Wilkins Ice Shelf, Scientific Claims and all that.

Workout notes My legs are sore due to three 10 milers in a row, so I’ll swim and bike a bit later (easy, recovery level stuff).

Update: 2650 yard of swimming: 500 free, 10 x (25 fly, 25 free). First 6 were on 1:10, last 4 were on the 1 (about 55 each), 10 x (25 drill, 25 swim), 5 x 100 paddle, 100 free, 50 back, 100 IM at cool-down intensity.

There was a lady two lanes over who was burning it up. Humility is always a good thing.

Wilkins Ice Shelf. Many of you have heard that the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the verge of collapse (maybe during the next Antarctic summer?)

A thin strip of ice, just 6 kilometres wide, is all that is holding back the collapse of a huge ice shelf in Antarctica, according to glaciologists.

The Wilkins ice shelf – previously some 16,000 square kilometres in area – has been disintegrating fast. On 28 February, an iceberg 41 km long and 2.5 km wide broke off the ice shelf. This triggered the runaway disintegration of a further 570 square kilometres of ice.

“I would be very surprised if it survives more than a couple more melt seasons,” says Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado, US.

Other researchers, including David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey, believe it could be gone within weeks. “The ice shelf is hanging by a thread – we’ll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be,” he says.

Basically, the floating sea ice acts as a barrier to protect ice shelfs from waves. But much of the sea ice has melted with has exposed this ice shelf to battering from the sea:

Normally, a slurry of sea ice floating in front of the ice shelf would act as a wave breaker, keeping the surrounding waters still. But this year – as in 2002 when the Larsen B shelf dramatically disappeared in just 30 days – warm temperatures melted away much of the sea ice. The glaciologists believe this is what has caused the break up of the Wilkins ice shelf in recent weeks.

The Wilkins ice sheet is not connected to inland glaciers in the same way as Larsen B was. As a result, its collapse will not accelerate the flow of glaciers into the ocean, and so will not immediately cause a sea-level rise.

Every time something like this happens, it opens up heated exchanges between those who believe that climate change is real and those who are skeptical of it.

Skeptics sometimes say: “hey, the Antarctic continent is cooling, isn’t it”? In fact, there is some truth to that claim.

While the rest of the world has generally been warming up, much of Antarctica has been cooling for the last 35 years, scientists report [...]

the cooling helps illustrate how little is known about some important aspects of Antarctica’s climate.

Thirteen researchers, who work with the National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-term Ecological Research program, report in the Jan. 13 online edition of the journal Nature on both the cooling and its effects in the Dry Valleys, an a little larger than Rhode Island on the west coast of the Ross Sea.

Dry Valleys temperatures dropped an average of 1.23 degrees Fahrenheit a decade from 1986 to 2000, with the greatest cooling during the December through February Antarctic summer, they report.

This cooling is important because “summer temperatures are the driver of Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems, and our data are the first, to our knowledge, to highlight the cascade of ecological consequence that result from the recent summer cooling, ” says Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the article’s lead author. [...]

As part of his research, Doran has scuba dived through holes cut in the permanent ice covering Dry Valley lakes to study the mats of diatoms and blue-green algae on the bottoms. In the Nature article the researchers report that growth of these mats has been declining 6% to 9% a year, at least in part because the cooler weather has thickened the layer of ice covering the lakes, reducing the sunlight that reaches the bottoms. [...]

That is some, pardon the pun, cool research, isn’t it? Mathematical research isn’t as exciting.

Unfortunately, many (outside of the scientific community) have misunderstood the significance of this research. Doran writes in the New York Times:

IN the debate on global warming, the data on the climate of Antarctica has been distorted, at different times, by both sides. As a polar researcher caught in the middle, I’d like to set the record straight.

In January 2002, a research paper about Antarctic temperatures, of which I was the lead author, appeared in the journal Nature. At the time, the Antarctic Peninsula was warming, and many people assumed that meant the climate on the entire continent was heating up, as the Arctic was. But the Antarctic Peninsula represents only about 15 percent of the continent’s land mass, so it could not tell the whole story of Antarctic climate. Our paper made the continental picture more clear.

My research colleagues and I found that from 1986 to 2000, one small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had actually cooled. Our report also analyzed temperatures for the mainland in such a way as to remove the influence of the peninsula warming and found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent had cooled than had warmed. Our summary statement pointed out how the cooling trend posed challenges to models of Antarctic climate and ecosystem change.

Newspaper and television reports focused on this part of the paper. And many news and opinion writers linked our study with another bit of polar research published that month, in Science, showing that part of Antarctica’s ice sheet had been thickening — and erroneously concluded that the earth was not warming at all. “Scientific findings run counter to theory of global warming,” said a headline on an editorial in The San Diego Union-Tribune. One conservative commentator wrote, “It’s ironic that two studies suggesting that a new Ice Age may be under way may end the global warming debate.” [...]

Our study did find that 58 percent of Antarctica cooled from 1966 to 2000. But during that period, the rest of the continent was warming. And climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals — thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals — all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet. An inconvenient truth?

Also missing from the skeptics’ arguments is the debate over our conclusions. Another group of researchers who took a different approach found no clear cooling trend in Antarctica. We still stand by our results for the period we analyzed, but unbiased reporting would acknowledge differences of scientific opinion.

The disappointing thing is that we are even debating the direction of climate change on this globally important continent. And it may not end until we have more weather stations on Antarctica and longer-term data that demonstrate a clear trend.

In the meantime, I would like to remove my name from the list of scientists who dispute global warming. I know my coauthors would as well.

Other factors which confuse people are those articles which point out “as yet unexplained” data which seems to confuse the issue:

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant,” Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. “Global warming doesn’t mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming.” [...]
That becomes clear when you consider what’s happening to global sea level. Sea level rises when the oceans get warm because warmer water expands. This accounts for about half of global sea level rise. So with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That’s a lot.

Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

“But in fact there’s a little bit of a mystery. We can’t account for all of the sea level increase we’ve seen over the last three or four years,” he says.

One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.

But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?

Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it’s probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.

That can’t be directly measured at the moment, however.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they’ve been playing during this period,” Trenberth says.

It’s also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it’s possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don’t know about. It’s an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate.

“I suspect that we’ll able to put this together with a little bit more perspective and further analysis,” Trenberth says. “But what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board.”

Ok, so what is going on? What is really happening? If you value science and its conclusions, there are a couple of great resources out there: New Scientist Magazine and Scientific American have both put together a collection of climate change articles.

The fact is that there are still many climate mechanisms that are not well understood as yet. There is, in fact, some uncertainty as to the cause or to the scope of climate change. There is, in fact, some uncertainty in our current models. But,

Some of these feedback processes are poorly understood—like how climate change affects clouds—and many are difficult to model, therefore the climate’s propensity to amplify any small change makes predicting how much and how fast the climate will change inherently difficult. “Uncertainty and sensitivity are inextricably linked,” Roe says. “Some warming is a virtual certainty, but the amount of that warming is much less certain.”

Roe and his U.W. co-author, atmospheric physicist Marcia Baker, argue in Science that, because of this inherent climate effect, certainty is a near impossibility, no matter what kind of improvements are made in understanding physical processes or the timescale of observations.

“Once the world has warmed 4 degrees C [(7.2 degrees F)] conditions will be so different from anything we can observe today (and still more different from the last ice age) that it is inherently hard to say when the warming will stop,” physicists Myles Allen and David Frame of the University of Oxford wrote in an editorial accompanying the article. “If the true climate sensitivity really is as high as 5 degrees C [(9 degrees F)], the only way our descendants will find that out is if they stubbornly hold greenhouse gas concentrations constant for centuries at our target stabilization level.”

Therefore, waiting for more scientific certainty before acting is a mistake, Roe says. “People are comfortable with the idea that stock markets, housing prices and the weather are uncertain, and they are used to making decisions on that basis,” he notes.

But this also means that targets such as stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at 450 parts per million (nearly double preindustrial levels) to avoid more than a 3.6 degree F (2 degree C) temperature rise are nearly impossible as well. There is no guarantee that such a target would achieve its stated goal. “Policymakers are always going to be faced with uncertainty and so the only sensible way forward to minimize risk is to adopt an adaptive policy,” argues climatologist Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, “which adjusts emissions targets and incentives based on how well, or badly, things are going.” [...]

It also means that scientists and other experts are going to have to monitor measures other than just atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases to catch catastrophic climate change developing. “It is essential that we designate the harbingers of abrupt and significant changes or, perhaps more importantly, the triggers and thresholds that could commit the planet to these changes well before their tell-tale signs appear,” says economist and IPCC author Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. “We cannot accept the adaptive design completely without having confidence in our abilities to determine exactly what to monitor.”

The IPCC has taken a crack at that, identifying 26 “key vulnerabilities” in its most recent assessment, ranging from declines in agricultural productivity to the melting of ice sheets and polar ice cover as well as determining how to judge if they are spiraling out of control. Disappearing Arctic ice is already helping to amplify global warming beyond what the IPCC had predicted in the past. “We already know about as much as we are going to about climate system’s response to greenhouse gases,” Roe says. “We already have the basis for making the decisions we need to make.”

Also, it is sometimes difficult to write an accurate science article for the non-scientist reader. Professor Moran reproduces a letter by Ruth Cronje, a faculty member of the Scientific and Technical Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Here is part of that letter:

The idea of using framing strategies to communicate science to the public has recently been taken up in scientific forums (1, 2), the mainstream media (3), and the blogosphere (4, 5). Most participants in the framing science debate limit their notion of scientific information to scientific facts. However, confining science messages to just the facts interferes with public understanding of science as a systematic, logical process of human inquiry and effaces the distinction between data and scientists’ reasoning about data. To communicate successfully, we should focus on scientific process by emphasizing two important elements of scientific rationality: skepticism and dynamicism (6, 7).

Scientists deliberately integrate skepticism into their procedures by trying to refute their own hypotheses, retaining them only when confronted with compelling evidence sought through carefully controlled procedures. Scientists tend to shy away from revealing the intrinsic skepticism of science to the public, fearful that it will open the door to doubt about the validity of their conclusions. But communicating only the facts of science (framed or unframed) destabilizes public confidence in science. A fact doesn’t allow science communicators to reveal, justify, and ultimately promote the skeptical reasoning process that helps make scientists more confident that their reasoning is correct.

Science is also dynamic; it is a cumulative enterprise that requires scientists to situate their instrumental activities and interpretations against the evidence that has come before and to alter them in light of new evidence. Insisting that new data be interpreted within the context of past and future data will ferret out and correct error over time, but it means that a fact cannot, by definition, be anything more than the (ephemeral and fallible) consensus of scientists at a given point in time. A “just the facts” strategy can and often does backfire, ultimately fueling public alienation from science. When scientists inform the public of “facts” (like the “fact” widely disseminated in the 1970s that all dietary fats are bad for us), and then that “fact” is refined or altered (now we’re told olive oil is good for us), the public is justifiably confused. Studies suggest that the public tends to regard normal scientific refinement and self-correction as equivocation or incompetence (8-10). Instead of sweeping uncertainty under the rug, science communicators should help the public understand the logical and systematic procedures by which scientists confront it.

So, some exclaim: “hey elite scientists sometimes get it wrong”. Well, in the long run, they (I say they because, while I am a mathematician, I am hardly elite), not really, (unless you count things like Newtonian mechanics as being wrong, when in fact it really isn’t)

Some food for thought: what has happened to computers over the last 30 years? What has happened with gps technology? Nuclear weapons (ok, evil, but still evidence that science works)?

Life expectancy (from birth) over the past 70-75 years or so? This speaks to advances in medicine, industrial safety, nutrition and well child care.

What about child mortality? What about infant mortality?

In 1847 Thomas A. Edison is born on February 11th in Ohio, USA, Alexander Graham Bell is Born on March 3rd in Edinburgh Scotland. Born just three weeks apart they were both triumphant over the dangerously high Infant mortality rates of their time. A harsh world took the lives of nearly 25% of all infants born during this period. Infant mortality rate is the death of a child before their first birthday; this is an annual rate of deaths measured in one thousand childbirths. The infant mortality rates in the early to mid 19th century were high. The babies raised in ideal conditions, clean environment, regularly breast fed, and well cared for could expect death rates of 80 to 100 per thousand. The inner city rates were dramatically higher, 300 deaths per thousand on average mainly due to the poverty, dreadful housing situations, and unhealthy urban sanitary conditions. The development of obstetrics, which encompasses all aspects of pregnancy, birth and its result, evolved into the rise of gynecology.

In short, scientific progress has produced real, tangible results, much of what overthrew the “common sense” at the time. I know that won’t be news to many of my readers and that those who deny scientific findings probably won’t have their minds changed. But hey, it is worth a try, and I have had fun reading these articles.