Lovelock Backs Down

[Josh Horton]

Food for thought ...

http://www.livescience.com/19875-gaia-lovelock-climate-change.html

'Gaia' Scientist Takes Back Climate Change Predictions

A scientist and author, James Lovelock, who once predicted doomsdaylike fallout from climate change has backtracked, calling his own projections and those of others "alarmist." Even so, climate scientists stress Lovelock's backtracking doesn't negate the reality of climate change, and in fact, his past predictions highlight some overall misunderstanding about planetary warming.

Lovelock, who introduced theGaia Hypothesis describing life on Earth as a vast self-regulating organism some 40 years ago, also stated that since 2000, warming had not happened as expected.

"The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," Lovelock told MSNBC.com in an interview.

While warming may not have reached Lovelock's expectations, it is clearly happening. Global temperature data shows the world is heating up. The first decade of this century was the warmest on record for more than a century, part of a trend in increasing warmth over the past 50 years, according to the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Lovelock's hypothesis has played a prominent role in the environmental movement.

In a conversation with MSNBC's Ian Johnston, Lovelock agreed that the level of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising, but contended that temperature has not increased as expected since 2000.

This is a significant reversal for Lovelock. In a column written for the U.K. newspaper The Independent in 2006, he wrote, "before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

Lovelock's views were not in line with mainstream climate science to begin with, Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist, pointed out.

"As I see it, Jim's views were at the alarmist end of the spectrum of scientific opinion, so frankly I see him largely as just coming back into the fold of mainstream thinking," Mann wrote in an email to LiveScience. "That having been said, he has made some statements which appear to reflect a misunderstanding of what the science has to say." [Busted: 10 Climate Change Myths]

Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the independent National Center for AtmosphericResearch (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., went further: "The fact is he knows little or nothing about climate change."

The past decade has seen a reduced rate of increase in warming. but it remains consistent with the overall warming trend, Trenberth said.

Global temperatures fluctuate from year to year and over short time scales as a result of natural variability. These ups and downs can obscure the overall trend, particularly if someone is looking to generate a particular result, he said. "You can take a piece of that record and get the wrong view as to what is happening."

Next year, Lovelock expects to release a new book. He said he believes his projections went too far in a previous book, "Revenge of Gaia" (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2006). Even so, Lovelock stressed that humanity should still try to curb its use of fossil fuels, according to MSNBC.com.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and onFacebook.

[RAU greg]

"...Lovelock agreed that the level of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising, but contended that temperature has not increased as expected since 2000." "There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,"

Rising CO2 isn't just about climate, it's also about ocean acidification, which perhaps unlike mean global temperature, is relentlessly and predictably increasing.  In any case, given what is at stake and what we know, unclear how Lovelock is now unalarmed.

-Greg

---

From: Josh Horton <joshuah...@gmail.com>
To: geoengi...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, April 26, 2012 7:25:34 AM
Subject: [geo] Lovelock Backs Down

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[Ken Caldeira]

The weather record of the past decade is entirely consistent with the well-established physics of climate science.

The last decade was the hottest ever recorded, which is exactly what would be expected based on a general understanding of physics.

But even if last decade were cooler than average, it still wouldn't undermine climate science.  Climate is about long-term trends, not short-term fluctuations.

It is as if you were to point to a sick animal that is surviving, and say that that undermines the theory of evolution, because evolution says that only the fittest survive.  No, evolution is about probabilities and sometimes a sick animal makes it through and a healthy animal gets eaten by a lion.

---

Lovelock is a brilliant and creative man, but often brilliant and creative people have a few great ideas that are correct and many fanciful ideas that are incorrect.  Lovelock made several major contributions to science including inventing the electron capture detector and pointing out the coevolution of climate and life.

However, his doomsday scenarios for climate change have always been far from the scientific mainstream. It may be that his extreme views have been upended by recent observations, but these observations have done nothing but confirm mainstream scientific understanding.

_______________
Ken Caldeira

Carnegie Institution Dept of Global Ecology
260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA
+1 650 704 7212 kcal...@carnegie.stanford.edu
http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab  @kencaldeira

Currently visiting  Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS)  

and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Resarch (PIK) in Potsdam, Germany.

[Ken Caldeira]

apparently my links did not come through well.

They are from:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png 

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png 

[david]

According to Lovelock's long time friend Stewart Brand, Lovelock's "thinking" changed when he read Trenberth's "Tracking Earth's Energy", i.e. the Trenberth and Fasullo Perspectives piece in 16 April 2010 Science.  As a result, Lovelock appears to have concluded that global warming has stopped and no one knows why. 

According to Brand, Lovelock thinks climate scientists have become "overly politicized".  Lovelock complained in an email to Brand: "my name is now mud in climate science circles for having dared to consort with sceptics".  The "sceptic" Lovelock decided to "consort" with is none other than Garth Paltridge, author of "The Climate Caper".  Those not familiar with the work of Paltridge may not need to know more that the fact that In the introduction to The Climate Caper, Paltridge explains that the scientists involved with the IPCC are the worst thing that has happened to science in the last several hundred years, because they are on a "religious crusade", "manipulating" the climate issue "into the ultimate example of the politically correct", acting as if "the science behind the issue", is "irrelevant".   Lord Monckton wrote the "Foreword" to the book.  Lovelock can't understand why climate scientists who formerly acted as if they took him seriously now view him in a completely different way.  

Brand's comments about Lovelock are in his online addition to his book "Ecopragmatism", starting in the fifth paragraph.   Brand wrote this in May 2010.  Lovelock appears to be Brand's primary source on climate science.  

I wrote a piece last year aimed at provoking Brand into a public debate about how whacked out all this Lovelock gibberish is but Brand did not respond.  

[Ken Caldeira]

This reminds me of Nobel syndrome, where people who have high achievement and expertise in one area then feel free to pontificate on all sorts of things about which they know little. 

To be ready to throw out a century or more of physical climate system understanding because of decadal scale tends in the hottest decade on record seems to be as reckless as excessive catastrophism. 

In lovelock's case, the pendulum seems to swing too wildly  Maybe if he let it come to rest somewhere between catastrophism and complacency it would hang closer to the truth. 

Ken Caldeira

kcal...@carnegie.stanford.edu

+1 650 704 7212

http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab

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[Ken Caldeira]

More evidence that Lovelock is making too much of decadal scale trends in atmospheric temperature. Look at ocean temperature. Oceans represent most of the heat capacity in the climate system,

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2012GL051106.shtml 

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/04/scienceshot-no-letup-in-worlds.html 

On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 8:15 PM, Joshua Horton <joshuah...@gmail.com> wrote:

"Maybe if he let it come to rest somewhere between catastrophism and complacency it would hang closer to the truth" - we'd all do well to follow this advice.

I hadn't appreciated the connection between Brand and Lovelock.  Then I picked up my copy of Brand's Whole Earth Discipline and there at the top of the front flap, "This book is truly important and a joy to read - James Lovelock."  Regardless, I give this book a lot of credit for getting environmentalists to take geoengineering seriously--Brand is very open to it and devotes an entire chapter ("Planet Craft").

Josh Horton

[Mike MacCracken]

Looking at the heat content curve, it appears there may well have been cooling following major explosive volcanic eruptions, including Agung (1963)/Awu (1966), El Chichon (1982) and Pinatubo (1991)--and maybe others (effect would depend on magnitude and latitude, time of year, etc.). That there is a response is an indication of the type of response one might be able to induce by a stratospheric injection, and perhaps by analogy with cloud brightening.

What would have caused the sharp possible increase near the start of the record (or in fact the quite large swing up and so much down) is not clear to me—perhaps not real, as error bars suggest. But very interesting.

Mike

On 4/30/12 4:18 PM, "Ken Caldeira" <kcal...@carnegie.stanford.edu> wrote:

More evidence that Lovelock is making too much of decadal scale trends in atmospheric temperature. Look at ocean temperature. Oceans represent most of the heat capacity in the climate system,

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2012GL051106.shtml 
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/04/scienceshot-no-letup-in-worlds.html 


On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 8:15 PM, Joshua Horton <joshuah...@gmail.com> wrote:

"Maybe if he let it come to rest somewhere between catastrophism and complacency it would hang closer to the truth" - we'd all do well to follow this advice.

I hadn't appreciated the connection between Brand and Lovelock.  Then I picked up my copy of Brand's Whole Earth Discipline and there at the top of the front flap, "This book is truly important and a joy to read - James Lovelock."  Regardless, I give this book a lot of credit for getting environmentalists to take geoengineering seriously--Brand is very open to it and devotes an entire chapter ("Planet Craft").

Josh Horton


On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Ken Caldeira <kcal...@gmail.com> wrote:

This reminds me of Nobel syndrome, where people who have high achievement and expertise in one area then feel free to pontificate on all sorts of things about which they know little. 

To be ready to throw out a century or more of physical climate system understanding because of decadal scale tends in the hottest decade on record seems to be as reckless as excessive catastrophism. 

In lovelock's case, the pendulum seems to swing too wildly  Maybe if he let it come to rest somewhere between catastrophism and complacency it would hang closer to the truth. 

Ken Caldeira
kcal...@carnegie.stanford.edu

+1 650 704 7212 <tel:1%20650%20704%207212>

http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab

Sent from a limited-typing keyboard

On Apr 27, 2012, at 17:50, david <jrando...@gmail.com> wrote:

According to Lovelock's long time friend Stewart Brand, Lovelock's "thinking" changed when he read Trenberth's "Tracking Earth's Energy" <http://www.deas.harvard.edu/climate/seminars/pdfs/Perspectives.pdf> , i.e. the Trenberth and Fasullo Perspectives piece in 16 April 2010 Science.  As a result, Lovelock appears to have concluded that global warming has stopped and no one knows why. 

According to Brand, Lovelock thinks climate scientists have become "overly politicized".  Lovelock complained in an email to Brand: "my name is now mud in climate science circles for having dared to consort with sceptics".  The "sceptic" Lovelock decided to "consort" with is none other than Garth Paltridge, author of "The Climate Caper".  Those not familiar with the work of Paltridge may not need to know more that the fact that In the introduction to The Climate Caper, Paltridge explains that the scientists involved with the IPCC are the worst thing that has happened to science in the last several hundred years, because they are on a "religious crusade", "manipulating" the climate issue "into the ultimate example of the politically correct", acting as if "the science behind the issue", is "irrelevant".  

 Lord Monckton wrote the "Foreword" to the book.  Lovelock can't understand why climate scientists who formerly acted as if they took him seriously now view him in a completely different way.  

Brand's comments about Lovelock are in his online addition <http://web.me.com/stewartbrand/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Afterword.html>  to his book "Ecopragmatism", starting in the fifth paragraph.   Brand wrote this in May 2010.  Lovelock appears to be Brand's primary source on climate science.  

I wrote a piece <http://theenergycollective.com/david-lewis/47133/stewart-brand-fearless-follower-lovelock-not-science#_ftn4>  last year aimed at provoking Brand into a public debate about how whacked out all this Lovelock gibberish is but Brand did not respond.  

On Thursday, April 26, 2012 7:25:29 AM UTC-7, Josh Horton wrote:

Food for thought ...

http://www.livescience.com/19875-gaia-lovelock-climate-change.html <http://www.livescience.com/19875-gaia-lovelock-climate-change.html>

'Gaia' Scientist Takes Back Climate Change Predictions

A scientist and author, James Lovelock, who once predicted doomsdaylike fallout from climate change has backtracked, calling his own projections and those of others "alarmist." Even so, climate scientists stress Lovelock's backtracking doesn't negate the reality of climate change, and in fact, his past predictions highlight some overall misunderstanding about planetary warming.

Lovelock, who introduced theGaia Hypothesis <http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2295-living-planet-pandora.html>  describing life on Earth as a vast self-regulating organism some 40 years ago, also stated that since 2000, warming had not happened as expected.
"The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," Lovelock told MSNBC.com <http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/23/11144098-gaia-scientist-james-lovelock-i-was-alarmist-about-climate-change?lite>  in an interview.
While warming may not have reached Lovelock's expectations, it is clearly happening. Global temperature data shows the world is heating up. The first decade of this century was the warmest on record <http://www.livescience.com/19278-extreme-weather-decade-climate.html>  for more than a century, part of a trend in increasing warmth over the past 50 years, according to the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Lovelock's hypothesis has played a prominent role in the environmental movement.
In a conversation with MSNBC's Ian Johnston, Lovelock agreed that the level of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising, but contended that temperature has not increased as expected since 2000.
This is a significant reversal for Lovelock. In a column written for the U.K. newspaper The Independent in 2006, he wrote, "before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

Lovelock's views were not in line with mainstream climate science to begin with, Michael Mann <http://www.livescience.com/19064-hockey-stick-climate-wars-mann.html> , a Pennsylvania State University <http://www.livescience.com/19875-gaia-lovelock-climate-change.html#>  climate scientist, pointed out.
"As I see it, Jim's views were at the alarmist end of the spectrum of scientific opinion, so frankly I see him largely as just coming back into the fold of mainstream thinking," Mann wrote in an email to LiveScience. "That having been said, he has made some statements which appear to reflect a misunderstanding of what the science has to say." [Busted: 10 Climate Change Myths <http://www.livescience.com/19466-climate-change-myths-busted.html> ]
Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the independent National Center for AtmosphericResearch <http://www.livescience.com/19875-gaia-lovelock-climate-change.html#>  (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., went further: "The fact is he knows little or nothing about climate change."
The past decade has seen a reduced rate of increase in warming. but it remains consistent with the overall warming <http://www.livescience.com/18868-mild-winter-climate-change.html>  trend, Trenberth said.

Global temperatures fluctuate from year to year and over short time scales as a result of natural variability. These ups and downs can obscure the overall trend, particularly if someone is looking to generate a particular result, he said. "You can take a piece of that record and get the wrong view as to what is happening."

Next year, Lovelock expects to release a new book <http://www.livescience.com/19875-gaia-lovelock-climate-change.html#> . He said he believes his projections went too far in a previous book, "Revenge of Gaia" (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2006). Even so, Lovelock stressed that humanity should still try to curb its use of fossil fuels, according to MSNBC.com <http://MSNBC.com> .
You can follow LiveScience <http://www.livescience.com/>  senior writer Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry <http://twitter.com/#!/Wynne_Parry> . Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience <http://twitter.com/#!/livescience>  and onFacebook <http://www.facebook.com/#!/livescience> .

[Mark Lawrence]

Ken's comments are great for bringing some real science into the
frequently speculative discussions around the decadal temperature
trends.

It is unfortunate that Lovelock also got caught up in this
misunderstanding of the climate system, given his prominent public
role.

Two recent papers which I found very helpful in making the science
behind this clear (admittedly this is not my central expertise, so
recently I was looking around for useful studies clarifying this),
which some of you might not yet be aware of, are:

==> Santer, B. D., et al. (2011), Separating signal and noise in
atmospheric temperature changes: The importance of timescale, J.
Geophys. Res., 116, D22105, doi:10.1029/2011JD016263.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011JD016263.shtml

"Executive Summary":
* A multi-model ensemble run with contemporary human forcing oftens
produce 10-year periods with little or no warming
* S/N (signal-to-noise) ratios for tropospheric temperature are about
1 for 10-yr trends (i.e., no signal is detectable above the noise),
but increase to 4 for 32-yr trends
* Trends >17 yrs are required for identifying human effects on
tropospheric temperature

==> Foster and Rahmstorf, Global temperature evolution 1979-2010,
Environ. Res. Lett., 6, 044022, 2011.

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022

This one nicely shows how taking into account ENSO and other major
factors of natural variability, applied to FIVE different datasets,
results in a quite stable background decadal temperature increase in
all the datasets.

The whole abstract is worth quoting:
We analyze five prominent time series of global temperature (over land
and ocean) for their common time interval since 1979: three surface
temperature records (from NASA/GISS, NOAA/NCDC and HadCRU) and two
lower-troposphere (LT) temperature records based on satellite
microwave sensors (from RSS and UAH). All five series show consistent
global warming trends ranging from 0.014 to 0.018 K yr-1. When the
data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on
short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation,
volcanic aerosols and solar variability), the global warming signal
becomes even more evident as noise is reduced. Lower-troposphere
temperature responds more strongly to El Niño/southern oscillation and
to volcanic forcing than surface temperature data. The adjusted data
show warming at very similar rates to the unadjusted data, with
smaller probable errors, and the warming rate is steady over the whole
time interval. In all adjusted series, the two hottest years are 2009
and 2010.

There are also earlier analyses by Ramanathan and others that
essentially made the same basic points, but more generally, not
applied so specifically to the recent decadal trend (or apparant lack
thereof).

Question: is Lovelock a part of this discussion group, i.e., has he
gotten to read these posts? If not, would anyone who knows him
personally think it's a good idea to send him some of the climate
science background in these posts?

--mark lawrence

--
PD Dr. Mark G. Lawrence
Scientific Director
Cluster SIWA - Sustainable Interactions With the Atmosphere
IASS - Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies e. V.
Berliner Str. 130
D-14467 Potsdam
Germany



On 30 Apr., 22:18, Ken Caldeira <kcalde...@carnegie.stanford.edu>
wrote:

> More evidence that Lovelock is making too much of decadal scale trends in
> atmospheric temperature. Look at ocean temperature. Oceans represent most
> of the heat capacity in the climate system,
>

> http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2012GL051106.shtmlhttp://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/04/scienceshot-no-letup-in...
>
> On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 8:15 PM, Joshua Horton <joshuahorton...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>

[Things Break]

For those who don't know about Paltridge, his claim to fame in climate "skeptic" circles came from his making much ado about some (flawed) upper tropospheric water vapor reanalysis data.

Actual paper:  Paltridge, G., A. Arking, and M. Pook (2009), Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data, Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 98(3), 351–359, doi:10.1007/s00704-009-0117-x.

Problems with the data set Paltridge used:  Dessler, A. E., and S. M. Davis (2010), Trends in tropospheric humidity from reanalysis systems, J. Geophys. Res., 115, 5 PP., doi:201010.1029/2010JD014192.

Spin for "skeptics": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8oiXUZ-rVQ

Note that the chum for "skeptics" Paltridge is so happy to toss in the waters of public discourse is notably absent from what the paper actually claims. The chutzpah of someone doing what he did and then accusing the IPCC authors of being bad for science is breathtaking. 

[Robert Tulip]

Ken Caldeira provides a link below to a scientific paper on ocean warming.

 

I have been discussing this paper at http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php/133062-Ocean-Warming

 

It appears there is some uncertainty regarding historical temperature measurements.  The thread provides links to discussions, including at http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/goos/meetings/2008/XBT/index.php

 

My calculation from the data in the Levitus et al 2012 paper was that if the amount of extra heat we are putting into the ocean went into an Olympic swimming pool it would boil it in about two milliseconds. In the minute it takes the swimmers at the London Olympics to complete a 100 meter race, enough heat is added to the oceans to bring more than 20,000 Olympic swimming pools to boiling point.   

 

I would appreciate comment on whether this analogy makes sense and is accurate.

 

Robert Tulip