How to talk about climate doomsday scenarios

David Wallace-Wells wrote a 7000 word cover story in New York Magazine on how unchecked climate change may make the Earth uninhabitable. With 2.5 million readers this longread was the most read article in the magazine's history.

That shows the impact a well written article can have. It also points to a change in the mood in America. Since Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement, happy to risk climate rapture for the quarterly earning of his donors, attention for climate change in America has spiked.





Americans are living through a nightmare, where you see the danger coming, but cannot convince others to stand up to it. Until you wake up bathing in sweat and pick up your phone from the night stand to read tweets from climate "sceptics" mocking you for facing reality. The same people that make a nightmare out of a perfectly solvable problem.

Sixteen climate scientists of Climate Feedback (including me) reviewed the NY Mag article. This number of reviewers may also be a record.

My summary would be that while the dangers of unfettered climate change are real, we found many inaccuracies, which typically exaggerated the problem. Thus the article was rated as having a "low scientific credibility". Both the NY Mag article and the Climate Feedback rating and earlier criticism by Michael Mann have sparked some controversy.

This post will be about how I would prefer the media to report on worse case scenarios. A second post will be about whether our "nitpicking" was the science police striking again?





I have no idea how 2100 looks like. Put yourself in the place of a well-informed citizen of 1900 and what they may have thought today looks like. Meters of horse shit on the streets due to the growth of traffic? Or imagine how an American thought this time would look like 50 years ago. Flying cars and Mars colonies?

Maybe in 2100 humanity has gone extinct, maybe civilization is gone, maybe humans are enslaved by corporations, maybe currently poor countries are also affluent and corporation can no longer repress us, maybe after another century of development we lead wonderful lives, maybe we are building our first intersolar cruiser, maybe no one cares about intersolar cruisers and people impress each other with poetry and four dimensional chess. Very likely they will be painfully embarrassed for me for the options I gave.

I have no idea how they view climate change in 2100. Do they see it as the biggest historical liability put on them? Are they annoyed at the tax burden for the huge necessary geo-engineering program? Do they wonder why people in 2017 thought it was such a big problem, while it was so easy to solve? Are they happy that due to the geo-engineering program they now have weather satellites and it only rains at night in urban areas?

Even in the best case scenario we are taking the climate system out of known territories. There will be many surprises and to be honest those are what worry me the most. The Uncertainty monster is not our friend and that makes it very hard to say which worst case scenarios are unrealistic.

It is custom to accept smaller risks the bigger the stakes are. Cars and smoking kill many people, but one at a time. A risk someone may be willing to take personally will be larger than the risk one takes with a community, a country or our civilization. The risk of dying in a car accident is 1 in 84 (1.2 %), this would be an unacceptable risk for civilization or humanity. Thus we have to look at the tails.

Finally, we expect the impacts of climate change to accelerate: Because some variability is normal, the first degree of warming makes much less problems than the next. Thus the risks of above average warming are expected to contribute much to the total risk. It is thus good that the article explores what surprises may be in store and talks about scenarios that are not likely, but risky.

Four horsemen of the apocalypse

The article reaches the worst case scenarios in four ways:

1. The worst case for the emissions of greenhouse gases.
2. The worst case for how sensitive the climate system responds.
3. The worst case for the impacts and how humanity responds.
4. The worst case for the scientific assessment of the evidence.

1. The worst case emission scenario was the [[RCP8.5 scenario]] of the IPCC. These scenarios are really just that: scenarios. No probability is assigned to them.

This is the IPCC report from 2013 and the scenarios were created well before that. My impression is that with the [[Paris climate agreement]] and the fast drop in the prices of renewable energy and storage, the RCP8.5 scenario is no longer very realistic. Another optimistic sign is that industrial emissions have stabilized the last 3 years. However, the US mitigation sceptical movement and their president will keep on fighting to make this dystopia a reality. So it is a legitimate question what kind of a world fossil fuel companies and these people want to create.

2. It is completely legitimate to explore the tails of the probability distribution of the climate sensitivity. Even if it had only 30% probability, Trump did get elected. Even if the chance is just one out of six, you sometimes role a six. And let's not start about Russian roulette. Unfortunately the tail of the distribution is not well constrained and very high sensitivities are hard to exclude.





3. The uncertainty of some impacts can be quantified reasonably well. These are the ones with the most physics in them such as heat waves and large-scale increases in precipitation. Then it is legitimate to go into the tail.

Other impacts are not understood well enough yet (Will ice sheets collapse? How much greenhouse gasses will the soil release due to heating?) or will never be fully predictable because of societal and technological influences (Will The Netherlands evacuate before or after Noah's flood? Will plant breeding keep up with climate change? Will societies be able to cope with climate refugees?). In such cases I would like to hear a balanced spectrum of views, including extreme ones.

Because the broad sweeping article discussed many climate change impacts it could not do justice to complexity of individual impacts. Climate change is typically just one stressor of many. When The Netherlands floods, the climate "sceptics" will not suddenly wake up and say "silly me, I was wrong, now I recognize that climate change is a problem, sorry about that". They will say the storm was to blame and it was really bad luck the storm came from the North West and its maximum coincided with high tides, the dikes were not strong enough, the maintenance not good enough and especially the government is to blame.

Looking at history or at the future only from a climate change perspective brings back bad memories of [[climate determinism]]. The Age recently reported on farm workers in Central America suffering and dying from chronic kidney disease. The regions where this new decease happens is well predicted by warming and changes in insolation. Simultaneously the problem is that these people are so poor that they have to work on hot days and also have a strong work ethic that promotes this. They tend not to drink during work and when they do it are often soft drinks because they are perceived as safer. A large part of the problem is funding for preventative care and people die because they cannot afford dialysis.

Among the worst: Ellsworth Huntington's maps of climate 'energy'. But the idea that climate determines society go back to the Greeks 3/10 pic.twitter.com/5sVUmC70Dj

— Simon Donner (@simondonner) 13 July 2017

This example shows two things. First of all, like the dikes breaking in The Netherlands, the problem has many aspects. Secondly, this was a problem because it was new. There will be many surprises due to climate change. The study of (rare) diseases helps in understand how a healthy body works. It shows what is important for healthy functioning. Medicine can study many bodies, we only have one Earth and will very likely be surprised what the Earth did for us without us realising it.

4. Like for non-physical impacts, where I am hesitant to go into the tail is when it comes to the interpretation of the evidence. That quickly ends in cherry picking experts that say what you want to hear. Those are strategies for mitigation sceptics. Even if those experts do not stray from the evidence and only hold a pessimistic view; I feel this is not for serious science reporting. It is fine to explain the ideas of such experts, but they should be balanced with other views.

Concluding, for the objective part of the problem: if you clearly say you are looking at the worst case feel free to go deep into the tail of the probability distribution. Only looking at mean changes understates the risks. The tail is a big part of the risk and thus very important. Do not forget to talk about many further surprises and that the Uncertainty Monster has an ugly bite.

When it comes to the more subjective parts, please balance pessimistic with optimistic voices. Subjective judgements are unavoidable when it comes to worst case scenarios and the far future where the changes will be largest. People can legitimately have different world views and as a science nerd I would like to hear the full range of legitimate views.

An article needs a focus, but please consider that climate change is one stressor of many. Climate change impacts are complicated, do them justice like a great novelist would and do not make a cartoon out of them.

Related reading

The updated New York Magazine piece By David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth - Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think. (The reviewed original, with annotations)

The Climate Feedback Feedback: Scientists explain what New York Magazine article on “The Uninhabitable Earth” gets wrong.

New York Magazine now also published extended interviews with the scientists interviewed for the piece: James Hansen, Peter Ward, Walley Broker, Michael Mann, Michael Oppenheimer.

A balanced article in The Atlantic: Are We as Doomed as That New York Magazine Article Says? Why it's so hard to talk about the worst problem in the world.

Michael E. Mann: The ‘Fat Tail’ of Climate Change Risk

Fans of Judith Curry: the uncertainty monster is not your friend

Introduction to Climate Feedback: Climate scientists are now grading climate journalism

Michael E. Mann, Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles in the WP: Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial. Good people, but I am not buying it: one negative journalistic story in a full media diet does not make people despair, hopeless and paralysed. Plus reality is what it is.


* Painting of the Four Horsemen by Viktor Vasnetsov - http://lj.rossia.org/users/john_petrov/166993.html, Public Domain, Link

Congress of the World Meteorological Organization, free our climate data

A small revolution happens at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Its main governing body (WMO congress) is discussing a draft resolution that national weather services shall provide free and unrestricted access to climate data. The problem is the fine print. The fine print makes it possible to keep on refusing to share important climate data with each other.

The data situation is getting better, more and more countries are freeing their climate data. The USA, Canada and Australia have a long traditions. Germany, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Slovenia, Brazil and Israel have just freed their data. China and Russia are pretty good with sharing data. Switzerland has concrete plans to free their data. I probably forgot many countries and for Israel you currently still have to be able to read Hebrew, but things are definitely improving.

That there are large differences between countries is illustrated by this map of data availability for daily mean temperature data in the ECA&D database, a dataset that is used to study changes in severe weather. The green dots are data where you can download and work with the station data, the red dots are data that ECA&D are only allowed to use internally to make maps. In the number of stations available you can clearly see many national boundaries; that is not just the number of real stations, but to a large part national policies on data sharing.

Sharing data is important

We need this data to see what is happening to the climate. We already had almost a degree of global warming and are likely in for at least another one. This will change the sea level, the circulation, precipitation patterns. This will change extreme and severe weather. We will need to adapt to these climatic changes and to know how to protect our communities we need climate data.

Many countries have set up Climate Service Centres or are in the process of doing so to provide their populations with the information they need to adapt. Here companies, (local) governments, non-governmental organisation and citizens can get advice on how to prepare themselves for climate change.

It makes a large difference how often we will see heat waves like the one in [[Europe in 2003]] (70 thousand additional deaths; Robine et al., 2008), in [[Russia in 2010]] (a death toll of 55,000, a crop failure of ~25% and an economic loss of about 1% of the GBP; Barriopedro et al., 2011) or now in India. It makes a large difference how often a [[winter flood like in the UK in 2013-2014]] or [[the flood now in Texas and Oklahoma]] will occur. Once every 10, 100 or 1000 years? If it is 10 years, expensive infrastructural changes will be needed, if it is 1000 years, we will probably decide to life with that. It makes a difference how long droughts like the ones in California or in Chile will last and being able to make regional climate prediction requires high-quality historical climate data.

One of the main outcomes of the current 17th WMO congress will be the adoption of the Global Framework on Climate Services (GFCS). A great initiative to make sure that everyone benefits from climate services, but how will the GFCS framework succeed in helping humanity cope with climate change if there is almost no data to work with?

In their own resolution (8.1) on GFCS, the Congress recognizes this themselves:

Congress noted that EC-66 had adopted a value proposition for the international exchange of climate data and products to support the implementation of the GFCS and recommended a draft resolution on this topic for consideration by Congress.

To understand climate, we need a global overview. National studies are not enough. To understand changes in circulation, interactions with mountains and vegetation, to understand changes in extremes, we need spatially resolved information and not just a few stations.

Homogenization

To reduce the influence of measurement errors and non-climatic changes (inhomogeneities) on our (trend) assessments we need dense networks. These errors are detected and corrected by comparing one station to its neighbours. The closer the neighbours are, the more accurate we can assess the real climatic changes. This is especially important when it comes to changes in severe and extreme weather, where the removal of non-climatic changes is very challenging.

For the global mean land temperature the non-climatic changes already represent 25% of the change: After homogenization (to reduce non-climatic changes) in GHCNv3 the trend is 0.8°C per century since 1880 (Lawrimore et al., 2011; table 4). In the raw data this trend is only 0.6°C per century. That makes a large difference for our assessment how far climate change has progressed, while for large parts of the world we currently do not have enough data to remove such non-climatic changes well. This results in large uncertainties.

This 25% is global, but when in comes to the impacts of climate change, we need reliable local information. Locally the (trend) biases are much larger; on a global scale many biases cancel each ohter. For (decadal) climate prediction we need accurate variability on annual time scales, not "just" secular trends, this is again harder and has larger uncertainties. In the German climate prediction project MiKlip it was shown that a well-homogenized radiosonde dataset was able to distinguish much better between prediction systems and thus to better guide the development. Based on the physics of the non-climatic change we expect that (trend) biases are much stronger for extremes than they are for the mean. For example, errors due to insolation are worst on hot, sunny and calm days, while they are much less a problem on normal cloudy and windy days and thus less of a problem for the average. For the best possible data to protect our communities, we need dense networks, we need all the data there is.

WMO resolution

Theoretically the data exchange resolution will free everything you ever dreamed of. A large number of datasets is mentioned from satellites to sea and lake level, from greenhouse gases to snow cover and river ice. But exactly for the historical climate station that is so important to put climate change into a perspective a limitation is made. Here the international exchange is limited to the [[GCOS]] Stations. The total number of GCOS Stations is 1017 (March 01, 2014). For comparison, Berkeley Earth and the International Surface Temperature Initiative have records with more than 30 thousand stations. And most GCOS stations are likely already included in that. Thus in the end, this resolution will free almost no new climate station data.

The resolution proposes to share “all available data”. But they define that basically as data that is currently already open:

“All available” means that the originators of the data can make them available under this resolution. The term recognizes the rights of Members to choose the manner by, and the extent to, which they make their climate relevant data and products available domestically and for international exchange, taking into consideration relevant international instruments and national policies and legislation.

I have not heard of cases where national weather services denied access to data just for the fun of it. Normally they say it is due to "national policies and legislation". Thus this resolution will not change much.

No idea where these counterproductive national policies come from. For new instruments, for expensive satellites, for the [[Argo system]] to measure the ocean heat content, it is normally specified that the data should be open to all so that society maximally benefits from the investment. In America they naturally see the data as free for all because the tax payer has already paid for it.

In the past there may have been strategic (military) concerns. Climate and weather information can determine wars. However, nowadays weather and climate models are so good that the military benefit of observations is limited. Had Napoleon had a climate model, his troops would have been given warmer cloths before leaving for Russia. To prepare for war you do not need it more accurate than that.

The ministers of finance seems to like the revenues from selling climate data, but I cannot imagine them making much money that way. It is nothing in comparison to the impacts of climate changes or the costs of maladaptation. It will be much less than the money society invested in the climate observations. An investment that is devalued by sitting on the data and not sharing it.

All that while the WMO theoretically recognises how important sharing data is. In another resolution (9.1), ironically on big data, they write:

With increasing acceptance that the climate is changing, Congress noted that Members are again faced with coming to agreement with respect to the international exchange of data of importance of free and unrestricted access to climate-related information at both global and regional levels.

UN and Data Revolution. In August 2014 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asked an Independent Expert Advisory Group to make concrete recommendations on bringing about a data revolution in sustainable development (). The report indicates that too often existing data remain unused because they are released too late or not at all, not well-documented and harmonized, or not available at the level of detail needed for decision-making. More diverse, integrated, timely and trustworthy information can lead to better decision-making and real-time citizen feedback.

All that while citizen scientists are building up huge meteorological networks in Japan and North America. The citizen scientists are happy to share their data and the weather services should fear that their closed datasets will soon become a laughing stock.

Free our climate data

My apologies when this post sounds angry. I am angry. If that is reason to fire me as chair of the Task Team on Homogenization of the WMO Commission for Climatology, so be it. I cannot keep my mouth shut while this is happing.

Even if this resolution is a step forward and I am grateful for the people who made this happen, it is impossible that in these times the weather services of the world do not do everything they can to protect the communities they work for and freely share all climate data internationally. I really cannot understand how the limited revenues from selling data can seriously be seen as a reason to accept huge societal losses from climate change impacts and maladaptation.

Don't ask me how to solve this deadlock, but WMO Congress it is your job to solve this. You have until Friday next week the 12th of June.

[UPDATE. It might not be visible here because there are only little comments, but this post is read a lot for one without a connection to the mass media. That often happens below science posts that do not say something controversial. (All the scientists I know see data exchange as holding climate science back.) Also the tweet to this post is popular, never had one like this before, please retweet it to show your support for the free exchange of climate data.

Please RT if you want the World Meteorological Organization to share climate data. #meteoworld http://t.co/C8qD0p6YXx pic.twitter.com/X4zymbIYJ6

— Victor Venema (@VariabilityBlog) June 3, 2015

]

[UPDATE. Wow, the above tweet has now been seen over 7,000 times (4th June; 19h). Not bad for a small station data blog. Never seen anything like this. Also Sylvie Coyaud blogs at La Repubblica now reports about freeing climate data (in Italian). If there are journalists in Geneva, do ask the delegates about sharing data, especially when they present the Global Framework for Climate Services as the prime outcome of this WMO Congress.]

Related reading

Nature published a column by Martin Bobrow of the Expert Advisory Group on Data Access, which just wrote a report on the governance of scientific data access: Funders must encourage scientists to share.

Why raw temperatures show too little global warming

Just the facts, homogenization adjustments reduce global warming

New article: Benchmarking homogenisation algorithms for monthly data

Statistical homogenisation for dummies

New article: Benchmarking homogenisation algorithms for monthly data

A framework for benchmarking of homogenisation algorithm performance on the global scale - Paper now published

The age of Climategate is almost over

It seems as if the age of Climategate is over (soon). Below you can see the number of Alexa (social bookmarking) users that visited What Up With That? At the end of 2009 you see a jump upwards. That is where Anthony Watts made his claim to fame by violating the privacy of climate scientist Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) and some of his colleagues.

Criminals broke into the CRU backup servers and stole and published their email correspondence. What was Phil Jones' crime? The reason why manners and constitutional rights are not important? The reason to damage his professional network? He is a climate scientist!

According to Watts and co the emails showed deliberate deception. However, there have been several investigations into Climategate, none of which found evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct. It would thus be appropriate to rename the Climategate to Scepticgate. And it is a good sign that this post-normal age is (almost) over and the number of visitors to WUWT is going back to the level before Climategate.

Since the beginning of 2012, the number of readers of WUWT is in a steady decline. It is interesting coincidence that I started commenting once in a while since February 2012. Unfortunately for the narcissistic part of my personality: correlation is not causation.

The peak in mid 2012 is Anthony Watts first failed attempt in writing a scientific study.

According to WUWT Year in review (Wordpress statistics), WUWT was viewed about 31,000,000 times in 2011 and 36,000,000 times in 2012. However, a large part of the visitors of my blog are robots and that problem is worse here as for my little read German language blog. Alexa more likely only counts real visitors.

Could we get more Earthquakes due to global warming and thermal expansion of the Earth's crust?

Thermal expansion can release quite some force as is seen in bridges and railroad tracks that are deformed due to hot weather. I am wondering whether thermal expansion of the Earth's crust due to global warming can similarly lead to seismic activity, especially at subduction zones where one crustal plate slides under another one.

I have searched the scientific literature, but was unable to find any articles on the topic, while it sounds quite straight forward to me. Did really no one have this idea before, or was it already debunked in 1960?

Dear journalists, This is not a press release; I do not like science by press release. While I am a scientist, I have no special expertise in geology. Please only write about this if the standards of your publisher are so low that you would also write about it if you next-door neighbour would have this idea. In other words, please wait until there is a scientific publication on this. Even better would be to wait until there are several papers, but I realise that that is illusory. Dear "skeptics", I did not write that your SUV is responsible for the seismic atomic genocide of the the Japanese population. This post is only written to bring the idea under the attention of the right scientists. At this stage, it is very likely that the idea is wrong and that nothing will happen. Dear colleagues, the reason to write this post is to attend someone with the skills to investigate it. It is thus highly appreciated if you could forward it to someone who may have the right skills. I guess two skills are needed: 1) modelling of the warming of the crust and 2) dynamical modelling of the crust expansion. If you have one of these skills, please contact me, maybe someone with the second skill also responded. If you have both skills or know someone, feel free to act as if it is your own idea. Ideas are cheap and this back-of-the-envelope computation was quickly made. The real innovative step is deciding which idea is worth spending a year of your time on to make it into science. It would be nice if after publication you could act as if a colleague attended you to this post and send me a copy of the article. I am curious.

Back-of-the-envelope computation

The length of the Equator is roughly 40x10⁶ metres. And my high-school tables book gives thermal expansion coefficients for various stone types between 4 and 12x10^-6 K^-1. So for a one degree temperature change one would expect that the Earth's crust would expand by 160 to 480 metre. (More accurately, one would use the size of a plate not the circumference of the Earth. On the other hand, the projected temperature change is larger than one degree.) For the sake of the argument, let's say that it is about 100m. One thing I do not know is whether the crust is sufficiently brittle/solid (like a railway track or bridge that deforms by heat) or whether there are air and liquid pockets and cracks which could absorb the expansion. Furthermore, maybe the additional pressure would mainly increase the width of the crust not its length or the crust would just crumple a little more.