Nature lays an(other) egg

Well grant the editorial staff at Nature this: They never are shy about printing really loosey-goosey stuff whenever the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) needs a boost or on the eve of another glitzy UN confab to discuss global climate change. Who can forget Natures 1996 gaffe timed in conjunction with the meeting in Geneva, Switzerland that gave rise to the Kyoto Protocol? Nature published a paper by various federal climatologists intended to demonstrate how upper-air data from 1963 through 1987 was in synch with gloom-and-doom generated by various climate models.

     As our long-time readers will recall, the researchers failed to use the complete temperature record a record that actually spanned 1957 through 1995. Once the long-term record was plugged in (sometime after the conference) all correspondence between the climate model results and climate reality evaporated. It turns out 1963 (six years after the starting point of the available data) was very cold thanks to eruption of Agung, a very large volcano. And it hardly was a coincidence that 1987 (a point eight years shy of the available records end) was unusually warm because of an El Nio event. The use of a foreshortened record of course results in a projection of robust global warming whereas the overall record shows no dramatic trend.
   
  But that was then and this is now a time when things really are political.
   
  British Prime Minister Tony Blair shortly will assume a years presidency of the G-8. Hes already spoken of his two top priorities: global warming and terrorism. Is that really the order of precedence? It seems to be. Blairs science advisor, Sir David King, is hopscotching the world and telling anyone who will listen that global warming is a far greater threat than international terrorism.

     Its no surprise, then, that Nature is willing to oblige Kings political agenda and publish yet another were-all-gonna-die story pegged to Europes 2003 summer heat waves, citing them as evidence that such a thing can be expected to happen every other year by mid-century, according to researcher Peter Stott.

     And how might Stott know this? A climate model tells him so, of course a climate model that factors in a 0.83 percent per year increase in the atmospheres carbon dioxide concentration. This is an intriguing assumption in light of the fact the actual increase was 0.39 percent in the 1970s, 0.45 percent in the 1980s, and 0.42 percent during the 1990s. The last three decades, in other words, average something like half what the climate model (and Stott) assumes.

     Climate models largely are linear with respect to the warming they project related to increasing carbon dioxide. As a consequence, the model that is the basis for this particular Nature article over-predicts warming during the next several decades by the same 50 percent! It cant help but to do so.

     We want to be clear about this. Were not claiming that the concentration of CO2 wont rise during the next fifty years. Thats the trend, after all. But assuming that it already is happening at a pace that will result in a 0.83 percent per year average increase for the next 50 years simply has no basis in fact, which should in and of itself invalidate the published result. This becomes especially true when one realizes that the time that it takes a carbon dioxide increment to fully express itself in terms of increased surface temperature is several decades (at least). In other words, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, today, will have more influence on surface temperature in 2050 than will the atmospheric concentration in 2025.

     CO2andClimate Alert senior editor Patrick J. Michaels confronted Myles Allen (listed as third author of the new Nature article) with this climatologic reality when they appeared together live on BBC-TV. Allens defense? They use the wrong number because, he says, thats the number the UN uses and it is a respected scenario. Later, under the glare of the studio lights, Allen admitted that if one were to tune their model with a realistic CO2 rise instead of their looney 0.83 percent scenario, the result would be exactly the amount of warming Michaels has projected for years a mere three-quarters of a degree rise per half-century.

     So which do you trust, reality or a made-up scenario?

     What is particularly galling about Stotts and Allens paper is its use of blatant political polemics masquerading as science. Nature routinely requires a first paragraph intended to function much as an abstract of a science paper, an opening paragraph distilling the relevant research findings into something that people who are too busy to read the details can quickly grasp. In other words, the opening paragraph (abstract) is supposed to reflect the research papers content. Consider, then, the first sentence in this particular articles first paragraph, The Summer of 2003 was probably the hottest in Europe since at least A.D. 1500, and unusually large numbers of heat-related deaths were reported in France, Germany and Italy.
 
    If death were the key word used to search the four-page article for additional relevant detail, what would the reader find? Nothing. Not one occurrence. A better teaser for Stotts article might have been, Sir David King, Prime Minister Tony Blairs science advisor, wants you to believe global warming is a greater threat than international terrorism, so consider this: The summer of 2003 was probably the hottest in Europe since at least A.D. 1500, and unusually large numbers of heat-related deaths were reported in France, Germany and Italy.

     In greater service to Sir David, Stott et al. go on to write: it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that potentially dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system is already under way. Well give Stott and his co-authors this much credit, they didnt go on to write, and as the climate warms, people are so stupid that they will choose to slowly fry and expire, rather than adapt to this gradual change (although the implication is there). Writing something like that would have been exceedingly absurd because that hypothesis has been tested. The results were reported by the International Journal of Biometeorology in what was awarded climate paper of the year by the Association of American Geographers. What that prize-winning research found was that, as urban climates slowly warmed for causes not related to global warming, heat-related deaths became more infrequent. In fact, in some cities, such deaths could no longer be statistically located. Yet Stott et al., brandish the future prospect of hundreds of thousands of heat-related deaths in front of Tony Blair and cant bring themselves to cite an article you can read more about at www.co2andclimate.org/wca/2003/wca_2bpf.html.

References
Stott, P.A., Stone, D.A., Allen, M.R., 2004. Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003. Nature, 432, 610-614.

Davis, R.E., Knappenberger, P.C., Novicoff, W.M., Michaels, P.J., 2003. Decadal changes in summer mortality in U.S. cities. International Journal of Biometeorology, 47, 166-175.