Bishop Hill Science says one thing, scientists another
Jul 3, 2015 BBC Climate: WG2 Anyone would think there was a big climate conference coming up, because the BBC is pumping out the climate propaganda left right and centre. A couple of nights ago we had Kirsty Wark fawning all over Chris Rapley on Newsnight (from 40 mins) and wondering why good people like him weren't making the policy decisions. Today we have Roger Harrabin on ocean acidification (video here).
The samples are chalky white for millions of years from the fossils of tiny shellfish. That's until this dramatic point 55 million years ago [the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum; PETM], when the oceans suddenly got hotter and more acidic and the shellfish disappeared. It took shellfish 160,000 years to recover and scientists say humans are changing the seas ten times faster than at this catastrophic event...
We then get a brief interview with Professor Daniela Schmidt of Bristol University (the recipient, like her colleague Stefan Lewandowsky, of a Royal Society research fellowship). Here's what she had to say:
My children will be alive in 2100. I would like them to be able to swim above a coral reef and enjoy its beauty. I would like them to be able to eat mussels and oysters and crayfish and if we continue to release CO2 at the current rate this is not going to happen.
Golly. Sounds pretty scary eh? Fortunately I was somewhat reassured by this paper in Geology, by the same Professor Schmidt, which discusses the same abiotic zones in the oceans at the time of the PETM. As the paper draws to a close, Prof Schmidt says this:
[Recent] papers highlight the migration of phytoplankton to follow their niche, and suggest that the extreme warmth led to an absence of calcifiers in tropical waters. Intriguingly, though, this abiotic zone appears several tens of thousands of years after the onset of the extreme temperatures and the acidification, is associated with changes in lithology, and follows a gap in the record.
If the abiotic zone appears tens of thousands of years after the temperature rises, I'm wondering why, when interviewed by Roger Harrabin, Professor Schmidt says she is worried about whether her children are going to see coral reefs and eat shellfish. Perhaps the excitement went to her head.
The rest of the paragraph is worth a look too:
This potentially slow response contradicts everything we know about ecosystem response to decadal temperature variability; for example, the North Atlantic Oscillation (Beaugrand et al., 2009; Beaugrand et al., 2002) or the California upwelling system (Chavez et al., 2003; Chavez et al., 1999). Aze et al. explain the abiotic zone by comparing it to the temperature adaptation of modern foraminifers. One would expect, though, that Paleogene foraminifers which evolved in an ∼15 °C warmer environment than today (Huber and Caballero, 2011) were generally adapted to these warmer temperatures. As so often, new papers ask more questions than they answer, such as: why are these abiotic zones not found at other open ocean sites nearer the equator? If the high-end temperatures are reasonable estimates, these might point to physiological limits at which enzymes start denaturalizing. Given the high metabolic rates in response to these high temperatures, the size of the supply of food needed to sustain the organisms is a pressing question and might have played a role in a regional exclusion. More work is needed, though, to move from assessments of past climates to predictive models for policy makers of the impact of future climate change on marine ecosystems, such as the cascading effects of these potential abiotic zones on food webs.
So the abiotic zone (or is it zones?) are not even seen at all tropical locations! Astonishing. There is quite a lot more to this story than the BBC would like you to know, isn't there?
I'm not holding my breath for a correction though: Roger doesn't correct things. The BBC will run with it all day.
Reader Comments (87)
A neutral observer might think that even the staff of BBC might be embarrassed at how biased its propaganda is.
It took an estimated 20,000 years for the 6 degree warming to happen, rather than, say a couple of centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
"if we continue to release CO2 at the current rate this is not going to happen"
Doug will lecture us about uncertainties in 3...2...1..
For the record ole Roger has written about dying corals since 1999, and acidification since 2005. In other news: mental sanity checks not usually carried out before entering the journalistic profession.
I'm not sure this changes anything about my point Doug?
There's a bit in the report where Roger says it's warming ten times faster now than during the PETM. I'm assuming they are comparing a 30-year trend to a 20,000-year one. I'm sure they could get a scarier figure if they took a 30-day trend and compared it to the 20,000-year one!
Doug, it's called the "last time it was..." trick.
Eg, "the last time it was 400 ppm CO2 sea levels were 200 feet higher." The user of the trick usually forgets to mention how long 400 ppm CO2 (or any such factor) lasted in order to produce the change.
The BBC are still pushing this, as expected. Perhaps you should email a copy of your piece to Harrabin, with a copy to the producer of the programme, and suggest there be a correction. It is typical of the Beeb's environmental team to act in such a sloppy manner. Of course they will never correct such biased reporting.
If you pay the licence fee, you are supporting a lying, propagandist organisation. As Paxman said, they have the mentality of 14-year olds.
It is morally wrong to pay the licence fee.
As I keep saying "Science" is now being used a group name for academics in almost any subject which uses maths (from economics to business studies to cooking to climate).
What sceptics mean by "science" is the scientific method: hypothesis, testing, data, impartiality.
What those like the BBC now mean by "science" ... is the eco-political views of academics who know more maths than they do.
There is no correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and the "global average temperature"; likewise there is no correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and the average alkalinity of the oceans. These so-called scientists are committing fraud (deliberately misleading people) and should be prosecuted.
Just a final thought, the BBC and Guardian are now very much out on a limb with their climate propaganda and unlike a few yeas ago, most people will just switch over from the BBC when it starts its eco-diarrhoea.
Yes, we grew up when the BBC had credibility because it was the only "impartial" channel as the others were commercial. But kids these days are far more savy as they are constantly bombarded by adverts on the TV, in games and many other places.
My kids never grew up with the idea the BBC were special or any more trusted than any other channel pushing stuff at them. Indeed, I honestly cannot say when I last saw my children watching the BBC (it's usually Dave).
With so many channels filled to the brim with advertising and product placement , people are far more aware of when someone is pushing propaganda at them and far more immune to that propaganda.
And the more blatant the propaganda - the more people recognise it as advertising/propaganda and the less people listen! So, there's very much a law of diminishing returns and far from increasing support by this zealous propaganda campaign, the BBC is probably undermining the credibility of not only itself, but also the climate scam.
Last night this story started off with the old CO2 vents, these allow scientists to study the effects of high CO2 in the water, but nobody seems to ask what else is being emitted by these vents, such as sulphur. Don't suppose sulphuric acid has got anything to do with the life near these vents.
The other howler was Harrabin's worried look when showing sea-bed cores around 55 million years ago, with no mention of what else was happening then.
BBC environment reporting is shameless activist-green propaganda.
Very, very, very suddenly? Extremely suddenly? Horrendously suddenly?
Hype and tosh.
Andrew, what a strange assumption.
Even taking the conservative century scale warming of 0.8 degc/century, this is more than twenty five times faster than the 0.03 degc/century estimated for the PETM.
The article you link to looks more like a comment on the ability to get absolute temperatures in deep-time records than an in depth research paper on the biology to me.
Life and, necessary enzymes, already exist comfortably at higher temperatures, so that is waffle.
BS, and they know it. Increased solar UV levels are provably damaging, but currently unfashionable where the explanation can't be attributable to CO2.
The BBC has also put 'the oceans are doomed again' up on their website. (They also seem to have been enabling comments again more frequently.)
I thought Richard Black left the BBC so he could save the oceans elsewhere, so why are they still spending license fee money saving the oceans in-house?. As a suggestion, perhaps the announced job cuts could be applied to the ocean-saving department.
Someone forgot to proof-read the paper: it should be 'denaturing', not 'denaturalizing'
Doug, a warming rate higher than 0.8C was observed in 1910-140 when human CO2 was quite low. Clearly Mother Nature is out to kill us all. ;)
does anybody else believe that had the rate of warming been 0.8degC/century in the PETM, we would be able to discern it from 0.03degC/century, 55 fracking million years later?
this seems another episode of "maths eludes climate scientists"
in other words...being able to discern a century 55.8 million years ago means having the capacity to resolve temporal changes with a precision of one part in 558,000.
1. Can we do that?
2. If we can do that, doesn't that mean we should be reasonably certain of century-scale changes in the last 55.8 million years?
3. If that's the case, why could Marcott et al only do their graph with a 300-y resolution, even if only covering the last 12,000 years or so?
4. What is more likely...that the current warming, twice during the last 100 years, has by far surpassed anything seen in the last 100 million years, or that we do not have the tools to watch how things unfolded in the past with enough precision to understand them?
By all means, if 0.03degC/century is the best estimate for the PETM warming, one should say that and use it. But the mundanely naïve error of comparing it to a completely different time period, regarding which our resolution capabilities are far far better, please, leave it to those who don't know about metrology.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.... It always amazes me that when underwater footage is shown of coral reefs, they always look remarkably healthy and vibrant.
The "Acid Oceans" meme is quite simply lies and has been oft repeated for several years. It comes from NGO's such as National Resources Defence Council, taken on board by Jane Lubchenco when she was in charge at NOAA. She is a long time associate of John Holdren, Obama's "Science Czar" and of Paul Erhlich. One of her star turns was a now removed video on the NOAA website, showing how a piece of chalk will fizz in a flask of vinegar, as an analogy to CO2 in the oceans. Aspiring climate change scientists see the prospect of future grants.
For some background on where the "30% increase in acidification since before the Industrial Revolution" came from, check out "Acid Seas – Back To Basic" http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/acid_seas.html.
The claims of dying shell fish due to CO2 in the NW Pacific are still repeated even though the cause was shown to be bacterial contamination from sewage outflow.
" My children will be alive in 2100. I would like them to be able to swim above
a coral reef and enjoy its beauty. "
It is quite a long way from Bristol to the nearest coral reef, surely nobody should travel that far as the CO2 you likely generated on route might have killed the reef on route..
Presumably her children would be at least 85 in 2100. If she believes that they will survive that long having decarbonised our energy supply, a) how would they manage to get to a coral reef - Solar Impulse MMC? and b) would they be fit enough to swim above a coral reef anyway?
Omnologos @11:56. - what you said! Tick VG.
The OA delusion is simply the one the BBC is re-visiting today.
The lack of facts, truth or data to support the report is not a significant factor in their decision making.
Doug McNeall
"It took an estimated 20,000 years for the 6 degree warming to happen, rather than, say a couple of centuries."
I've seen recent estimates as 6,000 years (e.g., http://orca.cf.ac.uk/61765/). That is comparable to the time that the deep ocean takes to reach equilibrium after an abrupt jump in CO2 concentration, in recent AOGCMs. But the vast bulk (generally > 80%) of the temperature rise in the top 100 m of the coean occurs in less than two centuries.
It doesn't add up and Rob Burton, I'm assuming at some point her kids will start walking and will get there by 2100. Not sure that their first activity when they get there would be diving to see the coral but they'll almost certainly need a bath.
So, he's worried about the permanent destruction of the coral reefs which were supposedly permanently destroyed in the past but are somehow still around to be destroyed by CAGW which can only be prevented by immediate adoption of a certain political ideology to which the author just happens to subscribe fervently?
And people buy this nonsense?
No wonder advertising is such big business.
This paper, also by Prof Schmidt, is interesting.
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/23/9273.full.pdf
It speaks of a 35% reduction in species numbers 13.5k years after the start of the PETM. This was only for deep-sea species. Shallower level ones were unaffected.
Struggling to see how this leads (a) to a conclusion that temp/acidity to blame and (b) that we face doom this century.
Nic,
Seems plausible: I guess that's why they go for "ten times" the warming speed, as opposed to the naive "25 times" calculation that I posted earlier (I'm guessing that there is considerable uncertainty at this deep a time).
Doug
"My children will be alive in 2100. I would like them to be able to swim above
a coral reef and enjoy its beauty. "
Best they swim the coral reef soon. I doubt they will want to do it in 85 years.
Just checking, but you know the whole article is based on a new summary in Science, right?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33369024
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6243/aac4722.abstract
It's not *just* looking at predicting the near-term future using the deep past, but synthesises research from a bunch of different studies. So the deep past offers a useful comparison for context, but isn't the only source of information.
Doug
Quite amazing degree of certainty in that statement. Seems to be a trait in 'climate science' academics.
Whilst I wish the good Professor's children well, nobody actually knows how long anybody will live, well up to now they haven't. But obviously Professor Daniela Schmidt has such ability, I wonder if such skills are being relayed to students? Should gain their attention, start a lecture by telling each student how long they are going to live.
Come to think about it, maybe it is not such a newly found ability, seem to recall one or three of my lecturers predicting my immediate demise.
Nothing says the world is in danger as much as an article behind a paywall
And nothing says every piece of the puzzle miraculously falls into its exact place as much as a scientific article that says in the abstract A reduced emissions scenario—consistent with the Copenhagen Accord’s goal of a global temperature increase of less than 2°C—is much more favorable to the ocean.
From post-normal science to made-to-order.
Just looked for other Schmidt papers, this has a very level headed and reasoned argument. Vast changes appear to be a given here
http://m.geology.gsapubs.org/content/42/9/831.full
"
Some don’t like it hot
The oceans are experiencing vast environmental changes that are predicted
to accelerate in the future ( Stocker et al., 2013 ). Warming, acidification,
deoxygenation, and increased stratification act on a global scale, whereas
other factors such as eutrophication, the effect of changes in runoff on the
carbonate system, and pollution act more locally to regionally. "
Just looked for other Schmidt papers, this has a very level headed and reasoned argument. Vast changes appear to be a given here
http://m.geology.gsapubs.org/content/42/9/831.full
"
Some don’t like it hot
The oceans are experiencing vast environmental changes that are predicted
to accelerate in the future ( Stocker et al., 2013 ). Warming, acidification,
deoxygenation, and increased stratification act on a global scale, whereas
other factors such as eutrophication, the effect of changes in runoff on the
carbonate system, and pollution act more locally to regionally. "
Just looked for other Schmidt papers, this has a very level headed and reasoned argument. Vast changes appear to be a given here
http://m.geology.gsapubs.org/content/42/9/831.full
"
Some don’t like it hot
The oceans are experiencing vast environmental changes that are predicted
to accelerate in the future ( Stocker et al., 2013 ). Warming, acidification,
deoxygenation, and increased stratification act on a global scale, whereas
other factors such as eutrophication, the effect of changes in runoff on the
carbonate system, and pollution act more locally to regionally. "
Doug McNeall - "(I'm guessing that there is considerable uncertainty at this deep a time)."
I don't think a guess is necessary. I'd have thought 'considerable uncertainty' would be a given.
With this rapid increase in temperature and acidity, the Isle of Wight, a lump of chalk, will be dissolved in how long?
Bad news for property owners, but good news for those serving life sentences in the 2 high security prisons. The length of tunnel requiring to be dug gets shorter by the minute.
The White Cliffs of Dover will have to be renamed the Climate Science Wasteland of Kent, but at least Oysters will be openable with a silver spoon extracted from the mouth of a wealthy oceanographer.
Doug McNeall, with this new paper synthesising so much other reconstituted prefabricated science, how will it affect the price of fish?
And will fishfingers be coated with seaweed crumbs instead of bread?
Or is reconstituted prefabricated science better off in landfill, where it will do less damage than feared possible, if read by gullible journalists?
Could someone enlighten me.
If carbon dioxide is causing the acidification of the oceans and coral and shellfish will be harmed, why is this so?
I was under the impression that shells and coral are made up of calcium carbonate (CaCO3?) which represents 60% in terms of atoms and 40% in terms of weight of the dreaded carbon dioxide.
Am I wrong? I would add that I am not a chemist, and I last studied chmistry 50 odd years ago.
And to think there still many weeks before Paris , so it is only going to get worse .
The good news there is a real danger of them overdoing it and the reason that are going so overboard is the fear that this will we 'their last chance ' not the planets , the causes .
If Paris falls flat they it only go to head one way , and that is bad way for the alarmists.
Does Roger Harrabin ever visit this site? I seem to remember that he did so in the very early days. Perhaps he avoids it like the plague these days because I doubt if anyone here has a complimentary comment about BBC climate policy.
I would like to put this question to Mr Harrabin.
What is the current BBC guidance on reporting climate matters? It is very clear that it does not involve impartiality so perhaps you could explain what it does say. As reluctant (and possibly dwindling) licence payers we have a right to know the criteria that determines what we are told.
All Harrabin and his tame psyentists are interested in is keeping the scam going.
A right bunch of shellfish bar-stewards.
Chris B, unfortunately by science education only goes back 35 years, but the scam in the '70s was acid rain, measured by pH values in mainly Welsh and Scottish rivers. This was apparently due to CO2 and SO2 in the atmosphere.
It was actually a result of the planting of conifer forests, changing the leaf litter, but acid rain was a wonderful scare story.
Then it was decided to blame CO2 for absolutely everything, and this enabled some long forgotten scientists to dust off previously filed research about acid. So CO2 + water = carbonic acid, and we all die.
Be very careful drinking soda water ever again, and don't spill it on a concrete surface, in case it goes fizz, and bang goes humanity.
This "chemistry for dunces class", is all climate scientists ever learnt, but is all they ever needed to know, to spread panic.
The green advocates are always looking for the next pressure point. Global Warming is beginning to suffer from alarmist fatigue, thanks to the BBC, and they need a new bandwagon.
They pushed bio-diversity for a while, but computer models predicting species loss based on computer models predicting climate change has to compete with computer models predicting every ailment, every disaster and every possible negative event modelled against the output of flawed computer models predicting climate change. They are all still at it, going hammer and tongs, but apathy incredulity has set in with the public.
As pointed out above, Acid Rain may have some potential left. It depends on increasing carbon dioxide but need not depend on increasing global temperature. What a bonus to those who despise the temperature hiatus and pray for a scorched earth!
It is science made for those who do not understand science. Carbon dioxide, that evil, toxic, man-made emission, (yes, we breathe it out), that should be banned, dissolves in water to produce nasty, corrosive carbonic acid that dissolves everything in its path. OMG we are all doomed.
Reality of course, is that the equilibrium of CO2 solubility means that most of the gas remains undissolved. Then we find that carbonic acid isn't stable. In the presence of calcium carbonate, such as reefs and the cliffs of Dover, the majority of products are pH buffers so acidity does not change.
The chemistry involved becomes quite complex which casts doubt on sea acidification but gives advocates including the BBC the opportunity to ignore all of the science and make alarmist claims in order to keep the Green bandwagon rolling. For these reasons, I believe that the BBC will be reporting on acidic, corrosive oceans for a long time.
Now I know they will not be acidic or corrosive, but just watch the BBC.
British Bullshit Corporation.
Corals evolved in the Lower Paleozoic when CO2 concentration in the atmosphere are estimated to have been in the region of THOUSAND's of ppm. They also survived ( and indeed thrived ) in the earlier Permo-Triassic thermal maximum and the Permo-Carboniferous Ice Age. They seem very robust in the face of climate change.
The PETM was a transient event lasting about 85,000 years around 54,5 million years ago and following it deep sea temperatures, which had been rising for the previous 10 million years rose for another +/-6 million years, since when they fell until the advent of the late Oligocene warming of 24 million years ago. Antarctic glaciation commenced 34 million years ago when the Drake channel opened.The Antarctic glaciation survived the warmer interval which lasted until +/- 12 million years ago, since when deep ocean water temperatures have fallen more or less continuously to today's level of +/- 0ºC.
The chances of a thermal event comparable to the PETM occuring in less than several million years, while the ocean basins are filled with water at close to freezing point and while there are massive polar ice volumes, is negligible. The oceans and ice provide a gigantic buffer to such events which have only occurred in the geological record after extended periods( ie 10's of millions of years) of global warming.
How does such rubbish as these people promulgate get published? Do the media do no background checks before broadcasting it?
By talking to plants, many people including Prince Charles, have noticed that they thrive on exhaled carbon dioxide. No one has ever recorded any correlation between talking to plants, at the same time as watering them leading to instant death, for the plant or human, or indeed any other pesky critters inhabiting green houses.
Ocean reefs have high concentrations of fish due to high oxygen levels cause by disturbance to the water. Water near reefs must therefore have slightly higher CO2 levels, yet still the reefs grow.
Coral reefs, consisting of live and dead coral, must have far more resistance to trace carbonic acid than climate scientists worst fears. That is why they are there.
Try sealing some sea shells in a jar of soda water, and leaving a note for your executors to see if anything has happened in 100 years time.
Paleoclimate Buff: About time some context - time-wise - was added. Well said. Let's face it, there are some, whose agendas we can only guess at (keeping their well-paid jobs?), who would like to fool us into believing that they can see a climate pattern in the last 150 years or so that has precedents in something that may, or may not have happened, 55 MILLION years ago! To people like these, Jurassic Park was not a movie made for entertainment, it was a documentary.