Sometimes I don’t feel well
Barometric pressure in my town
Like the last 36 hours.
Figures Lie and Liars Figure – Drought and Precipitation
This is part three of a series that documents a conversation on climate change between my aunt (who is unsure that climate change is occurring) and myself. So far we’ve talked more about trust than actual science, but that’s about to change!
My aunt had several questions after watching this EPA slideshow on climate change indicators. The tone of her questions (along with her admonishment that “figures lie and liars figure”) suggests that specific potential issues with individual data sets used to represent individual indicators erode the main conclusions of climate change science. I want to start by refuting that; the evidence for climate change comes from innumerable data sets supporting many, many indicators that together form an incredible number of lines of evidence in support of climate change.
But I think it’s still worthwhile to answer my aunt’s questions. Some of them reflect confusion over some difficult concepts. Here’s her first one:
The Drought slide said “from 2001 through 2009, between 30 and 60 percent of the United States experienced drought at any give time.” Then the Precipitation slide says “Average precipitation has increased in the United States and worldwide.” And, in fact, the graphic they show indicates by color coding that the majority of the areas (maybe even 80%) have increased precipitation. Now I realize that the Precipitation slide is for a period of 1901-2008 and the Drought slide is 2001 thorugh 2009, but what they are doing is using different period of time simply to make “their” point. What if both slides viewed the exact same years for the data?
Let’s take a look at those two slides in greater detail. The precipitation slide:
Average precipitation has increased in the United States and worldwide. Since 1901, precipitation has increased at an average rate of more than 6 percent per century in the lower 48 states and nearly 2 percent per century worldwide.
The drought slide has a generic image of a dry and dusty landscape and states
Over the period from 2001 through 2009, between 30 and 60 percent of the United States experienced drought conditions at any given time. However, the data for this indicator have not been collected for long enough to determine whether droughts are increasing or decreasing over time.
- Image via Wikipedia
My aunt claims that “what they are doing is using different period of time simply to make “their” point.” Reading the slide captions clearly shows that this isn’t a deliberate case of obfuscation – we don’t have data over the same length of time or across the country for drought that we do for precipitation. We only have very good drought data for the US over the last decade, though we have learned a lot about drought in particular regions through climate proxies like tree rings.
You might be thinking that this doesn’t make sense. How can we have information on precipitation but not drought? Well, drought isn’t just a lack of rainfall – the timing, temperature, and soil type are all important to consider when determining drought.
I don’t blame you if you’re suspicious, though – there is something conceptually tricky going on here. At first glance these two slides seem to be presenting conflicting statements – how can we have more precipitation, but also more drought? What’s going on (pdf)?
As average temperatures rise because of climate change, the Earth’s water cycle is expected to speed up, increasing evaporation. Increased evaporation will make more water available in the air for precipitation, but contribute to drying over some land areas. As a result, storm-affected areas are likely to experience increased precipitation and increased risk of flooding, while areas located far from storm tracks are likely to experience less precipitation and increased risk of drought. Since the 1970s, drought-affected areas have increased on a global scale—more likely than not as a result of climate change caused by human activities.
So some areas get wetter while others get drier – a spatial change.
It’s also easier to understand if you consider that we have more heavy precipitation events (from the slideshow):
In recent years, a higher percentage of precipitation in the United States has come in the form of intense single-day events. Eight of the top 10 years for extreme one-day precipitation events have occurred since 1990. The occurrence of abnormally high annual precipitation totals has also increased.
So an area can actually be in a drought while average precipitation stays the same, or even increases, if the timing of the rain changes! This is easier to imagine with an example. Let’s say you live in Greensboro, North Carolina and this is your average monthly climate:
Imagine the precipitation doesn’t change at all, but the average temperature each month increases 2 degrees. Even though July is getting the same amount of rain, it’s drier because the water evaporates faster. Now imagine that the total yearly precipitation stays the same, but 3 inches of rain that might normally fall in July occurs in a June deluge. The yearly precipitation hasn’t changed, but July just got much drier.
Here’s another scenario we could see: Yearly precipitation increases by 10 inches, it gets 2 degrees hotter in April and May, and a 40% of the rain occurs in just 3 storms in August. So even though there’s more water, between the timing and the higher temperatures increasing evaporation, much of the year is actually drier than normal.
If someone is feeling adventurous, they could probably comb through old weather records and find years where this sort of thing has happened. Lest I open myself up for criticism here, just because we’ve had years like that in the past doesn’t mean climate change isn’t happening – we expect more drought and/or more rain and/or more extreme rainfall events (depending on where you live) with climate change – so much that it isn’t considered a weird year, it’s considered the new normal.
Even in a situation where precipitation increases aren’t from more extreme precipitation events, temperature could increase so much that it’s still drier. That’s why when I look at what global climate models predict for the southwestern United States, I consider both temperature and precipitation. An extra half inch of monsoon rain could very easily be offset by a temperature increase.
When we think about the future of water availability, we aren’t necessarily interested in how much rain falls, we want to know how much is there to be used. If we’re getting a lot of our rain in a few big storms, most of it is just going to run off (or do more damage as a flood than it’s worth). We also consider the effect of temperature: if it’s hotter, the water doesn’t stick around as long where we need it in soils and reservoirs and rivers – it returns to the atmosphere.
While we can’t directly answer my aunt’s question (What if both slides viewed the exact same years for the data?), the data is still in line with what we expect from climate change. More precipitation and more heavy precipitation events don’t necessarily mean fewer droughts.
Related articles
- Drought, Floods, High Temps Consistent with Climate Change Projections (yubanet.com)
- Data suggests Iowa realy is getting wetter (gazetteonline.com)
- Jersey declares drought watch; Pa. next? (philly.com)
- Global Warming Makes Hurricanes Stronger, But Other Effects Remain Unclear (yubanet.com)
Why aren’t you using Flattr yet?
Flattr is a really easy way to support musicians, bloggers, programmers, or any other content creator out there. So far this month, I’ve used it to support Wikileaks, the blog post that introduced me to Flattr, and a helpful forum post, among other things. I only wish more of the blogs and newpapers I read and musicians I listen to were using it!
You can sign up here.
Why this extinction isn’t like the others
Almost a month ago I told you I’d have more to say about Novacek and Cleland’s biodiversity crisis paper. I’m sure you’re relieved to discover that I’m not a liar.
Last time I wrote about this paper I focused on why we care about biodiversity from an evolutionary standpoint – how big extinction events prune the “tree of life.” This time I want to talk about what Cleland and Novacek think we can – and can’t – learn from prior big extinctions.
I keep talking about big extinctions and while most of you reading this are probably familiar with the big five, I bet the person who stumbled on this blog by searching for “extinct airplanes” does not.
So, a quick tour of some bad times for life on Earth:
First was the Orodvician-Silurian extinction event about 450 million years ago. About 49% of animal genera went extinct, probably due to the onset of a really long ice age. About 100 million years later, 50% of all genera died off in the Late Devonian extinction. One hypothesis for this extinction event: plant evolution changed environmental conditions way too much, way too fast. Bet you never realized how dangerous plants are! The Permian-Triassic extinction happened about 250 million years ago and has a cheery nickname: The Great Dying. This is the biggest extinction event Earth had ever seen (though we might be causing an even worse one)! 83% of all genera died in this event – even the bugs didn’t escape unscathed. The most likely explanation for the Great Dying is that the earth went to hell in a handbasket – lots of different things went wrong all at the same time. Only 50 million years later 50% of species were wiped out in the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event. Then DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH until a giant asteroid killed them all in the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event about 150 million years later.
As I mentioned in my last post on the Novacek & Cleland paper, we’re in the midst of a major extinction event. There’s a lot we can learn about what we’re facing from past extinctions, the big lesson being that it takes millions to tens of millions of years for life to rebound. This is a bit longer than our current political system is set up to think about. More interesting, and perhaps more useful on timescales people can actually grasp, are the ways this extinction event is different.
The first big difference is the speed of this extinction. For the most part, mass extinctions are documented over really long time scales (millions of years!) in the fossil record. But for the current extinction “a period of only 75 to 100 years may be most critical to the transformation of the present biota.” What might be different about an extinction event that occurs over centuries as opposed to millions of years? My guess: the difference between an inch of rain every day for a year (this sucks) and 365 inches of rain in a day (we’re fucked).
Image by khteWisconsin via Flickr
In past extinctions, the global environment changed in a more or less continuous way. We’re starting to see global scale ecological change now with climate change, but a lot of the damage (and danger) to species is in how “patchy” we’ve made the world. Imagine you’re a flower growing in an abandoned field between a town and a big industrial complex. You grow well and produce seeds that are dispersed by the wind. Some fall in the field, but others blow further. None make it past the town or the industrial complex. The next year, the field is turned into a parking lot. A few of your seeds sprout in the town in cracks in the sidewalks and such, but they’re so spread out that the specialized pollinators they rely on don’t find them. And just like that, the entire genetic lineage is wiped out. What if this was a rare species? How does this affect the pollinators? We’ve made the world patchy in other ways, too. For example, it’s hotter in towns because of the heat island effect. Some places have really toxic soil and just a few yards away is normal dirt. Global climate change makes fragmented habitats even more of a challenge as the ideal climate for a species might be on one side of Toronto this year and the other side in 10 years.
- Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Perhaps the most important difference between this extinction and past mass extinctions is that we know what’s causing it. There’s a lot of debate about the causes of past extinctions, but we know without a doubt that humans are responsible for the current one. Since we know who’s responsible and how it’s happening, that means it is possible for us to do something about it.
Before I talk about what the authors of the paper recommend we do, I’ll go through some of the ways they point out we are most definitely NOT making things better: polluting, overfishing, changing the climate and biogeochemical cycles, introducing invasive species everywhere, fragmenting and destroying habitat, and messing with species communities.
Novacek, M. (2001). The current biodiversity extinction event: Scenarios for mitigation and recovery Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98 (10), 5466-5470 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.091093698
Related articles
- Mass Extinctions Change the Rules of Evolution (wired.com)
- Plants Can Be Endangered Too (thedailygreen.com)
Figures Lie and Liars Figure – Who can you trust?
This is part two in a series based on questions, concerns, and misconceptions that my aunt (and many other people) have about climate change. Last week, I posted about money concerns – that many people think scientists are making up this data to get rich or famous (a view perpetuated by the lovely senator from Oklahoma).
Despite the evidence I discussed or linked to in the last post, my aunt was still not convinced that scientists could be trusted.
The Main Stream Media
Before I get into the nitty gritty of the trust issues, I want to point out two comments in particular from my aunt:
I know scientists aren’t getting rich from this–at least not as exposed yet.
and
[S]cientists may not get it [money] in salary but some do have “consulting firms” set up which receive payments for various things like data analysis, etc. So it may not directly be from salaries, but there are ways that they can get rich.
I’m not falsely juxtaposing these statements or taking them out of context – they’re right next to each other in her original response. Notice the cognitive dissonance here – she’s simultaneously arguing that scientists DON’T get rich from climate change research and that they DO get rich from climate change research.
When I first read those comments, I was annoyed and a little angry. It’s easy to be dismissive when people say things like that – it makes me feel like they aren’t actually interested in what’s really going on, that they’ll use any argument – no matter how nonsensical or conflicting or based in fantasy – to support their position. But I don’t think she’s being disingenuous. I think her conflicting comments reflect the very genuine confusion most people feel about climate change research based on the absolute nonsense framework of “controversy” the MSM generally uses to present climate change.
Which brings me to the second of my aunt’s concerns (Climategate) and back to my first concern (the MSM):
[M]y news source is the general media (as it is for most lay people). [Link to ABC Climategate story that misconstrues email content.] This is kind of like if you have a restaurant and the food is great, some people will mention it and pass that on to friends, but suppose someone finds a dead fly in the soup—they tell everyone. May not be the fairest way for people to make final decisions but the fly was found in the soup nonetheless.
copyright Joel Pett
Based on MSM coverage of the hacked emails, my aunt thinks that there are at least a few really influential scientists that lie, lie, lie about climate change. This colors her entire opinion of climate science. The reality is that all of the scientists in the hacked emails were cleared of any and all scientific misconduct. Not only was the coverage of the scientists being cleared so much worse that my aunt didn’t even know about it, the ABC stories that did discuss it didn’t bother to correct the misconceptions their own stories spread about climate change.
It’s really frustrating to me as a scientist to know that so many people don’t trust my entire field, that the work I do has a very good chance of being unfairly disregarded. Even when other fields screw up (a bridge falls down, a medication has surprisingly lethal side effects, the entire freaking economy collapses), trust doesn’t get as low as it does for scientists who do work related to climate change. It’s not much comfort to be right either, when the consequences are so catastrophic.
Falsifying data
Ok, on to the trust issues! First, take a look at this passage:
Scientists most often falsify data to get famous, not rich. Politicians get rich along with corporate cronies but they influence scientists by giving them research funds with “expected” outcomes. Scientists are not all pure–remember the guy who I think painted spots on the mice or something like that to prove his research?
I think this paragraph in particular demonstrates the uphill struggle scientists face when trying to communicate their work to the public. This paragraph just assumes that scientists lie all the time. It also displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how science (and science funding) works. (Does anyone know what scientific misconduct case she could be referring to when she says “the guy who I think painted spots on the mice or something like that to prove his research”?)
Yes, sometimes scientists do falsify data. But it’s really, really stupid to falsify data in science because you will almost certainly get found out. I’m also going to argue that it doesn’t actually matter that much (to the science as a whole) if you don’t get caught. People who think scientists just make up data willy-nilly don’t understand how science works: if another scientist can’t follow your methods and get the same results, the conclusion is that either you made up the data or what you observed was a fluke. With climate change data, this means that if you made it up, regardless of whether you’re ever found out, your study doesn’t end up influencing what we think about climate change.
The climate change conspiracy
Scientific conspiracy
You could argue that all the climate scientists are in it together. Disregarding the absolute lack of motivation scientists have to do this, let’s consider what this would mean if we assume that climate change data is falsified. The conspiracy would be unbelievable vast. Data collected (and published) by scientists and nonscientists alike at academic, military, nonprofit and government institutions around the world, a great deal of it to study things other than global warming, and much of it before most people had even heard of global warming, was all made up or altered to support climate change. Pretty fucking unlikely.
Even if one day we find out that a particular temperature data set was tweaked or that the carbon dioxide measurement instrument at a particular research station wasn’t calibrated correctly or an entire set of bird migration data was completely made up, it wouldn’t change in any significant way our understanding of climate change. The amount of evidence and the number of lines of evidence supporting climate change is so overwhelming that problems with a few individual data sets just don’t matter to the big picture.
Those problems do matter to scientists though. Scientists try to be as correct as possible and some (maybe most …) of us take particular delight in proving other scientists wrong. When scientists look at research, they look for – and point out – problems and weaknesses. We like to argue. We get more attention for strong results that disagree with the common wisdom. These aspects of the scientific process and science culture make it even less likely that climate change is some made up conspiracy. If there was a real controversy, the scientists would be all over it, competing loudly to prove the other side wrong. [UPDATE: for a great example of this, go read this Scicurious post] But there is scientific consensus – essentially NO ONE disagrees that climate change is happening and people are the reason. Consider those indicators from the EPA slide show. Each one of them by itself wouldn’t be enough to convince a scientist that global warming was happening, but together they are quite convincing.
Fat cat scientists
Despite the evidence I presented last week, my aunt still thinks that plenty of scientists are lying about climate change for the money:
[S]cientists may not get it [money] in salary but some do have “consulting firms” set up which receive payments for various things like data analysis, etc. So it may not directly be from salaries, but there are ways that they can get rich.
It’s true that climate scientists can work in consulting or might even have a separate business on the side. I know one scientist who is part of a business that helps people make their homes more energy efficient. I don’t know of anyone who’s gotten rich off of being a climate scientist, but let’s pretend that there are lots of fat cat climate scientists who got rich doing climate change research. What would this mean for what we think about climate change?
I do want to point out that this just isn’t happening. Who would pay scientists gazillions of dollars to make up climate change? I can think of a few industries it would benefit today – maybe wind power, for example. But we’ve known about climate change for a long time now. So who would have benefited from climate change being made up in the 50s, 60s, 70s? I have no idea. Plus, whoever paid for it would have to have fixed all the data around the world over more than 100 years, as discussed in the “conspiracy” paragraph above. The evidence, in fact, is that money hasn’t influenced climate change science. However, fossil fuel interests made sure to cast doubt on climate change in the public mind.
I said I was going to pretend we scientists were getting rich doing consulting, but then I got carried off on a tangent about how stupid that is. But I said I would, so on with the stupid thought experiment.
What kind of blogger would I be if I resisted the impulse to include a cat picture?
I’m a (dishonest) climate change researcher and I’m part of a consulting firm. Wind Power Company wants to build a wind farm outside of Small Town, but Small Town thinks wind farms are ugly and they’ve got plenty of coal anyway. So Wind Power Company pays me to downscale global climate model (GCM) predictions for the town 20, 50, and 80 years out. Wind Power Company will pay me double my normal fee if Small Town allows the wind farm. I only use the worst case emissions scenario and instead of presenting results from multiple GCMs and their likelihoods, I only consider the most extreme case. Then I present the worst case scenario as the most likely scenario to the town.
Small Town thinks this is pretty bad news and that if this is true, maybe they should invest more in alternative energy. But I also had to disclose that I work for Wind Power Company, so they take my report with a grain of salt. The predictions from GCMs are publicly available through many sources and Small Town looks them up and tells Wind Power Company to take a hike.
This is probably not a very realistic scenario (feel free to put your own in the comments), but the point I’m trying to make is that if I have an environmental consulting firm that isn’t independent with transparent procedures, no one will take my results seriously. If I provide Wind Power Company with results other scientists can’t replicate, no one will take me seriously. That’s why the scientific community dismisses these guys paid by fossil fuel interests.
I also want to point out that the pharmaceutical and biomed industries have some very serious conflicts of interest and a LOT of money is at play. Yes, scientific misconduct is uncovered in those fields, but we don’t deny pregnancy occurs because someone lies about their research on ectopic pregnancies.
So let’s summarize:
- Falsified data doesn’t influence the big picture on climate change even if scientists get away with it.
- It’s impossible for climate change to be a conspiracy.
- Money isn’t influencing climate change scientists, it’s influencing the public debate on climate change policy.
In the next part of this series I want to address some of the specific questions my aunt had about the data from the EPA slideshow.
——————-
A note on Wikipedia:
I link to Wikipedia quite a bit and a couple people feel that they can’t take my arguments seriously because of my source. I like Wikipedia because even if you don’t believe what the article itself says, their articles are generally very well sourced. If you can follow a link, you can get all the information you need to make your own decision. It’s more efficient to link to Wikipedia than to individually link to many of the same sources the Wikipedia article uses.
A Silly Verse
I’ve been told that it’s impossible to truly appreciate Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin unless you read it in Russian. I may not recognize how truly great the poetry is, but I had a wonderful time reading it regardless. A gazillion critics have written gazillions of pages on the poem and you might enjoy poking through a bit of the scholarly literature if you want to know more about Pushkin and the Russian soul or to better interpret some of the allusions, but still read the poem itself if you can. It’s by turns delightfully silly and unexpectedly tragic.
Below, the narrator admonishes parents & husbands in a stanza that had me giggling:
In the Vortex of the Waltz (Vladimir Pervunensky, 2005)
In days of carefree aspirations,
the ballroom drove me off my head:
the safest place for declarations,
and where most surely notes are sped.
You husbands, deeply I respect you!
I’m at your service to protect you;
now pay attention, I beseech,
and due warning from my speech.
You too, mamas, I pray attend it,
and watch your daughters closer yet,
yes, focus on them your lorgnette,
or else . . . or else, may God forfend it!
I only write like this, you know,
since I stopped sinning years ago.