But that is not how the predictions were treated.
In my April 2007 column, “Baseball and Hurricanes,” conceived shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I confronted the claims being made that hurricanes were going to be more frequent and powerful than ever due to AGW. I pointed out that such claims presuppose an accurate knowledge of hurricane statistics from the era before we had satellites and modern technology to count hurricanes and measure their strengths. Not having such knowledge, the claims remain hypotheses only. And as it turned out, the years following Katrina brought relatively calm hurricane seasons.
My feelings about AGW circa 2007 can be summed up in several quotes:
"It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models."
"When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations, and the superficiality of our theories."
"Computer models of the climate . . . [are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs."
"We do not know how much of the environmental change is due to human activities and how much [is due] to long-term natural processes over which we have no control."
All of these quotes are from Freeman Dyson, one of the handful of living physicists who is undisputedly a genius. He, like I, does not get money from oil companies to preach “anti-AGW heresy,” and he certainly is neither stupid nor anti-science. A few more Dyson quotes like these can be found here: noconsensus.org/scientists/freeman-dyson.php. Though his statements sum up my views at that time, I did not know Dyson was a fellow AGW skeptic until recently. I arrived at the same understanding independently and for the same reasons he did, but why quote me when I can quote him?
In recent years I stumbled upon www.wattsupwiththat.com, a page popular with “AGW denialists.” This is the site of Anthony Watts, the man behind the surface stations project I discussed last November. I did not go there to learn about global warming, though. I went because he had a link to the SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) satellite and I wanted to see sunspots. But there were hardly any and no one really knew why. I found this interesting and would visit to read updated reports on sunspot numbers and how this low-count period compared with those of the past.
Watts also occasionally posted pieces entitled “How Not to Measure Temperature, Part (number).” I liked these because I am a stickler for experimental measurement and technique. The postings usually came with a picture of a particularly egregious example of improper siting of an official temperature station, most of them in the US. Watts was up to Part 88 when I decided I'd be discussing the results of the surface stations project in an Alternate View.
What I really appreciate about Watts’ page are the comments following the assorted postings. Reading them is very much like being at the Analog online forum. Some who weigh in do so entirely from a political perspective, which is interesting even if not scientific. Quite a few AGW embracers also join in the discussion, and it is sometimes valuable to read their input. But the best comments and commenters are like the best on the Analog forum. They are intelligent people from all walks of life, many of them toiling in or retired from scientific, engineering, or other technical professions, all of them with a lifelong interest in science. I feel every bit as comfortable with them as I do in a gathering of the Analog Mafia. It is people like us who volunteered to photograph and survey stations for the surface stations project.
I did make a pedagogical error in my November essay. When I said I was fortunate that there was a slow but tedious way I could recover my data in my junior year physics experiment, I assumed readers understood that my case was anything but typical. The only reason I could recover my data (and even then it was only good enough for an experiment fulfilling a school requirement, not for journal publication) was because I did one, and only one, thing wrong. And it was with one piece of equipment, and I was the only person making the measurements. There is no magic computer program or methodology that can undo bad measurements taken with bad or improperly placed sensors. Period. You can attempt to recover some useable data in some cases if you can isolate the source(s) sufficiently, and the nature of the correction is sufficiently simple (i.e. add 0.5 milliunits to each measurement). You still pay for it in increased uncertainty. But you cannot recover accurate data from a thermometer that is sited in a swamp and next to air conditioning units. (See this link for a discussion of that particular station: wattsupwiththat.com/2009/ 06/09/revisiting-detroit-lakes/more-8299. See this one for a detailed discussion of another station from which you will never know what the readings would have been: wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/22/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-84-pristine-mohonk-lake-ushcn-station- revisited/more-6436.)
Some have suggested the number of poorly sited stations is not enough to seriously compromise the data set. This is nonsense. With 80% of stations surveyed, 89% don't meet the NOAA's own siting criteria. 58% were rated as class 4, meaning the expected error is greater than 2 degrees C. That's three times the entire claimed 0.7 degrees C increase for the twentieth century. If this doesn't matter, why have siting criteria at all?
* * * *
Take any arbitrary century-wide slice of Earth history. Ascertain the averages of the statistics considered relevant to AGW—temperature, sea ice extent, glacial increase and recession, animal population densities and extents, hurricane numbers and intensities, and so on. For any of these categories, it would be unusual to find no change whatsoever from one end of the century to the other. Glaciers come and go, hurricane seasons vary greatly, animal populations are far from static whether people are around or not, and some periods are warmer than others. There are no changes now being attributed to AGW that would not have been changing anyway.
What, you Warmists, is the world supposed to look like if there were no AGW at all? On what grounds do you assert that expectation is valid? You cannot claim to know, and with certainty no less, that the world is warmer than it should be due to AGW if you do not know how warm it would be without it.
One thing that Climategate has accomplished is the loosening of the tongues of those climate scientists who, even though confident that AGW will ultimately be validated, felt all along that claims were presented with more certainty than the state of the science could provide. Another thing it brought is something no scientist can do without: A healthy dose of hard-earned humility.
Copyright © 2010 Jeffery D. Kooistra
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Short Story: THE VIEW FROM THE TOP by Jerry Oltion
A key step in solving any problem is to identify its real cause. . . .
The picture of his son caught Michael by surprise. He'd been reading Melissa's email, smiling at her account of another day spent answering school kids’ questions about the International Space Station, when he'd paged down and there was David looking out of the screen at him. He'd clearly been playing; his hair was tousled and his cheeks were flushed red in the autumn chill. It was such a wonderfully stereotypical photo that Michael laughed, but his laughter caught in a lump in his throat and before he knew what was happening he was in tears, crying quietly there in his corner of the Zvezda Module.
He turned toward the bulkhead so neither Larisa nor Quentin could see him. Thank goodness there weren't any cameras in the crew quarters. He could see the headlines now: NASA Sends Crybaby to Space; Blubbering Biologist Embarrasses Entire Nation.
He sniffed his suddenly runny nose and dabbed at his eyes with his shirtsleeve. Tears didn't run in free fall; they built up into big globs that eventually broke free and quivered their way around the hab module until they eventually got sucked into one of the myriad circulation fans. Not a problem if the fan was just blowing into an air recycler—those were designed to deal with high humidity—but most of the fans on board cooled electronic equipment. Splashing salt water on a live circuit could make more than just Michael cry.
He looked at David once more, the
n closed the lid on his laptop computer. He could read the rest of Melissa's email later, after he'd regained his composure.
Deep breaths helped a little. It was an old trick he'd learned years ago, back when he'd been teased mercilessly in grade school for his emotional outbursts. His unfortunate last name, Bebe, had provided the perfect nickname for his tormenters—"Baby Bebe"—and try as he might to suppress the tears, it wasn't until he'd learned to fight that they finally left him alone.
Exercise had helped him then. Maybe it would help now. He pushed himself over to the stationary bicycle and strapped in, set the resistance to “10,” and began pedaling his way around the Earth. Maybe if he worked up enough of a sweat, Larisa and Quentin wouldn't notice his tears.
Half an hour later he was exhausted enough to have an excuse for weeping, but though he could still feel the outburst lurking there beneath the surface, he seemed to have beaten it into submission for the moment.
Showering in space was both a luxury and a pain. No matter how well you sealed the compartment, water always got loose and you wound up chasing it around with your towel. In the month he'd been on board, Michael had learned to scrape himself clean with a wet cloth instead. He was toweling off when Quentin drifted into the module.
"How's it hanging?” Quentin asked, the same question he always asked, no doubt because it was even more inane than usual in free fall.
"Good,” Michael answered automatically. Both of them spoke loudly, not with macho bravado but out of necessity. All the cooling fans and circulation fans on board the ISS gave it the background ambience of a railroad yard.
"Yeah?” Quentin let the word hang between them for a moment, an invitation to talk if Michael wanted to.
"Yeah, things are actually . . . actually just about perfect. I'm in space! It's been my dream for as long as I can remember."
Quentin grinned. “Mine too. It's not quite the Buck Rogers scout ship I imagined as a kid, but here we are. I'm kind of sorry to be going home next month."
He'd been on board for five months already. Duty tours had settled down to a regular six-month schedule now that the Russians were responsible for all the flights. Michael had come up with the last supply rocket, and the cosmonaut he'd replaced had ridden it back down. Quentin would go on the next one. Two months after that, Larisa would go, and Michael would be the old-timer on board until his replacement came.
Quentin gestured at the walls, festooned with equipment Velcroed, tied, or simply wedged into place against every available surface. “Good thing the place looks like such a dump in the photos, or the competition for space up here would be even worse than it is, eh?"
"Right, good thing,” Michael said.
"Enjoy it while you've got it,” Quentin said.
Michael tried. He succeeded, too, but the problem was, he seemed to be enjoying it too much. In the days that followed, he teared up over the most trivial things. The sight of Earth curving away from him out the window, the smell of dinner in the otherwise nearly antiseptic space-station air, even the sight of the tiny crocuses in the Ukrainian high-school experiment that he, as both the biologist and the low man on the totem pole, had to tend each day.
It was a simple experiment. The high school class had decided to watch one of their country's native plants through an entire growth cycle and see how the lack of gravity affected it. They had chosen Crocus angustifolius, the “cloth of gold” crocus, because it was small, responded well to cultivation, and had pretty yellow blossoms. They had sent up a cylinder about a meter long and a third that wide, already planted with half a dozen corms that had sprouted within days after Michael had watered them and switched on the light.
The whole experiment had nearly come to an early end. On his first full day on board the station, when he was still getting used to maneuvering in free fall, Michael had underestimated his inertia and had careened into the experiment rack, busting a big chunk out of the Plexiglas cover with his elbow. He had duct-taped it back together, but it didn't fit tight anymore, so he had to be extra careful when he watered the plants.
Nobody had said anything, but he could imagine what went unsaid. The hotshot biologist had nearly blown the simplest experiment on the station. Wonder how he'll do on the DNA sequencer?
Not half bad, it turned out, except for the day when he burst into tears at the sight of a zebrafish genome. One of the fish strains that had been on board for nearly five years was developing longer, lacier fins, and he had found the genetic sequence that controlled it. Researchers on the ground had long ago shown that the fgfr1 gene affected fin growth and regeneration, but this was the first proof that evolutionary pressure could switch it on. When Michael had realized he was looking at the very blueprint of evolving life, he'd lost his self-control and the next moment he was crying like a mother at a wedding.
Fortunately, he was alone this time. Larisa was asleep in the crew quarters, and Quentin was across Node 2 in the Kibo module. Michael sniffed and dabbed at his eyes and bit his lip and clenched his fists and took deep breaths, and he eventually brought himself under control again, but later that day he got out the medical kit and self-prescribed an anti-depressant. He was supposed to confer with Mission Control first, but like any astronaut from Alan Shepard onward, he had learned not to involve the flight surgeon's office in anything he didn't have to. The only thing those guys ever did for astronauts was ground them if their health wasn't absolutely perfect. And an astronaut who couldn't control his emotions was sure to be grounded. If word of this got down to Mission Control, it would be Michael, not Quentin, who would be headed back to Earth on the next supply ship.
Antidepressants didn't just stop depression. They also moderated highs. They clipped both ends of the emotional spectrum, so Michael figured they might help him cope with his overwhelming feelings of joy. For several days they seemed to do so, which was probably the placebo effect since the package insert said it usually took at least a week for anti-depressants to kick in. Then one of the crocuses bloomed, and Michael dissolved at the sight of its pale yellow blossom reaching out toward the grow-light and just touching the top of its Plexiglas dome.
There was no hiding it this time. Larisa was just three feet away on his left, tending to her cryomanufacturing test equipment.
She looked over at him. “Problems?"
He sniffed and rubbed his eyes while he considered what to say. She had been all business with him from the moment he came on board. There had been moments of candor and mirth, as with any colleague, but never any real warmth. How much did Michael want to tell her?
She was the commander of the station. She had a right to know when one of her crew was compromised. So he said, “I'm having trouble controlling my emotions."
"In what way?” she asked.
He gripped the edge of the crocus experiment for support. “It's weird.” Sniff. “Normally people have trouble with negative feelings, but I keep becoming overwhelmed by joy.” Sniff. “I burst into tears at the slightest provocation.” His voice cracked.
"I see.” The corners of Larisa's mouth turned up in a hint of a smile. Michael instantly felt his fists and jaw clench in anticipation of the mocking laughter of his childhood, but Larisa merely said, “How long has this been going on?"
"About two weeks."
She considered that for a moment. “You are unable to control it?"
"Most times I can,” he said. “It's just when something catches me by surprise that I—” Sniff “—I go over the edge."
"You have tried antidepressants?” She didn't even pretend that a career astronaut would ask anyone first.
"Yes. They help, but apparently not enough."
Quentin drifted into the lab module, twisting to orient himself heads-up with the others. Then he saw the expression on his crewmates’ faces.
"Am I interrupting something?"
"No, this involves you too,” Michael said. “I'm having trouble keeping my emotions under control. I'm afraid if I can't get a handle on th
em, Mission Control is going to send me back down."
Quentin's face betrayed his first thought. If Michael went down in his place, Quentin could stay in space for two more months. But to his credit that expression came and went in an instant, replaced by genuine concern. “Something wrong at home?"
"No. Nothing's wrong anywhere. Maybe that's the problem. I'm at the pinnacle of my life, right here at the apex of my dreams, and the sheer magnitude of it all is apparently more than I can handle.” He wiped away tears with his fingers, transferring them to the absorbent fiber of his flight suit before they could drift loose.
Larisa said, “There are techniques for controlling emotion. Breathing exercises, thought stopping, aversion—"
"I've tried all that. I used to have this problem when I was a kid. I tried every trick in the book and invented some of my own. I beat it, too, until the last couple of weeks."
"You will have to beat it again,” Larisa said. “We can't have you crying in a spacesuit."
"Thanks for being so understanding,” he said.
She snorted. “I understand exactly. Men tell women all the time that we're too emotional. Unfit for command because we might burst into tears at a crucial moment. Every woman in Russia since Catherine the Great has learned to lock her emotions away if she is to succeed at anything. The fact that I'm here proves it's possible. You can do it as well."
Michael bit his tongue. For Larisa, that was a pep talk.
He turned to Quentin, who shook his head sadly. “Man, I wish I knew what to tell you. I'll cover for you however I can, but . . .” He left the statement hanging, either unable or unwilling to state the obvious.
"But I can't do EVAs,” said Michael, “and I can't do interviews, and I can't be depended on in a crisis."
"We don't know that,” Quentin said. “If the shit hits the fan, you'll probably be too busy tryin’ to survive to worry about how you feel about it."
Analog SFF, September 2010 Page 15
