by Jill and David Archer

This month’s open thread.

There has been an unusual surge of interest in the climate sensitivity based on the last decade’s worth of temperature measurements, and a lengthy story in the Economist tries to argue that the climate sensitivity may be lower than previously estimated. I think its conclusion is somewhat misguided because it missed some important pieces of information (also see skepticalscience’s take on this story here).

The ocean heat content and the global mean sea level height have marched on.

While the Economist referred to some unpublished work, it missed a new paper by Balmaseda et al. (2013) which provides a more in-depth insight. Balmaseda et al suggest that the recent years may not have much effect on the climate sensitivity after all, and according to their analysis, it is the winds blowing over the oceans that may be responsible for the ‘slow-down’ presented in the Economist.

It is well-known that changes in temperature on decadal time scales are strongly influenced by natural and internal variations, and should not be confused with a long-term trend (Easterling and Wehner, 2009;Foster and Rahmstorf, 2011).

An intensification of the trades has affected surface ocean currents called the subtropical gyres, and these changes have resulted in a predominance of the La Nina state. The La Nina phase is associated with a lower global mean temperature than usual.

Balmaseda et al’s results also suggested that a negative phase of the pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) may have made an imprint on the most recent years. In addition, they found that the deep ocean has warmed over the recent years, while the upper 300m of the oceans have ‘stabilised’.

The oceans can be compared to a battery that needs to be recharged after going flat. After the powerful 1997-98 El Nino, heat flowed out of the tropical oceans in order to heat the atmosphere (evaporative cooling) and the higher latitudes. The warming resumed after the ‘deflation’, but something happened after 1998: since then, the warming has involved the deep ocean to a much greater extent. A weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC) may have played a role in the deep ocean warming.

The recent changes in these decade-scale variations appear to have masked the real accumulation of heat on Earth.

The new knowledge from this paper, the way I read it, is the revelation of the role of winds for vertical mixing/diffusion of heat in a new analysis of the world oceans. Their results were derived through a set of different experiments testing the sensitivity to various assumptions and choices made for data inclusion and the ocean model assimilation set-up.

The analysis involved a brand new ocean analysis (ORAS4; Balmaseda et al., 2013) based on an optimal use of observations, data assimilation, and an ocean model forced with state-of-the-art description of the atmosphere (reanalyses).

By running a set of different experiments with the ocean model, including different conditions, such as surface winds and different types of data, they explored which influence the different conditions have on their final conclusion.

The finding that the winds play a role for the state of the warming may not be surprising to oceanographers, although it may not necessarily be the first thing a meteorologist may consider.

Other related discussions: OSS

References

1. M.A. Balmaseda, K.E. Trenberth, and E. Källén, "Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content", Geophysical Research Letters, pp. n/a-n/a, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/grl.50382
2. D.R. Easterling, and M.F. Wehner, "Is the climate warming or cooling?", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 36, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2009GL037810
3. G. Foster, and S. Rahmstorf, "Global temperature evolution 1979–2010", Environmental Research Letters, vol. 6, pp. 044022, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022
4. M.A. Balmaseda, K. Mogensen, and A.T. Weaver, "Evaluation of the ECMWF ocean reanalysis system ORAS4", Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, pp. n/a-n/a, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/qj.2063

Guest commentary by Darrell Kaufman (N. Arizona U.)

In a major step forward in proxy data synthesis, the PAst Global Changes (PAGES) 2k Consortium has just published a suite of continental scale reconstructions of temperature for the past two millennia in Nature Geoscience. More information about the study and its implications are available at the FAQ on the PAGES website and the datasets themselves are available at NOAA Paleoclimate.

The main conclusion of the study is that the most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the 19th century, and which was followed by a warming trend in the 20th C. The 20th century in the reconstructions ranks as the warmest or nearly the warmest century in all regions except Antarctica. During the last 30-year period in the reconstructions (1971-2000 CE), the average reconstructed temperature among all of the regions was likely higher than anytime in at least ~1400 years. Interestingly, temperatures did not fluctuate uniformly among all regions at multi-decadal to centennial scales. For example, there were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age. Cool 30-year periods between the years 830 and 1910 CE were particularly pronounced during times of weak solar activity and strong tropical volcanic eruptions and especially if both phenomena often occurred simultaneously.

Figure: Thirty-year mean relative temperatures for the seven PAGES 2k continental-scale regions arranged vertically from north to south.

The origin of the ‘PAGES 2k Network‘ and its activities can be found here and consists of nearly 80 individual collaborators. The Consortium’s collection of local expertise and proxy records was transformed into a synthesis by a smaller team of lead authors, but the large author list recognizes that the expertise of the wider team was essential in increasing the range of data used and interpreting it.

In addition to the background available at the FAQ, I think it is important to also highlight some aspects of the analytical procedures behind the study and the vital contributions of three young co-authors.

The benefit of the ‘regions-up’ approach embodied in the PAGES-2k consortium is that it made it easy to take advantage of local expertise and include a large amount of new data that would have been more difficult to assemble for a centralized global reconstruction. However, being decentralized, the groups in different regions opted for different methodologies for building their default reconstructions. While justifiable, this does raise a question about the impact different methodologies would have. To address this, the synthesis team (ably led by Nicholas McKay) applied three particular reconstruction methods to all of the regions, as well as looking at the basic area-averaged and weighted composites. He further analyzed the site-level records individually and without many of the assumptions that underlie the regional temperature reconstructions. These results show that the long-term cooling trend and recent warming are dominant features of the dataset however you analyze it. There is a sizable fraction of the records that do not conform to the continental averages, highlighting the spatial variability and/or the noise level in specific proxies.

One of the new procedures used to reconstruct temperature is an approach developed by Sami Hanhijärvi (U. Helsinki), which was also recently applied to the North Atlantic region. The method (PaiCo) relies on pairwise comparisons to arrive at a time series that integrates records with differing temporal resolutions and relaxes assumptions about the relation between the proxy series and temperature. Hanhijärvi applied this procedure to the proxy data from each of the continental-scale regions and found that reconstructions using different approaches are similar and generally support the primary conclusions of the study.

Regions where this study helps clarify the temperature history are mainly in the Southern Hemisphere. We include new and updated temperature reconstructions from Antarctica, Australasia and South America. The proxy records from these three regions come from many sources, ranging from glacier ice to trees and from lake sediment to corals. Raphael Neukom (Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL and University of Bern) played a key role in the analyses across the Southern Hemisphere. He used principal components regression (Australasia), a scaled composite (Antarctica), and an integration of these two approaches (South America) to create the time series of annual temperature change.

Inevitably, assembling such a large and diverse dataset involves many judgement calls. The PAGES-2k consortium has tried to assess the impact of these structural decisions by using multiple methods, but we hope that this synthesis is really just the start of a more detailed analysis of regional temperature trends and we welcome constructive suggestions for improvements.

References

1. M. Ahmed, K.J. Anchukaitis, A. Asrat, H.P. Borgaonkar, M. Braida, B.M. Buckley, U. Büntgen, B.M. Chase, D.A. Christie, E.R. Cook, M.A.J. Curran, H.F. Diaz, J. Esper, Z. Fan, N.P. Gaire, Q. Ge, J. Gergis, J.F. González-Rouco, H. Goosse, S.W. Grab, N. Graham, R. Graham, M. Grosjean, S.T. Hanhijärvi, D.S. Kaufman, T. Kiefer, K. Kimura, A.A. Korhola, P.J. Krusic, A. Lara, A. Lézine, F.C. Ljungqvist, A.M. Lorrey, J. Luterbacher, V. Masson-Delmotte, D. McCarroll, J.R. McConnell, N.P. McKay, M.S. Morales, A.D. Moy, R. Mulvaney, I.A. Mundo, T. Nakatsuka, D.J. Nash, R. Neukom, S.E. Nicholson, H. Oerter, J.G. Palmer, S.J. Phipps, M.R. Prieto, A. Rivera, M. Sano, M. Severi, T.M. Shanahan, X. Shao, F. Shi, M. Sigl, J.E. Smerdon, O.N. Solomina, E.J. Steig, B. Stenni, M. Thamban, V. Trouet, C.S. Turney, M. Umer, T. van Ommen, D. Verschuren, A.E. Viau, R. Villalba, B.M. Vinther, L. von Gunten, S. Wagner, E.R. Wahl, H. Wanner, J.P. Werner, J.W. White, K. Yasue, and E. Zorita, "Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia", Nature Geoscience, vol. 6, pp. 339-346, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1797
2. S. Hanhijärvi, M.P. Tingley, and A. Korhola, "Pairwise comparisons to reconstruct mean temperature in the Arctic Atlantic Region over the last 2,000 years", Climate Dynamics, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1701-4

Eric Steig

It is well known that ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula have collapsed on several occasions in the last couple of decades, that ice shelves in West Antarctica are thinning rapidly, and that the large outlet glaciers that drain the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) are accelerating. The rapid drainage of the WAIS into the ocean is a major contributor to sea level rise (around 10% of the total, at the moment).

All of these observations match the response, predicted in the late 1970s by glaciologist John Mercer, of the Antarctic to anthropogenic global warming. As such, they are frequently taken as harbingers of greater future sea level rise to come. Are they?

Two papers published this week in Nature Geoscience provide new information that helps to address this question. One of the studies (led by me) says “probably”, while another (Abram et al.) gives a more definitive “yes”.

The somewhat different details of the two papers appear to have hopelessly confused many journalists (though the Christian Science Monitor has an excellent article, despite a somewhat misleading headline), but both are really just telling different aspects of the same story.

There is already strong evidence that anthropogenic forcing has played a significant role in the collapse of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, cause by significant melting at the surface during summer. The warm summer air temperatures have been related to an increase in the “Southern Annular Mode” (SAM), essentially the strength of the circumpolar westerlies. Increased CO₂ is clearly part of the forcing of the observed positive trend in the SAM, though a larger player is likely to be ozone depletion in the stratosphere. Nevertheless, the short length of the observations – of both the ice sheet and climate – make it difficult to assess to what extent these changes are unusual. There is evidence for one ice shelf that a collapse like that observed in the 1990s has not occurred since at least the mid-Holocene, but comparable evidence is lacking elsewhere.

The connection between climate change and glacier response is more complex for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet than the Peninsula. As on the Peninsula, temperatures over the WAIS have risen significantly in the last few decades, but this is a symptom, rather than a cause. For WAIS, the culprit for the rapid thinning of ice shelves is increased delivery of warm ocean water to the base of the ice shelves. This isn’t due to a warming ocean (though the deep water off the Antarctic coast line is indeed warming), but to changes in the winds that have forced more circumpolar deep water onto the continental shelf. Circumpolar deep water, at about +2°C, is very hot compared with the in situ melting point of glacier ice. In a series of papers, we’ve shown that the warmer temperatures observed over the WAIS are the result of those same atmospheric circulation changes, which are not related to the SAM, but rather to the remote forcing from changes in the tropical Pacific: changes in the character of ENSO (Steig et al., 2012; Ding et al., 2011; 2012).

As on the Peninsula, there is evidence of anthropogenic forcing for the WAIS too: anomalous conditions since the 1980s in the tropical Pacific are characteristic of the expected fingerprint of global warming (e.g. Trenberth and Hoar, 1997; Collins et al., 2010). Still, as on the Peninsula, the short length of the instrumental observations make it difficult to say anything very definitive about long term trends.

Both our paper and that of Abram et al. add to our understanding of recent climate, glacier, and ice sheet changes in Antarctica by placing them into a longer-term context. Amidst the continuous chatter in the blogosphere about the strengths and limitations about “multiproxy” studies, these studies may be a refreshing return to simpler methods relying on just one type of “proxy”: data from ice cores. While ice core data aren’t perfect proxies of climate, they come pretty close, and aren’t subject to the same kinds of uncertainties that are unavoidable in biological proxies like tree rings.

Our study is the culmination of about a decade of ice core drilling and analysis in West Antarctica, through the ITASE program and the WAIS Divide ice core project. I’m the lead author on the paper but the author list is rightfully long; a lot of people have been involved in drilling and analyzing cores all across Antarctica.

The only “proxy” we use are oxygen isotope ratios. Oxygen isotope ratios (δ¹⁸O) in polar snow are well known to be correlated with temperature, and the underlying physics of the relationship is very well understood. In our study, we compile all the available δ¹⁸O data from high-resolution well-dated ice cores in West Antarctica and take a look at the average variability through the last 200 years. We also include data from the new WAIS Divide ice core that goes back 2000 years (actually, this core goes back to 68,000 years, and is annually resolved back to at least 30,000 years, but that’s a story for another time).

The average of the records for the last 50 years looks very much like temperature records from the last 50 years, with scaling of about 0.5‰/°C, exactly as expected, providing yet another piece of evidence that recent warming in West Antarctica has been both rapid and widespread (see the figure below). A critical point, though, is that it isn’t necessary to use the δ¹⁸O data as a proxy for temperature. Because the physics controlling δ¹⁸O is well understood, and we are able to implement δ¹⁸O in climate models, we can actually just use δ¹⁸O as a proxy for, well, δ¹⁸O. This simplifies the problem from “how significant is the recent warming?” to “how significant is the recent rise in δ¹⁸O”? We’ve shown previously, and show again in this paper, that δ¹⁸O in West Antarctic precipitation reflects the relevant changes in atmospheric circulation just as well (if not better) than temperature or other conventional climate variables do. Putting δ¹⁸O into a GCM and using the same experiments that reproduce the observed warming over West Antarctica also produces the observed δ¹⁸O increase in the last 50 years.

Figure 1. (a) Comparison of averaged δ¹⁸O (blue) across West Antarctica with the recent temperature record of Bromwich et al. (2013) from central West Antarctica (yellow). The light blue background is the decadal smoothed values +/- 1 standard error assuming Gaussian statistics. (b) Number of records used, and probability that the decadal average is as elevated as the 1990s (green).

Data sources: Most of the data for this figure have been available at http://nsidc.org/data/NSIDC-0425.html for some time. There’s a new location (which will link to the old one) where more recent data sets will be placed, but it’s not all up yet: http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0536.html.

Our results show that the strong trend in δ¹⁸O in West Antarctica in the last 50 years is largely driven by anomalously high δ¹⁸O in the most recent two decades, particularly in the 1990s (less so the 2000s). This is evident in the temperature data as well (top panel of the figure). The 1990s were also very anomalous in the tropics — there were several large long-lived El Niño events with a strong central tropical Pacific expression, as well as only very weak La Niña events. As in the tropics, so in West Antarctica: the 1990s were likely the most anomalous decade of the last 200 years.

Our results thus show that, indeed, recent decades in West Antarctica, which have been characterized by very rapid warming, and very rapid loss of ice from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, are highly unusual. Nevertheless, some caution is in order in interpreting this to mean that current rates of rapid ice loss from West Antarctica represent a long term trend. What we’ve observed is unusual, but it is also dominated by decadal climate variability, and can’t be considered “unprecendeted”. Furthermore, our statistical confidence that recent decades are truly exceptional is low. Our data suggest that there is about a 30% chance the 1940s were just as anomalous as the 1990s, and the 1830s have about a 10% chance of being like the 1990s. Based on the relatively small amount of available evidence from the tropics, both the 1940s and the 1830s were similarly characterized by long-lived El Niños. Looking at the very long term record from the WAIS Divide ice core, it appears that similar conditions could have occurred about once per century over the last 2000 years. Hence our answer to the question, “are the observations of the last few decades a harbinger of continued ice sheet collapse in West Antarctica?”, is tentative: “Probably”.

Anyone expecting a more dramatic result need only turn to the other new ice core paper in Nature Geoscience. Last year, Rob Mulvaney and others from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), along with French, American, and German colleagues, reached a very similar conclusion to ours, from an ice core from James Ross Island, on the northern Antarctic Peninsula. We discussed that paper at Realclimate last year. With δ¹⁸O data alone, it was possible to demonstrate only that recent warming on James Ross Island was “unusual”. The new paper, led by Nerelie Abram, adds a record of melt layers in the ice core to the assessment. The findings: a veritable Antarctic ice hockey stick.

Figure 2. δ¹⁸O (scaled to temperature) and melt layer frequency from the James Ross Island ice core.

Abram et al.’s paper is elegant in its simplicity. The key thing that matters to the ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula is how much melting occurs in summer, and this is almost exactly what Abram et al. are looking at. I say “almost” because formation of melt layers requires both that melting occurs and that it gets preserved, which depends a bit on the snow structure, the previous winter temperature, etc. But the results are unequivocal: there’s about 5 times the fraction of melt layers in the core as there has been on average over previous decades, and at least twice the maximum of any time before about the 1950s. The amount of melting occurring now is greater than at any time in the past 1000 years. If there has ever been a question about whether the “hockey stick” shape of Northern Hemisphere temperatures extends to at least some areas of the Southern Hemisphere, this record provides a decisive and positive answer.

Why the difference between the Peninsula and the WAIS? After all, both locations are warming at about the same rate. We could speculate that if there were melt layers in the WAIS cores, they would also show a significant increase like the James Ross Island core does. (It’s too cold at all the WAIS sites to have summer melting at all, so such information isn’t available.) I don’t think that is likely though. More important is the specific location of James Ross Island, on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula. On the western Antarctic Peninsula, temperature trends are greatest in winter and spring, just as they are over the WAIS, and we’ve argued elsewhere that the causes are similar: changes in regional circulation forced by anomalous conditions in the tropics (Ding and Steig, in press). But it is on the eastern Peninsula that the most rapid summer warming has occurred, and where the surface-melting has caused ice shelf collapse (indeed, James Ross Island wasn’t really an island until 1995, when the Prince Gustav ice shelf collapsed). Both statistical assessments and modeling results show that the trend in the SAM accounts for this warming trend. As I noted in the introduction to this post, the SAM trend is partly explained by ozone depletion in the stratosphere, and the most clearly anomalous melt in the James Ross Island core occurs after the late 1970s, about the time the ozone hole appeared. But the melt data also show that melting has increased nearly monotonically since the 1930s, well before the advent of the ozone hole. As in West Antarctic δ¹⁸O, there was a bit of an increase in melt in the 1830s and the 1940s at James Ross Island, perhaps also ENSO-related, but these little bumps pale in comparison with the amount of melting occurring since the 1950s.

So what does all this mean for the fate of Antarctic Peninsula glaciers and the West Antarctic ice sheet? Both our paper and the Abram et al. paper add substantial new evidence that something rather unusual is occurring in Antarctica. It is not just happenstance that rapid ice sheet, glacier, and ice shelf changes are occurring now, when we have finally begun to observe them closely. Rather, these changes are occurring along with what is happening to the rest of the planet. That said, it appears that we not have yet driven West Antarctic climate (nor West Antarctic glaciers) definitively beyond what might be expected from natural variability alone. In particular, I won’t be surprised if continued decade-to-decade variability in atmospheric circulation results in more, and less, intrusion of circumpolar deep water onto the continental shelf, and to more, and less, rapid thinning of ice shelves in West Antarctica*. On the Peninsula, though, it seems very clear that we have already pushed the system well beyond “normal”, and into conditions reminiscent of the mid-Holocene. I don’t think we’re going to see a return to “normal” conditions any time soon. It’s worth noting that most model projections suggest that the SAM trend may level off for a while as the ozone hole gradually declines, but those same model projections suggest the SAM trend will recover as CO₂ continues to rise. See. e.g. Thompson et al. (2011).

The real take home message here is that the ice loss from the WAIS and from the Antarctic Peninsula that have been observed in the last few decades are indeed likely to be harbingers of things to come. The very rapid rate of change in West Antarctica that we’ve seen over the last few decades is clearly overprinted by substantial decadal variability, so caution is in order in projecting that rate forward in time. The magnitude of the century scale trend will depend quite a bit, in my view, on what happens in the tropics over the next century. The sign of the trend, however, is clear. On the Peninsula, it’s crystal clear.

Note: An excellent summary of these two papers by Tas van Ommen will appear in Nature Geoscience in the May issue.

Guest post by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Francisco Doblas-Reyes, Sybren Drijfhout and Ed Hawkins

Climate information for the future is usually presented in the form of scenarios: plausible and consistent descriptions of future climate without probability information. This suffices for many purposes, but for the near term, say up to 2050, scenarios of emissions of greenhouse gases do not diverge much and we could work towards climate forecasts: calibrated probability distributions of the climate in the future.

This would be a logical extension of the weather, seasonal and decadal forecasts in existence or being developed (Palmer, BAMS, 2008). In these fields a fundamental forecast property is reliability: when the forecast probability of rain tomorrow is 60%, it should rain on 60% of all days with such a forecast.

This is routinely checked: before a new model version is introduced a period in the past is re-forecast and it is verified that this indeed holds. In seasonal forecasting a reliable forecast is often constructed on the basis of a multi-model ensemble, as forecast systems tend to be overconfident (they underestimate the actual uncertainties).

As the climate change signal is now emerging from the noise in many regions of the world, the verification of regional past trends in climate models has become possible. The question is whether the recent CMIP5 multi-model ensemble, interpreted as a probability forecast, is reliable.

As there is only one trend estimate per grid point, necessarily the verification has to be done spatially, over all regions of the world. The CMIP3 ensemble was analysed in this way by Räisänen (2007) and Yokohata et al. (2012). In the last few months three papers have appeared that approach this question for the CMIP5 ensemble with different methodologies: Bhend and Whetton (2013), van Oldenborgh et al. (2013) and Knutson et al (J. Climate, to appear).

All these studies reach similar conclusions. For temperature: the ensemble is reliable if one considers the full signal, but this is due to the differing global mean temperature responses (Total Climate Responses, TCR).

When the global mean temperature trend is factored out, the ensemble becomes overconfident: the spatial variability is too low. For annual mean precipitation the ensemble is also found to be overconfident. Precipitation trends in 3-month seasons have so much natural variability compared to the trends that the overconfidence is no longer visible.

These conclusions match with earlier work using the Detection and Attribution framework showing that the continental-averaged temperature trends can be attributed to anthropogenic factors (eg Stott et al, 2003), but zonally-averaged precipitation trends are not reproduced correctly by climate models (Zhang et al, 2007).

The spatial patterns for annual mean temperature and precipitation are shown in figure 1 below. The trends are defined as regressions on the modelled global mean temperature, i.e., we plot B(x,y) in

(1) T(x,y,t) = B(x,y) T_global,mod(t) + η(x,y,t)

This definition excludes the TCR and minimises the noise η(x,y,t) better than a trend that is linear in time.

Figure 1: Panels a and b show the trend in annual mean GISTEMP temperature analysis and the GPCC precipitation analysis over 1950–2011 defined by Eq.(1). Panels c and d show the same for the CMIP5 multi-model mean (historical+RCP4.5). Panels e and f show the percentile of the observed trend in the CMIP5 ensemble of trends. Coloured areas denote where the observed trend is in the tails of the ensemble. Panels g and h collect these percentiles (north of 45ºS) in rank histograms. The top and bottom 5% should only occur 5%, but in fact two to four times more of the map is in these percentiles. The grey area in the rank histograms denotes the 90% confidence inerval.

The conclusion that the ensemble is somewhat overconfident is based on the bottom two panels. These show that over 10%–20% of the maps the observed trends are in the top and bottom 5% of the ensemble. For a reliable ensemble this should be 5%. The deviations are larger than we obtain from the differences between the models (the grey area).

On the maps above the areas where the modelled trends fall in the tails of the ensemble are coloured. In part of these areas the discrepancies are due to random weather fluctuations, but a large fraction has to be ascribed to forecast system biases. (The results do not depend strongly on the observational dataset used, with HadCRUT4.1.1.0, NCDC LOST and CRU TS 3.1 we obtain very similar figures, see the Supplementary Material of van Oldenborgh et al).

These forecast system biases can arise in three ways.

First, the models may underestimate low-frequency natural variability. Knutson et al show that natural variability in the warm pool around the Maritime Continent is indeed underestimated up to time scales of >10 years, contributing to the discrepancy there in Fig.1e. In most other regions the models have the correct or too large variability.

Another cause may be the incorrect specification of local forcings such as aerosols or land use. As an example, visibility observations suggest that aerosol loadings in Europe where higher in winter in the 1950s than assumed in CMIP5. This influences temperature via mist and fog (Vautard et al, 2009) and other mechanisms.

Finally, the model response to the changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols and other forcings may be incorrect. The trend differences in Asia and Canada are mainly in winter and could be due to problems in simulating the stable boundary layers there.

To conclude, climate models can and have been verified against observations in a property that is most important for many users: the regional trends. This verification shows that many large-scale features of climate change are being simulated correctly, but smaller-scale observed trends are in the tails of the ensemble more often than predicted by chance fluctuations. The CMIP5 multi-model ensemble can therefore not be used as a probability forecast for future climate. We have to present the useful climate information in climate model ensembles in other ways until these problems have been resolved.

References

1. T.N. Palmer, F.J. Doblas-Reyes, A. Weisheimer, and M.J. Rodwell, "Toward Seamless Prediction: Calibration of Climate Change Projections Using Seasonal Forecasts", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 89, pp. 459-470, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-89-4-459
2. J. RÄISÄNEN, "How reliable are climate models?", Tellus A, vol. 59, pp. 2-29, 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0870.2006.00211.x
3. T. Yokohata, J.D. Annan, M. Collins, C.S. Jackson, M. Tobis, M.J. Webb, and J.C. Hargreaves, "Reliability of multi-model and structurally different single-model ensembles", Climate Dynamics, vol. 39, pp. 599-616, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00382-011-1203-1
4. J. Bhend, and P. Whetton, "Consistency of simulated and observed regional changes in temperature, sea level pressure and precipitation", Climatic Change, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0691-2
5. G.J. van Oldenborgh, F.J. Doblas Reyes, S.S. Drijfhout, and E. Hawkins, "Reliability of regional climate model trends", Environmental Research Letters, vol. 8, pp. 014055, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/014055
6. P.A. Stott, "Attribution of regional-scale temperature changes to anthropogenic and natural causes", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 30, 2003. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2003GL017324
7. X. Zhang, F.W. Zwiers, G.C. Hegerl, F.H. Lambert, N.P. Gillett, S. Solomon, P.A. Stott, and T. Nozawa, "Detection of human influence on twentieth-century precipitation trends", Nature, vol. 448, pp. 461-465, 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature06025
8. R. Vautard, P. Yiou, and G.J. van Oldenborgh, "Decline of fog, mist and haze in Europe over the past 30 years", Nature Geoscience, vol. 2, pp. 115-119, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo414

Some of my friends have made a film, Thin Ice, which tells the story of CO2 and climate from the standpoint of the climate scientists who are out there in the trenches trying to figure out what is going on. I have a small role in the film myself, and I am sure RealClimate readers will recognize many more familiar faces. One of the many things I like about this film is that it puts a human face on climate science. It’s harder to demonize people when you feel you know them, and realize that in the end they’re not that different from you and your neighbors (except maybe they know more about CO2 and climate than some others you might meet).

A description of the project, including trailers and clips can be found here . The film will be available during Earth Week for free streaming. Or even better, you can arrange a free screening for your group (details for obtaining a free Earth Week download for screening are available here ). Read below the fold for more information

Here is what Peter Barrett, the team leader for the film project has to say:

“A group of us have produced another film about climate science, but in this one scientists do the talking.

Some are well known to you, others not so, but all talk with passion , concern and some humour about their work. The film is mainly the work of geologist and photographer Simon Lamb and science documentary producer David Sington, DOX Productions, who worked together on Earth Story (BBC Horizon, 1998). The story line is Simon’s journey as a geologist. He has heard the terrible things the press have been reporting about his climate science colleagues, so he decides to take his camera and find out what’s really happening.

The key messages from this 73 minute film are that scientists can be trusted and that ultimately we have to quit using fossil fuels. We do not try and say how this should be done, but we hope that the film will lead audiences into some deeper thinking on the issue and perhaps even a shift toward solutions. Check out the website www.thiniceclimate.org , where you can see the 3 minute trailer. The website contains another 3 hours of supplementary material in 37 short video clips about various aspects of climate science.

We’d like your help in spreading these messages by hosting a screening in your community. It’s also a chance to talk with them afterwards through a panel discussion/Q&A. We are making the film available as a free download (2GB) for a 2 ½ day period after Earth Day starts in New Zealand – just complete the Screenings Information sheet attached and e-mail to thiniceclimate@vuw.ac.nz so we can post it on the website and send you download instructions. The film will also be available free for streaming to those who are happy just to watch it at home.

We’ve also attached a one-pager on the project and a poster

Feel free to pass this message on. Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Peter Barrett for the Thin Ice Team

PS While the film is in English with a range of accents we’ll have versions with subtitles in English, Mandarin, Spanish, French and German.”

Kerr (2013) recently provided a critical review of regional climate models (“RCMs”). I think his views has caused a stir in the regional climate model community. So what’s the buzz all about?

RCMs provide important input to many climate services, for which there is a great deal of vested interest on all levels. On the international stage, high-level talks lead to the establishment of a Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) during the World Climate Conference 3 (WCC3) in Geneva 2009.

Other activities include CORDEX, and the International Conference on Climate Services 2 (ICCS2). On a more regional multi-national level, there are several activities on climate services which have just started, and only in Europe there are several big projects: JPI-Climate, SPECS, EUPORIAS, IMPACT2C, ECLISE, CLIM-RUN, IN-ENES, BALTEX, and ENSEMBLES. Many of these project rely on global and regional climate models.

There are well-known limitations to both global and regional climate models, and many of these are described in Maslin and Austin (2012) as “uncertainty”. Maslin and Austin highlighted several reasons for why the regional-scale predictions made by these models are only tentative, and Racherla et al. (2012) observed that:

there is not a strong relationship between skill in capturing climatological means and skill in capturing climate change.

They acknowledged that the problem is not so much the RCMs, but the global climate models’ (GCMs) ability to predict climate changes on a regional scale. This finding is not surprising, however, it is important to establish this fact for the record.

Racherla et al. assessed the skill of an RCM and a GCMs, based on simulated and observed temperature and precipitation for two 10-year time slices (December 1968-December 1978 and December 1995 – December 2005). While they realised that estimating change from two different ten-year intervals is prone to errors caused by spontaneous natural year-to-year (and even slower undulations in temperature and precipitation – e.g. the AMO), they argued that such set-up was common in many climate change studies.

This aspect takes us back to our previous post about the role of large-scale atmospheric circulation associated with natural and ‘internal’ variations. The GCMs may in fact be able to reproduce many of the year-to-year variations and the slower variations, however, we know that these fluctuations are not synchronised with the real world.

The apparent lack of skill may not necessarily be a shortcoming of the individual climate models – indeed, they successfully compute the sensitivity of the subsequent large-scale atmospheric flow to small differences in their starting point.

These variations come on top of the historical long-term climate change trend. In the past, the regional natural variations have often been more pronounced than the regional climate change, and if they are out of synch, then we should expect neither a RCM nor a GCM to be able to predict the change between the two decades.

Hence, the fact that the past has been blurred by natural year-to-year variations does not invalidate the climate models. A proper evaluation of skill would involve looking at longer time scales or many different model runs. One important message is that one should never use a single GCM for making future regional climate projections.

For proper validation, we must look at a large number of different simulations with GCMs, and then apply a statistical test to see if the observed changes are outside the range of changes predicted by the models. By running many models, we get a statistical sample of natural variations following different courses.

Running RCMs is computationally expensive and it may not be possible to let them compute results for many decades or many GCMs. However, empirical-statistical downscaling (ESD) is an alternative that does not require much computing power. ESD and RCMs have different strengths and weaknesses, and thus complement each other.

A comparison between RCM results (coloured symbols with error bars) and ESD results (pink region showing the 90% interval for the model ensemble). Here the ESD was applied to many CMIP3 models forced by historic and future (SRES A1b) greenhouse gas emissions, and for the entire time period 1900-2100. The actual observations are shown as black symbols. From Førland et al. (2012)

The figure above, taken from Førland et al. (2012) shows a comparison between ESD and RCM results for the Arctic island Spitsbergen (a part of the Svalbard archipelago), where the ESD has been applied to the entire 1900-2100 period as well as 48 different GCM simulations.

Racherla et al. (2012) also discussed another concern, which is how RCMs and GCMs are combined. Since RCM only cover a limited space, the values at their boundaries must be specified explicitly (referred to as ‘boundary conditions‘), by the results from a coarser GCM or observation-based data (reanalysis).

The GCMs used to force the RCMs, however, do not account for situations where they and the RCMs describe a different states (e.g. precipitation or wind). This problem arises in the situation called upscaling, where small features grow in spatial extent (not atypical for chaotic systems).

It is possible to remedy some of the inconsistencies between the large-scale flow in the RCMs and the embedding GCMs by imposing so-called ‘nudging’.

Furthermore, imposing boundary values on models like RCMs may also sometimes cause problems such as spurious oscillations, and are by some labelled as an “ill-posed problem“. These problems can nevertheless be alleviated by using a “buffer-zone” along the RCM’s bundaries.

A finer grid mesh in the RCMs gives an improved description of mountains over that in the GCM, and introduces further details sugh as higher mountain peaks. This improvement alters the way air is forced upward over mountains, compared to the coarser GCM, and the amount precipitated out (‘orographic precipitation’).

Different ways of computing the cloud processes (cloud parametrisation) affect the condensation of vapour, the outgoing long-wave radiation, and precipitation.

A finer spatial grid also affects the wind structure and the evaporation near the surface (which depends on the wind speed). Furthermore, the energy transported in the atmosphere through eddies may not correspond between models with fine and coarse resolutions respectively.

Such differences between RCMs and GCMs may lead to inconsistent physics, however, are these concerns important, or just second-order effects?

Once again, a comparison between ESD and RCM results will provide some idea, and in many cases, there is a fair degree of agreement between these downscaling strategies. The problems with RCMs are absent in ESD (which have different caveats), however, the important question is whether the GCMs, used to drive both, provide a realistic description of the regional climate.

The figure above indicates that the GCMs (and the ESD results) underestimate some of the local natural variations in the past – which probably are connected with the Arctic sea ice (Benestad et al., 2002). The GCMs used in these calculations do not seem to capture the recent decline in the Arctic sea-ice cover (Stroeve et al., 2012).

Another problem may be that the RCMs do not represent the precipitation statistics well, even when data based on real observations (the ERA40 reanalysis) are used to provide the boundary values (Orskaug et al., 2011). For climate services, it is important that the precipitation statistics is realistic, and in the past, systematic biases have been “fixed” (in a not very satisfactory way) by bias-correction.

Boberg and Christensen (2012) presented one type of validation analysis, that may partially meet the concerns expressed in Kerr (2013). They reported that many RCMs overestimate the temperature in warm and dry climates (e.g. around the Mediterranean). This temperature bias was greater with higher temperature.

Most of the GCMs too had similar temperature biases, suggesting that the deficiencies seen in the RCM results were not different to those in the GCMs. Furthermore, these deficiencies cannot be explained in terms of the differences between the measured temperatures and the data used as boundary conditions for the RCMs (see figure below).

The mean temperature from the thermometer measurements (E-OBS data; upper) and the mean difference between the E-OBS and reanalysis data used as boundary conditions for the RCMs (ERA40; below). There is no indication of systematic large differences in warmer regions, and the largest differences seen here are in the mountains, where the observations are made at different altitudes than the surface elevation used in the reanalysis.

According to Kerr (2013), the RCMs need a more thorough validation, addressing the question whether they are able to describe changes in the local climate.

It is also important to verify that they actually provide a consistent representation of the physics when embedded in the GCMs. Do the energy and mass (moisture) fluxes across the lateral and top boundaries of the RCM correspond with the fluxes through the cross-sections in the GCMs corresponding to the RCM’s boundaries?

There are also new initiatives on proper validation of regional climate modelling (ESD and RCMs), and the European project VALUE represents one notable example.

(p.s. One of the references below has wrong author and title, but correct link and DOI).

References

1. R.A. Kerr, "Forecasting Regional Climate Change Flunks Its First Test", Science, vol. 339, pp. 638-638, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.339.6120.638
2. M. Maslin, and P. Austin, "Uncertainty: Climate models at their limit?", Nature, vol. 486, pp. 183-184, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/486183a
3. P.N. Racherla, D.T. Shindell, and G.S. Faluvegi, "The added value to global model projections of climate change by dynamical downscaling: A case study over the continental U.S. using the GISS-ModelE2 and WRF models", Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, vol. 117, pp. n/a-n/a, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2012JD018091
4. E.J. Førland, R. Benestad, I. Hanssen-Bauer, J.E. Haugen, and T.E. Skaugen, "Temperature and Precipitation Development at Svalbard 1900–2100", Advances in Meteorology, vol. 2011, pp. 1-14, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2011/893790
5. N. Roberts, "An observational study of multiple cloud head structure in the fastex iop 16 cyclone", Atmospheric Science Letters, vol. 3, pp. 59-70, 2002. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/asle.2002.0050
6. J.C. Stroeve, V. Kattsov, A. Barrett, M. Serreze, T. Pavlova, M. Holland, and W.N. Meier, "Trends in Arctic sea ice extent from CMIP5, CMIP3 and observations", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 39, pp. n/a-n/a, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2012GL052676
7. E. ORSKAUG, I. SCHEEL, A. FRIGESSI, P. GUTTORP, J.E. HAUGEN, O.E. TVEITO, and O. HAUG, "Evaluation of a dynamic downscaling of precipitation over the Norwegian mainland", Tellus A, vol. 63, pp. 746-756, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0870.2011.00525.x
8. F. Boberg, and J.H. Christensen, "Overestimation of Mediterranean summer temperature projections due to model deficiencies", Nature Climate Change, vol. 2, pp. 433-436, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1454

This year, the Geological Society of America is rolling out their SWITCH Energy Awareness campaign . The centerpiece of the campaign is a documentary film, SWITCH, which purports to be about the need for a transformation in the world’s energy systems. Recently, I attended the Chicago premier of the film, presented as part of the Environmental Film Series of the Lutheran School of Theology. I had high hopes for this film. They were disappointed. Given the mismatch between what the movie promises and what it delivers, it would be more aptly titled, “BAIT AND SWITCH.”

The film is soporifically narrated by Scott Tinker , of the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, who was also the major content advisor for the film. This a guy who has never met a fossil fuel he didn’t like. Dramatic footage of giant coal seams being merrily blasted to bits and carted off by hefty he-men driving 400 ton trucks are interspersed with wide-eyed kid-gloves interviews of energy-industry workers and executives in which Tinker looks like he’s overdosed on Quaaludes by way of preparation. There are a few segments on renewables thrown in, and even the token environmentalist or two, but the impression you get over most of the film is that only the fossil fuel guys have the right stuff.

Fossil fuels are unrelentingly portrayed as powerful, cool and desirable. Problems are swept under the rug, or given only the barest mention, mostly as a prelude to casual dismissal. Shots of the giant scar of an open pit coal mine in the Powder River basin cut over to shots of a credulous Tinker nodding like a bobble-headed doll while the foreman explains to him how it will all be all right because they saved the topsoil and will put it all back the way it was. Maybe that’s true, but given the intuitive implausibility of recreating a living, breathing ecosystem from the lunar lanscape the mining created, one would like to see at least a little probing of how well that all works out. Imagine Tinker coming upon a bunch of kids fiddling with a disemboweled flayed cat. This is how I imagine the interview would play out:

TINKER: Looks like you guys got yourself a dead cat there!
BOYS: Yep, did it ourselves. But dontcha worry, we saved the fur, and we’re gonna put everything back JUST THE WAY IT WAS!
TINKER: (glassy-eyed and nodding) Why, that’s just AMAZING!

Be that as it may, you never get to see or hear anything about mountain top removal coal mining (hint: they don’t save the mountaintop and put it back). On a tour of the Alberta Tar Sands, you get to see the insides of an antiseptic lab where happy technicians reverently pass around an adorable little flask of dilute bitumen (it looks so pure don’t you just want to drink it right down) while Tinker gapes in awe, but you never get to see the vast scale of environmental destruction wrought by tar sands mining outside. And while the film eventually gets around to loving natural gas, it skirts around the paradox that the tar sands consume a relatively low-carbon clean fuel (natural gas) that could be used directly as transportation fuel, to produce a dirty high carbon product (dilute bitumen and petcoke). Happy drillers on a mighty Shell offshore platform duly tsk-tsk about the big Oopsie! that was the Deepwater Horizon blowout, while assuring viewers that they’ve got that one licked, and golly no that couldn’t happen to us. Why, they even have Internet so they can get advice from the mainland if they need it!

Renewables, in contrast, are portrayed in a way that makes them seem wimpy — mainly by making inappropriate comparisons between small scale distributed power production sites and massive centralized power plants or oil production facilities. Tinker makes a lot of noise about the fact that the solar thermal site he visits in Spain was clouded over during the whole time they were filming it, which is probably meant to teach some lesson about intermittency, but instead leaves the viewer with a vague impression that renewables are not to be trusted. The film manages to say some nice things about the benefits of wind power in West Texas, and about Icelandic geothermal power, but on the whole the potential for renewable power comes off as fairly marginal, maybe the sort of thing little countries like Denmark or Iceland or Norway can rely on, but not big important places like us.

The truly fatal flaw of SWITCH, however, is that it never comes right out and explains why it is so critical for the world’s energy systems to switch off of fossil fuels, and why time is of the essence in making the switch. There are some oblique references to CO2 emissions, but no mention of the essentially irreversible effect of these emissions on climate, of the need to keep cumulative emissions under a trillion tonnes of carbon if we are to have a chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees C, or of how short the remaining time is before we hit this limit at the rate we are going. On the contrary, SWITCH positively revels in the idea that fossil fuels will never run out, given a high enough price (which, by the way, is probably not true). The clueless Washington Post review of SWITCH shows how utterly the film has failed in what should have been its prime educational mission. The reviewer writes “Why not continue to use coal and oil while developing other energy sources and technologies?” The answer, my friend, is that CO2 is forever, and its effects are not nearly so pretty as diamonds. But neither the reviewer, nor any other viewer, could be expected to learn this from SWITCH.

You begin to suspect something is really wrong when the first guy on screen to say something about climate is Richard Muller, of Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project fame, who managed to convert himself from a climate change denialist to a lukewarmer by arduously and noisily rediscovering what every working climate scientist already knew to be true. What Muller has to say about climate is that burning fossil fuels will cause the Earth to warm by about 2 degrees (“if the calculations are right”), but it’s going to be too expensive to stop it so we’ll just learn to live with it. There are so many things wrong with Muller’s statement that I hardly know where to begin. First, it is far from clear that a 2 degree warmer world is one that we can adapt to, or that the damages caused by such a climate would not overwhelm the costs of keeping it from happening in the first place. Second, if climate sensitivity is at the high end of the IPCC range or even beyond, we could be facing far greater than 2 degrees of warming even if we hold the line at cumulative emissions of a trillion tonnes of carbon. Third, even if climate sensitivity is at the middle of the IPCC range, that 2 degree figure assumes that we hold the line at burning one trillion tonnes of carbon (and we’re already halfway there). There are probably enough economically recoverable fossil fuels to go way beyond a trillion tonnes, which would take us to truly scary territory, especially in conjunction with high climate sensitivity. It gets worse once you realize that Muller’s cheery dismissal of the problem is essentially all you’re going to hear about the connection between fossil fuel burning and climate disruption. OK, so if the producer’s aim is for this film to play well in Nebraska, you can understand why he might not have wanted Tinker to interview somebody like Jim Hansen who’s been on the front lines of the climate wars and spent time in pokey for it, but how about Susan Solomon or Isaac Held, or Myles Allen or Richard Alley? How about any real climate scientist at all who could give an honest appraisal of what the world is going to be like if we continue unrestrained burning of fossil fuels — especially if fossil fuels never run out, as this film so cheerily predicts.

SWITCH is made to appeal to fans of an “all of the above” energy strategy, but it never confronts the fact that if we want to preserve a livable climate, “all” simply cannot include continued (let alone expanded) use of fossil fuels for very much longer. The biggest challenge we face is not learning how to extract every last scrap of fossil fuel, but learning how to leave most of it in the ground. This fault pervades every nook and cranny of the film. When discussing carbon capture and storage (CCS), an interviewee quite rightly declares that the only clean coal would be coal burned with CCS; Tinker goes on to lament that we could make coal clean, but it’s too expensive so we won’t do it. The only conclusion to be drawn from this would be that in that case coal has to be crossed off the energy menu. But instead Tinker moves on without ever giving a thought to this discomforting conclusion. And it is not very comforting to hear Steve Koonin (former chief scientist for BP/Amoco and currently Obama’s Undersecretary of Energy) and Ernest Moniz (head of MIT’s energy program, Obama’s pick to head the DOE, and a major natural gas booster) spend so much time on screen defending fossil fuels. “It can’t be all bad,” says Koonin, in reference to coal. Well, actually, from here on in, coal is all bad, and the less of it anybody burns, the better.

The segment on the developing world fails because it never addresses the question of what pattern of development could sustainably provide a decent standard of living for the worlds’ poor. Instead, in essence, it asks the question of what it would take to remake the world in Scott Tinker’s image — with all the energy usage that entails. In fact, you never get to see anybody but Tinker’s family using energy in their home, so you get no impression of how much access to a mere 200 watts of reliable power could transform the lives of poor Indians or Africans. At the outset of the film, Tinker arrogantly sets up his own energy consumption in his life as a Texas professor driving his oversized car from his sprawling house in the sprawling suburbs to wherever he is going in the course of his day as the measure of the energy required to support “a person” throughout the rest of the film. SWITCH shows no awareness that living in cities in and of itself leads to a lower carbon footprint, and that sound urban planning can multiply this advantage. This is an especially glaring omission, since most of the world’s people now live in cities, and the proportion is set to increase in the future. SWITCH never tells you that China could attain the standard of living of France without increasing its emissions at all, just by increasing the carbon efficiency of its economy to the current French level; nor does it tell you about China’s growing efforts in that direction, including most recently, a carbon tax. What SWITCH teaches you about the developing world is: They’re all gonna want cars and big houses like us, and they won’t go low-carbon because it’s too expensive, they’ll never pay for it and we won’t pay for them to do it either, so their emissions will soon swamp ours and nothing we do to reduce our own emissions will make much difference. It’s pretty much the standard “But … China!” argument promulgated by opponents of action to protect our climate. The fact that we will all pay for the consequences of a wrecked climate never figures into any of the costs mentioned in this movie.

SWITCH plays Pollyanna on energy technologies to such an extent that I found it off-putting even when the film was advocating things I basically agree with. I think cheap, fracked natural gas has made a useful contribution to reducing the growth rate of US CO2 emissions, but I cringe when SWITCH parrots the industry-sponsored myth that we have a sure 100 year supply of natural gas (we don’t ). Further, as Michael Levi’s cogent study points out, natural gas has at best a very short-lived role as a bridge fuel. Moreover, if cheap natural gas kills off renewables and next generation nuclear, it is not only a short bridge, but a bridge to nowhere. I think expansion of nuclear energy has an essential role to play in decarbonizing our energy supply, and I greatly admire the success France has had with their transition to nuclear electricity. But I doubt I would have found the credulous interviews with American and French nuclear workers particularly reassuring if I weren’t already familiar with the issues from other sources. Even the segment on Norwegian hydropower, with which SWITCH auspiciously opens, manages to give the false impression that most Nordic hydropower is free-run hydro with a relatively light footprint on the environment; In fact, Norwegian and Swedish hydropower rely on a massive network of dams and reservoirs which have disrupted the lives of indigenous peoples killed off salmon runs, and destroyed whole ecosystems. When the Suorva dam created Akkajaure in Northern Sweden, it drowned a biologically diverse chain of lakes and wetlands and turned off what used to be Europe’s largest waterfall.There is no question that hydropower is an important component of a carbon-free energy supply, but it is not helpful to sweep its environmental costs under the rug. Hydropower provides an example of the kind of difficult choice about conflicting environmental goods that global warming forces upon us. Given the facts, some of us might prefer a few more nukes to a few more Suorvas.

Way at the end of the film Tinker finally gets around to the benefits of energy conservation, but by then it’s too late. The message has already gotten through that we’re really good at fossil energy so why bother, especially since the developing world is going to burn them up anyway? None of the incomprehensible moving lines on graphs which are supposed to make the case for the importance of conservation make a dent in this impression. Tinker’s big ideas about conservation seem laughably puny: a new water heater, a bit of attic insulation, and driving his kids to school in … golf carts! One wonders what’s wrong with his kids, or his neighborhood, that they can’t walk or ride their bikes.

It would be easy to shrug off this film if it were just a matter of another hack with a minicam following Bjorn Lomborg around, but this has the backing of the GSA. The GSA has its share of members in the fossil fuel industries, but it is a respectable scientifically sound organization, which has taken a decent position on global warming. The GSA has not only blessed the film with its prestige, but is heavily promoting it as the anchor of its energy awareness campaign, with solicitation for Inconvenient Truth style “ambassadors” to promote the film’s agenda, and even a K-12 educational component. I think I do understand how the film took a wrong turn somewhere along the line. If you want to change minds and touch the heartstrings of a new audience rather than just preaching to the choir, it is probably more effective to find common ground in talking about solutions rather than by scaring the pants off people by talking about the scary consequences of global warming. I’m entirely sympathetic to this approach. But there’s a difference between positive messaging and losing sight of the nature of the problem that needs to be solved, to the point that one even loses sight of the message that needs to be conveyed. That is where SWITCH not only takes a wrong turn, but drives right off the cliff.

The GSA ought to distance itself from this fiasco. Schools should avoid it like the plague. Without being kept on life-support by the GSA, the film is so boring it will probably die a natural death. This film is a lot like those “duck and cover” movies that I saw as a kid, from which I learned that I could survive a nuclear strike if I put my head down against the lockers and covered up with a winter coat (just hope The Bomb doesn’t get dropped in summer). The message of SWITCH is the climate equivalent of the infamous quote by T.K. Jones, Reagan’s civil defense planner, that when it comes to nuclear war “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it” . In the case of SWITCH, the message that gets across is that if we keep figuring out ever more ingenious ways of extracting fossil fuels, and maybe burn more natural gas, insulate our attics and drive our kids to school in golf carts, everything’s gonna be OK. We have a right to expect better from the GSA, and the sooner SWITCH disappears from the public discourse, the better.

Open thread for April…