Keep your vehicles how you choose

One of the most common responses I get when people learn that I'm a climate scientist is that they tell me we're (climate scientists) all just trying to take away their SUV. Don't know why it's always an SUV when it gets mentioned, but it is. Anyhow, we're not (I don't think so; certainly nobody ever mentioned that policy to me), and I certainly am not. What I'm after is for decisions to be made using good information. Intelligent people of good intent can look at the same information and come to different conclusions. That's life. But a lot of what is out there is bad information. Bad information does not make for good decisions.

For instance, suppose you decided that emitting carbon dioxide was indeed a bad thing to do with the climate system and you have an SUV that gets 20 mpg. Should you toss it for a car that gets 30? I dunno. If you're driving six people in that SUV all the time, and would have to take two cars to carry them instead, you're better off with the SUV. A catch, of course, being that comment about 'all the time'. If very few of your miles are driven with the SUV fully loaded, then two 30 mpg cars would be better. And if the cars were 50 mpg, then even if the SUV really were fully loaded all the time, you would indeed emit less carbon dioxide even with two cars.

One thing I'll add: The people who tell you that climate scientists want to take away your SUV are trying to scare you. They don't want you to think about the science. Even if I'm rather optimistic about some things, I have to figure that people who don't want me to decide based on our best understanding of science are trying to get me to do something I wouldn't if I thought about it.

The Youthful and Damp Dr. Grumbine

A couple of funnies from the last couple days. Yesterday, I was carded in a restaurant when I ordered a beer. Not only am I over 21, but my first paper is as well. :-) Then today I went out to try rowing (scull, not a regular rowboat). Well, the instructor, Cindy Cole http://www.washingtonrowingschool.com/ was good. My wife had been taking lessons for most of the last year (they take the winter off) and, while unsatisfied with how well she was doing (not a teacher issue) was happy about the fact that she had never fallen in to the water. So today I went out to try it, and first time out fell in. This is a rare thing, I'll note. Takes a special level of skill to manage it as only 2 other people have managed it while Cindy's been running the school. I blame the egrets, of which there are many. If you're in the area and have ever wondered about rowing, do come in. I'll be back out Saturday morning, so beware.

Petitioning on climate, part 2

Part 2 here requires a little specialized knowledge, namely that there is a broadly based scientific professional society relevant to climate issues in the US; it is the AGU http://www.agu.org, and they have a class of members who have been recognized for their consistently high quality work (Fellows). The American Meteorological Society, http://www.ametsoc.org, is relevant of course, but is primarily meteorological with only a modest number of oceanographers, glaciologists, hydrologists, ... particularly as compared to the numbers the AGU has. On the other hand, AGU includes space physicists, mineralogists, ... as well, which takes us afield from climate. I'm a member of both societies, so you could call it specialized knowledge to know about them. But these organizations are easy enough to find if you set out looking.

In part 1, we looked a bit at whether the numbers of signers was large. The petition project itself, and even more those who quote it, wants us to believe that there is 'a lot' of scientific opposition. But it turns out that most of the signers are nonscientists, much less scientists in something relevant to climate; worse, the numbers are actually quite small compared to the sizes of the fields they were mass mailing to. Junk mail rate.

For part 2 here, let's look to see whether many of the people in the AGU have signed. We'd want to do a later check whether it was mineralogists vs. atmospheric scientists, but it's a start. Since the AGU has about 50,000 members, I didn't want to try checking the whole list. But AGU fellows are a limited population. Unfortunately, it turns out that the 0.1% I mentioned was how many can be inducted per year. Ouch. There are quite a few more Fellows than I was thinking. Nevertheless, I started checking alphabetically.
Last names beginning with A: 0 of 41 fellows have signed
Last names beginning with B: 0 of 91 fellows have signed

As this is tedious and error prone (just how many 'Browns' are there? yikes. Names like Grumbine are much easier!) I turned to the list of 2008 fellows (not yet included in the full list). There are 51 new members. Checking the names there, I found 2 name matches, but ... Well, the names that matched are Charles R. Bacon and James W. Kirchner. But the Fellow Bacon is working in California and the signer Bacon is in Michigan, while the Fellow Kirchner has a PhD and the signer does not. So we're to 0 of the 51 new Fellows. (I'll note that it isn't a requirement that a Fellow, or AGU member, have a PhD. What matters is doing good work in the area (Fellow) or be studying or have studied the area (member).)

0 of the 183 AGU Fellows I've checked so far have signed the petition. If you'd like to assist the check, please do; send your results to me at plutarchspam at aim dt com. AGU's listing of fellows is at http://www.agu.org/inside/fellows.html The Petition Project's listing of signers is at http://petitionproject.org/gwdatabase/Signers_By_Last_Name.php And, by all means, do recheck my tallies for what I've checked so far.


The real point, though, is that the petition project has tried to mislead us, not the exact numbers. They want us to believe that engineers, doctors, and veterinarians (among other things) are scientists; they're not. They want us to believe that the number of signers is not 'a few', but as I've shown in parts 1 and 2, using only information that requires no special study, it in fact is only a few -- under 1% of the people they consider eligible have signed (in the areas I've checked, to be sure, but I did hit the largest groups). They want us to believe that the petition is about science, but the petition itself doesn't ask any scientific questions (check it out, pay attention to that major weasel word 'catastrophic'), and its main conclusion is actually about signing political agreements -- not science. And ... well, quite a few things, including that being dead is no bar to being on the list. Edward Teller, signer of their sample form, has been dead since 2003.

What should a citizen do when trying to figure out where the science is on climate change? It'd take forever to go through every document on every site and read every book and then apply this sort of method to it. My take is that sources which mislead me on basic things that I can check probably don't suddenly get more accurate in the areas that I can't. If it's a major project of the organization (as opposed to some loose cannon shot off his mouth), then that organization (or that loose cannon) is an unreliable source. This project is a major effort (later spun off to its own project and web domain ) of the http://www.oism.org/, and several of its staff (of 6 faculty and 7 regular volunteers) are the major people involved in the petition project. Your call as to loose cannon vs. institution, but it's several loose cannons from a small group.

That weeds out a couple of web sites and a few people as dubious sources, which doesn't really gain us a lot in a world with millions (billions?) of web sites and billions of web pages.

But we can go another step and consider folks who cite the petition project as showing what the project claimed. As I've shown, it doesn't take much research to find that the project's claims don't match what is really there. So, people and sources that cite it uncritically are at least not doing homework on what they cite to me. I do mention a number of things in chatting with a friend over a beer that I've never researched (life being short already) but that I just heard somewhere. Fine. But it does mean that in those areas I'd be a poor person to try to learn the topic from. Not that I (or those petition-citing sources) are bad folks, but we haven't done homework in those areas. Doing a web search on '31,000 scientists' brings up a ton of hits (something like 40,000). On the first two pages citing the petition uncritically (or even enthusiastically) are:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=64734
Cites as an 'exclusive', not an editorial. Bob Unruh
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/05/18/31-000-scientists-rejecting-global-warming-theory-be-named-monday
blog, Noel Sheppard.
http://tadcronn.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/global-warming-consensus-31000-scientists-disagree/
http://www.uncommondescent.com/education/beneficial-natural-warming-31000-scientists/
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3214
Dennis Avery

As best I can see, none are editorials or opinion when at news outlets.

I'll start a summary of unreliable sources, probably at my web site rather than here. Please do suggest other candidates, to the same address. To be a candidate, the site or person must: make an error that can be detected by a nonspecialist -- on an important point to his argument (a primary dubious source), or, cite a primary dubious source uncritically. Not all errors count; for example, in my first paper a word was supposed to be 'parameter', but it got published with 'satellite'. An error, but it didn't affect the argument about ice sheets. For now, it also doesn't count that one person using highly specialized methods detected an error in another highly skilled person's work. I'm going for that citizen level where people can throughly check things out for themselves. That's why, for instance, I have so many links here and the notes are excruciatingly long. Check everything out yourself. If you think I'm wrong, send me your reasons why, with at least equal care to what I've done.

Petitioning on climate, part 1

Nature is quite unconcerned about what people sign on petitions, so it baffles me that folks who say they're interested in the science turn to petitions to settle matters. I figure the best way to find out about it is to turn to folks who are studying the thing you're interested in. If I'm interested in bridges, I should turn to a civil or mechanical engineer who is working on designing them, and not someone with the same degree who works on sanitation systems or aircraft engines, much less someone working on nuclear physics (interesting field, and bright folks, but ... not much concerned with bridges).

Nevertheless, such a petition is now out, 'new and improved!!!' with 31,000 signers. (Ok, the new and improved is my comment, not theirs, but having been getting their mailings off and on for over a decade, I'm more than a little jaded.) This is a chance to try out my earlier comments that one needn't be a professional to weed out some sources.

Over at http://www.petitionproject.org/gwdatabase/GWPP/Qualifications_Of_Signers.html is their commentary on the qualifications of the petition signers. One thing they mention is that:

7. Engineering and general science includes 9,992 scientists trained primarily in the many engineering specialties required to maintain modern civilization and the prosperity required for all human actions, including environmental programs.

Hmm. Right off, one needn't be a professional to notice that engineering and science are different fields. I chatted some about this earlier. Why run down engineers by calling them scientists? As they say, engineering is required to maintain (I include improve) civilization. I agree; that's why I started there. It's good, important work. But it isn't science. Even stranger is what happens when you look farther down the list -- they fail to include almost any engineering discipline in their engineering total. They include elsewhere:

Environmental Engineering (473)
Computer Science (217)
Nuclear Engineering (215)
Mechanical Engineering (2,581)
Aerospace Engineering (585)
Chemical Engineering (1,640)
Agricultural Engineering (111)

So we need to add another 5,822 to the engineering tally, making it 15,814.
Hmm. Over half the signers are engineers, it turns out.

They also seem to have no biomedical engineers or industrial engineers, a couple areas I had friends in when I was in college. (Ok, you have to know something about the fields of engineering to notice this. But it isn't that specialized a bit of knowledge.)

So, let's ask a different question (ignoring, for now, that there's no more reason to believe that engineers know climatology any more than we'd assume climatologists know engineering). Is that number of engineers a large fraction of the field? The project having conducted a massive mass mailing, they should have reached a lot of the engineers. If this is a matter they generally feel strongly about (and, as the petition notes, they're looking at people who maintain the infrastructure of civilization, and the project is claiming that this is threatened), it should be a pretty high fraction. At least, say, half.

I figure the National Academy of Engineering would be a good place to look for figures on engineers. The first result on my search for "number of engineers" was:
http://www.nae.edu/nae/naehome.nsf/Multi+Database+Search/85256DAD003F352385256F8D006130A8?OpenDocument
It noted a couple of things. One was, that about 75,000 engineers are graduating each year. Another is that 6% unemployment among engineers meant 120,000 engineers being unemployed. A little arithmetic shows us that this means there are about 2,000,000 engineers in the USA.

We have two comparisons then, to the number of graduates, and to the total population. The latter is more meaningful. Even so, the number of engineering signers represents only about 20% of a single year's graduates. This is not impressive. Compared to the total number of engineers, it represents about 0.8%. Fewer than 1 in 100 engineers has signed.

Don't take my word for those numbers, of course. Check it out yourself. The 2 million is suspisciously round. On the other hand, if something like 75,000 are graduating each year, it's hard to see that 16,000 can be a large fraction of the total number of engineers. Let me know what better figures you find.

Again with no special knowledge, let's look at the medical folks. The project is including MD, DVM, and 'medical science' in their figures here. Again, my GP is a good doctor, but I wouldn't presume that he is knowledgeable about the physics of turbulent transfer (an element of climate), any more than my turbulent transfer friend is the guy I'd expect to take care of my allergies. Anyhow, let's see how many doctors and veterinarians there are vs. the 3069 signers they have. Hmm. AMA site wasn't much help, but a general search on "number of doctors" lead me to here:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-03-02-doctor-shortage_x.htm Which gives the current (in 2005) figure at about 800,000. For veterinarians, I went with the general search since I don't know the name of their professional society. I found at http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos076.htm#emply a figure of 62,000. This is missing a number of fields, since I couldn't figure what all the project meant by 'medical' (maybe they're including nursing degrees? Dentists? lab technicians?). If anything, then, my 862,000 total here is an underestimate. The percentage of possible signers in this category who did sign is ... 0.3%. About 1 in 300. (If we add the 2.5 million registered nurses, that percentage gets very small indeed.)

As a general reader with no knowledge of the underlying science, this just looks very bad to me.
* The project and people citing it want me to believe that there is serious, large scale, scientific opposition to the science on climate.
But:
* Their 'big' number is grossly padded by people who have not studied climate science nor worked in it.
* It isn't a 'big' number. The fields they are including are huge. To be large, we'd have to be looking at well over 1 million signers (only 1 in 3 people the fields already named). Maybe you'd consider it large if only 1 in 10 signed. But that's still more than 10 times the rate that actually did.
* It strikes my general reader eye as strange that after listing that thus and so many PhDs signed the petition, and thus and so many climatologists signed, they don't, on their list of signers, include what the field was for the PhD. Given the numbers, it's actually possible that all the PhD signers were engineers. Not likely, but if we should be impressed by the doctorate, it'd be even more impressive if we could tell what it was in.


I've labelled this 'part 1'. Part 2 will get in to some things that you probably need some mildly specialized knowledge for. It's very mild -- things like knowing that the American Geophysical Union includes many of the people who work on climate change, and that they have designated not more than 0.1% of their members as Fellows for the consistently high quality of their work. So in part 2, I'll take a look at how many AGU Fellows have signed. As an AGU member (ordinary member) I've received the mailing myself, so I'm sure that they have as well.

What is climate?

This question is one I've never been satisfied with the answers to. That probably means that there's some good science to be done coming up with a solid answer to is. Probably the best description, though not a definition, is from Robert Heinlein: "Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get." What is missing from the description is how to decide what to expect.

Some of it, though, works very well as a practical matter as well. If you measure a temperature somewhere (my back yard at 12:30 PM), you have observed weather -- what we got at the instant, in the exact location, that we took the measurement. This is useful to know in its own right since what we experience directly as we live our lives is weather. If my backyard thermometer showed 95 F and humid, I know that it's a good time to read a book instead of do major weeding.

If I take readings of my back yard temperature for every July 23rd for the last bunch (project: how many? Why that many and not half as many or twice as many?) of years, and average them, then I have a notion of the expectation value (a formal process from statistics which you can study to answer my questions of how many years to average). This gives me an estimate of the temperature to expect -- the July 23rd temperature climate for my yard.

Weather is made of quite a few different things beyond temperature, so climate must be as well. Beyond temperature, we have expectations about the wind speed and direction (usually pretty mild around me, and mostly from the west), how often rain falls and how much falls when it does, how cloudy it will be, how often there is lightning, how deep the ground freezes in winter, ...

Given this, if you see someone say that a weather event -- a single storm somewhere, a cold temperature in some modest area (and compared to the globe, the US is a modest area) has proven or disproven something about climate, you know they're wrong. It's also why you'll see many scientists talking about climate change rather than global warming. Temperature is only one part of the climate system. Temperature, on the other hand, is one of the easiest things to measure, so many climate studies do focus on that. The science problem, though, is still the whole climate system.