Current sea surface temperatures

Seeing this, it seems somehow unsurprising that we got three simultaneous Atlantic Hurricanes, including two that repeatedly made landfall as Major hurricanes. That many millions of square miles of high-energy water are not natural, and not good news.

Gloom and Doom from the happiest country on Earth

I will say first that I find it difficult to imagine any rich modern country taking climate change more seriously, or being more eager to take concrete actions to oppose it, than does Denmark. Danish individuals, society and government, including every political party, acknowledge the reality of anthropogentic climate change and the very real dangers it poses to (very flat) Denmark and the world. Danes know that Denmark is too small for a drop in its emissions to make much of a difference, but they seem more than willing to do their part by reducing energy use, subsidizing alternative power sources (etc.) and applying what limited diplomatic influence they have. Denmark is economically comfortable enough to really invest in these things and has both a highly functional government and a populace willing to implement the policies that their leaders decide upon. I am sure there are people in Denmark who disagree, but I haven't met (or even heard of) them. Unlike most countries, they have made their emission reduction targets law (although how such a law is enforced is unclear to me).

Because of the above, not despite it, Denmark convinces me that humanity will rush headlong into global ecological disaster. I say this because if any country has the willingness and ability to implement the policies needed to avoid disaster, it is Denmark, and they are not there. For while Denmark invests in weaning itself off fossil fuels, it also invests very heavily in the fossil fuel industry, notably North Sea oil and gas exploration. The Danish government surely believes, probably correctly, that the will does not exist in the populace to give up on the profits of involvement in the scramble for hydrocarbons. So while Denmark is trying hard not to burn those fuels here in Denmark, it is trying hard to sell them to someone else who will burn them, doing every bit as much to submerge the Danish lowlands (aka Denmark). Danes know this, but like the rest of the world (I'm looking at you Canadian Tar Sands) they seem to feel  (again probably correctly) that if they don't do it someone else (Norway, UK, etc.) will.

So I can imagine a possible future in which all countries have become as convinced as Denmark is that humans are hurtling into climate disaster and need to hit the breaks, and that would be great, but I have trouble imagining that even in such a world this peculiar form of the tragedy of the commons would be escapable. As long as there is demand for fossil fuels, there will always be others who will extract and sell them because if they don't do it someone else will. And there will always be countries who, even if they fully understand the global situation, need inexpensive fuel and will burn those hydrocarbons. And as long as that is the case, no amount of individual turning down of heat and biking to work is going to make a big enough difference to matter. The problem is structural and that structure is disastrously profitable.

Unless, of course, and this is me looking for that ray of hope, other sources of energy rapidly become so much cheaper than fossil fuels that there is just not much profit to be made in extracting oil, coal or gas. In which case, we will be able to say that all those solar panels installed in the gloom of Denmark were not in vain, but were a vote of confidence and a wise subsidy for the development of alternative energy

Emissions of the aged

Projections of future carbon-dioxide emissions are complicated. How will energy consumption habits change as societies get richer or more urban? What mix of sources will we be getting our energy from?

My friend and colleague Emilo Zagheni decided we should make the calculus that much more complicated (and informative) by also asking how the aging of the population will influence carbon outputs. A demographer's demographer, which Emilio surely is, is never happy with any calculation that does not include age-structure in one way or another.

This article in the Economist summarizes what he did and what he found. As people get older, they tend to consume more and more, emitting more and more carbon, until 65ish, at which point consumption tends to start declining. See the graph, and the analysis, in the Economist, or the original in the journal Demography (2011) pp 371-399.  The punchline for the carbon-watcher is that the changing age-structure will tend to increase carbon emissions until about 2050, after which point such a large portion of the population will be above 65 (I'll be 73) that the age effect will begin to marginally decrease emissions.

I should finish with a quote from Ron Lee, Professor of both Demography and Economics at UC Berkeley, who both Emilio and I studied under. Ron was one of the inventors of the widely used Lee-Carter method* (1992) for forecasting future mortality patterns. Seventeen years later, I asked Ron how well his forecasts for the first 17 years matched what had actually happened in those years. He cocked his head slightly to the left, sighed sagely and said, "Well, demographers are well aware that our projections don't always fair so well in a complex world. But we console ourselves with the knowledge that we do much better than the economists."


* The original article has been cited more than 1000 times in the peer-reviewed literature, and modifications are used by the US Census Bureau, the UN, and so forth.

Jon Asks: 2

In the Laura Ingalls Wilder book The Long Winter, Laura's father says that you can predict the severity of a winter by observing the thickness of muskrat nests in the summer. Muskrats, he says, will build thicker nests during the summer if the following winter is going to be relatively colder, and vice versa with thinner nests and relatively warmer winters. Has this folk wisdom been investigated? Is it true? And if so, where can I get my own muskrat colony?

I can't find anything on Google Scholar or Web of Science indicating that anyone has published anything about muskrats and weather prediction, other than this:

Man's natural craving for advance knowledge of coming weather extends thousands of years back of any attempts at scientific weather forecasting. Realizing that he has not the necessary foresight himself, he has imagined animals to be endowed with some peculiar sense which enables them to know, weeks or months ahead, what the weather will be. Thus a large group of animal weather proverbs has come into existence. Millions of people believe that the thickness of fur on a muskrat, or the number of nuts stored by a squirrel, or a supposedly early migration of certain birds, indicates a severe winter. Yet it is certain that animals have no such foresight.

from: Robert DeC. Ward. 1926. The Present Status of Long-Range Weather Forecasting
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 1-14

He provides no evidence to show that they don't, he is just certain. Note that the version you mention has to do with the thickness of the wall of the house, while the version Ward mentions has to do with the thicknesss of their fur. The fur hypothesis would be easier to test, if you were a muskrat hunter. I am frankly doubtful whether he or anyone else has done the work that would be needed to convincingly either story. You would have to measure the wall thickness of bunches of muskrat houses (or the pelt of many muskrats) in the summer. You would have to do this every year for quite a few years in order to make a convincing analysis of the relationship between wall thickness and hardness of winter. You would probably also want to measure various features of the microclimate, the muskrats behavior and physiology, and the local ecology, in order to get some sense of what the mechanism was. You probably would want to measure the pelts and the houses, just to make sure you were measuring the right thing. This is one limitation to testing folk-wisdom. There are often several versions, and it is hard to know if you are testing the right one unless you test all of them, and then you increase your chances of finding a strong correlation just by chance. My best guess is that there is some, but not a lot of, truth to either version of the story. Certainly they could pick up on whatever cues are available that the winter is going to be hard. But like most weather prediction, they probably aren't very accurate, at least not months in advance.

Planeless sky

The unpronounceable Icelandic volcano has left my place of work quite empty. This last week was the largest demography conference of the year, and a large portion of my colleagues flew to Dallas for it. They have not been able to return.



This map (from the NYTimes) shows which European airports are currently closed. Rostock is right in the middle of the gray area, half way between Berlin and Copenhagen. The closest operating airports right now are Madrid (2500km), Rome (1700 km including crossing the Alps) or St. Petersburg (2 days by ferry), and they are all booked up. So I may not have many coworkers around until this dust blows over.

The sunsets have been colorful the last couple of days, and the horizon looks hazier than usual, but other than that and the lack of airplanes flying over, I can see no smoke. Also, the grocery stores are out of bananas.

The airlines are starting to question the science behind the flight ban. I am doubtful myself. The concentration of particles (which hasn't actually been measured in most places) must be pretty minute, as the emissions from a small eruption are dispersed over perhaps 100,000,000 cubic kilometers.

I come to that rough estimate because the effected area is about 5000km east to west, 5000km north to south and the cloud is about 4 km top to bottom. I've not seen an estimate for how many tons of ash are up there, or what concentration is dangerous, but I'm guessing the concentration of particulate matter up there is no higher than that over LA or Houston in the summer.

Speaking of New Scientist:

They have an article about methane plumes found bubbling up from from methane hydrates in the Arctic Ocean near Svalbard, where warming water seems to be releasing (and then redissolving) large quantities of the greenhouse gas. First talking polar bears and now potentially catastrophic climate changing gasses.

Your biggest misconception about science

Among the frantic madness of trying to finish a thesis, I've been thinking a lot about how we evaluate scientific evidence. This has brought me to realize what I see as the single greatest, most damaging, and potentially most widespread misconception held about science. I'm not talking about disbelief in evolution, or climate change, or the moon landing, or any of the other usual loony bin stories. The misconception I have in mind is at the root of, or at least facilitates, many of these more discussed fallacies.

Imagine if you will that you are an electrician. I ask you to install a solar power system, in which you have specific training, and then to run the power to batteries, outlets and appliances in various parts of a house I am building for my grandmother. You carefully chose the type, size and placement of the photovoltaic panels, figure out how to attach them securely to my roof, how to run the wires, how to ensure safety and consistency of power. You comply with various and sundry codes I've never heard of, use materials whose properties I'm not knowledgeable enough to appreciate, and otherwise exercise your expertise and skill.

I, as an intelligent well-educated person with some layman's knowledge of wiring should be able to ask you questions about your work, and if you know what you are doing, you should be able to explain your choices in ways that make sense to me. Why are you using the more expensive panels instead of these cheap ones my cousin bought? Why does the wire go through there instead of through here? But you would rightly think I was an idiot if I thought I could evaluate the soundness of the plan in all its intricacies. Other than getting independent opinions from other experts, assessing your reputation, or spotting huge obvious flaws like a lack of power to the kitchen, I would have no way of telling if you were really planning an ideal system, or screwing me because you secretly own stock in the company that sells that brand of battery. And if three electricians gave me three divergent opinions on the same design, I would not presume to know which was right without asking a fourth. The same would be true of work by almost any expert in almost any technical field. Non-experts should be able to understand, should be able to spot obvious flaws, should be able to ask multiple opinions, but should not assume they are qualified to assess the finest points. No one without training as an electrician can say if a complex wiring diagram is perfect or adjudicate a disagreement between master electricians.

You've probably spotted where the long analogy is headed. It is often said, quite rightly that any scientist who can't explain his work to an intelligent layman is a fraud (or at least very bad at explaining). I forget the original quote. This, and the general (and correct) view that scientists should feel obligated to explain our work to the public reinforce the view that any thinking person should be able to evaluate the correctness of a scientific conclusion. But if I, having worked as a carpenter and done some wiring, can't evaluate the optimality of a complex circuit diagram, why should I, as a biologist, expect to be able to assess whether the uncertainty is understated in a climate prediction model which took hundreds of person years to design and build, went through multiple iterations, been evaluated by independent experts and are so complex it would take me months of reading just to understand what all of the variables are? I shouldn't and neither should you, unless you have years of intense training in that sub-field. I can read the papers, get a sense of what the question and conclusion is, understand an outline of the methodology. But I have no hope of just stumbling upon a conceptual or methodological error. I have no hope of finding the climatologist's errors if what I read is not the primary paper, but an article written by a journalist who also has no training in climatology. This is the blind leading the blind in trying to find flaws in the color scheme of a digital drawing. If two climatologists with opposing viewpoints were to write a trade book in which they lay out their disagreements, present evidence for their views and question each other's evidence, I would understand the science much better than I do, but I would still not be qualified to say which one of them was right and why.

It is unfortunate that non-experts generally can't evaluate science. It leads to the view that science is esoteric, made up, snobbish, arbitrary, undemocratic, religious and most of the other negative things people believe about science. It is also unfortunate that people don't know, or won't admit, that they can't just sit down and by thinking hard decide whether a scientist's work is useful, novel and correct. But they can't. You can't. I can't either, except in fields where I have reviewed the literature, thought deeply about the issues for weeks or months, read more literature in tangentially related fields, discussed the issues with other scientists and then sat down and written out my objections and concerns. This is why PhDs take more than five years on average. Science is hard and requires masochistic attention to detail, not only for those making statements, but also for those evaluating it. If you could sit down read a few papers on a subject and make a novel, well reasoned and convincing argument showing that previous papers are substantially wrong, you could have a PhD in a few weeks. No one has ever done it (or if they did their was fraud involved.)

This misperception, that anyone can evaluate science is widespread. I know scientists who openly contradict conclusions which are long since the consensus in fields in which they have no particular expertise. I've talked to several extremely well educated non-scientists who claim to have evaluated the evidence for human-caused global warming and come to firm conclusions. My conclusion that humans are causing climate change is based not on my personal review of the arguments pro and con, but on the fact that the vast majority of people who are qualified to judge, including many who were originally skeptics, say that it is no longer reasonable to doubt. But many, perhaps most Americans feel qualified to personally cast judgment based on the evidence. I have seen no polling on this, but expect that a larger number of Americans would tell you they are capable of offering informed opinions of scientific controversies than on disagreements between electricians.

As an evolutionary biologist, I feel qualified to read a book by an "Intelligent Design" proponent and say exactly what is wrong with their argument. I can map the circular logic, find the flaws in their interpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and point out which references are being misquoted. I can describe exactly how their evidence fails to support their argument, and explain exactly why the argument fails to qualify as a science. A nonscientist, reading these books, and armed with the delusion that if there are flaws she will see them, is likely to believe or disbelieve based on religion, politics and predilection. The scientific soundness of the argument is tertiary. Before I was versed in evolutionary biology, I could see logical flaws in Intelligent Design. But had I been raised with as little knowledge of evolution as I have of climatology, I could have only trusted to expert opinion. Similarly, while conspiracy theories about the moon landing are grossly implausible, I am not qualified to judge the claim that the physics of the landing wouldn't work as NASA says they do. The fact that physicist say it works just as explained is good enough for me.

It is not the moral of this story that you shouldn't ask questions, be skeptical and challenge authority. It is not my intention to claim that laymen should never question the competence and motives of experts. Rather, I urge that we try to be realistic in judging our ability to evaluate complex arguments in fields we don't know much about. I am not an expert in whatever it is you studied, and I am not hubristic enough to think that I am.

Carnival of Science!

The lead story on the BBC New's Science and Environment page is on the research of one of the post-doctoral researchers in my professor's lab. The idea is rather simple, the process was complex.
We know that climate changes over time, and that where one can find a particular type of habitat changes with the climate. Recently, using a wide range of data sources, scientists have been constructing both a detailed history of how climate has changed over time and what climate parameters limit the extent of particular habitats, such as South America's Atlantic Rainforest. My lab-mate, Ana Carnival (along with several collaborators) combined the climate history data with the climate requirement data to make maps of how the extent of the Atlantic forest has changed over the last 20,000 years. She found that there were a few relatively small areas that had been rainforest the whole time, even when climate shifts caused the rest of it to change to other habitat types, such as grassland. She identified these as 'rainforest refugia,' areas where rainforest species could survive through the millenia when the climate was inhospitable elsewhere. She then predicted that these refugia should be the centers from which genetic diversity spread to the rest of the forest once its borders once again grew. To test these predictions, she gathered genetic samples from three species of frogs which can survive only in the rainforest. Sure enough, the frog's DNA told the story she had predicted, confirming the refugia she had identified based on climate models. This is not only cool science, it has significant conservation implications. These refugia should house a large portion of the diversity found in the rainforest, because at some points in the last 20K years, all the rainforest species lived there. This suggests that if we are forced to make choices about which land to preserve (which we are) we might do well to preserve these refugia. And both the methods and the conclusions are potentially generalizable to other thretened habitats around the world.

One final thought: This is very cool work, and very much in line with what most people in my adviser's lab study, but it is so far from my own work that I barely understand the details. This may be why I don't notice any glaring errors in the BBC article, or maybe the UK press are not as bad at writing about science as the American press.

Rep. Boehner, Ludite

This morning on NPR, I heard an interview with Rep. John Boehner, the House Minority Leader. When asked about his reservations with President Obama's stimulus plan, he responded by saying that some of the spending did not seem wise to him.

"Remember, the goal of the stimulus package is to preserve jobs and help create new jobs in America," Boehner said. "And I don't know how giving NASA $400 million to study global warming is going to meet the goals."

It occurs to me to wonder if perhaps Rep. Boehner has so little conception of how science works that he truely doesn't know that when money is spent to study a problem, that money goes into the economy. NASA does not simply trassubstantiate the money into knowledge about global warming. NASA employs thousands of Americans on problems such as these; NASA contractors employ many thousands more. NASA advances technologies that help create new jobs.

My guess is that Rep. Boehner knows all this. It seems likely that Rep. Boehner knows that engineers and scientists are being laid off along with workers in almost every other field. Rather, I suspect the congressman is simly trying to rally his political base by warning them that the government is spending money on a problem they have been trained to think is a liberal hoax, global warming.

Which shows a certain level of consistency. Rep. Boehner is as derisive of the conclusions of science as he is ignorant of the process by which we reach those conclusions.

New York's Geese are exploding in another way

The Christmas Bird Count is one of the great success stories of Citizen Science. Every year in late December, tens of thousands of volunteers across North America brave snow and sleet and Christmas Shopping traffic to go out and see how many birds they can see. Everyone writes down how many individual birds they see of each species, and where they were looking, and all these data are collected into a central database. The Audubon Society's scientists know how many people were looking, and where, and they have large numbers of observers, so they can calculate pretty reliable winter range maps, and calculate rates of population change in each area.

Looking at their data for Canada Geese, a pretty remarkable number emerges. The number of Canada Geese in New York State in December has, for quite a while, been increasing by 22% per year! At that rate of increase, population would double about every three and a half years (1.22^3.5=2), and the population doubled at this rate starting about 1955 and leveled off about 1990, so it had time to double about 10 times. 2^10=1024. So for every goose in New York in late December before the 1950s, there is now a kilogoose in the same area at the same season. To put it another way, most CBC observers in NY in the first half of the 20th century saw not one geese. The average NY state observer these days sees 50 or 60 geese.

Here is a graph from the CBC historical query page.


There is a lot of noise in the data, but the trend is very clear.

So why are there so many more geese in NY in the winter? Partly, there are just more geese everywhere. Humans have been good to Canada Geese. Lawns, golf courses and grain stubble are all feasts for geese. We've killed off a lot of the natural predators, and we don't hunt them ourselves as much as we used to. And New York winters aren't nearly as cold and snow-buried as they used to be, especially around the city, which means fewer of the geese bother migrating any further south than New York.

In considering the causes of the bird-plane collision that caused yesterday's much publicized crash, we should keep in mind that a few decades ago, there would have been no geese to hit in January above the Bronx.

All global warming is local

I got home from the lab late last night and turned on NPR. There was a voice I instantly recognized, my major professor, and the director of the MVZ, Craig Moritz. What, I wondered, was Craig doing in my radio at this late hour? Being interviewed by All Things Considered for this piece on the effects of climate change on the wildlife of Yosemite National Park.
Mean monthly minimum temperatures in Yosemite have risen by 6 degrees Fahrenheit in the hundred years since the MVZ's first director, Joseph Grinnell, surveyed the wildlife there. Apparently in response, many of the wildlife species in the park have moved their upper and lower limits thousands of feet higher than they were.

The project is described in great detail here, and a subset of the Yosemite data were just published in Science. I wasn't involved in this work, in case you were wondering.

Argument of Science!

Listening to NPR this morning, I heard two stories which did an excellent job of articulating two opposing point of view, both wrong, which taken together helped me articulate to myself how scientific knowledge is formed, and the difference between a denier and a skeptic.

The first story was about an extremely bright 15 year old who sat down to read the science on global warming, decided she didn't believe humans were causing the change, and then set up a hugely popular website 'debunking' the climate change 'hysteria' and attacking the scientists who support it. She objects not only to their conclusions, but to their dismissal of those who make the arguments she makes.

The second was about the Pope, and his visit to the US. One of the main goals of this tour, and this pope, is the War on Relativism. The pope argues that in this modern era, people believe that there is no objective truth, that every viewpoint is equally valid, and therefore anyone can believe anything they want. He argues that if there is no objective truth, we are all lost in a swamp of uncertainty, and life is not only meaningless but unpleasant.

So the 15 year old thinks that anyone who looks at the evidence and makes up her mind should be taken seriously, and the Pope thinks we need to have one objective truth arbitrated by the Church. To my way of thinking, they are both wrong.

Science (as a process and a culture) is neither a free for all where every view is equally valid, nor a dictatorship where those in high status can pontificate and the 15 year olds have to listen. Science is, in the words of Ernst Mayr, "one long argument," but it is a highly organized argument. There are only certain ways one is permitted to advance one's viewpoint. One can present data, but one cannot engage in personal attacks (although Mayr himself was well known for questioning the intelligence of those who disagreed with him). One can criticize, or tear to shreds, the logic used by other scientists, but one cannot simply refuse to listen. One can question the motives of others, but then still has to look at their arguments. If evidence is legitimate, one has the responsibility to be open to being won over. Personal attacks like 'quack', 'pseudo-scientist', 'corporate whore' and so on are to be reserved for those who grossly violate these rules. The only way this argument ever reaches an endpoint is if everyone on one side is either won over or dies of old age. Even then, if someone thinks they have found new evidence that the world is in fact flat, they can reopen the argument. Science does not deliver absolute, unquestionable truths.

But while you can argue anything you want, if your argument does not meet certain standards, it, and you, will be dismissed out of hand. Your statements must be logical, consistent with and based on data and must demonstrate knowledge of and meaningful response to what has been said and written before. If you want to argue that the world is flat, you'd better have a good explanation for all those data that seem to suggest a spherical Earth. And how a flat Earth came into being, and tides, and cosmology, and so on and so forth. There is a strong scientific consensus on the basic shape of the Earth (although there are bulges and deviations from sphericallity that still need to be better understood), because there is overwhelming evidence from a wide range of disciplines. The same can be said for the reality of evolution, the Holocaust, global warming, and a variety of other topics where the argument continues despite being settled in the minds of almost all scholars.

Those who oppose the consensus view on these issues generally point out that science is not "majority rule." As an example, the great majority of geologists long thought that plate tectonics was a ridiculous idea, and if the majority had ruled, we would have rejected what is now a foundational (possibly even bed-rock?) concept of geology, geography and evolution. It is therefore important to address this objection, because while true, it is a straw man. No reasonable scientist believes that truth can be arrived at through a popular vote of experts. That is not how the long argument works.

The relevant fact is not that the vast majority of informed scientists now accept plate-tectonics, but rather that we had that argument, and the plate-tectonics skeptics were unable to explain the data. Skeptics were converted, or gradually modified their views, or retired, and the number of supporters increased. The heroes in this story, from my perspective, are not those who believe because their teachers told them so, but those who were open minded enough to carefully change their minds.

We now accept plate-tectonics because the skeptics, being good scientists, had no choice but to look at the evidence presented, and there was eventually no logical way to cling to the view that continents are too big to move. "Eventually" being several decades.

So maybe several decades from now, we will have rejected evolutionary theory, decided that the Holocaust was just a historical ploy by the Jews for sympathy in their bid for an Israeli state, and realized that the global climate is just naturally cycling? Possible, but not likely, for several reasons.

First, plate-tectonics was a new idea that opposed everything humans had always assumed about our world. It was a hard idea to wrap a mind around. Creationism is not a new, radical and difficult to comprehend idea (my niece is dating a creationist who says he believes it because it is easier to understand than evolution, and his family believes it). Nor is a naturally controlled climate, or anti-Semitism. The idea of plate-tectonics overcame a distinct disadvantage these other ideas don't have.

Second, plate-tectonics took so long to gain acceptance partially because it took that long for technology to improve enough to produce convincing data. But during those decades, data gradually accrued. These other ideas have been around for decades, or millennia, and during that time the evidence has increasingly pointed against them.

Third, there was no lobby or faith pushing plate tectonics. No one stood to get rich or win political points by arguing that the crust of the earth moves and changes. Quite the opposite. The same cannot be said for Ahmadinejad, Bush and Exxon-Mobil.

Finally, and most importantly, there never was a body of data showing that the continents had always been in their current locations. That was the null hypothesis. We have enormous bodies of data supporting the reality of evolution, the Holocaust and anthropogenic climate change. Those who argued for plate-tectonics did not have to ignore or misinterpret a similar body of data presented by the other side. Scientific creationists (pseudo-scientists), scholarly anti-Semites (quacks) and professional global warming deniers (corporate whores) have to do exactly that. The only way to advance their views within the rules of the scientific process is to take all that data, and show us why it is fake or misunderstood. It is because they can't do this that they are disrespected. (Let me here be entirely clear that these insults are not intended to include either the pope or the teenager, both of who are honest non-scientists.)

The argument cannot be won, so there will always be Flat-Earthers, Static-Plate-ers, Creationists, and deniers of the Holocaust and Global Warming. And those people have the right to their points of view. And we have the responsibility to look at any new evidence they produce, if it really is new and it really is relevant evidence. We don't have to pay attention to people who, for the 5 millionth time, argue that the human eye is irreducibly complex and therefore there is a God. They violate the rules of the argument both by ignoring what has already been said, and by foregoing logic, and thereby forfeit their right to be taken seriously.

So, all of that said, how would I reply to the young woman who doesn't believe in human caused climate change, and to the Pope? To her I would say, "It is great that you are getting into science, and you absolutely have the right to come to your own conclusions. Based on your statements, I believe you have misunderstood much of what you read, and been mislead by those with a financial interest in misleading the public. I encourage you to learn more about the conceptual fields on which the science rests." To the Pope I would say, "The days when the Catholic Church was the unquestionable arbiter of truth for western civilization are long gone. At no point in the foreseeable future will the Church, or any other entity, resume that role. I respectfully suggest you accept this and guide the church into a new and more constructive role."

Biofuels won't fix it.

Pretty much every issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution has a paper or two worth the reading. I thought this one was worth drawing your attention to:

Christopher B. Field, J. Elliott Campbell and David B. Lobell. 2008. Biomass energy: the scale of the potential resource. Trends in Ecology & Evolution. Volume 23, Issue 2, Pages 65-72

Abstract:
Increased production of biomass for energy has the potential to offset substantial use of fossil fuels, but it also has the potential to threaten conservation areas, pollute water resources and decrease food security. The net effect of biomass energy agriculture on climate could be either cooling or warming, depending on the crop, the technology for converting biomass into useable energy, and the difference in carbon stocks and reflectance of solar radiation between the biomass crop and the pre-existing vegetation. The area with the greatest potential for yielding biomass energy that reduces net warming and avoids competition with food production is land that was previously used for agriculture or pasture but that has been abandoned and not converted to forest or urban areas. At the global scale, potential above-ground plant growth on these abandoned lands has an energy content representing ~5% of world primary energy consumption in 2006. The global potential for biomass energy production is large in absolute terms, but it is not enough to replace more than a few percent of current fossil fuel usage. Increasing biomass energy production beyond this level would probably reduce food security and exacerbate forcing of climate change.

"Science" "Journalism"

Even taking into account how poor the state of science journalism is in this country, and what a sorry rag the San Fransisco Chronicle is, this piece on the danger posed to San Francisco by invasive pythons is well below the curve.
To summarize, there is an introduced population of Burmese pythons in the Everglades, 3100 miles away. A USGS lab used an off the shelf climate model to predict where in the US Burmese Pythons could deal with the climate, and San Francisco (along with pretty much the southern half of the US) showed up as one potential habitat.

The idiot who wrote the article then follows this train of thought to show that pythons will be eating pedestrians on Market Street by 2020:
•One python showed up at Lake Okeechobee, 100 miles north of the Everglades, and in the same direction it would travel if its single-minded goal was to reach Fisherman's Wharf.
•Pythons can travel up to 20 miles a month, and the road to SF is 3000 miles, so it will be here in 150 months, or about 12 years.
•Pythons eat mammals.
•"Human beings - like rodents, beavers and deer - are mammals, government scientists confirmed."
•Giant snakes falling from office buildings and eating you.
•QED

The sad thing is, reading the article, I am not sure if he is joking, but I am sure there are some people who will think this is a real threat.

Ecological causes and effects of SoCal fires: Initial thoughts

There are numerous wildfires currently blackening southern California. The short term response has to be to the fire itself. Save the people, save the pets, save the homes and the businesses. But what should be the response when the fires are out? Ruibiuld everything exactly as is was? That is the most likely outcome. After a disaster, people want to rebuild, regardless of how likely it is that disaster will happen again. But how likely is it these fires will return? What ecological factors played into this disaster, what ecological effects can be expected and what lessons should we draw from all of this?

I feel it is important to raise these issues before everyones attention moves on and we fail to learn from previous mistakes. I'll appreciate your input and comments.

With no further ado:

Ecological Causes:

1. Obviously the big'un is the Santa Ana Wind, the hot dry wind that blow-dries out of the Great Basin and over southern California every year. The topography and climate of coastal southern California, combined with the Santa Anas make for fires pretty much every year. It is being reported that the Santa Ana's are stronger and more persistent than usual this year. It is not yet known, so far as I know, if the Santa Ana's are expected to be stronger every year now that the Great Basin's climate is turning much hotter and drier.

2. California has had an unusually dry year this year. Unusual meaning "in comparison to the last 150 years." This year may turn out to be unusually wet as compared to the next 150 years, because, as mentioned, the climate of the southwest is drying.

3. A lot of these areas have many times the natural fuel-load. The last 150 years are important, because that is how long we have been suppressing fires in southern California. This unusually wet period allowed for a lot of biomass to build up, and not burn off, because we would not let it burn.

The natural time between fires in most of these areas is a few decades. Fires would pass through, burn off much of the fuels without destroying the local ecology because in most cases, the previous fire was recent enough to keep this fire from getting too hot. By putting out every fire we could for so long, we allowed the fuel load to build up to the point that the fires now get incredibly hot and spread incredibly fast. Some of the areas currently burning have burned recently, but the mean time since the last fire is much higher than what is natural.

4. We tend to build our settlements and structures without regard to the fact that we are building in a fire maintained ecology, and another fire will come. By failing to take that into account, we make things that much harder for firefighters and those who need to evacuate. It is like building in a floodplain and expecting your house to not get washed away every once in a while.

5. The climate is changing and the southwest is becoming more of a desert. When wet areas dry out, the vegetation eventually burns off.

Ecological Effects:

1. California is a world center of biodiversity, and quite a few of our species are found nowhere else. Many of the native plants and animals are already endangered by habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and climate change. Most of our natural areas are fragmented by human edifices. The native populations could deal with the comparatively mild natural wildfires of the past. Smaller, more fragmented and already declining native species with small ranges may well have trouble keeping a foothold in areas burning as hot and wide as the current fires.

I have a colleague who studies a species of native mouse found primarily in San Diego County. This year he could find almost none of his mice because their habitat is turning to desert. He did find them in a few places. In the last two days some of those places have gone up in smoke.

2. Fuel loads in the areas currently burning will be reduced, which is both good and bad. Good in that future fires will have less fuel. Bad in that all that fuel load was sequestered carbon, which is now in the atmosphere, and because the drier southwest won't have as much vegetation, that carbon is not going to be taken back out by the same land. My guess is, without having seen any numbers, that total carbon output from these fires will actually be quite minuscule on a global scale, and we are better off without all that tinder lying around.

3. If the rains in SoCal do get started in a month or two, we can expect some serious erosion from all the areas that have been stripped of their vegetation.

Lessons, not just for SoCal, but for the country:

1. Don't just let fuel build up until it explodes. Areas like this need to have some plan for how to get rid of fuel. My personal preference is controlled burns at times of year when the fire is easier to keep in hand. We can't keep pretending we can keep fire based ecologies from burning forever.

2. Notice that climate change is a serious problem now. Stop making the problem worse.

3. Take fire risk into consideration when deciding where and when to build. Developers should be legally responsible for planning their developments such that they are not putting residents and firefighters at risk. Planners should disallow building in areas that cannot be defended from fires.

Hurricane Season

Welcome to the 2007 Hurricane Season. Estimates I've seen predict a very active year, with 14-21 named storms including 7-9 hurricanes of which about half are expected to be category three to five, meaning winds exceeding 111 mph.

Here is a recent abstract from a paper published by a well respected lab:

ABSTRACT
Information obtained through March 2007 indicates that the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season will be much more active than the average 1950-2000 season. We estimate that 2007 will have about 9 hurricanes (average is 5.9), 17 named storms (average is 9.6), 85 named storm days (average is 49.1), 40 hurricane days (average is 24.5), 5 intense (Category 3-4-5) hurricanes (average is 2.3) and 11 intense hurricane days (average is 5.0). The probability of U.S. major hurricane landfall is estimated to be about 140 percent of the long-period average. We expect Atlantic basin Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity in 2007 to be about 185 percent of the long-term average.

This early April forecast is based on a newly devised extended range statistical forecast procedure which utilizes 40 years of past global reanalysis data and is then tested on an additional 15 years of global reanalysis data. Analog predictors are also utilized. We have increased our forecast from our early December prediction due largely to the rapid dissipation of El Niño which has occurred over the past couple of months. Currently, neutral ENSO conditions are observed. We expect either neutral or weak-to-moderate La Niña conditions to be present during the upcoming hurricane season. Tropical and North Atlantic sea surface temperatures remain well above their long-period averages.