The following guest blog is by Holman Jenkins, a Wall Street Journal columnist and member of the WSJ editorial board, in response to a blog (here) by Stuart Gaffin, a climate researcher at Columbia University who is a regular contributor to these pages. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content — the views are the author’s alone.

By Holman Jenkins

Several of my emailers in response to my WSJ column were also perplexed what I meant when I wrote that climate science has managed to yield on the most important issue -– namely mankind’s actual impact on the climate — only a “negative finding.” In fact, clarification appears in the next sentence: Science hasn’t been able to how “an increase in the atmosphere’s component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability.”

I use “science” here to mean what most people mean by science: systematic study of the world in hopes of drawing reliable conclusions. I use “climate” the way everyone uses “climate.” Mr. Gaffin seems to read “climate” as “atmosphere” and my statement as suggesting we know nothing of any kind about how the atmosphere might behave in response to rising CO2 levels. But that’s not what I said. I’m talking about what everyone actually cares about, whether the net result is a warming climate that will continue to warm in detriment to the presumed interests of humanity.

I don’t need to rehearse how much of current claims about a human contribution to warming are based on climate models. Many scientists have pursued actual empirical results (i.e. from the world, not from computer models) to show the human contribution, but results have been maddeningly elusive or indeterminate. Speaking for myself, that’s information I would very much like to have — I would not impose large, costly adjustments on society based simply on predictions of computer simulations created by scientists eager to affirm their intuitions about climate and CO2.

But there’s no satisfying people like Mr. Gaffin that skepticism is not a willful resistance to their metaphysical certainty. Here we verge on the real source of my dissatisfaction with, and even distrust of, many of the self-appointed spokesmen for climate science, who seem to be engaged in a collective exercise of begging the most important questions.

Mr. Gaffin cites some (uncited) authority that “current research [has] concluded with 90% confidence that current warming is due to human activities.” I assume he’s referring to the UN’s IPCC, but he doesn’t say. Those double “currents” are peculiar as well -– since warming is “currently” not taking place by the most relied-upon temperature records (i.e. current research). I suppose, though, he can define “current” however he wants.

But here’s my larger gripe: How much more useful it would be if climate scientists could say (for instance) that the warming experienced in the 20th century coincided in systematic fashion with rising man-made CO2 levels and is unprecedented in the behavior of earth’s climate. How much more helpful if they could show that past climate history yields strong evidence that previous warming episodes were caused by rising CO2 levels.

How much more helpful if they could say this or that particular feature of climate warming accords precisely with what is known about CO2’s behavior in the atmosphere and is inconceivable in the absence of rising CO2.

That Mr. Gaffin instead relies on unnamed authorities supplying faux-certain probabilities that a factual proposition is true is an example of everything wrong with much public presentation of climate science (and richly ironic since Mr. Gaffin’s whole objection to my column is that it  expresses uncertainty about the human role in climate change.)

In a pedantic quibble, Mr. Gaffin also complains that I refer to mankind’s contribution to rising CO2 levels. To be as pedantic as Mr. Gaffin but more accurate, “contribution” allows for a human contribution in a range of 0% to 100%. More importantly, presumably he knows that the atmosphere isn’t a sealed container and that the oceans, volcanoes and biosphere all play a role in CO2 levels.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial page occupies a uniquely obnoxious place in commentary on global warming. Over the many years that I have read with trepidation what they write, I have yet to see accurate presentation of the science issues.

They have fed their readers so much misinformation and confusion one can only conclude they consider complete fabrication fair play in the discussion.

The Director of the Columbia University Earth Institute, Jeff Sachs, has in the past invited the WSJ editorial board, along with any scientists they wish to bring, to discuss the science at the University — an invitation they assuredly have not accepted even though it’s a short subway ride away.

In response to President Obama’s revolutionary new efforts to cap CO2 emissions, WSJ editorial member Holman Jenkins Jr. tells us to “…Put away the global warming panic…” and writes an impressive number of fictions in two sentences:

“… Mankind’s contribution to rising CO2 levels raises serious questions, but the tens of billions poured into climate science have, by now, added up only to a negative finding. We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in the atmosphere’s component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability…”

What does “… contribution to rising CO2 levels …” mean — implying as it does that natural sources are raising CO2 levels? Does not Mr. Jenkins know that mankind’s activities are wholly responsible for the increasing CO2 emissions? This can be seen in many ways such as looking at the ice core records of stable CO2 concentrations since the end of the last ice age or from carbon isotope data for fossil fuel carbon for example.

What does it mean to write all “ … climate science has added up to a negative finding …”? Even if you have never seen an IPCC report, do you really believe that all the news you have been hearing for decades about global warming and IPCC has been due to a single “negative finding”? What is this so-called bottom line negative finding among the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of findings?

What does it mean to write “ …We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in [atmospheric] CO2 is impacting our climate …” Really? Scientists studying atmospheric physics don’t have the slightest idea how CO2 affects heat radiation and the Earth’s energy balance, not to mention the gazillion other facts we know about CO2 and climate?

Then, remarkably, in the same sentence that claims science knows nothing about CO2, somehow he (or science?) knows enough about it to conclude that “ …the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability …” Which one is it? Science knows nothing or science has actually demonstrated something very technically precise: “…the impact [of CO2] is too small to untangle from natural variability …”

By the way, the last statement is a flat out contradiction to current research which concluded with 90%  confidence that current warming is due to human activities. But what the heck. This is the world of the Wall Street Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone. 

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish political scientist who makes a semi-career (if not career) out of countering claims about global warming.  His brand of writing tends to throw major counter claims out there on quite big climate issues, in short pithy sound-bites, often without data, letting the reader try and figure it out.

A recent Lomborg editorial is an example and has many claims in it that one needs to take time to carefully analyze. Here I will just react to one of Lomborg’s deceptive suggestions that sea level has suddenly stopped rising:

Since 1992, we have had satellites measuring the rise in global sea levels and they have shown a stable increase of 3.2mm a year: spot on compared with the IPCC projection. Moreover, over the past two years, sea levels have not increased at all; actually, they show a slight drop. Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?

Without seeing the actual data, readers of this passage will think sea level rise from 1992-2006 was smoothly monotonic and then suddenly this stopped and is reversing. Here’s a graph of the data Lomborg is referring to (I thank Gavin Schmidt for this graphic):

In fact the short term 2-year trends are all over the place. This is due to the short term variations in weather like pressure, winds, currents and so forth,  that cause small oscillations in sea level, just like they do in temperature.

Following Lomborg’s approach in 1998-2000 (or ’94-‘96 or in ’04-’06, etc) you might have concluded sea level had stopped rising (and things were therefore “much better than expected”), but this would have been meaningless for the long term, which is what counts.  The fact is nobody should be claiming anything at all about long-term sea level based just on two-year trends and that’s why it doesn’t make any headlines.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

I am not a Republican. However, early in John McCain’s campaign for the presidency, I would often say to friends and family-who know I am not a Republican-that if I did vote solely on the one issue I research most, climate change, I would probably vote for McCain.

He came across to me as the candidate who most respected the science and gravity of the issue (perhaps even as much as Al Gore I thought … why else take such a big political risk with his party?) and was prepared to lead America in a new direction. That was then, this is now.

The Republican political machine, in bringing new ‘discipline’ to the McCain campaign, has no doubt also shut him down on the global warming issue. I seem to hear little about it any more from him (”Drill here!  Drill Now!”). His new vice-presidential (VP) pick - Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, is just further evidence of this. 

Palin believes that current global warming is somehow unrelated to the massive greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere.  

 Her online climate change report  clearly implies that she thinks it is a natural cycle and that nothing except adaptation should be done about it. (See my last blog about the ‘first question’ I often would like to ask skeptics of global warming.)

These extreme positions are offered without a single piece of scientific evidence to support them. They obviously will only justify unmitigated fossil fuel combustion.

We’ve had eight years of an administration with a vice president who holds similar positions and who has demonstrated the stagnating power that VP’s can exert on U.S. climate policy and which only leads to accelerated greenhouse gas emissions. It would be true change to have a VP who understands that it there is a profound difference between an atmosphere with a carbon dioxide concentration of 1000 parts per million versus one with 400 or less.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

A retrospective exhibit about the life and inventions of R. Buckminster Fuller (a.k.a. Bucky) is about to open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City . Fuller was truly one-of-a-kind-an iconoclastic architect, inventor, engineer, and philosopher.

I still have vivid memories of a public talk he gave at Columbia University in the late 1970’s. He died in 1983. He is best known as the leading proponent, if not inventor, of the geodesic dome, the sturdy spherical structure, composed of triangular elements, that closely approximates a sphere.  

It’s hard to imagine Bucky not being engaged by the modern problems of global warming. It would have attracted him on all fronts: the energy challenges, the technological challenges and the ‘geo-engineering’ challenges.

Geo-engineering is the term used to describe large-scale human interventions that could possibly offset climate change such as deliberate releases of particles into the stratosphere to block sunlight, or the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and power plants.

Certainly, Bucky thought on such scales. For example, he envisioned covering mid-town Manhattan with a  large geodesic dome as a way to create a controlled climate!

How this would work is puzzling to me. For example, if the dome was clear to sunlight, the greenhouse effect inside in summer would be astounding and I can’t imagine it would require less electricity to cool it off than it does now-it would likely need vastly more electricity.

Still, as an urban climate scientist, I don’t like to dismiss such conceptual ideas completely out of hand because if a geo-engineered way were found to cool cities down this would be of enormous socio-economic value. Cities are where the world’s population will increasingly live and we are going to have to find ways to make them more habitable as summer heat waves become more brutal and common.

Right now the main ‘technologies’ we have to do so are tree planting, light-colored surfaces and green roofs. However, if large-scale initiatives were found that could artificially shade large sections of cities or increase wind ventilation during heat-waves, that would be much more effective, saving vast amounts of energy and lives. I’ve heard anecdotally of Japanese researchers orienting new buildings to channel winds in certain directions and even of trying to bring cold bottom water up from Tokyo Bay.  

Any Fuller-esque ideas out there?

 Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

Colleagues of mine at Columbia have just published a large study of physical and biological changes recorded around the world since 1970 , during which the globe has been warming.

The massive database they compiled describes an extraordinary and fascinating range of phenomena that would likely be sensitive to climate changes like spring flowering of plants, migration times and ranges for birds, fish and insects, spring river flows from winter snow melt, lake freezing and melting times, pollen release, egg-laying, and even the time that bullfrogs start calling in Spring. (It’s hard to find bullfrogs in a lake but it sure is easy to hear them so I trust that data!)   

The database also included long-term changes in things like mountain glaciers, lake algae levels, permafrost and alpine tree ranges. In all, close to 30,000 records were studied. They found that around 90% of the records showed a change that is consistent with a warmer climate.  So, for example, leaves and flowers are budding earlier, ground hogs in the Rockies end hibernation earlier, mountain glaciers are retreating, there are earlier high water river flows and so on. 

We know the planet has been warming but this study shows how sensitive living and physical systems are to temperature changes already. Now try to imagine what it will be like if we get three times the warming of the last century, as is roughly predicted.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and will be a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Reuters is not responsible for the content — the views expressed are the author’s alone.

The root cause of all environmental problems-from beer cans floating on a lake to global warming-can be explained using the following two contrasting scenes:

Scene 1: We are sitting in an automobile inside a small, closed garage.

You are in the passenger seat and I am at the wheel. We are waiting for a third passenger from inside the building. Suddenly I reach for the ignition and turn the engine on. Alarmed by the thought of being poisoned by the exhaust, your eyes widen in amazement as you say, “What are you doing?” When you reach to turn the ignition off, I block your hands and soon a life-and-death struggle begins for control of the vehicle. You are screaming: “Are you crazy! You’re going to kill us both!”  If we manage to survive the episode you will seek to have me put under psychiatric care. Heck, I might even end up in prison for attempted manslaughter. My days as an ordinary law-abiding citizen are over.

Scene 2: Exact same situation except that now the car is sitting a mere ten feet back on the driveway outside the garage.

I reach for the ignition and turn the car on. You might look over but you say nothing. The engine could idle 15 minutes or more, but we sit calmly in silence. Our passenger arrives and we drive off. I remain a perfectly well-respected citizen. Indeed if you happened to question me the next day about the engine idling, you’re the one who would probably feel strange.

Economists explain the remarkable difference between scene 1 and 2 as “the tragedy of the commons.” When we pollute a seemingly vast reservoir like the atmosphere (a “common space”) the rapid dilution of our pollution makes us oblivious to what we are doing. Since everyone acts the same self-interested way (the “tragedy”), the pollution accumulates, including carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) . If instead, we were forced to inhale all of our own emissions, we would stop this behavior immediately. Since this is never the case, the economic solution is a pollution tax.

Throwing a beer can on a lake is the same thing-the can soon floats away so you don’t have to look at it. But if everyone were to toss empty cans into the same lake, it would soon be blanketed in tin. Who would be responsible for cleaning up the lake? Would it be fair to ask all residents to foot the bill, or just the individual polluters? The same question exists with global warming and greenhouse gas emissions: If rich countries alone were forced to absorb all the impacts of their emissions, we’d have seen a lot more action by now. Instead, less developed countries have the dubious privilege of sharing the impacts.

What makes the oblivion brought on by the commons so extreme that, like with an engine idling, the polluting behavior becomes the “norm” and questioning it feels almost “abnormal”? 

For example, how would you feel asking a stranger to turn off his idling car? How would you react if you had to pay for how much pollution your car emitted while you were idling?