Eulogy for Stephen Schneider, forthright climatologist and warrior

I didn't know Stephen Schneider, the Stanford University climatologist who has just died from an apparent heart attack, well enough to pen a comprehensive account of his life and works.

RealClimate has an appreciation by his close colleague, Ben Santer; and the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have obituaries, among others.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has an In Memoriam note [46.60KB PDF] that describes Dr Schneider as...

"...a major contributor to the IPCC and one of its fiercest supporters... a warrior for honesty and a dedicated campaigner for giving people the complete story.

"Steve's scholarly approach, combining world-class research with deep commitment to broad communication, set a remarkable standard of excellence."

As a journalist covering climate change through the Kyoto conference of 1997, the Bush administration's decision to absent itself from that arena, the seminal IPCC report of 2007 and last December's UN summit in Copenhagen, Stephen Schneider was someone whose influence you could hardly miss, from his pioneering work on developing numerical models of climate to the interviews and conversations and speeches through which he sought to convey the implications of all that science to the public.

Of course, that didn't necessarily make him a popular man.

I last spoke to him about three months ago. The context was abuse: the vitriolic, sustained, personalised and sometimes apparently organised abuse that has been levelled against scientists in the climate field, including him.



It materialises in blogs and newspaper articles that appear to start from the standpoint that everyone in the field is corrupt, incompetent and crooked. It streams into scientists' e-mail inboxes.

Some of those receiving it see it as a deliberate, malicious and politically-motivated campaign of harassment.

Australian journalist Clive Hamilton has documented the threats and abuse leveled against scientists in his country in a series of online articles commencing with "Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial."

He cites cases of scientists being compared in e-mails to Pol Pot, and being told that unless they stopped what they were doing, they would "end up collateral damage in the war."

From my own inquiries, such harassment does not appear routine in the UK, though it does happen. Prominent climate scientists I spoken to have encountered abusive e-mails, some registering a crescendo in the run-up to the Copenhagen conference, and others noting that it emerged whenever they published a paper or spoke in the media.

It has reached its apogee, however, in North America -- not least in the threatening e-mails and indeed events that have followed Stephen Schneider, Ben Santer and several of their colleagues in recent years -- events that the former detailed to some extent in his book Science as a Contact Sport.

In one of his recent e-mails to me, he said that title was probably "too wimpy an analogy" given how far things had gone.

We're not only talking here about messages accusing scientists of being communist traitors whose raison d'etre is world government -- though there are enough of those -- but threats to life and limb.

We're talking about a threat perceived to be serious enough that a prominent climate researcher had to be escorted to last December's American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting by security guards.



We're talking about a dead rat left on a doorstep around midnight, the perpetrator driving off hurling abuse in -- perhaps inevitably -- a huge 4x4.

Some of the scientists have been most concerned by a posting on the website of the white supremacist organisation Stormfront.

It shows photos of eight prominent people working in climate change, either as scientists or on the policy side -- including Stephen Schneider -- and labels them all as "Jews."

Further down, a comment on the thread contends that the "global warming scam has always borne the stench of the same old Jewish liars, thieves, swindlers and murderers."

Dr Schneider regularly engaged with scientists and politicians sceptical of climate science, through peer-reviewed publications, books, advice to a succession of US administrations, and the IPCC.

But how is anyone supposed to engage with Stormfront?

Here is perhaps an issue that ought to concern people sceptical of human-induced climate change.

It is a broad spectrum. But how does propagation of the "Jewish liars" or "world government" arguments affect perceptions of those who challenge the mainstream picture along scientific lines?

Doesn't the climate of abuse overshadow the real issues that sceptics are flagging up, and reduce the chances of "sceptical" science being taken seriously?

And what is the abuse supposed to change? Does anyone really expect committed scientists to stop doing science just because they are labelled "scum" or "paid liars"?

It's an approach to winning hearts and minds that must have a limited chance of success.

Stephen Schneider didn't feel inclined to pull back. In a recent e-mail to me and others, he decried the attempt by Senator James Inhofe and others to seek legal redress against 17 climate scientists, including Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, as "a smokescreen of denial and deceit."

He recounted that he was working an extra four hours every evening trying to put the record straight, as he saw it, on issues such as "ClimateGate" and alleged mistakes in IPCC assessments -- "No time to stop now..."

Link:   http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2010/07/i_didnt_know_stephen_schneider.html

Distorted view through the climate gates

Much has been written -- not least on this website -- and much more surely will be written over the coming months about supposed inconsistencies, errors, misjudgements and poor practice among climate scientists.

How many "scandals" do we now have with the suffix "-gate" attached to them? At least five, by my count, with the most embarrassing surely being the projection that the mighty Himalayan glaciers could largely be gone within a human generation.
The latest -gate -- detailed in a series of articles in The Guardian by environment journalist Fred Pearce -- concerns a set of temperature data from China that was used in a 1990 paper in Nature to estimate the likely impact of progressive urbanisation on temperatures recorded at weather stations.

The paper is one of several cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in reaching its conclusion that:

"Urban heat island effects are real but local, and have not biased the large-scale trends."

The implication of The Guardian's article is that Chinese scientists contributing data for that paper had not taken as much care as they should have done to document and allow for the fact that some of the weather stations had been relocated over the course of the study period, possibly affecting their readings; and that at some stage the paper's lead author, Professor Phil Jones, had been made aware of the issue by an independent UK researcher, Douglas Keenan, but did not seek to publicise or remedy it.

As anyone following the -gate trail will know, Professor Jones is the scientist at the centre of the original "Climategate" -- November's e-mail theft from the University of East Anglia.

The point of this post isn't to go once more over well-trodden ground, but to raise a simple but crucial point.
Like all the other noisy -gates, this latest one throws up two questions: was scientific best practice followed, and is there anything here that affects the basic picture of climate science?
Whatever the answers to those may be -- and Professor Jones' University of East Anglia has issued a rebuttal covering key points of The Guardian's article -- the important point to make is that they are separate questions.

In some circles, every single -gate "relevation" has been followed by a ritualised fanfare claiming that the picture of climate warming through rising greenhouse gases concentrations has now been "fatally undermined," or some similar phrase.

Journalists with an eye for old-fashioned concepts such as balance, like Fred Pearce, are careful to avoid making that conclusion.

He writes that this latest episode...

"...does not change the global picture of temperature trends. There is plenty of evidence of global warming, not least from oceans far from urban influences. A review of recent studies published online in December by David Parker of the Met Office concludes that, even allowing for Jones's new data, 'global near-surface temperature trends have not been greatly affected by urban warming trends'."

He could also have cited the body of evidence from the satellite record, which also shows a clear warming trend.

In a paper published in the journal Energy and Environment [pdf link] in which he detailed his concerns about the 1990 conclusions, Doug Keenan made the same point:

"None of this means that the conclusion of the IPCC is incorrect."

In an interview with the Press Association (PA) about The Guardian's article, Phil Jones says he stands by the conclusion of the 1990 paper, not least because it was backed up by other studies, including papers in 2007 and 2008 that used a more detailed Chinese dataset.

Below is a graph comparing the 1990 (Jones et al.) and 2007 (Li et al.) graphs.
He goes on to say:

"It makes me quite worried people are beginning to doubt the climate has warmed up."

And clearly some people do doubt that -- many of you tell me so, in great detail, on every post I write, whatever it deals with -- and judging by your comments, that's partly because some of you believe that all climate scientists are as bent as a... well, a hockey stick might be a good simile here.

It is a free world; and if you really do hold that view, then presumably it makes sense to jump the divide between the two questions I raised earlier, and conclude that as all climate scientists are dodgy, so is all climate data.

But I would argue that keeping the questions separate is of absolute and vital importance.

How scientists and the institutions of science behave is an important issue, no doubt about it -- for evidence, look no further than the latest developments on the MMR saga, which sees The Lancet retracting the decade-old paper that sparked all the fuss -- and Phil Jones tells PA in his interview:

"We do need to make more of the data available, I fully accept that."

But what matters far, far more than the nuances of climate scientists' behaviour is whether the climate is warming, and if it is, what is driving that warming.

Those are questions crucial for humanity's future, because if the IPCC's projections become reality, substantial swathes of the global population will find themselves living in much more straitened circumstances than they face at present.

If the scientific case for greenhouse warming crumbles, so be it; but I'd suggest we should beware of assuming it is crumbling simply because a few scientists or a few scientific papers or a few IPCC reviewers have been seen to fall short of the highest standards.

Link:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2010/02/much_has_been_written.html

Arctic roots of 'upside-down' weather

It's cold in Kirkcaldy, freezing in Frankfurt and brass monkeys in Bryn Mawr... a winter spell with weather that's unusually -- well -- wintry.

But not everywhere; in fact, other places in the Northern Hemisphere are seeing weather that's unseasonably warm.

In Goose Bay in Newfoundland, it's barely getting below 0 °C -- bikini weather, relatively speaking, given that the average minimum for January is -23 °C.

The cause of what one weather service refers to as these "upside down" conditions is an extreme of the Arctic Oscillation (AO).

Essentially, air pressure is measured at various places across the Arctic and at the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere -- about 45°N, roughly the latitude of Milan, Montreal or Vladivostok.

The difference between the average readings for the two latitudes gives the state of the Arctic Oscillation index.

A "positive" state is defined as relatively high pressure in mid-latitudes and relatively low pressure over the polar region. "Negative" conditions are the reverse.

And what we have at the moment is an unusually extreme negative state.

The graph below comes from the US government's Climate Prediction Center and shows the variability of the index from 1950 to 2009.
The text on the graph is a little unclear as I've had to shrink it a bit, but you can see at the bottom right the current negative conditions developing during December -- and here's the original.

Over at the New York Times, they've compiled a different graph that shows how extreme these few weeks are turning out to be -- unmatched since the early 1960s, a period that saw several winters in the UK featuring extended spells of cold, snowy weather.

What the negative AO conditions mean is that cold air spills out of the Arctic down to mid-latitudes, which this time round includes much of Europe, tracts of the US and China.

For the UK, this implies a higher chance of cold northerly or easterly winds.

But if you live in places that are usually cold at this time of year -- such as Goose Bay -- you'll see a concomitant rise in temperatures compared with what happens during "positive" AO conditions, when the cold air is confined to more northerly latitudes.

A little more than a decade ago, I visited Yakutsk in Siberia which lies close to one of the candidates for the title of "coldest place on the planet" -- the village of Oymyakon, which has seen the mercury plummet as low as -71 °C.

I don't know how balmy it is in Oymyakon right now but in Yakutsk itself, the daily minimum is a mere -35 °C -- that's 10 °C warmer than the January average.

Despite the name "Arctic Oscillation," there's little discernible pattern to how the pressure difference varies, or what causes it -- perhaps "Arctic Random Fluctuation" would be a better name.

Some researchers have linked an apparent increase in the average state of the index from the 1960s to the 1990s to man-made global warming, but you would have to say the jury is definitely still out.
 
(The AO is linked to another naturally varying phenomenon, by the way -- the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the variability in the pressure difference between Iceland and the Azores - in fact, some hold that the NAO is just a sub-set of the AO.)

So the question of how long the unusually wintry UK conditions will last is really a question of how long the Arctic Oscillation will remain in its extreme negative state -- and a week to 10 days seems to be the favoured timescale.

Link:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2010/01/arctic_conditions_arctic_cause.html

Small island states and poor African nations vulnerable to climate impacts laid out demands for a legally-binding deal tougher than the Kyoto Protocol.

This was opposed by richer developing states such as China, which fear tougher action would curb their growth.

Tuvalu demanded -- and got -- a suspension of negotiations until the issue could be resolved.

The split within the developing country bloc is highly unusual, as it tends to speak with a united voice.

Our future rests on the outcome of this meeting Ian Fry, Tuvalu delegate Earth Watch - Richard Black's blog

After talks resumed in the afternoon, the Tuvalu delegation walked out when it appeared that the issue might be sidelined.

Private discussions will now continue behind the scenes among a small group of concerned countries.

Tuvalu's negotiator Ian Fry made clear that his country could accept nothing less than full discussion of its proposal for a new legal protocol, which was submitted to the UN climate convention six months ago.

"My prime minister and many other heads of state have the clear intention of coming to Copenhagen to sign on to a legally binding deal," Mr Fry said.

"Tuvalu is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, and our future rests on the outcome of this meeting."

The call was backed by other members of the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS), including the Cook Islands, Barbados and Fiji, and by some poor African countries including Sierra Leone, Senegal and Cape Verde.

Several re-iterated the demand of small island developing states that the rise in the global average temperature be limited to 1.5 °C, and greenhouse gas concentrations stabilised at 350 parts per million (ppm) rather than the 450 ppm favoured by developed countries and some major developing nations.

Developing split
Fast-growing economies such as China, India and South Africa oppose the lower target of 350 ppm because they feel that meeting it would retard economic development.

Here, they also opposed Tuvalu's call for a new legally binding protocol to run alongside the existing Kyoto Protocol, arguing that the existing convention and Kyoto agreement are tough enough.

"The main task of this (conference) is to adapt an agreed outcome from the Bali Action Plan [agreed in 2007] and we should very much focus on that," said China's lead negotiator Su Wei. "We have a very valid system to combat climate change." But the existing agreement is not tough enough for the smaller, more vulnerable members with more to lose from rising sea levels and less to lose in terms of the economic constraints of a tough treaty. China's negotiator Su Wei told the conference that his country, and the other emerging economies, did care about the problems of small island states; but Jerome Esebei Temengil from Palau's delegation gave a different view. "We're dying here, were drowning; and some of us know that they don't really care, because we have to beg them," he told BBC News. "Actions speak louder than words. If they really do care, please have a little listen to us." Great divide? Some observers suggested the session marked a major development in the politics of the climate convention, with small countries prepared to stand up to more powerful neighbours. "This is the first time we've seen the island nations make such a splash," said Malini Mehra of the India-based Centre for Social Markets. "The AOSIS call for a new protocol and the way it was denounced by Saudi Arabia, China, and India show that the G77 has now come asunder and the island nations are leading," she told BBC News "As they must -- they have seized the high moral ground." During the same session, China -- and other countries -- re-iterated calls for industrialised nations to pledge bigger cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions. But that has been a familiar call here; the rift between members of the formerly solid developing country bloc is a much less common happening, and may indicate that hopes held out by some countries of signing only a political commitment here may not be enough to placate the poorest and most vulnerable nations. China has protested against an incident which prevented a top diplomat from entering the vast Bella Center where the conference is underway. Mr Wei told the meeting he is "extremely unhappy" that a Chinese minister was barred from entry on three consecutive days. He said the unnamed minister has been trying to enter since Monday but failed despite having two security badges made out. Both badges were confiscated by security guards on Wednesday morning. Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8403745.stm

COP15 Copenhagen Climate Summit: Day 2

by Richard Black, environmental correspondent of the BBC, December 8, 2009

15.16 CET: As the seriously obscure parts of the UN climate conference got down to business this morning, attention turned to some of the science being presented -- notably, the analyses from the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Met Office that pegged the "Noughties" -- the decade since 2000 -- as the warmest since instrumental observations began.

The essential conclusions are in our news story; but obviously there's some interest these days in how the records are put together.

Some news reports on the "ClimateGate" affair might have given the impression that the UK's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and maybe the Met Office team that works closely with it too, has its own network of weather stations across the world and that somehow data from that network is collected, stored and processed separately from every other source of temperature data.

It's erroneous; and for pretty obvious reasons. If you have three or four major centres in the world doing climate analysis, why would they each set up and safeguard data from their own stations?

Would a UK or US centre, for example, be allowed to set up its own weather station in Tibet? Would three agencies go through the financial and logistical pain of setting up their own instruments in Antarctica, say, when one could do it and share the data?

The other factor is that temperature measurements aren't only used for climate research. They're also vital for weather monitoring and forecasting -- indeed, most were set up for that purpose.

What there is is a series of weather stations around the world -- thousands of them -- mostly maintained by national weather services. These services now generally share information with each other as a matter of policy, in theory in real time or as close as possible:

"As a fundamental principle of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and in consonance with the expanding requirements for its scientific and technical expertise, WMO commits itself to broadening and enhancing the free and unrestricted international exchange of meteorological and related data and products."

When there isn't a national weather service, things become a little messy. Some stations are not set up for immediate data transfer; some are privately maintained and are under no obligation to provide data free of constraint.

Adding into this now, as the Met Office explains, is a fleet of floating buoys that now numbers well over a thousand; plus a number of ships that take the sea temperature as they move.

Much of this data has to be scrutinised and processed. Sometimes instruments take a knock and produce bizarre reading, which may be taken out of the record until the problem can be investigated.

More importantly, the spread of instruments across the world is very uneven; lots in North America and western Europe, very few in parts of Africa.

The US GISS-TEMP dataset gets round this, for example, by "interpolating," or filling in, the important but data-scarce Arctic region, whereas the Met Office record does not -- which, in the words of Met Office head of climate research Vicky Pope, means that the Met Office record "tends to underestimate the warming."

Then there are satellites. And these too are showing increasing temperatures, as demonstrated in the latest bulletin from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, where John Christy, Roy Spencer and their team collect and collate satellite readings.

Their value for the global trend since 1978 is 0.13 °C per decade, with 2009 featuring the warmest November in the 31-year record.

That's slightly less than the Met Office figures that show about 0.18 °C per decade; but a clear trend nevertheless.

The data should come as no surprise to anyone who's been following the issue for a long time -- and that includes delegates to the UN climate talks here, where the UN system means IPCC and WMO advice carries official weight.

16.19 CET: Something of a buzz going around the centre now, as the Guardian's estimable environment editor John Vidal reveals the so-called "Danish text."

It's a document drawn up by the Danish hosts and distributed around a select group of 40 countries last week, apparently as their preferred basis for a political outcome here.

The whole exercise has the potential to disrupt things hugely as -- according to John Vidal's analysis -- it removes lots of power from the UN climate convention and legitimises a long-term inequality between developed and developing countries.

Developing countries have already found plenty in it to hate.

I'll file a news story at some point once various radio commitments are out of the way.

In the meantime, The Guardian has posted the text here.

19.30 CET: So, if you've seen my news story on the "Danish text" issue you'll see that not everyone is using the "something rotten in the state of Denmark" line that The Guardian followed.

Some agencies such as CAFOD (quoted in the news story) were very damning, but other observers saw less to disagree about.

One long-time observer of this process -- from another charity working on poverty and development issues -- suggested positions were close enough for a deal to be likely.

Both the Danish text and that from the BASIC bloc (again, see the news story for details) leave brackets where numbers should be for pledges on cutting emissions.

The big issue is the legal form of a new agreement -- whether to extend the Kyoto Protocol to cover further pledges from developed nations, or whether to stick everything under a new agreement -- and that's been going on since discussions started shortly after the 2007 climate summit in Bali.

So what can we learn from the issue that might help make sense of the rest of the conference?

Firstly, bits of text will abound -- some will turn out to be important, others will fade into obscurity. Some contain the seeds of a compromise, others are intended to mark a position with steel.

Secondly, some commentators will bend whatever texts emerge (or are selectively leaked) to the service of long-held positions. Nothing wrong with that -- one expects bodies engaged in this process to spin fast and furiously -- but the spin has to be taken off before we can see the form underneath.

Thirdly, governments may not always speak with one voice. One rumour doing the rounds -- from a credible source, to me -- is that the Danish text is very much the agent of the Prime Minister's office and regarded with distaste in the environment ministry.

True? I have no idea; sounds possible, might be wrong; or perhaps that idea has been dropped into the mix to make someone look good -- who knows?

At some point over the next couple of days, I'll blog further about how the summit works, and how people in my position attempt to make sense of it for you -- and why we sometimes fail.

Link:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2009/12/cop15_copenhagen_climate_summi_1.html