Klimat

Även den andra dagen på konferensen MM Öresund innehöll många godbitar. Framtidsforskaren Henrik Good Hovgaard, från Future Navigator, började med att beskriva alla de kriser som vi befinner oss i: Säkerhetskris, Hälsokris, Livsmedelskris, Fattigdomskris, Resurskris, Tillväxtkris och den största av kriser: Klimatkrisen.

Så vad skall vi göra åt alla dessa kriser? Jo det värsta vi kan göra är att stoppa huvudet i sanden, sa Henrik. Men är det inte just det vi gör, tänker jag?

Och sen ger han oss en lång rad med sedvanliga framtidsforskaridéer om hur vi bör tänka och göra, och hur framtiden kommer att se ut. Innovation är viktig - men det handlar ju inte bara om nyheter, utan om att kombinera befintlig kunskap. Förr hade konsumentarna makten - nu handlar det mer om att konsumenterna utnyttjar makten tillsammans, och så får vi se den underbara filmen med Black eyed peas-konserten med flashmoben som dansar koordinerat. Och så filmen som visar hur en ihärdig ledare får följare, och hur följare nummer två kanske är den allra viktigaste. Kolla själv här:



Det var småputtrigt trevligt och ibland lite tankeväckande - på ett framtidsforskarsätt. Men det viktigaste som Henrik sa var nog: Framtiden handlar inte längre om "mer" utan om "bättre". I en värld av kriser behöver vi inte mer prylar utan bättre, inte mer trafik utan bättre osv. Frågan är dock hur vi kommer dit, bl a med tanke på mitt förra inlägg.

Forskaren från Roskilde universitet, Marlene Freudendal-Pedersen pratade om rörlighet, och sa blandannat att mobilitet är centralt för att vara människa. Våra vardagsliv är fyllda av val, och mobiliteteten gör det möjliggör att vi inte behöver välja bort lika mycket som förr.

Hon pekade på hur viktiga "strukturella berättelser" är, dvs de berättelser som formar vårt tankesätt. Och berättade vidare om hur politiker låter sina egna berättelser forma politiken. Man utgår från berättelsen om sitt eget liv och förstår kanske inte att alla inte lever som man själv. Om man själv alltid flyger till Stockholm, blir det naturligt att utgå från denna berättelse och tycka att flyget alltid är bättre än höghastighetståg.

Vill vi skapa en bättre framtid måste vi sätta mål för den, att skapa strukturella berättelser som stöder vår vilja. Om vi gör det kan vi hjälpa till att lösa alla dagens kriser.

Alla presntationer från konferensen kommer att läggas upp på konferensens webb-plats.

Länk:

MM Öresund

And so it goes – another year, another annual data point. As has become a habit (2009, 2010), here is a brief overview and update of some of the most relevant model/data comparisons. We include the standard comparisons of surface temperatures, sea ice and ocean heat content to the AR4 and 1988 Hansen et al simulations.

First, a graph showing the annual mean anomalies from the IPCC AR4 models plotted against the surface temperature records from the HadCRUT3v, NCDC and GISTEMP products (it really doesn’t matter which). Everything has been baselined to 1980-1999 (as in the 2007 IPCC report) and the envelope in grey encloses 95% of the model runs.

The La Niña event that emerged in 2011 definitely cooled the year a global sense relative to 2010, although there were extensive regional warm extremes. Differences between the observational records are mostly related to interpolations in the Arctic (but we will check back once the new HadCRUT4 data are released). Checking up on our predictions from last year, I forecast that 2011 would be cooler than 2010 (because of the emerging La Niña), but would still rank in the top 10. This was true looking at GISTEMP (2011 was #9), but not quite in HadCRUT3v (#12) or NCDC (#11). However, this was the warmest year that started off (DJF) with a La Niña (previous La Niña years by this index were 2008, 2001, 2000 and 1999 using a 5 month minimum for a specific event) in the GISTEMP record, and the second warmest (after 2001) in the HadCRUT3v and NCDC indices. Given current indications of only mild La Niña conditions, 2012 will likely be a warmer year than 2011, so again another top 10 year, but not a record breaker – that will have to wait until the next El Niño.

People sometimes claim that “no models” can match the short term trends seen in the data. This is not true. For instance, the range of trends in the models for 1998-2011 are [-0.07,0.49] ºC/dec, with MRI-CGCM (run5) the laggard in the pack, running colder than observations.

In interpreting this information, please note the following (repeated from previous years):

• Short term (15 years or less) trends in global temperature are not usefully predictable as a function of current forcings. This means you can’t use such short periods to ‘prove’ that global warming has or hasn’t stopped, or that we are really cooling despite this being the warmest decade in centuries.
• The AR4 model simulations were an ‘ensemble of opportunity’ and vary substantially among themselves with the forcings imposed, the magnitude of the internal variability and of course, the sensitivity. Thus while they do span a large range of possible situations, the average of these simulations is not ‘truth’.
• The model simulations use observed forcings up until 2000 (or 2003 in a couple of cases) and use a business-as-usual scenario subsequently (A1B). The models are not tuned to temperature trends pre-2000.
• Differences between the temperature anomaly products is related to: different selections of input data, different methods for assessing urban heating effects, and (most important) different methodologies for estimating temperatures in data-poor regions like the Arctic. GISTEMP assumes that the Arctic is warming as fast as the stations around the Arctic, while HadCRUT3v and NCDC assume the Arctic is warming as fast as the global mean. The former assumption is more in line with the sea ice results and independent measures from buoys and the reanalysis products.
• Model-data comparisons are best when the metric being compared is calculated the same way in both the models and data. In the comparisons here, that isn’t quite true (mainly related to spatial coverage), and so this adds a little extra structural uncertainty to any conclusions one might draw.

Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) showed nicely that if you account for some of the obvious factors affecting the global mean temperature (such as El Niños/La Niñas, volcanoes etc.) there is a strong and continuing trend upwards. An update to that analysis using the latest data is available here – and shows the same continuing trend:

There will soon be a few variations on these results. Notably, we are still awaiting the update of the HadCRUT (HadCRUT4) product to incorporate the new HadSST3 dataset and the upcoming CRUTEM4 data which incorporates more high latitude data (Jones et al, 2012). These two changes will impact the 1940s-1950s temperatures, the earliest parts of the record, the last decade, and will likely affect the annual rankings (and yes, I know that this is not particularly significant, but people seem to care).

Ocean Heat Content

Figure 2 is the comparison of the ocean heat content (OHC) changes in the models compared to the latest data from NODC. As before, I don’t have the post-2003 AR4 model output, so I have extrapolated the ensemble mean to 2012 (understanding that this is not ideal). New this year, are the OHC changes down to 2000m, as well as the usual top-700m record, which NODC has started to produce. For better comparisons, I have plotted the ocean model results from 0-750m and for the whole ocean. All curves are baselined to the period 1975-1989.

I’ve left off the data from the Lyman et al (2010) paper for clarity, but note that there is some structural uncertainty in the OHC observations. Similarly, different models have different changes, and the other GISS model from AR4 (GISS-EH) had slightly less heat uptake than the model shown here.

As can be seen the long term trends in the models match those in the data, but the short-term fluctuations are both noisy and imprecise. As an aside, there are a number of comparisons floating around using only the post 2003 data to compare to the models. These are often baselined in such a way as to exaggerate the model data discrepancy (basically by picking a near-maximum and then drawing the linear trend in the models from that peak). This falls into the common trap of assuming that short term trends are predictive of long-term trends – they just aren’t (There is a nice explanation of the error here).

Summer sea ice changes

Sea ice changes this year were dramatic, with the Arctic September minimum reaching record (or near record) values (depending on the data product). Updating the Stroeve et al, 2007 analysis (courtesy of Marika Holland) using the NSIDC data we can see that the Arctic continues to melt faster than any of the AR4/CMIP3 models predicted.

This may not be true for the CMIP5 simulations – but we’ll have a specific post on that another time.

Hansen et al, 1988

Finally, we update the Hansen et al (1988) comparisons. Note that the old GISS model had a climate sensitivity that was a little higher (4.2ºC for a doubling of CO2) than the best estimate (~3ºC) and as stated in previous years, the actual forcings that occurred are not exactly the same as the different scenarios used. We noted in 2007, that Scenario B was running a little high compared with the forcings growth (by about 10%) using estimated forcings up to 2003 (Scenario A was significantly higher, and Scenario C was lower).

The trends for the period 1984 to 2011 (the 1984 date chosen because that is when these projections started), scenario B has a trend of 0.28+/-0.05ºC/dec (95% uncertainties, no correction for auto-correlation). For the GISTEMP and HadCRUT3, the trends are 0.18+/-0.05 and 0.17+/-0.04ºC/dec. For reference, the trends in the AR4 models for the same period have a range 0.21+/-0.16 ºC/dec (95%).

As we stated before, the Hansen et al ‘B’ projection is running warm compared to the real world (exactly how much warmer is unclear). As discussed in Hargreaves (2010), while this simulation was not perfect, it has shown skill in that it has out-performed any reasonable naive hypothesis that people put forward in 1988 (the most obvious being a forecast of no-change). However, the use of this comparison to refine estimates of climate sensitivity should be done cautiously, as the result is strongly dependent on the magnitude of the assumed forcing, which is itself uncertain. Recently there have been some updates to those forcings, and so my previous attempts need to be re-examined in the light of that data and the uncertainties (particular in the aerosol component). However, this is a complicated issue, and requires more space than I really have here to discuss, so look for this in an upcoming post.

Overall, given the latest set of data points, we can conclude (once again) that global warming continues.

References

1. G. Foster, and S. Rahmstorf, "Global temperature evolution 1979–2010", Environmental Research Letters, vol. 6, 2011, pp. 044022-. DOI.
2. P.D. Jones, D.H. Lister, T.J. Osborn, C. Harpham, M. Salmon, and C.P. Morice, "Hemispheric and large-scale land surface air temperature variations: An extensive revision and an update to 2010", Journal of Geophysical Research. DOI.
3. J.C. Hargreaves, "Skill and uncertainty in climate models", Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, vol. 1, 2010, pp. 556-564. DOI.

För många år sedan kom det fram forskningsresultat som visade att vanliga människor var intresserade av att innerstäderna skulle bli mer bilfria. Forskningen visade också att de flesta politiker tyckte likadant. Det mest intressanta var dock att politikerna inte trodde att vanligt folk ville ha det så, och därför blev det heller inte så.

Gång på gång får vi bevis för att våra politiker går i otakt med sina väljare i en mängd frågor. Idag vet vi från opinionsundersökningar att de flesta är positiva till den nya utsläppsavgiften på flygresor för klimatets skull, men det tog väldigt lång tid att få till dem.

Om du frågar våra politiker så tycker de flesta att styrningen skall vara evidensbaserad, dvs grunda sig på forskning och beprövad vetenskap. Men när det kommer till kritan så agerar man inte så. Just nu har vi läst i bladen hur en politiker i Malmö tycker vi skall strunta i att bygga höghastighetståg och istället satsa på flyget, och då kan vi ju åka kollektivt till flygplatsen.

När jag för ett år sedan höll ihop ett seminarium med ca 80 beslutsfattare, de flesta politiker, som skulle fatta beslut om en ny strategi för kollektivtrafiken i ett av sydliga våra län, gjorde jag som jag ofta gör och lät dem svara på mentometorfrågor kring en mängd frågor, bl a hur man tog sig till mötet. Då visade det sig att av de 80 närvarande hade två cyklat, två åkt  kollektivt och resten åkt bil. Jag frågade dem då hur de tänkte, när de själv inte trodde på sin egen produkt. Som om Volvochefen skulle åkt Mercedes.


Att inte leva som man lär, att fiffla och prata i egen sak verkar vara lika vanligt både till höger och vänster. Makt korrumperar brukar man säga, och även om det inte går så långt, så tycks tanken att man som politiker skulle lyssna på folket och leva som man lär, bli allt mer sällsynt.

Idag på den välbesökta konferensen om mobility management i Malmö, som vi ordnat tillsammans med danska och svenska aktörer, berättade trafikverket om det stora gap som finns mellan de mål som våra politiker satt upp för minskningen av utsläppen från trafiken, och hur långt man når med de åtgärder man fattat beslut om.  Och det visade sig att det finns inga planer på hur man skall lyckas sluta detta gap.

När skall vi få politiker som lever som de lär, fattar beslut grundat på beprövad vetenskap, lyssnar på folket och leder utvecklingen mot ett hållbart samhälle?

Länk:

MM Öresund 

My co-authors and I have just published an article in Nature Geoscience (advance online publication here; associated press release here) which seeks to explain certain enigmatic features of tree-ring reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperatures of the past millennium. Most notable is the virtual absence of cooling in the tree-ring reconstructions during what ice core and other evidence suggest is the most explosive volcanic eruption of the past millennium–the AD 1258 eruption. Other evidence suggests wide-spread global climate impacts of this eruption [see e.g. the review by Emile-Geay et al (2008)]. We argue that this–and other missing episodes of volcanic cooling, are likely an artifact of biological growth effects, which lead to a substantial underestimation of the largest volcanic cooling events in trees growing near treeline. We speculate that this underestimation may also have led to overly low estimates of climate sensitivity in some past studies attempting to constrain climate model sensitivity parameters with proxy-reconstructed temperature changes.

Tree rings are used as proxies for climate because trees create unique rings each year that often reflect the weather conditions that influenced the growing season that year. For reconstructing past temperatures, dendroclimatologists typically seek trees growing at the boreal or alpine treeline, since temperature is most likely to be the limiting climate variable in that environment. But this choice may also prove problematic under certain conditions. Because the trees at these locations are so close to the threshold for growth, if the temperature drops just a couple of degrees during the growing season, there will be little or no growth and therefore a loss of sensitivity to any further cooling. In extreme cases, there may be no growth ring at all. And if no ring was formed in a given year, that creates a further complication, introducing an error in the chronology established by counting rings back in time.

We compared simulated temperature of the past millennium derived by driving theoretical climate models with estimated natural (volcanic+solar) and anthropogenic forcings for the past millennium. We employed two different climate model simulations: (1) the simulation of the NCAR CSM 1.4 coupled atmosphere-ocean General Circulation Model (GCM) analyzed by Ammann et al (2007) and (2) simulations of a simple Energy Balance Model (EBM). While the GCM provides a more comprehensive and arguably realistic description of the climate system, the computational simplicity of the EBM lends itself to extensive sensitivity tests. As the target for our comparison, we used a state-of-the-art tree-ring based Northern Hemisphere (NH) mean temperature reconstruction of D’Arrigo et al (2006). The reconstruction was based on a composite of tree ring annual ring width series from boreal and alpine treeline sites across the northern hemisphere, and made use of a very conservative (“RCS”) tree-ring standardization procedure designed to preserve as much low-frequency climatic information as possible.

Interestingly, the long-term variations indicated by the model simulations compared remarkably well with those documented by the tree-ring reconstruction, showing no obvious sign of the potential biases in the estimated low-frequency temperature variations that have been the focus of much previous work (see e.g. this previous RealClimate review). Instead, the one glaring inconsistency was in the high-frequency variations, specifically, the cooling response to the largest few tropical eruptions, AD 1258/1259, 1452/1453 and the 1809+1815 double pulse of eruptions, which is sharpy reduced in the reconstruction relative to the model predictions. Indeed, this was found to be true for any of several different published volcanic forcing series for the past millennium, regardless of the precise geometric scaling used to estimate radiative forcing from volcanic optical depth, and regardless of the precise climate sensitivity assumed.

Following the AD 1258 eruption, the climate model simulations predict a drop of 2C, but the tree ring-based reconstruction shows only about a 0.5C cooling. Equally vexing, the cooling in the reconstruction occurs several years late relative to what is predicted by the model. The other large eruptions showed similar discrepancies. An analysis using synthetic proxy data with spatial sampling density and proxy signal-to-noise ratios equivalent to those of the D’Arrigo et al (2006) tree-ring network suggest that these discrepancies cannot be explained in terms of either the spatial sampling/extent or the intrinsic “noisiness” of the network of proxy records.

However, using a tree growth model that accounts for the temperature growth thresholding effects discussed above, combined with the complicating effects of chronological errors due to potential missing growth rings, explains the observed features remarkably well.

Show in the above figure (Figure 2d from the article) is the D’Arrigo et al tree-ring based NH reconstruction (blue) along with the climate model (NCAR CSM 1.4) simulated NH mean temperatures (red) and the “simulated tree-ring” NH temperature series based on driving the biological growth model with the climate model simulated temperatures (green). The two insets focus on the response to the AD 1258 and AD 1809+1815 volcanic eruption sequences. The attenuation of the response is produced primarily by the loss of sensitivity to further cooling for eruptions that place growing season temperatures close to the lower threshold for growth. The smearing and delay of the cooling, however, arises from another effect: when growing season lengths approach zero, we assume that no growth ring will be detectable for that year. That means that an age model error of 1 year will be introduced in the chronology counting back in time. As multiple large eruptions are encountered further back in time, these age model errors accumulate. This factor would lead to a precise chronological error, rather than smearing of the chronology, if all treeline sites experienced the same cooling. However, stochastic weather variations will lead to differing amounts of cooling for synoptically distinct regions. That means that in any given year, some regions might fall below the “no ring” threshold, while other regions do not. That means that different chronological errors accumulate in synoptically-distinct regions of the Northern Hemisphere. In forming a hemispheric composite, these errors thus lead to a smearing out of the signal back in time as slightly different age model errors accumulate in the different regions contributing to the composite.

Including this effect, our model accounts not only for the level of attenuation of the signal, but the delayed and smeared out cooling as well. This is particularly striking in comparing the behavior following both the AD 1258 and AD 1809 eruptions (compare the green and blue curves in the insets of the figure). Our model, for example, predicts the magnitude of the reduction of cooling following the eruptions and the delay in the apparent cooling evidence in the tree-ring record (i.e. in AD 1262 rather than AD 1258). We have also included a minor additional effect in these simulations. While volcanic aerosols cause surface cooling due to decreased shortwave radiation at the surface, they also lead to increased indirect, scattered light at the surface. Plant growth benefits from indirect sunlight, and past studies show that e.g. a Pinatubo-sized eruption (roughly -2W/m^2 radiative forcing) can result in a 30% increase in carbon assimilation by plants. This effect turns out to be relatively small because it is proportional in nature, and thus results in a very small absolute increase when growth is suppressed i the first place by limited growing seasons. However, not including this effect results in a slightly less good reproduction (purple dashed curves in the two insets of the figure) of the observed behavior.

As noted earlier, our main conclusions are insensitive to the precise details of the forcing estimates used, the volcanic scaling assumptions made, and the precise assumed climate sensitivity. They were also insensitive to the details of the biological tree growth model over a reasonable range of model assumptions. The conclusion that tree-ring temperature reconstructions might suffer from age model errors due to missing rings is bound to be controversial. A few points are worth making here. First of all, our conclusion is quite specific to temperature-sensitive trees at treeline, and it does not imply more general problems in the larger discipline of dendrochronology. Secondly, the conclusion at this stage simply a hypothesis, a hypothesis that can account for these key enigmatic features in the actual tree-ring hemisphere temperature reconstruction: the attenuation, and the increasing (back in time) delay and temporal smearing of the cooling response to past volcanic forcing. Were an equally successful and more parsimonious hypothesis to be provided for these observations, I would be the first to concede and defer to this alternative explanation.

One argument against the specific conclusion of missing growth rings is that trees are carefully cross-dated when forming regional chronologies, and this precludes the possibility of chronological errors. That, however, assumes that there are at least some trees within a particular region that will not suffer a missing ring during the years where our model predicts it. Yet our prediction is that all trees within a region of synoptic or lesser scale where growing season temperatures lie below the growth threshold will experience a missing ring. Thus, cross-dating within that region, regardless of how careful, cannot resolve the lost chronological information. It is my hope that dendroclimatologists will reassess raw chronologies more carefully and critically assess the extent to which the predicted features might indeed be present in the underlying tree-ring data. Again, this paper presents a hypothesis for explaining some enigmatic features of existing tree-ring temperature reconstructions. It is hardly the last word on the matter.

Finally it is worth discussing the potential wider implication of these findings. Climate scientists use the past response of the climate to natural factors like volcanoes to better understand how sensitive Earth’s climate might be to the human impact of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, e.g. to estimate the equilibrium sensitivity of the climate to CO2 doubling i.e. the warming expected for an increase in radiative forcing equivalent to doubling of CO2 concentrations. Hegerl et al (2006) for example used comparisons during the pre-industrial of EBM simulations and proxy temperature reconstructions based entirely or partially on tree-ring data to estimate the equilibrium 2xCO2 climate sensitivity, arguing for a substantially lower 5%-95% range of 1.5–6.2C than found in several previous studies. The primary radiative forcing during the pre-industrial period, however, is that provided by volcanic forcing. Our findings therefore suggest that such studies, because of the underestimate of the response to volcanic forcing in the underlying data, may well have underestimated the true climate sensitivity.

It will be interesting to see if accounting for the potential biases identified in this study leads to an upward revision in the estimated sensitivity range. Our study, in this regard, once again only puts forward a hypothesis. It will be up to other researchers, in further work, to assess the validity and potential implications of this hypothesis.

Guest Commentary by Eugenie Scott, National Center for Science Education

Imagine you’re a middle-school science teacher, and you get to the section of the course where you’re to talk about climate change. You mention the “C” words, and two students walk out of the class.

Or you mention global warming and a hand shoots up.

“Mrs. Brown! My dad says global warming is a hoax!”

Or you come to school one morning and the principal wants to see you because a parent of one of your students has accused you of political bias because you taught what scientists agree about: that the Earth is getting warmer, and human actions have had an important role in this warming.

Or you pick up the newspaper and see that your state legislature is considering a bill that declares that accepted sciences like global warming (and evolution, of course) are “controversial issues” that require “alternatives” to be taught.

Incidents like these have happened in one or more states, and they are likely to continue to happen. Teachers are encountering pushback from many directions as they try to teach global warming and other climate science topics.

The importance of climate change education is, to the RealClimate community, a no-brainer. Numerous professional science organizations, from the American Chemical Society to the American Geophysical Union to the Geological Society of America have stressed the imperative of climate science being an integral part of science education.

So What’s a Teacher to Do?

Long a defender of the teaching of evolution, the National Center for Science Education has recently launched an initiative to support and defend the teaching of climate change science.

The “support” part has challenges all its own. Unlike evolution, which easily fits into biology and other life science courses, climate science spans multiple disciplines and can fall through disciplinary cracks in biology, chemistry and physics, or appear briefly in more specialized disciplines like ecology or Earth sciences. Moreover, climate science is complex and often non-intuitive, and students (and all too often teachers) stumble over misinformation and misconceptions that are hard to overcome. Many educational institutions are wrestling with how to support climate science in the K-12 curriculum.

But the “defend” part is where NCSE will make a unique contribution. Our experience over the decades helping teachers and school boards resolve the problems that have arisen over the teaching of evolution should stand us in good stead in helping them deal with this newer “controversial science”. Of course, there are many perspectives affecting the objections to climate science education, and each requires its own response.

Some of the denial is literal (It’s not happening! The science is bad!), some of it may be interpretive (it’s maybe happening but people aren’t to blame), and some of it stems more from the implications of climate change (it’s happening and maybe humans are responsible, but someone else is to blame and/or there’s nothing I can do about it). We’re going to help teachers understand where pressure against climate science education comes from, as the first step in helping them construct a response. From the evolution education controversy we learned long ago that one does not solve these problems merely by piling on more or better science: the underlying, motivating issues must be addressed. The science is essential, but not sufficient.

Climate change education should be an integral part of science education. Students should graduate from high school and certainly college with at least a basic understanding of the foundational concepts of climate science so they can understand human activities and how they are impacting climate and other aspects of the earth system.

This is no small task, and obviously NCSE as a relatively small non-profit can only do so much. We need your help.

We have been successful because we marshal allies, like scientists, teachers, parents, and other citizens, at the grassroots. NCSE’s success over recent decades in defending the teaching of evolution has been due in large measure to scientists and others who are willing to support good science education locally and at the state level. We also need scientists to provide us with their scientific expertise.

If you are a climate scientist, please give us your contact information so we can consult with you. Also, your contact information will be helpful to us if something occurs in your region or state where we need a scientist to write a letter, testify before a committee, support a teacher, or help in some other way.

Of course, an obvious way you can help is to join NCSE, but even if you don’t, your expertise will be helpful to us.

Visit our website, and contact our new Programs and Policy Director, Mark McCaffrey, who will be helping spearhead the new initiative, to let us know you support our effort. Teachers will thank you.

This month’s open thread. Current topics are focused on the laughingly bad Daily Mail article by David Rose, the fallout from the Wall Street Journal’s latest regurgitation of why no-one should ever do anything ever. And perhaps someone might want to audit some of David Whitehouse’s arithmetic and reading comprehension…

Or anything else. Within reason.

Kapitalismen är i kris! skriker tidningarna ut. Samma ekonomiska system som under decennier gett oss välstånd tycks nu inte längre fungera. Men det är väl inte systemet i sig som inte fungerar, utan sättet att använda och uttolka det? En uttolkning som gett oss Carema-skandaler, perversa bonusar och ett överutnyttjande av naturens resurser. En tolkning som gjort det möjligt att på många håll lånefinansiera en ohållbar konsumtion, med för stora hus i USA och för dyra bilar i Grekland.

Som jag ser det är kapitalismens kris en moral- och ansvarskris. En stor del av problemet ligger nog i det finansiella systemet, där vi överlåtit ansvaret för hur vi vill satsa våra pensionspengar till anonyma fondförvaltare, som du aldrig träffar och som inte satsar sina egna pengar. Och som när systemet brakar ihop räddas av samma stat som i alla andra sammanhang vurmar för den fria marknaden. Vi har privatiserat vinsterna och socialiserat förlusterna. För kallade man det för Ebberöds bank.

Och vi har fortsatt att strunta i miljön på det att vinsterna skola bliva så stora som möjligt. Vi har inte internaliserat de externa effekterna, och därmed gjort det lönsamt att satsa på grön teknik. Den gröna teknik, som både skulle kunna rädda världen, och skapa en hållbar utveckling och nya jobb.


Bara idag kan man läsa i Dagens Industri flera intressanta exempel: "Sveriges flygplatser går back" - t ex flygplatsen i Jönköping som subventioneras med 20 miljoner per år. Och för några dagar sedan kunde man läsa om hur USA, Kanada och Kina protesterar mot att Europa inkluderar flyget i utsläppshandeln. Veckans Affärer skrev igår om hur svenska el-intensiva företag som Sandvik och Atlas Copco outsourcar sina utsläpp. I sina hållbarhetsredovisningar ser det ut som om Atlas Copco är mycket mer energieffektivt per omsättningskrona är Sandvik, men det beror bara på att man flyttat en stor del av tillverkningen till Asien och då struntar i att redovisa utsläppen som sker där.

Men som Veckans affärer klokt konstaterar: "Men precis som man kritiskt har börjat granska underleverantörskedjan för vissa konsumentvaror, där säljbolagen i väst använder outsourcing till namnlösa underleverantörer i öst för att kringgå konsumentkrav och regelverk, kommer det här sannolikt bli en utmaning även för verkstadsbolagen."

Många företag struntar i miljö så länge det inte finns nån reglering. Som om de verkade i ett kommunistiskt östland - och bara försökte smita från allt som inte uttryckligen är förbjudet.

Inte konstigt att kapitalismen  är i kris. En kris som handlar om moral och ansvar. Dagens företag måste också visa att de är en del av samhället och ta ansvar för detta. Först då kan vi få ett hållbart ekononiskt system.

Länkar:
Svenska flygplatser går back
VA - utsläppen outsourcas

Back in 2007, the IPCC AR4 SPM stated that:

“Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

This is a clear statement that I think is very well supported and correctly reflects the opinion of most climate scientists on the subject (and was re-affirmed in two recent papers (Jones and Stott, 2011;, Huber and Knutti, 2011)). It isn’t an isolated conclusion from a single study, but comes from an assessment of the changing patterns of surface and tropospheric warming, stratospheric cooling, ocean heat content changes, land-ocean contrasts, etc. that collectively demonstrate that there are detectable changes occurring which we can attempt to attribute to one or more physical causes.

Yet, in a paper just out in BAMS (Curry and Webster, 2011) this statement is apparently evidence that IPCC is unable to deal with uncertainty. Furthermore, Judith Curry has reiterated on her blog that the term ‘most’ is imprecise and undefined. For instance:

Apart from the undefined meaning of “most” in AR4 (which was subsequently clarified by the IPCC), the range 50.1-95% is rather imprecise in the context of attribution.

However, Curry’s argument is far from convincing, nor is it well formed (why is there a cap at 95%?). Nor was it convincing when I discussed the issue with her in the comments at Collide-a-Scape last year where she made similar points. Since the C&W paper basically repeats that argument (as has also been noticed by Gabi Hegerl et al who have a comment on the paper (Hegerl et al.)), it is perhaps worth addressing these specific issues again.

Let’s start with what the statement actually means. “Most” is an unambiguous adjective (meaning more than half), and ‘very likely’ in IPCC-speak means that the statement is being made with between 90 to 99% confidence (i.e. for every 10 such statements, the scientists expect 9 or more to pan out). Given that some people have found this confusing, it may help somewhat if the contents of the statement are visualised:

Figure 1: Two schematic distributions of possible ‘anthropogenic GHG contributions’ to the warming over the last 50 years. Note that in each case, despite a difference in the mean and variance, the probability of being below 50, is exactly 0.1 (i.e. a 10% likelihood).

The figure shows two Gaussian distributions, both of which have the probability of x being less than 50 at 0.1. i.e. P(x<50)=0.1. If either of them had been the distribution of the estimated increase in global temperatures due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases relative to the observed increase, the IPCC statement would have been almost exactly correct (i.e. if x=100*trend_caused_by_GHG/actual_trend). These distributions show a number of key issues that need to be appreciated. First, the actual increase of temperatures purely due to the rise in GHGs is not precisely known (and therefore there is a distribution of potential values). Note that we are presuming that there is a single ‘true’ answer, so the distribution is a measure of our ignorance, not a claim that the answer itself is a random variable.

Second, the IPCC statement is not a declaration about what the most likely value of ‘x’ is. It states merely that P(x> 50%) is at least 0.9. In the two figures, one has the mean value of x at 80%, while the other has the mean value at 100%. Both fit the IPCC statement equally well. Some people have interpreted the IPCC statement confusing the likelihood of the statement with the actual relative trend (i.e. that the 90% refers to the expected attribution), but that would be a big misreading of the text.

Third, there is certainly a potential for the increase in temperatures due to anthropogenic GHG changes to be greater than the observed trend because we know that there have been both natural (volcanic and solar) and human-caused (reflective aerosols, land use change) factors that are expected to have lead to cooling over the post-1950 period (therefore there is no cut off at 95% of the actual trend). The actual trend will be a function of the warming factors, balanced by the cooling factors. And of the warming factors, the well-mixed greenhouse gas (CO2, CH4, N2O, CFCs) changes are the dominant term (about 75% of the increase in warming factors from 1950, the rest is related to black carbon effects, ozone etc.).

Fourth, the statement clearly encompasses many different estimates of what the actual trends are being driven by and is not therefore a particularly strong conclusion. Myles Allen (Allen, 2011) points out that during the drafting, the text was changed from ‘contributed substantially’ to ‘most’, and focused on greenhouse gases rather than the total anthropogenic effect specifically in order to have a more quantitative conclusion and more justifiable statement.

Now let’s put some real numbers in here. Attribution is fundamentally a modelling task, and the principal models that can be used are the coupled GCMs – at least to start with. What do they estimate the warming trend from the well-mixed GHGs to have been over the last 50 years? The figure below shows this for some of the GISS CMIP5 models (more model data can be downloaded from CMIP5 portal):

The 50 year trends (here, from 1956 to 2005, 5 ensemble members), are 0.84ºC (range [0.79,0.92]) for just greenhouse gas forcing. and 0.67ºC (range [0.54,0.76]) for the all-forcings case (in CMIP3, the envelope of the all-forcing trends is [0.4,1.3], or equivalently 0.74 +/- 0.22ºC (1 sigma spread) using 55 individual model simulations – the wider spread reflecting structural variations in the models and forcings). As in the more recent model simulations, the GISS CMIP3 50 year trends using only well-mixed GHG forcings is around 0.1ºC more than the ‘all-forcing’ case (data here).

The actual observed trend depends a little on the dataset used, but is around 0.6 +/- 0.05ºC (1 sigma uncertainty in the OLS fit). If we then estimate the percentage (as illustrated above), assuming a 0.2ºC sigma in the model spread, ‘x’ is roughly 140% +/- 35% (1 sigma). If we interpreted that range as a Gaussian distribution (not really a good idea, but simple enough for illustration), we’d estimate that P(x<50%) would be less than 1% (even less likely than the IPCC AR4 statement allowed for).

There are good reasons why the IPCC assessed that the probability was not as low as suggested by the models or any individual attribution paper. Specifically, the overall assessment must take into account potential structural uncertainties that don’t come into the straight model analysis. For instance, the models may systematically be overestimating the GHG-driven trend, they may be underestimating the internal variability, and they may be undersampling the structural uncertainty in making models themselves. The first kind of error would cause an overestimate in the mean of the distribution, while the other factors would cause an underestimate in the variance of the trends – all would increase P(x < 50%). On the other hand, the net forcing is almost certainly less than the effect of anthropogenic GHGs alone and so that biases the mean of the ‘all-forcings’ trends low, and some of the spread in the trends is related to different models having different forcings (biasing the spread wide). These elements can be quantified during the attribution (using fingerprint scaling, monte-carlo emulators etc.), but when they are all taken into account, the difference is less than one might think (it turns out that structural uncertainty likely isn’t being underestimated and the internal variability in models comfortably spans the range inferred in the real world (Yokohata et al., 2011; Santer et al., 2011)).

Curry and Webster specifically bring up two issues that, they claim, lessen the confidence one should have in the IPCC statement: that the history of solar forcing is uncertain in scale, and that aerosol forcings have a huge error bar. These two statements are true as far as they go – the scale of solar forcing is not tightly constrained prior to about 1960, and the total aerosol forcing and it’s variation in time is uncertain. But C&W’s specific complaint is that the attribution studies used in AR4 used solar forcing that was too large compared to more recent studies. However, reducing any warming trend associated with solar actually makes the attribution statement more likely which somewhat undercuts their point.

With respect to aerosols, the key thing to remember that regardless of the magnitude of the change, the sign of the forcing is almost certainly negative (i.e. the net aerosol effect has been one of cooling). The dominant anthropogenic aerosols are sulphates (derived from the SO2 emitted during the burning of sulphur-containing fossil fuels), which are reflective, and hence cooling. Other aerosols (black carbon, organic carbon, nitrates) are more uncertain, but have a net effect that is smaller.

Now, the statement in AR4 specifically states that the effect of greenhouse gases is more than half of the observed trend, which is actually independent of the effects of aerosols. But with the high probability of aerosols being a net cooling, this increases the ratio of the GHG-driven trends to the actual forced trend.

The final issue is whether the internal variability of the system on multi-decadal timescales has been properly characterised. For instance, it is possible that all the models grossly underestimate the internal variability, in which case any expected trend due to GHGs would be drowned out in the noise. But there is no positive evidence for this at all – as Hegerl et al point out, the estimates of multi-decadal variability in the models and observational records all overlap within their (substantial) uncertainties (arising from the shortness of the record, and the difficulty in estimating internal variability in the presence of multiple forcings). So while it is conceivable be that there is a bias, it is currently undetectable, which implies it can’t be that large.

In summary then, the IPCC AR4 statement was a fair, even conservative, assessment. There is an unfortunate tendency to reify the particular statements made by IPCC, since there were clearly other correct statements that could have been made. For instance, it might well have been worthwhile to add a statement about the likely range of the anthropogenic trends (i.e 80-120% of the actual trend or similar), so that a better picture of the appropriate distribution could be given (see Huber and Knutti (2011) for examples). But claims that the statement was unsupported, or that it demonstrated that IPCC was ignoring uncertainty are simply untenable.

The next iteration (IPCC AR5) is now underway, but given the early results of the CMIP5 models (which are on the whole very similar, as discussed at fall AGU), and more recent literature on this issue (see refs below), I see no reasons in the recent literature why the conclusions in AR5 will be much different. But if anyone still finds the assessment confusing, they have an opportunity to make their points via the IPCC review process, and the resulting conclusions will likely be clearer because of them.

References

1. G.S. Jones, and P.A. Stott, "Sensitivity of the attribution of near surface temperature warming to the choice of observational dataset", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 38, 2011. DOI.
2. M. Huber, and R. Knutti, "Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance", Nature Geoscience, vol. 5, 2011, pp. 31-36. DOI.
3. J.A. Curry, and P.J. Webster, "Climate Science and the Uncertainty Monster", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 92, 2011, pp. 1667-1682. DOI.
4. G. Hegerl, P. Stott, S. Solomon, and F. Zwiers, "Comment on “Climate Science and the Uncertainty Monster” J. A. Curry and P. J. Webster", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 92, 2011, pp. 1683-1685. DOI.
5. M. Allen, "In defense of the traditional null hypothesis: remarks on the Trenberth and Curry WIREs opinion articles", Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, vol. 2, 2011, pp. 931-934. DOI.
6. T. Yokohata, J.D. Annan, M. Collins, C.S. Jackson, M. Tobis, M.J. Webb, and J.C. Hargreaves, "Reliability of multi-model and structurally different single-model ensembles", Climate Dynamics. DOI.
7. B.D. Santer, C. Mears, C. Doutriaux, P. Caldwell, P.J. Gleckler, T.M.L. Wigley, S. Solomon, N.P. Gillett, D. Ivanova, T.R. Karl, J.R. Lanzante, G.A. Meehl, P.A. Stott, K.E. Taylor, P.W. Thorne, M.F. Wehner, and F.J. Wentz, "Separating signal and noise in atmospheric temperature changes: The importance of timescale", Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 116, 2011. DOI.

I förrgår var vi på premiären av Johan Westers och Anders Janssons nya show "Köp mjölk - skriv bok". Den handlar om vår tid och hur vi försöker få vardagens bestyr som att köpa mjölk gå ihop med projekt som att skriva en bok. Ingen Kajan, ingen Tiffany och inget Svinarp. Men en mycket bra show på alla sätt. Se den om du är i närheten av Lund den närmsta tiden.

En av de saker som tas upp i showen flera gånger är alla de krav som kommer med vår tids ständigt uppkopplade tillvaro. Och hel del betraktelser om skillnaden i hur ungdomar och äldre kommunicerar. "Ungdomarna är så snabba med sitt sms:ande att medan de beställer en kaffe latte på Espresso House hinner de kommunicera hela textmassan till Utvandrar-sviten".

Och i många roliga exempel fick vi se exempel på när Johan och Anders fick sms under föreställningen från barnvakten respektive frun.  "Är det OK att min pojkvän kommer hit?" "Visst" "Får han ta med sin övervakare?" Och flera andra fall där detta korthuggna sätt att kommunicera vållar förvirring.


Själv känner jag inga stora problem med att vara uppkopplad. Att läsa mailen i telefon, och kunna avverka många av dem på språng mellan möten etc, sparar mej besväret att sluta dagen med hundra olästa mail som ligger och gnager.

Alla roliga kontakter och idéer jag fått via den här bloggen, Facebook, Twitter och LinkedIn har gett mej massor av ny energi. Och för jobbets del så kommer det inte helt sällan in jobb via sådant som diskuterats i sociala media.

Så jag är som de flesta vet ganska nöjd med att kommunicera via sociala media, via mail och sms. Och jag tror inte heller att internet, med sina avancerade sökmotorer, gör att vi upptäcker mindre. I nya numret av Intelligent Life finns en artikel som vill hävda att serendipiteten, att via lyckliga omständigheter av slump göra nya upptäckter (har skrivit om detta begrepp flera gånger, med definition och allt), minskar på grund av att Google, Wikipedia etc leder oss rätt direkt. Men där känner jag inte igen mig alls. Inte hittar jag färre nya idéer pga av internet? Nej många, många fler. Och bloggar, Facebook osv ger mig ständigt anledning att titta närmare på olika saker. De senaste dygnen har det handlat om den svenska skolan, biogasinfrastruktur i Skåne, megastäder, Sven-Harry, cykling i Groningen, goda viner, hedonistisk hållbarhet, Liljewalcs vår salong, Buernos Aires mobility plan etc. Utan internet hade jag inte hittat mycket av detta.

Så internet gör oss nog inte mindre medvetna utan mer....

När jag var student på LTH brukade vi gå och äta lunch nästan varje dag på en restaurang som heter Finn Inn. Ni vet Finn är ju jätten som skulle riva hela domkyrkan, och som finns som staty i kryptan. På Finn Inn åt nästan varje dag också byggmästaren Harry Karlsson. Jag minns honom som en ganska ful, kort satt liten man i kostym. "Det det är Harry Karlsson" sa man.

Vad jag inte visste då var att han hade en son som hette Sven-Harry Karlsson, som inte kom så bra överens med sin far, och som sedermera själv skulle bli framgångsrik byggmästare. Sven-Harry växte upp i Lund, i ett hem med tavlor av Carl-Fredrik Hill och Ernst Josephsson på väggarna. Hans syster är Anna Wahlgren, men det är ju en annan historia.

När jag under sex år var med i Boverkets Stadsmiljöråd, innan det lades ner, lärde jag känna Sven-Harry, som också var en av medlemmarna. Stadsmiljörådet var ett av regeringen utsett råd som skulle diskutera stadsutveckling ur olika aspekter. Rådet  hade ofta mycket intressanta diskussioner kring stadsutveckling och stadsbyggande, och levererade input till Boverkets verksamhet. Men Boverket har raderat ut allt om rådet från sin webbplats. Men det finns massor av spår på andra webbplatser - rådet delade bl a varje år en utmärkelse som fick mycket uppmärksamhet. Men 2008 var det slut och Boverket lade ner rådet, utan vettig förklaring.

Sven-Harry gav färg åt mötena med sina berättelser ur verklighetens byggande och planerande. Han berättade ofta om sina vedermödor att med alla byggregler kunna bygga hus som folk vill bo i och som samtidigt håller hög kvalitet. Han förespråkade hållbarhet och kvalitet. Och hans synsätt hade lett till att hans företag Folkhem gått så bra att han haft råd att investera i konst.


”I vårt samhälle har vi varit dåliga på att betala för kvalitet. Allt ska gå så snabbt numera och det är kvaliteten som får ta stryk”.

Ett av alla intressanta möten hölls hemma hos Sven-Harry på hans lilla herrgård på Djurgården, med namnet Ekholmsnäs. Där fick vi en initierad visning av Sven-Harrys stora konstsamling, med ett helt rum med Carl-Fredrik Hill - målningar, en stor Strindberg-målning, Bruno Liljefors, Gösta Adrian Nilsson, Bror Hjort, men också en hel del modern konst, som Öyvind Fahlström osv. Det var som att gå runt i ett museum. och sen åt vi middag i Gula Rummet med den fascinerande Strindbergmålningen i bakgrunden.

Ett av de sista mötena som Stadsmiljörådet hade, berättade Sven_Harry att han tänkte bygga ett museum för att alla skulle kunna få njuta av all konst han samlat på sej. Han hade övervägt två placeringar - Lund eller Stockholm. Försökte säga att Lund nog gärna skulle se museet där. Nu blev det Stockholm, och det vackra mässingsklädda museet Sven-Harrys (konstmuseum)  finns nu på plats i Vasaparken i Stockholm, och öppnade lagom till Sven-Harrys 80-årsdag, hösten 2011.

Och som en typisk egensinnig Sven-Harry -idé har en exakt kopia av hela Ekholmsnäs första våning byggts upp på taket till museet. Så nu kan alla går runt i Sven-Harrys hem och se alla tavlorna på plats, precis som när vi hade möte med Stadsmiljörådet.

I lördags var jag och hustrun där och det var en lätt absurd känsla att gå runt och titta på tavlorna precis som vi gjorde när Stadsmiljörådet var på besök. Missa inte att besöka muséet när du är i Stockholm.

Länkar:

Sven-Harrys

A group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University is trying to get a better understanding of the views of earth scientists regarding various climate change topics. They have set up an ongoing poll to do this, called Vision Prize. It’s a short (10 question) poll, covering topics like the rate of CO2 increase, predicted future temperatures, sea ice and sea level states, and hurricane frequencies. Early participants can designate a $20 donation from the group to a charity of their choice, upon completion. Please take a few minutes to help them out if qualified.

Det är sent och jag är trött efter att ha hållit i en intensiv övning på LTH i eftermiddag om hur framtidens kollektivtrafik kan se ut. Mycket spännande diskussioner med såväl forskare, framtidsanalytiker, trafikverket osv.

Och sen, för ovanlighetens skull med flyg, till Umeå  för att i morgon diskutera ett spännande projekt kring ett nytt it-system för bättre samordning mellan olika färdmedel.

Och mitt under seneftermiddagen kommer mail från kontoret: den nya miljöministern Lena Ek säger att biltrafiken måste minska. Det räcker inte med bara de tekniska lösningarna, vi måste också minska vårt bilresande!



Heureka! Just som forskarna sagt i många år! Bingo! Och jag kan komplettera mitt föredrag i morgon med denna totalt nya omsvängning, från Anderas Carlgrens uttalande om att det är bra att trafiken ökar, till Lena Eks att den måste minska.

Så även om jag är trött, var det helt enkelt tvunget att skriva några rader om detta. Hoppas nu det kan ge avtryck i hur planeringen av transportsystemet kommer att se ut de närmaste åren!

Tilllägg: 19 jan.

Jo det tog inte lång tid innan infrastrukturminister (varför har vi inte en skolhusminister också?)  naturligtvis tog tillbaka kommandot och sa nästan exakt det som de brukar säga: "Trafiken kommer att öka och det är bra. Särskilt för att avlångt land som Sverige i utkanten av Europa." I rapport igår den 18 jan ansluter hon sig till den vanliga mittfåran.

Tråkigt då att hon inte är påläst. Jo det står i vitboken att "curbing mobility is not an option". Men där drar man i alla fall den slutsatsen att det då behövs en massiv överflyttning till järnväg, och en utbyggnad av denna.

Och forskarna, och trafikverket, säger fortfarande att det går inte att klara klimatmålen utan att faktiskt trafiken minskar. Elmsäter Svärd har nu tagit över Carlgrens roll som trafikkramare, utan koll på forskningen.

Och den djupt rotade tron att friheten alltid ökar med ökande trafik är helt enkelt inte sann. Den som vill veta mer skriver lämpligen "frihet" i sökrutan här ovan så får du alla argumenten. Och hittar också den debattartikel jag skrev 2010 i ämnet.


Länk: SVT om ministerns uttalande

Update January 27: There is also another recent dog-based animations from Victoria (southeast Australia) explaining some of the key drivers of our climate and how some are changing.

A TV series that ran on Norwegian TV (NRK) last year included a simple and fun cartoon that demonstrates some important concepts relative to weather and climate:

In the animation, the man’s path can be considered as analogous to a directional climatic change, while the path traced by his dog’s whimsical movements represent weather fluctuations, as constrained by the man’s path, the leash, and the dog’s moment-by-moment decisions of what seems important to investigate in his small world. What might the leash length represent? The man’s momentary pause? The dog’s exact route relative to concepts of random variation? The messages in this animation are similar to the recent results of Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf in ERL (see post here).

We’d also like to praise the TV-series ‘Siffer‘, hosted by an enthusiastic statistician explaining how most things in our world relate to mathematics. The series covers a range of subjects, for instance gambling theory, the Tragedy of the Commons, anecdotes about mathematical riddles, medical statistics, and construction design; it even answers why champagne from a large bottle tastes better than that from a smaller one. There is also an episode devoted to weather forecasting and climate.

Success in understanding our universe often depends on how the ‘story’ about it is told, and a big part of that often involves how mental images are presented. Mathematics and statistics can describe nature in great detail and “elegance”, but they are often difficult and inaccessible to the average person. Conversely, the man-and-dog animation is intuitive and easy to comprehend. Similarly, Hans Rosling’s Fun with Stats provides some very nice demonstrations of how to convey meaning via the creative display of numbers.

Almost 3000 non-science major undergraduates at the University of Chicago have taken PHSC13400, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, since Ray Pierrehumbert and I (David Archer) first developed it back in 1995. Since the publication of the textbook for the class in 2005 (and a much-cleaned-up 2nd edition now shipping), enrollment has gone through the roof, it’s all I’ve been able to teach the last few years, trying to keep up with demand. I hear it is the largest class on campus, with 4-500 students a year out of an annual class of only around 1400. Now the content of this class is being served to the internet world at large: Open Climate 101.

You can watch video lectures followed by quizzes to challenge and hopefully stimulate your understanding, and work your way through tutorials with interactive models and simple mathematical ideas. Actually all that stuff has been available for a long time, online or in the textbook, but now it’s packaged into an interactive assessing system, which admittedly lacks the personality and finesse of our graduate student teaching assistants, but I hope it’ll get the job done. You can work at your own pace, on your own time. You don’t get University of Chicago credit, but it’s free, and if you get to the end of it you can download a certificate of accomplishment with your name and a verification code, signed by me. I hope people find it useful.

Hela mitt yrkesliv har jag skrivit olika former av dokument som haft till syfte att ge mig, eller de organisationer jag jobbat för, framgång. Det har handlat om papers till tidskrifter och konferenser, forskningsansökningar och anbud på konsultjobb. Har alltid tagit detta arbete på största allvar, i sann övertygelse att dokumenten också bedöms på samma sätt.

På senare tid har jag börjat tvivla. En process som pågått några år tycks ha gjort att det nu ofta inte alls räcker med att skriva det bästa anbudet, eller forskningsansökningen etc. Nu krävs det ett stort arbete med lobbying för att komma ifråga. Du måste ägna mycket tid och kraft åt att prata med, och helst bli bekant med de som skall bedöma dokumentet. Du måste övertyga redan innan du skriver ditt anbud eller ansökan. Alla andra gör ju så.  Här kommer några aktuella exempel, där jag är övertygad att annat än dokumentet spelat roll:

(För de som tycker att jag bara pratar i egen sak och gnäller, kan jag tala om att jag pratat med många i branschen som tycker samma sak. Och att vi trots nedanstående så har vi på Trivector extremt mycket att göra...)

1) På Transportforum, trafikbranschens stora årliga mötesplats som var förra veckan, brukar vi på Trivector ha med mellan 15 och 20 föredrag. Eftersom vi jobbar med så mycket forskningsprojekt och strategiska utredningar, och har rykte om att göra bra presentationer, brukar vi alltid ha framgång med de förslag vi skickar in.


I år fick vi "bara" med 12 föredrag, trots att de höll sedvanlig kvalitet. Och trots att jag lyssnade på ovanligt  många högst mediokra, ointressanta och oinspirerade föredrag. Och trots att det i programmet fanns gott om personer som höll två, tre föredrag, varav en del var standardföredrag de hållit tolv gånger före. Och jag satt en hel dag och lyssnade på föredrag om citylogistik, och så låg informationstäthet som det var där har jag sällan sett på en konferens. När jag pratar med folk så säger de att vi måste bli bättre på att lobba och sälja in oss hos de som har ansvar för de olika sessionerna.

2) Vi lämnade i våras ett anbud på en utvärdering av ett mycket stort forskningsprogram där staten lagt flera miljarder på forskning om it i fordon. Förfrågan var på mer än 25 sidor, med sida upp och sida ner med krav på anbudslämnaren. Vi klarade alla dessa krav galant, utom ett, men en sådan kompetens fanns i vårt nätverk så det var inte ett problem. Eftersom förfrågan var så omfattande lade vi mycket jobb på anbudet, och på att förklara hur vi skulle göra - och vårt anbud blev också 25 sidor tjockt. Men det kan väl vara ok för att utvärdera ett miljard-projekt?

Vi blev därför mycket besvikna när vi inte fick anbudet. Särskilt som de som fick det hade skrivit ett anbud på 1,5 (en och en halv) A4-sida! Och bland många andra brister saknade man den efterfrågade specialkompetensen. För ovanlighetens skull bestämde vi oss för att överklaga, och anlitade också jurist för ändamålet. I den korrespondens som följde i de olika rundorna framkom så många märkliga argument att man baxnar: "nej vi tyckte inte att er metod var bra eftersom ni skulle intervjua ett tjugotal som varit inblandade i forskningen. Det har inte de tid till!" För att utvärdera ett miljard-projekt.....

Efter flera rundor fick vi avslag med motiveringen att det är helt ok att anta ett anbud på 1,5 sida för att utvärdera ett miljard-projekt, och att det är ok att strunta i de skall-krav man själv satt upp (eller rättare låtsas som de uppfylls trots att det inte kunde bevisas av dokumenten). Som skattebetalare ryser man. Men kanske hade nån annan varit bättre på att lobba?

(vårt anbud var på ca 900.000 och de som fick det på ca 750.000 om nu nån undrar, men det hjälper ju föga om man inte uppfyller kraven...)

3) Under snart ett års tid har LTH arbetat för att det forskningscenter om kollektivtrafik, som planeras, skall hamna i Lund. De anser helt enkelt att det är självklart, med tanke på att man har landets enda professor i ämnet, att man  forskat och utbildat i dessa ämnen betydligt mer än Göteborg och Stockholm, och dessutom är Skåne den region som lyckats absolut bäst i att  öka kollektivtrafikresandet, så här finns mycket intressanta forskningscase. Dessutom har både Stockholm och Göteborg fått flera liknande satningar inom trafikområdet.

Nu hör vi rykten att det redan är klart att centrat skall hamna i Göteborg, eftersom de ju lobbat mycket bättre. Och att det är så synd om västsverige nu när SAAB försvinner (har vi hört det förr?) Skåningarna får kritik för att de verkar så ointresserade och inte lobbat tillräckligt. Ansökan skall vara inne den 2 maj....

Är det nån som vet var man kan gå en kurs i lobbying?

Första dagen på Transportforum, branschens årliga firmafesti Linköping. Sjuttonhundra personer som lyssnar på kanske 18 parallellasessioner om allt du kan tänka dig inom trafikområdet.

Missade tyvärr det mesta av ministerns inledningstal, mentydligtvis pratade hon om vikten av en pålitlig järnväg. Hoppas det inte bara blir prat. Det är akut!
Sen har jag hört i stort sett alla talare prata om de storautmaningar vi står inför. Ni vet det där med klimatet, oljan osv. Det är stor skillnadmot kanske tio år tillbaka, då var det betydligt färre som lyfte dessa frågor.Nu säger allt från politiker, till höga tjänstemän på de olika verken samma sak.
Men sen när det kommer till åtgärder så föreslår ingen åtgärdersom kan nå de mål som vi faktiskt ställt upp på att nå, när det gäller t ex utsläppsminskningar.Idag har jag varit på ett extremt oinspirerande seminarium om Sverigestransportforskning, och det pratades många fina ord.  Men ingen sa att vi faktiskt redan haråtgärder så det räcker för att nå målen.


Resten av eftermiddagen var jag på ett mycket bra seminariumom EU.s vitbok. Ni vet där det står att ”minska rörligheten är inget alternativ”.De forskare som pratade där sa det vi redan vet sen länge, det kommer inteatt räcka med all ny teknik. Och inte heller med den rejäla överflyttning tilljärnväg som faktiskt föreslås. Vi måste också minska behovet av att resa och transportera. Jag tycker att de borde säga det betydligt tydligare, och intevara så forskaraktigt försiktiga.
Säg som det är: Ny teknik, satsning på höghastighetsjärnvägetc räcker inte. Vi behöver minska transportbehoven också – inte öka dem. Ellersom prof Bo Lennart Nelldal försiktigt sa: Jag tror inte vi dör om vi inte fårresa femtio procent mer…..
Nej, risken är förmodligen väsentligt större om vi ökarresandet så vi inte når klimatmålen.
Nu är det dags att byta om till middagen.

I’ve put together an easy-to-play-with online model of methane in the atmosphere. I’m going to use it for teaching along with the rest of the Understanding the Forecast webmodels, but it was designed to be relevant to the issue of abrupt new methane burps as we’ve been ruminating about lately on Realclimate.

The model runs in three stages: a pre-anthropogenic steady state which ends in the model year
-50, addition of a new chronic source for 50 years (from human activity),then a spike beginning at model year 0 (supposed to be today) and running for 100 years into the model future. Here are results from the “worst case scenario” in the last post (whether you believe it is the true worst case or not): 200 Gton C over 100 years.

Looks like we got the factor of 10 methane increase about right.

Source and sink of methane in the model.

The lifetime of methane in the atmosphere, used to calculate the methane sink in any time step, is parameterized as a function of concentration following Schmidt and Shindell (2003).

The atmospheric lifetime of methane, used to calculate the sink flux.

The radiative forcing is parameterized from output from the NCAR model, scaled by an efficacy factor of 1.4 from Hansen et al, (2005). The radiative forcing is compared with Business-as-usual CO2 radiative forcing with the model year 0 corresponding roughly to year 2010, and with CO2 rising at 0.65% per year. The methane radiative forcing before year 0 is not time-realistic because the real human sources did not switch on instantaneously 50 years ago, but you can compare the future evolution of radiative forcing from CO2 and methane, from year 0 onwards.

The radiative forcings of CO2 and methane compared. The scenario is more-or-less comparable to 750 ppm CO2, as we thought.

The CO2 concentration used to generate the last figure.

Timing is everything

Four simulations with the same amount of carbon released as methane in the “spike”, on different time scales for the release.

10 Gton C release in 1 year — the spike.

Same spike but not as sharp: 10 Gton over 20 years.

Same 10 Gton but spread over 50 years.

100 years.

Enjoy. Go and get your swamp gas on, and give the poor model planet your worst. Bwahahahahaha!

References

1. G.A. Schmidt, "Atmospheric composition, radiative forcing, and climate change as a consequence of a massive methane release from gas hydrates", Paleoceanography, vol. 18, 2003. DOI.
2. J. Hansen, "Efficacy of climate forcings", Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 110, 2005. DOI.

Let’s suppose that the Arctic started to degas methane 100 times faster than it is today. I just made that number up trying to come up with a blow-the-doors-off surprise, something like the ozone hole. We ran the numbers to get an idea of how the climate impact of an Arctic Methane Nasty Surprise would stack up to that from Business-as-Usual rising CO2

Walter et al (2007) says that Arctic lakes are 10% of natural global emissions, or about 5% of total emissions. I believe that was considered to be remarkably high at the time but let’s take it as a given, and representing the Arctic as a whole. If the number of lakes or their bubbling intensity suddenly increased by a factor of 100, and it persisted this way for 100 years, it would come to about 200 Gton of carbon emission, which is on the same scale as our entire fossil fuel emission so far (300 Gton C), or roughly the amount of traditional reserves of natural gas (although I’m not sure where estimates are since fracking) or petroleum. It would be a whopper of a surprise.

Scaling Walter’s Arctic lake emission rates up by a factor of 100 would increase the overall emission rate, natural and anthropogenic, by about a factor of 5 from where it is today. The weak leverage is because the high latitudes are a small source today relative to tropical wetlands and anthropogenic sources, so they have to grow a lot before they make much difference to the sum of all sources.

The steady-state methane concentration in the air scales nearly linearly with the emission rate. Actually, the concentration goes up somewhat faster than a constant times the emission rate, because the lifetime in the atmosphere gets longer (IPCC TAR). Let’s err on the side of flamboyance (great word in this context) and say the concentration of methane in the air goes up by a factor of 10 for the duration of the extra methane emission (meaning that the lifetime doubles).

Using the modtran model on line I get a radiative forcing from 10 * atmospheric methane of 3.4 Watts/m2 (the difference in the instantaneous IR flux out, labeled Iout, between cases with and without 10x methane). Using the TAR estimates of radiative forcing gives 2.7 Watts/m2.

But methane is a reactive gas and its presence leads to other greenhouse forcings, like the water vapor it decomposes into. Hansen estimates the “efficacy” of methane radiative forcing to be 1.4 (Hansen et al, 2005, Shindell et al, 2009), so that puts us to 4 or even 5 Watts/m2.

This is about twice the radiative forcing today from all anthropogenic greenhouse gases today, or (again according to Modtran) it would translate to an equivalent CO2 at today’s methane concentration of about 750 ppm. That seems significant, for sure.

Or, trying to “correct” for the different lifetimes of the gases using Global Warming Potentials, over a 100-year time horizon (which still way under-represents the lifetime of the CO2), you get that the methane would be equivalent to increasing CO2 to about 500 ppm, lower than 750 because the CO2 forcing lasts longer than the methane, which the GWP calculation tries in its own myopic way to account for.

But the methane worst case does not suddenly spell the extinction of human life on Earth. It does not lead to a runaway greenhouse. The worst-case methane scenario stands comparable to what CO2 can do. What CO2 will do, under business-as-usual, not in a wild blow-the-doors-off unpleasant surprise, but just in the absence of any pleasant surprises (like emission controls). At worst comparable to CO2 except that CO2 lasts essentially forever.

References

1. K.M. Walter, L.C. Smith, and F. Stuart Chapin, "Methane bubbling from northern lakes: present and future contributions to the global methane budget", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, vol. 365, 2007, pp. 1657-1676. DOI.
2. J. Hansen, "Efficacy of climate forcings", Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 110, 2005. DOI.
3. D.T. Shindell, G. Faluvegi, D.M. Koch, G.A. Schmidt, N. Unger, and S.E. Bauer, "Improved Attribution of Climate Forcing to Emissions", Science, vol. 326, 2009, pp. 716-718. DOI.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, but it also has an awesome power to really get people worked up, compared to other equally frightening pieces of the climate story.

What methane are we talking about?

The largest methane pools that people are talking about are in sediments of the ocean, frozen into hydrate or clathrate deposits (Archer, 2007). The total amount of methane as ocean hydrates is poorly constrained but could rival the rest of the fossil fuels combined. Most of this is unattractive to extract for fuel, and mostly so deep in the sediment column that it would take thousands of years for anthropogenic warming to reach them. The Arctic is special in that the water column is colder than the global average, and so hydrate can be found as shallow as 200 meters water depth.

On land, there is lots of methane in the thawing Arctic, exploding lakes and what not. This methane is probably produced by decomposition of thawing organic matter. Methane could only freeze into hydrate at depths below a few hundred meters in the soil, and then only at “lithostatic pressure” rather than “hydrostatic”, meaning that the hydrate would have to be sealed from the atmosphere by some impermeable layer. The great gas reservoirs in Siberia are thought to be in part frozen, but evidence for hydrate within the permafrost soils is pretty thin (Dallimore and Collett,1995)

Is methane escaping due to global warming?

There have been observations of bubbles emanating from the sea floor in the Arctic (Shakhova, 2010; Shakhova et al., 2005) and off Norway (Westbrook, 2009). The Norwegian bubble plume coincides with the edge of the hydrate stability zone, where a bit of warming could push the surface sediments from stable to unstable. A model of the hydrates (Reagan, 2009) produces a bubble plume similar to what’s observed, in response to the observed rate of ocean water warming over the past 30 years, but with this warming rate extrapolated further back in time over the past 100 years. The response time of their model is several centuries, so pre-loading the early warming like they did makes it difficult to even guess how much of the response they model could be attributed to human-induced climate change, even if we knew how much of the last 30 years of ocean warming in that location came from human activity.

Lakes provide an escape path for the methane by creating “thaw bulbs” in the underlying soil, and lakes are everywhere appearing and disappearing in the Arctic as the permafrost melts. (Whether you get CO2 or a mixture of CO2 plus methane depends critically on water, so lakes are important for that reason also.)

Methane bubbles captured in freezing lake ice in Alaska

So far there hasn’t been strong evidence presented for detection enhanced methane fluxes due to anthropogenic warming yet. Yet it is certainly believable for the coming century however, which brings us to the next question:

What effect would a methane release have on climate?

The climate impact of releasing methane depends on whether it is released all at once, faster than its lifetime in the atmosphere (about a decade) or in an ongoing, sustained release that lasts for longer than that.

When methane is released chronically, over decades, the concentration in the atmosphere will rise to a new equilibrium value. It won’t keep rising indefinitely, like CO2 would, because methane degrades while CO2 essentially just accumulates. Methane degrades into CO2, in fact, so in simulations I did (Archer and Buffett, 2005) the radiative forcing from the elevated methane concentration throughout a long release was about matched by the radiative forcing from the extra CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere from the methane as a carbon source. In the figure below, the dashed lines are from a simulation of a fossil fuel CO2 release, and the solid lines are the same model but with an added methane hydrate feedback. The radiative forcing from the methane combines the CH4 itself which only persists during the time of the methane release, plus the added CO2 in the atmosphere, which persists throughout the simulation of 100,000 years.

The possibility of a catastrophic release is of course what gives methane its power over the imagination (of journalists in particular it seems). A submarine landslide might release a Gigaton of carbon as methane (Archer, 2007), but the radiative effect of that would be small, about equal in magnitude (but opposite in sign) to the radiative forcing from a volcanic eruption. Detectable perhaps but probably not the end of humankind as a species.

What could happen to methane in the Arctic?

The methane bubbles coming from the Siberian shelf are part of a system that takes centuries to respond to changes in temperature. The methane from the Arctic lakes is also potentially part of a new, enhanced, chronic methane release to the atmosphere. Neither of them could release a catastrophic amount of methane (hundreds of Gtons) within a short time frame (a few years or less). There isn’t some huge bubble of methane waiting to erupt as soon as its roof melts.

And so far, the sources of methane from high latitudes are small, relative to the big player, which is wetlands in warmer climes. It is very difficult to know whether the bubbles are a brand-new methane source caused by global warming, or a response to warming that has happened over the past 100 years, or whether plumes like this happen all the time. In any event, it doesn’t matter very much unless they get 10 or 100 times larger, because high-latitude sources are small compared to the tropics.

Methane as past killing agent?

Mass extinctions like the end-Permean and the PETM do typically leave tantalizing spikes in the carbon isotopic records preserved in limestones and organic carbon. Methane has an isotopic signature, so any methane hijinks would be recorded in the carbon isotopic record, but so would changes in the size of the living biosphere, soil carbon pools such as peat, and dissolved organic carbon in the ocean. The end-Permean extinction is particularly mysterious, and my impression is that the killing mechanism for that is still up for grabs. Methane is also one of the usual suspects for the PETM, which consisted of about 100,000 years of isotopically light carbon, which is thought to be due to release of some biologically-produced carbon source, similar to the way that fossil fuel CO2 is lightening the carbon isotopes of the atmosphere today, in concert with really warm temperatures. I personally believe that the combination of the carbon isotopes and the paleotemperatures pretty much rules out methane as the original carbon source (Pagani et al., 2006), although Gavin draws an opposite conclusion, which we may hash out in some future post. In any case, the 100,000-year duration of the warming means that the greenhouse agent through most of the event was CO2, not methane.

Could there be a methane runaway feedback?.

The “runaway greenhouse effect” that planetary scientists and climatologists usually call by that name involves water vapor. A runaway greenhouse effect involving methane release (such as invoked here) is conceptually possible, but to get a spike of methane concentration in the air it would have to released more quickly than the 10-year lifetime of methane in the atmosphere. Otherwise what you’re talking about is elevated methane concentrations, reflecting the increased source, plus the radiative forcing of that accumulating CO2. It wouldn’t be a methane runaway greenhouse effect, it would be more akin to any other carbon release as CO2 to the atmosphere. This sounds like semantics, but it puts the methane system into the context of the CO2 system, where it belongs and where we can scale it.

So maybe by the end of the century in some reasonable scenario, perhaps 2000 Gton C could be released by human activity under some sort of business-as-usual scenario, and another 1000 Gton C could come from soil and methane hydrate release, as a worst case. We set up a model of the methane runaway greenhouse effect scenario, in which the methane hydrate inventory in the ocean responds to changing ocean temperature on some time scale, and the temperature responds to greenhouse gas concentrations in the air with another time scale (of about a millennium) (Archer and Buffett, 2005). If the hydrates released too much carbon, say two carbons from hydrates for every one carbon from fossil fuels, on a time scale that was too fast (say 1000 years instead of 10,000 years), the system could run away in the CO2 greenhouse mode described above. It wouldn’t matter too much if the carbon reached the atmosphere as methane or if it just oxidized to CO2 in the ocean and then partially degassed into the atmosphere a few centuries later.

The fact that the ice core records do not seem full of methane spikes due to high-latitude sources makes it seem like the real world is not as sensitive as we were able to set the model up to be. This is where my guess about a worst-case 1000 Gton from hydrates after 2000 Gton C from fossil fuels in the last paragraph comes from.

On the other hand, the deep ocean could ultimately (after a thousand years or so) warm up by several degrees in a business-as-usual scenario, which would make it warmer than it has been in millions of years. Since it takes millions of years to grow the hydrates, they have had time to grow in response to Earth’s relative cold of the past 10 million years or so. Also, the climate forcing from CO2 release is stronger now than it was millions of years ago when CO2 levels were higher, because of the band saturation effect of CO2 as a greenhouse gas. In short, if there was ever a good time to provoke a hydrate meltdown it would be now. But “now” in a geological sense, over thousands of years in the future, not really “now” in a human sense. The methane hydrates in the ocean, in cahoots with permafrost peats (which never get enough respect), could be a significant multiplier of the long tail of the CO2, but will probably not be a huge player in climate change in the coming century.

Could methane be a point of no return?

Actually, releasing CO2 is a point of no return if anything is. The only way back to a natural climate in anything like our lifetimes would be to anthropogenically extract CO2 from the atmosphere. The CO2 that has been absorbed into the oceans would degas back to the atmosphere to some extent, so we’d have to clean that up too. And if hydrates or peats contributed some extra carbon into the mix, that would also have to be part of the bargain, like paying interest on a loan.

Conclusion

It’s the CO2, friend.

References

1. D. Archer, "Methane hydrate stability and anthropogenic climate change", Biogeosciences, vol. 4, 2007, pp. 521-544. DOI.
2. N. Shakhova, I. Semiletov, I. Leifer, A. Salyuk, P. Rekant, and D. Kosmach, "Geochemical and geophysical evidence of methane release over the East Siberian Arctic Shelf", Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 115, 2010. DOI.
3. N. Shakhova, "The distribution of methane on the Siberian Arctic shelves: Implications for the marine methane cycle", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 32, 2005. DOI.
4. G.K. Westbrook, K.E. Thatcher, E.J. Rohling, A.M. Piotrowski, H. Pälike, A.H. Osborne, E.G. Nisbet, T.A. Minshull, M. Lanoisellé, R.H. James, V. Hühnerbach, D. Green, R.E. Fisher, A.J. Crocker, A. Chabert, C. Bolton, A. Beszczynska-Möller, C. Berndt, and A. Aquilina, "Escape of methane gas from the seabed along the West Spitsbergen continental margin", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 36, 2009. DOI.
5. M.T. Reagan, and G.J. Moridis, "Large-scale simulation of methane hydrate dissociation along the West Spitsbergen Margin", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 36, 2009. DOI.
6. D. Archer, "Time-dependent response of the global ocean clathrate reservoir to climatic and anthropogenic forcing", Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems, vol. 6, 2005. DOI.
7. M. Pagani, K. Caldeira, D. Archer, and J.C. Zachos, "ATMOSPHERE: An Ancient Carbon Mystery", Science, vol. 314, 2006, pp. 1556-1557. DOI.

Om du frågar millenie-generationen eller generation Y, dvs de som är födda si sådär 1980-1995 om hur de ser på bilägande så säger 55% att de kör mindre bil av miljöskäl. Hela 70% säger att de skulle valt kollektivtrafik, saåkning eller bilpool i högre grad om det funnits bättre möjligheter i området där man bor.

Vidare säger 68% att sociala medier som Facebook, Twitter, sms och online-spel gör att de ibland umgås via nätet istället för att köra bil för att ses. Men även bland äldre åldersgrupper så finns samma tendenser, om än inte lika starka.

Den yngre åldersgruppen, 18-34 år  är också mest benägna att dela media, dela bil och samåka, och att byta lägenhet på semestern. All denna vurm för kollektiva lösningar har naturligtvis sin grund inte bara i hänsyn till miljön, utan har också ekonomiska förtecken.

Siffrorna kommer från en undersökning som Zipcar, det stora kommersiella bilpoolsföretaget i USA gör varje år. Men troligtvis kan vi se samma utveckling här om ett par år, eller kanske redan nu.


En annan trend, som också håller på att växa sig stark i USA, är gemensamhetskontor. Dvs kontor där personer från olika företag sitter och jobbar, för att slippa pendla, för att man vill ha sällskap av andra ensam-företagare eller för att man är på resande fot. Det är nog samma sak som i Sverige kallades för datastugor i olika utredningar för sådär tjugo år sedan. Regus, som är en av världens största på kontorshotell, säger att denna typ av lösningar nu svarar för tjugo procent av deras intäkter.

Kanske är dessa trender en del i peak car use, att biltrafiken inte ökar längre i många av västvärldens städer och länder, som jag skrivit om vid flera tillfällen.

Frågan är när beslutsfattare börjar förstå vad som händer, och anpassar planering och regler. Hur länge kan man sova medan revolutionen pågår?

Länkar:
Zipcars undersökning
The economist om gemensamhetskontor