Archive for the ‘Copenhagen Conference’ Category

Wikileaks has the University of East Anglia (UEA) emails on uploaded and readily available to be downloaded.

The Climate Research Unit (CRU) at UEA have sent out numerous press releases on the subject of these emails.

There is currently an editing war on wikipedia and, well, the discussion encapsulates all the special interests in the -gate. It’s a good read if you have the time.

Climategate is essentially the following: An assortment of emails were stolen by an anonymous hacker and then placed into the public arena for debate. These several thousand emails have supposedly shown a type of malfeasance against the notion of climate change and the rigour of science behind the environmentalist movement. At least this is the dual charge from several political sources. The specific troubling quotes are as follows:

1. Phil Jones of East Anglia Univeristy to a lot of people. [Nov 16, 1999]

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

2. Phil Jones to Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University [July 8, 2004]

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

3. Michael Mann to Phil Jones + Gabi Hegerl of University of Edinburgh [Aug 10, 2004]

“Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future.”

4. Kevin Trenberth of US National Center for Atmospheric Research to Michael Mann. [Oct 12, 2009]

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t…”

At a glance these quotations look rather bad. Fairly bad, in fact. Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, even states that “My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues.”

Hm. Although they “do not read well” the context of the entire -gate puts the issue to rest rather quickly.

First of all, no one would base policies that’d reshape how the world worked based on a few studies by a few scientists. There are rigorous institutions put into place to counter bad science. In addition to this, thousands of studies published that have been talking about climate and how it’s a threat to mankind (note, however, that I don’t say climate change is a threat to the planet–George Carlin explains why [NSFW, swearing]). So even if these specific scientists are wrong, even if the multitude of institutions were wrong, and there has been a massive conspiracy (Ha!), the movement to solve climate change is not imperilled. At most this release of emails may quash the careers of three or four scientists.

Heck, as per the CRU press release on December 1st “Over 95% of the CRU climate data set concerning land surface temperatures has been accessible to climate researchers, sceptics and the public for several years…” The press release continues to say

“It is well known within the scientific community and particularly those who are sceptical of climate change that over 95% of the raw station data has been accessible through the Global Historical Climatology Network for several years.  We are quite clearly not hiding information which seems to be the speculation on some blogs and by some media commentators,” commented the University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research Enterprise and Engagement Professor Trevor Davies.

It’s been checked, double checked, and triple checked again, again, and again. No information is being hidden.

Numerous scientists and other groups have waded into the -gate to say that climate change is a fact.

American Meteorological Society:

For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true — which is not yet clearly the case — the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.

There’s an entire wikipedia page dedicated to the -gate and a section on how it has been received by scholars. All of the reactions by scientists thus far are in defence of the fact of climate change being a fact.

Proclamations of ‘victory’ by Hannity+Inhofe and others are, quite frankly, quite off the mark.

Secondly, on a more intriguing note, the emails that were released show a pretty neat look into the private lives of numerous scientists. A few quotes quickly come to mind:

… need to get this surgery over and then I will get busy with my review…

…getting married, did I mention, will work on this next data set a soon as I am back from my honeymoon…

At no point a direct reference in the leaked emails say anything of directly cooking the books. There are no mentions of meetings that were specifically made to skirt the law or scientific principles.If they felt comfortable enough to say the word ‘trick’ wouldn’t it be at odds with a conspiratorial outlook to not talk about meetings about cooking entire articles, papers, and all that? It just isn’t there.

If anything, there might be a worry that too many academics are working overtime and not getting to see their newborn grandkids enough.

Thirdly, the CRU press release on November 24th explains how the quotes were taken out of context. The ‘trick’ was just a word used to describe a statistical technique to make the data clearer in that it solved the discrepancy between the flip from non-specific measurements of temperature (cores of trees, steam ships measuring temperature of sea water before use of water) to precise measurement instruments (a thermometer being the most basic example). The press release is in the quote below.

Recently thousands of files and emails illegally obtained from a research server at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have been posted on various sites on the web. The emails relate to messages received or sent by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) over the period 1996-2009.

A selection of these emails have been taken out of context and misinterpreted as evidence that CRU has manipulated climate data to present an unrealistic picture of global warming.

This conclusion is entirely unfounded and the evidence from CRU research is entirely consistent with independent evidence assembled by various research groups around the world.

There is excellent agreement on the course of temperature change since 1881 between the data set that we contribute to (HadCRUT3) and two other, independent analyses of worldwide temperature measurements. There are no statistically significant differences between the warming trends in the three series since the start of the 20th century. The three independent global temperature data series have been assembled by:

• CRU and the Met Office Hadley Centre (HadCRUT3) in the UK.
• The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Asheville, NC, USA.
• The Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), part of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) in New York.

The warming shown by the HadCRUT3 series between the averages of the two periods (1850-99 and 2001-2005) was 0.76±0.19°C, and this is corroborated by the other two data sets.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 4th Assessment Report (AR4) published in 2007 concluded that the warming of the climate system was unequivocal. This conclusion was based not only on the observational temperature record, although this is the key piece of evidence, but on multiple strands of evidence. These factors include: long-term retreat of glaciers in most alpine regions of the world; reductions in the area of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) snow cover during the spring season; reductions in the length of the freeze season in many NH rivers and lakes; reduction in Arctic sea-ice extent in all seasons, but especially in the summer; increases in global average sea level since the 19th century; increases in the heat content of the ocean and warming of temperatures in the lower part of the atmosphere since the late 1950s.

CRU has also been involved in reconstructions of temperature (primarily for the Northern Hemisphere) from proxy data (non-instrumental sources such as tree rings, ice cores, corals and documentary records). Similar temperature reconstructions have been developed by numerous other groups around the world. The level of uncertainty in this indirect evidence for temperature change is much greater than for the picture of temperature change shown by the instrumental data. But different reconstructions of temperature change over a longer period, produced by different researchers using different methods, show essentially the same picture of highly unusual warmth across the NH during the 20th century. The principal conclusion from these studies (summarized in IPCC AR4) is that the second half of the 20th century was very likely (90% probable) warmer than any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely (66% probable) the warmest in the past 1300 years.

One particular, illegally obtained, email relates to the preparation of a figure for the WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999. This email referred to a “trick” of adding recent instrumental data to the end of temperature reconstructions that were based on proxy data. The requirement for the WMO Statement was for up-to-date evidence showing how temperatures may have changed over the last 1000 years. To produce temperature series that were completely up-to-date (i.e. through to 1999) it was necessary to combine the temperature reconstructions with the instrumental record, because the temperature reconstructions from proxy data ended many years earlier whereas the instrumental record is updated every month. The use of the word “trick” was not intended to imply any deception.

Phil Jones comments further: “One of the three temperature reconstructions was based entirely on a particular set of tree-ring data that shows a strong correlation with temperature from the 19th century through to the mid-20th century, but does not show a realistic trend of temperature after 1960. This is well known and is called the ‘decline’ or ‘divergence’. The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste. CRU has not sought to hide the decline. Indeed, CRU has published a number of articles that both illustrate, and discuss the implications of, this recent tree-ring decline, including the article that is listed in the legend of the WMO Statement figure. It is because of this trend in these tree-ring data that we know does not represent temperature change that I only show this series up to 1960 in the WMO Statement.”

The ‘decline’ in this set of tree-ring data should not be taken to mean that there is any problem with the instrumental temperature data. As for the tree-ring decline, various manifestations of this phenomenon have been discussed by numerous authors, and its implications are clearly signposted in Chapter 6 of the IPCC AR4 report.

Included here is a copy of the figure used in the WMO statement, together with an alternative version where the climate reconstructions and the instrumental temperatures are shown separately.

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The WMO1999 figure (top) with climate reconstructions and instrumental temperatures merged, and a version (bottom) with the climate reconstructions (coloured) and instrumental temperatures (annual & summer in black) shown separately.

The worry about “idiots” is just from worrying about misrepresentations of themselves in the political discourse around climate change. That’s a fairly hairy place to put anyone who is locked up day in and day out in a lab, and that has never had any training with the media. Stressful, even. Not everyone is a silver tongued politician nor a solid communicator like Al Gore or David Suzuki. People are imperfect and, well, it’s a good thing these scientists knew this and reminded each other of it throughout their emails since, well, a movement can only handle so many media gaffes.

So, in conclusion, the reaction by the right-wing bloggers on this issue is completely unwarranted. Same with the coverage by Fox News, et al. Climate change is still a reality to be handled at Copenhagen and beyond.

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Liberal.ca is hosting a contest for edited pictures of Harper being, well, not being in Copenhagen.

Last week Stephen Harper finally agreed to follow world leaders like Barack Obama to the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen.

We know that there are many, many places that Harper would rather be than Copenhagen next week—and we want you to use your mad Photoshop skills to illustrate them for us!

Being the mischievous blogger that I am I’ve concocted this fine image above. :D Submit yours ASAP.

Several university clubs (Development Studies Club; Eco-Club; Institute for Sustainable Energy, Economy and Environment Student’s Association; Model United Nations Team; Political Science Graduate Students Association; Urban Calgary Students Association; Young Liberal Association; and the Residence Students Association’s Save NRG Team) at the University of Calgary hosted a town hall over the Copenhagen conference happening between Dec. 7th and 18th. As per their facebook group:

Experts in different areas of environmental research will discuss the implications of next month’s United Nations Conference on Climate Change to Canada in a town hall at the University of Calgary. This is a non-partisan event and is open to all members of the Calgary community.

Four non-partisans came to the event to make a panel to explore, answer questions, and educate interested individuals about the issues surrounding the climate change qualms surrounding the Copenhagen conference. Here are my notes divided into the four speakers who spoke at the round table.

Dr. David Layzell – Executive Director – Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy (ISEEE)

He is an expert on expendable bio-economy, the plants sciences, has written 100+ peer-reviewed article, and holds seven US patents.

Magnitude is important to see the climate change issue. International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook (Nov 2009) has a projection out to 2050 from now till then. Our emissions will rise 40 to 50% over next fifty years. Provides an adviosry projection of pushing CO2 down to 450ppm. There is a need to curtail it from our course of 385 ppm. 20% chance of dangerous climate change begins at 450ppm while increasing in risk as you go beyond that.

The GHG gap is of 850 Mt CO2. We didn’t touch Kyoto and we have a sizable gap in what we have, will have, and what we should have.

Solutions?: Non-energy, conservation, efficiency and conversion, renewable and alternative energy, carbon storage. Focus on energy sector and reducing effort on sector needs to be done. 75% of market share needs to be shifted to greener sources. 2% change per year over 40 years makes this 75% possible quite easily.

Market share of primary energy has become stable over last 40 years. Oil, gas, coal, and electricity are in stable form. Major transition from wood-coal at beginning of 20th century, coal-oil after WWII, and the changes done is done over 40 years for market share to change from 1% to 10%.

Maximum slope for any source changes by 2% each year. Each solution is additive and can build up to a resolution to this crisis.

Problems: Rapidly growing demand, lower cost alternative, resource depletion, new technology proven at scale, and government policy driver. First one, not so much. Second one, the same. Third and fifth, yeah. Fourth, not so much. Alternatives are not ready, not lower cost, not rapidly increasing demand. Government can be a driver, and we will have depletion. The motivation, the driver will likely be policy rather than a push.

Dr. Frances Bowen – Director of the International Institute for Resources Industries and Sustainability Studies (IRIS) at the Haskayne School of Business

Corporate environment strategy. Firms environmental strategy choices.

Frame this area as an ethical issue: Conflicts will be happening at Copenhagen. Bangladeshi team in documentary in Water World as a cited source. 3.5 million people have already relocated to whatever earth is available in capital cities. Schools are now on boats in several places. Climate warming is soft words, according to scientist in movie–catastrophe is what we’re fighting. Environmental refuges is happening and will increase.

Note the James Goodale group chilling out with Pygmies. Senses and awareness of animals, survival rests on it, and the tribe sensed something disturbing in the universe. Recognized this in changes of plants. Groups of people are sensing something is deeply wrong and inacted rituals to push away perceived evils.

Desmond Tutu recently put out “leaving the world to sink or swim in meagre resources is morally wrong, we do not need climate change apartheid.” Homer Dixon: Talks of many of the challenges are existential or ethical crises.

Copenhagen is both a failure of our ethical systems to handle crises and is a venue to change our path, and change our morality. Look to our political leadership and we can see global failure in adequate response. Number of years have gone by and much of the world leadership has not done anything. He includes Canada in group that hasn’t been up to the job of leadership.

Two ways to respond: Do something or do nothing.

Four point on not doing things… Technology can change this through a magical bullet.. Climate change not proven. Uncertainty. No point.

If we’re wrong we don’t lose out. If we’re right and do nothing, well, we’re doomed.

Stabilized wedges of technologicalal responses in technology uses.. we got here by several decisions in how we got here. Responding just by using technology will not address the decisions we’ve made so far. What are our ethical and moral duty to do this?

This will be too expensive. Much more in the way of cost, according to Suzuki foundation and Pern, say more cost from not doing anything. More expensive avoiding issue.

Waiting for others (not my problem). Ethical flaws since it hasn’t been effective. We are waiting for other people, like China and India as villains to pick up slack. This results in us doing nothing and that provides us with several serious risks in moral efficacy.

If we’re not doing nothing, on what basis we do something on?

This is a general rationalistic viewpoint on climate change that can be summarized through game theory, as per the following video:

Several positive solutions: (1) What are the impacts, consequentialism. Agenda 2021, cost benefit analysis, and response to environmental issues. See impacts and solve them. Vulnerable to being hijacked, however, as the issue of who decides on the benefits-cost analysis, too blunt of an instrument.

(2) Deontological. Give rights to things. Make things assumed parts of reality like USA constitutionalism. Rights approach shows that rights are inherent and natural. Goes beyond costs and benefits to see rights of selves and in future people. Philippines had a court case made by several children against a al factory. Ecuador begins to see the rights beyond just human beings and stretches out to rivers and ecological facets.

This has limitations too. Doesn’t fit into ecological sciences.

(3) Leopold in Sand County Almanac. “A thing is right if it enhances the integrity, stability, beauty of a biotic community. It’s wrong if harms stability, integrity and beauty.” Approach of harm to communities, individuals. Limits are the links of humans and nature.

Offer of possibility: even if Copenhagen doesn’t succeed it is an opportunity to see how current behaviours and ethical resources are not adequately responding to crises. We can then grow into creating new ethical resources.

Concerns of ethics and justice of climate change.

Dr. Mishka Lysack – Assistant Professor of Social Work and co-chair of the Curriculum and Research Portfolio of the Sustainability Stewardship Working Group at the Office of Sustainability

Spirituality and the environment. Organized first teach ins at the University of Calgary. Head organizer of Ecological conference happening at the UoC in may.

Magnitude of the challenge to the business community. Magnitude in energy companies and companies that use energy. Impact based approach continued from previous speaker.

Emissions impact from three things: (For Canada)

(1) Population, (2) Affluence, and (3) Technology.

What can business to do this? Business cannot do immigration/population control. 20% emissions cut by 2020 is 2% a year from first speaker. Do we cut 2% population a year? No.

Affluence, then? Assumption of standard of living will fall, supposedly. Buying stuff will be harmed, using it well, and obsolescence. Marketing schemes to buy more stuff… Business can redefine affluence, cut down on carbon footprint. Find new ways to present products to consumers with less environmental impact.

Do we want to cut affluence by 2% a year? There are ways to do this, but it not the best way. There’s more efficient options now.

Now, what about technology? Suite of silver bullets rather than a single silver bullet from the last speaker. Efficiency is huge. Turning things off. Renewables also big. Carbon capture and storage. Range of technology options.

Issue becomes the need for policy solutions to enforce a transition. Transition needs unusual technologies. First speaker has good market reasons for changes for wood/coal/oil… We don’t have that now.

Characteristics of technologies that we need to have and overcome:

(1) Precautionary technology, precautionary actions. Manipulating market to change energy system to avoid climate issues. Businesses used to uncertainties but not used to large scale risks of climate change.

Hedging one solution. Some help can be done by policy. Another problem is selling problem in additon to solution (so people can buy it) and Copenhagen can solve this.

(2) These problems are local, situated. Carbon capture solution 70% in first speaker’s graphs by 2050. Changes are, err, hedged as a last resort. Creates issues with transferring technology, marketability in Alberta and beyond?, how to get into decision makers heads who are in other parts of the world, and plying on the knowledge of situation of climate change to local,-person-community.

(3) Disruptive innovation problem. Carbon Capture and Storage can be a solution, however it is an additional cost to things already being down. Disruptive in costs. Other things can move beyond disruptive costs.

Example of photography:  first use of digital photography was bad. All new technologies are disruptive are damaging. Choice comes from choosing the ones with the best chance of solutions.

Businesses who win in the end and in the long term are not there when it all begins. Incumbent firms lose out. See Apple. How can we soften the blows on the loser and sweeten the deal for winners?

A question not asked in Copenhagen is: you have a money to invest, now where do we invest? Where do we invest in affluence, population, and, more importantly, technology?

Douglas V. Tingey – Counsel at BMG Canada (Environmental and Climate Change Law)

Environmental and climate change law. 25 years of experience. Created a Kyoto-based firm and work in South America and in east Asia.

Business, law practice. Advises joint international in south east asia in Kyoto. First project was 2 1/2 million hectare to be protection of said area as an ecosystem. Tasked with trust structure to hold endowment to support management of project. Avoid taxes so it could be invested.

Middle of 2004, Russians join Kyoto. Now we could see funding conservation through Kyoto protocols.  We could put piping around area, push water through, take advantage of CSRs. Making 30,000 credits per installed Megawatt. A lot of credits.

Not small numbers. Credits no longer $3 per credit. Now $20-ish / credit. Multiply that by thousands of credits and we’re talking about real money here.

One of the underlying themes in Kyoto is how to leverage the private sector to get behind the solutions that are necessary. Flexible mechanism, carbon trading… How do we get the private sector involved? That/s the question.

The answer is to encourage others through increasing the rate of return. It works. It works. One of the few lawyers on carbon finance through incentives of Kyoto protocol on making things happen.

Copenhagen 2015–there has to be a deal. There is no alternative other than getting something–it might not be everything nor solve every issue, but it has to set up framework agreement to get the basis of it to be put into place. The hardest issue is to make commitments within an agreed approach and needs to be encouraged.

The Kyoto protocol doesn’t expire in 2012. First period simply ends. Kyoto will continue on from Copenhagen. 3/4 vote puts it into new period with new commitments. Canada cannot run away from international obligations.

1/5 chance after 420ppm, as mentioned by 2nd speaker. The harm is more like 1/4 or 1/3 if we don’t make the changes immediately or soon. The need is there, now, and science puts its there. New studies have it there. We have to communicate this–make it communicable to the average person by making that 1/3 risk not of the planet saving but being run over getting to work. Pushes a different perspective and forces people to recognize that people are being reckless.

Policy drivers need to have a government that believes in government. Issues needs government. Proper role of government, and its 3,000 year debate, still needs to be solved and especially in the context of environmental policy. We need the leadership.

Conservatives are screwed in this regard seeing that they do not like the idea of growing government since it requires an increase in the capability of government. Goes against their limited-government ideology. This is dangerous and needs to change.