Don't Worry, Be Happy

Eli, as the bunnies know, has been a fan of DSCVR, aka Triana for like a seriously long time. He even has a decal sitting on his desk.  A little while ago he noted that the mission was being unmothballed (shoved into the closet by the lamented George Bush) to serve as a space weather observatory to replace a failing mission.  The Rabett had heard in a social gathering, that there was work at Goddard on refurbishing the instruments.  Eli wrote to the responsible parties, and got a go away and don't bother us.

Dr, Rabett:

Thanks for your email regarding the status of DSCOVR. At this time, NOAA is not able to  answer your questions, pending the outcome of the ongoing Congressional budget process. Once those issues have been resolved, we'll be in a better position to discussthe way forward on DSCOVR.

Regards, Michael Simpson
DSCOVR Program Manager

But amazingly, funding for DSCVR appeared in the latest Persidential Budget, so Eli wrote again and received a reply

Dr. Rabett,

The NASA Earth Science Division (ESD) will be providing funds to integrate and test the EPIC and NISTAR instruments so that they will fly in a fully functional mode on DSCOVR.  The data that will be returned from the EPIC instrument will be minimally processed to incorporate basic calibration parameters and then archived.  Any additional processing of the data will be part of a ROSES call from ESD.  Due to limited existing ground system resources, the EPIC data rate will be no greater than the equivalent of one RGB image (3 spectral bands) every 4 hours. The data is planned to be publicly available.  If you have more questions please contact Dr. Richard Eckman, the DSCOVR Program Scientist in the ESD.  I am not aware of any plans for an earth observing spacecraft at L2.

Regards,
Viet Nguyen
-----------------------------------
Q. Viet Nguyen, PhD
Program Executive
Joint Agency Satellite Division

Not totally wonderful news, but not nothing.  The remark about the data being archived means that there is no funding for data analysis, still it will be available.   EPIC is a ten channel imaging spectroradiometer which can measure ozone, aerosols, clouds and land and ocean surface changes.  NISTAR is a three cavity radiometer to measure reflected solar radiation and energy emitted by the Earth.  Details here.  Eli is going out for some carrot juice.  Don't worry.

A message from the recovery room

Eli's immediate post below as reference. I haven't written anything yet because I've been meaning to first set aside several hours to recover where everything ended up. I think where my hubris messed things up was in that wasn't just those skepticalish abstracts I wanted to understand, but an attempt to get all discrepancies in any category resolved by forgetting the abstracts when reviewers disagreed and reading the source papers instead. That bridged too far for us volunteers and ended it.

Still could be a good thing just to read the papers for the skeptical abstracts. I think some of the implicit doubting might go away (not all of it). That info could feed into the other studies.

Eli's done a great job resurrecting the work we all did.

The Past is Prologue

Cook et al., searched the ISI web of science between 1991 and 2011 for articles which were returned following a keyword search on "global warming" and "global climate change".  A team of reviewers then categorized the ABSTRACTS.  Back in 2008, Brian organized a similar exercise for a smaller number of abstracts, about 650 published between 2002 and 2006 which will be designated below as the prequel.  A team of six reviewers then categorized the ABSTRACTS with two reviewers looking at each abstract.

As a first step it is useful to compare the categories which were independently settled on by both teams.  Until about a week ago, neither team was aware of the others work, so these were indeed independent exercises..

Prequel
Explicit Endorsement of AGW	Explicit Endorsement of AGW
Implicit Endorsement	Implicit Endorsement
No Position	Discussion
Implicit Rejection	Methods
Explicit Rejection	Paleoclimate
	Unrelated
	Undecided
	Implicit Rejection
	Explicit Rejection

The primary difference is that the Prequel Team had more categories in the middle to deal with the predictable muddle.

An important point that has been missed is that MOST, essentially the vast majority of the papers, tossed up by such a search are biologically, ecologically or economically oriented.  Relatively few are what the Bunnies would call WGI material.  Most are WGII and WGIII.  Go ahead try it in Google Scholar.  Such papers, like WGII and WGII one way or another take the conclusions of WGI (that there is human caused climate change) as their starting point and we had to figure out how to deal with that

The prequel of the prequel was a small training set selected from the ~650 from which rating instructions were developed and then each member of the team rated about 200 abstracts.  The results were

Prequel	#
Explicit Endorsement of AGW	244	21%
Implicit Endorsement	407	34%
Discussion	222	19%
Methods	78	7%
Paleoclimate	107	9%
Unrelated	43	4%
Undecided	33	3%
Implicit Rejection	21	2%
Explicit Rejection	28	2%

Cross-Tabs tomorrow, but in almost all the cases the two reviewers were close to each other lumping the five neutral ratings as one.  There were only 13 problem papers where there was significant disagreement (support/reject) between the two reviewers, at which point everyone ran out of steam before trying to to reconcile them by actually looking at the papers.

Why bring this up now.  Well there have been a bunch of surveys, this being an unpublished one, and they all are within a stone's throw of each other, the "doubting" literature is really thin.

Congratulations to John, Dana, and the rest of the authors and helpers from Skeptical Science.  The amount of work they did is astounding.  Eli knows.  Brian is still in the recovery room.

Reprise

From long ago by Barry Brook an update of  Eileen O'Shaunghnessy's, End of the Century-1984



"...Hansen's bones are quiet at last,
...No science disturbs the lucid line,
For sun-scorched Earthers tune their thought
To Offworld Station 'Holocene-1'
From where they know just what they ought,
...memories of times past that should be banished
Only relics, philosophies and a parched wasteland lie below..."

Why not?

Eli has never been much of a fan for manned space exploration.  The bunny may have to reconsider.

Cook, et al. The prequel, the teeth gnashing, the recursive fury

Some time ago, like in about 2007, Brian came to Eli offering a poisoned pawn.  Eli, said, well actually wrote, Brian, how would you as a tip top climate blogger, like to take part in an Oreskes redo, with a bunch of other usual suspects (they are welcome to out themselves).  Sounds interesting saith the bunny, only to find out that it would involve reading something like 200 abstracts from 2002-2007 selected from 664 by random chance (Didn't know that Random Chance was Brian's other name did you).  The idea was to apply some granularity and different eyeballs.  Brian and helper bunnies pulled down the abstracts and set them up in a data base and assigned four eyeballs to evaluate each for fit into several categories

• Explicitly endorse
• Implicitly endorse
• Discusses AGW
• Implicitly reject
• Explicitly reject

there were two other categories which were treated as besides the point or neutral

• Methods
• Paleoclimate

and the dreaded

• Disputed

Suffice it to say, they were strongly in line with what Cook, et al, have come up with, but not nearly so well done.  Also those early bunnies were querulous, something that Eli has never, never been accused of.

Now some, not Eli to be sure, have been trying to trash Cook, et al., which has just been published as open access, even before it appeared.  The recursive fury has been something to see.

Before the reveal, Eli needs to talk about the teeth gnashing and the recursive fury that Cook's on line survey open to all has stirred.  The curious thing is that  it's the self styled lukewarmers who are going bats, lead by Lucia and Brandon Shollenberger.  Rank Exploits has something like ten posts on the survey, trying to get people to muck it up, doing the McIntyre on John, accusing him of mopery and today postulating all sorts of ethics violations.  Victory has been declared because the open survey closed.  All sorts of IRB reasons given by the folks at Lucia's but John says it was simply because the original paper will be published this week. 

One might ask why the fuss?  As has become clear from recent work (not just Lewandowsky, et al.) climate change, because the damage arises in the future presents ethical threats to future generations with a global reach, presents a dilemma for those who object to national and international responses.  They can't stand it and they really can't stand the fact that increasingly those who study climate are becoming more convinced that climate change will seriously damage our earth in the future.

UPDATED:  The graph, clearly shows that denial remains low, explicit endorsement increases in the published literature.(So Ei got this backwards.  As somebunny pointed out to him Eli,

There's a problem with the sentence below your graph explicit endorsement decreasing in the published literature, as one would expect, since "no position" increases, as one would expect since taking boiler-plate positions is not abstract-worth

Separately, of the subset of papers that do take a position, the fraction of endorsers increases somewhat, as per one of the graphs in the SkS post, but that's not what your chart is on about.

No bunny is perfect

Skeptical Science has more details for those interesting in picking nit or not, but the take home abstract is that

We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11,944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.

The Rabett Run and friends survey was done late 2007 into 2008 for 664 abstracts.  36% endorsed AGW,  31% partially endorsed, 2%(16) rejected AGW or doubted it and the remainder appeared to be neutral, unconcerned or besides the point.  About 2% were subjects of violent disagreement.

It might be amusing to post the list of those that the prequel team (played by Jar Jar Binks) thought rejected AGW

Explicitly

Shaviv (2005)	On climate response to changes in the cosmic ray flux and radiative budget
Zhen-Shan et al. (2007)	Multi-scale analysis of global temperature changes and trend of a drop in temperature in the next 20 years

Implicitly

Berliner (2003)	Uncertainty and climate change
Gerhard (2004)	Climate change: Conflict of observational science, theory, and politics

Rejects or Doubts

Dorman (2005)	Estimation of long-term cosmic ray intensity variation in near future and prediction of their contribution in expected global climate change
Karner (2002)	On nonstationarity and antipersistency in global temperature series
Lai et al. (2005)	Global warming and the mining of oceanic methane hydrate

Partially Rejects or Doubts

Belov et al. (2005)	Prediction of expected global climate change by forecasting of galactic cosmic ray intensity time variation in near future based on solar magnetic field data
Bryden et al. (2003)	Changes in ocean water mass properties: Oscillations or trends?
Chappell et al. (2004)	Modelling climate change in West African Sahel rainfall (1931-90) as an artifact of changing station locations
Dorman (2006)	Long-term cosmic ray intensity variation and part of global climate change, controlled by solar activity through cosmic rays
Guglielmin (2004)	Observations on permafrost ground thermal regimes from Antarctica and the Italian Alps, and their relevance to global climate change
Hubalek (2005)	North Atlantic weather oscillation and human infectious diseases in the Czech Republic, 1951-2003
Lahsen (2005)	Seductive simulations? Uncertainty distribution around climate models
Leiserowitz (2005)	American risk perceptions: Is climate change dangerous?
McDonagh et al. (2005)	Decadal changes in the south Indian Ocean thermocline
Raghavan et al. (2003)	Trends in tropical cyclone impact - A study in Andhra Pradesh, India
Staeger et al. (2003)	Statistical separation of observed global and European climate data into natural and anthropogenic signals
Tiwari et al. (2006)	Paleomonsoon precipitation deduced from a sediment core from the equatorial Indian Ocean
van Poppel et al. (2005)	Electron tomography of nanoparticle clusters: Implications for atmospheric lifetimes and radiative forcing of soot
Vandergoes et al. (2003)	The Last Glacial-Interglacial Transition (LGIT) in south Westland, New Zealand: paleoecological insight into mid-latitude Southern Hemisphere climate change
Vitas (2004)	Tree rings of Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karsten) in Lithuania as drought indicators: dendroecological approach
Zhang et al. (2003)	Archaeal lipid biomarkers and isotopic evidence of anaerobic methane oxidation associated with gas hydrates in the Gulf of Mexico

---

Oh yes, the carping has started

Rumsfeld forgot the unknown knowns

I'm slogging my way through Steve Pinker's Better Angels book on the history of violence so I can finally write about how it's convincing and give it a negative review. Not done yet though, I'm only on page 534 and still have several hundred pages to go.

Way back on page 514 there was something worth writing about, an update on Donald Rumsfeld's sole contribution to humanity:  he talked about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, a useful way to look at problems. What Rumsfeld missed, says Pinker citing Dominic Johnson citing Slavoj Zizek, is unknown knowns, which are things known or knowable but are ignored or suppressed.

The context for Pinker was unknown knowns that Rumsfeld and the Bushies had in front of them about Iraq - lack of nuclear weapons development particularly, and the lack of a plan for governing the country. Unknown knowns applies even better to climate change - the evidence is hitting us in the face, literally so in some cases, and mountains of data and history available for anyone to see, but half of American politics refuses to see it. I doubt we'll get the hardcore denialists to know them, but we need to move the fencesitters so they're not stuck by the same unknown knowns.


UPDATE:  lifted from someone else's comment:

If the rational course of action involves admitting that you cannot have what you most want, don't bet on the persons involved being rational.

Non-negligent mistake vs negligence vs strict liability vs Benghazi

Tort law was one of my favorite classes in law school, gruesome injury cases being more interesting than contractual disputes over international chicken shipments.

The usual rule of non-negligent mistake is that you lump it. I drive over a virtually-invisible oil patch and go into a skid and injure you. No one would've seen it, so the injuries are your problem.

Negligence is when I failed to see an otherwise-visible oil patch because I was adjusting the car radio instead of carefully watching the road, and this time I owe you. The classic Reasonable Person wouldn't have adjusted the radio except in absolutely safe conditions. The RP isn't superhuman, supersmart, or superskilled, but he or she doesn't make easily foreseeable mistakes.

Strict liability reverses the rule of non-negligence:  if the harm was from something that even RP would not have avoided, the victim gets compensated. Same as the first case, I drive over a virtually-invisible oil patch and injure you, only that now, your injury results from the fact that I was transporting explosives that then exploded. Strict liability is considered a mostly-modern legal invention but there were earlier forms. Collapsing dams for watermill ponds were examples, and my favorite case was a pioneering, late 19th-Century balloonist who landed on a woman's vegetable patch. She hauled him into court for her veggies. He rightly pointed out that ballooning is brand new and no one knows how to land them - the judge said tough luck, if you do something abnormally risky like ballooning then you're strictly liable for any harm.

Negligence and strict liability seemed like separate concepts until Professor Grey pointed out that the Reasonable Person acts reasonably every time, but no actual human being does. It is unreasonable to expect someone to be reasonably prudent every time, but the law expects that, so a corner of strict liability is embedded in the law of negligence, presumably for the same societal reasons that we apply strict liability in other situations.

So this brings us to Benghazi - it's hard to figure out what the right wingers are screaming about, especially when their bizarre claims about coverups seem tangential to the real issue of inadequate security in the lead-up to the tragedy. I don't know if the inadequate security was a non-negligent mistake or negligence on someone's part, although I'd lean towards the latter. As far as the response  once the attacks started and the hurt feelings of the people who believe they didn't get accurate information in the near-term aftermath, the first of those two things is hard to judge and the second isn't all that important.

But that still leaves the screw-up in the security preparations. Even if it's negligence that resulted in four deaths, I don't hold that as a major screw-up of the Obama Administration. They make thousands of security decision, and they will screw some of them up. Someone should pay for it somewhere in the chain of command (assuming it is negligence), but this is small potatoes - it would be unreasonable to go from this to concluding that the administration as a whole is negligent.

I wish the worst thing we could say about the Bush Administration was that they screwed up and four people died.


UPDATE:  I need to do some additional research but I think Paul Ryan lied to the public on national television about a national security issue in the vice-presidential debate when he said there was virtually no US security in Libya compared to what we have at the Paris embassy, while knowing that CIA was nearby. He should get hit with this when he runs in 2016.

ICYMI*, Chait's optimist take on Obama and climate

Boiling it down to the essence:

After Obama’s original cap-and-trade plan failed, he started using the agency regulatory powers directly. (This is how Obama has been able to issue new regulations on cars, fuel, appliances, and future power plants.)

So far, there is one hole in his regulatory agenda: power plants that currently exist. This is, unfortunately, a very large hole, as these plants, mostly coal, emit 40 percent of all U.S. carbon emissions.... 

Then, a few weeks after last year’s election, the Natural Resources Defense Council published a plan for the EPA to regulate existing power plants in a way that was neither ineffectual nor draconian. The proposal would set state-by-state limits on emissions....Much like a cap-and-trade bill, it would allow market signals to indicate the most efficient ways for states to hit their targets—instead of shutting coal plants down, some utilities might pay consumers to weatherize their homes, while others might switch some of their generators over to cleaner fuels....Here is a way for Obama to use his powers—his own powers, unencumbered by the morass of a dysfunctional Congress—in such a way that is neither as ineffectual as a firecracker nor as devastating as a nuke: The NRDC calculates its plan would reduce our reliance on coal by about a quarter and national carbon emissions by 10 percent.... 

[NRDC's] Lashof predicted the following sequence of events. The agency will finish drafting its regulation scheme by the end of the year. It will then take about a year of public comments and revisions, at which point it will finalize its rule. That will be the end of 2014, just after the midterm elections. Another nine months to a year will be required to carry out the rule, which will get us to the end of 2015—and the international climate summit.

I've thought the most likely outcome is that Obama would do the wrong thing on Keystone and match it with a right thing on something else about climate. Not sure if the timing proposed above would make it the right thing to be matched with Keystone. This is far more important than Keystone, though, if it happens.

The remainder of Chait's article argued that Obama has used the regulatory structure as much as he could for small-bore climate actions, and if you set aside the bully pulpit issue then he's done a decent job. My impression, not backed by solid data, is that he passed up a lot of politically viable chances for small-bore actions on climate.

NRDC's proposal is here. Basically your state's average emission rate has to be somewhat better than a combined rate for coal and natural gas produced by current plants, with the combined rate determined by the mix of coal and gas you currently have. AFAICT if your state already has little coal and a lot of renewables, you don't have to do much, but if your state has a lot of coal power, the punched is eased somewhat. Many different trading devices allowed to reduce emissions rate, including purchasing efficiency efforts by consumers.

UPDATE:  clarified per the comment.


*ICYMI, ICYMI, means in case you missed it. I missed it when it came to that acronym for a while.