Climate Science 101: Holdren, Lubchenco Take Congress Back to School
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Members of Congress took a brief trip back to high school science class Wednesday morning, complete with science experiments, sports analogies, raised voices and a bit of name-calling.
The hearing in Chairman Ed Markey’s Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming was expected to provide an opportunity for two of the administration’s top scientists to defend the climate science that has come under fire since last week's release of e-mails stolen from researchers — and for the Committee’s climate change skeptics to air their accusations.
It did not disappoint.
Several members of the Republican minority called for Congressional hearings and investigations to look into the e-mails and whether they raise questions about the integrity of climate science.
“I’m not sure the U.S. Congress is the best way to get at scientific truth,” responded John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The scientific community has mechanisms for addressing controversies like these and those have already been set in motion, he said.
A couple minority members took their accusations to another level. Rep. John Sullivan of Oklahoma said he saw a “culture of corruption in science right now.”
Holdren replied, “It would be amazing if all the academies of sciences and all the scientists around the world who have come to the same conclusions were part of some conspiracy." He said he doesn't believe “these emails are sufficient to demonstrate a ‘culture of corruption’ in the scientific community” and pointed out that scientists manipulate data regularly in order to make it understandable and comprehensive. It isn't nefarious, he said.
The hacking of the servers at the UK's University of East Anglia and posting online of the stolen e-mails and documents has provided an unexpected platform for a small but vocal minority of doubters to raise questions about the mountain of research that has been conducted on the effects and extent of climate change, particularly in the last decade.
While they have succeeded in partially distracting from the work being done to mitigate climate change, they can provide no answer for why global temperatures have increased so precipitously as industrialization has increased and spread. A study released last week by 26 climate scientists found global temperatures had increased at a rate of 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade over the past 25 years, parallel to increases in greenhouse gas emissions. This lines up with the findings of past studies.
Other measurements, such as the actual amount of carbon in the atmosphere, point to similar trends.
“The rate of increase has accelerated in the last decade. The increase [of carbon in the atmosphere] in this decade has averaged 1.9 parts per million per year. In the 1990s, it was 1.5 parts per million per year. That’s the trend we’ve got to turn around,” Dan Lashoff, director of the Natural Resource Defense Council’s climate center, told reporters Wednesday morning.
Jane Lubchenco, administrator of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, testified at the hearing along with Holdren.
“The emails really do nothing to undermine the work of thousands of scientists all around the world that tell us our climate is changing,” she said.
The skeptics have plenty of accusations, but no theories of their own for why this change is occurring, Rep. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and co-sponsor of the House-passed American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) bill, told the committee.
“There is no alternative theory that the minority is proposing," he said, "so the deniers have decided to use a small number of emails as a way to cast doubt, … as a reason why we should stop all efforts.”
As an analogy, Markey said that if the body temperature of a child went up two degrees, no one would accept that as the “new normal” for that child; they would use the science available to return her to a normal level.
If that wasn't clear enough for the congressional audience, he added another analogy: baseball statistics. The percentage of players hitting more than 40 home runs in a season spiked in the 1990s. But once Major League Baseball started cracking down on steroid use, the number of home run hitters normalized to pre-1990s levels. Just as ballplayers wanted to keep steroid use quiet so they could keep slamming homers out of the park, he said, climate change skeptics and coal and oil companies today are trying to keep evidence of humans' role in climate change quiet so they don't have to clean up their industries.
Markey was not the only one patiently trying to explain the science.
Lubchenco pulled out pitchers of water and performed actual science experiments for the representatives to demonstrate the effects of ocean acidification. Increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased levels of dissolved CO2 in oceans, which raises the acidity of seawater over time. She used chalk to represent the shells of the small organisms that form the base of the food pyramid and partially dissolved them in a vinegar-water mixture representing the projected acidity of future seawater.
Markey thanked her for refreshing their knowledge of high school science.
“This explained to us why just about everyone under the age of 25 wants us to do something about [climate change],” he said. “That’s why they call them the Green Generation — because they are up on the science.”
Lubchenco's demonstrations failed to impress Wisconsin Rep. James Sensenbrenner, though, the committee's ranking Republican.
Referring to the hacked e-mails, Sensenbrenner said,
“There’s increasing evidence of scientific fascism going on,” later adding, “There’s an awful lot scientific McCarthyism going on,” by which he meant name-calling.
Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) came to the scientists' defense.
“It is continually stunning to me that people can see the evidence before their eyes” and continue to doubt the reality of climate change, he said. He turned to Holdren and said, sarcastically, “I just want to ask you if you’re a member of a global conspiracy.”
Holdren assured the committee he was not.
Inslee then expressed his own concerns about the state of the science, but from another angle — that it has not provided projections that are dire enough. Lubchenco responded that scientists have to err on the side of cautious and conservative estimates.
Later, Inslee spoke with obvious emotion and a raised voice as he talked about climate change’s effects in the Seattle area:
“I’d like to be able to catch salmon … maybe 50 or 60 years from now, and when people watch what I’ve watched and say that’s fascism, I got a problem with that.”
While it was not clear what “scientific fascism” might actually be, Holdren tried to address the concerns of Sensenbrenner. This data in the e-mails addressed a “very small part” of what we know about climate science, he explained. He also pointed out that in the time since the data referred to in the e-mails was collected, the National Academies of Science had studied and reported on the same data. The academies concluded in 2006 that the last 50 years have been the warmest in the last 1,000 years and probably much longer, he said.
Holdren emphasized that science is always contentious, but that the science behind anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming.
“I would point out that scientists are human … but the point is that however this plays out, the great bulk of the climate science will not be changed,” he said.
See also:
Skeptics Exaggerating Science Scandal to Derail Copenhagen Climate Talks
Scientists Call on Obama, Congress to Take Stronger Climate Action
Obama Orders Return to Scientific Integrity in Policymaking
Matthew Berger studied political economy at the London School of Economics and previously worked at the environmental nonprofits Earthjustice and the Marine Stewardship Council. He is based in Washington, D.C.
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Global Warming IS BENEFICIAL
In 1938 the earth's population was 3 Billion people.In 2008, earth's population doubled to 6 Billion people. In another 70 years, it will be 12 Billion. One more time, 70 years later, it will soar to 24 Billion, (with a commensurate increase of livestock and agricultural needs). Do you want to provide life-giving water for them?
70% of the earth's FRESH water is stored in the Antarctica, (which is melting), whether or not, man is the cause! NOTE: NASA believes the Sun is mainly responsible, (with little help from mankind). Nature has been successfully regulating global temperatures for Billions of years. Man should NOT attempt to control/legislate it!
With the advent of renewable-energy electricity-producing systems, water from the oceans will be desalinated, and distributed by pipeline, from places where there is too much, to places where there is too little. EONS from now, if more water is yet needed, with copious amounts of electricity available, fresh, potable water, will be synthesized!
Carmine Cifaldi
Won't be able to breathe
Long before what you predict comes true our air will not be able to sustain us. You will not survive unless you have a private supply of oxygen.
Another Climate Scientist with No Name?
Dear Sean
Thank you for your comment below. Do you have a last name and credentials you would like to share so that our readers could verify that you are indeed a climate scientist, as you say?
Does your "outreach program" include publishing peer reviewed literature, or is it limited to commentary in the court of public opinion?
Climategate
I am a climate scientist, and part of the "outreach" for my research program seeks to place facts in the public domain. Here they are:
• We have known for years that the Mann hockey stick model (the one in Gore's movie) was wrong, and we know why it was wrong (Mann used only selected data to normalize the principal component analysis, not all of it). He retracted the model.
• We know that the Medieval Warm period existed, where the temperatures were higher than they are now (Chaucer spoke of vineyards in northern England). Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the MWP. And for good reason.
• If the MWP is "allowed" to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a "runaway greenhouse" in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen's runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now.
• We have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 600,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). Jones et al. know this too (see their "Copenhagen Diagnosis"); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well.
• We have known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered. We have long known that Jones's paper dismissing this explanation (Jones, et al. 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172) is wrong and potentially fraudulent (see the same data used to confirm urban heat islands in Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380).
• Most of us (except Briffa) know that the Briffa conclusions are wrong, and why they are wrong; groups in Finland, Canada (lots of places actually) show cooling by this proxy, not warming; the IPCC even printed the Finn's plot upside down to convert the fact (cooling) into the dogma (warming).
• We have also long known that Jones, Mann, and the other IPCC scientists have been gaming peer review, blackballing opponents, and doing other things that show that they are not the political ingenues that you suggest. We have tolerated years of their refusal to release data (now, we know, much of these data were discarded), something that would in any other field of science lead to disbarment.
• We have been annoyed by Al Gore, who declared this science "settled", refused to debate, and demonized skeptics (this is anti-science: debate and skepticism are the core of real science, which is never settled).
New in ClimateGate are answers to two question:
(1) To what extent did the East Anglia people engage in simple self-deception (which happens often in science) or fraud? I am not willing to crucify Jones on the word "trick". Nor, for that matter, on the loss of primary data, keeping only "value added" data (which is hopelessly bad science, but still conceivably not fraud). But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures (these numbers are hard-programmed), splining observational data to model data, and other smoking guns, all showing that they were doing what was necessary to get the answers that the IPCC wanted, not the answers that the data held. They knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it. If "peer review" was functioning, and the IPCC reports are rigorously peer reviewed, why was this not caught? The answer: The politics of climate have corrupted peer review so thoroughly that it could not catch even these obvious scams.
(2) Will this revelation be enough to cause the "global warming believers" to abandon their crusade, and for people to return to sensible environmental science (water use, habitat destruction, land use, this kind of thing)? Perhaps. First, we have not lost just one research project amid dozens of others that survive to still support human-caused climate warming. A huge set of primary data are gone. Satellite data are scarcely 40 years old. Everything is interconnected, and anchored on these discredited studies. Even without the corruption of the peer review process, this is as big a change as quantum mechanics was in physics a century ago.
Accordingly, no "consensus" exists. The "2500 scientists agree" number that one hears (including from the Obama administration yesterday) is fiction. God knows who they are counting, but to get to this number, they must be including referees, spouses, and pets).
That said, religious people are intrinsically committed to their faith, and climate warming believers are exactly this. The Pope will not become a Protestant even if angel Gabriel taps him on the shoulder and asks him to. Likewise, the author of this may believed until the day he retires that there remains "overwhelming support" human caused global warming, even if every last piece of data supporting it is controverted. As a graduate student, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die.
Your Skeeter Truck Is Smokin'
I can't believe what I just read. The clown car you rode into the ring in is smokin' like a skeeter truck and all the clowns are lying on the ground. The data don't go no where. Stays right where it is at NOAA, NASA and the USGS. Go git ya' some and do your own work. Anyone is welcome to submit their work for peer review even if you are honkin' yer horn Clarabelle.
Smooch!
Climate change
Terrific update of the debate. Glad you took the time to elaborate thoughtfully.
I am what my friends mockingly call a "flat earther". I am also a professor of medicine and use science very respectfully... physicians are valuable only if we are skeptical of "conventional wisdom" to advocate for the people affected by "science": patients. Unless climate scientists are ruthlessly skeptical of the "obvious" and put their egos away for a while, we will all be punished by what may be nonsense.
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