People and Institutions

In an earlier post, I commented off-handedly that science is done by people, not institutions. Elsewhere in the blogosphere someone took exception to that. So it seems a point to expand a little.

The thing is, science is done by people, and scientists as people are rather heavy on individualism. Managers of scientists usually wind up making comments about 'herding cats'. Consequently, when you're talking about an institution that scientists are involved with, it's a near certainty that some of the people there disagree to some extent or other with what their colleagues published. Plus, as I mentioned in talking about peer review, merely getting published does not mean that you're right.

The scientists simply do not are not speak for their institutions unless you're told emphatically otherwise in some specific case. I do not speak for my employer, someone at NASA does not speak for NASA in writing a scientific paper, someone at NOAA does not speak for NOAA, someone at a University does not speak for the University, and so on.

There's a different aspect of that individualism. Even where the scientists are naturally inclined to be more conformist (which has struck me as rare), the rewards are set up for nonconformity. The surest way to prominence in science is to support an argument that what people previously believed to be true, isn't.

Between the two, by the time you can get scientists to agree overwhelmingly on something (the earth is round), it has ceased to be a scientific question. The shape of the earth question is now about things like whether the equatorial radius is 6378160 or 6378240 meters. (Maybe a narrower difference now; it's been a while since I looked.). There's agreement about round, but not about exactly how large, nor exactly how much squishing there is towards the poles.

Analyzing the simplest climate model

Before we try to solve the problem of why the temperature around us averages about 15 C (288 K) instead of the -18 C (255 K) we found in the simplest model, let's look some more at the model. It depends on 3 things -- the sun's energy input to the earth, the albedo of the earth, and the average distance between the earth and sun. How much does it depend on those things? By the end, we'll also have another site to ignore for its unreliability.

We know that the sun's output can vary by about 1 Watt per square meter during a solar cycle. So try computing the temperature with 1368 instead of 1367. Try again with 1366. How much difference does that make? I get about 0.05 K (0.09 F). That's a pretty small number. We'd be hard-pressed to get a thermometer to record it.

How about the albedo? I find about a 1 K change (0.9) for a 0.01 change in albedo. Such a change in albedo (or to increase it by this much) is plausible for the earth, though 0.10 would be a wild value, not expected by anybody I know of. Quick sanity check ... why is the albedo so much more important than solar term? Albedo multiplies the solar constant. The natural variation is 1 Watt per square meter. The 0.01 change in albedo means a 13.67 Watt per square meter change in energy entering the climate system, so we expect it to be much larger. (project: why is it 19 times more important rather than just 13.67?)

The mean distance from the earth to the sun does change -- on a long enough time scale. Changes in the earth's orbital eccentricity (how circular vs. how oval-shaped) can give changes in average distance of something like 0.001 AU. This translates to about 0.18 K (0.32 F) variations in earth's temperature to space. (These are Milankovitch variations in eccentricity, with the fastest time scale of change being 100,000 years; some are over 2 million years).

If we take those sizes of temperature change and divide by how fast they occur, we get a sense of which is most important for thinking about climate change on our time scale of interest. The sun's output changes along a solar cycle of about 11 years. The earth's albedo changes with the seasonal cycle, so 1 year. And the eccentricity is 100,000 years. Looking at degrees per year, we then have:

1. Albedo 1 degree per year
2. Solar cycle 0.005 degrees per year
3. Eccentricity 0.000002 degrees per year

So, if we're thinking about weather and climate over the next few years to centuries, the obvious candidate to be paying attention to is the albedo. Eccentricity changes too little and too slowly, and the solar cycle returns to its start before the century is up (net of zero change), and is much smaller than the albedo effect can be on a few year scale (albedo doesn't go in the same direction for a long time, but just how long and how much needs some thinking).

Variations in solar output and the earth's orbit are not part of the climate system itself, and the orbit can be predicted to very high accuracy for a very long time into the future. In terms of understanding the climate system, both the solar and orbit factors are good -- given these non-climate terms, we can compute a climate. If we know the albedo.

But what is albedo? It's the bouncing of energy from the sun back to space. Now what does that bouncing? Well, everything in the climate system -- clouds, gas molecules, ocean surface, trees, grass, desert, dirt, glaciers, snow cover, ice packs, ... The gas molecule term depends little on the climate, and, if I remember correctly, would bounce about 15% of the solar input even if the earth's surface were a perfect solar absorber (perfectly black). But it isn't; even the ocean, which is about the darkest part of the earth's surface, reflects at least 6% of the sun's energy (that reaches it), and that figure increases as the sun gets low in the sky.

If none of these things changed their albedo as the climate got colder or warmer, we'd only have an annoyance -- can't give a climate figure without looking at the system. But the extent of deserts, ice sheets, sea ice, ... does change depending on climate temperatures. That 'about 0.30' albedo is correct for recent times. It may not be correct in an ice age earth or an even warming than present earth. Consequently, while we can use this model to understand some points about the climate system, we can't use it to predict full climate responses. We're not surprised, since we're much warmer at the surface than the blackbody temperature. But this is an additional reason we're going to want a more complex model down the road.

On the other hand, it does help us understand the system -- we know now that albedo is very important, and how much it and solar input could be expected, on a simple basis, to affect climate.

We also, it turns out, have a tool for identifying unreliable sources. I was surprised to see this be the case, but Steve Milloy at junkscience(dot-com)/Greenhouse assumes that if there were no clouds, the earth's albedo would be zero. Even knowing nothing about the details of albedo, you know this has to be wrong. If the earth's albedo, aside from clouds, were zero, you couldn't see the earth except for the clouds. As this image reminds us, you can indeed see the earth from space. His writing where he makes the error says:
We should note that devoid of atmosphere Earth would actually be a less-cold -1 °C (272 K) because the first calculation strangely includes 31% reflection of solar radiation by clouds
He also seems to be calculating the solar constant rather than taking an observed value, and using odd values for the his calculation.

Project: what would be better values for each figure, and how would using them affect his results?

More from Icecap

Ah well. Still more errors from Icecap; I'll comment first about the ones aimed at me personally. The article opens

"Alarmist Blog Blocks Comments ala Real Climate
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, Fellow
Fashioning itself after Real Climate, Grumbine Science blog posted a blog on the recent Washington Examiner story I authored ..."

Alarmist? It would have been good if the author had pointed out what I said that was alarming.

Fashioning itself after Real Climate? Hardly. If I wanted that, I'd simply have joined up Real Climate. Check out Real Climate and see for yourself whether this is the same sort of site. (And if you think it is, please point out where, beyond an interest in science communication, you feel I'm copying.)

The name of the blog is also wrong. Grumbinescience is my sister's, for her jr. high science class. This is MoreGrumbineScience. (If my other sister starts one, I've told her she has to name it 'Even More Grumbine Science' or some such.)

I attempted to respond several times on the blog to the blogger and commenters questions or complaints but the moderator refused to post my responses so here they are.
I've received zero comment submissions from D'Aleo. I did get two from 'Anonymous' on that thread. One I published, the other I didn't. The one I didn't was not regarding icecap, rather my comment about it being a red flag of mine (regarding the guest article at Pielke's site) when an article calls for open debate where there is a no comment policy.

He comments in his (self-described) rant that: By the way we have been asked why we at Icecap don’t allow comments. I assure you if I were retired or we were getting huge contributions like Real Climate with their blank checks from Fenton Communications and I could devote full time to Icecap we would. It is a full-time job policing and monitoring and responding on an open blog. I have to make a living mainly from other consulting and forecasting jobs. What I get from Icecap is supplemental.

Dang! You mean I could get paid for this!? I'm getting zero dollars from anywhere, certainly not a 'supplemental' income. How about this Fenton bunch? Are they giving out checks of any size, much less blank? Can I get some? Well, if they are, it appears that it isn't to Real Climate -- a fact they mentioned more than 3 years ago.

More to the point, though, D'Aleo complains about being unable to get his comments posted here, while at the same time not allowing comments at his blog. He complains about being unable to allow comments while getting income for his blog, while I get paid nothing by anybody. He complains about being a one man show making it impossible to allow comments, while I am a one many show, and do allow comments.

It also strikes me that if someone wants to complain about not being able to get comments posted, he really should use his own name. An 'anonymous' had one post rejected, and an 'anonymous' had one get through despite being resource free. I'm more lenient with the posts that disagree with me than those which agree.

If his posts never reached me through blogger, I've also given, a few times, an email address for contacting me -- plutarchspam at aim dot com. I've received zero mail there.

But he did spell my name correctly and give a correct link here, so he wasn't wrong in every mention.


For the science, he ultimately says very little, I think. But, of course, check it out yourself:

He says the newspaper made him take away the UAH label from the MSU on the figure. It could have been in the text (and should, irrespective of the graph's label).

He never addresses my complaint about the misleading axis on CO2, instead saying that my complaint was about the smoothness of the curve.

On the ARGO observations of heat content he cites (after and NPR story and Pielke's blog -- neither being a scientific source):
Willis J. K., D. P. Chambers, R. S. Nerem (2008), Assessing the globally averaged sea level budget on seasonal to interannual timescales, J. Geophys. Res., 113, C06015, doi:10.1029/2007JC004517.

I'd searched on web (as scientists often have their papers listed, and even full content on their web site), Google scholar, Web of Science, and Meteorological and Geophysical Abstracts without turning up any newer Willis papers regarding ARGO than the 2007 correction. It turns out that this paper in its entirity is available (which surprised me as AGU is usually fairly restrictive) so I've put the link to the article and you can read it yourself. The abstract is:

Analysis of ocean temperature and salinity data from profiling floats along with satellite measurements of sea surface height and the time variable gravity field are used to investigate the causes of global mean sea level rise between mid-2003 and mid-2007. The observed interannual and seasonal fluctuations in sea level can be explained as the sum of a mass component and a steric (or density related) component to within the error bounds of each observing system. During most of 2005, seasonally adjusted sea level was approximately 5 mm higher than in 2004 owing primarily to a sudden increase in ocean mass in late 2004 and early 2005, with a negligible contribution from steric variability. Despite excellent agreement of seasonal and interannual sea level variability, the 4-year trends do not agree, suggesting that systematic long-period errors remain in one or more of these observing systems.

Now, remember that D'Aleo's original claim was that ARGO showed cooling. Does that abstract support his claim? It undermines it twice. The latter is obvious in the last sentence whether you're an oceanographer or not ...suggesting that systematic long-period errors remain in one or more of these observing systems. At least one of the systems -- satellite or ARGO -- has a systematic problem. It's therefore hard to say that ARGO shows, necessarily, either a warming or cooling since it could be the one that's got a systematic error.

That aside, though, there's the first undermining. You need to be enough of an oceanographer that steric refers to sea level change due to expansion or contraction of the water itself whether because of warming or cooling (respectively, thermosteric in the paper) or removal or addition of salt (ditto, halosteric). D'Aleo's claim is that ARGO shows a cooling -- that should show up as a drop in sea level (a negative steric contribution). In the abstract it only mentions that there was no contribution during 2 of the years -- no net steric change. No support for D'Aleo there either. In the paper itself, the text gives the steric component trend as -0.5 plus or minus 0.5 mm/year, as a net between the temperature and salinity contributions. The two are mentioned individually in the paper, but no error bar is given. Assuming they gave the 1 standard deviation bars, as usual, then there's about a 1 in 6 chance that the steric contribution is positive. And that's if we assume that the ARGO buoys are not the one (of the) source with a systematic problem.

This paper mentions a paper submitted by Willis in 2007 regarding ARGO and heat content. That's an important term, 'submitted'. If it had been published, it would be cited that way. If it had been accepted for publication (passed the peer review), it would have been described as 'in press'. At the time this paper was accepted, though (22 February 2008), the other had not been. It will be interesting to see what the other paper has to say. As I said before, I do hope they can work out the problems with the ARGO data for this purpose. (It's already very useful for other purposes.) But it's that other paper that D'Aleo needs, not this one.

As I'd suggested early on, you don't need to be a professional scientist to recognize many of the errors from some sources. Once you do, it's time to move elsewhere, I think. It's hard enough to understand the world when you're reading good sources (or at least, good enough that they're not making errors my sister's jr. high class could recognize).

Olympic Connection

I almost have a connection to the Olympics. While riding in a train, I started talking to the guy on the seat opposite. It turned out he (Simon Ayeko) was on his way to a track meet to try to qualify for the Ugandan Olympic team. He didn't make it, which I don't understand since he's run fast enough to meet the 'A' standard in his event -- the 3000 m steeple chase -- this year. They're sending nobody in that event. Also surprising since he only has the second best time from Uganda. Oh well. He's a young guy, so I hope he makes it to the 2012 games.

In a different way, I do have a connection to the Olympics. My wife and I went to Greece for our honeymoon. While there, we visited Delphi. One part of the site at Delphi was the stadium in which the Pythian Games were held. The games at Olympus were not the only ones. So I ran full out for the 1 stade (178 meters) race, starting from where the racers would have 2500 years ago. Didn't succeed in getting some high school students who were posing at the start to join in a race. But I ran my best, while thinking of the competitors representing their cities those centuries ago.

International Science

This weekend we'll be celebrating the new citizenships of two of my coworkers. This is one of the things we mean when we talk about science being international. Science isn't some vapor that floats around the world, rather it is people sharing ideas all over world. And working together in many parts of the world. Some like their new locations enough to take citizenship there. So this weekend we'll be welcoming two coworkers to their new citizenship with some food, drink, and conversation. Perhaps rather a lot of conversation; you may have noticed that I'm a bit chatty. I'm not terribly unusual in this among my group, or scientists generally.

There's an important -- to having confidence in scientific results -- flip side represented by the distribution of scientists. If all scientists are wealthy northwest European men (which was nearly the case in the 1800s), then it wouldn't be too surprising for a particular idea to strike the fancy of them all for the same cultural reasons rather than being good science. Today, though, with scientists spread across every continent, from different ends of the economic spectrum (my going to college required the limit in loans, work study, summer jobs, etc., plus academic scholarships, not family wealth; while some good scientists still come from financial backgrounds like those 1800s folks), both men and women (not as many women in my area as I'd like, but my postdoctoral adviser was one and there are more now than 30 years ago), different races, religions, ethnic groups, political preferences, ... it's very hard for an idea to be shared across those different groups unless there's something to it. (Ok, yes, scientists are very prone to believing that science is interesting and a good way to study scientific problems. But that's not a scientific conclusion, it's an assumption.)