R.I.P. Stephen Schneider

Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford University and long an active faculty member in the Department of Biology, Schneider apparently suffered a heart attack on an airplane en route to London from Stockholm. Schneider's obituary appeared in today's Washington Post but his death is not yet mentioned on his Stanford University webpage. Schneider was an early member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was actively working on the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) at the time of his death.

Hat tip to Democracy Now! for alerting me to the news. A eulogy written by Ben Santer has been posted at Real Climate.

ClimateGate debunked by UK Parliament

Climate scientist Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom has been completely exonerated of any misconduct in the "ClimateGate" scandal based upon emails stolen from the university's email server. According to results of an inquiry released today by the Science and Technology Committee of the UK Parliament, Dr. Jones' research methods were “in line with common practice in the climate science community." Statistical and mathematical analyses performed by his Climate Research Unit have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified by independent scientific experts.

The DeSmog Blog has a thoughtful summary of this final chapter in the long and messy "ClimateGate" scandal. Comments are just starting to show up at the brief entry on RealClimate.

My entries in this blog about ClimateGate began on November 23rd, 2009. Follow up posts were written on November 24th, November 28th, November 30th, December 4th, and December 5th. ClimateGate was clearly well timed to undermine plans for the Copenhagen Climate Summit as well as Climate Change legislation here in the United States.

SNOWMAGEDDON!

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Unusually Large Snowstorm
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Who are the Climate Skeptics?

Back on December 16 of 2009, Jim Lippard posted a lengthy investigation of the denialist infrastructure in terms of citations, credentials, and organizational affiliation. I came across his blog by accident while reading Juan Cole today.

tcktcktck... BOOM!

As many of us expected, the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen has failed to reach a substantive or binding agreement. The United States negotiating team refused to commit to specific targets for emission of greenhouse gases, continuing the policy initiated during the administration of George W. Bush when we refused to join other developed countries in signing the Kyoto Protocol.

Particularly positive develompents in Copenhagen include a strong showing by developing countries, including civil society participants alongside the official delegations. A new crop of climate activists has emerged, loosely coordinated through organizations such as Friends of the Earth, the Climate Action Network and the tcktcktck Global Citizens for Climate Action.

As Kumi Nadoo writes in his open letter to President Barack Obama, the paltry cuts in greenhouse gas emissions which the United States may successfully enact through the Waxman-Markley bill will fall considerably below what is necessary to avert catastrophic climate change. In addition, we have yet to make a commitment to long-term financial assistance for poor countries which will need to adapt to the impacts of our rapid industrial development throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Nadoo admonishes Obama for a lack of ambition and warns that many who were energized by his promise of hope are now becoming discouraged. Like Nadoo, I too cling on to hope. To quote Nadoo, "the prospect of personal leadership at the negotiations allows me to retain some ‘audacity of hope’ that (Barack Obama) will have both the courage and the vision to make history."

COP15 COPS OUT


NGO leaders of the Climate Action Network lament the effort by Barack Obama and the United States delegation to hijack the United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Schmidt and Christy face off on CNN

Climategate, Copenhagen, and the UN intergovernmental panel

The Copenhagen Climate Conference organized by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) begins this coming Monday, December 7th. Will the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit scupper an international agreement?

Holdren remarks to U.S. House Select Committee

Dr. John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, gives his opening statement during the Select Committee Hearing, "The State of Climate Science" held on December 2, 2009. Holdren emphasizes that relative role of natural and anthropogenic forcing is being addressed within the scientific community and will not benefit from political or governmental intervention.

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Climategate: George Monbiot on Real News

A secretive scientific culture permeates climate research, according to Monbiot. Is this unique to climate science? Do most scientists belong to a democratic and "open" society as Monbiot claims, following Karl Popper?

Michael Brklacic of Carleton University is interviewed by Paul Jay of "The Real News" about the emails stolen from the university server for the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

CRU Email Hack and "Climategate"

There has been a great deal of chatter in blogs on both politics and climate science regarding emails and scientific data stolen from a university computer serving the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The stolen material can be found in many places on the internet at this point, and relatively few scientists have managed to find time to read them or address the issues involved. The most balanced and thoughtful discussions can be found in the posts by Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate.

My only comment at this point is that all scientists need to be concerned about our privacy and confidentiality privileges both as citizens and professional researchers. It is particularly offensive to hear a sitting United States Senator promoting this sort of thievery and promising to hold a Senate hearing in which the stolen material will be aired and relied upon to trample upon the rights of university professors and government scientists here in the United States.

The hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming has finally been conclusively disproven by the failure of politicians meeting in Copenhagen to agree to reduce carbon emissions. Senator James Inhofe announces this exciting finding and rubs it in to Senator Barbara Boxer in the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. Senator Inhofe used to chair this committee before the Democratic Party took over the leadership of the United States Senate.

Senator Inhofe was all over talk radio on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 promising to hold hearings on emails stolen from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. Inhofe's hearings would deal not with the ethics of stealing scientific data and electronic communication but with the content of the scientific discussions partially represented by the stolen emails.

The Ed Morissey show on the "Hot Air" blog.

America's Morning News with Melanie Morgan.

African Cities and Sea Level Rise

This post is stimulated by a recent African Loft post on this same topic. David Wheeler and numerous coauthors with the Center for Global Development (CGD) have compiled the fundamental data. Alexandria in Egypt and Lagos in Nigeria are particularly at risk both because of their likely inundation by rising seas and because of their rapidly increasing populations.

As noted by Gupta and others (2009), "variations in coastal morphology will magnify the effects in some areas, while largely insulating others." Their complete paper projecting storm surge impacts for developing countries can be downloaded at the CGD webpage here. An appended spreadsheet (.xls 53k) further tabulates the data for 327 cities. Alexandria ranks second and Lagos third based upon the population projected to be exposed to storm surges by the year 2100.

Asian cities are also at serious risk, with Manila ranking at the top of the CGD compilation. Cities in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar (Burma), Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam are also among the top 20 in the CGD table. Impacts projected for Vietnam's Mekong delta by the CGD and many independent scientists were reported in a recent New York Times article by Seth Mydans.

Wheeler and his coauthors with the CGD are certainly qualified to compile these data and explain their implications for risk assessment and public policy. Wheeler himself stands out as a clear thinker who both comprehends the scientific literature and interprets it to the general public in simple language. Following the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Wheeler (2007) penned a note about the sea level projections in which he correctly criticized their overly conservative use of glacial ice melting rates for Greenland and West Antarctica. As discussed in an earlier post on African Loft, a scenario in which these ice sheets continue melting at their present rates will in fact result in catastrophic submergence by the year 2099 along the coast of West Africa. Nigeria would be particularly affected because of the dense population in Lagos and other coastal cities.

The Apostle's Denial

Patrick Moore was one of the cofounders of Greenpeace. He has been an environmental activist for nearly four decades now, sailing into the Aleutian Islands on the inaugural Greenpeace mission in 1971. For many of us, however, Moore first came to our attention for his unique stance in support of nuclear power. In an interview with Fareed Zakaria last year in Newsweek, Moore championed the rapid construction of new nuclear plants as a means to replace the energy currently generated by coal-fired power plants in the United States and other parts of the world.

This morning on BBC's One Planet radio program, Mike Williams interviewed Patrick. Moore expressed skepticism regarding the anthropogenic causes for global warming, stating -

"I do not believe that we know for certain that we are causing global warming or climate change. I believe the subject is so much more complex than we understand."

It will be interesting to see how this apostle's denial is received by members of the scientific community who have made anthropogenic forcing a cornerstone of contemporary climate science.

Second Warmest July on Record

Based upon temperature anomalies worldwide, NASA GISS is reporting that July of 2009 was the second warmest July within the period of instrumental record, going back well over a hundred years. The story is presented on the AccuWeather
site by their senior meteorologist, Brett Anderson. I was not able to find the same analysis on the NASA GISS site.

Excellent Blog Awards

I received my E over a year ago from George, the Decrepit Old Fool, but I apparently neglected to pass the award on as requested. I am certain that I would have chosen a completely different set had I attended to this right away. The list below suggests that I have become a bit more focused on geology, which is only partially true. There really are quite a lot of excellent geologists who are also excellent bloggers.

Ron Schott
Volcanista
Clastic Detritus (Brian Romans)
Lounge of the Lab Lemming

Evolution... not just a theory anymore (Greg Laden)
De Rerum Natura (Reed Cartwright)
Grrlscientist (Devorah Bennu)
Imnakoya's Grandiose Parlor
Loomnie
Cup O'Joe

The "Excellent Blog" Award appears to have originated with Project Mommy, a blog written by Shannymar about her daughter Kayla. Brandy Betz, creator of Moue Magazine, described the spirit of the award when she passed hers on back in February of 2008.

I will have more to say about each of my excellent bloggers later. If you have read this far, please do yourself a favor and support Grrlscientist Devorah Bennu in her campaign to blog an expedition to Antarctica. She has 715 votes and is only a few hundred away from winning.

Gore on energy policy

Al Gore gave a spirited speech yesterday at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. which can be streamed in its entirety on C-Span. Gore was introduced by fellow members of his bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection, and he acknowledged that Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr was also in the audience.

Specific points in Gore's platform are discussed and are currently being debated in blogposts by Andrew Revkin, Joshua Tremblay, and others. Gore's platform will undoubtedly be the standard around which politicians will begin to rally as we begin to move toward the fall elections.

How did I manage to miss it? The obligatory "green issue" of The Onion came out on the 4th of July!