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Thursday, April 16, 2020

Corona Virus Update: Don't take stories about reinfected cured patients too seriously (part 31)

Prof. Dr. Christian Drosten

The last Corona Virus Update Podacast with specialist for emerging viruses Prof. Dr. Christian Drosten had two main topics. The internationally most important one is about press reports that cured patients would be reinfected or even that people may not become immune after recovering from the disease. ThEN WHat AbOuT hErD iMmUNiTy?

I have seen people who are normally careful and well informed talk about these "reinfections". However, it is very likely just a problem with measurement accuracy when in the final stages of the disease the amount of virus becomes very low and hard to detect, especially in samples taken from the throat.

The other half of the podcast was about a study on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the German municipality Heinsberg. A region not too far from Bonn were there was a big early outbreak after a Carnival party. At a press conference some preliminary results were presented without any detail on the methods, on how these results were computed. The numbers suggested less people may die and more may be infected without knowing it.

There was first a wave of publicity praising the results and discussing the political implications. Then after consulting scientists there was a wave of publicity claiming the study was rubbish, while all the scientists had said was that they did not have information on the methods and thus could not comment. Sometimes they explained the kind of information they would need to have and that was spun into the study doing this this wrong, which was not claimed. On social media people started attacking the Heinsberg scientists or those asking for more information, which can only be based on whether they liked the numbers (politically) because they knew about the methods even less. For a day Germany looked like the US culture war. Social media has a mob problem that needs addressing.

It was not a glorious hour for science reporting by (probably mostly) political journalists. Anyway because this is much ado about nothing until we have a manuscript describing the methods and purely German I have skipped this part. I was nodding a lot, yes those are the kinds of problems you have interpreting measurements, yes you really need to know the measurement process well to assess the results. There are so many similarities between sciences.

It may still be fun for the real virology science nerd to learn the kind of details that matter to interpret a study. They can read the German transcript.

The basic problem determining whether someone is ill

Korinna Hennig:

Over the weekend there have been several reports from China and South Korea about patients who were considered to have recovered or were discharged from hospital and have now tested positive again. So this is not about antibodies, but about the actual virus detection in the throat swab, for example, or from the lungs. Is it conceivable that the virus is reactivated? You also examined the course of the PCR tests on the Munich patients.

Christian Drosten:

This phenomenon can be described as follows: A patient is discharged from the hospital, verified as corona negative and as cured. And a moment later - it could be days, three or four days, or even up to seven or eight days - the patient is tested again. And suddenly he is positive for the virus in the PCR. It is said that the patient may have become newly infected, or in reality he was not immune at all, although he survived the disease. Or the virus has come back again, and you know certain infectious diseases, herpes viruses are the prime example, which can always come back.

One asks the question: is this perhaps the case with this new virus? Unfortunately, there are still very few precise descriptions in the scientific literature of how the virus is excreted in patients in different types of samples, for example in swabs taken from the throat or in lung secretion, also known as sputum, or in stool samples - these are all the types of samples we know that the virus is detectable. Only a few studies have so far described how this behaves over time in relation to excretion.

We have made and published one of them. We have made an overview picture of this excretion over time in nine patients from Munich. ... This shows the detection limit of the polymerase chain reaction. And you can see clearly, especially towards the end of the disease process, when the patients recover, that there is still virus present. It is sometimes detectable, sometimes for a few days in a row, then again for a few days in a row it is not detectable. This always jumps above and below the detection limit.

These are simply statistical phenomena that occur. A PCR can only test a certain sample, a certain sample volume for virus. There are statistical distribution phenomena which mean that the virus has in principle been there the whole time, but the test cannot always detect it. You have to picture it like this, I often explain it to students like this: you have a swimming pool full of water and goldfish are swimming in it. And there is no doubt that they are there. But now you take a sample from this paddling pool with a bucket, blindfolded. And then you may have a goldfish in your bucket and sometimes not. Still, one would not deny that there are goldfish in the swimming pool. ...

Reporting of the results

And now the question is simply how to deal with it. I can tell you that here in Germany something like this would not happen, because we have a culture here, where results like this are questioned relatively quickly and rules are always seen with the possibility of an exception. In other words, a German health authority would practically say: well, okay, that's obvious, that's what happened now.

But in the Asian culture of public health there is a much greater strictness in dealing with such rules. That is not so bad. I don't want to criticize it now. It is simply a cultural difference that when such a rule is established, it is adhered to.And when it is then said that we now agree that a patient who has been PCR negative twice in a row, we define him as cured and discharge him. ...

It is a thoroughness to say: No, this rule will not be questioned now, this is no exception, but we just enter it into the table. The patient was tested negative twice and now he is positive again. And now we test a few hundred of such discharge courses and enter all this in the table and discuss it only after we have the table completely. Then we write this together and write a scientific publication about it. This is exactly what happened, several times.

These scientific publications are now in a public resource and readable, but now this discussion process is starting. So, now it's starting with people reading such publications, who perhaps do not know the details and say: What is this? It looks like a reinfection. What is going on with this virus? And it's being spread again through even more discussion channels. This creates excitement and uncertainty.

As a scientist, I would prefer the "Asian" process, that is the cleaner data, where you know exactly what happened. You have to understand the measurement process, but the scientific literature is for scientists.

I like the movement to open science, which makes it easier for people to participate in science and also for scientists to do science, but the scientific literature is not written for normal people and it will lead to problems when people with half-knowledge start reading the scientific literature. In this case it was probably innocent, in many cases bad actors abuse this to mislead the people.

Study one

How the samples were take for one of the studies was not fully clear, as can happen with preprints.

So it may well be that at one point when the patient was discharged, they simply took swabs from the throat, and at another time they may have looked in the lung secretion that someone coughed up. Such things can happen, these are two different types of samples.

And we know well, that the lung secretion stays positive much longer after discharge. And we also believe that it is not infectious for others. Using cell culture virus isolation studies, which we also did in our publication we tried this. We already believe it's no longer infectious. We've never been able to isolate an infectious virus. ...

Study two

In the other study it is actually more interesting, it is a bit more explicit. They examined 172 patients beyond the point of discharge. In 25 of them, the test was positive again, on average after 5.23 days after discharge. There it is also clearly stated, the discharge criterion was two negative throat swabs in a row.

So: The patient had to have a negative throat-swab twice, then he was discharged as cured. But we know exactly that the throat-swab is the sample that becomes negative earliest in patients. So in the second week of illness, many patients no longer have a positive throat-swab on most of the days that one tests, while stool and sputum are still reliably almost always positive.

And then it is said that of these 25 patients, 24 patients had severe histories. For me, this indicates that if someone has a severe history, he will of course be discharged later. Then he will be treated in hospital for a longer time. And especially with these patients we know that the virus in their throat is almost always completely gone. So the virus in the throat has had time to be eliminated. So in severe cases, the throat swab is no longer positive after this long time.

Let me set a break here to let this sink in. If it were really a problem of people being re-infected because they did not acquire immunity, it would be the patients who got most ill, who did not acquire immunity. If it really were a matter of immunity, the opposite would be more logical.

Then it is said that 25 patients have been diagnosed as positive. But in 14 of them, the laboratory test was positive again after they had been discharged from the stool, i.e. not from the throat-swab, and this tells me that we have exactly this mix-up here. For we know that the stool samples in particular remain positive for the virus for a long time, and I have to say that here too, by the way, we have not found any infectious virus in them. This is probably again only dead, excreted virus.

And with others it was throat swabs, which then tested positive again. But then we have to say again, a throat swab can also contain naturally coughed up lung mucus. You cough up the stuff and it sticks to the back of your throat.

You can see from the way in which it was done methodically and from the samples in which it was found, and also from the type of patients, that people say that these are patients who have been seriously ill for a long time, that there is a risk of falling into this trap, into this confusion. I would even suspect that the authors themselves simply know that this "mistake" could be present here. ...

Other podcasts

Part 28: Corona Virus Update: exit strategy, masks, aerosols, loss of smell and taste.

Part 27: Corona Virus Update: tracking infections by App and do go outside

Part 23: Corona Virus Update: need for speed in funding and publication, virus arrival, from pandemic to endemic

Part 22: Corona Virus Update: scientific studies on cures for COVID-19.

Part 21: Corona Virus Update: tests, tests, tests and how they work.

Part 20: Corona Virus Update: Case-tracking teams, slowdown in Germany, infectiousness.

Part 19: Corona Virus Update with Christian Drosten: going outside, face masks, children and media troubles.

Part 18: Leading German virologist Prof. Dr. Christian Drosten goes viral, topics: Air pollution, data quality, sequencing, immunity, seasonality & curfews.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

No, we do not have 12 years to stop catastrophic climate change #12years

I have to apologize to Peter Hadfield (better known as Potholer54) as I am not sure I have found the source of the talking point that we only have 12 years. Science journalist Hadfield always encourages real skeptics to check claims by searching for the source in the scientific literature. The best solution to the riddle I found is really disappointing, but independent of the source, the claim is terrible.

How much warming is seen as acceptable is a political compromise between how hard it is to change the energy system (against powerful vested interests) and how much damages people see as acceptable. All world leaders have agreed in the Paris climate agreement on the following compromise.

Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C [3.6°F] above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C [2.7 °F] above pre-industrial levels, recognising that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.

Previously the political compromise used to be to keep the warming below 2°C and most scientific work thus focused on the impacts of 2°C warming and on possible ways to make the transition that fast. After Paris politicians asked scientists to study how much the damages from climate change would be reduced and how much harder it would be to limit warming to 1.5°C.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thus brought all the research on this topic together and in October published a report on the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C warming. In the media reporting a frequent talking point somehow was that we only have 12 years to stop climate change.

How much CO2 can we still emit?

Before looking into it I had guessed the claim would be based on the carbon budget. How much CO2 we can still emit until we reach the amount that will likely warm the Earth by 1.5°C. Note that CO2 accumulates in the climate system and the warming is determined by the total historical amount we emit. I sometimes worry people think that when global warming becomes too devastating we can stop emitting CO2 and the problem is solved. When the French stopped dumping salt in the Rhine and Meuse the water quality quickly became better. CO2 is not like that. When we stop emitting CO2 warming will even continue for some time, it will not go back to the temperature we used to have and many consequences (such as sea level rise) will keep getting worse, just slower.

The Earth has already warmed by about 1°C since the end of the 19th century.* Based on past emissions alone we would not reach the 1.5°C warming level yet, according to the IPCC report. A part of the carbon budget is still left. This is a bit more than 10 times how much we currently emit per year and could thus have been the source of the talking point. The Summary for Policy Makers of the IPCC states:

Limiting global warming requires limiting the total cumulative global anthropogenic emissions of CO2 since the pre-industrial period, that is, staying within a total carbon budget (high confidence). By the end of 2017, anthropogenic CO2 emissions since the pre-industrial period are estimated to have reduced the total carbon budget for 1.5°C by approximately 2200 ± 320 GtCO2 (medium confidence). The associated remaining budget is being depleted by current emissions of 42 ± 3 GtCO2 per year (high confidence). The choice of the measure of global temperature affects the estimated remaining carbon budget. Using global mean surface air temperature, as in AR5, gives an estimate of the remaining carbon budget of 580 GtCO2 for a 50% probability of limiting warming to 1.5°C, and 420 GtCO2 for a 66% probability (medium confidence).

This would have been a better reason for the talking point than the possible reason below, but even then we do not have 12 years, we should do more NOW. We cannot wait 12 years and then suddenly stop all emissions. We are already doing a lot, half of all new electrical generation capacity in the world is already renewable power, but we need to do more and do this now. The only time better than now is decades ago.

The best time to start [reducing emissions] was 25 years ago. The second best time is today.

On the other hand, the Earth does not explode in 12 years, any action reduces damages and adaptation costs. If we do not manage to limit the warming to 1.5°C, it would be better to limit it to 1.6°C than to 1.7°C, and so on. There is no brick wall we crash into, there is no cliff we fall into, there is no "deadline", CNN. Any limitation of the warming makes life on Earth better. Being lied into one Iraq war is catastrophic, but still better than 2 or 3 wars.

Any analogy is imperfect, but a better analogy would be that climate change is like crossing a busy street without looking, it is a irresponsible risk and the farther you go the higher the risk. Another analogy is walking into a mine field as Michael Mann often says. We do not know when the mines will explode, better walk into the field as little as possible and not 12 meters.

Reducing CO2 emission means changing our energy system and agriculture. This is a big task, and not something we will not be finished within 12 years. When we do more now, we would also have more time than 12 years to finish the task.

It is much better to say that to achieve the climate goals we have set ourselves in the Paris climate agreement we have to be at zero emissions in a generation. Or that we have to half emissions in 2030.

I would vote for that, but considering the resistance to change of the establishment, Gavin Schmidt is probably realistic when writing on RealClimate:

Can we avoid going through 1.5ºC?

IPCC has to use a few circumlocutions to avoid giving a direct answer to this question (for reasonable and understandable reasons). I’m not quite so constrained…

There are many issues related to the feasibility question of which physical climate-related issues are only one. The basic issue is that the effort to reduce emissions sufficiently to never get past 1.5ºC would require a global effort to decarbonize starting immediately that would dwarf current efforts or pledges. This seems unlikely (IMO).
...
So my answer is… no.

I get that there is reluctance to say this publically – it sounds as if one is complicit in the impacts that will occur above 1.5ºC, but it seems to me that tractable challenges are more motivating than impossible (or extremely unfeasible) ones – I would be happy to be proven wrong on this though.

The craziness begins

However, the press articles and TV segments on the IPCC report do not talk about the carbon budget. In most cases they do not explain at all where the 12 years comes from. The Guardian headline is: "We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN." Given that English is the global language, the difficulty of the English have understanding international relations is rather surprising. The IPCC is not the UN. More importantly for this post, the headline is not explained anywhere in the article.

The most surprising place to see the claim is Fox News**: "Terrifying climate change warning: 12 years until we’re doomed." That is some contrast to their evening television opinion shows operating as the PR arm of the Republican party. This article was on their homepage, in the science section, under the category "Doomsday" and republishing an article written by the New York Post. Again I cannot find a justification for the headline in the article.

The Sunrise Movement will visit members of Congress to lobby for a Green New Deal on Monday, December the 10th and would like climate scientists, who happen to meet at the AGU Fall meeting in Washington DC, to join them. They also did not go to the source, but trusted newspapers when they write in their call for action: "the latest UN report says we have 12 years to rapidly transform our economy to protect human civilization as we know it."

As an aside, had I been in Washington, I would have been happy to join them, I feel we need to do more to reduce climate change damages, but the Green New Deal is politics, not science. So I would not show up as a scientist (in one of those stereotypical white lab coats).

We may be getting a bit closer to the solution listening to CNN. Interrupting their programming on the missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft CNN titles "Planet has only until 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change, experts warn" and says: "In Paris leaders pledge to keep the rise well below 2 degrees [Celsius]. This report now suggests we aim for 1.5°C. A benchmark we are predicted to reach in 2030."

(No, the politicians suggested we'd aim for 1.5°C.) Why does CNN think that experts warned about this? The reporting of LifeGate may give a hint:

If not curbed, this trend will lead the Earth to exceed the threshold of +1.5 degrees between 2030 and 2052 (according to the different scenarios the SR15 took into consideration). This means that in just 12 years we could reach the temperature rise that the Paris Agreement hypothesised for 2100.

LifeGate is a news organization calling itself "the leading point of reference for sustainable development since 2000". They at least describe this situation is sufficient detail to have a look what the source says.

What does the IPCC say about 1.5°C, 2030 and 2052? The summary for policy makers states in their description of the current situation:

Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, with a likely range of 0.8°C to 1.2°C. Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. (high confidence)

Chapter one of the report has the details and confirms that the period 2030 to 2052 is based on an estimate of how much the world has warmed up to now and how fast it is warming. That fits, we have warmed about 1°C and the warming is about 0.2°C per decade. So one degree more warming would be in 5 decades and half a degree warming more would be 25 years, which is the middle of the 2030 to 2052 year interval.

Figure SMP1, panel a, from the Summary for Policy Makers of the IPPC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C.

This is the warming baseline WUWT & Co., Big Coal and Big Oil and the pro-torture politicians Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Mohammad Bone Saw Salman are fighting for, which is for comparison with climate policies that benefit humanity in the remainder of the report.

The period of 2030 to 2052 is mentioned in the beginning of the report and was also mentioned early in the IPCC press conference. So it makes sense that is was noted in the press, but that they used the lower uncertainty range (12 years) and not the mean (26 years) is weird, as well as calling reaching the 1.5°C level an immediate catastrophe or deadline, while it had a different function.

Maybe I am too much of a scientist, but mentioning the lower boundary of an uncertainty range makes no sense without defining the range. The IPCC used the term "likely", which is defined as a probability between 66 and 100%. If you wanted to more sure the period contains the year we will cross the 1.5°C level, for example "virtually certain" (99-100%), the range would have been much wider and the lower bound much earlier. Scientifically speaking the "12 years" without that context is meaningless.

So what most likely happened is that we have scientists describing the progression of climate change. They give the uncertainty range and the press decides to only mention the lower boundary of this range. Then they somehow turn it into a deadline, put this in many headlines and never tell their readers where the number comes from. This made #12years a somewhat viral political meme. Chinese whispers of the worst kind. Journalists please listen to Peter Hadfield: check the source.

* If we define the pre-industrial temperature as the temperature of the second half of the 19th century, as the newest IPCC report did. The actual industrial revolution and our CO2 emissions started a century earlier. Politicians will have to clarify how they define their thresholds. It may be a good idea to convert the 1.5°C and 2°C limits into warming since a more recent period, as this is better defined due to much better observations.

** Clicking on the Fox News link may give you "Access Denied". Copy and paste works.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Is nitpicking a climate doomsday warning allowed?

Journalist and amateur mass-psychic David Wallace-Wells published an article in the New York Magazine titled: "The Uninhabitable Earth - Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think."

Michael Mann responded on Facebook as one of the first scientists. He disliked the "doomist framing" and noted several obvious inaccuracies at the top of the article that all exaggerated the problem.

Some days later seventeen climate scientists of Climate Feedback (including me) reviewed the NY Mag article.

In my previous blog post I argued that this is a difficult, but important topic to talk about. The dangers of unfettered climate change are huge. Also if we do not act faster than we did in the past we are taking serious risks with our civilisation and existence. We should seriously consider that the situation can become worse than what we expect on average. Such cases are a big part of the total risk.

While the danger is there and should be discussed, the article contained many inaccuracies, which typically exaggerated the problem. Thus I have rated the article as having "low scientific credibility", which was the most selected rating of the other scientists as well.

Both the critique of Mann and of Climate Feedback produced quite some controversy. This was exceptional; normally the people who see climate change as an important problem trust the scientists who told them about the problem.

Like other climate scientists I correct both sides when I see something and have enough expertise. Although it is much rarer to have to correct people who see climate change as a problem (let's call them the "concerned"). I guess the real problem is big enough, there is not much need to exaggerate it. The overwhelming amount of nonsense comes from people playing down the problem. Normally the deniers really dislike contrary evidence, but the concerned are mostly happy to be corrected and to be able see the problem more clearly.

It is interesting that this time the corrections were much more controversial. Why was it different this time? Was our "nitpicking" a case of the science police striking again? Could Climate Feedback give more useful ratings?

Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial

Michael Mann followed up his Facebook post with an article in the Washington Post together with communication expert Susan Joy Hassol that "doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial". The key argument was:

Some seem to think that people need to be shocked and frightened to get them to engage with climate change. But research shows that the most motivating emotions are worry, interest and hope. Importantly, fear does not motivate, and appealing to it is often counter-productive as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it.

This is an argument climate activists who want to be effective need to be aware of. The well-known groups already tend to stick to the science. Climate change is bad enough as it is and they rightly value their credibility.

The argument makes me uncomfortable, however, when connected to science. The situation is what it is. Also if that provokes fear, scientists should stick to the evidence and not tone it down to be "effective". It is the job of an activist to be effective. It is our job is to be honest.

If the population would have to fear we are not honest, that would produce additional uncertainty and give more room for the prophets of doom. Thus toning it down fearing fear can also produce fear.

David Wallace-Wells uses the fear that scientists hide the severity to make his story more scary. He is claiming throughout that article that scientists are not giving it straight: scientist are technocrats who are too optimistic that the problem can be solved, "climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious", he talked to many scientists, but does not name most in the original article, thus suggesting they are only willing to tell the truth anonymously, "the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months ... have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion", "Pollyannaish plant physiologists", "Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria", "But climate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must."

This framing may have made the article more attractive to readers who expect scientists not to be honest and to understate the problems. This in turn may have provoked a more allergic reaction to the Climate Feedback critique than an article mostly read by people who love and respect science.

That the audience matters is also suggested by clear difference in the responses on Reddit sceptic and Reddit Collapse. The people on the Reddit of the real sceptics (not the fake climate "sceptics") were interested, while the people preparing for the collapse of civilisation were more often unhappy about Climate Feedback.

In the Climate Feedback reviews the doomist tone is often not appreciated, but if you look at the details, at the annotations of the scientists, it is clear that the problem is that the NY Mag article contains errors that exaggerate the problem, not the bad news that is accurate. In the summaries spreading doom and exaggerating were sometimes used interchangeably. So let me say clearly: I have never talked to a scientists who was more worried in private than in public.

While scientists say what they think, they do tend to be careful in what they claim. The more careful the claim, the more confident a scientist can be that the evidence is sufficient to support it. We like strong and thus careful claims. This is justified when it comes to the question whether there is a problem. You do not want to cry wolf too often when there is none. However, as I have argued on this blog before we should not be careful about the size of the wolf. Saying the wolf is a Chihuahua is not good advice to the public.

My advice to the public would be to expect problems to be somewhat worse than the scientific mainstream claims, but not to go to prophets of doom and especially to avoid sources with a history of inaccurate information. (At least for mature problems, in case of fresh problem it can go both ways.)

Nitpicking

Looking at the high risk tails is uncomfortable for everyone, also for scientists. That provokes more critical reading and an unfortunate claim in such a story will get more comments than a similar one hidden in a middle of the road most accurate story.

However, unfortunately the article also often made statements are clearly inaccurate, wrong or are missing important context. The biggest error in the article — from my perspective as someone who works on how accurately we know how much the Earth is warming — was this line:

there are alarming stories every day, like last month’s satellite data showing the globe warming, since 1998, more than twice as fast as scientists had thought.

This has been updated by David Wallace-Wells to now read:

there are alarming stories in the news every day, like those, last month, that seemed to suggest satellite data showed the globe warming since 1998 more than twice as fast as scientists had thought (in fact, the underlying story was considerably less alarming than the headlines).

This was a report on a satellite upper air dataset that was the favourite of the climate "sceptics" because it showed the laast warming. Scientists have always warmed that that dataset was unreliable. Now an update has brought it in line with the other temperature datasets. The "twice as fast" is just for a cherry picked period. That is about as bad as mitigation sceptical claiming that global warming has stopped by cherry picking a specific period.

The scientific assessment for the actual warming did not change, certainly not become twice as much. If anything we now understand the problem better, which would mean less risk. The change is also not that much compared to the warming we had over the last century.

Because the actual scientific assessment did not change one could also argue that the mistake is inconsequential for the main argument of the story and the comment thus nitpicking. At least for me it matters. I hope more people feel this way.

There were many more mistakes like this and cases where missing context will give the reader the wrong impression. I do not want to go through them all in this already long post; you can read the annotations.

There were also cases which were also nitpicking from a scientific viewpoint. Where these comments were mine, I included them for completeness. They also did not influence my rating much.

Apparently I have to add that parts of the text without annotations are not automatically accurate. Especially for such a long article annotating is a lot of work. At a certain moment there are enough annotations to make an assessment. In addition even with 17 scientists it will happen that none of the scientists has relevant expertise for specific claims.

Climate Feedback rating system

We may want to have another look at the rating system used by Climate Feedback; see below. Normally finding a grade is quite straight forward. In this case I had to think long and was still not really satisfied.

Suggested guidelines for the overall scientific credibility rating
Remember that we do not evaluate the opinion of the author, but instead the scientific accuracy of facts contained within the text, and the scientific quality of reasoning used.

+2 = Very High: No inaccuracies, fairly represents the state of scientific knowledge, well argumented and documented, references are provided for key elements. The article provides insights to the reader about climate change mechanisms and implications.
+1 = High: The article does not contain major scientific inaccuracies and its conclusion follows from the evidence provided.
0 = Neutral: No major inaccuracies, but no important insight to better explain implications of the science.
-1 = Low: The article contains significant scientific inaccuracies or misleading statements.
-2 = Very Low: The article contains major scientific inaccuracies for key facts supporting the author’s argumentation and/or omits to mention important information and/or presents logical flaws in using information to reach his or her conclusion.
n/a = Not Applicable: The article does not build on scientifically verifiable information (e.g., it is mostly about politics or opinions).

The scale is not symmetrical in the sense that if you get X facts wrong and X facts right you are in the middle. It might be that some people expect that. I would argue that getting only 50% right is pretty bad for a science article.

A problem in this case was that we can only give integer grades. So I gave a -1. I thought about neutral, but decided against it because that would mean "no major inaccuracies" and there were. For the part I could judge I found several mistakes and cases of missing important context (that is the description of -1). Had it been possible, I would have given the article a -0.5., because the tag "low scientific credibility" sounds a bit too harsh.

The rating of the article and the summary is made independently by all scientists and most made the same consideration. Had I been able to see the other "low" rating, I might have opted for "neutral" for balance. (We can see the annotations of the other scientists and can also respond to them. Sometimes when I am one of the first to make annotations, I wait with my rating to see what problems the others find.)

The relativity of wrong is very important. This same week Climate Feedback reviewed a Breitbart story about the accuracy of the instrumental warming estimate (my blog post on it). That was a complete con job and got "very low" rating. Giving the New York Magazine piece half the Breitbart rating does nor feel right. A scale from 0 to 4 may work better than one from -2 to 2. A zero sounds a lot worse than one and "low" would not be half of "very low".

The actual problem may be only -2 means inaccuracies influencing the main line of the story. It is more a scale for a science nerd looking for a high quality article than a scale for a citizen wanting to know how reliable the main line of the story is. Up to now that was mostly correlated, for this piece is was not, which made grading hard.

The more concrete a claim is, the more objective it can be assessed. Thus I would personally prefer to keep it a scale for science nerds and not go to a more vague and subjective assessment whether the main line is accurate.

A previous Feedback on a climate nightmare article by climate journalist Eric Holthaus got plus and minus ones. That shows that such an article can get positive ratings. That the article was never rated "neural" suggests that we may have to reconsider its description. That it states "no important insight" may make neutral almost worse than -1. It sounds like the famous quote: "not even wrong."

Based on the above discussion of the NY Mag review my suggestion for a new rating system would be the one below. It should be seen if it also fits well to other articles. I changed the numbers, the short descriptions and the long description for neutral.

4 = Excellent science reporting: No inaccuracies, fairly represents the state of scientific knowledge, well argumented and documented, references are provided for key elements. The article provides insights to the reader about climate change mechanisms and implications.
3 = Very good science reporting: The article does not contain major scientific inaccuracies and its conclusion follows from the evidence provided.
2 = Good science reporting: Mostly accurate statements and only minor inaccurate ones.
1 = Some problems: The article contains significant scientific inaccuracies or misleading statements.
0 = Major errors: The article contains major scientific inaccuracies for key facts supporting the author’s argumentation and/or omits to mention important information and/or presents logical flaws in using information to reach his or her conclusion.
n/a = Not Applicable: The article does not build on scientifically verifiable information (e.g., it is mostly about politics or opinions).

Why climate feedback?

There were people asking why we, Climate Feedback, were doing this. This could be interpreted in two ways:
1) Why do you nitpick this article I feel is an important wake-up call?
2) Why do you do this at all?

First of all, we do not know in advance what the outcome will be. Many articles on climate change are also very good and get great ratings. That is the kind of feedback journalists appreciate and which may help them in their careers and stimulate them to write better articles. Some journalists have even asked for reviews of important pieces to showcase the quality of their work.

We had a few authors who updated their article. David Wallace-Wells also did so and added more sources and transcripts. As far as I know such updates have only happened on the side that accepts the science. Also in that way our work improves science journalism, although such updates will come too late for most readers.

Most people will likely only get a general impression of how reliable news sources are when it comes to climate change. When we have enough reviews Climate Feedback will also make "official" assessments of the reliability of media sources. For more prolific writers also their individual credibility starts to become clear.

The reviews have already made clear that people who accept that climate change is real typically write accurate articles, while writers who do not want to solve the problem typically write error-ridden and misleading articles. That is good to know.

Only criticising the climate "sceptics" is not in the nature and in the training of good scientists. More utilitarian: solving climate change is a marathon, the energy transition will not be completed before 2050. Adaptation to limit the consequences of climate change will also be a job for generations to come. It is thus important that scientists are seen as trustworthy and only picking on one group would damage our reputation.

There are people who want to understand the details and when they meet misinformation being able to explain what is wrong with it. On reddit these people gather in /r/skeptic/. They normally accept climate change is real and like details/nitpicking, quality arguments and a rational world.

29. Along comes a brilliant writer from outside those circles, w/ a galvanizing, wildly popular piece, & for his efforts, he is ... scolded.
— David Roberts (@drvox) 12 July 2017

I do worry that there is also a downside to science policing in that people are less comfortable speaking about climate change fearing to be corrected. That is one reason to let minor cases slip and in bigger cases be gracious when it is the first time making a mistake. David Wallace-Wells responded graciously to the critiques, it were others that objected.

Making a mistake is completely different from the industrial production of nonsense on WUWT & Co.

It would be progress if scientists had a smaller role in this weird US "debate". It was forced on us by a continual stream of misinformation on the science from climate "sceptics". There should be a debate what to do about it and that is a debate for everyone. If you would see less scientists in US debates around climate change that would probably mean that the important questions are finally being addressed.

It would also be progress because scientists are typically not very good communicators. Partially that is because most scientists are introverted. Partially that is the nature of the problem, some things are simply not true, some arguments are simply not valid and there is little room for negotiation and graciousness.

On the other hand, science communication works pretty well in countries without the systemic corruption in Washington and the US media. So I do not think scientists are the main problem.

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

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:

The worst case for the emissions of greenhouse gases.
The worst case for how sensitive the climate system responds.
The worst case for the impacts and how humanity responds.
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.

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

The IPCC underestimates global warming

A month ago the New York Times insulted its subscribers with a climate change column by Bret Stephens, their new hire from the Wall Street Journal. The bizarre text was mostly a sequence of claims that did not follow from the arguments presented.

The column also contained one fact. Which was wrong and later corrected. Stephens claimed:

Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities.

As a dutiful watcher of Potholer54, which any real skeptic should be, you know that it is a good idea to check the source and Stephens helpfully provided a link to the Summary for Policymakers of the 5th assessment synthesis report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This summary mentions the number "0.85" in the sentence:

The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend show a warming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C over the period 1880 to 2012, when multiple independently produced datasets exist (Figure SPM.1a). {1.1.1, Figure 1.1}

Figure SPM.1a. Annually and globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature anomalies relative to the average over the period 1986 to 2005. Colours indicate different data sets.

Thus Stephens confused the global temperature with the temperature of the Northern Hemisphere. Not a biggy, but indicative of the quality of Stephens' writing.

A related weird claim is that the "warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities."

As quoted above the warming since 1880 is not exactly known, but probably between 0.65 and 1.06 °C. That it was warming is so certain that a journalist may call it "indisputable". There is thus no conflict between probabilities and certainty. In fact they go hand in hand. When scientists talk about uncertainties, they are quantifying how certain we are.

However, I did not want to attack the soft target Bret Stephens. The hard target IPCC is much more interesting. They put some thought in their writing.

More precisely I have problems when they write in the summary for policy makers: "temperature data as calculated by a linear trend show a warming of 0.85". That means that they fitted a linear function to the data — using [[least squares regression]] — and used this trend and the length of the period to estimate the total warming over this period.

This is a problem because calculating the total amount of warming using a linear trend underestimates global warming.* I show this below for two global temperature datasets by comparing the linear warming estimate with a nonlinear (LOESS) warming estimate. The linear estimate is smaller: For NASA's GISTEMP it is 0.05 °C smaller and for Berkeley Earth it is 0.1 °C smaller.

Such linear estimates are well suited for comparing different datasets because it is well defined how to compute a linear trend and the bias will be similar in the different datasets. That is why linear estimates are used a lot in the scientific literature and scientists reading this know that a linear estimate can be biased when the curve itself is not linear.

But this was a warming estimate for the summary for policy makers. Policy makers and the public in general should get an unbiased estimate of the climatic changes we have seen and are before us.

Tending to underplay the problem is quite typical. There is even an article on climate Scientists Erring on the Side of Least Drama and also The Copenhagen Diagnosis gives several examples such as the very low predictions for the decline in sea ice or the increase in sea level.

When it comes the warming found in station data, we did study the main possible warming bias (urbanization) in depth, but hardly did any work on cooling biases that may lead us to underestimate the amount of warming.

In a recent study to define what "pre-industrial" means when it comes to the 2 °C warming limit, the authors suggest a comparison period with relatively few volcanoes, which is thus relatively warm. This underestimates the warming since "pre-industrial". The authors wanted to be "conservative". I think we should be unbiased.

I understand that scientists want to be careful before crying wolf, whether we have a problem or not. However, when it comes to the size of the wolf, we should give our best estimate and not continually err on the side of a Chihuahua.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

Clickbait articles dividing an already divided country even more

Yougov and The Economist just published a poll on political conspiracy theories that was designed to produce outrage and clicks on stories how stupid the other tribe is and how we rational people are above that. Secular Talk, a popular high-quality YouTube pundit, made two stories out of it: "50% Of Dems Think 'Russia Tampered With Vote Tallies' To Elect Trump" and "Nearly Half Of Trump Voters Believe Hillary Is Pimping Kids."

In the poll Americans were asked: "Do you think the following statements are true or not true?". One of the conspiracies was: "54. Conspiracy Theories – Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President."

The problem was that people could only chose between: "Definitely true", "Probably true", "Probably not true", and "Definitely not true". There was no option: "I do not know". "I do not know" would have been the rational answer. "Definitely no evidence" would be another fine option that was not available.

Especially given the lack of audits of the votes and the undemocratic active resistance of some Republican politicians against audits "probably not true" is as wrong as "Probably true". As an aside, in a democracy there should be no doubt that votes are counted correctly, every citizen should be able to follow the trail from the filled in ballot the voter put into the ballot box to the final count and audits should actually count paper ballots by hand and naturally be free/automatic.

The strangest people are those that said "Definitely true" or "Definitely not true".

The article made the story more juicy by combining the 17% of Democrats answering "Definitely true" with the 35% answering "Probably true" to "50% of Dems".

Conspiracies do exist, if there was more than one person involved in making this poll, my personal conspiracy would be that the question was crafted to produce artificial outrage, clicks and revenue.

Another conspiracy question was: "52. Conspiracy Theories – Leaked email from some of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers contained code words for pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse - what some people refer to as ’Pizzagate’."

Most of the Pizzagate Republicans (40%) said "probably true" rather than "definitely true" (9%) and again had no way to say "I do not know". Most American likely should have answered "I do not know" because they do not follow the conspiracy media that closely.

Such pedophilia conspiracies naturally exist, but in case of Pizzagate there is no evidence for it. "Definitely no evidence" would be the right answer, but that could again not be answered.

The question is also badly phrased. The hacked emails did contained the word "pizza", which is claimed to be a code word used by pedophiles. Thus if you take the question too literally you could even answer that the question is true.

These answers are sad, but no way as bad as the headline "Nearly Half Of Trump Voters Believe Hillary Is Pimping Kids" suggests. The poll is the saddest part of this story.

Takeaways:
1. If you see a poll, check the exact formulation of the question and the answers, especially when it is not a standard question that is regularly asked and the poll is thus more likely intended to generate clicks.
2. Even reputable sources, like The Economist and Secular Talk, can be wrong.
3. large parts of the media make money manufacturing outrage. To reduce this do your due diligence before you spread an emotional story. If that means spreading less stories: fine. News is no longer scarce, quality is.

This polls was a way to produce clicks and divide an already divided country even more.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

The BBC will continue fake debates on climate science

Nigel Lawson, not a scientist, but confuses public about science helped by the BBC.

David Rose wrote in The Daily Mail that Mr MacLeod, head of editorial standards and compliance for BBC Scotland, sent an email to his colleagues:

"When covering climate change stories, we should not run debates / discussions directly between scientists and sceptics. If a programme does run such a discussion, it will... be in breach of the editorial guidelines on impartiality."

Anthony Watts wrote a response in his usual elderly statesman manner; it was titled: "Climate change campaigners fear debate, can’t face climate skeptics anymore, so they rig TV news shows". No link, you can find the cesspit yourself. Note the word fear that is so important to the conservatives and the concealed message that climate scientists are climate change campaigners.

The Daily Mail is not the most reliable source around. The only article missing in the side bar is "Britney beheaded two-headed baby in satanic ritual". Thus I have asked the BBC for confirmation. They replied:

[I]t is not the case that “the new policy of the BBC is to no longer have debates between climate scientists & climate "sceptics"” as you state – our policy is and remains that all views are given due weight in BBC coverage of the issue.

Sounds like the bad news for Watts' blood pressure and the good news for science and democracy is wrong. The BBC will continue having fake debates on climate science. Or at least there does not seem to be a BBC-wide consensus opinion yet. What I found especially worrying is that the BBC does not distinguish between false balance ("due weight") and fake public debates. They are related, but separate problems.

What is wrong with the media?

Why is this a problem for democracy? I would like to explain the importance of accurate media reporting on climate science using a great new video that was just released called Can we trust scientists? h/t The New Anthropocene.

It reminds us of the huge trust the public has in science and contrasts it to the large percentage of people holding opinions that deviate from the scientific consensus. Not only when it comes to climate change, but also evolution and vaccination.

It argues that people who know of the consensus generally accept it. This makes sense because a consensus opinion is much more reliable as the opinion of single persons. However, many people have the wrong impression that scientists are not sure yet whether climate change is a problem. Also the climate dissenters often claim there is no consensus.

As a consequence climate scientists are forced to state that there is a consensus on the basics. A somewhat awkward position as the job of a scientist is to refute existing hypothesis and there is nothing more beautiful for a scientist to refute a consensus idea. That means you are better than all the others. Or more modestly, that you were lucky and had a better idea. :-)

The video argues that vocal individual dissenters and the press are responsible for the misperception of how sure scientists are that climate change is real. The problem with the press is that they like controversy and that they present both sides as equal.

I think that the press is just part of the problem. Some people seem really determined not to understand what science has found. And I am not so sure whether the solution presented in the video, reading and watching bloggers and YouTube v-bloggers, will help. But maybe WUWT and Co. have damaged my trust in blogging. Apart from that, this is a video well worth watching and sharing.

False balance

I have this vision of a few theoretical physicists leaving the Large Hadron Collider after a long night of experiments, and stopping in at the local pub for a drink, where a few of the rowdier locals decide to challenge them on the fundamentals of quantum chromodynamics and a nonsense argument (debate) ensues.
David Sanger

Variable Variability

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Thursday, April 16, 2020

Corona Virus Update: Don't take stories about reinfected cured patients too seriously (part 31)