What's YOUR Favorite Planet?

I walked to tech sessions on February 19th, as I am required to do twice a week for advancement in the PhD program at good ol' UT, expecting the usual, for what else is there to expect, unless you can expect something else? But the usual means a talk by some departmental member, whether student, faculty, or research staff. Occasionally we get the outside scientist, invited here to show us what's what. What was here on February 19th was not the usual.

I was early, as usual, as I have to judge my departure-for-campus time conservatively, and sat down. What was initially the usual ample space became standing room only, and who should appear but one Fred Singer, leader of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. He says:

That there is anthropognic CO2 and a greenhouse effect, and that human-caused global warming is plausible.

That water vapor is a more important greenhouse gas than CO2 but is not talked about because no one can do anything about it.

That human-caused global warming is not realistic.

That satellite data is more reliable than surface data for recording global temperature, and that most apparent temperature rise is a result of surface temperatures showing us the urban heat island effect.

That the NIPCC does not draw support from industry and so has no vested interest in its own scientific conclusions.

That Al Gore's "hockey stick" temperature curve, which he got from the 3rd IPCC report, is based on statistical errors.

That polar bears should not, and do not generally, swim in the Arctic Ocean.

That the real temperature curve, replete with the historically-documented Medieval warm period, shows that we are emerging from a mini-Ice-Age since, and nothing is statistically freakish about the weather these days.

That the agreement of temperature data to climate warming models is based on the range of predictions, not the mean.

That satellite and/or radiosonde data refute the "Fingerprint of man-made global warming."

That the true, non-freakish, modern increase in global temperature is caused by the Sun, as evidenced by near-perfect anticorrelation between 14C and 18O in a stalagmite in Oman.

Was he right? I don't know. According to the website of his own Science and Environmental Policy Project he has been a consultant for everyone from GE to Exxon to Lockheed-Martin, so his assurance that the NIPCC has no vested interest in its own conclusions has an awkward Dick Cheney feel to it.

I don't know what polar bears think of swimming. I grant that the computer-generated polar bear in An Inconvenient Truth was awfully appealing to emotions. But polar bears do feast on seals, according to Sea World, and I don't suppose the seals travel more than a couple of miles from the icy coast to greet their predators.

Do radiosonde and satellite data refute anthropogenic global warming? I have to see more than two figures to be swayed one way or the other. It did seem that one was closer to predictions than the other, and I would have loved to have asked why, but the Q&A session afterwards was pretty hot stuff.

One Q of which wasn't a question at all, but an explanation that 18O values are a proxy for rainfall, not for temperature. As I understand it, since 18O is heavier, physically, than normal 16O, 16O gets preferentially evaporated, so when snow, which is 16O-enriched, falls onto growing glaciers instead of rolling back into the oceans, the oceans become 18O enriched (i.e., ocean water has higher 18O values in colder times). So if that's the case I can imagine that any water not locked up in glaciers would have a higher 18O value when it's cold. So if 14C goes up with increased solar radiation and 18O goes down, it seems reasonable to me that solar radiation is positively correlated with higher temperature.

But correlation isn't always causation.

And we should not base base our understanding of global climate on a fixture in what may be Osama Bin Laden's den.

And I don't understand the hydrogeologic plumbing chez Osama.

Another Q was really a C-for-comment on models, and how Singer should not dis them, as they incorporate physics. I have to admit that I find this point of view anathema, in that modern-day physics does not even begin to touch the complexity of dynamic systems like the climate on Earth.

A scientist from Stanford once told me (and several other people gathered to hear him speak) that balancing geological cross-sections is a fool's errand because there is no Newton's Law of Balanced Cross-Sections. If that sounds opaque (to mix a metaphor), the man tried to argue, as far as I could tell, that one's observations are not as reliable or as important as Newton's.

But listen to me - I'm rambling. We need to keep studying the climate on Earth, and whilst studying it, we need to take careful action. And at this point it's better to carefully wean ourselves from hydrocarbons than drillbabydrill. The upside of weaning is clean renewable non-terrorist energy; the downside is some lost revenue.