Why Climate Deniers Desperately Need "The Pause" in Warming; And Why The Pause is not a Pause

A new article by scientists Dana Nuccitelli and Michael Mann reiterates the fact that the climate system continues to warm. Their opening line begins "over the past 17 years, the Earth has warmed rapidly." This continued rapid warming is borne out by the overwhelming science during the period climate deniers often claim there to have been a stoppage in warming (and even more bizarrely, a "cooling").

The climate is warming rapidly, so how can climate deniers claim it isn't?

Nuccitelli and Mann explain it quite nicely in their article, which I urge you to read in full. To begin with, deniers always ignore all the data sets except their preferred single set of satellite data, which deniers claim shows cooling. With that in mind, Nuccitelli and Mann note:

First of all, it is wrong: the satellite data clearly show ongoing warming over the past two decades.

Secondly, the satellite data in question only estimate the temperature of the atmosphere above Earth's surface. We, and most other living things, reside on Earth's surface, and the data tell us that surface warming continues unabated.

Finally, warming of the atmosphere accounts for only about two per cent of overall global warming; more than 90 per cent goes into heating of the surface and the oceans. That heating contributes to the melting of the ice sheets, and the acceleration of global sea level rise.

Clearly the "pause" is not a pause at all. One of the best ways to see the fallacy of deniers claiming a pause is to look at the following global land-ocean temperature record:

[See larger]

As is evident to everyone, temperatures vary from year to year due to short-term influences like El Nino and La Nina events, volcanic action, aerosols, and natural variability. Just as evident to everyone is that the overall trend is one of warming. There are short periods of time where the rate of warming is slower or faster, and even a period where warming seemed to have stopped (this was a temporary condition when toxic aerosols from unregulated air pollution were masking the warming effects of CO2), but clearly the trend is warming.

In short, it's clear human activity (mostly burning of fossil fuels) is warming the climate system. The rate varies due to short-term influences, but the main driver of the warming is increased CO2 in the atmosphere. The science on this is unequivocal (i.e., clear and undeniable). In recent years, even more of the warming has been going into the oceans (where most of it goes anyway) as the lack of El Nino, the recurring La Ninas, the increased volcanic activity, and the increased aerosol emissions from rapidly growing China all have contributed to a slower rate of increase in the warming of the atmosphere. That heat is still there; it's just that more of it is in the oceans. This is temporary. El Nino's return and other indicators helped 2014 become the hottest year on record, and 2015 is already on pace to surpass that record. The evidence supports the idea that the rate of warming is actually increasing, and will likely speed up rapidly.

So why do climate deniers keep insisting that "the pause" means climate change isn't happening or has stopped?

Because they have no science to back up their denial. If you look at the history of climate denial you'll see deniers hop, skip, and jump from one false interpretation to another. They must ignore the vast majority of data, extract one factoid, and create an entire fictitious story line that is contradicted by the actual truth. That is why you see deniers argue that a single paper is the "death knell" for man-made climate change, only to have the author of any legitimate study come out to explain it does no such thing. Deniers must ignore the science and fabricate conclusions that are divorced from reality. And that's what they do every single time.

Which begs the question, how do scientists and the honest public deal with climate denial? I'll have more on that in future posts, but the first thing that scientists can do is be careful about adopting the language of denial lobbyists. The "pause" or "hiatus" language is denial language. It was created by lobbyists to falsely throw doubt on the continued warming. As denial lobbyists intended, the denialosphere of paid, ideological, and conspiratorial bloggers quickly saturated the internet with the two misnomers. That was to be expected. But scientists started using the terms in their own blogs and conversations, thus playing into the lobbyist's intended deception.

Instead, scientists should have clearly explained that short-term influences routinely cause short-term variations and that the overall trend continued. Perhaps a more accurate term should have been used by scientists ("faux pause" was belatedly adopted by some climate scientists, but even that mimes the lobbyist-preferred misdirection). The problem here is that scientists are not always very good at communicating with the public, whereas lobbyists have ample experience in that regard since the very job of lobbyists is to manipulate public opinion and provide cover for political allies. While I can't recommend scientists become more political, I can recommend scientists spend more time reaching out to the public and communicating the science accurately.

In that regard, there is much more work that needs to be done.



Source of graphic: "Warming since 1880 yearly" by DHeyward - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Warming_since_1880_yearly.jpg#/media/File:Warming_since_1880_yearly.jpg

The Importance of Michael Mann's Lawsuit Against the National Review

Anyone paying attention to man-made climate change issues no doubt has heard of Michael E. Mann, a climate researcher at Penn State University. Mann became famous, of sorts, as a critical link in the chain that unequivocally demonstrates human activity is warming the planet. In 1998 and 1999 Mann published papers with co-authors Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes that included graphs now known to everyone as the "hockey stick" graphs.

A compilation of a tremendous amount of data, the hockey stick graph is notable because it clearly shows a startling upward rise in the temperature trend of our planet. Even non-scientists can easily see the sharp temperature increase. Which is why the climate denial lobby found it necessary to attack the graph.

Understand that by saying attack the graph I mean attack the lead author of the papers in which the graph is presented. As Mann himself discusses in his recent book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, the climate denial lobby employed a technique they have used often and which Mann calls the "Serengeti Strategy" after the way predators separate out one prey from the herd. Because the science of the graph itself is unassailable, these lobbyists have been attacking Dr. Mann's person continually for the last decade.

In science, each and every paper published must stand up to scrutiny. Mann's papers and graph have stood up to some of the greatest scrutiny every applied to a single piece of science. The conclusion - the graph is sound and it is supported by more than a dozen other independent studies that confirm that same trend. The lobbyists know this but continue to attack because, well, because that is what they are paid to do.

The lawsuit

Unfortunately for them, climate denial lobbyists found that Mann and the scientific community wouldn't simply accept the constant stream of falsehoods being said about them. After one particularly egregious attack on Mann (including a disgusting comparison to a pedophile), Mann sued for defamation. The case has been in the courts for over two years as the defendants have delayed proceedings in the hopes of overextending Mann's ability to pay for legal protection.

Ironically, given that science is inherently self-correcting, the lawsuit represents a critical step in restoring public trust in science. The public trust that has been damaged not by scientists' actions but by the distortions, misrepresentations, and outright fabrications of the climate denial lobbying industry. The climate denial industry, funded by fossil fuel and right wing ideological interests and carried out by a multitude of highly paid lobbyists and their media outlets, have been making up stuff and misleading for so long they seem to forget that what they say isn't true. They've lied about the hockey stick graph so often that they apparently felt a sense of entitlement to lie and impugn the character and reputation of any scientist that stands in their way.

Mann isn't the first scientist to be personally attacked because their science was irrefutable, but perhaps the outcome of this defamation lawsuit will inhibit future attacks on others. Perhaps the case will mean that lobbying organizations will no longer be able to intentionally disparage scientists, either individually or collectively. Perhaps scientists and policymakers can focus on understanding the science and the policy options that can help us deal with the science without being attacked by a science denial industry adept at lying about facts. And the unequivocal fact is, human activity is causing a warming of the planet. It's time for the lobbyists to stop lying and start informing policymakers about how policy can best fix the problem.

More on the lawsuit

An excellent article by Aaron Huertas of the Union of Concerned Scientists

Climate Science Watch

Brief of Michael Mann submitted September 3, 2014

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars by Michael E. Mann - A Book Review

If you ever wanted to know how it feels to be hunted by a pack of rabid wolves, Michael Mann’s The Hockey Stick is the book for you. The “hockey stick” graph became an icon in the Climate Wars, at least in the sense that it gave a target for the climate denialist industry to focus on in their efforts to deny the science. For those who are confused the bottom line is this – the hockey stick is robust, joined by a dozen other graphs into a veritable hockey team, and represents one small piece of multiple lines of evidence that demonstrate our planet is being warmed by human activity.

Mann begins by discussing how the hockey stick was “Born in a War” during the mid-1990s. As his own research was just beginning to develop, the climate denialist industry was already hard at work attacking other scientists like Ben Santer in what Mann calls the “Serengeti strategy.” In “Climate Science Comes of Age” and “Signals in the Noise” Mann takes us through the state-of-the-science and how his emerging research relates to the research of other scientists, including future co-author Raymond Bradley. In “The Making of the Hockey Stick” Mann gives us both the history and the science that led to the seminal paper commonly referred to as MBH98 and its follow up paper MBH99. The hockey stick papers. In short, the hockey stick is merely a reconstruction of northern hemisphere temperatures going back a millennia or so and based on a range of proxy data, that is, data from corals, ice cores, tree rings and other sources of long-term information that are used to define atmospheric temperatures. This one (relatively) simple graph was the result of “a substantial body of work.”

But as the science developed so too did the attacks on that science by fossil fuel industry lobbyists and their allies. The hockey stick graph became part of the 2001 Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, and was perceived as a major threat to the denialist industry’s interests. It was actually only one of three figures used in that IPCC report showing the same sort of pattern of historical temperatures. As Mann discusses, the MBH papers didn’t even attempt to establish causality, but this fact – like most facts – didn’t seem to slow the denialist desire to set up the hockey stick as THE pedestal of climate change…and then proceed to try to tear it down.

Mann goes on in ensuing chapters to discuss the “Origins of Denial” (e.g., going back to the tobacco industry’s “doubt is our product” strategy), and the various critiques of the hockey stick. Some of the more interesting chapters have to do with the political attacks on Mann and his co-authors. The chapter “Say It Ain’t So, (Smokey) Joe!” refers to Joe Barton (“I apologize to BP” for holding them accountable for the Deepwater Horizon spill). Barton called a House hearing on the hockey stick based solely on an opinion piece written in the Wall Street Journal. Barton was universally chastised for abusing his position to carry on a political intimidation. Even other Republicans like Sherwood Boehlert and John McCain rebuked Barton’s clear attempts to harass scientists.

In “A Tale of Two Reports,” Mann relates the findings of two evaluations of the hockey stick paper – one by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) commissioned by Sherwood Boehlert, and one by a statistics professor named Edward Wegman commissioned by Joe Barton. The NAS review was conducted by a team of highly qualified scientists and looked intensively at the research. The Wegman team consisted of Wegman, one of his graduate students, and one other co-author. The NAS review universally reaffirmed the veracity and robustness of the MBH hockey stick. The Wegman report disagreed. Not surprisingly, evidence later determined that Wegman had collaborated with denialist organizations, had passed off much of Stephen McIntyre’s faulty work as his own, and as much as 1/3 or more of the Wegman report had been plagiarized. Despite reaffirmation by the NAS, the addition of a dozen other independent reconstructions all showing the same thing, and voluminous evidence from multiple lines of investigation all showing that the hockey stick accurately represents the state-of-the-science, the denialist bloggers still repeat the false talking points coming out of Wegman’s ethically-challenged and factually-deficient report.

There is much more in the book, of course, and along the way Mann also discusses the ubiquitous inability of any denialist argument to stand up to even the most basic scientific scrutiny. He discusses the cadre of industry-sponsored blogs that serve as an echo chamber for denialist talking points, even long after they have been thoroughly debunked many times (including, for example, the falsehood that the hockey stick is broken).

Mann further discusses attempts to intimidate climate scientists in chapters called “Heads of the Hydra” (whenever one false talking point is debunked, two more false talking points are tossed out and/or recycled from the ones already debunked), “The Battle of the Bulge” (about how the denialist industry has made a last ditch effort to harass and intimidate scientists now that the science has become undeniable), and “Climategate: The Real Story” (how the denialist industry coordinated an orchestrated disinformation campaign). Mann’s recounting of how the “hide the decline” false talking point required the convenient omission of 23 words and the combining of two completely unrelated topics for the denialists to create their fake scandal is enlightening.

The final chapter “Fighting Back” is about how climate scientists have started to defend themselves and the science against the vicious harassment and intimidation of the climate denial lobby. One example he lists is Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli’s witch hunt that was working its way up through the courts. Just this past week the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Cuccinelli had no basis for pursuing what all parties acknowledge is nothing more than a politically motivated attempt to intimidate scientists who are doing research politicians find ideologically inconvenient.

In an Epilogue, Mann notes that his views of the “role of the scientist” have evolved over the last 10 years. Previously Mann, like most scientists, believed the role of the scientist was to do scientific research and that others should take on the duty of communicating it to the public. Now he believes that it is a responsibility of all scientists to ensure that their science is accurately communicated, and sometimes that means being out there to correct the intentional disinformation pushed by the science denial lobby. All scientists should consider this advice.

I highly recommend this book.  I also highly recommend the book Global Warming and Political Intimidation by Raymond S. Bradley, the “B” of MBH98/99. Like Mann, Bradley has experienced first hand the “Serengeti Strategy” of harassment.

Photo Credit and to order the book: Amazon.com

Climate Scientists Talking to the Public

Graphic courtesy of NASA

One of the more emphatic debates these days is whether scientists should talk more with the public. Traditionally, scientists do their science in the lab or the field, toil for weeks or months (or even years) over analysis, and then write up their findings for publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals to be read only by other scientists.

The public sees none of this. They usually can't access the journals because they don't have a subscription. Not that it matters; scientific writing is generally incomprehensible to anyone outside their field of study, never mind the public. In any case, single papers are only pieces in a very large puzzle, and who outside of a few academics has the time to work on a puzzle that size? Well, no one.

So where does the public get its scientific information? Largely from the news media, who generally, okay, let's be frank, do a lousy job of communicating the science as a whole. Usually a single paper is presented as if it is the entire puzzle, not the one piece. And tomorrow's piece, presented just as breathlessly by a media geared towards sensationalism, may seem to totally contradict yesterday's piece. Add to this the fact, yes, the fact, that there are parties out there who intentionally try to mislead the public. The obvious example are lobbyists paid to protect their benefactor's interests by standing in the way of policy changes that could negatively impact the short-term bottom line. By now I think we all know some blatant examples.

Which leaves scientists. The traditional "do science, let others communicate it" mantra just doesn't work any more. Science is part of everyone's life...every single day. That's a good thing. But with the virtual cesspool of blogs, where anyone can saturate the internet within hours with the most inane non-scientific drivel, the public is inundated with information. As Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum noted in their book, Unscientific America, on the internet "there’s tons of information available, but much of it is crap.” So to counteract that crap, scientists have to step up and communicate the facts of science directly to the public. This isn't a new idea. Carl Sagan did that with his original Cosmos series (recently resurrected with Neil deGrasse Tyson), and the above-mentioned Chris Mooney discussed it in a 2010 Washington Post Op-Ed.

The idea has gotten new legs in recent weeks in an effort to get the facts out about man-made climate change. Penn State climate scientist (and co-author of the "hockey stick" paper) Michael Mann recently wrote a New York Times Op-Ed called "If You See Something, Say Something," a play on the post-9/11 warnings in many of the nation's subway systems. Phys.Org discussed the pluses and minuses in a recent post, saying "Climate scientists want to interact more directly with the public." Others have also tackled the issue.

Let's be blunt -  there clearly is a need for scientists to ensure the public gets an accurate picture of the science behind man-made climate change and other scientific issues. But how to do it? At the very least it's important for scientists to become more accessible to the public. Get a Facebook page to highlight your research, tweet your latest findings, Google Plus your research. Ah, but here's the rub. Do it in a way that isn't going to come off as overblown gibberish readable only by those who have spent years learning the jargon. Drop the "sciency talk." Talk to us in language we use every day. The public doesn't need to have every detail so that they can replicate your research. We just need to understand what is happening (e.g., the planet is definitely getting warmer and we are the main cause) and what it means (e.g., it could make George Strait's song about "Oceanfront Property in Arizona" sound like a good investment opportunity).

In short, scientists need to remember that they are part of the public too. Share your work.

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars by Michael E. Mann - A Book Review

If you ever wanted to know how it feels to be hunted by a pack of rabid wolves, Michael Mann’s The Hockey Stick is the book for you. The “hockey stick” graph became an icon in the Climate Wars, at least in the sense that it gave a target for the climate denialist industry to focus on in their efforts to deny the science. For those who are confused the bottom line is this – the hockey stick is robust, joined by a dozen other graphs into a veritable hockey team, and represents one small piece of multiple lines of evidence that demonstrate our planet is being warmed by human activity.

Mann begins by discussing how the hockey stick was “Born in a War” during the mid-1990s. As his own research was just beginning to develop, the climate denialist industry was already hard at work attacking other scientists like Ben Santer in what Mann calls the “Serengeti strategy.” In “Climate Science Comes of Age” and “Signals in the Noise” Mann takes us through the state-of-the-science and how his emerging research relates to the research of other scientists, including future co-author Raymond Bradley. In “The Making of the Hockey Stick” Mann gives us both the history and the science that led to the seminal paper commonly referred to as MBH98 and its follow up paper MBH99. The hockey stick papers. In short, the hockey stick is merely a reconstruction of northern hemisphere temperatures going back a millennia or so and based on a range of proxy data, that is, data from corals, ice cores, tree rings and other sources of long-term information that are used to define atmospheric temperatures. This one (relatively) simple graph was the result of “a substantial body of work.”

But as the science developed so too did the attacks on that science by fossil fuel industry lobbyists and their allies. The hockey stick graph became part of the 2001 Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, and was perceived as a major threat to the denialist industry’s interests. It was actually only one of three figures used in that IPCC report showing the same sort of pattern of historical temperatures. As Mann discusses, the MBH papers didn’t even attempt to establish causality, but this fact – like most facts – didn’t seem to slow the denialist desire to set up the hockey stick as THE pedestal of climate change…and then proceed to try to tear it down.

Mann goes on in ensuing chapters to discuss the “Origins of Denial” (e.g., going back to the tobacco industry’s “doubt is our product” strategy), and the various critiques of the hockey stick. Some of the more interesting chapters have to do with the political attacks on Mann and his co-authors. The chapter “Say It Ain’t So, (Smokey) Joe!” refers to Joe Barton (“I apologize to BP” for holding them accountable for the Deepwater Horizon spill). Barton called a House hearing on the hockey stick based solely on an opinion piece written in the Wall Street Journal. Barton was universally chastised for abusing his position to carry on a political intimidation. Even other Republicans like Sherwood Boehlert and John McCain rebuked Barton’s clear attempts to harass scientists.

In “A Tale of Two Reports,” Mann relates the findings of two evaluations of the hockey stick paper – one by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) commissioned by Sherwood Boehlert, and one by a statistics professor named Edward Wegman commissioned by Joe Barton. The NAS review was conducted by a team of highly qualified scientists and looked intensively at the research. The Wegman team consisted of Wegman, one of his graduate students, and one other co-author. The NAS review universally reaffirmed the veracity and robustness of the MBH hockey stick. The Wegman report disagreed. Not surprisingly, evidence later determined that Wegman had collaborated with denialist organizations, had passed off much of Stephen McIntyre’s faulty work as his own, and as much as 1/3 or more of the Wegman report had been plagiarized. Despite reaffirmation by the NAS, the addition of a dozen other independent reconstructions all showing the same thing, and voluminous evidence from multiple lines of investigation all showing that the hockey stick accurately represents the state-of-the-science, the denialist bloggers still repeat the false talking points coming out of Wegman’s ethically-challenged and factually-deficient report.

There is much more in the book, of course, and along the way Mann also discusses the ubiquitous inability of any denialist argument to stand up to even the most basic scientific scrutiny. He discusses the cadre of industry-sponsored blogs that serve as an echo chamber for denialist talking points, even long after they have been thoroughly debunked many times (including, for example, the falsehood that the hockey stick is broken).

Mann further discusses attempts to intimidate climate scientists in chapters called “Heads of the Hydra” (whenever one false talking point is debunked, two more false talking points are tossed out and/or recycled from the ones already debunked), “The Battle of the Bulge” (about how the denialist industry has made a last ditch effort to harass and intimidate scientists now that the science has become undeniable), and “Climategate: The Real Story” (how the denialist industry coordinated an orchestrated disinformation campaign). Mann’s recounting of how the “hide the decline” false talking point required the convenient omission of 23 words and the combining of two completely unrelated topics for the denialists to create their fake scandal is enlightening.

The final chapter “Fighting Back” is about how climate scientists have started to defend themselves and the science against the vicious harassment and intimidation of the climate denial lobby. One example he lists is Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli’s witch hunt that was working its way up through the courts. Just this past week the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Cuccinelli had no basis for pursuing what all parties acknowledge is nothing more than a politically motivated attempt to intimidate scientists who are doing research politicians find ideologically inconvenient.

In an Epilogue, Mann notes that his views of the “role of the scientist” have evolved over the last 10 years. Previously Mann, like most scientists, believed the role of the scientist was to do scientific research and that others should take on the duty of communicating it to the public. Now he believes that it is a responsibility of all scientists to ensure that their science is accurately communicated, and sometimes that means being out there to correct the intentional disinformation pushed by the science denial lobby. All scientists should consider this advice.

I highly recommend this book.  I also highly recommend the book Global Warming and Political Intimidation by Raymond S. Bradley, the “B” of MBH98/99. Like Mann, Bradley has experienced first hand the “Serengeti Strategy” of harassment.

Photo Credit and to order the book: Amazon.com