Margaret's target this time is public funding of fertility treatments. In particular her concern is with women who hold off on having children until they have established careers only to run into difficulties getting pregnant at their relatively advanced ages. What she objects to is the argument that the government ought to pay for in-vitro fertilization treatments for such women on the grounds that women have a right to get pregnant. While acknowledging that women have such a right -- "Well, sure, of course" -- she denies that this entitles them to public funding for their fertility treatments.
For a change, Margaret is at least onto something -- the distinction between positive and negative rights: the fact that women have negative reproductive rights -- rights to government non-interference in their reproductive decisions -- does not entail that they have positive reproductive rights -- rights to government assistance in achieving their reproductive goals. But the logical point does not establish that women are not entitled to government aid, only that any such entitlement does not simply follow from the right to non-interference.
Now, of course, government resources -- that is, tax dollars -- are limited and have to be divided among competing interests. But insofar as we are genuinely committed to gender equality -- and, hence, don't think women should be forced to choose between career and family -- we are obliged dedicate a portion of these resources to aid women in achieving their reproductive goals. This does not entail that fertility treatments for women who have put off having children need to be publicly funded -- the money might be more effectively spent on programs, such as subsidized daycare, which enable younger mothers to pursue their career goals. But it does entail that women who desire to pursue both career and family are entitled to a share of government resources to help them do so.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Settling some Science
Once again Margaret Wente is hyperventilating over hot new talking points in climate-change denial circles. During an interview, climatologist Dr. Phil Jones said that CRU temperature data shows the increase in global temperature over the last fifteen years is ‘less than statistically significant’.
To quote Homer Simpson in a similar state of mind, whoo hoo! A real climate scientist is saying that global warming might not even be happening! It’s all over, this is denialism’s wet dream on a plate (ugh)! Right? Well, no. Dr. Jones said, truthfully, that warming over the last fifteen years falls just short of being statistically significant. Ms. Wente is over the moon about this: “Hello? When other people say that, they’re called deniers”, she proclaims. Not so. This is a trivial result, a product of the short period and the wide year-to-year variation in global temperatures. The warming over this period, as measured by CRU, falls short of being statistically significant.
This means that the possibility of the observed warming being due to chance variation in year to year temperatures is not ruled out with 95% confidence. The rate of warming, at about .12 oC per decade, is slow enough that a chance pattern of year-to-year variation over the last fifteen years that just happened to finish as much warmer as that period did has a probability higher than 5% (in fact, as Dr. Jones pointed out in his interview, this probability is just barely over 5%).
This 5% probability is the standard threshold for ‘statistical significance’—but it’s not a magical line handed down from on high; it’s just a choice about how much evidence we standardly require before rejecting the hypothesis that an observed correlation is due to mere chance. If we suspect there’s a real effect (and we certainly do in this case) then we go looking for more data to check. The larger the sample size, the better your chance of significant results. And, lo and behold, over the last twenty years observed warming in the CRU data is statistically significant! (It’s also worth noting that we are now in a deep solar minimum, but 2009 was still the second warmest year on record—it’s funny how facts about solar output are important to deniers when they might help to explain observed warming, and completely neglected when they don’t.)
Also, if we use the GISS temperature measurements instead (which include wider coverage of the arctic based on correlations between measured temperatures over fairly large regions), the increase over the last fifteen years is statistically significant—that is, the probability of the observed increase being due to chance turns out to be a bit less than 5%. No doubt, this difference between the two main measures of global temperature will soon be a new topic of intense discussion in the denialsphere: how could our two best measures of earth’s temperature disagree on this basic question?
So if all the evidence we had for global warming was the warming over the last fifteen years in CRU data, we would be uncertain (by the arbitrary standard that rules out chance only when the probability of an observation being due to chance is less than 1 in 20). But the balance of probability would strongly favour warming. The odds of the observed increase being due to chance variation are less than 1 in 10, but not less than 1 in 20. Of course we have much more evidence than that, and the odds that the observed warming is due to chance when we look at more data and longer periods are far less than 1 in 20. Finally, on longer scales the warming grows more and more significant, that is, our confidence that it is not a matter of chance becomes higher and higher.
Ms. Wente’s excitement about Dr. Jones’s statement reveals nothing about climate science, but a lot about her ignorance of statistics and probability. Would she also be excited to know that if we consider only a few days in February and a few days in May, the temperature difference between the two months can easily fail to be statistically significant?
Along the way Ms. Wente once more tosses out a brief concession, admitting that anthropogenic global warming is settled. The ‘third position’ she now identifies herself with accepts “the underlying science, which says that climate change is happening and human activity is a factor”. Surely this implies that she does admit the science is settled? Of course not! Having conceded the conclusion she has resisted for so long, she continues to dismiss and belittle the problem we face. The science is still not settled for her, because her ‘third position” (endorsed, she claims, by unnamed experts) says that “threats of imminent catastrophe have been wildly exaggerated,” and “(w)e don’t know much about what might happen in the future, especially when it comes to specifics such as rising sea levels or regional droughts.”
There are indeed still questions about the details of just how much warming will result, and just how bad the consequences will be—and no serious defender of the science of global warming, from Al Gore to David Suzuki to James Hansen, Michael Mann and Phil Jones himself has denied this. But, pace Ms. Wente, this doesn’t mean we don’t know a lot about what might happen: the paleoclimatological record shows that the last time temperatures were just a few degrees warmer than they now are, sea level was meters higher. How quickly that rise in sea level occurred is not known, but nothing we know rules out a rapid rise in the near future: sea levels fall slowly as the earth cools, but they rise much faster during warming, and the resolution of our data doesn’t show a delay. Climate shifts can be dramatic in other ways too, altering rainfall patterns, disrupting life cycles for plants and animals and increasing destructive large-scale weather events. Both models and the past climatological record show that the climate can be very sensitive, and any major changes will be difficult if not impossible for many people and countries to cope with. Further, though the worst consequences may be delayed, our failure to act now can lock in drastic changes later: our descendants will suffer from our reluctance to make changes in our energy systems.
So Ms. Wente is pulling another fast one here—she is moving the goalposts. It wasn’t long ago that she disputed that anthropogenic global warming was happening, eagerly joining in the attack on Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of past temperatures and questioning whether present warming is in any way exceptional. Now she accepts that it’s happening, and that it’s at least partly due to our greenhouse gas emissions. But she demands (before she’ll admit the science is ‘settled’) that we know just how much warming will happen, how soon, and what the consequences will be. But this is ridiculous: there will always be some level of uncertainty about these things: Ms. Wente has picked a reading of what it takes to ‘settle the science’ that implies the science can never be settled. This is a nice rhetorical trick, but pretty silly when you think about it.
Part of moving the goalposts is forgetting the past. Several years ago, Ms. Wente was similarly excited over the ‘Hockey stick’ debate, a short-term obsession of the denialsphere triggered by the prominence of Michael Mann’s reconstruction of past temperatures over the last 1,000 years. Ms. Wente gleefully announced that MacIntyre and McKitrick had shown Mann’s work was wrong and that current warming is not exceptional. But subsequent work by multiple climate scientists and a detailed review by the American Academy of Science have confirmed Mann’s pioneering work and extended it using different proxies and more refined statistical methods. (Worse for Ms. Wente, the Republican-led House ‘investigation’ of Mann’s work that led to the Wegman report attacking Mann’s work has been exposed as a set-up job, manipulated by Representative Joe Barton and others: see DeSmog and Deepclimate.) But it seems Ms. Wente has forgotten all about this episode. Past manipulations and the failures of denialist arguments simply disappear from her story, as she spins the latest ‘defeat’ for global warming science while pronouncing her own views to be moderate, sensible, balanced and wise. Isn’t it funny that her views also keep turning out to be wrong?
To quote Homer Simpson in a similar state of mind, whoo hoo! A real climate scientist is saying that global warming might not even be happening! It’s all over, this is denialism’s wet dream on a plate (ugh)! Right? Well, no. Dr. Jones said, truthfully, that warming over the last fifteen years falls just short of being statistically significant. Ms. Wente is over the moon about this: “Hello? When other people say that, they’re called deniers”, she proclaims. Not so. This is a trivial result, a product of the short period and the wide year-to-year variation in global temperatures. The warming over this period, as measured by CRU, falls short of being statistically significant.
This means that the possibility of the observed warming being due to chance variation in year to year temperatures is not ruled out with 95% confidence. The rate of warming, at about .12 oC per decade, is slow enough that a chance pattern of year-to-year variation over the last fifteen years that just happened to finish as much warmer as that period did has a probability higher than 5% (in fact, as Dr. Jones pointed out in his interview, this probability is just barely over 5%).
This 5% probability is the standard threshold for ‘statistical significance’—but it’s not a magical line handed down from on high; it’s just a choice about how much evidence we standardly require before rejecting the hypothesis that an observed correlation is due to mere chance. If we suspect there’s a real effect (and we certainly do in this case) then we go looking for more data to check. The larger the sample size, the better your chance of significant results. And, lo and behold, over the last twenty years observed warming in the CRU data is statistically significant! (It’s also worth noting that we are now in a deep solar minimum, but 2009 was still the second warmest year on record—it’s funny how facts about solar output are important to deniers when they might help to explain observed warming, and completely neglected when they don’t.)
Also, if we use the GISS temperature measurements instead (which include wider coverage of the arctic based on correlations between measured temperatures over fairly large regions), the increase over the last fifteen years is statistically significant—that is, the probability of the observed increase being due to chance turns out to be a bit less than 5%. No doubt, this difference between the two main measures of global temperature will soon be a new topic of intense discussion in the denialsphere: how could our two best measures of earth’s temperature disagree on this basic question?
So if all the evidence we had for global warming was the warming over the last fifteen years in CRU data, we would be uncertain (by the arbitrary standard that rules out chance only when the probability of an observation being due to chance is less than 1 in 20). But the balance of probability would strongly favour warming. The odds of the observed increase being due to chance variation are less than 1 in 10, but not less than 1 in 20. Of course we have much more evidence than that, and the odds that the observed warming is due to chance when we look at more data and longer periods are far less than 1 in 20. Finally, on longer scales the warming grows more and more significant, that is, our confidence that it is not a matter of chance becomes higher and higher.
Ms. Wente’s excitement about Dr. Jones’s statement reveals nothing about climate science, but a lot about her ignorance of statistics and probability. Would she also be excited to know that if we consider only a few days in February and a few days in May, the temperature difference between the two months can easily fail to be statistically significant?
Along the way Ms. Wente once more tosses out a brief concession, admitting that anthropogenic global warming is settled. The ‘third position’ she now identifies herself with accepts “the underlying science, which says that climate change is happening and human activity is a factor”. Surely this implies that she does admit the science is settled? Of course not! Having conceded the conclusion she has resisted for so long, she continues to dismiss and belittle the problem we face. The science is still not settled for her, because her ‘third position” (endorsed, she claims, by unnamed experts) says that “threats of imminent catastrophe have been wildly exaggerated,” and “(w)e don’t know much about what might happen in the future, especially when it comes to specifics such as rising sea levels or regional droughts.”
There are indeed still questions about the details of just how much warming will result, and just how bad the consequences will be—and no serious defender of the science of global warming, from Al Gore to David Suzuki to James Hansen, Michael Mann and Phil Jones himself has denied this. But, pace Ms. Wente, this doesn’t mean we don’t know a lot about what might happen: the paleoclimatological record shows that the last time temperatures were just a few degrees warmer than they now are, sea level was meters higher. How quickly that rise in sea level occurred is not known, but nothing we know rules out a rapid rise in the near future: sea levels fall slowly as the earth cools, but they rise much faster during warming, and the resolution of our data doesn’t show a delay. Climate shifts can be dramatic in other ways too, altering rainfall patterns, disrupting life cycles for plants and animals and increasing destructive large-scale weather events. Both models and the past climatological record show that the climate can be very sensitive, and any major changes will be difficult if not impossible for many people and countries to cope with. Further, though the worst consequences may be delayed, our failure to act now can lock in drastic changes later: our descendants will suffer from our reluctance to make changes in our energy systems.
So Ms. Wente is pulling another fast one here—she is moving the goalposts. It wasn’t long ago that she disputed that anthropogenic global warming was happening, eagerly joining in the attack on Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of past temperatures and questioning whether present warming is in any way exceptional. Now she accepts that it’s happening, and that it’s at least partly due to our greenhouse gas emissions. But she demands (before she’ll admit the science is ‘settled’) that we know just how much warming will happen, how soon, and what the consequences will be. But this is ridiculous: there will always be some level of uncertainty about these things: Ms. Wente has picked a reading of what it takes to ‘settle the science’ that implies the science can never be settled. This is a nice rhetorical trick, but pretty silly when you think about it.
Part of moving the goalposts is forgetting the past. Several years ago, Ms. Wente was similarly excited over the ‘Hockey stick’ debate, a short-term obsession of the denialsphere triggered by the prominence of Michael Mann’s reconstruction of past temperatures over the last 1,000 years. Ms. Wente gleefully announced that MacIntyre and McKitrick had shown Mann’s work was wrong and that current warming is not exceptional. But subsequent work by multiple climate scientists and a detailed review by the American Academy of Science have confirmed Mann’s pioneering work and extended it using different proxies and more refined statistical methods. (Worse for Ms. Wente, the Republican-led House ‘investigation’ of Mann’s work that led to the Wegman report attacking Mann’s work has been exposed as a set-up job, manipulated by Representative Joe Barton and others: see DeSmog and Deepclimate.) But it seems Ms. Wente has forgotten all about this episode. Past manipulations and the failures of denialist arguments simply disappear from her story, as she spins the latest ‘defeat’ for global warming science while pronouncing her own views to be moderate, sensible, balanced and wise. Isn’t it funny that her views also keep turning out to be wrong?
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Horse Race to Disaster
Margaret Wente has returned to her Saturday spot with a column ("collapse") that reads like a typical, triumphant bit of climate change denial. But it's not; it's a bizarrely triumphant political analysis of the political horse race over whether any serious action will be taken on climate change in the foreseeable future. Ms. Wente argues for the negative, and, sadly, she may be right. But what's most interesting here is that, briefly and rather late in the column, she explicitly declares "None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid." This makes the eager spin of the political discussion that occupies the rest of her column just plain weird: various small 'scandals', blown out of proportion in the press and blown still further out of proportion by Ms. Wente's presentation, are damaging efforts to come to grips with the threat of climate change. Ms. Wente isn't denying that there is a threat. But she's utterly gleeful about detailing and, in fact, exaggerating the damage to the political case for action on climate change.
Since there are so many distortions and exaggerations in the column, this response will be far longer than I'd like. That's the trouble with what we call, in the parallel debate between evolution and creationism, the 'Gish Gallop': a debating technique famously used by creationist Duane Gish to discomfit his opponents, by rhyming off dozens of falsehoods, distortions and exaggerations in a quick few paragraphs, and leaving the other side the unenviable choice between examining and refuting each in careful detail (time's up, and the audience isn't listening carefully enough to follow anyway) or dealing with at most a few (what? you didn't say anything about claim 3 or claim 7 or claim 25). Since this is a blog and I can go on as long as I please (or my family will tolerate) I'll take a (modest) version of the first approach here. Please be patient.
Wente's column begins with the IPCC error regarding Himalayan glaciers, which are indeed melting, but not as quickly as a non-peer-reviewed report cited by the IPCC had claimed. "But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it", Wente remarks-- leaving the impression that a gross exaggeration was deliberately included in the IPCC's last report. This is, of course, false. The IPCC is a massive project, with separate groups examining different aspects of the issue. Working Group 1 addresses the basic science of climate change, Working Group 2 works on "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability", and Working Group 3 studies ways to reduce GHG emissions and otherwise mitigate climate change. The world's top glaciologists are involved in the process, but this claim in the Group 2 report slipped past them-- no expert on the Himalayan glaciers (which are indeed threatened) caught the error.
From this exaggeration, Ms. Wente moves to a quick, cherry-picked evaluation from the "brilliant" Walter Russell Mead, an influential commentator on American foreign policy, a big supporter of the disastrous invasion of Iraq who warned of potential American economic stagnation--in 1992, just before the massive growth in jobs and employment of the Clinton Presidency. Mead claims, to Ms. Wente's approval, that "(t)he global warming movement as we have known it is dead." He may be right, but his track record on actual policy recommendations isn't encouraging. Further, and interestingly, Mead continues by claiming that a major international agreement was never in the cards anyway: his analysis is that the complexity and difficulty of agreeing to share the burdens of action on climate change is too much for the international system to cope with, raising serious doubt about whether there's any blame at all to be laid at the feet of the IPCC and scientists who are trying to warn the world about the consequences of inaction.
From here Wente's whirlwind tour moves on to the East Anglia email hack-- a propaganda success for deniers, perhaps, but no more than that: the only serious matter revealed in 13 years of emails were some inappropriate responses, at East Anglia, to repeated demands for the release of documents that had reached the level of outright harassment-- does Ms. Wente think she could continue to do her job while receiving and responding to tens of formal demands for access to her correspondence, notes and other materials monthly? All the other (widely cited but rarely examined) 'smoking guns' turned out to be quotes out of context and outright distortions of what was in the emails. But she declares her denialist reading of the emails just right: "these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide"-- a grossly unfair non-sequitur. If they did have a lot to hide, surely there would actually be some evidence of this in the emails and the data (pretty well all of it) that's been released?
Then it's on to citations of (small bits of) bad data from Chinese weather stations, in a report by Phil Jones and Wei-Chyung Wang. These data were part of the support, in IPCC 2007, for the claim that warming related to cities rather than climate change was insignificant. While the quality control of those data was apparently not as good as it should have been, similar comparisons have been made elsewhere, for example by the NOAA, and by testing various effects, such as a systematic difference between windy and calm nights in urban temperature records-- and the results are the same: the storied 'urban heat island effect' is negligible.
Another small problem for Working Group 2 is next, a possibly unreliable report on just how sensitive the Amazon rain forest may be to reductions in precipitation-- an article that one expert dismisses as "a mess". But how important is this? Multiple reports in the peer-reviewed literature show that climate change may alter precipitation and dramatically change the nature of the Amazon forest.
Ms. Wente then turns to the latest 'scandal du jour', the debate over Dr. Regenda Pachauri's Energy and Resources Unit, which has received millions of dollars to study the effects of glacial melting in the Himalayas. Pachauri is the current head of the IPCC; Wente claims that these grants are based "on the strength of that bogus glacier claim". But again, this is a tempest in a teapot. That the Himalayan glaciers are endangered is not in question-- the mistake was the claim that the glaciers could be gone by 2035. Studies on the effects of glacial melting are needed, whether the complete loss of those glaciers is 25 years away or 75 years away--and our experience with rapid Arctic ice melt shows that things can turn out to be worse than even the most pessimistic scientists expect. When summer river flows from those glaciers decline, major agricultural areas in India, China and especially Pakistan will be in serious trouble.
The credibility of the IPCC has been damaged, says Ms. Wente. Of course this can be read in two ways: is the IPCC perfect? Of course not, and anyone who thought so was silly and (no doubt) disappointed. But is the IPCC a credible source of information and advice on the state of climate science, the risks and impacts of climate change and what measures might mitigate them? Yes, obviously it is. Like any large group of people dealing with massive amounts of information, it will make mistakes. But the IPCC process of detailed examination of the scientific literature by multiple experts, with input from many different sources carefully (even if, yes, imperfectly) reviewed is an admirable and important accomplishment.
Wente closes with a flourish: "By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement." But who's exaggerating? Are the certainties exaggerated by the IPCC? Does the existence of two small errors in the IPCC "impacts" report constitute a general pattern of exaggeration? Does the fact that skeptics have been criticized for their regular, gross distortions of the facts (from George Will's repeated nonsense about sea-ice levels to widespread claims of cooling based on cherry-picked starting and ending dates to Ms. Wente's own eager endorsement of of denialist attacks on Michael Mann's (sound and increasingly well-supported) 'hockey stick' graph), constitute 'demonization'? How imminent and severe must catastrophe be before it would OK with Wente to sound the alarm?
Yes, there are uncertainties in science, but scientists continue to work to resolve and reduce them. The historical evidence that Earth's climate is a sensitive beast is clear-- if it weren't, the Milankovitch cycles couldn't possibly explain past cycles of glacial advance and retreat. The collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica may take centuries, but once it's underway, we cannot stop it-- and nothing in the historical record shows substantial delay between climate forcing and the big melt. The climate forcing we're now imposing is much more rapid and much larger than the forcing that ended the last ice-age.
Before closing, I want to turn a more immediate question: what's going on here? There's an increasingly extreme double-standard at work, not just in this column by Margaret Wente, but in the world of journalism in general. It seems that scientists and organizations involved in climate change research and advocacy must be pure as the driven snow to avoid extensive, detailed, nit-picking and exaggerated criticism. But the lies and confusions and distortions and motivations of denialists are not even worth mentioning, let alone examining carefully or mentioning in the same breath with which climate scientists' reputations are blown away. Even journalists who are broadly supportive of the scientific consensus-- now more than a decade old and more firmly established than ever-- have accepted the double standard: they systematically examine and report even tiny flaws or errors in IPCC reports and the personal behaviour of every significant climate scientist, while passing over the dishonesty, zombie arguments and long-established P.R. campaign whose funding, whose main figures and whose motives have been laid bare over and over again, to yawns of indifference from Ms. Wente and her fellow-travelers. Cherry-picking errors and mistakes on the part of scientists and organizations who are worried about global warming and ignoring the regular pattern of mistakes, flawed arguments and outright speculation in work by the few remaining skeptics who actually do climate science, and the quick assumption that environmental activists' claims can be dismissed outright as suspicious because of their motives, while ignoring the role of motives amongst the skeptics-- surely there's something wrong here!
And last, I want to close on a different note-- a note that really rings false in Wente's column. If she's not denying the vast body of evidence that climate change is happening, if she's not denying that human activities are largely responsible, surely she ought to be worried if the political debate is really going as badly as she says. Is it good news, if the IPCC, the largest, most systematic effort to evaluate and report on the state of a scientific question in history, turns out to be a failure not in the sense of getting the science wrong, but in the sense of failing to persuade politicians and populations to actually do something about a real problem? Is the triumph of denialist propaganda, the general journalistic obsession with small errors by serious scientists and the apparent utter disregard for the documented dishonesty of climate change denialists, really something Ms. Wente should take pleasure and delight in announcing (and exaggerating)?
Is this an issue for cheering and booing? Does Wente think 'her side' of the public issue has won, and damn the consequences? The consequences we're talking about include, on the middle-of-the-road 3 degrees Celsius per CO2 doubling climate sensitivity, truly frightening prospects-- prospects that, failing serious action, will be locked in and unavoidable by the middle of this century, even if privileged middle-aged people alive today don't live to see them. Just to list a few, I'm talking about massive glacial melting, the collapse of southwestern and even mid-western farming in the United States and many other farming regions, the continued burning of Australia and the U.S. west coast, and a risk of ocean levels rising as fast as several meters per century, forcing migrations of hundreds of millions (and that's just a start). There may be a delay-- some these consequences may be left for our descendants in the 22nd century to cope with. But they will be inevitable if we don't act. Some will not be delayed enough to protect our children, and our grandchildren will remember us as the blind and selfish lunatics who destroyed their world. The longer action is delayed, the more costly and the less effective it can be-- and the more likely and more serious the disasters that we are risking become. I'm waiting for Margaret's other shoe to drop-- though I'm not holding my breath.
Since there are so many distortions and exaggerations in the column, this response will be far longer than I'd like. That's the trouble with what we call, in the parallel debate between evolution and creationism, the 'Gish Gallop': a debating technique famously used by creationist Duane Gish to discomfit his opponents, by rhyming off dozens of falsehoods, distortions and exaggerations in a quick few paragraphs, and leaving the other side the unenviable choice between examining and refuting each in careful detail (time's up, and the audience isn't listening carefully enough to follow anyway) or dealing with at most a few (what? you didn't say anything about claim 3 or claim 7 or claim 25). Since this is a blog and I can go on as long as I please (or my family will tolerate) I'll take a (modest) version of the first approach here. Please be patient.
Wente's column begins with the IPCC error regarding Himalayan glaciers, which are indeed melting, but not as quickly as a non-peer-reviewed report cited by the IPCC had claimed. "But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it", Wente remarks-- leaving the impression that a gross exaggeration was deliberately included in the IPCC's last report. This is, of course, false. The IPCC is a massive project, with separate groups examining different aspects of the issue. Working Group 1 addresses the basic science of climate change, Working Group 2 works on "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability", and Working Group 3 studies ways to reduce GHG emissions and otherwise mitigate climate change. The world's top glaciologists are involved in the process, but this claim in the Group 2 report slipped past them-- no expert on the Himalayan glaciers (which are indeed threatened) caught the error.
From this exaggeration, Ms. Wente moves to a quick, cherry-picked evaluation from the "brilliant" Walter Russell Mead, an influential commentator on American foreign policy, a big supporter of the disastrous invasion of Iraq who warned of potential American economic stagnation--in 1992, just before the massive growth in jobs and employment of the Clinton Presidency. Mead claims, to Ms. Wente's approval, that "(t)he global warming movement as we have known it is dead." He may be right, but his track record on actual policy recommendations isn't encouraging. Further, and interestingly, Mead continues by claiming that a major international agreement was never in the cards anyway: his analysis is that the complexity and difficulty of agreeing to share the burdens of action on climate change is too much for the international system to cope with, raising serious doubt about whether there's any blame at all to be laid at the feet of the IPCC and scientists who are trying to warn the world about the consequences of inaction.
From here Wente's whirlwind tour moves on to the East Anglia email hack-- a propaganda success for deniers, perhaps, but no more than that: the only serious matter revealed in 13 years of emails were some inappropriate responses, at East Anglia, to repeated demands for the release of documents that had reached the level of outright harassment-- does Ms. Wente think she could continue to do her job while receiving and responding to tens of formal demands for access to her correspondence, notes and other materials monthly? All the other (widely cited but rarely examined) 'smoking guns' turned out to be quotes out of context and outright distortions of what was in the emails. But she declares her denialist reading of the emails just right: "these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide"-- a grossly unfair non-sequitur. If they did have a lot to hide, surely there would actually be some evidence of this in the emails and the data (pretty well all of it) that's been released?
Then it's on to citations of (small bits of) bad data from Chinese weather stations, in a report by Phil Jones and Wei-Chyung Wang. These data were part of the support, in IPCC 2007, for the claim that warming related to cities rather than climate change was insignificant. While the quality control of those data was apparently not as good as it should have been, similar comparisons have been made elsewhere, for example by the NOAA, and by testing various effects, such as a systematic difference between windy and calm nights in urban temperature records-- and the results are the same: the storied 'urban heat island effect' is negligible.
Another small problem for Working Group 2 is next, a possibly unreliable report on just how sensitive the Amazon rain forest may be to reductions in precipitation-- an article that one expert dismisses as "a mess". But how important is this? Multiple reports in the peer-reviewed literature show that climate change may alter precipitation and dramatically change the nature of the Amazon forest.
Ms. Wente then turns to the latest 'scandal du jour', the debate over Dr. Regenda Pachauri's Energy and Resources Unit, which has received millions of dollars to study the effects of glacial melting in the Himalayas. Pachauri is the current head of the IPCC; Wente claims that these grants are based "on the strength of that bogus glacier claim". But again, this is a tempest in a teapot. That the Himalayan glaciers are endangered is not in question-- the mistake was the claim that the glaciers could be gone by 2035. Studies on the effects of glacial melting are needed, whether the complete loss of those glaciers is 25 years away or 75 years away--and our experience with rapid Arctic ice melt shows that things can turn out to be worse than even the most pessimistic scientists expect. When summer river flows from those glaciers decline, major agricultural areas in India, China and especially Pakistan will be in serious trouble.
The credibility of the IPCC has been damaged, says Ms. Wente. Of course this can be read in two ways: is the IPCC perfect? Of course not, and anyone who thought so was silly and (no doubt) disappointed. But is the IPCC a credible source of information and advice on the state of climate science, the risks and impacts of climate change and what measures might mitigate them? Yes, obviously it is. Like any large group of people dealing with massive amounts of information, it will make mistakes. But the IPCC process of detailed examination of the scientific literature by multiple experts, with input from many different sources carefully (even if, yes, imperfectly) reviewed is an admirable and important accomplishment.
Wente closes with a flourish: "By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement." But who's exaggerating? Are the certainties exaggerated by the IPCC? Does the existence of two small errors in the IPCC "impacts" report constitute a general pattern of exaggeration? Does the fact that skeptics have been criticized for their regular, gross distortions of the facts (from George Will's repeated nonsense about sea-ice levels to widespread claims of cooling based on cherry-picked starting and ending dates to Ms. Wente's own eager endorsement of of denialist attacks on Michael Mann's (sound and increasingly well-supported) 'hockey stick' graph), constitute 'demonization'? How imminent and severe must catastrophe be before it would OK with Wente to sound the alarm?
Yes, there are uncertainties in science, but scientists continue to work to resolve and reduce them. The historical evidence that Earth's climate is a sensitive beast is clear-- if it weren't, the Milankovitch cycles couldn't possibly explain past cycles of glacial advance and retreat. The collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica may take centuries, but once it's underway, we cannot stop it-- and nothing in the historical record shows substantial delay between climate forcing and the big melt. The climate forcing we're now imposing is much more rapid and much larger than the forcing that ended the last ice-age.
Before closing, I want to turn a more immediate question: what's going on here? There's an increasingly extreme double-standard at work, not just in this column by Margaret Wente, but in the world of journalism in general. It seems that scientists and organizations involved in climate change research and advocacy must be pure as the driven snow to avoid extensive, detailed, nit-picking and exaggerated criticism. But the lies and confusions and distortions and motivations of denialists are not even worth mentioning, let alone examining carefully or mentioning in the same breath with which climate scientists' reputations are blown away. Even journalists who are broadly supportive of the scientific consensus-- now more than a decade old and more firmly established than ever-- have accepted the double standard: they systematically examine and report even tiny flaws or errors in IPCC reports and the personal behaviour of every significant climate scientist, while passing over the dishonesty, zombie arguments and long-established P.R. campaign whose funding, whose main figures and whose motives have been laid bare over and over again, to yawns of indifference from Ms. Wente and her fellow-travelers. Cherry-picking errors and mistakes on the part of scientists and organizations who are worried about global warming and ignoring the regular pattern of mistakes, flawed arguments and outright speculation in work by the few remaining skeptics who actually do climate science, and the quick assumption that environmental activists' claims can be dismissed outright as suspicious because of their motives, while ignoring the role of motives amongst the skeptics-- surely there's something wrong here!
And last, I want to close on a different note-- a note that really rings false in Wente's column. If she's not denying the vast body of evidence that climate change is happening, if she's not denying that human activities are largely responsible, surely she ought to be worried if the political debate is really going as badly as she says. Is it good news, if the IPCC, the largest, most systematic effort to evaluate and report on the state of a scientific question in history, turns out to be a failure not in the sense of getting the science wrong, but in the sense of failing to persuade politicians and populations to actually do something about a real problem? Is the triumph of denialist propaganda, the general journalistic obsession with small errors by serious scientists and the apparent utter disregard for the documented dishonesty of climate change denialists, really something Ms. Wente should take pleasure and delight in announcing (and exaggerating)?
Is this an issue for cheering and booing? Does Wente think 'her side' of the public issue has won, and damn the consequences? The consequences we're talking about include, on the middle-of-the-road 3 degrees Celsius per CO2 doubling climate sensitivity, truly frightening prospects-- prospects that, failing serious action, will be locked in and unavoidable by the middle of this century, even if privileged middle-aged people alive today don't live to see them. Just to list a few, I'm talking about massive glacial melting, the collapse of southwestern and even mid-western farming in the United States and many other farming regions, the continued burning of Australia and the U.S. west coast, and a risk of ocean levels rising as fast as several meters per century, forcing migrations of hundreds of millions (and that's just a start). There may be a delay-- some these consequences may be left for our descendants in the 22nd century to cope with. But they will be inevitable if we don't act. Some will not be delayed enough to protect our children, and our grandchildren will remember us as the blind and selfish lunatics who destroyed their world. The longer action is delayed, the more costly and the less effective it can be-- and the more likely and more serious the disasters that we are risking become. I'm waiting for Margaret's other shoe to drop-- though I'm not holding my breath.
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