would do to New York, and by Thursday night the reports of the hurricane forced me to cancel my swing through New England and Florida, and rebook my JetBlue flight back on Saturday night. It was clear that the storm would make it impossible to get to those New England museums on Monday or Tuesday, let alone expect the collections managers to show up and help me out. My long-planned museum tour would have to be postponed, and I’d have to spend more scarce grant money trying to do it all over again before my sabbatical ended.

Then things started to get really crazy. I came into the Paleontology department office first thing Friday morning, and the staff there (all long-time New Yorkers) were hearing news that the City that Never Sleeps would shut down completely by Saturday afternoon, not just Sunday when the storm hit. Suddenly it was apparent that my Saturday night flight was unrealistic, as were my plans to give a guest lecture and record a podcast with NYC Skeptics on Saturday. Instead of wrapping up the remaining pieces of my peccary research before moving on, I had to spend time unsuccessfully trying to reschedule my JetBlue flight for an earlier time. Every flight was already all sold out, so I’d have to eat the cost of that ticket, plus spend hundreds more finding any plane ticket home out of the NYC metro area. The best I could do was a flight out of Newark that evening, which meant leaving the Museum immediately. I raced to catch the C train subway down to Penn Station to catch the LIRR to my friend’s place out in Nassau County (where I was staying to avoid the $200 or more a night hotels in Manhattan). I ran to his place and packed and caught the next LIRR back to Penn Station. I was hoping to use NJ Transit trains to Newark, but the time window was too tight for my 6:30 flight, so I had to spend $80 on a cab to make sure I didn’t miss it.

By this time, insanity was everywhere. Friday afternoon rush out of Manhattan is always bad but it was compounded by all the panicky drivers fleeing through the tunnels before the hurricane flooded them all. Frantic drivers were even ruder and more dangerous than usual (for a town full of truly crazy cabs and other bad drivers), as were all the panicked passengers in Penn Station trying to get any train out of town. Once I reached the airport, it was the usual hassle (slow security lines, and I was even singled out of random screening). At the gate, the smell of desperation was palpable as people were trying to get whatever flight they could to anywhere off the East Coast, since flight cancellations were happening already, 48 hours before the storm was due.

Fortunately, I’d already gotten a confirmed reservation and boarding passes online, so I needed only a seat assignment, and we all packed into the full flight to Detroit. After that short hop, the Detroit airport was a very different experience: no threats of storms there, plus it was already late at night. My red-eye to LAX finally boarded, and I was crammed into a tiny aisle seat with screaming babies on all sides for the 5-hour flight. I finally landed at LAX, wandered through all the construction in Terminal 6 for a long time until I found my bag, then there were the usual long delays waiting for SuperShuttle at 1:30 in the morning, so when I finally reached home and dropped into bed, I had been traveling for nearly 24 hours straight and gotten almost no sleep since Thursday night. After I finally caught up on some of my lost sleep and the jet lag, Saturday was bright and sunny in LA, although we’ve had nearly a week of weather over 100°F and our heat wave is not done yet.

Now, as I watch the TV coverage of the storm, I realize how lucky I was to get out at all, and only to have to spend a few hundred dollars to change plans. I was on almost the last flight out, and my friends and students who had flights on Saturday had to remain refugees with the people they had stayed with. Yet it appears that the East Coast dodged a bullet, with only a handful of deaths, although the flooding, downed power lines, washed out roads, and other damage will certainly total in the millions when it is all over. But it could have been MUCH worse, given how vulnerable NYC is if those hurricane-force winds had really spawned tornadoes in the concrete canyons, or the flooding of the city had taken out the subway and train and auto tunnels that are its lifeline. Of course, we’ll hear the usual griping from people who didn’t take the warnings seriously and didn’t think the storm was that bad. But the last major hurricane to hit the Northeast was Gloria back in 1985 which killed 11 people and caused $900 million in damage in 1985 dollars. Most Northeasterners are not old enough to remember it from 25 years ago. Hurricane Irene was not a Category 4 like Gloria was, but it was much bigger in size (it spanned an area the size of Europe) and dropped a LOT more rain on already saturated ground from a record wet summer. Before Gloria, there had been only 4 hurricanes within 75 miles of New York City since 1851.

But some people who ignored the warnings drowned or were hit by trees or electrocuted when they touched downed power lines. More candidates for the Darwin Awards, I guess. Even more annoying was the persistent Big Apple bias of the reporting. All weekend it was “New York, New York, New York” even though the storm was much worse in the Carolinas, Virginia, DC and Philadelphia. But NYC is still the “Media Capital” and (except for CNN in Atlanta) most news still comes from there.

So why should we care about Hurricane Irene, other than its effects in the regions it hit? Ever since Katrina, people have been wondering about how hurricanes and how climate change might affect them. Hurricane Irene is truly unusual, since the East Coast has not been hit by a storm this big in recent history. As Bill McKibben writes in his post:

Irene has a middle name and it’s Global Warming…Irene is just the kind of hurricane one might expect to become more common due to global warming. It’s rare for such a large, powerful hurricane to maintain its strength beyond the Carolinas, meteorologist Jeff Masters tells McKibben, because wind shear and/or cool seawater normally wear down any tropical storms that make it that far. Wind shear could still disrupt Irene, but as McKibben writes, “ocean temperatures won’t.” Sea-surface temperatures in Irene’s path are now about 1 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit above average, “which will make it easier for Irene to maintain its strength much farther to the north than a hurricane usually can,” Masters explains.

As I discuss in my new book, Catastrophes!, what worries scientists most about Katrina and subsequent hurricanes is that the 2005 season has been part of a long-term trend in more and more intense hurricanes over the past 20 years. 2005 broke the record held by the previous worst season on record: 2004. The number of Category 4 and 5 storms between 1990 and 2006 has increased dramatically compared to the interval between 1975-1989 (Curry and Holland, 2005). Emanuel (2005) showed that the power of the most recent hurricanes (as measured by wind speed and duration) has jumped 50% since 1970. Nearly all the most destructive hurricane seasons on record have happened in the past 20 years, with many of the years in the 2000s at or near record levels of major hurricanes. The ranking of seasons with the most major hurricanes has 2005, 1999, 1996, and 1994 in their top five. Of the seasons with the most named tropical storms in the Atlantic, the years 1995, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2008 are all in top ten list, and only two years (1933, 1936) on the top ten list were before 1969. Only 2002 and 2006 have failed to make the list of the most named tropical storms in this decade. The 2009 season started late but it had a record 7 named storms in August, and finished with 20 storms and 8 hurricanes altogether.  2010 was the warmest year on record with many hurricanes that mostly stayed at sea. As I write this, it’s too early to tell whether 2011 will also make the top ten list, although the first seven months of 2011 had some the warmest sea-surface temperatures since 1880.

One of the criticisms of efforts to identify whether hurricanes have become worse in recent years is the lack of a detailed historical record. Other than a few great storms of past centuries, there are almost no reliable historical records of hurricanes before 1900. But a recent study (Mann et al., 2009) used cores taken from seven coastal locations (lagoons, lakes, barrier islands) on the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. plus one site in Puerto Rico, and identified the sandy storm layers, and dated them by radiocarbon methods. From this, they obtained a historical record of almost a thousand years of hurricane seasons on the Atlantic. They found that the last two decades have indeed had the highest number of hurricanes, averaging 17 per year, more than twice the value of any previous decade. The last time hurricanes were this frequent was during the Medieval Warm Period.

Not surprisingly, this information has been grist for the mill in the debate over climate change. There is no dispute that the sea surface temperatures in the tropical oceans have warmed dramatically. It makes sense that warmer oceans, which produce hurricanes in the first place, would produce more of them and more intense storms. There are plenty of top scientists who argue that the connection is real (e.g., Curry and Holland, 2005; Emanuel 2005; Webster et al., 2005), and most of these articles have been published in the top-of-the-line, most stringently reviewed scientific journals such as Science and Nature. But as usual, the climate denialists are not convinced. Part of the problem is that this is still a short-term trend, since the data for both oceanic temperatures and hurricane velocities do not go back very far, so it is hard to establish whether such a correlation has happened in the past. Ironically, some of the scholars who have documented this increase in hurricane intensity,  such as Kerry Immanuel, are (or at least were) Republicans. They are appalled by the climate-denialism that is almost a GOP plank now.

And a final irony: the talk I was supposed to give to the NYC Skeptics on Saturday was on my new book “Catastrophes!” On top of that, earlier that week I’d experienced the Virginia earthquake and watched the bookshelves in the 10th floor Osborn Library sway back and forth. So now I must reschedule my New York-New England-Florida trip for November or December, and make up the canceled NYC Skeptics lecture. Maybe we’ll have a blizzard, just for the occasion…

Order the book from shop.skeptic.com

The national news is dominated by yet another set of extraordinary tornadoes in the southern and central United States. The last month brought enormous twisters, including the May 22 tornado that wiped out Joplin, Missouri, and paved a path of destruction in Oklahoma and Kansas as well. It has killed at least 144 people (so far), making it the deadliest single tornado since the April 9, 1947, event that killed 181 in Woodward, Oklahoma. Back on April 27, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was devastated, with a death toll that is still unknown as searchers comb through the debris. But on that date alone, over 327 tornadoes were reported, causing at least 344 deaths (149 of those in Alabama), with significant damage and deaths from Arkansas to Mississippi and on up into Tennessee and Georgia. The death toll from these storms exceeds the more than 300 killed in the legendary April 3–4, 1974, “Super Outbreak”, which caused death and destruction from Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio to Alabama and Georgia. These recent storms follow closely on the heels of major tornado outbreaks all over the Midwest and Southeast in February, March, and early April.

What is happening? We understand the fundamentals of tornadoes pretty well. Usually there is warm moist air mass rising from the Gulf of Mexico that moves north and meets cooler, drier air from the northern Plains and the Rockies. When these collide, a strong front develops which causes a big horizontal cylindrical vortex to form. The warm air rises up as it meets the cold air and thunderheads grow. If there is also strong shear from the jet stream, the horizontal cylindrical spiral of air will tilt into a vertical funnel. If it continues to grow, it will touch the ground and become a tornado.

Because tornadoes are generated when these different air masses come into collide, they are most common in the spring, when the weather is transitioning from cold on the northern Plains to hot on the Gulf Coast. Thus, March through July are the busiest months of “tornado season”, although tornadoes occur in every month of the year. The U.S. has by far most of the world’s tornadoes due to its favorable geography. The Rocky Mountains funnel and block air masses, the warm Gulf air rises up from the south, and cold air masses descend from Canada.

The only other country in the world with significant tornadoes? Bangladesh, which also has a barrier of high mountains funneling the air masses (the Himalayas), warm moist air from the Bay of Bengal, and other similar factors. The world’s deadliest tornado occurred not in the U.S., but in Bangladesh on April 26, 1989, killing more that 1300 people.

The U.S. tornado season is getting off to a rip-roaring start this year, with over 1208 tornadoes reported so far, at least 875 of those confirmed (as of May 24, 2011). At this pace, 2011 will easily break the previous records for tornado seasons (although there have been seasons in the past that started strong and then fizzled). Of these, there were at least 4 tornadoes that were a Category 5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, the largest known events, with estimated wind speeds in excess of 200 mph (322 km/hr). So far, 2011 is the deadliest year in U.S. tornado history due to the more than 322 deaths in the April 27 outbreak and the more than 144 deaths in the May 22 outbreak.

The good news is that these numbers don’t yet approach the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history, including over 700 killed and 2027 injured by the Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925. That twister carved a path of destruction for hundreds of miles from Missouri to Indiana. If you look at a list of the Top Ten Killer Tornadoes in the U.S., most occurred in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, when there were no tornado warning systems in place and fewer places had tornado shelters. Today, there may be lots of dangerous tornadoes in a given year, but a higher percentage of people survive because of warnings and shelters and better building construction—even though our population growth and development are putting more people in harm’s way.

Are tornadoes becoming more frequent than ever before, just like larger killer hurricanes are becoming more frequent and energetic? Here, the evidence is still preliminary and inconclusive. Tornado data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) seems to show a fairly stable but fluctuating trend of about 800-1000 tornadoes per year between 1970 and 1988. Then, starting in 1989, the trend climbs to around 1200 tornadoes per year, with big spike of over 1300-1400 tornadoes in 1998 and 2003, 1692 in 2008, 1156 in 2009, 1282 in 2010, and already over 1200 in less than 5 months of the start of 2011. There seems to be no strong correlation with El Niño or La Niña years, as once thought. A lot of scientists are currently studying the data, but so far as I know, no one has done a careful statistical analysis to see if this trend is meaningful, and whether it holds up against the records over the past century. There are numerous confounding factors, such as the effects of larger more widespread populations that increase the potential damaged areas, and also a larger, more alert population that reports more tornadoes than 50 years ago. But it would not surprise me to find that the warming of the tropics that drives hurricanes also means more energy in those Gulf Coast warm moist air masses that cause tornadoes, as was predicted in 2007 studies by NASA and the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2008 study “Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Change on the United States.”

So hold on to your hats! It may not be the end of the world but by natural variation coupled to a warming trend we might just get walloped more this year than most.

This episode is now the textbook example of the broader concept that data may contain spurious patterns or results, depending on the methods used to gather that data. Humans are great at detecting patterns, and researchers will often mine large pools of data looking for connections. We also do this automatically in our everyday lives – mining the massive amounts of data of our daily experiences for patterns and then often responding as if these patterns are real and meaningful.

There are many kinds of false patterns in data other than sampling bias, and it often takes an expert to know how to interpret a complex data set. Meanwhile complex data can be presented to the public in a partial or deception way in order to create a false impression. The global warming controversy is now the poster child for this phenomenon. The notion that the planet is slowly warming and that human activity is playing a significant role is based upon large sets of data that has to be analyzed in very complex and subtle statistical ways. Both sides of the controversy point to biases or errors in the data that falsely make it look as if the Earth is or is not warming.

I am not suggesting equivalency here – just that the fight is largely taking place in the arena of horrifically complex sets of massive amounts of data. For the record, I find the argument for anthropogenic global warming to be compelling. I would not say that it is certain, but it is probable enough that it is reasonable to think about how we can mitigate such effects from continuing unrestrained into the future. This is one of those areas of research where scientific certainty will likely not be achieved until long after it is too late to do anything about it, so we have to act based upon probability.

One of the many challenges of looking at the data of planetary temperatures is that we need to look at trends over a long period of time. By definition, this takes a long time. (It is similar to asking what the long term effects are of some medical intervention – if you want to know what the risks vs benefits are over 20 years, that will take at least 20 years to research.) What this means practically is that recent trends are difficult to analyze statistically. By definition recent trends are short term.

This has led to the fact that, looking at warming trends since 1995, there has been no statistically significant warming. Global warming dissidents have used this fact to argue that global warming is not happening – whatever warming was happening in the latter half of the 20th century is now over, and this is all part of the natural cycle of temperature fluctuation.

But as I stated – it is always going to be true that when we look at the trend in the last 10 years we have only 10 years of data, and that may not be enough to be statistically significant. So dissidents will always be able to argue that there has been no warming in the most recent decade.

Professor Phil Jones (yes, the same Jones who was caught up in the “ClimateGate” scandal – which, btw, never turned up any evidence of scientific misconduct), was often quoted as saying that the data from 1995-2009 did not show significant warming. It did show warming, which was statistically significant at the 90% confidence level – but not the 95% that is the accepted cutoff. Well, after adding in the data for 2010, the warming trend for this period is now, according to Jones, significant at the 95% level. He is quoted by the BBC:

“Basically what’s changed is one more year [of data]. That period 1995-2009 was just 15 years – and because of the uncertainty in estimating trends over short periods, an extra year has made that trend significant at the 95% level which is the traditional threshold that statisticians have used for many years.

Jones argues that 20-30 years is the time period we really should be looking at. But of course, as I stated, this means we will always be 20-30 years behind the times in our knowledge of recent climate change.

Conclusion

There are many sources of potential artifact in the climate data. Where are the temperature stations located? Have cities built up near them over the years, leading to false warming? There are also artifacts in the time it takes for stations to report their data to central repositories, which then have to crunch the data. There are changing methods of temperature measurement of the years.

In addition to artifact in the gathering and reporting of the data, there are numerous trends in the data itself. There are multiple natural climate cycles, as well as short term anomalies (like volcanic eruptions) that need to be taken into account.

This is why sorting through all of this noise in the climate data is not for the amateur. Of course, now that climate change is a politically-charged issue, the internet if full of exactly that – amateur analysis of the data. This is definitely an area where substituting one’s own analysis for the consensus of scientific opinion is probably not a good idea.

Job one, on almost anybody’s list, is conservation. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimated in 2008 that existing technologies could cut world energy demand 20 percent by 2020. For supply, it makes financial sense to generate power close to home. Most communities spend 10 percent of their money for fuel, and almost all of it disappears, off to Saudi Arabia or Exxon. Yet in 2008 the Institute for Local Self-Reliance showed that nearly half of all American States could meet their energy needs entirely within their borders, “and the vast majority could meet a significant percentage.” Wind turbines and rooftop solar could provide 81 percent of New York’s power, for instance, and almost one third of Ohio’s.

I’ll begin by stating that McKibben and I agree in principal almost entirely. We do need to completely replace our fossil fuel driven power grid, and as quickly as possible. With that said, I disagree with virtually every single point he makes. Let’s go one by one:

Job one, on almost anybody’s list, is conservation. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimated in 2008 that existing technologies could cut world energy demand 20 percent by 2020.

Conservation has never proven to be a satisfactory strategy to solve virtually any shortage. Spending money to replace refrigerators and air conditioners with Energy Star compliant models is money that should instead be thrown at the Big Solution: small, incremental steps are time wasted. If 20 percent is the maximum we can expect from this, it’s clearly a non-starter. We need 100 percent replacement of fossil fuels. We need the giant leap. And if you depend on people shutting off the water while they shave, or driving more slowly, or turning off the lights when they leave the room, your strategy is guaranteed to fail. Should they? Yes. Will they? No. The habits of Ed Begley Jr. do not represent those of most people. Don’t depend on something that won’t happen; solve the problem instead. This lesson has had to be re-learned every time we’ve depended upon people to choose to conserve.

For supply, it makes financial sense to generate power close to home… Wind turbines and rooftop solar could provide 81 percent of New York’s power, for instance, and almost one third of Ohio’s.

Only in rare cases, like rooftop hot water systems. Rooftop solar and wind? No way, not even close, probably not even if you depend upon the unsustainable government subsidies we now enjoy. Things like transformers and maintenance and upgrades are the realities of these systems. These are intractable for the average homeowner, but they are trivial for a centralized power station that has the personnel, the money, and the means. Significantly, they also enjoy vast economies of scale. One large transformer for a neighborhood is far more efficient than a thousand small ones; one giant wind generator with 100 moving parts and a team of dedicated technicians walks all over a thousand small, unmaintained generators with 100,000 moving, breakable parts.

Transmission loss is a real factor, to be sure. But it’s more than made up for by the tremendous economies of scale.

Most communities spend 10 percent of their money for fuel, and almost all of it disappears, off to Saudi Arabia or Exxon.

I have to call foul on McKibben for this one. Only a tiny fraction of our fossil fuel comes from Saudi Arabia, and almost none from hostile Mideast countries. We produce well over a third of it domestically, and most that we import comes from Canada, Mexico, and non-Arab OPEC countries like Nigeria and Venezuela. Most of what remains does indeed come from Saudi Arabia, but it totals merely about a sixth. Cries of “Buying gas and oil sends your money to those evil woman-hating, hand-chopping, Muslim Saudis” are weasel words designed to frighten and sensationalize. Are you enriching Exxon? Yes. Are you enriching Saudi Arabia? Hardly. That he puts them in the same sentence implies that they are both equally bad places to send your money. Exxon is evil to those who embrace anticorporatism; Saudi Arabia is evil to those who embrace human rights. Equating the two is a wonderfully debatable topic, which I’d love to hear; but it’s not science, and has no place in a publication purporting to offer science-based solutions.

The reason for this is probably obvious – skeptics are divided politically (this is an oversimplification but largely true) between liberals and libertarians, both of which seem to have strong and opposite opinions on the topic of global warming. As a result I have been simultaneously criticized for being too soft and too hard on global warming dissidents. I hope this means that I am striking an objective balance – but then, of course, I get criticized for striking a “false balance.” I have been told that I am losing my skeptical street cred, and that I have faith in global warming as a secular religion. Many people also seem to think they can divine my political persuasion from my opinions on global warming, but then proceed to make very incorrect assumptions on that score.

There has also been intense fighting on what to call global warming dissidents – the term I have settled on as the most accurate and neutral. Part of the problem is that dissidents come in a broad range of opinions. At one end of the spectrum there are what can only be described as deniers – those who engage in all the tactics of denialism against any notion of climate change. At the other end are those who accept the core scientific consensus of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), but are skeptical of some of the dire predictions and proposed fixes. And there is every permutation in between – defying easy categorization or labeling. So I use “dissidents” as a neutral catch-all.

What is most disappointing about the AGW controversy is the degree to which self-identified members of the skeptical community engage in less-than-skeptical discourse on this topic. I am mainly referring to the many dozens of e-mails I have received on the topic (every time I talk about it) but also on blogs and articles.

I would like to share with you an e-mail exchange I had recently with a global warming dissident. He is responding mainly to my recent discussion of “climategate” – which has really increased the nastiness of the discussion on AGW.

My personal understanding of the current state of climate science is this – the evidence is very solid that average global temperatures are trending up over the last century and that human forcing through CO2 production is the best current answer to explain this trend. If this trend continues (a somewhat big “if”) then there will likely be significant unwanted consequences – not for the earth, but for human civilization. Shifting around agriculture and shorelines will be inconvenient, to say the least. But there is admitted uncertainty in this, and we don’t know all the ways in which the environment will respond to CO2 and temperature increases. But, as is often the case with applied sciences, we have to act prior to certainty if we want to affect the outcome.

Further, the current plans for fixes to rising CO2 and climate change are as much political as scientific. I think the best solutions to focus on are those things that we would benefit from anyway. Let’s accelerate research and development into alternative energy sources and increased energy efficiency. Even if AGW is a non-issue, these will be good things. It’s a win-win.

I must admit I have not been impressed with those who have e-mailed me to try to convince me that AGW is pseudoscience, and that dissidents are the real skeptics. It seems that the more someone tries to convince me of this position, the more they push me in the opposite direction. The following e-mail exchange really is representative of what I receive. (Forgive the length of the exchange.)

Steve, I was heartened to hear your softened position on Global Warming in the Year End SGU, even though Rebecca is still rabid. Eventually, all of you will come to realize who were the real skeptics on this issue, and who were the Denyers. A quote from below article – if the shoe fits:

“The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a Religious Faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual (separate your waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets). We are told that we must have faith (all argument must end, as Al Gore likes to say) and must persecute heretics (global warming skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, we are told).

People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from whatever flimsy source may be at hand. The rest of us, and judging from polls that includes most of the American people, are free to follow a more rational path.”

from: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/How-climate-change-fanatics-corrupted-science-83396362.html

I responded with the opinion I outlined above, concluding:

When you dig through all the nonsense and look at the actual data – in my opinion it supports the conclusion that the planet is warming and anthropogenic forcing is playing a significant role. Where this will lead and what to do about it are less clear. There is still uncertainty, but one thing is sure – if we wait until we are certain about AGW it will be too late to do anything about it. It’s like waiting to treat a patient with possible cancer until after you are sure it’s cancer, because it has spread and is now incurable.

Here is part of the e-mailer’s response:

Thanks for the considered reply. We of course agree on many of the issues – I have always been in favor of pollution control, energy efficiency, alternative energy, recycling when efficient. But not Cap and Trade or Carbon Credits or other political/economic disasters. Regarding your cancer analogy, you don’t treat for cancer without the biopsy showing the actual cancer. If you saw the Walter Williams / John Coleman information I sent yesterday, the “warming” itself is now questionable because CRU dropped the coldest temperature data from the mix used to show global temps. And the anthropogenic forcing effect is very tenuous – and where we truly disagree on Truth and Relevance.

OK – this is where I like to dig in. Whenever I get a specific claim I investigate it for myself and try to find out what the real story is. It seems that when it comes to the AGW controversy the claims of the dissidents do not hold up under investigation. So, did the CRU drop data in order to create the false impression of global warming? Here is what I found.

Your point about the CRU dropping the coldest temperature data is a good example of why I am not impressed with the criticisms of AGW dissidents. You seem to be accepting uncritically the claims of the extremists on one side. My approach is always to investigate the claims first, see what both sides are saying, and then come to a conclusion.

It did not take me long to find this: http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2010/01/kusi-noaa-nasa/
A very reasoned and referenced analysis of this claim.

First, as far as I can tell the claim comes from here: http://www.climategate.com/climatologists-drop-806-cold-weather-stations-in-a-single-year

The claim of dropped data results from anomaly hunting followed by admitted speculations:

“Absent any public statement from climatolgists for such a strange act, I can only speculate that this a deliberate attempt to cause an artificial warming of the data set. I can think of no other valid scientific reason.”

Ah – an argument from ignorance. Well, he should have investigated first.

It turns out that stations are not being dropped from the data. It takes years and even decades to put together the hand-collected data from many stations around the world. So as you look back in time, those stations whose data has not been made available yet “drop off”. As the author above explains – if you look at the number of stations providing data 30 years from now you may see a spike around 2010 in the number of stations. In other words – stations are not being dropped, there is just a delay in getting data from them.

Second – you need to ask what should be an obvious question – is there any evidence that the stations which are currently missing from the data (for whatever reason) would skew the temperature results in favor of a warming trend. The answer to this is a clear no, from multiple independent lines of evidence. First – satellite temperature data would increasingly depart from ground station data if the ground stations were being biased in one direction. No such trend exists.

Second, when you compare stations with current data and those without current data, there is no pattern or bias toward warmer or cooler temperatures. So the core claim that cooler temperatures are being systematically dropped is false.

As a side note, the claim is about the GHCN, not the CRU.

This is representative of the entire climategate affair, as far as I can tell – although I am reserving judgment until all the facts are in. It does seem the CRU scientists were not following the rules of transparency and had developed a bunker mentality. It remains to be seen if they were engaged in “pious fraud.” What I reject are the premature conclusions of dissidents who were quick to assume that climategate confirmed all of their most extreme opinions.

So far, when you dig down to the real information it turns out that the anomalies in the data were just an innocent part of the scientific process – in this case the lag in data collection. This is true anomaly hunting and confirmation bias.

I am still waiting to hear a legitimate scientific argument from AGW dissidents why we should reject the claim that global warming is happening and is likely anthropogenic. I am not impressed by political arguments, calling my position a religion, or weaving liberal conspiracy theories.

I may be wrong – if you think I am then let’s discuss the science. My challenge to those who consider themselves global warming skeptics is, if you wish to truly earn that mantle, is to focus on scientific arguments. My opinions can be changed on this topic, I really have no stake in the debate at all – except the one that every human on the planet has, which is only served by knowing the truth, whatever it is. I hope global warming is not happening, it is nothing but a major inconvenience and crimp in civilization. I would love to just continue burning fossil fuels and not have to worry about the consequences.

So if you disagree with me, show me some science. And spare me the name-calling and conspiracy theories.

NASA visualization of arctic surface warming trends. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, Larry Stock, Robert Gersten

As many skeptics know by now, legendary skeptical trailblazer James Randi set off a firestorm last week with two Swift blog posts about global warming. His first post carried his strong suspicion that consensus science on climate change is incorrect, while his followup post wondered “whether we can properly assign the cause to anthropogenic influences.”

Skeptical bloggers were swift to respond. Critics (including PZ Myers, Orac, Sean Carroll, and James Hrynyshyn) chastised Randi for speaking outside his domain expertise; for dissenting from current consensus science; and for lending his name to the disreputable “Oregon Petition Project.” Others, like Phil Plait, corrected Randi while sensibly reminding us that “anyone, everyone, is capable of making mistakes.” And, inevitably, global warming deniers seized upon the event. (One headline, at Britain’s Telegraph.co.uk, gleefully crowed “James Randi forced to recant by Warmist thugs for showing wrong kind of scepticism.”)

But, of the many posts to respond to Randi, two in particular caught my attention. SkeptiCamp pioneer Reed Esau asked,

So what happens now? That uneasy feeling you are now experiencing may be the implications of the situation setting in. … Most of us are laymen who don’t have the professional experience and analytical skills to properly evaluate the data and the methods. To pretend we do (or to reject it on a hunch) separates us from the very scientific enterprise we skeptics purport to value.

Similarly, according to Skeptical Inquirer columnist Massimo Pigliucci, “we need to pause and think carefully about the entire skeptical movement in light of episodes like this one.”

So, What Happens Now?

I’ve long argued that our patchy, lukewarm reluctance to accept mainstream climate science is skepticism’s greatest failure. I’ll return to that argument in future posts, but today I’d like to concentrate on the general question raised by Esau and Pigliucci: what is skepticism’s appropriate relationship to consensus science? What — if anything — may skeptics responsibly say on mainstream science subjects?

Organized skepticism has always talked about science. Certainly, we use science-informed arguments when critiquing paranormal claims. We use techniques from science (and from other investigatory disciplines, such as history and journalism) when digging into strange stuff. The promotion of scientific literacy is also a core part of our traditional mandate (as I argued in the essay “Where Do We Go From Here?”).

Nonetheless, it’s my opinion that there are severe limits on the kinds of scientific arguments into which skeptics may responsibly wade. If we’re serious about our science-based epistemology, we must be prepared to consistently defer to scientific consensus. As Esau puts it,

That consistency is essential, because without it people like myself will ask “So, what’s the point?” To waver from that consistency risks calling the entire enterprise into question.

Staying on Track

The simple truth is that many skeptics have limited scientific qualifications. Yes, of course, there are towering, world-class scientists in the skeptical camp. But most skeptics are not working scientists. Even skeptics who do have scientific qualifications are frequently called upon to comment outside of their area of domain expertise. (Think of astronomer Phil Plait commenting on vaccines, or neurologist Steve Novella commenting on evolution.)

At the same time, people turn to skeptical media to find out what’s really true about weird things — sometimes life and death things, as in alternative medicine. Skeptics solicit that trust. We make the implicit (and sometimes explicit) promise that we are able to provide the nuanced, objective, evidence-based facts.

That combination of stated commitment to science, limited qualifications, and weighty ethical responsibilities (as when we comment on medicine) place a very high due diligence burden upon skeptics.

So, with last week’s firestorm as a cautionary tale, I’d like to propose some rules of thumb for skeptical discussion of mainstream science:

1) Where both scientific domain expertise and expert consensus exist, skeptics are (at best) straight science journalists. We can report the consensus, communicate findings in their proper context — and that’s it.

Skeptical resources spent on mainstream science journalism are resources taken away from our core mandate (pseudoscience and the paranormal — a mandate no one else has), although science popularization is of course valuable in itself when done responsibly. (My upcoming book is a straightforward kids’ primer on evolution.) But skeptics who do delve into science reporting should consider themselves obligated to stay close to mainstream expert opinion — and, obligated to solicit fact-checking and criticism from actual scientific experts.

Unfortunately, some lay skeptics have the idea that general critical thinking skills qualify them to critique professional science even in the face of wide agreement among domain experts. I submit that this is hubris — and almost always a mistake. (It is also the exact argument that sustains anti-vaccine activism, creationism, and other fringe positions whose examples we might wish to avoid.)

Daniel Loxton with 2000 sheep (in night corral) on the BC side of the Alaska Panhandle

In my previous career as a shepherd, we had a term for a very similar (and almost inevitable) phenomenon: “Rookie Syndrome.” Raw trainee shepherds would arrive in camp, look at sheep for a couple days, and then start to argue with the experienced hands. Why they thought a cursory glance qualified them to challenge domain experts is anyone’s guess, but it happened all the time. With some basic, introductory experience (say, two or three years), they typically became embarrassed about the arrogance and naiveté of their first weeks — during which they had known too little to even realize what they did not know.

Whether it’s sheep, law, stage magic, aircraft maintenance, Shakespeare scholarship, or a scientific discipline, every field has its specialized literature, skills, and knowledge base that take years of work to acquire. In any complex field, such domain expertise is essential to form a qualified opinion. And in most such fields, Rookie Syndrome — armchair quarterbacking — is common.

2) Where scientific domain expertise exists, but not consensus, we can report that a controversy exists — but we cannot resolve it. As Bertrand Russell put it,

when the experts are…not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and… when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

Skeptics sometimes stumble badly here: we cannot, as laypeople, responsibly wade into an area in which we are not expert and expect to settle expert controversies.

If we’re not qualified, we should not promote our opinions. If we are qualified, we should attempt to convince our fellow experts in the relevant peer-reviewed literature — not skip peer review to make popular appeals in the popular (skeptical) press.

3) Where scientific domain expertise and consensus exist, but also a denier movement or pseudoscientific fringe, skeptics can finally roll up their sleeves and get to work.

This is traditional ground for us, our bread and butter, as when we combat creationism or vaccine paranoia or AIDS denial. But note that there are two distinct components to critiquing fringe movements: knowledge of pseudoscience (our own area of domain expertise); and knowledge of the contrasting body of actual scientific literature — a literature on which we are not typically expert.

On the straight science component, we are obligated to defer to the current state of the science. On the pseudoscience component, we are often able to make a contribution in our capacity as the best available experts.

Consider the example of debating creationism. In the past, creationists typically ran rings around biologists. This was not because scientists lacked knowledge of science, but because scientists lacked specialized knowledge of nonsense. That’s where we came in. The history and rhetoric of nonsense is a specialized niche arena — our arena. Skeptics perform an essential public service when we concentrate on that.

This is our primary realm:

4) Where a paranormal or pseudoscientific topic has enthusiasts but no legitimate experts, skeptics may perform original research, advance new theories, and publish in the skeptical press.

This practically endless assortment of traditional skeptical topics (from Nessie to pyramid power to astrology to iridology to UFO crashes to psychic surgery) is where we should focus our energy. In these areas, our contribution is unique, valuable — and, I have argued, an ethical obligation. There are hundreds of topics under this vast umbrella, so it’s not like this “narrow” mandate for skepticism doesn’t offer us enough to do!

In this shadowy, fringe realm, skeptics can indeed critique working scientists. There is no mainstream of consensus science on, say, ghosts; skeptics are the relevant domain experts. And, just as we stumble when we venture outside of our expertise, so too will scientists who charge blindly into our own speciality.

And what are the most powerful, most illuminating, most enduring examples of skeptics schooling credentialed scientists and prestigious mainstream media? Exactly those demonstrations — such as the epic Project Alpha and Carlos hoaxes — brought to us by James “The Amazing” Randi.