Is the Wall Street Journal making like an ostrich and sticking its head in melting permafrost?
If you haven't already, check out the editorial page from yesterday's Wall Street Journal. On it you'll find a spirited, one might say angry piece by L. Gordon Crovitz entitled "Climate Change and Open Science: In the Internet age, transparency is the foundation of trust." The piece riffs off a BBC interview with Phil Jones, the embattled director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, to reach its inevitable conclusion that "equivocation has replaced 'unequivocal'" in the climate science world.
That word unequivocal in this context carries symbolic meaning, having appeared in the latest assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: "warming of the climate system is unequivocal."
The word was included in the report after much discussion and debate and, as I understand it, was retained over the objections of some politicians at the insistence of the scientists. Now the climate skeptics, including apparently the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, would like to use the climategate incident to take the 'un' out of unequivocal.
As noted in yesterday's TheGreenGrok, the media coverage of climategate has not been exemplary of journalism at its best. Now outlets like the WSJ are using the occasion of the Jones interview to pile on -- using quotations taken out of context to press their attack on climate scientists. RealClimate has a nice piece on how the Daily Mail inaccurately spun the Jones interview to undermine the science.
The WSJ's editorial follows a similar path. Here is one example.
The piece states: "Phil Jones ... acknowledged to the BBC that there hasn't been statistically significant warming since 1995." OK, that is what he said, sort of. Why sort of? Because the WSJ conveniently neglected to include the context.
Actually, Jones said that there was a warming trend in global temperatures since 1995 -- at a rate of 0.12 degrees Centigrade per decade (or 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade). But because of the short time period, the rate was not quite statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level. It was "quite close to the confidence level" but not quite there.
Simply put, a 95 percent confidence level means that there is a 95 percent probability that the actual temperature trend was positive and a five percent probability it was not. The 95 percent confidence interval is referred to by statisticians as "2-sigma" because it covers two standard deviations from the mean.
Scientists often choose the 2-sigma or 95 percent confidence level, instead of the 1-sigma or 68 percent confidence level, to be conservative in their conclusions. Note: climate scientists are being conservative in their pronouncements about global warming, not the other way around.
Here's the point, Mr. Crovitz: saying that there was no statistically significant trend is not the same as saying the temperature trend between 1995 and today was positive but not significant at the 95 percent confidence level -- in fact it was statistically significant at a slightly lower confidence interval. Doing so can be particularly misleading when reporting to a public that is not aware that scientists commonly use a 95 percent confidence level to establish statistical significance. It is especially misleading since the lack of statistical significance in the trend at the 95 percent confidence level was related to the shortness of the time period over which the trend was calculated.
I am left with three possible inferences from the Crovitz piece:
I suppose there is a finite probability that I have got it wrong, and there is another explanation. My confidence level is only 80 percent, so I guess I'm being a bit unconservative in this instance.
So much of the arguments about global temperature trends focus on how to interpret temperature records from myriad weather stations. Indeed, a lot of the climategate controversy surrounding Jones was about a paper he wrote in 1990 trying to quantify the influence of urban heat islands based on weather stations in China.
The debate over the temperature record is important for establishing the magnitude of the warming but is unnecessary to establish that the globe is warming. The globe integrates the temperature signals from all those individual stations and provides very obvious, large-scale signs of climate change. What are those signs? How about melting glaciers? How about shrinking sea ice? How about earlier arrival of spring? How about melting permafrost?
And speaking of melting permafrost: this just out from the journal Permafrost and Periglacial Processes. Authors Simon Thibault and Serge Payette of Laval University in Quebec report on a study of permafrost extent near the James Bay area of Quebec.
Using a combination of aerial and ground surveys and historical aerial photographs, the authors concluded that permafrost in the region had retreated northward by about 130 kilometers (80 miles) over the past 50 years. They note that the changes they found are similar to the findings of numerous other permafrost studies, such as here and here. (See related article and photographs here, here, here, and here.)
Don't believe it? Congratulations, you've joined the ranks of the skeptical ostriches with their heads buried deep in the melting permafrost.
Originally posted at www.thegreengrok.com.
Follow Bill Chameides on Twitter: www.twitter.com/theGreenGrok
Richard2: "The winter arctic sea ice is approaching its maximum for this year, and is at a level similar to other recent years."
Fact: The ice is significantly below the baseline years 0f 1979 to 2000 used for comparative purposes. Last year, Arctic ice was also the thinnest on record.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Richard2: The mountain glaciers in the Himalayas are not melting away; some are melting very slowly, some are stable, and some are actually growing.
Fact: "A recent study by the Indian Space Research Organization, using satellite imaging to gauge the changes to 466 glaciers, has found more than a 20 percent reduction in size from 1962 to 2001, with bigger glaciers breaking into smaller pieces, each one retreating faster than its parent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/science/earth/17glacier.html?_r=2
The sea levels along the west coast of the continental U.S. continue to be measured as below the level of 1998.
Fact: Sea levels along the west coast have increased by 8 inches in the last 120 years and continue to increase approximately 2.5 mm per year.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/recentslc.html
Richard2: The CO2 level is rising very slowly, and forests... are growing taller...as a result.
Fact: Co2 has reached levels not seen in 15 million years.
Taken from the 26,000 member Institute of Physics' submission to the Parliamentary Committee investigating the CRU e-mail release. The committee begins open testimony on Monday in London.
All the submissions to the committee have now been posted on the internet, including that of the Institute of Physics.
Following the emails' release, more than 1,700 scientists from the United Kingdom signed a statement saying: "We, members of the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities."
Furthermore, in a December 4, 2009, letter to Congress, 29 prominent scientists, including 11 members of the National Academy of Scientists, stated, "The body of evidence that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming is overwhelming. The content of the stolen emails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming."
Additionally, a December 3, 2009, editorial in the science journal Nature stated: "Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real -- or that human activities are almost certainly the cause," and that claims to the contrary by "the climate-change-denialist fringe" are "laughable."
The American Meteorological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Union of Concerned Scientists have all reaffirmed their position that human-caused global warming is real.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/news/latest/uk-science-statement.html
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/scientists-statement-on.pdf
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html
" that human activities are almost certainly the cause" they cannot even say it as fact........they have to couch it in a qualifying phrase of "almost certainly"
The fact is that the levels of certainty required for science versus policy are two very different things. If society waited for 95% certainty before doing anything we'd never do anything, or at least very little.
As a statistician you have a much better understanding than most WSJ readers of this issue. For most the statement that "there is no statistically significant trend" is very different from "there is a positive trend but it doesn't meet the 95% confidence level because of the shortness of the time series."
If you don't think so, try it out on some non-technical friends. I dare say, even you with all your statistical knowledge would find that the second statement carried significantly more useful information than the first.
Here's an example, albeit an extreme one: you're on an airplane about to take off. In one case the pilot tells you they've done a Monte Carlo simulation of the flight and found that there's no statistically significant probability the plane will crash. In the other the pilot tells you that the probability of the plane crashing doesn't quite meet the 95% confidence level. Would you receive these two statements equivalently? Now I know a pilot wouldn't present this information in the manner I've described, but I think you get the point.
Changing the subject a bit: looking at the history of the flight record for the space shuttle, one might conclude that on any given mission there is almost a 99% chance that the shuttle will have a successful mission, and return to Earth with its passengers and crew intact. On the other hand, there is a 1+% chance that the shuttle will have a catastrophic accident. What is the responsible course of action to take under these circumstances?
Is the value of the missions worth the loss of life that occurs every 70 missions or so?
As for the attacks on the IPCC reports, it is interesting to see where the attacks are coming from. If the people working for Rupert Murdoch and Exxon would demand as much accuracy in their reporting as they are demanding from the IPCC, then nothing would ever be reported from them. To say that the conclusions of the entire 3,000 page report are false because one or two paragraphs should not have been inserted is not logical, unless those paragraphs are crucial to the whole body of the report, which they are not.