Rio+20 - The Hangover

George Monbiot, the influential English journalist and environmental activist writes in the Guardian on the failed Rio+20 summit, under the deadline “After Rio, we know. Governments have given up on the planet”.

It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth's living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue "sustained growth", the primary cause of the biosphere's losses.

Climate Change is a wicked problem

Jay Rosen has given an excellent account on climate change, why it is a wicked problem, and how journalists could cope with its coverage. This was delivered as keynote address to the 2nd UK Conference of Science Journalists, June 25, 2012 at The Royal Society, London.

Here are a few excerpts:

Geden: Modifikation des 2-Grad-Ziels

Wir freuen uns, hier einen neuen Artikel von Oliver Geden auf der klimazwiebel zur Diskussion stellen zu können:

Oliver Geden: Die Modifikation des 2-Grad-Ziels
Klimapolitische Zielmarken im Spannungsfeld von wissenschaftlicher Beratung, politischen Präferenzen und ansteigenden Emissionen
(eine Studie der Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin)

Hier ein Interview mit Oliver Geden  zum Thema

Und jetzt auch noch auf spiegel-online für alle, die zu faul sind, die lange Fassung zu lesen!

(add 26. Juni) und hier aus dokumentarischen Gründen und der Variationen des Themas wegen:  http://derstandard.at/1339638922111/Oliver-Geden-Rio20-Handeln-statt-verhandeln-fuer-die-Umwelt

The Other Side of Climate Science

I recently submitted a paper that was somewhat against the mainstream climate change conclusions, and needless to say the paper was rejected.  It was submitted to a sociological journal which I assumed might be less partisan.  But this is not sour grapes about rejection.  I have come to view journals like clubs.  If you don’t agree with the rules of the club then you don’t get membership.  If you can’t find a club to join, start your own and seek like minded souls.  But this is not about trends in academia, it is about one single comment made by a reviewer.

Expecting the unexpected

A  new study published study in Nature alerts to impending catastrophic developments - this time not mainly based on climate change impacts but on wider developments caused by resource use. Here is the abstract:

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence. The plausibility of a planetary-scale ‘tipping point’ highlights the need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning signs of critical transitions on global as well as local scales, and by detecting feedbacks that promote such transitions. It is also necessary to address root causes of how humans are forcing biological changes.

Am Lagerfeuer der klimazwiebel

 

Wir sind, so Bruno Latour, nie modern gewesen. Noch immer sitzen wir ums Lagerfeuer und erzählen uns mythische Geschichten und versuchen die Angst zu bannen, dass uns der Himmel auf den Kopf fällt. Diese Angst trägt heute den Namen Klimawandel. Stellen wir uns für einen Moment vor, wir wären Claude Levi-Strauss und beugten den Kopf über eine dieser mythischen Erzählungen, die ihm von der Welt der Wilden zugtragen worden sind. Wer sind diese Wilden, die in den Spiegel schauen und das Klima zurückblicken sehen? Können wir eine Struktur erkennen, eine Symmetrie?

Der Klimawandel ist in unseren Gesellschaften bekanntlich ein abstraktes Konzept, das erst durch Messungen und Zahlenreihen berechenbar und regierbar gemacht werden kann. Es liegt in der Natur solcher Statistiken und ansteigender Kurven, dass sie ihre eigene Lesart hervorbringen. Man setzt Werte fest und misst die Sachlage daran, ob diese überschritten werden. Eben solches ist laut der Messstation auf Hawai mit dem Treibhausgas CO2 geschehen, wie Alexander Bojanowski auf spiegel-online berichtet.

Interview with Christopher Castro

In my series of interviews with Atmospheric scientists for the newsletter of the Atmospheric Science Section of the American Geophysical Union, I have now interviewed Christopher Castro, who is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona. The interview was published in the May 2012 issue of the Newsletter - it is #15 in my AGU series (there is a second series, among scientists from the Hamburg Center of Excellence CLISAP).

BR TV zum Thema Skeptiker: 3. Juni, 21.15

Anfang Mai 2012 wurde ich für den Dokumentarfilms "Falscher Klima-Alarm? Skeptiker-Argumente auf dem Prüfstand", interviewt - jetzt wurde mir der Ausstrahlungstermin der Sendung mitgeteilt: Sonntag, 3. Juni, 21.15h - 21.45h, Sendereihe "Faszination Wissen", Bayerisches Fernsehen. Die Sendung ist nach der Erstausstrahlung mehrere Wochen lang online abrufbar auf der Netzseite von "Faszination Wissen".

Oliver Krüger and Frederik Schenk: The Long Run

Oliver Krüger and Frederik Schenk: The Long Run

1 Introduction

Just recently, klimazwiebel released an interview with Reiner Grundmann , in which he reports about his struggles with publishing a somewhat controversial paper. The story we are about to tell and the previous interview fit neatly together.

2 The Story

Half a year ago, we planned to write a comment to Donat et al. (2011) in the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). Because GRL changed its policies regarding comments to already published manuscripts, we prepared a small paper. In the following peer review process we realized that getting published would eventually become difficult. We received two rounds of reviews with GRL, which finally rejected our manuscript.

Later on we revised the manuscript and submitted to the Environmental Research Letters (ERL), where the manuscript was rejected after one round of reviews. After that incidence, we submitted to one open discussion journal, namely Climate of the Past (CP). CP rejected the manuscript immediately at the initial review stage. The initial review, done by one of the editors, is supposed to be a low standard to enter the open discussion, but we failed nevertheless.

In total we received seven reviews that lead to the rejection in three journals in a row. These seven reviews varied in their opinions significantly. They varied from minor comments to major comments. They were either positively or negatively minded. We also received "interesting" comments. For instance, one reviewer suggested that the average of +1 and -1 is 0.

The editor who did the initial review for CP was more open to questions regarding his rejection. He stated that our results would be plausible, but not convincing (even though he believed our results).

After these episodes, we decided to change our publication strategy. We put the manuscript on arXiv.org to make it publicly available. At the same, we submitted to Journal of Climate, from which we are expecting news whether they are willing to start the review process or not.

3 The Manuscript

The manuscript we are talking about is called "Inconsistencies between long-term trends in storminess derived from the 20CR reanalysis and observations" by Krueger, Schenk, Feser, and Weisse.

 In the letter to the editor we wrote: “In the manuscript we analyze storminess derived through a pressure-based proxy (extreme percentiles of geostrophic wind speed) in the 20th Century Reanalysis dataset 20CR over the Northeast Atlantic and compare our findings with results obtained from pressure observations.”

The method strictly follows Alexandersson et al. (1998, 2000) (their results made it into the last IPCC WG1 report as Fig. 3.41, online at http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-3-41.html).

And continuing: “Our findings are based on a relatively simple, yet robust method for analyzing storminess over the large and well studied area of the Northeast Atlantic. The results point to a marked inconsistency between storminess in the reanalysis dataset and storminess derived from observations, which casts doubt on the use of 20CR to describe long term trends, at least in terms of storminess. We believe that changes in the number of stations assimilated into 20CR are a plausible explanation for the discrepancies.

The 20th Century Reanalysis dataset 20CR is a new climate dataset that reaches back to 1871. Because it is nearly 140 years long, scientists hope to use it for long-term trend analyses. With our work, we are assessing how realistically 20CR describes such long-term trends in terms of storminess. We chose to restrict our analyses to the Northeast Atlantic region as this region has been in the focus of several studies in the past that deal with storminess. Ideally, results obtained through 20CR and observations would agree with other, also because the pressure observations analyzed in those past studies have been very likely assimilated into 20CR. Unfortunately, as aforementioned, storminess in 20CR and observed storminess differs significantly.”

The manuscript is available online at http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5295

4 Remarks

Despite from being rejected by several journals, we are continuing our struggles, because we believe it is worth to do so. We do not know yet how many approaches it will take us. Even though our manuscript seems quite controversial, we are willing to initiate a discussion about the topic if somebody lets us.

References

Alexandersson, H., T. Schmith, K. Iden, and H. Tuomenvirta, 1998: Long-term variations of the storm climate over NW Europe. The Global Atmosphere and Ocean System, 6 (2), 97–120.

Alexandersson, H., H. Tuomenvirta, T. Schmith, and K. Iden, 2000: Trends of storms in NW Europe derived from an updated pressure data set. Climate Research, 14 (1), 71–73.

Donat, M., D. Renggli, S. Wild, L. Alexander, G. Leckebusch, and U. Ulbrich, 2011: Reanalysis suggests long-term upward trends in european storminess since 1871. Geophysical Research Letters, 38 (14), L14 703.

Interview Reiner Grundmann

1. Reiner, you have published the paper “’Climategate’ and The Scientific Ethos” in Science Technology & Human Values. I understand that this article had a long history of submissions and rejections. Would you mind telling us, what happened, and what you think why this happened?