We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong.

Science Journal – WSJ.com

This is an interesting article which repeats the research findings of Dr. Ioannidis and others. I carry a healthy respect for the difficulty that scientists face find in their search for verifiable science. Mother Nature grudgingly gives up nuggets of knowledge only after a lot of work and rework. Below is the link to the original report by Dr. Ioannidis and another link that was provided as recommended reading in the WSJ article.

Dr. John Ioannidis argued that false findings may be the majority of published research claims, in “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” in the PLoS Medicine journal, in August 2005.

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In another PLoS Medicine article earlier this year, Ramal Moonesinghe and Muin Khoury at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention demonstrated that the likelihood of a published research result being true increases when that finding has been repeatedly replicated in multiple studies. The article is: “Most Published Research Findings Are False — But a Little Replication Goes a Long Way.”

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Hot news: NASA quietly fixes flawed temperature data; 1998 was NOT the warmest year in the millenium

Oops!

The interesting thing about this “news” bite is that Oprah just played her Al Gore show on climate warming this week. My wife was swayed by the show and I found myself explaining to my wife why I believe there is less certainty in the climate numbers than Al Gore portrays. I was not successful at getting to her to look at both sides of the question until I asked her to think about our local temperature records. Like most of the United States we are having some hot weather. This is likely the hottest week we have experienced here in the last ten years. You would think that with all of this global warming we would have been regularly setting record temperatures in the last ten years. Hmm… the weather man says the record was set in 1941 and the most recent high temperature for this day was 1998.

Now we get this “news” bite that says “5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II”. Since the revised temperature graph no longer looks like a “hockey stick”, the link of global warming to human activity is much more tenuous. From the data it looks like there is a recent warming trend but there is a significant warming cycle in the 1930-1960 data. It will be hard to convince people to accept a dollar a gallon tax on gasoline to combat global warming with this data. Though the case for global warming is a bit weaker, we are once again reminded that climate science is a fuzzy science.

China will pass the United States as the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gasses this year, an official with the International Energy Agency was quoted as saying. China had been forecast to surpass the U.S. in 2010, but its sizzling economic growth has pushed the date forward, the IEA’s chief economist…

Source: Digg – Blog: China Will Pass U.S. As Polluter

I guess I am surprised. I thought the US was well out in front. China’s rapid increase in the production of greenhouse gasses complicates the global warming issue but it does not detract from the fact that it is in the best interest of the US to invoke energy policies that encourage energy efficiency and independence from foreign oil imports while at the sametime reducing greenhouse gasses.

I must admit that I was inspired to take a close look at our energy consumption and estimated CO₂ emissions after reading this Popular Mechanics article, Energy Family Part Four: Power Pioneers – Popular Mechanics. Since I am engineer I had to have some calculations. So I went over to the EPA site and pulled down their green house gas spreadsheet. The key information was the utility cost so I gathered up the electric bills for the last year. The results were not surprising. Most of our green house gas emissions, 84%, come from our use of electricity. In particular our electric bills are 50% higher for the months of December, January, and February.

So what can I do about this. There are three viable options:

1. Geothermal heat pump
2. Wind Power
3. Solar Power

The geothermal heat pump is probably the most cost effective solution since we have the land available. The savings are between 25% to 50% over conventional systems.

The wind and solar power are distant second places. Wind power is generally cost effective while solar power would be a very nice solution for us if it wasn’t so darn expensive. My mother-in-law would flip out if we put a wind turbine on the property so I think it is out of the question. We have an arena roof that faces the southern sky and the prices for solar panels are dropping but it is still too expensive. My first choice is obviously the geothermal heat pump.

Anthropocentric climate change is a problem. The question is, what kind of problem is it? Many people claim that it is an environmental problem. Some claim that it is a technological, scientific, or even moral problem. Others vigorously contend that is it not a “problem” at all. I believe that, first and foremost, anthropocentric climate change is a political problem. And political problems require that we choose a solution from a range of political options. Although it may not exhaust the range of possibilities, I believe that the basic listing of positions and options on climate change can be derived from combination of three categories:

Category A
1. The earth’s climate is being significantly affected by human activities.
2. The earth’s climate is not being significantly affected by human activities.
Category B
1. The long-term effects will be catastrophic.
2. The long-term effects will not be significant.
Category C
1. There is nothing we (can/need to) do about it.
2. We can avert disaster if we act now.
3. We may be able to avert disaster if we act at a future time.

These options can be arranged in twelve possible permutations (1,1,1 | 1,1,2 | 1,1,3 | 1,2,1 | 1,2,2 | 1,2,3 | 2, 1, 1 | 2, 1, 2 | 2, 1, 3 | 2, 2, 1 | 2, 2, 2 | 2, 2, 3). Seven are based on absurd combinations (1, 2, 2| 1, 2, 3 | 2, 1, 1| 2, 1, 2| 2, 1, 3| 2, 2, 2| 2, 2, 3) and can be ignored. The remaining five options can be labeled as: 1,1,1 ”“ The Hopeless Pessimist 1,1,2 ”“ The Act-Now Optimist 1,1,3 ”“ The Act-Later Optimist 1,2,1 ”“ The Do-Nothing Optimist 2,2,1 ”“ The Skeptical Optimist Of the remaining five only one combination using A-2 remains ”“ 2,2,1, The Skeptical Optimist. There are at least two problems that the optimistic skeptic faces. The first is that if she is wrong, we will either be worse off than if we chose any other option or no better off than if we had been a Hopeless Pessimist or an Act-Later Optimist. The second problem is that this option is currently not politically viable.

For better or worse, a critical mass of scientists, politicians, and other policy makers have already rejected this option. Although it may be a valid personal position to hold””perhaps even the correct position””as a policy opinion, it is currently a loser. In time, as new evidence is presented, this may change. But if we have to make a rational policy choice, the optimum strategy is to concede the claims for global warming and choose from the remaining options.

Much the same could be said about the positions of the Hopeless Pessimist (too pessimistic) and the Do-Nothing Optimist (too panglossian). That leaves us with only two politically viable options: either we enact policies to combat anthropogenic climate change today or we wait for some future date when we will have either a technological solution or the political will to enact effective policies.

The problem with acting now is that even if we could agree on what action would be most effective, we couldn’t force the international community to commit to such action. No matter what policies we adopt in the U.S., if China and India refuse to make the same changes the effect will be minimal. Since they refuse to make sacrifices today for a potential benefit that may not accrue for another century, anything we do is moot.

By default, we are left with the Act-Later option. The hope is that we will either have found a technological solution to anthropocentric climate change or we will have acquired the political will to act decisively. The danger, of course, is that we will have waited until it’s too late. But delaying taking direct action on global warming does not mean that we cannot take action at all.

In fact, I would argue that the most pragmatic approach is to adopt a “yak shaving” strategy. Yak shaving is a term that originated in an episode of the cartoon Ren & Stimpy and was later adopted by the MIT AI Lab to describe any “seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you’re working on.” In other words, by taking actions that may solve a smaller problem you may inadvertently solve or alleviate the larger problem that had originally needed a solution.

Consider, for example, the claim that global warming will lead to an increase in the frequency and severity of hurricanes. If true we are likely to face future disasters on the scale of Hurricane Katrina. But while we may not be able to solve the global warming problem, we could work on a problem that made Katrina especially deadly: poverty.

Because they were unable to evacuate the city, Katrina had a disproportionate impact on the poverty-stricken residents of New Orleans. Many people died needlessly because they lacked the financial means to escape the area. Alleviating poverty would not have prevented the hurricane from hitting Louisiana, but it could have lessened the impact and the loss of life. Similarly, reducing poverty will not prevent global warming from increasing the number or severity of future hurricanes. It would, however, make it considerably easier to live with such natural disasters.

Convincing people to take such an indirect approach to the problem will not be easy. You can’t get the idea across in an Oscar-winning documentary and it’s not likely to appeal to people who prefer to take action by holding “consciousness raising” benefit concerts. What it will do, though, is allow us to focus our attention and resources on solvable problems. Because attention and resources are always limited, we should, out of common sense and moral necessity, focus on those problems that have a chance of being solved. That means that a currently insolvable “problem” like climate change should be at the bottom of the list.

Rather than attempt to argue this point, I’ll leave you with this video by statistician and political scientist Bjorn Lomborg which explains why prioritizing problems like climate change isn’t as important prioritizing solutions:

[Note: While the video is lengthy (17 minutes) it is quite engaging and well worth the time it takes to watch it in its entirety.]
(HT: Acton Institute PowerBlog)

Link to Shave a Yak, Save a Planet:Choosing a Climate Change Policy

I found this post interesting. I disagree with the choices in Category A. My personal view is that the climate is probably being affected by human activity but its effect is probably not very significant when compared to the other major natural events. Despite my quibble with his choices I think that still puts me in the Skeptical Optimist group. I read Bjorn’s analysis a couple of years ago and still agree with it. The video did a good job of explaining his rationale.

I think the “Do Nothing” strategy of Category C ignores the impact of cost savings from being “green”. Several years ago I started replacing incandescent light bulbs with lower power, longer life fluorescent bulbs. Recently I have been toying with the idea of a major solar panel installation on our arena roof. My gut says that this project would pay for itself by significantly reducing our electric bill.

AP – In a “sneak peak” revealing a grim side effect of future warmer seas, new NASA satellite data find that the vital base of the ocean food web shrinks when the world’s seas get hotter.

Link to Warmed-up oceans reduce key food link (AP)

I guess the most surprising thing about this article is that it is a good example of the global warming agenda in the news media. The article says, “a significant link between warmer water ”” either from the El Nino weather phenomenon or global warming and reduced production of phytoplankton of the world’s oceans”. There is agreement that there is a significant link with El Nino. The link to global warming is much more difficult link to prove and later in the article they say so. “Other oceanographers agree with the El Nino link but said that with only a decade of data it is harder to make global warming connections.” You can see the emphasis of the article is on the catastrophic effects of global warming and downplaying the problems with linking this data to predictions on global warming.

It is interesting to compare this article with the recent research that is analyzing whether the oceans have gotten warmer or cooler from 1999 to 2005. The research from an extensive array of buoy data indicates that the trend line for water temperature has been flat at almost all latitudes except for the highest latitudes. The temperature data from the buoys is contrary to the satellite data used in this article. From a scientific viewpoint the conflicting temperature data is the more interesting problem since satellite data is at the source of a wide range of global predictions.

Despite the problems with the water temperature data, my major problem with the article is that El Nino is a short term cyclical climate change with well known ramifications on global weather patterns. The time of this study coincides with a peak in the hurricane cycle.  Since phytoplankton turn sunlight into food  I wonder about the impact of weather effects such as cloud cover and storms on phytoplankton generation.  It would not be the first time that someone noticed that sunlight and storms affected crop production. If the recent research on water temperature using buoys is correct then factors other than temperature must be influencing phytoplankton production. I am also uncomfortable with using the color of the seas as seen from satellite photos to determine phytoplankton production estimates. Retrofitting the buoys with the ability to measure phytoplankton density would be a natural solution. Considering the facts that were presented in the article and the problems with many of the climate models, I feel like I am being asked to make a leap in faith judgement that the effects of El Nino are a good predictor of the long term effects of increased global temperature. To me at least, the scientists appear to be comparing apples and oranges. There are too many variables in play other than temperature. I think that there is still more ink in the pen on this subject.

Whenever I look at new climate change reports I wonder if we are one step closer to explaining the universe or just a tiny step ahead of chaos. My gut feeling is that chaos is laughing nearby.

My wife is a fan of the McLaughlin Group. One of the little games we play to make the show more interesting is to guess which subjects they will discuss. The game is easy if you are reasonably in touch with the political news for the week. Last Friday they surprised us. They discussed global warming. There wasn’t any recent news that I knew of to trigger this discussion so it was fascinating to me that they chose this subject. They rehashed old political views on the overwhelming consensus among the scientists, the unwillingness of the Bush administration to do something about global warming, the conspiracy of the oil and coal companies, and the impending apocalypse if action was not taken immediately. In a way I found it amusing. The commentators seemed to be straining to be passionate about the subject.

During October I saw an interesting trend in two blogs that I follow. I noticed that the BBC started putting out global warming articles about once a week. I think the impetus was a report compiled by Sir Nicolas Stern that revised previous forecasts with more severe financial penalties to the world if action was not taken on global warming immediately. It is a well written report whose primarily purpose is to refute Lonborg’s argument that our money would help society more if it was spent on solvable, current problems, such as, drinkable water and malaria.

The other blog that seemed to erupt in October was the World Climate Report. They comment on a lot of scientific articles on climate research and during October and November they had a lot to write about. The “hockey stick” graph which is one of the keystones of global warming debate continues to draw more skeptics in the scientific community. It is not hard to pick on the “hockey stick” graph. The primary problem with the hockey stick data is that the scientists have to “guess” at the temperature before 1900. Scientists prefer to use the word “proxy” but for the common man it is just an educated guess. The primary way of estimating temperature where no direct measurements are available is to look at tree rings. Yea, we are thinking about spending billions of dollars based on tree rings. Some scientists have problems with relying solely on this method. Another problem with the “hockey stick” graph is that this data appears to be too “smooth”. The graph curiously wipes out the “Medieval Warm Period” and “Little Ice Age”. History books from these two time periods have led scientists to believe that the temperatures were much warmer than normal in the Medieval Warm Period and much cooler than normal in the Little Ice Age. Puzzles like this intrigue scientists. It is not surprising that when these skeptical scientists chose an alternate proxy, they found a greater variability in the temperature data. Whether you chose stalagmites in China or diatoms in Finland, the “Medieval Warm Period” and the “Little Ice Age” are visible on the temperature graphs. They also found that the increased variability in the temperature was a worldwide phenomenon so it maybe related to solar output. Another trend you can conclude from the temperature data is that the warmest 30 year period is not the last thirty years. Despite our global warming the Finland study concluded that the warmest period was probably 1470-1500 while a separate Greenland temperature study concluded that the 1930s and 1940s were the warmest decades in the twentieth century.

Several other global warming predictions also suffered. The most obvious casualty was the link between global warming and severe storms. The severity of the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons convinced many people that a link must exist. Severe hurricanes and global warming seemed a natural fit to the media and politicians. Several politicians chimed in on this link after Katrina. In 2005 the head of NOAA forecast a trend of severe hurricanes for the years to come. I can only guess he was trying to be politically correct. Although it did not get the publicity of the global warming predictions, the scientific studies and models for hurricanes have always maintained that hurricanes have a weak relationship with global warming trends. Other factors continue to be more important in determining the severity of the hurricane season. As the 2006 hurricane season comes to a close, there have been zero hurricanes to hit the U. S. Even the people far inland noticed that the 2006 hurricane season was extremely quiet. It is interesting to review the Stern report and see that they forecast a doubling in damage costs due to increased hurricane intensity due to global warming. Having lived on the Gulf Coast for eighteen years I feel I have a good, practical understanding of hurricanes. The biggest problem with hurricane damage costs is that there are too many people living in the prime hurricane zones. It is not the intensity of the storm but the amount of rain that comes with it that causes most of the damage. I was ten times more worried about flooding than wind damage. Many coastal areas cannot get flood insurance because they flood. This is not rocket science! Attributing a doubling in damage costs to global warming is a stretch.

Another interest tidbit is the Gulf Stream does not appear to be slowing. This slowdown or cessation had been popularized in Al Gore and in the movie, “The Day after Tomorrow”. A slowing of Gulf Stream leads some scientists to speculate about the next European Ice Age. After a little bit more data was collected and analyzed by scientists in the UK, most of the scientists have concluded, “… that we have not seen any significant change of Atlantic circulation to date”.

The final interesting tidbit is drought. Water vapor and soil moisture have always been the toughest climate variables to predict. A common prediction is that the increased temperature will melt glaciers worldwide and increase sea levels. In other areas the increased temperature will cause more droughts. I find it amazing that most of this water did not return to the earth in form of rain or snow. I know it did when I lived in Houston. Heat plus humidity equals afternoon showers. The common explanation is that the greater evaporation overwhelms the increases in precipitation. I didn’t notice that result in Houston. Despite the heat wave that affected most of the United States last year, our farm in Ohio had our best growing season for grass since we have owned the farm. We rely on rain water for our drinking water, too. During the summer we get water delivered to supplement our rain water collection. This summer we did not have any water delivered. This has not happened before in the eight years we have lived here. That’s curious! Some scientists share my curiosity about the relationship of heat and water vapor and they have backed up their conclusions with scientific studies. Despite the summer heat wave the draught severity index shows above average moisture conditions for a big chunk of the U. S. The graph confirms my observation that Ohio has above average soil moisture for this year. A Columbia University study analyzed some historical moisture data and they believe the link to droughts is marginally stronger with colder weather than it is with warmer weather. They conclude with their belief that the strongest link to droughts in the U.S. is with the formation of the weather pattern called, La Niña. To the Columbia University study global temperature change did not appear to be a significant factor.

That is not good news for the supporters of Sir Nicolas Stern’s report on the economics of climate change. Recent scientific studies tend to confirm that the global temperature estimations have shown much greater temperature swings than as portrayed in the original “hockey stick” graphs. Both Greenland and Finland appear to have been warmer in the past than today. The greater the variability in the temperature data, the less confident we are at linking greenhouse gases to future temperature trends. If we cannot confidently predict that future temperature changes are based on greenhouse gases, carbon based taxes do not make sense. New taxes are disruptive. Global warming solutions will be disruptive. If we do not get a big benefit from the disruption, carbon taxes could end up being a “fool’s errand”. The breakdown in the linkages of hurricanes and drought with global warming erode more of his financial assumptions and social priorities. The primary methods of reducing the financial and social impact of hurricanes do not involve greenhouse gases. We need less people living along the coasts. Since that is not likely to occur, it makes more sense to spend our money reducing flooding and improving construction practices than reducing greenhouse gases. If continuing scientific studies confirm that regional weather patterns are the primary determinant of droughts, then the prudent government planners will focus on implementing irrigation projects and encouraging better farming practices. These are proven methods of improving crop yields in all countries. Droughts and famines have been with us throughout recorded history. The biggest impediment to reducing famine in Africa is local politics not greenhouse gases. Global warming advocates have attempted to include all the world’s ailments under the global warming umbrella. Blaming greenhouse gases from developed countries for the drought and famines in Africa is counter-productive. The big umbrella approach to global warming diverts our attention from the real problems confronting this world. Real problems require focused solutions and constant attention.