Yesterday, it was reported that Huntsman had apparently thrown his lot in with Romney, Newt Gingrich, and the rest of the GOP field who have reversed themselves on the issue lately. Huntsman’s ostensible “flip flop” came during an address to the anti-regulatory, industry front group Heritage Foundation.

Many have been quick to attack Huntsman for this seeming pivot, and I confess that my reaction was quite negative as well, even though Huntsman’s chances seem as dismal as ever.

But according to Politico, Huntsman is denying any change in position, and has reaffirmed his support of the scientific consensus:

“Let me be very clear on this: there is no change,” he told reporters after his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition. “I put my faith and trust in science. So you have 99 of 100 climate scientists who have come out and talked about climate change in certain terms, what is responsible for it. I tend to say this is a discussion that should not be in the political lane but should be in the scientific lane.”

“Is there a one percent that has a disagreement? There’s a one percent that has a disagreement,” he added. “Will those discussions continue, as they always do in the scientific community, to clear up those areas of ambiguity? I suspect so. But, as for me, I’m on the side of science on this one.”

I suppose that’s one benefit of infrequent blogging- I procrastinated my way out of jumping the gun. Anyway, as James Fallows said, it will be interesting to see what Huntsman says the next time climate comes up.

Matt Ridley is a techno-optimist of the Lomborgian mold, with all of the cherry-picking and source misrepresentation that goes with it apparently. He gave a speech to the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh [corrected - see below] that has “skeptics” falling all over themselves in delight.

What groundbreaking evidence does Ridley marshal in defense of his rejection of mainstream science?

I was curious. Ridley ostensibly is a cut above the average denizen of WUWT. He was trained as a zoologist before taking up science writing. He has articles frequently published in the mainstream press, as the delicious-in-hindsight tweet by Andy Revkin reflects. He’s widely acclaimed for popularizing science concepts for mainstream reading audiences. So whatever Ridley had must be good, I thought. His arguments would reflect the best of the “skeptics’” best.

It turned out I was wrong. Or perhaps, I was right, and Ridley was bringing the best of the “skeptics’” best. Either way, it was an enormous disappointment. Ridley’s speech turned out to be a textbook Gish Gallop, full of false claims, logical fallacies, and trivially true but irrelevant “facts”. It was, as I put it at Keith Kloor’s blog, “skeptic” bingo.

• Sea level rise is small and is decelerating!
• Methane isn’t increasing!
• Hockey Stick!
• Etc.

I don’t think I will do a point by point rebuttal to every claim in Ridely’s speech at this time (maybe later, for sport, time permitting). But suffice it to say that while Ridley is being lauded by the denialosphere now, he’s actually done them a tremendous disservice. With this speech, he’s fully exposing himself as a crank, and has thus reduced the ever-dwindling list of “credible skeptics” one further.

And in case anyone is curious, while the year-to-year variability is significant,  on climate-relevant timescales, sea level rise is indeed accelerating (Church and White 2011; Rahmstorf and Vermeer 2011).

But more to the point, absent emissions stabilization, sea level rise is going to increase, reaching 1m or more by end of century (Vermeer and Rahmstorf 2009).

Failure to stabilize emissions will almost assuredly result in the eventual collapse of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, committing the world to multimeter sea level rise that will be for all practical purposes irreversible. Many of Ridley’s claims similarly depend on falsely equivocating between concern over future climate changes absent emissions stabilization (and their relative irreversibility over human timescales) and what is happening at present. This couldn’t be more misleading.

As you might imagine, given the way this is going, Ridley’s claim that methane isn’t increasing is also false. Methane levels today are much higher than they’ve been over at least the past 800,000 years and continue to increase (Loulergue et al., 2008; NOAA AGGI).

The “hockey stick” nonsense has been done to death. And “skeptics” like Ridley inevitably fail to mention the main points: the “hockey stick” has basically nothing to do with either the attribution of recent warming to humans or the seriousness of future warming; the ostensible statistical problems in the original Mann et al. paper were overstated by its critics, and the actual problems it did have don’t tremendously affect its results (Huybers 2005; Wahl and Amman 2007); moreover, independent Northern Hemisphere reconstructions (including “skeptics’” own) show more or less the same results as Mann et al.’s recent work- the warming during the instrumental record exceeds peak Medieval temperatures (Ljunqvist 2010; Loehle and McCulloch 2008; Mann et al., 2008; Moberg, et al., 2005).

People like Ridley spend an awful lot of time listening to “skeptic” bloggers like Jo Nova and Bishop Hill, but seem to have no grasp of basic Earth systems science. And it shows. There is a total lack of coherence in Ridley’s claims. Ridley wants us to know that the climate changed rapidly in the past- but yet we’re also supposed to believe that climate sensitivity is very small. He also flubs basic concepts- equilibrium sensitivity is not the same thing as transient sensitivity (i.e. how much we will warm in response to a given increase in radiative forcing is larger than how much warming we’ll experience in the near term due to things like the thermal inertia of the ocean).

Perhaps Ridley can follow his own advice and “unlearn” the lies, fallacies, and nonsense he’s being cheered for regurgitating. Though let’s just say I’m a little skeptical of the prospect.

References:

• Church, J.A., and N.J. White (2011): Sea-Level Rise from the Late 19th to the Early 21st Century. Surveys In Geophysics, 32, 4-5, 585-602, doi:10.1007/s10712-011-9119-1.
• Huybers, P. (2005): Comment on “Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance” by S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick. Geophysical Research Letters, 32, L20705, doi:10.1029/2005GL023395.Ljungqvist, F.C. (2010): A new reconstruction of temperature variability in the extra-tropical northern hemisphere during the last two millennia. Geografiska Annaler: Series A, 92, 3, 339-351, doi:10.1111/j.1468-0459.2010.00399.x.
• Loehle, C. and J.H. McCulloch (2008): Correction to: A 2000-Year Global Temperature Reconstruction Based on Non-Tree Ring Proxies. Energy + Environment, 19, 1, 93-100.
• Loulergue, L., et al. (2008): Orbital and millennial-scale features of atmospheric CH4 over the past 800,000 years. Nature, 453, 383-386, doi:10.1038/nature06950.
• Mann, M.E., et al. (2008): Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 105, 36, 13252-13257, doi:10.1073/pnas.0805721105.
• Moberg, A., et al. (2005): Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data. Nature, 433, 613-617, doi:10.1038/nature03265.
• NOAA AGGI: The NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index. URL: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/
• Rahmstorf, S., and M. Vermmer (2011): Discussion of: “Houston, J.R. and Dean, R.G., 2011. Sea-Level Acceleration Based on U.S. Tide Gauges and Extensions of Previous Global-Gauge Analyses”. Journal of Coastal Research, 27, 4, 784–787, doi:10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-11-00082.1.
• Vermeer, M., and S. Rahmstorf (2009): Global sea level linked to global temperature. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 106, 51, 21527-21532, doi:10.1073/pnas.0907765106.
• Wahl, E.R., and C.M. Ammann (2007): Robustness of the Mann, Bradley, Hughes reconstruction of surface temperatures: Examination of criticisms based on the nature and processing of proxy climate evidence. Climatic Change, 85, 33-69, doi:10.1007/s10584-006-9105-7.

Roger, though, just can’t help himself.

Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou published an article in PNAS examining the influence of warming on the likelihood of extreme temp events, notably in the context of the blistering 2010 Russian heat wave. Roger accuses Rahmstorf of cherry-picking his period of analysis, and then uses this accusation to cast aspersions on the integrity of climate science more generally.

Here is another good example why I have come to view parts of the climate science research enterprise with a considerable degree of distrust.

…

Climate science — or at least some parts of it — seems to have devolved into an effort to generate media coverage and talking points for blogs, at the expense of actually adding to our scientific knowledge of the climate system. The new PNAS paper sure looks like a cherry pick to me.

What’s Roger’s actual complaint with the Rahmstorf and Coumou paper? Roger writes:

Look at the annotated figure above, which originally comes from an EGU poster by Dole et al. (programme here in PDF). It shows surface temperature anomalies in Russia dating back to 1880. I added in the green line which shows the date from which Rahmsdorf and Coumou decided to begin their analysis — 1911, immediately after an extended warm period and at the start of an extended cool period.

Obviously, any examination of statistics will depend upon the data that is included and not included. Why did Rahmsdorf and Coumou start with 1911? A century, 100 years, is a nice round number, but it does not have any privileged scientific meaning. Why did they not report the sensitivity of their results to choice of start date? There may indeed be very good scientific reasons why starting the analysis in 1911 makes the most sense and for the paper to not report the sensitivity of results to the start date. But the authors did not share that information with their readers. Hence, the decision looks arbitrary and to have influenced the results.

Roger obviously didn’t bother to actually read the paper he’s attacking.

If there’s one thing Roger can’t stand, it’s scientists pointing out that man-made global warming is making certain kinds of extreme events worse. If there’s another thing he can’t stand, it’s the scientists who blog at RealClimate. Put them together, and Roger goes off the deep end.

UPDATE:

Caught out, Roger is predictably moving the goal posts rather than acknowledging that his attacks were unjustified.

First Roger attacked Rahmstorf and Coumou for ignoring the pre-1911 data. He uses this ostensible sin of omission to smear the larger field. Except of course this is completely false. When this is pointed out, Roger moves the goalposts and claims that Rahmstorf and Coumou didn’t actually look at the 1880-2009 data because they didn’t use a linear trend to look at the 1880-2009 data. [Edited to add: this is an implicit rather than explicit claim by Roger, as we'll see.] The paper is quite clear about making the case that the data (for 1911 on and for 1880-2009, for synthetic data and actual obs) are better described by a nonlinear trend, and the passage I cited in the original point makes it clear that the 1880-2009 data were analyzed using a nonlinear trend.

Roger then has the chutzpah to claim that Rahmstorf has “confirmed” Roger’s “critique”:

It would be quite shocking indeed if Rahmstorf actually “confirmed” Roger’s critique. But of course he did no such thing. When Roger claims “they did not run the analysis from 1880″, he’s completely wrong (see the above excerpt from the paper). When he claims Rahmstorf has “confirmed” his critique, what Roger really means is that Rahmstorf confirmed that they did not look at the 1880-2009 data using a linear trend- which, again is perfectly clear in the paper itself. So it has gone a bit like this:

Roger: “They didn’t look at the whole record!”

Uh, yes, they did.

Roger: “No, they didn’t perform The Analysis* for the whole record!”

*Valid only for Roger’s definition of “The Analysis”.

Roger has taken a concession that the paper did not do something it never claimed to have done and declared victory. Perhaps at some point he’ll realize that claiming something does not make it so.

FURTHER UPDATE:

Roger has repeatedly made the claim that Stefan Rahmstorf “confirmed” Roger’s critique. Roger’s original critique was that the 1880-1910 were not analyzed by Rahmstorf and Coumou. This original critique is patently false, as the paper shows in the excerpt I posted above.

The basis for Roger claiming that Rahmstorf “confirmed” his critique was Rahmstorf stating that a linear trend was not used in analyzing the 1880-2009, as is clear in the paper.

I let Rahmstorf know that Roger was claiming Rahmstorf confirmed Roger’s critique. Rahmstorf responded:

That is truly bizarre, since what I responded to Pielke (in full) was: “We did not try this for a linear trend 1880-2009. The data are not well described by a linear trend over this period.” As shown in the paper and above, our main conclusion regarding Moscow (the 80% probability) rests on our Monte Carlo simulations using a non-linear trend line, and of course is based on the full data period 1880-2009. Nowhere did we “use 1910-2009 trends as the basis for calculating 1880-2009 exceedence probabilities”, and I can’t think why doing this would make sense. Faced with this kind of libelous distortion I will not answer any further questions from Pielke now or in future. As an aside, our paper was reviewed not only by two climate experts but in addition by two statistics experts coming from other fields. If someone thinks that using a linear trend would have been preferable, that is fine with me – they should do it and publish the result in a journal. I doubt, though, whether after subtracting a linear trend the residual would fulfill the condition of being uncorrelated white noise, an important condition in this analysis.

And on a final note, Pielke actually had the nerve to write this:

You may read the paper differently than I do and you may interpret Rahmstorf’s comments differently than I do — happens all the time on these blogs. In such a situation I propose that the best course of action would be to solicit further information to resolve the dispute. Or, perhaps you’d rather we just make comments about motives and call each other names

This, after he wrote a post impugning the field over an “omission” that existed only in his mind. Unreal.

Anthony Watts is desperately trying to spin the initial findings of the BEST re-examination of land-surface temperature data, which has absolutely obliterated his claims to “skeptic” fame (that UHI, station quality, station dropout, etc. are responsible for all or much of the warming in the official instrumental records). His latest misdirection is a regurgitation of an ignorant email blast from David Whitehouse/Benny Peiser, which is little more than creationist-level quote-mining:

The quote cited by Whitehouse/Peiser/Watts comes from the fourth BEST draft paper, “Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures” (Muller et al., 2011).

The context of the paper is that BEST finds a high correlation between land surface temperature variability and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation on interannual (2-15 years). They claim that this result is surprising:

Interannual to decadal variations in Earth global temperature estimates have often been identified with El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events. However, we show that variability on timescales of 2-­‐15 years in mean annual global land surface temperature anomalies, Tavg are more closely correlated with variability in sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic.

As an aside, I objected yesterday that I thought this was a little bit of a “bait and switch”- BEST is talking about land-only temps, whereas ENSO is the dominant source of interannual variability in global temps (due to its influence on SSTs).

In any event, the quote-mining by GWPF/WUWT comes from the following statement:

Since 1975, the AMO has shown a gradual but steady rise from -­‐0.35 C to +0.2 C (see Figure 2), a change of 0.55 C. During this same time, the land-­‐average temperature has increased about 0.8 C. Such changes may be independent responses to a common forcing (e.g. greenhouse gases); however, it is also possible that some of the land warming is a direct response to changes in the AMO region. If the long-­‐term AMO changes have been driven by greenhouse gases then the AMO region may serve as a positive feedback that amplifies the effect of greenhouse gas forcing over land. On the other hand, some of the long-­‐term change in the AMO could be driven by natural variability, e.g. fluctuations in thermohaline flow. In that case the human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated.

Let’s make some things clear up front. The BEST paper does not actually look at the issue discussed in this paragraph. Rather, it looks at how AMO variance on 2-15 year timescales correlates to the land-only temperature record. In the BEST analysis, both are “cleaned” of any long-term signal, such as the anthropogenic warming trend.

To emphasize the decadal-­‐scale variations, the long-­‐term changes in the temperature records and oceanic indices were “pre-­‐whitened.” This is a process to remove a large signal that is not being studied in order to reduce bias in the remainder. To do this, we fit each record (yearly data sets) separately to 5th order polynomials using a linear least-­‐squares regression; we subtracted the respective fits, and normalized the results to unit mean-­‐square deviation. This procedure effectively removes slow changes such as global warming and the ~70 year cycle of the AMO, and gives each record zero mean. The 12-­‐month smoothing removes high frequency (e.g. monthly) changes. All of the remaining analysis in this paper is based on the pre-­‐whitened temperature records and oceanic indices.

So BEST’s actual analysis does not in any way support the claim that”the human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated”- it cannot by definition.

However, that does not mean that we can’t examine the question they raise. How large is the contribution of actual natural variability in the North Atlantic compared to the contribution of anthropogenic warming?

It’s important to note that the AMO is computed in such a way as to remove linear trends only. As such, the existence of a non-linear external trend like man-made warming of the ocean (including the North Atlantic) is going to show up in the AMO index as though it were internal variability, even though it’s obviously not.

This has led to some “skeptics” attempting to blame anthropogenic ocean warming on the AMO, thinking that the AMO is driving the changes in the global ocean rather than the other way around. Both Tamino and Zeke have had a go at showing why this is exactly backwards.

So how much of the temperature change in the North Atlantic is attributable to the AMO rather than man-made global warming? Ting et al., 2009 take up the question, first reviewing several methods of attempting to isolate the AMO from the global warming signal using observations alone:

Figure 2 shows the application of two of the previously proposed approaches designed to remove the forced signal associated with both anthropogenic and other natural (volcanic and solar) forcing from the total observed NASSTI, with the purpose of uncovering the internal component of the variability. The first commonly used method is to remove the linear trend from the observed North Atlantic SST index, as shown in Fig. 2a (e.g., Enfield et al. 2001; Sutton and Hodson 2005; Knight et al. 2006). This method assumes that the forced trend is linear and uniform over time. The linear detrending method suggests that the positive anomaly in NASSTI at the end of the twentieth century (0.4°C) is equally divided between the externally forced trend and the internal AMO variability (amplitude 0.2°C) and that the latter is currently at a peak state, similar to its state in the middle of the twentieth century. A second method is to use the global mean sea surface temperature as a proxy for the externally forced signal (Trenberth and Shea 2006; Mann and Emanuel 2006). When subtracting the global mean SST anomalies from the tropical North Atlantic SST to remove the forced signal, Trenberth and Shea (2006) concluded a predominant contribution from the anthropogenically forced warming to the total North Atlantic SST anomalies. In this study, we regress the two dimensional SST field on the time series of globally averaged SST (SSTg) and obtain an estimate of the internal component as the local difference between the total field and the regression pattern. The North Atlantic average of both the regressed NASSTI and the residual is shown in Fig. 2b. The regression method used here accounts for the fact that the forced SST is not uniform spatially, which differs from that used in Trenberth and Shea (2006).

Comparing Figs. 2a and 2b, one sees that the two methods imply considerable differences in the amplitude and temporal properties of the forced and internal variability. Unlike linear detrending, regression on the global mean SST implies that the positive NASSTI anomaly at the end of the twentieth century is largely due to the forced signal (~0.34°C) and only a small portion is caused by internal AMO variability (~0.06°C), consistent with Trenberth and Shea (2006). Furthermore, although linear detrending might suggest that theAMOis at its peak amplitude and that the internal variability in the next 2 decades would stay at the same amplitude or decrease, regression on the global mean SST suggests that the internal component of the AMO could cause even warmer north Atlantic SST in the coming years. Another commonly used measure of the anthropogenically forced variability is the global mean surface temperature (Tg), as shown in Fig. 2c. This method suggests an even weaker recent warming due to internal variability than when global mean SST is used, leaving the externally forced signal to explain almost all of the observed change during the late twentieth century. In addition to the difference in relative contribution to forced and internal components of NASSTI, the overall amplitude of the AMO is about 20% weaker using the global mean SST and global mean surface temperature as a proxy for forced trend.

And then using climate models:

Observed internally generated AMO index constructed by subtracting from the observed index the model estimates of the forced NA SST... The black dashed line... is the average across all six models (Ting 2009).

To remove the model-based estimate of the forced change from the observed North Atlantic SST record, we averaged the six models’ forced changes…and subtracted it from the observed time series. The uncertainty in this estimate is represented by the spread generated when each model’s forced component is separately removed from the data (see Fig. 5b). The amplitude of the oscillation, to which we hereafter refer to as AMO, is between -0.3° and +0.2°C, which is comparable to the detrended NASSTI in Fig. 2a but larger than those in Figs. 2c and 2e. In terms of the phase of the oscillation, Fig. 5b indicates that theAMOso defined is similar to that using the global mean surface temperature or global mean sea surface temperature as the forced signal (and shown in Fig. 2).

[In other words, the black, dashed line in the second plot is the modeled AMO version of the computed AMO (blue and red) curve in the upper group of plots.]

Ting et al. demonstrate that while there is a range of methods available to examine the issue of how much AMO variability plays a role in addition to the anthropogenically forced (i.e. global warming) component of North Atlantic warming, there does appear to be a genuine AMO contribution- though of arguable size. However, Ting et al. are also clear that the AMO contribution is to variability, rather than to any long term trend:

The results presented here do not lead to dramatically different conclusions from the earlier studies dealing with the same issue. We believe, however, that our rigorous statistical analysis puts the claim that the North Atlantic displayed in the twentieth century an internal ‘‘oscillation’’ of considerable magnitude (compared to overall externally forced trend) on a more robust footing. We were also able to show that this internal variation led to sharp decadal changes in temperature, but due to its oscillatory nature these transitions led to an overall compensation on a century time scale.

In other words, the AMO is not driving long term North Atlantic ocean warming.

While the BEST analysis is interesting, it says nothing about the issue WUWT and GWPF claim it is supporting, and there is no evidence to support the hypothesis that the anthropogenic component of global warming is overstated, based on AMO data.

References:

• Muller, R.A., et al. (2011): Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures. Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, submitted.
• Ting, M., et al. (2009): Forced and Internal Twentieth-Century SST Trends in the North Atlantic. Journal of Climate, 22, 1469-1481, doi: 10.1175/2008JCLI2561.1.

Image courtesy of Flickr user "crowderb", used under Creative Commons.

[First, congratulations to Robert Rohde, and the rest of the team that actually worked on the science end of the project. There are some outstanding issues that need to be resolved prior to calling the work a finished product, and I hope the BEST team addresses them.]

Was anyone outside of the “skeptic” blogosphere surprised by the findings that UHI, station quality, station drop out, etc. weren’t really affecting the surface record? I don’t think so. But there is a great deal of revisionist history going on, which I’ll get to in a moment. Speaking of revisionist history, though-

That Anthony Watts has done a complete 180 from his earlier pledge to accept the BEST results should surprise no one. His whining that the results have been released prior to review- given his entire “surface stations” project and his years of insinuating if not outright claiming that much of the instrumental warming was spurious- is the height of chutzpah. BEST is being transparent with their data and methodology, something that people (even WUWT regulars and “skeptic” true believers) fought tooth and nail to get Watts to do.

Roger Pielke Sr. was quick to attempt to downplay the BEST results by implying they were not independent of previous analyses. Perhaps Roger should have actually bothered to read the papers he was attacking. I guess it all depends what his goal was- to offer legitimate criticism, or provide Marc Morano with soundbites attacking BEST.

I agree with WMC that this changes basically nothing about my opinion of Muller himself. The charges that Muller grossly distorted the truth about the so-called “hockey stick” controversy, he doesn’t appear to really even understand basic aspects of climate science, etc. stand. My negative opinion of Muller stems not just from his current attempts to portray himself as single-highhandedly saving climate science from the “skeptics”, but go back to earlier encounters with him in paleo/geology literature. Let’s just say the dynamic of Muller trying to claim the mainstream has failed to account for something significant and Muller positioning himself as the tough truth-teller is nothing new. At least in this case Muller has the fortune of actually coming down on the correct side, something that can’t be said for his previous efforts.

Lastly, let’s talk for a moment about the furious backpedaling that’s happening in response to BEST. “Skeptics” over at Curry’s, WUWT, on social media sites like Reddit, etc. are falling all over themselves trying to claim that No True Skeptic actually denies that the Earth is warming. They’re claiming the BEST results are meaningless because they don’t actually address attribution.

To which I reply, “Bullshit.” A staggeringly large number of climate “skeptics” do in fact deny that the Earth is warming. A survey less than a month ago found that less than half (49%) of self-identified Republicans and even fewer (41%) self-identified Tea Partiers agreed that the Earth is actually warming.

No, the BEST papers do not directly address attribution, but neither did the myths that they (along with all the other analyses and data sets) exploded. Are we supposed to believe that “skeptics” weren’t claiming that all or much of the warming in the instrumental record was due to UHI, station siting, station drop out, etc.? Please.

If the “skeptics” want to pretend that they never claimed we weren’t warming as NASA GISS, Hadley-CRU, NOAA, et al. showed, and instead want to focus on the attribution of warming to human causes, so be it. I hope they don’t expect the rest of us to join them in their revisionism.

When the initial furor dies down, I’d like to discuss some of BEST’s interesting (as opposed to merely confirmatory) results.

Image courtesy of Flickr user "Hypocentre", used under Creative Commons

Pumice is interesting stuff. For one thing, it’s light. Really light. It has such a low density that it can and does float in water. It’s also very English muffin-like in its myriad nooks and crannies. These and some other key properties have had some who study the origins of life (here and on other planets) thinking hard about pumice as a possible starting place for life.

In the September issue of the journal Astrobiology, Martin D. Brasier and coauthors lay out their case for pumice (Brasier 2011).

Figure 2 (Brasier 2011), click to embiggen.

And I think pumice has a strong case indeed. But what really intrigues me is that Brasier, et al. seem to think they’re on to something… novel.

They write:

The notion of tiny rock compartments acting as reaction vessels for the synthesis and development of early organic molecules is not, of course, a new idea (see Nisbet, 1985). Others have argued for the potential of micropores within feldspar and zeolite minerals (Parsons et al., 1998; Smith 1998; Smith et al., 1999). The potential of such fabrics for RNA synthesis has lately gained support from computer modeling (Branciamore et al., 2009). But the potential of pumice for the emergence of early life—plus the diagenetic mineral suites to which pumice can play host—has not received attention. Below, we therefore explore the possibility that extensive rafts of pumice were positioned for hundreds—possibly thousands—of years at the interface of the early ocean-atmosphere-lithosphere system, concentrating metals, phosphates, catalysts, and organic polymers. We explore whether such deposits could have provided a remarkable setting for the emergence of the first life on Earth

Interesting stuff. But there’s a slight problem. Pumice as the location of the origin of life has “received attention”. Curtis Ebbesmeyer coauthored (with Akira Okubo) a letter and submitted it to Nature back in 1993 on exactly this subject, entitled “Origin of Life in Floating Pumice”. Nature did not accept the letter for publication, suggesting further work to bolster their case. Ebbesmeyer published the submitted letter in the journal Oceanography a few years later as part of a tribute issue to Akira (Ebbesmeyer 1999).

I first came across Ebbesmeyer’s pumice hypothesis ten years later, in the book Ebesmeyer coauthored with Eric Scigliano recounting Ebbesmeyer’s oceanographic career entitled Flotsametrics. (Ebbesmeyer achieved notoriety by using Nike footwear and rubber duck bath toys lost at sea to track ocean currents.)

Excerpt from "Flotsametrics" (Ebbesmeyer 2009).

To be clear, I don’t think that Brasier et al. have done anything untoward. It’s not as though Ebbesmeyer and Akira Okubo actually published their paper in a conventional manner. And had I not had Ebbesmeyer’s book recommended to me, I wouldn’t have any idea that someone got there first.

I think the pumice idea is a fascinating one, and Brasier et al. seem to have written the kind of paper that Nature suggested Ebbesmeyer and Akira resubmit with. I hope if any negative attention comes out of this that it will at least spark a greater interest in this fascinating candidate for the first place life called home.

References:

• Brasier, M.D., et al. (2011): Pumice as a Remarkable Substrate for the Origin of Life. Astrobiology, 11(7), 725-735, doi:10.1089/ast.2010.0546.
• Ebbesmeyer, C. (1999): Pumice and Mines Afloat on the Sea. Oceanography, 12, 1, 17-21.
• Ebbesmeyer, C., and E. Scigliano (2009): Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science. Smithsonian, ISBN: 0061558419.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Scott Ableman, used under Creative Commons

The year 2011 started off with something of a surprise- George Will seemingly supporting science! Yes, this George Will. I wasn’t the only one taken aback.

Will’s journalistic colleague Andy Revkin was likewise surprised by this seeming about face from someone who all too readily attacked science when it conflicted with his conservative ideology, writing:

I think it’d make sense to devote at least as many column inches to this vital issue as you’ve expended trying to undercut decades of scientific study pointing to a growing human influence on the climate system.

This summer, Revkin again called upon Will to show how serious Will actually is about supporting science (and again at the end of August) by penning “a fresh column… building on [Will's] January rebuke of Republican lawmakers seemingly seeking to lead a charge away from federal support for science.” At the time, Revkin pointedly noted that Will was preoccupied with other topics.

Well, it appears Revkin now has Will’s response. GOP Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman recently had the gall to side with the scientific community on the issues of climate change and evolution. Today’s Republican party is infamously unique in its rejection of the scientific reality of man-made global warming. That a top-tier Republican candidate like Jon Huntsman would unabashedly stand with the scientific community was a welcome surprise.

Such apostasy was apparently sufficient to rouse Will’s attention where Revkin’s pleas to stand up for science were not. Will took to the pages of Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post to join his fellow Republicans’ assault on science.

Will sneered:

For Jon Huntsman: You, who preen about having cornered the market on good manners, recently tweeted, “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” Call you sarcastic. In the 1970s, would you have trusted scientists predicting calamity from global cooling?

Gee, Will sure does love recycling!

Setting aside the fallacy of believing that because science got something wrong in the past it follows that it’s incorrect now, Will is actually engaging in revisionist history.

Despite repeated claims by Will and others to the contrary, there was no consensus predicting cooling in the 70s. Rather predictions of warming “even then dominated scientists’ thinking” (Peterson 2008):

Had Huntsman listened to the balance of the scientific evidence in the 1970s, he would be looking pretty good 30 plus years later. Contrast that with Will, who manages to still get what was said then wrong today, even with the benefit of hindsight!

Will continues:

Are scientists a cohort without a sociology — uniquely homogenous and unanimous

I will freely stipulate that true unanimity is seldom achieved on any subject, no matter how well-established scientifically. That being said, on the question of the reality of man-made warming of the climate, it’s pretty darn close. Surveys of the primary literature show virtually no opposition (Oreskes 2004). Survey data also show that 97-98% of scientists with relevant expertise/who are actively publishing in relevant fields likewise support the consensus (Doran 2009, Anderegg 2010).

without factions or interests

On the contrary, climate science is necessarily an interdisciplinary field. And it’s precisely this patchwork, factious nature of the field that makes the aforementioned consensus all the more striking.

That scientists whose life’s work is focused on solar influence on climate are broadly in agreement with those who focus on the ocean’s role, and with those who study climatic changes in the geologic past due to orbital variation, volcanism, or plate tectonics, etc. that anthropogenic warming is driving the present climatic change is quite amazing, especially if one is as cynically-minded as Will. Self-interest (which we will see Will believes is quite the powerful motivator) is poorly served by the various alternative drivers of warming being exonerated by the scientists that study them.

and impervious to peer pressures or the agendas of funding agencies?

This is a rather pathetic appeal to motive. And it fails for much the same reason that the previous comment does. If one were interested in prolonging and maximizing the amount of funding one could receive for one’s own corner of the scientific community, swiftly and virtually unanimously reaching consensus on something is probably the worst possible way to go about it.

But if Will is genuinely interested in how scientific consensus can be reached and trusted, he could always consult an expert on the subject. Naomi Oreskes literally wrote the book on this topic as it concerns the triumph of plate tectonics (Oreskes 2001). For the truly concerned like Will, she’s also written an accessible primer on the consensus on global warming (Oreskes 2007).

Alas, given Will’s track record (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here), the likelihood of him bothering to actually educate himself on the subject appears to be about as slim as Huntsman’s chances for the Republican nomination.

As a parting shot, Will cannot resist twisting the knife in Huntsman over his science-affirming campaign’s poor reception by today’s GOP voters:

Your chief strategist, John Weaver, says the “simple reason” the GOP is “nowhere near being a national governing party” is that “no one wants to be around a bunch of cranks.” … Although you say the country is “crying out” for a “sensible middle ground,” you have campaigned for three months on what you say is that ground and, according to the most recent Gallup poll, your support among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents is 1 percent.

The folly of codifying anti-science beliefs into a technologically-rooted nation’s political platform would seem self-evident, a “no brainer” as it were. Will and his fellow conservative elites would do well to reconsider their present course,  which is a “no brainer” of an altogether different kind.

Image courtesy of Flickr user saucy_pan, used under Creative Commons

References:

• Anderegg, W., et al. (2010): Expert credibility in climate change. Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (USA), 107, 27, 12107-12109, doi:10.1073/pnas.1003187107.
• Doran, P.T., and M.K. Zimmerman (2009): Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, Eos Trans. AGU, 90(3), 22, doi:10.1029/2009EO030002.
• Oreskes, N., ed. (2001): Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth. Boulder: Westview Press, with Homer E. Le Grand.
• Oreskes, N. (2004): Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. Science, 306, 57021686, doi:10.1126/science.1103618.
• Oreskes, N. (2007): The scientific consensus on climate change: How do we know we’re not wrong? Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren, 65-99, DiMento and Doughman eds., MIT Press.
• Peterson, T.C., et al. (2008): The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 89, 9, 1325-1337, doi:10.1175/2008BAMS2370.

[UPDATE: I see Phil Plait was having similar thoughts today.]

Image courtesy of Flickr user "Mr DeJerk", used under Creative Commons

Image courtesy of Flickr user "Jennoit", used under Creative Commons

The National Science Foundation’s Inspector General office has completed its inquiry into allegations of misconduct leveled at Penn State climate scientist, RealClimate blogger, and “hockey stick” lead author Mike Mann. Yet again, Mann was cleared of all allegations of misconduct. And, yet again, this does nothing to dissuade the paranoid conspiracy theorists that fancy themselves “skeptics” but who are anything but.

As always, Conspiracy Theory 101 dictates that when an investigation fails to confirm your tin foil nuttery, it can only mean that the investigation was illegitimate and part of the conspiracy. Previous examples here, here, and here.

[UPDATE:  Like clockwork...]

Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman has been earning some praise and concern for sending this reality-based tweet yesterday. Praise from those of us who wish desperately that science will not become a victim of the GOP’s identity politics. Concern from many who believe it already is, and that this effectively has ended Huntsman’s campaign.

While the beltway press seems to be obsessing over the antics of Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman, Huntsman has been flying more or less under the radar. For those who wish to know a little more about Huntsman, you could do worse than this recent Vogue profile.

As I said over at Kloor’s, it’s a sad day when politicians have to be applauded for mild acceptance of mainstream science, but applauded they should be.