A look back at QED: a science and skepticism conference

First things first: QED was great fun, entertaining and fascinating. It was a great event and the organisers deserve a big pat on the back. I would definitely try to go if it’s on again next year.

However, as a relatively new follower of the Skeptic movement – I always held back because the way “sceptic” is used in relation to climate change – I thought it might be worth noting down a few of my impressions from the conference.

A bit more context…

I realise it was relatively short event but I felt that a trick was missed by not having a longer introduction about what Skepticism is, what it’s for and what its big challenges are. These issues sort of came up at various points during the event but it might’ve been nice to have a reference point for everything that followed.

A little bit too ghosty…

Of the 12 1 hour sessions in the main hall, 2 were about ghosts (maybe 2.25 if you count the bits in Bruce Hood’s talk). I guess ghosts are quite fun and there are some serious issues related to them (e.g. exploitation of vulnerable people) but it felt like a bit too much. Surely there are other issues we should be thinking about?

A couple of odd quotes…

…and, oddly enough, both from Eugenie Scott. These were just a couple of things that were tweeted quite a bit by attendees and made me think. First up:

“Science is organised common sense”

I think I understand the point Eugenie was trying to make here – that science isn’t some distant, abstract thing that non-scientist can’t get to grips with – but this description just didn’t work for me. How does this describe quantum mechanics, Avogadro’s law or even evolution? It just makes science sound so… boring. Science is usually beautiful and unexpected – nothing even close to common sense.

“Evolution is the history of the Universe”

So this was a phrase that Eugenie re-used from a talk that she had previously given where she had to sum up her discipline in 7 words. Assuming that she was talking about evolutionary biology, then at face value this description massively overstates the scope of that field. I’m sure physics and chemistry play some role in the universe too! If inspiration was the order of the day, then surely being the “…history of life” is pretty important too. I’m probably being far too literal but I was really surprised at how well it was received by the audience, which is more the reason that I thought I should make this point than criticising Eugenie.

Numpties…

Simon Singh tried to tackle what I would consider one of the big issues facing Skepticism – that the word “skeptic” is beginning to be understood more widely as “contrarian” rather than someone who simply ask questions. In climate circles, some people use “denier”, “septic” or worse to refer to those who do not accept the IPCC-based consensus on climate change but I’m not that keen on being offensive. All the same, it’s often useful to have term to refer to that community. I’m not sure I agree with Simon that numpty should be that term but at least it got raised!

Again, just to sum up, I thought the event was brilliant. Simon Singh and Jim Al-Khalili gave brilliant physics talks. Helen Keen was wonderful and Jon Ronson and Chris Atkins gave insights into worlds that I knew little about.

Just thought I’d make a few points.

Climate change in the Uxbridge Gazette

I was contacted earlier this month by a local paper doing a feature on the recent cold weather. I gave a few quotes and I think it turned out ok! Here’s the text from the article (it’s not online):

Last December was the coldest in the UK since records began, with the local weather station at RAF Northolt seeing its lowest-ever temperature. So why was 2010 among the hottest years globally? Reporter James Cracknell asks a top climate scientist from Brunel University.

Climate change is never far from the news and is a major concern, not just for environmentalists, but for anyone involved in planning and preparing for our future. Yet the science can seem complicated and confusing for many of us.

This is especially so when we look outside and see nearly a foot of snow, as Hillingdon residents did last month.

The Met Office have confirmed it was the coldest December in the UK since records began in 1910 and that a record low for the borough of minus 14.2C was set at RAF Northolt on the night of December 19/20.

How does this fit in with climate change, which we are told will cause average temperatures to rise rapidly unless the dangerous greenhouse gases released from burning oil, gas and coal, can be dramatically reduced?

The latest global figures show that 2010 as a whole was actually one of the hottest ever on record, despite the bitter winter seen in northern Europe. Climate scientists from the University of Alabama in Huntsville have reported that only 1998 – when world temperatures were boosted by a strong El Nino event – was hotter than 2010. And only by 0.01C.

Brunel University’s own expert, Dr Andy Russell, who lectures on the Climate Change Impacts and Sustainability masters course, told the Gazette: “The first thing to say is that a couple of cold winters in Europe do not mean that global warming has ended.

“We try to understand long-term changes over the whole planet – you can’t learn much by looking out of the window every now and again.

“Similarly, we also need to consider more than one season on one continent. Taking this view, we see that Russia, North Africa, Antarctica and the Arctic were much warmer than usual this year.

Dec 2009 to November 2010 temperature differences from the 1951-1980 average from NASA GISS. There is sparse data coverage over the poles.

“When we work out the global average temperature for 2010, the European cold snap doesn’t come close to cancelling out those warming areas.

“Even the cooling seen over the Pacific Ocean in the last few months – a natural pattern known as La Nina – has failed to make much of an impact on the warming trend.”

But if the world is warming, why is it still so cold in the UK? “Oddly enough, it could be caused by the intense warming that we’ve seen in the Arctic in recent years,” explained Dr Russell.

“Some new research using computer models of the climate has shown that the melting of the Arctic ice has changed the wind patterns over a region reaching all the way down to Europe. Where our winters used to be bathed in relatively warm winds from the west, we now experience bitter winds from the east.”

The Brunel University course teaches students about the potential impacts of man-made climate change across key areas including health, business, politics and technological development.

Recent severe weather events such as the floods in Australia, devastating wildfires in Russia and record monsoon rains in Pakistan should become more common and present a major challenge for the authorities tasked with preparing for and coping with these disasters.

While forecasting the weather remains difficult, Dr Russell says the one thing we know to expect is the unexpected.

“As we continue to experiment with our atmosphere by adding more greenhouse gases, we should probably be prepared for more climate surprises like this one,” he warns.

Book review: Solar by Ian McEwan (2010)

I’m a fan of McEwan so I was keen to give his latest book a read as it touches on climate change.

The main character, Michael Beard, is a Nobel prize winning physicist with his best work a long way behind him. He’s taken on the figurehead role for a new renewable energy institute.

He initially sounds dubious as to the importance of climate change and seems to have taken the role largely for the money.

However, by the end of the novel, which covers the years 2000-2009, he his convinced about the importance of his innovation in solar energy in relation to dealing with climate change. He even delivers the following darkly humourous passage to convince a colleague that they need not worry about acquiring funding for their project:

“Here’s the good news. The UN estimates that already a third of a million people a year are dying from climate change. Even as we speak, the inhabitants of the island of Carteret in the South Pacific are being evacuated because the oceans are warming and expanding and rising. Malarial mosquitoes are advancing northwards across Europe… Toby, listen. It’s a catastrophe. Relax!”

Beard is quite an unpleasant character and, as is typical for McEwan’s novels, the story develops around a series of problems that snowball out of control from seemingly unimportant events. That said, this is probably the most comical McEwan book I’ve read – one or two scenes are full-on slapstick.

There’s also a strange part of the book that I recognised as being lifted from Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Even more strangely, when Beard re-tells these events at a later stage in the book another character questions the authenticity of Beard’s story (and even mentions that it was in the Douglas Adams book!) In retrospect, this small sub-story reflects the main course of events.

Perhaps the key theme, though, is the nature of academic achievement. In particularly, Beard’s reflections on his glory days and his more recent accidental absorption of a younger colleague’s similar purple patch. It’s an engrossing and tangled story that develops…

Overall, it’s a tragic, darkly comic romp through the lives of some seriously flawed people.

Book Review: The Last Generation by Fred Pearce (2006)

Short review

Quick romp through history of cllimate science up to 2006 with intresting annecdotes and interviews, though relatively light on the science.

Longer review

I finally got round to reading this after someone gave it to me years ago. For some reason, despite knowing it was by Fred Pearce (long time environment journalist), I thought it was a fiction book based on climate change. (Feel free to look a-hever so clever by commenting that “the book is fiction, haven’t you read Watts Up With That?” or the like.)

I think it was the cover image that did it for me – it doesn’t really look like a science book – but you know what they say about judging books by their covers…

So, here are my thoughts.

Plus points

Having studied and worked on climate science for a few years now I knew most of the content material pretty well. The fact that the book didn’t bore me says a lot about Pearce’s writing style: lots of short, well structured chapters that not only feel self contained but also flow with the overall thesis of the book.

A couple of bits that were new to me, and interesting, were the stories behind Arrhenius and Croll. I knew what they’d done but Pearce describes nicely just how unlikely their contributions were.

The El Nino chapter was also a bit of a highlight for me. I usually struggle to describe what it is and what it does but I felt that Pearce’s description was “right enough” to be a nice, simple introduction to the phenomenon. It was also the case with his nice chapter on atmospheric circulation changes in the high-latitudes. I certainly plan to borrow some of his images and ideas!

Style

The book involves a lot of short interviews with scientists to give interpretations of the topic at hand. This felt like a compromise between a full on journalistic style on the one hand and including citations to the scientific literature on the other. It gave a feel for the characters at work though. Wally Broecker didn’t seem to come out of the book too well; he sounds like quite an ego. Lonnie Thompson seems universally reveered. Overall, though, Richard Alley came across best in this format – he gives good quote and has a good grasp of the big picture. (I’d also recommend his book – The Two Mile Time Machine – which has a wonderful analogy about temperature propagation using a roast turkey.)

Not so great points

I think Pearce overplayed the “battle” between polar and tropical climatologist. I don’t really know any of the people he interviewed that gave him the impression that these two groups are in conflict but it struck me as the most “journalisty” part of the writing i.e. manufacture a conflict to keep people reading. Of course everyone thinks that their field is more important than everyone else’s but that’s only because they work on it.

The real low point was the Glossary, which was rubbish and didn’t even seem to have been proof read. This is nitpicking I guess.

Context

Books about developing fields are never going to be timeless and this book suffers a little from what was going on at the time Pearce was writing: abrupt climate change was the research theme du jour and that probably gets more coverage then it would if he wrote the book now. That said, I’m surpised that Pearce picked so many issues that are still relevant and some of the context leading up to the IPCC AR4 report was quite interesting despite being out of date.

Pearce also described his partial loss of optimism for a good solution to the climate change issue since the publication of his first book on this subject in 1989. Indeed, since 2006, the Copenhagen summit came and went without significant progress being made. Perhaps this wouldn’t have been the case if all the delegates there had read Pearce’s wonderfully clear chapter on the potential political solutions to climate change. Probably not. Perhaps I still have too much optimism!

I also got to thinking about what Pearce would change if he was writing it now. Perhaps the big development, for better or worse, since 2007 was the UEA CRU email theft/hack/leak. Since then, Pearce has gone a little off the boil (I’ve not read his latest book – expect a review in 4 years time 😉 – but his “major investigation” in The Gaurdian certainly wasn’t his best work). In the book he shows a lot respect for what Steve McIntyre was doing at the time. That’s fair enough – McIntyre’s probably the most credible of the “Skeptics”, whatever that means – but I suspect that this is the area Pearce would update first, not least because his Hockey Stick chapter seemed to contain lots of little errors. Phil Jones was also notable by his absence in the book, which is strange given his big role in the story that Pearce was telling.

Keith Briffa

One of Jones’ colleagues, though, does pop up. Briffa, a tree ring climate reconstruction guy, makes a wonderful point on page 309. Many of the “skeptic” blogs focus on a period called the Medieval Warm Period (900-1300 AD ish). As climate science has developed the MWP seems to have become less important – we know about it because it was important in Northern Europe where a lot of early climate science developed. If climate science developed somewhere else first then it probably wouldn’t have been called the “warm” period as it was not warm everywhere, although there was something going on globally so it is now more accurately referred to as the Medieval Climate Anomaly.

Anyway, one of the key “skeptic” arguments seems to be that climate scientists downplay the MWP to make current warming look more important. However, if the MWP was a bigger and more widespread positive anomaly then this means that Earth’s climate is even more sensitive than we now think to forcing changes, whether natural or not. In this respect, we should be even more worried about greenhouse gas changes as they would have an even greater impact than currently projected. That is, of course, unless you reject the Radiative Forcing literature as well as the Palaeoclimate literature. That would be risking a lot on the unevidenced assumption that there are a high concentration of innept or corrupt scientists working in the two closely related fields.

Overall…

…a nice reminder of why Pearce is one of the leading environmental journalists that we have.

Science is Vital (and “impact”)

The future is not looking great for the funding of UK science. Recent comments by Vince Cable (Business Secretary) imply that cuts might be hard and based on a poor interpretation of the state of UK research, which is actually in pretty good health and very competitive.

Ben Goldacre nicely sums up some of the potential impacts.

So what can we do?

The best option is probably to let our politicians know the potential implications of their decisions and how passionate we are about science by signing the petition started by Science is Vital. They also suggest writing to your local MP (the provide information on how best to do it) and they have organised a rally in London for the 9th October.

The point I really wanted to make, though, was about the word impact. We all seem pretty confident about the impact of funding cuts – the brain drain, long-term impact on the economy, science based industries abandoning the UK etc.

But a few months ago, a lot of the vocal UK science community was expressing concern at having to plan and subsequently demonstrate the impact that our research has. “This can’t be done” was something I heard quite a lot. I hope we didn’t make a rod for our own back. Can our worrying predictions now be taken seriously given that we previously expressed little hope of predicting our impact?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m behind the Science is Vital campaign and understand the importance of science to the country as a whole. I also realise I’m mixing up the outcomes of specific research projects with “science” as a whole. I just thought it would be nice for people to tell me why I’m wrong!

BBC Wild Weather

The BBC seem to have something coming up on Wild Weather. I think its next week but the website isn’t too clear on what’s going on!

I’ve been involved a little bit: I’ve written a little bit about the Birmingham tornado of 2005; another short piece about the 1987 Kent “hurricane” and; I’ll be on BBC Inside Out in the north-west talking about hail and flooding – no idea when that’s going out though.

UPDATE:

So the bit I thought I did for Inside Out actually went out as a programme called Wild Weather. This link takes you to a page where you can view all the regional Wild Weather shows. I’m in the North-West one for about 20 seconds taking about rainfall patterns in Manchester. We also filmed a bit on hail but that doesn’t seem to have made it into the programme! Oh well.

I also found another page on the BBC website with input from me – it’s about the Manchester rainfall changes again. Here it is.

The Barometer Episode 3: Polar opposites: penguin vs polar bear

Episode 3 of The Barometer is now out! We’re investigating the poles this month. There’s an interview with a couple of guys from the Centre for Atmospheric Science who’ve worked in the Arctic and an interview with the organiser of Polar Live with a couple of clips of music that’ll be played at that concert.

Here it is:

Bjørn Lomborg – I’m still here!

It sounds like Bjørn Lomborg is doing a bit of a U-turn in today’s Guardian.

He was always a bit of a favourite with the “skeptics” by saying that there was little economic argument to act on climate change. And that it was a bit of an obsession with middle class people in developed nations. Well, it gets you thinking at the very least. However, he is not without his critics – The Lomborg Deception, for example, aimed to take apart some of his arguments.

So, I was pretty surprised to see that Lomborg seems to have changed his mind.

Then it struck me that maybe its not so strange.

10 years ago, I guess a great way to get people to listen to you would have been to say that acting on climate change was a waste of time. That’s what Lomborg did and he was certainly listened to.

Right now, given all the media puff about climate science all being a scam, it seems that the best way to get publicity is to come out say that climate change is “a challenge humanity must confront”.

What to make of all this?

Well, it seems that Lomborg is a pretty decent self-publicist even if he’s not convinced by his old arguments anymore.

I can’t help feeling that the last 10 years have been wasted (from the point of view of engaging policy makers and the public with the implications of climate change) and that Lomborg played quite a big part in that.

Update: there’s another interesting column in today’s Guardian responding to Lomborg’s new position. Asking some interesting questions.

Red sky in the morning…

I took an unscheduled stop on my cycle in to work this morning to take some photos of the amazing altocumulus that was over my patch of West London. Here’s a quick snap:

And here’s another looking straight up, it was lovely and fuzzy:

Anyway, it got me thinking about the old saying “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. Red at night, sailor’s delight.” This relates to the Norwegian model of fronts, which is summarised by this figure below:

So the saying kind of works because, if you see some altocumulus then it is quite likely to be at the leading end of a warm front. This means that some bad weather may be on its way. Sure enough, here’s the current Met Office forecast (though I doubt that this was constructed by looking up at the clouds!):

The other question that comes up here is: why is the altocumulus red? The quick answer is that its at about the right height to pick out the red light that is scattered from the sunlight that is travelling through the atmosphere at a particular angle in the mornings and the evenings but see here for a more complete discussion.

The Barometer – a new podcast about weather and climate.

So, here’s a shameless plug for a new podcast we’ve put together at the Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Manchester. We’ve tried to keep it short (this episode is about 14mins long), fun (the theme of the main discussion in this episode in the atmosphere of the World Cup) and topical (there’s some quick News stories in there too).

This is our first attempt but I’m quite proud if it! More episodes to follow, hopefully every two weeks or so. Enjoy: