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Cleaned up annotations June 1 2009. Better late than never…
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Here was a link to the audio (M3U, Windows Media Player).
Call-in with Dr. Robert C. Balling Jr.
Tuesday Nov. 18, 2008
KVMR, Nevada City, California
Part I
This first section is just Dr. Balling and the host.
(who believes in being civil to his guests, and the previous week had interviewed Dr. David Roland-Holst of UC Berkeley, author of a new study estimating the financial cost of climate change for California; which is huge.)
Part II is here.
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[0:00]
KVMR:
Through a video link, President-elect Barack Obama addressed a climate change conference convened today by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles, saying he would more aggressively tackle the problem of climate change than the Bush Administration.
But behind the politics of global warming, scientists are engaged in a robust debate about the effects of manmade CO2 in our atmosphere. Joining us now is a researcher involved in the debate over climate change.
Robert Balling Jr is a professor in the climatology program of the School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University. He has served as a climate consultant to the United Nations Environment Programme and served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Robert, welcome to the KVMR evening news.
I want to start by asking –
Can you maybe describe the debate that’s going on among scientists and in peer reviewed journals and otherwise, over the issue of climate change?
RCB:
Well I’ll do that, just as soon as you tell me what happened in the Civil War. It’s kind of a big question – if you were to go to a library or look at any top of the line science journal, you would quickly discover that every element of the greenhouse issue has its folks who seem to be supportive of certain ideas, and others who are not.
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** Note how he’s directing you to focus on the noise, not the signal, of science. Even so, he’s wrong: there *is* such a thing as scientific progress, and some things – e.g., that CO2 is a greenhouse gas – have been settled for a long, long time. Oreskes has made this point – the basic science of global warming was clear decades ago.—————————————–
The most fundamental questions, like, is the planet warming – in reality there’s quite a debate about that very subject
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** Literally true, but false in any meaningful sense . There’s no longer any debate about it in the climate science literature, just among people who aren’t working climate scientists (plus a vanishingly small proportion of climate scientists – there’s a reason why the same 8 or 10 names come up over and over again.)
—————————————–; as I tell people, you would just discover that the climate change issue is very much more complicated than it is often presented to the public. And that’s somewhat the message I have on the circuit, is that no matter what thing you ask about, you find out there’s an incredible story behind it and quite a debate going on in the scientific community.
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** Again, not true, at least not in the sense that he’s trying to convey; it may look that way, but typically the things that *are* settled aren’t being debated in the scientific community, and so – unless there’s an industry-funded effort to make them appear unsettled – they’re not news.
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KVMR:
Well, let’s just step back and tackle that question – “is the planet warming, and how do we know?” To me it’s scientists collecting data and then drawing conclusions based on that data, right? well, is the planet warming?
RCB:
Yes and no
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** Literally true, meaningfully false – i.e., this is sophistry, given that the question we’re really interested in is “do we expect that the planet will keep on heating up over the next few hundred years” (due to human activity)”
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We have a number of ways that the planetary temperature is taken – there are satellites that measure microwave emissions that come from the low atmosphere (those are directly related to the temperature of the low atmosphere, these polar orbiting satellites that allow for a global temperature to be measured); balloons are launched all over the world every day, the balloon record can give us a sense of the planetary temperature; and then there are literally millions of thermometer records from all over the world, and they’re not perfect by any means but they can all be averaged and get another sense of the planetary temperature; the good news is they’re all very highly correlated.So it would seem easy, is the earth warming or not?If you said how about the last 30 years, the answer’s absolutely, all three of those primary ways that we measure the temperature of the earth show warming. But if you said how about for the last 6 years from 2002 to present, all three show cooling.
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** This may be dishonest reasoning – we know there’s a lot of noise in the system, and to draw attention to a tiny slice in noisy data as if it’s meaningful is dumb – or deliberately misleading. Again, it’s focusing on the noise, not the signal. And (is this correct?) the cooling seen isn’t even statistically significant – see Tamino on this (I think Balling is referring to the same dataset).
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So you could answer the question a thousand different ways – if you said is the earth warming and you mean the last 100 years, the answer’s yes; if you mean the last 1000 years the answer may not be yes, or if you mean how about the last million years, the answer is well, we’ve actually been rather cold the last million years. So that question is not as easy to answer as it sounds at first glance.
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** “not as easy to answer”? only if you don’t know what issue you’re really trying to understand. The issue is how we can retain the climate that our civilization evolved with – we shouldn’t feel comforted that the earth’s climate was different half a million years ago, if it’d be catastrophic for it to become that way now. “The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”
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KVMR:
So it’s really trying to take and analyze and see some sense and consistency to trends in temperatures…?
RCB:
Yes, even if you could show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the earth was warming over the last 30 years, and I think scientists have, we know that the climate system varies quite naturally I mean clearly we’ve had ice ages come and go, we’ve had warm periods come and go, and it’s hard given the natural variability of climate to say what we have seen over the last 30 years is absolutely related to the buildup of greenhouse gases.
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** Agreed that there’s never absolute proof. But there is a great enough weight of evidence that reasonable people are no longer disputing it.
Balling’s also failing to mention here that the “flat” temperature of previous decades – before the 30 yrs of warming – is well understood to have been a *masking* of the underlying CO2 forcing, with pollution from human-produced aerosols (link)—————————————–
There are people who talk about fingerprints; the warming of the surface does seem to be in the right places – it’s in the winter, the high latitudes, night, land areas, where the models tell us we should see it, but the models also tell us we should see a lot more warming above the surface and that warming hasn’t been seen.
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** This appears to be bogus. From Wikipedia on warming –“A minor issue in climate modeling is the perceived mismatch between actual conditions and those projected by the models. A 2007 study by David Douglass and colleagues compared the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data and found that the models did not accurately project observed changes to the temperature profile in the tropical troposphere. The authors note that their conclusions contrast strongly with those of recent publications based on essentially the same data.[79] A 2008 paper published by a 17-member team led by Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory noted serious mathematical flaws in the Douglass study, and found instead that deviations between the models and observations were statistically insignificant.[80]”
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So on the one hand you see this fingerprint, and then another analysis you don’t see the fingerprint.
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** Oh yes you do (if I understand correctly); see above. —————————————–
KVMR:
I’ve attended the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union – AGU – for the past 7 years, and I go by the graces of my wife who is a scientist, but I also go as a reporter; I saw Al Gore speak there a couple years ago, and he was very well received as a champion of spreading the word about climate change and global warming.
He sort of qualified his remarks to the scientists – perhaps you were there, you are a member of the AGU – saying he’s not a scientist, he’s a politician, and he was looking to bridge those two worlds; and by the reception he got from the standing-room-only group of scientists, it appeared that most people agreed with him. How do you feel about Al Gore and what he has done in terms of raising awareness about climate change?
RCB:
Well there’s no doubt he’s a politician first, and there’s no doubt he spends a lot of time raising awareness of the issue.
I saw the film that he put out, and I believe that if at any moment if you said ok, let’s stop the film right there, and now lets go critically examine what he just said; it’s as I mentioned in the beginining, what we would find out over and over that what he just said is accurate according to some subset of scientists; and what he just said is not consistent with the research findings from a number of other scientists. Sometimes in the film he’d make very simplistic statements that I think most scientists would feel ill at ease with, and at other times he would say things that most of us would be at ease with.
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** again, he’s trying to focus on the noise – and more importantly, what he’s saying doesn’t match what the survey of scientists found.
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Of course he’s going to get a standing ovation, these are human beings, they’re going to be polite to speakers
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** I’m leaving this one as an exercise for the reader…
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, there’s no question – if Al Gore keeps the issue alive, and you are a scientist who is in line to receive substantial federal grants, you might stand up and clap as well.If I’m in the audience I would certainly receive his message well, I’d be respectful, but again I don’t think he accurately represents the state of science.
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** Dr. Balling did compose a rebuttal to An Inconvenient Truth, which was itself rebutted – also see Salon’s Did Al get the science right? (“The usual oil industry flacks and dogmatic skeptics have surfaced to denounce Al Gore’s global warming movie. But climate scientists say that, basically, he got it right.”)
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I mean, even if you were to download the IPCC technical summary
KVMR:
(which you contributed to)
RCB:
(yeah I have in the past, there’s no question about that)
– if you were to download the technical summary and read it, you would immediately sense that the IPCC is saying things that are not consistent with some of the points that Gore makes.
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** as in timeframe for the sea level rise? Gore didn’t provide one.
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But I welcome him to the debate, I’m not one to sit back and tell somebody “I don’t want to hear your message”, the more messengers the better.
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** Even ones that cloud public understanding? Does this help to inform the public on what the public *needs* to be informed of?
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But he has been, no question, a very powerful figure in raising awareness of the global warming issue – to the extent that the awareness has been raised – and you can look at some various polls of where global warming really stands in the eyes of the American public, and you can make a case that given all this raising awareness it didn’t work, it didn’t really raise the awareness that much.
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** Certainly not among college educated Republicans. See MoJo’s Bizarre Public Opinion Numbers on Global Warming.
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KVMR:
It seems that people are polarized over this issue; I’ve heard people say that climate change is not happening, and we had a congressional candidate on here saying the climate change is the product of alarmists, and…
RCB:
I don’t know if it’s the product of alarmists, but I can get for you astrophysicists at Harvard who could explain to you that variations in the earth’s temperature are very closely related to variations in the output of the sun
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** Are Soon and Baliunas still saying this? Here’s graphic evidence otherwise, from Tamino.—————————————–
; and some of these people believe that what we have seen in recent decades is solar related; and even this cooling that we’ve seen recently in global temperature is often explained away as a reduction in solar output.
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** By actual climate scientists (I very much doubt it; if so, provide a link please!), or by Heartland’s “global warming experts”, the vast majority of whom aren’t even climate scientists?
Desmogblog covers Heartland’s “experts” here.—————————————–
So it’s not just a matter of people calling each other names – there are very credible scientists at MIT and Harvard, and Stanford and elsewhere who are writing in a way that would put them in the skeptical camp, which is enormous by the way.
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** enormous in the blogosphere, maybe – we’ve got several here in Nevada County. And retired engineers seem to be particularly well represented, in accordance with the Salem Hypothesis.In scientific journals, not so much.
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KVMR:
You really wouldn’t get this in popular culture, this really isn’t making it into the mix; it seems that it’s a slam dunk for climate change.
RCB:
I don’t really believe that. I mean, you can turn on the radio in Phoenix Arizona, for probably 8 hours a day, some of your brothers in talk radio are talking about global warming, and making fun of it, and interviewing scientists who are skeptical – I never think that the skeptical viewpoint doesn’t get its airing, at all. I’ve had every opportunity to be on, you name it, and I think the skeptical message has definitely been aired and the American public has heard it. I think to this day, when you ask many Americans what they think of the issue, they still laugh it off they sort of make fun of Gore, they make fun of the issue, and I think they do get that from some of the champions of talk radio.
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See Part II (the call-in segment)
Note: if you’d like to comment, and part of your comment is “global warming’s not happening and/or overblown and/or nothing we did and/or alarmists are pushing it”, I’ve set up a separate thread for this –please respond in the comments here.
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