Climate Feedback
Everyone's talking about the CRU data hack. Quirin Schiermeier reports on Nature News:
One of Britain's leading climate-research centres has had more than 1,000 files stolen from its computers and republished on the Internet. The cyber-attack is apparently aimed at damaging the reputations of prominent climate scientists.
The full story is here:
Cross posted by Katharine Sanderson on The Great Beyond 
Two papers in Science yesterday have poured cold water on the promise of second generation biofuels.
Biofuels derived from the cellulosic, woody parts of plants are not having their greenhouse gas emissions properly accounted for, says Jerry Melillo from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Melillo’s study suggests that changes in the way land is used, as a consequence of growing crops for biofuels, is not taken into account, and if it were then those biofuels would be shown to actually cause more greenhouse gases to be released than fossil fuels. Nitrous oxide emissions from increased use of fertilisers are a big part of the problem.
"The problem is, we have a finite amount of land where new crops could be grown. Melillo and colleagues now report that if biofuel crops replace food crops on current farmlands, then the clearing of forested land for additional food crops will release more carbon from the soil there than in the areas where the biofuel crops themselves are being grown," says the press release.
In a related policy forum article, Timothy Searchinger from Princeton University and a bunch of colleagues point out flaws in the ways that carbon emissions are counted for cap-and-trade schemes in both Europe and the US.
They say that the assertion that fuels made from biomass can be counted as carbon neutral is wrong. “Harvesting existing forests for electricity adds net carbon to the air,” the report says. “If bioenergy crops displace forest or grassland, the carbon released from soild and vegetation, plus lost future sequestration, generates carbon debt, which counts against the carbon the crops absorb.”
"In the near-term I think, irrespective of how you go about the cellulosic biofuels program, you're going to have greenhouse gas emissions exacerbating the climate change problem," Melillo is reported as saying in Reuters.
Energy efficiency news says the report is damning for biofuels.
More bad news comes from a UNEP report, highlighted by the New York Times. The report calls for greater debate about biofuels before ploughing headlong into a completely biofuel-powered society, although it focuses mainly on first generation fuels, unlike the Science papers.
Image: Chris Neill, MBL
Many of our readers will no doubt be aware of the long-standing dispute between Steve McIntyre and members of the climate science community whose data McIntyre is keen to get hold of.
For those of you less familiar with the story, here’s some background. McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit blog, is best known for questioning the validity of the statistical analyses used to create the ‘hockey stick’ graph. The ‘hockey stick’ is the graph that illustrates the past 1000 years of climate based on palaeo proxy data and was published by Penn state climatologist Michael Mann and co-authors in Nature back in 1998.
More recently, McIntyre has turned his attention to criticizing the quality of global temperature data held by institutes such as NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Several organizations worldwide collect and report global average temperature data for each month. Of these, a temperature data set held jointly by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Exeter, known as HadCRU , extends back the farthest, beginning in 1850.
Since 2002, McIntyre has repeatedly asked Phil Jones, director of CRU, for access to the HadCRU data. Although the data are made available in a processed gridded format that shows the global temperature trend, the raw station data are currently restricted to academics. While Jones has made data available to some academics, he has refused to supply McIntyre with the data. Between 24 July and 29 July of this year, CRU received 58 freedom of information act requests from McIntyre and people affiliated with Climate Audit. In the past month, the UK Met Office, which receives a cleaned-up version of the raw data from CRU, has received ten requests of its own.
I’ve reported the full story for this week’s Nature, but here’s a breakdown, plus some details that didn’t make the cut.
Why does McIntyre want the data?
Given McIntyre’s track record in critiquing data that comprise a significant part of the evidence for global warming, one might wonder whether he is in fact interested in having a go at reproducing the global temperature record. But McIntyre insists hat he’s not interested in challenging the science of climate change, or in nit-picking; rather he is simply asking that the “data be made available”.
Why won’t Jones give McIntyre the data?
Jones says that he tried to help when he first received data requests from McIntyre back in 2002, but says that he soon became inundated with requests that he could not fulfill, or that he did not have the time to respond to. He says that, in some cases, he simply couldn’t hand over entire data sets because of long-standing confidentiality agreements with other nations that restrict their use.
Although Jones agrees that the data should be made publicly available, he says that “it needs to be done in a systematic way”. He is now working to make the data publicly available online and will post a statement on the CRU website tomorrow to that effect, with any existing confidentiality agreements. “We’re trying to make them all available. We’re consulting with all the meteorological services – about 150 members of WMO – and will ask them if they are happy to release the data”, says Jones. But getting the all-clear from other nations could take several months and there may be objections. “Some countries don’t even have their own data available as they haven’t digitized it. We have done a lot of that ourselves”, he says.
Are there likely to be 'holes' in the data’?
Everyone agrees that raw station data are imperfect; that’s why they are cleaned up before being handed over to the UK Met Office. Jones says that existing issues include stations being relocated without being renamed, but he emphasises that these minor errors do not affect the global temperature trend, because there are thousands of individual stations collecting data worldwide at any one time.
McIntyre says that he does not expect to find any major errors in the data. But he also believes that too few resources are put into quality checking climate data, and that independent professional statistical services should be employed to check the data. Any thoughts on who might offer such services?
What was the CRU ‘data purge’ about?
A couple of weeks ago, it became clear that McIntyre had in fact retrieved some of the HadCRU data from a server on the CRU website. On realizing this, CRU immediately removed the data from their website, leading to speculation about a CRU ‘data lockdown’ over on Climate Audit. It transpires, however, that these data were on an anonymous ftp server intended for Met Office Hadley Centre project partners only, and were not for public use.
What’s next?
Given that McIntyre’s wish for access to the data will take time to be granted, this dispute will likely continue for some time. He’s especially aggrieved by the fact that hurricane expert Peter Webster at Georgia Tech University was recently provided with data that had been refused to him. McIntyre’s point here is that he should be treated as a legitimate academic given his background and publication record.
But Webster points out that he was allowed access because of the nature of his request, which was very specific and will result in a joint publication with Phil Jones. “Reasonable requests should be fulfilled because making data available advances science”, says Webster, “but it has to be an authentic request because otherwise you’d be swamped".
Once the data become publicly available, Jones wants McIntyre to produce a global temperature record. “Science advances that way. He might then realize how robust the global temperature record is”, says Jones. Asked if he would take on the challenge, McIntyre said that it’s not a priority for him, but added “if someone wanted to hire me, I’d do it”.
Olive Heffernan
The UK's Met Office has had its funding for climate research slashed by a quarter, following withdrawal of financial support by the government's Ministry of Defence (MoD).
The loss of £4.3 million (US$7.0 million) in funding from the MoD will affect the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter, the world-class climate modelling institute whose researchers made key contributions to the last assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.
"This news comes as a shock," says climate scientist Martin Parry, formerly at the Met Office and now at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London. "The UK's core modelling work on climate change has been funded from this source, up to now."
The Met Office is now in negotiations with other goverment departments in an effort to recoup some of the lost funding.
Read the full story over on Nature News.
Olive Heffernan
Image: UK Met Office
Scientists have long debated how the global climate might be affected by thawing of the Arctic's permanently frozen soils, known as permafrost. As permafrost melts, bacteria break down the organic matter in the soil, releasing greenhouse gases. But at the same time, plants flourish with access to warmer, deeper soils, taking in carbon dioxide. The overall affect on the climate was assumed to be the balance between the gassing and greening.
A new study in this week’s Nature [subscription], suggests that initially, after 15 years of thaw, plants grow faster and take in more carbon than is released by the melting tundra, making the ecosystem an overall carbon sink. But after a few decades, the balance shifts and the ecosystem becomes a source of carbon.
"The plants are growing faster, but after a few decades the rate of carbon loss from the soils is so high the plants can't keep up," says Edward Schuur from the University of Florida in Gainesville, who led the research. When Schuur extrapolated the findings to the entire Arctic region, they suggested a release of around a billion tonnes of carbon every year — of the same order of magnitude as emissions from current deforestation of the tropics. Burning of fossil fuels releases about 8.5 billion tonnes of CO2 a year.
It's estimated that permafrost soils store about twice as much carbon than is currently present in the atmosphere, so the stores of carbon in permafrost are unlikely to run out any time soon. "It's a slow-motion time bomb," says Schuur.
Read the full story over on Nature News.
Anjali Nayar is an intern reporter with Nature News.
Today, at the AGU Joint Assembly, I looked into two kinds of risk: of drought leading to civil violence and of the odds that extreme weather events may cause other types of disruption.
It’s always encouraging to see undergraduates engaged in scientific research, the more so when it is interdisciplinary. That’s what surprised me about a poster with the intriguing title, “Climate Change and Civil Violence,” which turned out to be a class project at Princeton University, stretching over three semesters, with three successive classes of students involved in the research.
The students, led by their professor, Gregory van der Vink, focused on a swath of West Africa - 21 countries from Mauritania to the Central African Republic, including most of the semi-arid Sahel region, as well as coastal forests. They looked at the likelihood that climate change, especially increasingly severe drought, will lead to civil violence in each of the countries studied. It is obviously difficult to attribute specific environmental causes to social phenomena, but the students—majoring in politics, various sciences, pre-engineering, and other fields—gave it a good try.
The choice of drought as the key climatic factor was based on the expectation that the Sahel will further dry, shortening the growing season by at least 20% over the next 40 years. Nomadic herdsmen will, for example, have to move further south or adopt a more sedentary life, or both.
Another key factor is the resiliency of the population, its ability to cope with the coming climatic changes. This factor varies considerably from country to country, the researchers found, and is related to population size, political system, natural resources, and other variables. The relative significance of each of these is difficult to assess, of course.
Bottom line: after exhaustive analysis, the students concluded that the five countries in the study that are most vulnerable to drought-induced civil violence are Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, and Gambia. Of these, three—Nigeria, Senegal, and Mali—have already experienced conflicts that included an environmental factor, they say. Of the five, only Gambia has not experienced any violent conflict during the past 10 years.
The study, as the students themselves note, was a preliminary effort to correlate environmental and socio-economic risk factors that could lead to civil violence. They are not predicting specific events in particular countries, but there seems little doubt that this topic is one that will assume increasing importance in coming years to policy makers and civilian populations alike, and not just in Africa.
Continue reading "AGU 2009 Joint Assembly: Climate risk research " »
Climate change represents the biggest health threat of the twenty-first century, according to a new report published 16 May in The Lancet. Olive Heffernan talks to lead investigator Anthony Costello, director of the Institute for Global Health at University College London.
How did this study come about?
Just over a year ago, The Lancet challenged us to do this study. Back then, climate change was not one of my top priorities. I would have said that dealing with malnutrition and HIV and having a better health service were more important issues in health. But I’ve changed my perspective now, partly because I’m beginning to notice the effect that rising temperatures are having in certain parts of the globe.
What climate-related health issues can we expect this century?
In a very broad sense, there will be changing patterns of infection. Insect-borne diseases like dengue fever, tick-borne encephalitis and malaria will spread. We’re already seeing blue tongue virus in livestock moving up from southern Europe, for example. But I don’t think that infectious disease will be the major health effect of climate change, unless new viruses emerge, which is a great unknown.
Heat is a silent killer. Certainly as average temperatures rise we’re going to get many more heat waves and people outside of their coping range. When you get above a certain temperature level, the question is how well can people adapt.
But the biggest health effect that will emerge in the next 20 years will be related to food and water security. There could be quite serious shortages and large rises in food prices, which will penalize the poorest. Currently malnutrition is quite a significant factor in about 60 per cent of childhood deaths. This can result in low birth weight and predisposition to infectious diseases, such as measles, tuberculosis and pneumonia.
What can health professionals do?
Firstly, we have to add the voice of the health community to the argument to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We must campaign urgently on emissions and reforestation. Climate change is going to affect the health of our children and grandchildren, and getting that message across does focus minds. Secondly, we need a framework for tackling this problem.
What exactly would that framework involve?
We need more information. I was shocked to find that there are no health impact assessments on the impacts of climate change in Africa. Not one. The World Health Organization has the tools to do this, but there are very few resources. So we need to start by having country-level health impact assessments for climate change. There’s a deficit of data on climate impacts in Africa, but the situation isn’t much better in Asia. Beyond that, we need to get down to localities. It’s quite important to do participatory work with communities on their risks, and we’re interested in launching an initiative to get people to collect their own data.
Guest contribution by Bill Hewitt
Yesterday saw the launch of a new climate research center in New York City. The Columbia Climate Center is the offspring of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, itself the brainchild of its founder and director, the influential and prolific economist, Jeffrey Sachs. The CCC has defined an ambitious mission for itself: to integrate the work of various world-class centers and institutes at Columbia, to develop strategies for mitigation of and adaptation to global climate change, and to communicate the science and best policy thinking to the public and decision makers. The affiliates of the CCC include such leaders in climate science as NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), led by Jim Hansen, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO).
Jeffrey Sachs is something of a force of nature. He led the task force that recommended the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals and is now President of Millennium Promise. He is ubiquitous in the op-ed pages of publications like the FT and at blogs like the HuffPo. His latest book, among several, is Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.
Speaking at the launch yesterday, Sachs said that climate change activists “wouldn’t know what we were doing without the brilliant and painstaking work of scientists.” He noted, for example, the “foresight and prescience” of Wally Broecker, one of the pioneers of climate science and a mainstay at LDEO for nearly 50 years. (Broecker spoke later, recounting six decades of climate research.) Sachs said that scientists have been “not only correct, but correct in their worries” and that, at this point, the “uncertainties of science are only of the depth of the risk” we are facing.
Continue reading "New climate centre launches at Columbia " »
Cross-posted from The Great Beyond
New Yorkers beware! A new study published in Nature Geoscience says the north-eastern US coast will be in more trouble from global warming than previously believed.
Looking at the predictions from a whole set of different climate models, researchers Jianjun Yin, Michael Schlesinger and Ronald Stouffer found that changes in ocean circulation will result in higher sea levels in the region, over and above expected global sea level changes. Depending on whether greenhouse gas emissions are low or high, an additional rise of between 15 and 21 cm can be expected by 2100, they say.
“Some parts of lower Manhattan are only 1.5 meters above sea level,” says Yin, a researcher at Florida State University (National Geographic). “Twenty centimetres of extra rise would pose a threat to this region.”
The graphic right shows dynamic sea level rises at coastal cities worldwide in the medium greenhouse-gas emission scenario, due to the knock on effects of changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
“Our results show that the northeast coast of the United States is among the most vulnerable regions to future changes in sea level and ocean circulation, especially when considering its population density and the potential socioeconomic consequences of such changes,” write the researchers. “It should be noted that the impact of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet on the [Atlantic meridional overturning circulation] is not taken into account here.”
Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will head up a new climate and energy research institute at Yale University from this Fall.
The announcement was made by Yale University President Richard C Levin today at the plenary session of the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen.
Pachauri will serve at the Yale Institute on a part time basis and will retain his current positions as IPCC chair and director-general of India’s Energy and Resources Institute, TERI.
Further details of the centre are available over on Economic Times.
Olive Heffernan
The UK will get an intriguing new climate research centre next week, with the launch of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the London School of Economics and the University of Leeds. In a Q&A for Nature Reports Climate Change, I've interviewed Andrew Gouldson, who will co-direct the centre with Judith Rees under chairman Lord Nicholas Stern - and who envisions a strong focus on regional impacts of climate change.
CCCEP's experts will be closely in touch with policymakers and other local stakeholders, Gouldson says, in a way that "builds both their capacity and ours — ours to do good research, and theirs to use that research to take better decisions on climate change." One of the stakeholders, and a funder of one of the five research streams at the new centre, is the insurance company Munich Re. As I wrote last month, another new project that aims for the cutting edge of policy-relevant research is a hurricane model projection that Greg Holland is now wrapping up at NCAR - also partly insurance industry-funded. Could these academic-public-private three-ways be the way forward? Let us know in the comments.
I thought the most interesting part of the interview was what Gouldson had to say on the new UK Climate Change Act, which imposes a legally binding requirement to cut emissions 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. Here's an extract:
AG: At the national level, I think Britain's been very proactive indeed. The government has been quite brave signing up to this medium- to long-term target which is really quite ambitious. But I don't think there's a public understanding, or possibly even a public acceptance, of what a low-carbon economy might look like — one which is 60, 70, 80 per cent decarbonized.AB: Does that make it less likely that the policy will actually come through with results?
AG: In the next 10 to 15 years, not necessarily, because there are lots of mitigation options that are relatively affordable and technologically viable. I think the question is what happens in the phase after that. Is there a political appetite to do some really quite painful things which would involve some powerful people or parties losing out? I think there's a need now, in the next few years, to build some sort of broad consensus on the need to shift towards a low-carbon economy.
Read the full interview here.
Anna Barnett
Image: Andrew Gouldson, photographed by Stevie Kilgour at the University of Leeds.
In the 70s and 80s, scientists from around the world worked to reconstruct Last Glacial Maximum (19,000 to 23,000 years ago) sea surface temperatures across the globe under the auspices of the Climate: Long Range Investigation, Mapping and Prediction (CLIMAP) project. Since then, a number of new proxies and seafloor coring and drilling projects have produced a wealth of additional data. In a new paper online this week in Nature Geoscience (subscription required), the MARGO (Multiproxy Approach for the Reconstruction of the Glacial Ocean surface) team members have updated this reconstruction using all the newly available data.
Stimulating algal growth by adding iron to nutrient-poor ocean regions is one of several geo-engineering methods that could possibly mitigate greenhouse warming. But given widespread worries about possibly harmful side-effects on marine life, large-scale ocean ‘fertilization’ is currently not considered advisable.
Predictably, environmental groups have therefore jumped on an iron fertilization experiment which an international team of oceanographers is set to conduct over the next two months in the Southern Ocean near the island of South Georgia. Critics claim that LOHAFEX violates the moratorium on ocean fertilization activities which the United Nations had agreed upon last year. The Nature news story here has more details.
The somewhat ambivalent wording of the legally binding UN Convention on Biological Diversity adds to the controversy. ‘Small-scale’ scientific experiments in ‘coastal waters’ are exempted from the moratorium, it reads. But ‘small-scale’ is a relative term, and where exactly coastal waters give way to the open ocean remains also undefined.
Picture: The Polarstern (Alfred Wegener Institute)
The team on board the German ‘Polarstern’, who plan to spread 20 tonnes of iron sulphate over less than 20 by 20 kilometres-large patch of ocean surface in the Scotia Sea, hope that the study will provide new insight into how ocean ecosystems respond to fertilization – the very data, hence, that are needed to assess whether or not larger-scale future activities might be justified. But opponents counter that such doing already qualifies as an activity banned by UN law. Pressure groups have launched a signature campaign aimed at stopping the Polarstern crew, which will reach its destination by the end of the week, from dumping its load.
A number of companies, such as the now defunct Planktos Inc., had in the past hoped to commercialize ocean fertilization for the carbon credit market. Scientists and institutes participating in LOHAFEX stress that the experiment has no commercial background whatsoever.
UPDATE:
The Indo-German ocean fertilization experiment, LOHAFEX, has been suspended. The German science ministry, in response to environmental concerns, has asked the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven that an additional independent assessment be conducted before the planned activities can commence.
Meanwhile, the Polarstern, scheduled to reach the planned study region in the Scotia Sea by the end of the week, will continue its journey as planned. On arrival, the 48 scientists on board will start doing preparatory work, but the team will have to await permission from the ministry before they can dump any nutrients into the ocean. AWI has today commissioned two undisclosed institutions to carry out the required extra assessment. It hopes the reports will be delivered within ten days.
Quirin Schiermeier
A Chinese expedition is expected to start work this week on a new Antarctic base that will faciliate novel research in climate science as well as in other fields, reports Jane Qiu over on Nature News [subscription].
The Kunlun base will be located at Dome Argus, or 'Dome A', some 4,093 metres above sea level. It will be China's third Antarctic research facility and is being built as a legacy of International Polar Year, a major two-year scientific programme that comes to an end in March.
According to radar studies of the region, Dome A sits atop ice over 3,000 metres thick. Scientists hope that extracting ice cores of that depth at this particular site could extend the record of past climate changes back to 1.5 million years. Qiu writes:
A key focus of research is finding sites where ice cores stretching back further in time than any others could be drilled. A core obtained at a site known as Dome C — about 1,000 kilometres from Dome A (see map) — reached 3,200 metres deep and helped to reconstruct past climate going back 800,000 years. Many believe that Dome A promises older ice because it is higher and has less snow, meaning that researchers can get more years of climate records in a given thickness of ice.
Work on the station is expected to be completed by January 28, before temperatures drop tobelow –50 °C. At that stage it will have room for 25 people, with 11 sleeping units. I'm guessing they use that rotational bed-sharing system scientists sometimes use at sea?
Olive Heffernan
Image:P. Huybrechts, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Over the past 24 hours, some 15,000 earth scientists descended on San Francisco for the annual Fall conference of the American Geophysical Union. Delegates were a dead give away at the airport and on the BART yesterday with their large poster tubes in tow. It’s my first AGU and it could be the jet lag, but I’m feeling slightly overwhelmed by the sheer size and number of parallel sessions; at any given time I could be at one of at least four climate-related talks and invariably find myself wondering why the session next door is receiving louder applause.
A number of talks today focused on the need for climate science to become less curiosity driven and more specific to the needs of stakeholders such as local authorities and natural resource managers.
This is a topic that’s been getting a lot of attention recently. Earlier this year, for example, scientists called for a billion dollar investment in climate computing facilities to enable regional scale climate predictions on decadal time scales. At a press conference this morning, scientists including Jonathan Overpeck from the University of Arizona and Jack Fellows of UCAR highlighted the importance of partnerships between universities and decision makers in enabling states and regions to plan for climate change.
For the latest comment, analysis, news and features, go to Nature Reports Climate Change, Nature’s online resource dedicated to in-depth coverage of climate science and the implications for policy, the economy and society.
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