The answer to the question “where the heck is global warming?” is “precisely where you would expect,” as we will see.

Wired has done some excellent reporting on one of the supposed start-dumping-your-clean-energy-stocks e-mails — the one by Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado:

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low….

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Note:  No, I’m not thrilled with reprinting part of an illegally stolen e-mail, but this was in Wired and has been confirmed by the author and actually deals with the science.

This email allegedly “suggests that reality contradicts scientific claims about global warming,” at least to those who don’t understand and accept climate science.  Not surprisingly, the author, one of the country’s leading experts on climate, disagrees.  Let me first note that Trenberth signed the Must Read Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists, which opens:

The 2007 IPCC report, compiled by several hundred climate scientists, has unequivocally concluded that our climate is warming rapidly, and that we are now at least 90% certain that this is mostly due to human activities. The amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere now far exceeds the natural range of the past 650,000 years, and it is rising very quickly due to human activity. If this trend is not halted soon, many millions of people will be at risk from extreme events such as heat waves, drought, floods and storms, our coasts and cities will be threatened by rising sea levels, and many ecosystems, plants and animal species will be in serious danger of extinction.

One can only dream that we lived in a world where that important declaration by more than 200 of the world’s leading climate scientists would get even one half the media coverage of a bunch of stolen e-mails that do nothing whatsoever to change the scientific evidence or the urgent need for action.  But I digress.

Trenberth says,  “If you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists.  The unfortunate thing about this is that people can cherry pick and take things out of context.”  Here is Trenberth explaining what his e-mail in fact meant in context:

But Trenberth, who acknowledged the e-mail is genuine, says bloggers are missing the point he’s making in the e-mail by not reading the article cited in it. That article – An Imperative for Climate Change Planning (.pdf) — actually says that global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise.

“It says we don’t have an observing system adequate to track it, but there are all other kinds of signs aside from global mean temperatures — including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot of other indicators — that global warming is continuing,” he says.

Or, as Gavin Schmidt explains deep in the comments section of RealClimate, when asked “Is Dr Trenberth correct in his claim that we can’t explain why the planet hasn’t been warming as expected?”

[Response: It is the level of explanation that is the issue. The zero-th order explanation is that 'natural variation' and possible structural issues in the surface data sets are plenty large enough. But it would be good to know exactly what form that natural variation has taken and why exactly it has the impact on the global mean temperatures it has. It is this second-order explanation that Trenberth is discussing. - gavin]

I would urge people to read Trenberth’s article, which asks:

The global mean temperature in 2008 was the lowest since about 2000 (Fig. 1). Given that there is continual heating of the planet, referred to as radiative forcing, by accelerating increases of carbon dioxide (Fig. 1) and other greenhouses due to human activities, why isn’t the temperature continuing to go up? The stock answer is that natural variability plays a key role1 and there was a major La Niña event early in 2008 that led to the month of January having the lowest anomaly in global temperature since 2000. While this is true, it is an incomplete explanation. In particular, what are the physical processes? From an energy standpoint, there should be an explanation that accounts for where the radiative forcing has gone. Was it compensated for temporarily by changes in clouds or aerosols, or other changes in atmospheric circulation that allowed more radiation to escape to space? Was it because a lot of heat went into melting Arctic sea ice or parts of Greenland and Antarctica, and other glaciers? Was it because the heat was buried in the ocean and sequestered, perhaps well below the surface? Was it because the La Niña led to a change in tropical ocean currents and rearranged the configuration of ocean heat? Perhaps all of these things are going on? But surely we have an adequate system to track whether this is the case or not, don’t we?

No, we don’t know for certain what explains 2008 — but as I’ve written many times, the combination of an extended La Niña plus “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century” plus natural climate variability offer more than enough explanation for 2008 being … still bloody warm, among the ten warmest years on record – 0.1°C warmer than the decade of the 1990s as a whole – and warmer than any year of last century beside (the El-Niño-enhanced) 1998.  And if you read the article you’ll see that Trenberth goes through all of the relevant factors that contribute to natural variability.

It bears repeating that a new NOAA-led study, “An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950” (subs. req’d, release here) concluded:

[S]ince 1950, the planet released about 20 percent of the warming influence of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to outer space as infrared energy. Volcanic emissions lingering in the stratosphere offset about 20 percent of the heating by bouncing solar radiation back to space before it reached the surface. Cooling from the lower-atmosphere aerosols produced by humans balanced 50 percent of the heating. Only the remaining 10 percent of greenhouse-gas warming actually went into heating the Earth, and almost all of it went into the ocean.

That is from my post Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It’s the oceans, stupid! The key figure:

Figure 1: “Total Earth Heat Content [anomaly] from 1950 (Murphy et al. 2009). Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008.”

In other words, the surface temperature data — which is subject to the vagaries of climate variability — only represent a tiny fraction of the human-caused warming.  As another recent study showed, if you look at where most of the heat is going, the warming continues unabated:

Figure [2]: Time series of global mean heat storage (0–2000 m), measured in 108 Jm-2.

Where the heck is global warming?  Just where you’d expect it.  The study makes clear that upper ocean heat content, perhaps not surprisingly, is simply far more variable than deeper ocean heat content, and thus an imperfect indicator of the long-term warming trend.

Let me end with Trenberth’s science-based call to action, from the Bali Declaration:

Based on current scientific understanding, this requires that global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by at least 50% below their 1990 levels by the year 2050. In the long run, greenhouse gas concentrations need to be stabilised at a level well below 450 ppm (parts per million; measured in CO2-equivalent concentration). In order to stay below 2ºC, global emissions must peak and decline in the next 10 to 15 years, so there is no time to lose.

No time to lose.

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NOTE:  This post will be continually updated to cover things like the NYT’s misdirected (front page!) reporting.

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution).

So begins the RealClimate post on this hack-heard-round-the-blogosphere.   At the end, I’ll excerpt that post, which makes clear this is much ado about not bloody much.  I’ll also look at the

The predictable FoxNews take is here (screen capture of their front page is above).  At the end, I’ll post some truly amazing quotes from the anti-scientific side of the blogosphere, from Brad Johnson’s Wonk Room post, including this from the Telegraph’s James Delingpole:

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW.

Whatever smoke the anti-scientific disinformers are able to blow into people’s faces over this bunch of emails dating back over a decade, it doesn’t change the basic facts about human-caused warming:

Figure: Time series of global mean heat storage (0–2000 m), measured in 108 Jm-2.

The NYT’s Revkin has a piece whose headline and lede, typically, misses the entire point, “Hacked E-Mails Fuel Climate Change Skeptics.”  Note to Andy:  Everything fuels the disinformers! And that includes studies and data that prove the exact opposite of what they assert.

Who cares that, as Revkin says in his opening (!) sentence, this is “causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change”?  This was a chance for Revkin to make up for his misinformation-filled post from September [see "NYT’s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation"].  Even his most science-based sentence is hedged:  “But the evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so broad and deep that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.”  Unlikely?  Ya think?

Revkin asserts in the so-called paper of record that “some of the comments might lend themselves to sinister interpretations.”  So is this a news story or just a speculative opinion piece?  Instead of saying what interpretation might be possible, why not actually talk to the authors of the emails and other scientists and report what they emails actually were meant to communicate?  Oh, wait, later in the piece he notes “But several scientists whose names appear repeatedly in the e-mails said they merely revealed that scientists are human beings, and did nothing to undercut the body of research on global warming.”  Duh.

I do appreciate that Revkin reported this blockbuster news in the third paragraph:

In another [email], a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Stop the presses!

The fact that a crime was committed is buried in the story — Scholars and Rogues has a genuine analysis of that important fact and its implications, which Revkin basically glosses over.   It is worthwhile to note at this point that the University “could not confirm that all the material circulating on the Internet was authentic.”  Again, duh.

The fact that this misdirected NYT story was on the front page just compounds the miscoverage.  The Washington Post story is on page A14, with this vastly superior headline and subhead:  “Hackers steal electronic data from top climate research center: Scientists’ e-mails deriding skeptics of warming become public.”

Here’s most of the rest of the post from the scientists at RealClimate, which is still the most thoughtful thing I have seen written on the subject:

As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

There are of course lessons to be learned. Clearly no-one would have gone to this trouble if the academic object of study was the mating habits of European butterflies. That community’s internal discussions are probably safe from the public eye. But it is important to remember that emails do seem to exist forever, and that there is always a chance that they will be inadvertently released. Most people do not act as if this is true, but they probably should.

It is tempting to point fingers and declare that people should not have been so open with their thoughts, but who amongst us would really be happy to have all of their email made public?

Who indeed?

If you want some specific explanations for some of the other e-mails that have been getting the most attention, Gavin Schmidt has been doing yeoman’s work in the comments at Real Climate.  Just search for “gavin,” and you will find his various responses.  Gavin is asked, “Is Dr Trenberth correct in his claim that we can’t explain why the planet hasn’t been warming as expected?”

Here is a longer discussion of the email by NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth on “where the heck is global warming?”

Brad Johnson from Wonk Room notes the disinformers are “sifting through the illegally obtained letters of private correspondence for “proof” that the scientific consensus on climate change is actually a global conspiracy“:

– Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss “repetitive, false data of higher temperatures.”

– The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, “The blue-dress moment may have arrived.”

– “The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century,” blares Michelle Malkin.

– The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are “proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in moderrn [sic] science.”

The UK media reports that the official University of East Anglia reply as of Friday afternoon is:

“We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites,” said the spokesperson in a statement. “Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.”

“This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation,” the spokesperson continued.

“We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this enquiry.”

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SuperFreak Dubner embraces ClimateGate conspiracy theories

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David Roberts at Grist has the winner of the irony-can-be-so-ironic award:

From a sharp-eyed reader comes this ad for Humble Oil (which later merged with Standard to become, yes, Exxon). It may win the All Time Millenial Award for Maximal Irony. It’s from a 1962 edition of Life Magazine, available on Google Books (click for larger version):

Hmm, in December 2008, I blogged on an AP story about data presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union:

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.

[Note to AP -- "what scientists say is global warming???  I missed that uber-lame construction the first time around.]

And remember that over its lifetime,  “the burning of organic carbon warms the Earth about 100,000 times more from climate effects than it does through the release of chemical energy in combustion,” as climatologist Ken Caldeira and NYU’s Martin Hoffert calculate in an analysis first published on Climate Progress!  Yes, not all the cumulative warming from CO2 occurs right away nor does it all go into melting ice, but the point is we’re just at the very beginning of the mega-melting to come.

I’m filing this under greenwashing because I don’t have a category for unintentional anti-greenwashing — see “Shell’s ironic vision of carbon capture.”

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Let’s look at one of the illegally hacked emails in more detail

By the time the pediatrician Nina Pierpont settled in upstate New York, she had already built a rather diverse and full career. As the Connecticut native tells it, she studied birds in the Amazon jungle on her way to earning a Ph.D. in behavioral ecology, then enrolled in medical school, completing a degree and practicing among Navajo Indians and Yup’ik Eskimos. Then she and her husband moved to Malone, N.Y., a small town just 11 miles from the Quebec border, where she opened a pediatric practice.

Over the last several years she has reinvented herself again. Upon hearing about a proposal for a nearby wind farm, Pierpont began looking into effects of wind turbines related to her expertise—medicine. She tracked down others who lived near wind projects—two families in England, five in Canada, one in the U.K., one in Italy, another in the U.S. All 38 people had previously complained about health effects they blamed on wind farms. Several had since moved away. When Pierpont interviewed them by phone, they reported symptoms that included headaches, nausea, insomnia, visual blurring, vertigo, and panic attacks.

Pierpont came to believe that the cause was infrasound, a type of low-frequency sound inaudible to humans except at very loud levels (think the opposite of a high-pitched dog whistle). Residents weren’t merely hearing the thrum of turbines, she concluded, they were feeling it as an imperceptible vibration in their bodies. This was disrupting the inner-ear vestibular system—the body’s chief tool for balance and spatial orientation.

“These feed back neurologically onto a person’s sense of position and motion in space, which is in turn connected in multiple ways to brain functions as disparate as spatial memory and anxiety,” Pierpont, 54, writes in a forthcoming book.

Pierpont with her new book (and navigation added by her website).Courtesy windturbinesyndrome.comFor this collection of symptoms Pierpont coined the term “wind turbine syndrome.” Then she set to work publicizing it. Her website, windturbinesyndrome.com, documents her writing and collects testimonies from others who say they are afflicted by the condition. Her book of the same name is set for publication this month, available only through the website. A series of news articles have repeated her claims, in the Portland Oregonian, USA Today, and as a Sunday feature in the UK Independent.

Through it all, Pierpont does not claim to have definitive proof the syndrome exists. Rather, she says her findings make further research necessary before wind farms can be safely built within two kilometers of homes and schools. Yet out of all the obstacles wind energy faces—the up-front costs, the competition from subsidized fossil fuels, the aesthetic objections--Pierpont’s claim has become one of the least likely and most annoying problems for the industry.

It is unlikely because it is easily debunked and annoying because it keeps spreading anyway. Pierpont’s work has provided ammunition to those opposing wind farms across the country, from New York to Minnesota to Washington state. Wind advocates could not name a project that had failed because of her claims, but they say opponents of projects have latched onto her claims, bringing stacks of her work to local planning officials, who must do the time-consuming work of sorting through the claims.

“The reason it’s a hassle is that opponents--who frankly don’t like looking at wind turbines--grasp on to a lot of things to oppose projects. This happens to be one of them,” said Tim McMahan, a Portland land-use lawyer who focuses on wind-energy developments in the Northwest.

Pierpont did not respond to multiple interview requests and states on her website that she rarely grants media interviews. Her comments to the Independent suggest she’s willing to play the role of persecuted truth-teller: “The wind industry will try to discredit me and disparage me, but I can cope with that. This is not unlike the tobacco industry dismissing health issues from smoking.”

So here’s what’s wrong with wind-turbine syndrome. First, there’s Pierpont’s method. Her study consisted of 38 people from ten families—by most standards too small to yield conclusive results. All of them self-identified as people who were already experiencing health effects; there was no control group.

Further, acousticians who study the issue say Pierpont fundamentally misunderstands the nature of low-frequency sound. Geoff Leventhall, an English acoustician who retired from the University of London and chairs the European Institute of Noise Control Engineering, agrees that turbines create infrasound that cannot be heard. So do driving with an open window, swinging on a swing set, and even jogging--the slight rise and fall of the head create the effect. Leventhall describes infrasound as a common phenomenon that isn’t dangerous except at extremely high levels, such as those produced by spacecraft. Infrasound from wind turbines does not approach that level, said Leventhall, who recently flew to Wisconsin to testify at a hearing for the proposed Glacier Hills Wind Park.

His critique of “wind turbine syndrome” becomes more technical from there. Essentially, he picks apart Pierpont's claim that bodies absorb infrasound without actually hearing it. At the frequency of infrasound (generally less than 20 Hz), the human body makes plenty of its own noise—the heart pumps, the ribcage expands and contracts. These noises mask whatever turbines might add, Leventhall said. (A very small number of people experience extreme responses to all sorts of sounds, both low and high-frequency, though Leventhall and other experts say this is an unrelated issue.)

“Pierpont has clearly misunderstood much of the acoustic material which she refers to,” he writes in an appraisal of her work he submitted to the Wisconsin project.

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) says it doesn't know how many people live within two kilometers of a turbines--the setback Pierpont recommends. With the growth of wind energy worldwide, the number surely reaches the thousands. Yet it has not led to significant health complaints outside Pierpont's research.

Courtesy windturbinesyndrome.comFinally, there’s the peer review issue. Pierpont’s work has not been accepted by any peer reviewed scientific journals, the standard first step in publishing original research. (See a brief post on why peer review matters in science and medicine.) She describes her book as peer-reviewed, a claim the Independent repeats. But the four-person editorial board consists of Pierpont, her husband (the ecumenically named Calvin Luther Martin), and two others--a professor emeritus of literature and an ecologist and psychologist. “This is obviously a self-published book,” notes Grist contributor Gar Lipow.

Given all this, why has the claim stuck around? As books such as Denialism and Climate Cover-Up attest, it’s far easier to raise and spread rumors than to refute them for good. The inaudible nature of infrasound makes it especially difficult to understand.

“[By] describing a condition that you can’t hear, you can’t feel, and you don’t know it exists, but you tell people it can hurt them, you create this sense of a problem that can’t even be detected,” the land-use lawyer McMahan said of wind-turbine syndrome. “You can get people really worried about it because they have no ability to judge for themselves.”

For any development project, running the gauntlet of local-government approval is rarely simple. There is suspicion of projects that are funded by outside investors—the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) effect. And wind farms bring their own challenges, with towers clearing 250 feet, highly visible locations offshore or on ridge tops, and their connection to the politically charged issue of climate change.

And then there are legitimate questions about wind-turbine noise—turbines do create sound after all, from both the gearbox (though this has grown much quieter in newer turbines) and from moving blades. It's no more harmful than the noise from new highways or airports, but residents of quiet areas don't react favorably to those things either. Some residents living near turbines find the sound annoying, and this annoyance becomes a health effect when it causes stress.

But annoyance is maddeningly difficult to study--it must be self-reported (it can’t be measured by a machine) and is inherently subjective—one person’s noise is another’s music. A Swedish study in 1967 [PDF] confirmed something we know by experience: your feelings about the source of noise shape whether you find the noise annoying. I react differently to the stereo in my own house than to the music blaring from my neighbor’s party, even if it’s the same song. Those who invest in wind turbines and stand to profit from them are likely to find their sound less disturbing than a neighbor would.

It’s a different issue than the “hidden” sound that concerns Pierpont and her followers. As three University of Massachusetts engineers stress in “Wind Turbine Acoustic Noise” [PDF], the audible swish-swish of turbine blades is not infrasound.

There are good reasons to make this message clear.

“Wind energy generates electricity without air pollution, water pollution, or the carbon emissions that come from traditional sources of energy,” said Jen Banks, a siting specialist at AWEA. “For the sake of human and environmental health, it’s essential that any decisions about wind-energy use are based on sound scientific knowledge.”

The sound issue remains a growing pain for the industry, something it will need to resolve—and communicate effectively—for it to thrive.

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Let’s look at one of the illegally hacked emails in more detail

Here’s what we know so far

Ask Umbra on trash, toxics, and tots

The most detailed satellite information available shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica are shrinking faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode, a new study found….

Using 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite, scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. That’s where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to the study….

“To some extent it’s a runaway effect. The question is how far will it run?” said lead author Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey. “It’s more widespread than we previously thought.”

That’s from “Study: ‘Runaway’ melt on Antarctica, Greenland,” the pull-no-punches MSNBC story last month.  The full study, “Extensive dynamic thinning on the margins of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,” was published in Nature (subs. req’d, excerpted below).

The British Antarctic Survey put out a news release with graphics.  Here are some satellite tracks, from NASA’s ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite), revealing areas of dynamic thinning (red) in Antarctica and Greenland [click to enlarge].

The release notes that this “dynamic thinning”:

The authors conclude “Ice shelf collapse has triggered particularly strong thinning that has endured for decades.”  More of the MSNBC story:

Some of those areas are about a mile thick, so they’ve still got plenty of ice to burn through. But the drop in thickness is speeding up. In parts of Antarctica, the yearly rate of thinning from 2003 to 2007 is 50 percent higher than it was from 1995 to 2003.

These new measurements confirm what some of the more pessimistic scientists thought: The melting along the crucial edges of the two major ice sheets is accelerating and is in a self-feeding loop. The more the ice melts, the more water surrounds and eats away at the remaining ice.

What’s going on in Antarctica may be even more worrisome than what’s happening in Greenland, as I’ve noted (see Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier” and “Q: How much can West Antarctica plausibly contribute to sea level rise by 2100?” [A:  3 to 5 feet]).

Antarctica is disintegrating much faster than almost anybody imagined.  In 2001, the IPCC “consensus” said neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.  As Penn State climatologist Richard Alley said in March 2006, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.”

The warming of the WAIS is most worrisome (at least for this century) because it’s going to disintegrate long before the East Antarctic Ice Sheet does — since WAIS appears to be melting from underneath (i.e. the water is warming, too), and since, as I wrote in the “high water” part of my book, the WAIS is inherently less stable:

Perhaps the most important, and worrisome, fact about the WAIS is that it is fundamentally far less stable than the Greenland ice sheet because most of it is grounded far below sea level. The WAIS rests on bedrock as deep as two kilometers underwater. One 2004 NASA-led study found that most of the glaciers they were studying “flow into floating ice shelves over bedrock up to hundreds of meters deeper than previous estimates, providing exit routes for ice from further inland if ice-sheet collapse is under way.” A 2002 study in Science examined the underwater grounding lines–the points where the ice starts floating. Using satellites, the researchers determined that “bottom melt rates experienced by large outlet glaciers near their grounding lines are far higher than generally assumed.” And that melt rate is positively correlated with ocean temperature.

The warmer it gets, the more unstable WAIS outlet glaciers will become. Since so much of the ice sheet is grounded underwater, rising sea levels may have the effect of lifting the sheets, allowing more-and increasingly warmer-water underneath it, leading to further bottom melting, more ice shelf disintegration, accelerated glacial flow, and further sea level rise, and so on and on, another vicious cycle. The combination of global warming and accelerating sea level rise from Greenland could be the trigger for catastrophic collapse in the WAIS (see, for instance, here).

You can read every thing a laymen could possibly want to know about what the recent study on Antarctic warming does and doesn’t show at RealClimate here.

The authors of the Nature article find:

In Antarctica, we find significant dynamic thinning of fast-flowing ice at rates greater than plausible through interannual accumulation variability for drainage sectors….  On the glacier scale, thinning is strongest in the Amundsen Sea embayment (ASE), where it is confirmed as being localized on the fast-flowing glaciers and their tributaries (Fig. 3 [below]. The area close to the Pine Island Glacier grounding line thinned in the period 2003–2007 at up to 6 m yr-1, neighbouring Smith Glacier thinned at a rate in excess of 9 m yr-1 and Thwaites Glacier thinned at a rate of around 4 m yr-1. These rates are higher than those reported for the 2002–2004 period.

They conclude:

In Antarctica, dynamic thinning has accelerated at the grounding lines of the major glaciers of the Amundsen Sea embayment, and in places has penetrated to within 100 km of the ice divides. Ice-shelf-collapse glaciers show particularly strong thinning that has persisted for years to decades after collapse and in places has penetrated to their headwalls. Although losses are partly offset by strong gains on the spine and western flank of the Antarctic Peninsula, numerous glaciers feeding intact Antarctic Peninsula, West Antarctic and East Antarctic ice shelves are also thinning dynamically. We infer that grounded glaciers and ice streams are responding sensitively not only to ice-shelf collapse but to shelf thinning owing to ocean-driven melting. This is an apparently widespread phenomenon that does not require climate warming sufficient to initiate ice-shelf surface melt. Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized.

Did I mention the time to act is now!

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Let’s look at one of the illegally hacked emails in more detail

Here’s what we know so far

Uber-ironic 1962 ad touts oil’s ability to melt glaciers!

Here is the letter from 18 top U.S. scientific organizations:

Dear Senator:

As you consider climate change legislation, we, as leaders of scientific organizations, write to state the consensus scientific view.

Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.

These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science. Moreover, there is strong evidence that ongoing climate change will have broad impacts on society, including the global economy and on the environment. For the United States, climate change impacts include sea level rise for coastal states, greater threats of extreme weather events, and increased risk of regional water scarcity, urban heat waves, western wildfires, and the disturbance of biological systems throughout the country. The severity of climate change impacts is expected to increase substantially in the coming decades. [See Footnote #1 below]

If we are to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change, emissions of greenhouse gases must be dramatically reduced. In addition, adaptation will be necessary to address those impacts that are already unavoidable. Adaptation efforts include improved infrastructure design, more sustainable management of water and other natural resources, modified agricultural practices, and improved emergency responses to storms, floods, fires and heat waves.

We in the scientific community offer our assistance to inform your deliberations as you seek to address the impacts of climate change.

Well it’s a start (see “Publicize or perish: The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential catastrophe of climate change“).  But I still prefer the Bali declaration by more than 200 of the world’s leading climate scientists, which embraces the 2°C target and specific emissions reductions targets.

The footnote reads:

The conclusions in this paragraph reflect the scientific consensus represented by, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and U.S. Global Change Research Program. Many scientific societies have endorsed these findings in their own statements, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, and American Statistical Association.

You go, statisticians — now if you would only clue in your Danish counterpart (see “The Bjorn Irrelevancy: Duke dean disses Danish delayer“).

Here are all the organizations that signed on:

No American Physical Society?  They’ve got some explaining to do.

Kudos to all those scientific organizations who did sign on!

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Let’s look at one of the illegally hacked emails in more detail

Memo to media and deniers: If your “global cooling” piece revolves around Dr. Latif, you probably have the entire story backwards. But, at least for deniers, that is the goal.

In an interview today, Dr. Latif told me “we don’t trust our forecast beyond 2015″ and “it is just as likely you’ll see accelerated warming” after then. Indeed, in his published research, rapid warming is all-but-inevitable over the next two decades. He told me, “you can’t miss the long-term warming trend” in the temperature record, which is “driven by the evolution of greenhouse gases.”  Finally, he pointed out “Our work does not allow one to make any inferences about global warming.”

Latif’s work can be baffling, but I mostly deciphered it on this blog in 2008 (see “Nature article on ‘cooling’ confuses media, deniers: Next decade may see rapid warming“).   Latif’s Nature study is consistent with the following statements:

Here is his Nature “forecast” in green (”Each point represents a ten-year centred mean” — more discussion at the end):

Now, with the caveat that Latif claims no “skill” in any forecast after 2015 — a caveat the media and deniers never print — as you can see, their model suggests we’ll see pretty damn rapid warming in the coming decade, just as the Hadley Center did in a 2007 Science piece and just as the US Naval Research Lab and NASA recently predicted (see “Another major study predicts rapid warming over next few years — nearly 0.3°F by 2014“).

How badly have the media [and deniers] botched this reporting unintentionally [and intentionally]?  Let’s see:

World will ‘cool for the next decade’

Three mistakes in one New Scientist headline from last month — a record, I suspect.  The headline would have been more accurate if it said, “World poised to see accelerated warming in the coming decade.”

Then we have these multiply-misleading statements:

… global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years….

Dr. Mojib Latif, a prize-winning climate and ocean scientist from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel, wrote a paper last year positing that cyclical shifts in the oceans were aligning in a way that could keep the next decade or so relatively cool, even as the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming continue to increase.

Those quotes from Revkin’s recent piece are not what Latif’s paper posited.  Revkin’s entire thesis is wrong, as I showed here.  Global temperatures have been rising measurably for decades.  My extended interview with Latif makes clear just how inappropriate it is to use his work to make the case we are headed into a decade or more of being “relatively cool.”  At the very least, we are going to stay relatively hot.  But you could just as easily — and more accurately — use his work to make the case that we are headed into a decade or more of rapid warming.  He models only “internal fluctuations” around the overall anthropogenic warming trend, so if warming seems to stall for a few years, it must catch up to the long-term trend, sometimes quite rapidly.

[And I just noticed Revkin's use of the word "linked."  C'mon, status quo media!  That would be like saying South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford was "linked" to an Argentinian woman.  They had a torrid affair, and heat-trapping gases cause global warming.  That's why they're called "heat trapping gases"!  But I digress.]

George Will quoted Revkin’s error-riddled piece and then compounded the mistakes with a few outright falsehoods:

In the fifth paragraph, a “few years” became “the next decade or so,” according to Mojib Latif, a German “prize-winning climate and ocean scientist” who campaigns constantly to promote policies combating global warming. Actually, Latif has said he anticipates “maybe even two” decades in which temperatures cool.

No, Latif does not “anticipate” maybe even two decades of cooling.  He doesn’t even predict it.  Again, as Latif will happily tell anyone who asks, “my only forecast is to 2015.”

The non-existent fact-checkers of the Washington Post could not even be bothered to click on the link they inserted, which doesn’t even contain the phrase “maybe even two”!  Will just made up the quote.  And the link is to an editorial of Investors Business Daily [IBD] which is roughly equivalent to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal as a source for climate facts.

And then we have the outright lies of the Swift boat smearer.  In his never ending quest to destroy both a livable climate and the English language, the uber-disinformer and self-acknoweldged performance artist Marc Morano actually wrote:

Why does Eilperin fail to note that a top UN IPCC scientist, Mojib Latif of Kiel University in Germany told a UN conference earlier this month that he is now predicting global cooling for several decades and he admitted he was unsure how much the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) had impacted global temperatures in the past three decades.

So now Latif is “predicting global cooling for several decades” although the link to that assertion goes to Morano’s own screamingly inaccurate headline:

UN Fears (More) Global Cooling Commeth! IPCC Scientist Warns UN: We are about to enter ‘one or even 2 decades during which temps cool’

For Marc not-a-mathlete Morano, “one or even 2″ is the equivalent of “several.”  For Morano, even basic math and simple word choice is twisted beyond the bounds of reason.  No doubt in the next version of the children’s game of Telephone that Morano plays with himself, he’ll claim that Latif is predicting a century of cooling.

But Morano’s false headline — and Will’s false statement — all derive from the link Morano provides to … yes, another New Scientist story — the origin of a lot of this confused Latif nonsense, which begins:

Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter.

One of the world’s top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.

How is it possible that a scientist who says that he doesn’t have faith in the skill or accuracy of his projections after 2015 can constantly be quoted as predicting the future over the next one or even two decades?  Two reasons.

First, as “The Way Things Break” explained at length, “This was not an explicit prediction by Latif — it was a hypothetical scenario that is a real, if not necessarily likely, possibility.”

Hypothetically, it could happen — hypothetically, monkeys could fly out of my butt — but Latif was most certainly not predicting it.

How do I know?  I asked him, something that has gone out of fashion.

Again, Latif simply doesn’t make predictions beyond 2015.  As he told me, his model has “no skill” after that, which is to say it has no accuracy, and so “my only forecast is to 2015.”  Indeed, he told me “I can’t really predict two decades in the future.”

Their model has nothing whatsoever to do with anthropogenic global warming, and so it has no bearing whatsoever on the long-term temperature trend.  They do model internal ocean-driven fluctuations around that trend, but if the temperature rise stalls for any length of time, the major impact is that subsequently, the temperature rise accelerates.

Second, there is another source of confusion.  Let’s look in more detail at the paper’s key figure, the one that looks at past and (forecast) future global temperatures, “Hindcast/forecast decadal variations in global mean temperature, as compared with observations and standard climate model projections” (click to enlarge)

Let me once again try to explain this complicated figure.

The first thing to know about the figure — indeed, one major source of confusion — is that “each point represents a ten-year centred mean.” That is, each point represents the average temperature of the decade starting 5 years before that point and ending 5 years after that point.

Second, the red line is the actual global temperature data from the UK’s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research. Why does the red line stop in 1998 and not 2007? Again, it is a running 10-year mean, and the authors use data from a Hadley paper that ends around 2003 (I believe), so they can’t do a ten-year centered mean after 1998.

Third, the black line is one of the IPCC scenarios, A1B. It is a relatively high-CO2-growth model — but actual carbon emissions since 2000 have wildly outpaced it (see here).

Fourth, the solid green line is the “hindcast” of the authors — how well their model compares to actual data (and the A1B scenario). It is then extended (in dashes) through 2010 and finally to 2025, where it meets up with A1B, since their model only imposes decadal variability on the inexorable climb of human-caused global warming.

[Fifth, the short purple line is with radiative forcing (i.e greenhouse gas concentrations) frozen at 2000 levels, which, of course, didn't happen.]

So you can clearly see that the green line rises and then plateaus, repeatedly, until it really starts to take off in the decade of the 2010s. Perhaps the source of much of the media’s confusion is that the authors describe their results in the final line of the abstract this way:

Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.

But what they mean by that statement is not what a simple reading of that sentence would suggest: They do not mean that “the global surface temperature may not increase over the next ten years starting now.” What they mean is what the lead author, Dr. Noel Keenlyside, wrote me [in 2008] when I asked for a clarification:

Thus, based on our results we don’t expect an increase in the mean temperature of the next decade (2005-2015).

They are predicting no increase in average temperature of the “next decade” (2005 to 2015) over the previous decade, which, for them, is 2000 to 2010! And that’s in fact precisely what the figure shows — that the 10-year mean global temperature centered around 2010 is the roughly the same as the mean global temperature centered around 2005.

The authors have not predicted the next 10 years won’t see any warming. They have, however, offered an explanation for why temperatures have not risen very much in recent years, and, perhaps, why ocean temperatures have also not risen very much in the past few years (see here). Dr. Keenlyside continues:

However, as you correctly point out, our results show a pick up in global mean temperature for the following decade (2010-2020). Assuming a smooth transition in temperature, our results would indicate the warming picks up earlier than 2015.

Again, at that point, Dr. Keenlyside reiterates the disclaimer that this analysis can’t be used for year-by year predictions. Indeed, he notes that his main conclusion is not really quantitative, but qualitative:

Given the uncertainties that exist in such kinds of preliminary studies, I believe it is more useful to point out that climate on decadal timescales may be quite different from that expected only considering external radiative forcing (as in the IPCC). This is actually an obvious, but I believe mostly overlooked fact. Our results highlight this.

I would add two points. First, as you can clearly see in the figure — the actual observed runnning average temperatures from the Hadley Center since 1995 have been between the IPCC scenario projection and Dr. Keenlyside’s forecast, which does suggest that his model may be underestimating warming. Indeed, the lack of agreement between the model’s “hindcast” and actual temperatures since 1995 should remind us again to view this only as a very preliminary analysis with predictive ability that is much more qualitative than quantitative.

Second, this general prediction — internal variability leading to slower than expected warming in recent years through 2010, followed by accelerated warming — is almost exactly the same prediction that the Hadley Center made last summer in Science (see here). They concluded:

… at least half of the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.

… [2014 will] “be 0.30° ± 0.2°C warmer than the observed value for 2004.”

Similarly, the US Naval Research Lab and NASA just predicted in a new Geophysical Research Letters study (see “here“):

From 2009 to 2014, projected rises in anthropogenic influences and solar irradiance will increase global surface temperature 0.15 ±0.03 °C, at a rate 50% greater than predicted by IPCC.

So I take all three of these admittedly preliminary short-term forecasts to suggest that warming is going to be a roller coaster ride, with much short-term variation, but we are probably going to get quite hot quite fast early in the 2010s.

One final caveat: After reading my first draft of the 2008 post (which I subsequently revised), Dr. Keenlyside wrote me, “All our figures are decadal means, and it is hard to say (due to high frequency internal variability) at which point [after 2010] a rapid increase will occur.” That is, his study does not necessarily predict the rapid warming will actually start, in say, 2011, though his results are not inconsistent with that possibility. He reiterates that his paper is not designed to make such detailed year-by-year predictions. Indeed, the paper was designed to show that any such predictions are complicated by decadal-scale climate factors.

So I think it is quite safe to say that:

Latif told me that at the request of the NYT, he submitted an op-ed to clarify his work.  That will clear things up once and for all.  Or not.

As a great sage once said, “Anyone who isn’t confused here doesn’t really know what’s going on.”

UPDATE: More from Deep Climate:  anatomy-of-a-lie-how-morano-and-gunter-spun-latif-out-of-control and here.

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Climate Central’s analysis found that New York City will see a three-fold increase in the number of 90-degree-plus days in August by midcentury.Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist

By some measures, the Chicago and New York of tomorrow are likely to be hotter than the Atlanta of today—at least in August.

Climate Central’s analysis of projected midcentury August temperatures for 21 major American cities, under a fairly conservative warming scenario, suggests some startling changes ahead.  Today, the only cities on the list where more than half of the days in an average August exceed 95° F are Phoenix and Dallas; by the 2050s, Houston, Sacramento, Tampa Bay, and Orlando could join them.  Today, seven cities break 90° F on at least half of the days of a typical August; by the 2050s, they could be joined by Atlanta, Denver, Indianapolis, Miami, and Philadelphia.  By midcentury, a dozen cities could average more than one day over 100° F per August, where today only three share that dubious distinction. (See below for a list of detailed results for all cities analyzed.)

These patterns match a broad finding in climate research that what seems to be a small amount of general global warming could have a large effect on weather extremes—including extreme heat events, which are forecast to become more frequent, more intense, and longer lasting (see U.S. Climate Change Science Program report).

Extreme weather and climate events can cause significant damages, and heat waves are considered public health emergencies. Hot temperatures contribute to increased emergency-room visits and hospital admissions for cardiovascular disease, and can cause heat stroke and other life-threatening conditions.

Events such as the Chicago heat wave of 1995 and the 2003 European heat wave [PDF], which killed an estimated 40,000 people, have proven especially deadly to vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and persons with respiratory illnesses.

Climate Central used established scientific methods (more detail on the next page) to take results averaged from 12 major global climate models and apply them to 21 American cities.  The resulting projections should be taken not as concrete predictions but rather as best guesses within a range of uncertainty.  However, all 12 models used are unanimous in projecting more hot days by the middle of the century than we have today.  For its projections, Climate Central used a moderate-high scenario of greenhouse-gas emissions.  The scenario and resulting projections of risk currently appear to be conservative, since global emissions have exceeded the scenario in recent years.

Find out more and watch city-specific videos at Climate Central.

  Average number of days each August over … 90°F95°F100°F City1980’s & 1990’sProjection: 2050’s1980’s & 1990’sProjection: 2050’s1980’s & 1990’sProjection: 2050’s Atlanta 11 25 2 14 0 3 Boston 3 8 0 3 0 0 Chicago 4 14 1 6 0 2 Cleveland 2 10 0 3 0 0 Dallas 26 29 19 26 10 19 Denver 7 22 1 12 0 3 Detroit 2 14 0 5 0 1 Houston 23 29 6 20 1 4 Indianapolis 5 18 1 8 0 2 Los Angeles 6 14 2 6 1 2 Miami 17 30 0 11 0 0 Minneapolis 2 8 0 3 0 1 New York 4 12 1 4 0 1 Orlando 19 29 1 18 0 1 Philadelphia 6 20 1 9 0 2 Phoenix 31 31 30 31 27 30 Sacramento 20 26 12 20 7 12 San Francisco 0 1 0 0 0 0 Seattle 1 5 0 1 0 0 Tampa Bay 22 30 2 22 0 2 Washington, DC 10 19 3 10 0 3

Analysis methods

Climate Central’s analysis is based on recent data from weather stations, regional-scale outputs from climate projection models, and a common technique for deducing best-guess local climate projections from regional ones.  In its essence, this method involves calculating differences between current and future global climate model simulations, and applying them to observed climate data from the same vicinity.

Climate Central first identified weather stations closest to each city on the list, and then found the nearest regional location with model projections available.

For current patterns, Climate Central looked at August daily high temperatures at each weather station for 1981-2000, counting the total days exceeding 90°, 95° or 100° F over those 20 years, dividing by 20, and rounding off.  The answers for each city were the average number of days reaching above each temperature in one August during the 1980s or 1990s—roughly today’s climate.  (Any given August might have many more or fewer hot days.)

For future projections, Climate Central averaged outputs from 12 major climate models at the available regional location nearest to each city for 2046-2064, and for 1981-2000 (simulated values, not actual ones).  We then calculated changes in the 20-year average monthly maximum temperature between these simulated future and current climates, and added the differences to the actual 1981-2000 weather station data from each city (already described).

This last step created new, simulated data for each city for 20 Augusts in the middle of this century.  We then applied the same method that we used with actual 1981-2000 temperatures to estimate the average number of days over each temperature threshold in this future scenario.

The resulting projections give long-term averages, not predictions for any individual year; actual outcomes will vary significantly from year to year due to the natural variability of climate.  Furthermore, because the modeling and methods used involve uncertainty, the projections should be taken as best guesses within a range of uncertainty.  True long-term averages will likely prove somewhat higher or lower than the projections here.  However, all twelve models are unanimous in projecting increased hot days from the present by the middle of the century.

All model outputs used were based on a medium-high greenhouse gas emissions scenario called “A1B” by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions this decade have exceeded the A1B scenario thus far.  This makes the projections here conservative, matching a future in which emissions are reduced compared to the current trend.

The techniques and general climate projections used are well established in the scientific literature (for example, see here and here).

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‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

So a guy writes in to our local paper saying climate change is a big scam, nobody ever shows the actual data, blah blah blah.

I usually ignore these things like I ignore the moon landing deniers and the flat earthers, but this time I had a second in the morning and so I sent him a few things I keep on my desk like a soldier keeps weapons nearby: Naomi Oreskes Science article from 2004 (2004!) that shows that there are NO peer reviewed scientific papers that say anything other than that the climate is warming and it's human caused; the latest NASA global temperature data going back to the 1800s; and a publication on the disproportionate warming in the United States by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization. And I mail it to the dude. Took me five minutes. Advancing the cause of information vs. myth.

Then guy calls me back, leaves a message. First, he's alarmed that I found his address, as if I were going to come over and lecture him on climate science (If you're paranoid, maybe not a great idea to write to the local paper ... too much exposure). Then, in his message, he says, very nicely: "Thanks for the information. You're not going to change my mind though. There are tons of studies that show this isn't happening."

But brother: I sent you information from the most respected scientific journal saying that there isn't such information out there!

What is wrong with people? I know this discussion is pointless--it's like trying to convince someone to change their religion. But I like to engage in the fight every once in a while as a sort of bloodsport, a fight club. It gets the blood flowing, like a good workout at the gym or a big cup of coffee.

--

Arm yourself with Grist's "How to talk to a climate skeptic."

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The following essay was written by William B. Monahan, Senior GIS Scientist with Audubon California.

The Yellow-billed Magpie’s native habitat in California is threatened by climate change.Alison Sheehey / California Audubon SocietyThey traipse through forest, grass and wetland, through mud, rain and even snow. They carry binoculars and take careful notes of everything they see.

These are the folks—thousands of dedicated bird watchers—that for more than 100 years have been taking part in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, documenting fluctuations in bird populations the old-fashioned way: counting birds one by one, year after year.

Old fashioned as it is, this data has proven invaluable for researchers through several generations. Now, we at Audubon California have found a way to use the work of these volunteers to shed new light on climate change, one of the most challenging issues for bird conservation today.

For years, people have made substantial investments in conservation—billions and billions of dollars—with their fingers crossed that their work won’t simply be erased by climate change in the coming decades. If we’re going to ensure a future for birds and habitats, then we need to understand the changes that are coming.

Modern science provides a number of tools that enable us to create viable models of the potential future impacts of climate change on the environment. However, sophisticated GIS mapping and climate data are even more useful when we have historical information to both generate and test complex models.

Enter all those birders standing in the rain diligently counting Sandhill Cranes, Wilson’s Warblers and hundreds of other bird species in California and across the United States.

The history of scientific discovery is generally one of newer technology and methods replacing old ones: the telescope replacing the naked eye, the transistor replacing the vacuum tube, etc.

But this new work in the area of climate change is different. Once we combine these two technologies—the decidely low-tech counting of birds and the high-tech computer modeling and mapping—we make some surprising discoveries that wouldn’t have been possible with either on their own.

Perhaps the most notable of these is the fact that while the consequences of inaction are still great, we have a startling amount of power to lessen the impacts of global warming on our wildlife and natural landscapes. While climate change could cause significant range declines in up to a third of California’s birds, these impacts can be greatly lessened for many species if we take immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Take, for instance, the Yellow-billed Magpie, a highly social bird that lives only in California’s Central Valley and Coast Ranges. This species could lose as much as 75 percent of its range under the worst emissions scenarios (a loss that in combination with other pressures such as habitat loss due to development would likely result in the bird’s extinction). However, the magpie could lose as little as 9 percent of its range if we take extra strong measures to reduce greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere.

Meanwhile, the California Gnatcatcher, long a barometer for conservation in California, could lose as much as 56 percent of its range, or as little as 7 percent, depending on how well we address climate change.

These findings are quite different from the apocalyptic predictions that often prompt people to ask what possible difference can it make if they drive a hybrid car or use compact fluorescent light bulbs on their porch. What this is telling us is that, with regard to the future impacts of climate change on birds and other wildlife, the die is not cast. Research is increasingly showing us how we can beat climate change to the punch, and protect much of what makes California and the United States special.

Thankfully, California lawmakers have already put this state ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, and there will be a move in the coming year to provide even further support to help birds and wildlife adapt to changes in the climate that are already underway. The rest of the country is following closely behind with legislation on the national level.

There are two ways you can help in this effort:

The first is by taking part this December in the Annual Christmas Bird Count (learn more at audubon.org), or in one of Audubon California’s volunteer science projects year-round.

You can also let your representatives in Washington know that you support the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (HR 2454, often called the Waxman-Markey bill), which represents this country’s first real effort to reduce global greenhouse gases. The Audubon Action Center has resources to help you contact your lawmakers.

—

Track the debate and take action >>>Grist Editor’s Note

Climate Citizens call to action: If you receive a response to your letter or email to your senators, pass along the response to the Audubon Society and Grist. Climate Citizens is Grist’s accountability effort to make sure politicians in the nation’s capital speak openly and clearly to the voters about their views on climate change. Email Grist at

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Climate change is happening. The science is sound. But plenty of people and organizations with various motives (all dubious) are spending millions to sow seeds of doubt among the American public.

Following on our in-depth series, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic, Grist will launch an occasional feature that tracks the latest global warming denialisms and skeptics garbage, making sure to point readers to the real story.

Jeff Jacoby The conservative columnist for the Boston Globe coughs up a huge hairball of climate disinformation in his July 1 piece, citing real climate scientists who purportedly doubt that mankind’s reliance on fossil fuels is warming the globe.

The Boston Phoenix’s David S. Bernstein tears into Jacoby, noting that his column is full of the same horse manure being shopped around by the same small group of climate deniers, some of whom, it turns out, completely agree with the science of global warming. Go figure.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute claims that the EPA suppressed an internal report raising serious doubts about the science of global warming. The free-market think tank says longtime EPA staffer Al Carlin was told to shut up when his work cast doubts on the science used to justify the agency’s finding that CO2 emissions pose a threat and, therefore, should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Sadly, CBSNews.com and too many others picked the story up and ran rather one-sided reports. Now, unsurprisingly, conservative lawmakers are demanding an investigation.

Grist’s Jon Hiskes called up CEI to hear their side of things. Well, there’s nothing to it.  Carlin is an economist, not a climatologist, and the EPA says its managers went out of their way to give Carlin a platform for his skepticism. In the end, he was told to butt out because, well, he’s an economist trying to weigh in on a scientific report. And as for the science in Carlin’s document, turns out it’s full of holes too, according to a detailed assessment by REAL NASA CLIMATE EXPERT Gavin Schmidt. Newsweek gets in on the debunking too, while Media Matters dissects the shoddy reporting of the CEI allegations. And don’t miss this great TPM piece.

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Big Blue is rolling out a wide range of "green" services, including research into a new generation of batteries that could double the range of electric vehicles.Courtesy IBMBack in the day when I had to convince East Coast editors that green tech wasn't some crunchy California fad but Big Business, I often cited IBM as Exhibit A that Fortune 500 companies saw a lot of green to be made in green.

Over the past several years, Big Blue has been recycling and repurposing a panoply of technologies to create a portfolio of environmental services -- everything from a traffic congestion pricing system in Stockholm to a smart water and electricity grid for Malta.

I recently ran into C. Spike Narayan, manager of science and technology at IBM's Almaden Research Center, at one of those green business dinner gatherings held with some frequency at various upscale San Francisco restaurants. He mentioned that his Silicon Valley lab was working on a new battery technology with the potential to extend the range of electric cars to more than 400 miles per charge and make it possible to use the batteries to store electricity generated by solar power plants and wind farms.

Narayan wouldn't say much more than that at the time. Last week, however, I headed back into the city for another green tech dinner -- put on by IBM -- where details of the battery project were provided, as well as other new Big Green initiatives from Big Blue.

IBM hopes to exploit its expertise in supercomputing, nanotechnology, green chemistry and materials science to develop lithium-air technology. As Narayan explained it me, such batteries could pack 10 times the energy density of the lithium ion batteries now used in electric cars because they use air drawn in from outside the battery as a reactant. That means lithium-air storage devices weigh less than lithium-ion batteries, which also improves performance of electric cars. It's not a new idea, but no one has yet created a rechargeable lithium air battery.

If lithium air proves feasible and cost-effective, it could ice the ICE (internal combustion engine) and turn intermittent renewable energy sources into 24/7 power plants. The net-zero home could become a reality with solar panels on the roof and a bank of lithium air batteries in the basement to provide power when the sun isn't shining.

But the technological challenges are immense, which is why only a few startups and the U.S. Department of Defense have attempted to tackle lithium air.

First, you have to figure out how to strip the water from the air before it enters the battery. "You need a membrane technology that can carefully transport only oxygen extremely well while excluding everything else," says Narayan.

That's where IBM's long-time work on membranes for desalinization plants comes into play. Given that the lithium air reaction deposits layers of lithium oxide on the membrane, IBM will need to manipulate materials on the nano level to keep the batteries functioning. Researchers will tap Big Blue supercomputers to model the performance of various potential catalysts for the lithium air reaction.

Even IBM can't do this alone, however, and the company is seeking to form an alliance with universities and government laboratories. "We have no desire to make batteries," says Rich Lechner, IBM's vice president for energy and the environment. "We will license" the intellectual property.

Adds Narayan: "This is a five to 10 year project. The first phase is to go after the big science problems. Then we're ready to engage with automotive companies and battery manufacturers."

(The news comes as the U.S. Department of Energy announced it would loan nearly $8 billion to Ford, Nissan and Silicon Valley electric car startup Tesla Motors to develop electric cars and battery manufacturing capacity.)

Another IBM green tech development that could have significant impact in our data-dependent global economy: The company has built a new supercomputer called the Aquasar at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich that water-cools not just each rack of servers but each individual processor. The waste heat is then used to heat the building during the cold Swiss winter. The result: a 40 percent cut in energy consumption.

And in another sign that tackling corporate America's CO2 addiction is too big for even a tech behemoth, IBM unveiled Green Sigma -- a new alliance with erstwhile competitors like software giant SAP and networking kingpin Cisco, along with Johnson Controls and Honeywell, that will cooperatively devise solutions for reducing companies' carbon footprints.

Green Sigma ... gotta be a cartoon superhero spinoff in there somewhere.

--

Below: An IBM video about the Aquasar supercomputer.

Read past Green State columns by Todd Woody.

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In “The Limits of Science Diplomacy,” SciDev.net Director David Dickson argues that scientific collaboration can achieve only very limited diplomatic victories. A conference hosted by the Royal Society in London earlier this month, entitled “New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy” (agenda), seems to have arrived at a similar conclusion.

But this view of science diplomacy is overly pessimistic. It sets unrealistically high expectations such dialogue could never hope to achieve. Science diplomacy is not meant to solve all aspects of conflicts or distrustful relationships, so setting such a high bar is a bit of a straw man. Science, as well as dialogue on the management of shared natural resources, remains an under-utilized and under-studied tool for trust-building, so it is premature to declare it a failure before we have sufficient evidence for evaluation.

Veterans of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and other Cold War-era scientific dialogues might suggest we are neglecting some rich experiences from this era. It bears remembering that Pugwash was awarded the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize (and current U.S. Science Adviser John Holdren delivered the acceptance speech as then executive director of Pugwash).

A distinct but related arena for further policy attempts and research inquiries is environmental peacebuilding, where mutual interdependence around natural resources provides pathways for dialogue in the midst of conflict. The establishment of the Cordillera del Condor Transboundary Protected Area between Ecuador and Peru was a result of integrating joint environmental management structures in the 1998 peace agreement that ended a long-festering border conflict. Negotiation over shared resources, such as water, can be a diplomatic lifeline for otherwise-hostile countries, such as Israel and Jordan, which held secret “picnic table” talks to manage the Jordan River while they were officially at war. And the U.S. military has successfully uses environmental cooperation to engage both friends and adversaries.

Collaboration on scientific and environmental issues won’t solve all our problems. And defining and identifying success remains a fundamental challenge when success is the absence of something (conflict). But let’s not retreat to the common church-and-state division where scientists fear being “contaminated” by participating in policy-relevant dialogues. And let’s certainly not declare science diplomacy a failure—and stop trying to make it a success—based on unrealistic expectations for the benefits such efforts might produce.

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This here is a cinquain! My seventh-grade teacher would be so proud. Check out the growing collection of weekly climate-news poems.

Report:
We’re in trouble.
Frost, blight, drought, pests, high seas.
We should move to safer ground now!
But where?

NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco and Obama science adviser John Holdren unveiled the government’s new, massive report on climate change impacts.Kate Sheppard / Grist

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Photo: Sarah van SchagenSomewhere off Canada's Pacific Coast, the wind is filling the colorful octopus-adorned sails of the Good Ship Ocean Watch as it weaves its way clockwise around North and South America on a "voyage of discovery." Manning that ship is a crew of seasoned sailors, educators, scientists, and writers -- with a singular, overarching goal in mind: "raising awareness about important ocean conservation and marine science issues."

But Around the Americas isn't your average awareness-raising campaign, Captain Mark Schrader explained as his crew readied the boat for their inaugural launch May 31 from Seattle's Shilshole Marina. "We're trying to do more than just say 'hey, there's a problem here.' We're trying to say why it's a problem, here's what the problem is, and here's what we can do to mitigate it."

To that end, the crew will be doing much more than hoisting sails and conducting research experiments. They'll be making more than 30 stops along the 25,000 mile route to invite people aboard, give presentations in local schools, and host public forums. They're also encouraging local ocean conservation groups to use their arrival to champion what's going on in their community, Schrader said.

To further the reach of the Around the Americas voyage ("to the people of Iowa!"), the educators at Seattle's Pacific Science Center have developed a K-8 ocean science curriculum that will incorporate data from the journey and be accessible online in Spanish and English.

And the journey doesn't end at the last port of call. The legacy of the trip will continue in the form of a book by writer Herb McCormick and a documentary by filmmaker Lazslo Pal.

"All of this is successful and all of the money spent is worth it, we think, if we have an exponential reach after [the launch]," Schrader said. "If this gets into not two schools, but 200,000; if this [message] starts reaching millions of people."

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To study the conditions of sea ice, one must walk very carefully across it. Here, two members of the Catlin Arctic Survey team maneuver a supply sled through a rough patch.Courtesy Catlin Arctic Survey

To millions around the world, Pen Hadow -- the first person ever to trek to the North Pole alone without any support -- is simply one of the most extraordinary people alive. To me, however, he is also the man who didn't come to dinner.

Let me explain. One day last year Pen arranged to come to our village for dinner with me and the local Member of Parliament who was also, at the time, the shadow minister of the environment. The MP and his wife, Peter and Claire Ainsworth, got ready to host him in their home, only to receive a message that he was physically unable to get there.

So my wife and I had a convivial evening alone with the Ainsworths, all of us much amused that the man who had unhesitatingly taken to his feet when a ski broke two thirds of the way to the Pole -- and who had frequently swum through freezing waters when they barred his way -- had been unable to make it through England's placid home counties.

To be fair, I seem to remember that there was a reason for his inability to show, and he did turn up for tea with us a few weeks later. Hadow then told us of an expedition he was trying to finance to measure the condition of the Arctic's ice. He was anxious to get the job done this year so that the results could be presented to December's vital climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

It takes quite a lot to deter a man who once banged an attacking polar bear over the head with a saucepan ("The 'boing' on its skull freaked it out and made it run", he recalls.) Inevitably, Hadow pulled off the new expedition, with support from Prince Charles, the World Wildlife Fund and the United Nations Environment Programme.

So, with his mission just completed, I rang him up at the weekend while he was recovering in Ottawa to ask out how it had gone. He described the task he and his equally intrepid companions -- fellow Brits Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley -- had just completed as being "hunter gatherers for information." And, indeed, the data they brought back is badly needed.

Satellite imagery shows that the extent of the polar ice cap is shrinking dramatically -- at a rate of about eleven percent a decade since 1979 (losing an area the size of Alaska in 2007 alone). But the thickness of the ice is also vitally important, and neither satellites nor submarines are very good at measuring it. The only real solution is to get out and do it on the ground, or rather on the ice, and that's a job for someone like Rupert Nigel Pendrill Hadow (to relay his full name).

Pen Hadow works the manual ice drill the team had to resort to after their ice-penetrating radar kit malfunctioned.Courtesy Catlin Arctic SurveyHe and his team set out from northern Canada in early March to walk 1,200 kilometers to the North Pole, dragging behind them an ice-penetrating radar kit that would measure its thickness every ten centimeters of the way. To their "huge frustration," the device failed to work for most of the way and they had to rely instead on boring holes in the ice and using an adapted tape measure.

The results were surprising. Hadow told me that he had been advised by some of the world's leading experts that their route would mainly take them over "multi-year" ice that had long been there, failing to melt in the summer. But as it happens, Hadow went on, only two of the team's 1,500 bore holes found multi-year ice. Virtually all the rest, at an average of 1.774 meters thick, turned out to be "first year ice" that had only frozen this past winter, and -- since the Arctic sea ice moves around -- had presumably drifted onto the line of their trek.

That, in itself, does not reveal a great deal about the thickness of the ice-cap. Indeed, what the measurements did show was slightly reassuring. For example, said Pen, "it was thicker than would be expected for first year ice at this stage of the season," suggesting that "this could be a recovery year" in the Arctic -- at least for the time being.

But it will have revealed valuable scientific data that will now be analyzed by Prof. Wieslaw Maslowski of the U.S. Naval Post Graduate School, one of the more pessimistic authorities on the Arctic ice.

Naturally, there were some narrow escapes for Hadow and team, most notably when they woke at 3:15 a.m. one morning to find the ice floe on which they had camped was beginning to break up. Somehow, with the aid of torches in the pitch dark, they managed to find the single two-foot wide spot where their floe abutted a neighboring one, allowing them to escape in time.

So perhaps it's not too much to hope that Hadow will manage to find his way back to our village to report back in full on his recent adventure After all, he has still to have that dinner.

--

Video: Pen Hadow discusses sea ice conditions during 2009 mission:

Video: NASA animation of sea-ice changes over the past three decades (via WWF YouTube channel):

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Antarctica is warming rapidly, climate scientists report, upsetting fragile ecosystems and threatening the world with a significant rise in sea-levels. With the largely uninhabited and frozen continent melting before humanity's very eyes, what better time to roll out a new documentary about the coldest, driest and windiest place on Earth.

Billed as a journey to Antarctica for scientific discovery, "Ice People," a documentary set to air tonight on the Sundance Channel, is really more of an exercise in landscape cinematography.

Two-thirds of the 77-minute film is devoted to capturing some breathtaking panoramas, which was no easy feat. Filmmaker Anne Aghion shot in -60 degree F temperatures to capture some rarely seen images of Antarctica and the people who live and work there. At one point Aghion braved 95-mph winds to document the repair of a windmill on the Ross Sea Archipelago. (They use wind power in Antarctica! -- who knew?)

But the result of a film heavy on snow-covered mountains and wind-blown ice and snow is that "Ice People" comes devoid of plot. Lacking a narrator, what descriptive information a viewer gets is from the handful of interviews with the four research scientists who are the principal subjects of the film, and a single scene devoted to documenting operations at McMurdo Station, the largest bastion of humanity on the continent.

When it's not ogling the landscape, the film followed two field geologists, Drs. Allan Ashworth and Adam Lewis, and two undergraduate students, Kelly Gorz and Andrew Podoll, looking for evidence of a warmer past in ancient Antarctic lakebeds. During the course of the filming, the researchers made a breakthrough discovery of exquisitely preserved moss and leaf fossils, as well as a layer of volcanic ash that allowed the scientists to date the abrupt collapse of a warm Antarctic climate to about 14 million years ago. The discovery of Antarctica's warm past made headlines around the world last year, but you wouldn't know that from the film, which glossed over mention of the discovery to make time for more footage of the scientists digging holes in a field of boulders.

In the final 15 minutes, film's focus shifts dramatically from the Antarctic landscape to the lives of the research scientists. Here, at last, are some one-on-one interviews with the four scientists as well as scenes of their austere living conditions camped out on a frozen lakebed and debating subjects such as the intersection of religion and science (not much intersection, they agreed) and how it feels not to shower for four months (gross).

As awe-inspiring as the cinematography was, had I not been watching "Ice People" for a review, I probably would have given up after the first 20 minutes. The novelty of footage from the exotic Antarctic landscape wore off well before the much more compelling stories of the research scientists ever began to take shape.

But for anyone looking to gaze on one of the last untouched wildernesses on the planet, the footage Aghion recorded is hard to beat.

"Ice People" airs on the Sundance Channel Tuesday night at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT.

Watch the trailer:

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Editor's Note: Tom Philpott's April 28 piece on the swine flu pandemic, which raised the question of whether there is a link between the virus' emergence in Mexico and the presence nearby of factory-scale pork farms, sparked a vigorous debate on the Society for Environmental Journalists listserv. Merritt Clifton was one of several writers to take issue with Tom's piece. At Grist's invitation, he put his critique into an essay form, which is posted below:

--

Thirty years ago this month I knelt beside the Yamaska River in southern Quebec with a test kit -- downstream from several of the then-largest, factory-type pig farms in North America (which happened to lie upstream from the water intakes for the cities of Farnham and St. Hyacinthe) -- and found that the Yamaska literally contained more extraneous chemicals from pig excrement than H2O.

The predictable happened as the weather warmed. By midsummer thousands of people were ill. My exposés helped to bring the construction of new water filtration and treatment plants--but did not slow the growth of factory farming. Three out of every five Quebec farmers sold out to the mega-conglomerates or were forced out of business during the next 10 years.

Twenty-three years ago this month I was the first volunteer firefighter to arrive at burning factory farrowing barn. Ten minutes ahead of the trucks with the equipment, I found no way to free any sows and piglets before all roasted alive in their steel farrowing crates, squealing in terror and agony.

As a lifelong second-generation vegetarian, and longtime vegan, I would like nothing more, for both humane and environmental reasons, than to see an end to factory farming.

Yet in exposing and attacking the many and often grotesquely obvious excesses of factory farms, I believe it is essential at all times to be fair, be accurate, and not amplify allegations which may be unsubstantiated--not least because amplifying an unfounded or premature allegation tends to erode the credibility of the critic.

As of the moment, about two weeks into formal medical forensic investigation, no one knows just what the source of the mutant H1N1 virus first discovered in the Vera Cruz region of Mexico might have been.

Much attention has been given to the case of five-year-old Edgar Hernandez, of the La Gloria hamlet in Perote, near the Granjas Carroll factory pig farm. Hernandez--who survived--is the earliest victim of the mutant H1N1 virus from whom a sample was preserved. La Gloria residents blamed Granjas Carroll for an outbreak of illness in February and March 2009. Officially attributed to biting flies, the illness produced flu-like symptoms.

Granjas Carroll is half-owned by Smithfield, the world's largest factory pig producer, involved in pollution incidents at multiple sites on several continents. As the mutant H1N1 virus is a variant of an illness that is generically if somewhat inaccurately termed "swine flu," one might be tempted to presume that this disease, often lethal in Mexico, has incubated and emerged as result of the intensely unnatural manner in which Smithfield raises pigs for slaughter.

Prudence dictates waiting for substantial medical evidence. Though the Hernandez sample is the oldest that exists, flu-like illnesses had already been reported throughout the region for weeks. Granjas Carroll, however, reported no unusual disease outbreaks among either pigs or staff. Biting insects associated with pig waste may have infected La Gloria residents with something, but many insect-borne illnesses produce flu-like symptoms, including the malarial and rickettsial disease families, which are of protozoan and bacterial rather than viral origin, and are known to occur in the vicinity.

There are reports that at least one migrant worker returned to La Gloria with a flu-like illness contracted in the U.S., and spread it, before Hernandez fell ill. The nature of influenza is that a new strain may be quite widely distributed before it turns deadly. Often the deadly turn comes in a place where environmental conditions, weather, or a population already weakened by some other disease produce unique susceptibility. La Gloria may be such a place, and the presence of the pig farm may be a factor.

Yet even this would be far from indicting the pig farm for the disease itself, which may have emerged thousands of miles away, and might as easily have arrived with the migrant worker as it appears to have spread outward from Mexico, once people started looking for it.

By then the mutant H1N1 virus might already have been distributed worldwide. But only in the right--or wrong--conditions would it behave differently enough from any other flu to be identified.

Perhaps the migrant worker, or some other person who was the actual Vector One, contracted the disease while working at a U.S. factory farm. Or perhaps Vector One wrapped sandwiches at a fast food restaurant, and picked up the various reassorted "swine flu" strains that comprise this new variant of H1N1 from co-workers who had other versions of common flus.

Until the medical evidence is in, we just don't know. And focusing prematurely on the presumed factory-farm connection could prove a dangerous distraction from identifying and responding to the actual source of a potential pandemic.

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The White House today announced the members of President Obama's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. The distinguished group will be co-lead (unsurprisingly) by John Holdren, the president's top science adviser and an environmental science expert.

Other climate/energy experts on the panel include:

Rosina Bierbaum, a widely-recognized expert in climate-change science and ecology, is Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. Her PhD is in evolutionary biology and ecology. She served as Associate Director for Environment in OSTP in the Clinton Administration, as well as Acting Director of OSTP in 2000-2001. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mario Molina is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as well as Director of the Mario Molina Center for Energy and Environment in Mexico City. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his role in elucidating the threat to the Earth's ozone layer of chlorofluorocarbon gases. The only Mexican-born Nobel laureate in science, he served on PCAST for both Clinton terms. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.

Ernest J. Moniz is a Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, Director of the Energy Initiative, and Director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at MIT. His research centers on energy technology and policy, including the future of nuclear power, coal, natural gas, and solar energy in a low-carbon world. He served as Under Secretary of the Department of Energy (1997-2001) and Associate Director for Science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1995-1997).

Daniel Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also Director of the Harvard University-wide Center for Environment. He was trained as a marine geochemist and has employed a variety of methods to study the carbon cycle and climate over a wide range of Earth's history. Awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 2000, he has recently been working on technological approaches to mitigating future climate change.

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