Asking the Wrong Questions About Global Warming

I was once a TA for a physics lab that contained a large number of pre-med students.  One of the classes in this lab was designed to teach the concept of conservation of momentum by studying collisions between two hockey pucks of different masses on an air table.  I was asked by a very bright pre-med student "what does momentum look like?".  I was a bit baffled by the question but I explained how momentum was defined and how to calculate it for the hockey pucks.  He responded by telling me that my explanation about "transfers of momentum" made no sense because he didn't see anything move from one puck to the other in the collision.  I'll admit that I had to think for a while before I could answer that one and by that time the bright pre-med student had figured out a purely mechanical way to get the right answers and was no longer interested in my explanations.

A recent national poll found that:

44% of voters thinks human activity has a bigger impact on the long-term heating and cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere than solar activity does. Thirty-seven percent (37%) disagree and believe solar activity has a greater impact. Eighteen percent (18%) are not sure.

The problem with that question is exactly the same problem as asking what momentum looks like - both indicate a basic failure to understand the issue.  It's not as if climate variations are caused exclusively by people or the sun - in fact there are dozens of effects that can lead to large variations in the Earth’s climate including changes in solar luminosity, carbon sequestration by plants, solar activity, volcanic activity, and humanity burning carbon-based fuels.  Changes to any of these processes will lead to changes in climate.  The Sun’s luminosity changes on billion-year time-scales while human activity can have significant impacts over a few decades.  Solar activity is on an 11-year cycle, but to change the climate one needs to look at averages over many cycles, so again we’re talking about roughly 100 year time-scales. All of these processes are always changing the climate, so the question of which process has the bigger impact depends on the time-scale you are interested in.  It’s true that the Sun has been more active than normal over the past several cycles, but if you want to change the climate as fast as we’re observing, the Sun just isn’t up to the task.

Let’s look at how solar activity impacts climate. There are clear indications that long-term trends in solar activity can impact Earth's climate.  The leading theory is that when solar activity is at a minimum the average magnetic field strength in the heliosphere is lower than when the Sun is more active. Stronger magnetic fields are more likely to have strong interactions with high-energy cosmic rays (mostly protons and electrons).  When cosmic rays interact with the magnetic field they tend to produce synchrotron radition or undergo inverse Compton scattering.  Both processes reduce their energy, so the number of high-energy cosmic ray hits on the upper atmosphere goes up when solar activity is low.  When cosmic rays hit the atmosphere they tend to produce showers of thousands of particles with enough energy to ionize huge number of atoms.  These free electrons and ions catalyze droplet formation, thereby enhancing cloud formation.  More clouds mean that the Earth becomes more reflective (higher albedo for you astronomers in the audience) and therefore the Earth's mean temperature should go down.  There are some pretty clear indications from ice core and tree ring studies that indicate that when the Sun goes through an extended minimum, the Earth tends to go into an ice age.

The key here is no scientist thinks that solar activity does not impact climate - there is hard evidence that it does - however the issue is that it does so much too slowly.  If we look at the temperature record, we can see there are variations on a number of time-scales - but they key in discussing anthropogenic warming is that there is a huge spike in temperature on a very short time-scale that is unlike anything else in the data in the last century - which also corresponds to the time when human burning of fossil fuels and destruction of forested areas has peaked.

So at long last here's my point: asking if the Sun impacts our climate more or less than we do is completely missing the point.  The question we should be asking is if we are responsible for the recent spike in the Earth's average temperature.  Spoiler alert:  the answer is at least in large part yes.

Babies, Injections, Science, & Public Relations

How can you not find this face heart-breaking?

On Monday of this week my 6-month-old daughter had a regular check-up with the pediatrician.  Our doctor listened to her heart and lungs, asked us about her sleeping habits, told us she was old enough to wear sunscreen, and ordered 4 vaccines for our little girl - three shots and one taken orally.  Giving shots to a baby is no fun - our nurse said she feels terrible every time - but my wife and I would much rather that our daughter experience shots than measles or polio.

Those 4 vaccinations bring the total number our baby has received to 13 in six months.  She will get another 3 or 4 in the next 3 months.  That's a lot of shots, all of which are unpleasant experiences for babies, parents, and nurses.  After having experienced holding my precious daughter down while the nurse gives her shots, I understand a little better why some parents and health-care professionals would look to connect those shots with something like autism.  The causes of autism are a scientific mystery and there is no scientific treatment for the disorder.  But what is very real to parents is that children often start to display symptoms of autism about the same time that the memories of all of those injections are fresh in the minds of parents.

Of course there is no medical evidence for any connection between vaccines and autism.  The National Academy of Sciences just became the latest scientific body to certify that vaccines are safe.  But try telling that to the Cunningham family of Coal City, West Virginia.


So why do I bring up vaccines and autism on a physics blog?  Because here as in many other fields of science, the problem is with what feels true to the public, not the science. The data may clearly show that vaccines save lives and have absolutely no link to autism, but as a parent I have this gut reaction that says that anything that hurts my baby must be evil. The James Webb Space Telescope may be a scientific masterpiece that gets canceled because it feels like "government waste".  The only scientific debate about anthropogenic climate change is how much of a change will we make and how fast, but Rick Perry, who may be the next president of the United States, is arguing that it doesn't exist.  These are all examples, in my opinion, of areas where the real problems aren't with the science, but the public relations.

So how do we as scientists fix this?  I'm afraid I don't have many answers.  I think the scientific community needs to work harder to engage the public, but also needs to be better at engaging the public.  I am open to suggestions on how to do that.

Is The Idea Of An Enlightenment Dead?

Chris Mooney, a blogger over at The Intersection, gave an interesting 5 minute discussion where he despairs that the idea of an enlightenment may be as good as dead.  Why?  Let's read some quotes: (Or you can watch above yourself, between the 15 and 20 minute marks)

First: smart people are good at defending their preconceived notions:

We all think that, the longer you've been in school the more you've learned, you become more scientific in your thinking. You become more rational. 

NO! It doesn't work like that. In fact, the smarter you are the better you are at gathering information that agrees with with what you already wanted to believe anyways. And the better you are at arguing your point, the better you are at confirming your biases. In fact when arguments come at you, you've already got a armada of counter arguments. 

Unfortunately this is all too true.  In fact, we just posted on a poll that seem to suggest the more educated you are the more likely you are to side with your political parties views on climate change.  (And Chris discusses this very thing in the video.)

So: if you want someone to accept climate change, or any other issue that runs against someones world view, educating them further does not seem to mean they will be more likely to accept it!

Second: Many hoped that things like TV or the Internet will finally unite society, making us less ignorant of the world and therefore more likely to make correct decisions.  Unfortunately, this optimistic idea has failed and the media seems to only compounds the problem:

You have to throw human nature with the modern media system... The Internet came along fractionating the audience even further into self selecting the little pockets of information and their going for the stuff that they already agree with. So this confirmation bias, this sense that we're going to reaffirm ourselves, now we've got media that purposely allows us to do it.  

And so it is.

If you are right leaning there are websites and a dedicated 24 hour cable news network for you.  If you are left leaning you've got the same options from cable and the web.  If you are an atheist you have blogs like Pharyngula where you can find hundreds of other people to help reassure you that you are correct and people who are not atheists must be idiots. If you are religious... and so it goes.

On one hand smart people are great at gathering information and putting together clever arguments and on the other we have a well structured media system to assist them in their efforts.

And so Chris concludes:

We have to give up on frankly, the enlightenment.... central to the enlightenment... is this idea that truth triumphs, everybody becomes a better critical thinker. and society advances and we become more reasoned we become more knowledgeable... it's not like that.

Unfortunately, I fear he is correct.  Ultimately, the talent of being smart and resourceful mixed with the ease of finding whatever you want from the modern media will probably kill the idea of a society that converges on "truth" (whatever that means) and thus will kill the idea of an enlightenment.

Thoughts?

(Oh and Happy New Years!)

Was the Space Shuttle Worth It?

After 134 missions, 5 shuttles, 14 lives lost, and $174 billion dollars, the space shuttle program is scheduled to end on February 27, 2010.  The next generation of launch vehicles is still up in the air but no one is talking about a reusable vehicle like the shuttle.  Meanwhile the Russians are essentially still using the same one-time-use Soyuz system they've been launching since the 70's at much lower costs.  So now that we're approaching the end of an era in space exploration, let's ask the question:  was the shuttle program worth it?

If you ask the American public it was.  A Rassmusen Reports survey showed that 52% of those polled though the shuttles were worth the cost in dollars and lives, while only 28% disagreed.  Encouragingly, even in tough economic times like the present, 78% of Americans think it's important or very important to have an unmanned space exploration program and 72% say the same about a manned space exploration program.

I'm grateful that the US keeps investing in space exploration, however I personally think that the shuttle program was a poor way to do it.  With a fleet of vehicles that can only go into low-earth orbit there was no real destination for the shuttle program until the building of the International Space Station (and even then one has to ask why are we going there?).  Without a destination, the shuttle program fell into a "cause-of-the-year" syndrome where the shuttle became a zero-G research lab, a construction vehicle, a delivery truck, and a service van, to name a few.  Without a focused mission, NASA lost much of the public attention it had with the Apollo program.  Now if you ask people why NASA sends men and women into space you're likely to get responses like "good question".

I'm not trying to pin all of the inefficiencies and short-comings of the American space program on the shuttles, but I have to wonder if we could have done more over the past 30 years without it.

How Much Will You Pay For Clean Energy?

We have all heard the term "clean energy" buzzing around recently. Climate science says that our current output of CO2 is dramatically changing our planet. President Obama wants to make it a major component of our future economy. Basically everyone seems to be in favor of energy sources that don't involve smokestacks.

That is until it comes to paying for it. A Rassmussen Reports poll released today shows that despite the preference for clean energy, when asked how much more they would be willing to pay for it 51% said nothing, while another 20% said no more than $8 per month. Only 24% said they would be willing to spend over $25 more a month to promote clean energy. That means over two-thirds of the country isn't willing to give up more than a couple of Big Macs per month for the environment.

So in typical American fashion, we want something but we don't want to pay for it.

50% of Americans Want to Cut Space Exploration

Unless you live in a cave (with Internet access), you know there is a recession going on. Unemployment is hovering around 10% with almost 17% fewer people in the work force than there were 5 years ago. Americans are generally in a financial pinch. Couple that with the fact that it's not cheap to explore space. So far humanity has relied on large governmental agencies to do it for the simple reason that it costs a lot and doesn't offer any immediate return on investment. In the long term I believe space exploration will pay for itself millions of times over, but we as a society tend to be a little impatient.

How impatient? A new poll from Rassumen shows that 50% of Americans believe we should cut funding to NASA in the current economic climate while only 31% disagree. Interestingly, the poll shows that men support funding NASA more than women, and that support for cutting funding is strongest among people ages 18-29.

The good news, for those of us that get funded by NASA, is that despite NASA's lack of popularity President Obama has requested a 15% increase in NASA's budget in order to keep NASA's science program on track and keep the manned spaceflight program from grinding to a halt until the shuttle's replacement comes online.

Thoughts on “Climategate” from a Computational Scientist

If there is a more controversial topic in science than climate change I don’t know what it is. Even then most of the controversy isn’t really about the science - it’s about the politics, economics, and ideology related to the science. I have previously posted on how people’s opinions about climate change are influenced by non-scientific factors. For those of you that follow the news, you have heard a lot about the recent controversy over copies of stolen e-mails from the University of East Anglia, Britain’s main climate research center. These e-mails contain unprofessional comments about climate change skeptics, comments about data analysis “tricks”, and even a couple remarks about denying, delaying, or deleting public data requests. For a good summary of the whole mess, see this story from the New York times.

Dubbed “climategate” by conservatives, many have pointed to these e-mails as evidence that the science behind climate change is false. One writer has gone so far as to say that this is “the final nail in the coffin for global warming”. I am not a climate scientist, but I do work with climate scientists and I do work on large computer simulations of the sun which are somewhat analogous to the global climate models (GCM’s) upon which many future predictions about climate change are based. So here are my thoughts on this whole mess.

1. Nothing that I have seen in these e-mails suggests that the science behind global warming has been faked. Anybody who has ever taken a math class has learned “tricks” for working problems. Computational science is full of simplified approximations that make these simulations possible. There are a lot of simplified approximations in climate science, but the overall consensus between many different models using many different approximations is that humanity is driving up atmospheric concentrations of CO2, which it turn warms the planet. Currently all of the major computational models agree that observed warming trends are largely due to anthropogenic forcing, so while one model would be questionable, the fact that all of them agree on this point is a pretty good indication that they’ve got it right.
2. Most people have no idea how science is done. Science classes are filled with tidy little experiments that produce tidy little results that are always consistent with other experiments and never unexpected. Real science is full of ambiguous individual results that on their own lead to uncertain conclusions. But when real scientists see strong statistical trends in data over many different models and experiments, they can confidently draw correct conclusions. The general public (and many with political agendas) are often uncomfortable with the idea that unresolved details can be a part of a well-supported theory, so they either discard the unresolved details or the well-supported theory.
3. Like many people, some scientists have big egos and lack social skills. On top of that, scientists have spent years learning the intricacies of their specific research topic. Add to that the fact that a large portion of the general public - including many politicians - are essentially scientifically illiterate and some scientists can at times feel justified in draconian measures like repressing dissension or limiting access to data to get the general public to agree with scientific facts. It’s not right, but at the same time I think think it comes more from frustration than some sort of politically motivated conspiracy.
4. One thing that no one in science will stand for is bad science. If climate change could be disproved through rigorous scientific tests it would be the sort of result that would make the person that accomplished it an instant celebrity in the climate community. To borrow an example from astronomy, in the late 1990’s two independent teams of highly qualified astronomers released independent data showing that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. This destroyed 40 years of work in cosmology that assumed a decelerating universe - in some cases entire careers’ worth of work was rendered invalid overnight. There were a lot of skeptics, but the data was solid and the two teams measurements were independent. When the results were announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society they were met with a standing ovation. The point is the scientists as a whole are interested in the truth even if its not on their side of the argument. If there were conclusive evidence showing the global climate was not changing climatologists would embrace it. The reason most of them fight skeptics as hard as they do is that the data disproving climate change simply isn’t there. Instead all sorts of tests indicate that the climate is changing due to human activity.

So there are my thoughts. The e-mails don't disprove the science behind climate change, but they do lay bare some of the short-comings of both the general public and the scientific community.

The Recession Changes Minds on Global Warming

In the past decade the science behind global warming has gone from solid to all but certain. Human activity has been shown to better than 90% confidence to be the leading cause of global climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is essentially a who's who list of atmospheric scientists, climatologists, and economists that specialize in climate related issues. They are experts and they know their stuff.

In April 2008, back when housing prices were a concern and the economy was just starting to slow down, 47% of Americans believed the IPCC while only 34% didn't. But then the recession hit and things changed, at least in the minds of the average American as measured by Rasmussen polls.
Each poll in this series has an error of +/- 3%, but it appears clear that over the last 18 months or so there has been a clear trend towards blaming "planetary trends" for global warming instead of human activity. The science on global warming hasn't changed in the past year, but it appears that economic worries trump science in the public mind when they think about global climate change.

World Peace: A Physical Impossibility?

Today I happened to visit Slashdot.org to see if there was anything interesting there and their when-ever-they-care-to-update-it poll caught my eye. After voting I looked at the results and I was struck by some of the results. The question was "Which breakthrough is most likely?" With 7 options: 1. Time Travel, 2. Faster Than Light Travel, 3. Human-Level AI, 4. Discovery of Aliens, 5. Immortality, 6. World Peace, 7. Sharks With Frickin' Lasers.

According to poll it would seem that world peace ranks down there in believability with things that are, for all we know, physical impossibilities. I just found it interesting that world peace would be in the same category as things that the slashdot crowd consider to be physically impossible. This would seem to indicate that people consider world peace to be a physical impossibility. I don't consider it a physical impossibility, hence my vote.

Is Obama Less American Than Tony Blair?

A while back I posted about groups of people who continue to argue that Obama is ineligible to be president because he isn't a "natural born citizen" as the Constitution requires despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Well it turns out that the root of the issue may not be restricted to small groups of right-wing nuts. Scientific American is reporting on a study by Harvard professor Mahzarin Banaji that shows that white Americans on average found former British prime minister Tony Blair to be "more American" than Barak Obama. In the study people were asked to choose which one was more American after reading short bios on each person with attached pictures. Interestingly, British actor Hugh Grant was rated as more American than American reporter Connie Chung as well.

So maybe the birthers are simply people expressing a wide-spread deep-seated belief among white people that white and northern European equals American.

Public Opinion on Hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope is commonly credited with doing wonders for the popularity of astronomy in past few years. Hubble stunning images have changed the way people imagine the universe. Possibly Hubble's most famous image is its shot of the "pillars of creation", shown here.A recent national poll by Rassumsen Reports, however, shows that Hubble hasn't impressed your average American quite enough. Only 47% of Americans believe that Hubble has been worth the cost.

The problem, I think, is that we in astrophysics especially need to do a better job of explaining to the public how our research will impact their lives and their children's lives in practical ways. The impacts are there - understanding the universe through Hubble and other great observatories will develop technologies and understanding that engineers in 20 or 50 years will use to make our lives better - we just haven't done as good of a job as we might have hoped in showing that to people.

Climate Change Science Losing the Public Battle

In the last few years, the science on global climate change has reached a point where it can conclusively say that human activity is a major cause of changes to our planet's climate. Of course there is still a lot of uncertainty in some areas. We don't fully understand the chemistry of the upper atmosphere or how feedback from deforestation or glacial melting work exactly. But when essentially all of the top climate scientists in the world can agree on something, it's time to realize that while the models might be far from perfect, they are close enough to get the basics right.

However as the science continues to improve and become more sure of the predictions of dramatic climate change, the American public is moving the other direction. A Rasmussen national phone survey released today shows that more Americans now believe that climate change is caused by natural planetary trends (44%) than in April 2008 (34%) with a margin of error of plus or minus 4%. If this survey is accurate, that means that there has been significant shift in the past year away from the scientific conclusion that human activity, not natural trends, are mainly to blame for changes in climate. You can find a story on the poll here.

So why have 1 in 10 Americans changed their minds in the past year? My guess is that the change is driven by economics rather than science. Most people can connect the dots from climate change to energy prices to economic effects. I think that many people blame last years sky-high gas prices for at least part of the current economic downturn, so that influences them to disbelieve climate change in order to protect the economy.

Whatever the reason, this illustrates the fact that most people make decisions about science in very unscientific ways.

Rising Suport for the Iraq War?

In either a show of changing opinions or just how fickle the American public really is, the latest New York Times/CBS poll reported by the New York Times Online (available here) showed that last week "42 percent of Americans said taking military action in Iraq was the right thing to do, while 51 percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq. Support had been at all time low in May, when only 35 percent of Americans said the United States’ involvement in Iraq was the right thing and 61 percent said the United States should have stayed out."

Does this mean that the American public is actually being patient with the troop surge, as President Bush has requested? Does it mean that the troop surge is changing public opinion? Or could it be that summer just makes Americans more upbeat about everything? It is impossible to know for sure, but it seems to me that this troop surge may be at least in part responsible.

Mike Besselman, who served in the Navy, said something a few months ago about the Iraq War that I think is very true. He said that we cannot fight the Iraq War half-way. We either need to commit the forces needed or get our people out of harms way. I can't help but wonder if this troop surge was at least closer to committing the forces necessary to accomplish the mission in Iraq. The real question is what happens if the troop surge really is working? Even the most optimistic US commanders think it will take at least several more months for the surge to really be effective. Will the American public have that kind of patience? And, perhaps more importantly, will the Iraqi Government actually be able to get anything meaningful accomplished in that limited window of opportunity? If the answer to either of those questions is no, then I think President Bush should start drawing down troop numbers, focus on training the Iraqi army and fighting terrorism, and get our service men and women out from the middle of the Shite/Sunni conflict.

For more on one theory of how the US could safely reduce troop levels and keep Iraq from becoming totally unstable, check out this excellent article from Time Magazine.