By Roger Jones, Victoria University

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, has reportedly acknowledged to Graham Lloyd of The Australian, that there is a “17-year pause in global temperature rises”, a fact that apparently has been suppressed in Australia. Dr Pauchauri endorses debate, saying that people had a right to question the science, whatever their motivations.

But according to Lloyd, Pachauri’s views contrast with arguments in Australia that views outside the orthodox position of approved climate scientists should be left unreported.

Am I an “approved” climate scientist? because I don’t hold that view, nor do I know any who does. What we would like, though, is for science to be reported as science and for opinion to be reported as opinion. And for all reporting to be accurate.

Lloyd makes this claim: unlike in Britain, there has been little publicity in Australia given to recent acknowledgement by peak climate-science bodies in Britain and the US of what has been a 17-year pause in global warming. Britain’s Met Office has revised down its forecast for a global temperature rise, predicting no further increase to 2017, which would extend the pause to 21 years.

This is the Met Office’s latest five-year forecast shown below. Skeptical Science reports the Met Office saying: the latest decadal prediction suggests that global temperatures over the next five years are likely to be a little lower than predicted from the previous prediction issued in December 2011. We’re in the midst of a period of La Niñas, which have a slight cooling effect, as do rising sulphate emissions in Asia. But look at the blue line – do my eyes deceive me? Is it level with the previous black line? It’s warmer? Perhaps Lloyd’s computer has a tilt to the right that makes increases look level.

The Met Office predicts record global mean temperature over the next five years – now that’s news.

News Corporation sells roughly 70% of the newspapers in metropolitan Australia, and its readers are subject to this kind of fudging on a regular basis. It’s no wonder some “approved” scientists are frustrated.

But that’s not the only thing that frustrates me. It is also time to challenge what Lloyd calls the orthodox position of climate science.

Climatology needs to stop hiding behind long-term trends and explain what is in plain sight, and why variations in the rate of warming might be important. I’m working with colleagues at the moment on a National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility project called Valuing Adaptation to Rapid Change and we’re looking at the economics of rapid change. Non-linear behaviour in climate driving extreme events has the potential to really hurt us.

The first thing to bear in mind is that a trend line is a model. A warming trend is not a theory of how climate changes. If a complex, non-linear system fails to follow a trend, look at the model to see whether it represents the theory sufficiently well.

In a nutshell, the theory says greenhouse gases act like a blanket, trapping heat near the surface. This creates a radiation imbalance at the top of the atmosphere. The earth system warms to return this balance by increasing the heat escaping from the top of the atmosphere so that energy out equals energy in. This is a slow process, taking centuries, because the ocean has to warm sufficiently to support a hotter atmosphere. The scientific confidence in this aspect of climatology is extremely high. A simple trend line is sufficient to measure this process.

But on decadal time scales, the trend-line model fails. Most of the heat trapped in the earth system goes into the oceans. The top 700m of ocean increased in heat content from 3 x 10²² Joules in 1997 to 10 x 10²² Joules in 2010, in a highly non-linear manner, due to mixing rates between the surface and deep ocean. The atmosphere holds as much heat as the top 3m of ocean, about 0.4% of the heat content above. Why on earth then, with highly non-linear processes in the ocean, would we expect a gradual warming trend in the atmosphere?

A paper I published last year shows that most of Australia’s warming occurred in two episodes, one in the late 1960s to early 1970s, when south west WA rainfall also decreased, and the other in 1997-98. The other finding was that most of this warming was anthropogenic. On decadal timescales, step and trend is a much better model for explaining warming than simple trends.

To me, the graph above makes perfect sense: mild trends separated by an instantaneous rise of about 0.3°C. By ignoring non-linearity and projecting future climate change as simple trends, orthodox science is doing us a great disservice. We have not yet woken up to the recent non-linear increases in heatwaves and fire danger in Australia let alone planning for more such changes in the future. The same goes for floods.

Observed and projected percentage area experiencing an exceptionally hot year: Queensland as an example. Note the recent rapid increase (source: K. Braganza, Bureau of Meteorology)

Days above high fire danger, average of 9 Victorian sites, showing statistically significant rapid increase (site data from Bureau of Meteorology)

It’s time to stop defending orthodox science by hiding behind simple trends and come to grips with the fundamental non-linearity of climate change. That’s the risk we need to mitigate, adapting to changes that can’t be avoided.

Roger Jones receives funding from the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility. He is affiliated with Climate Scientists Australia and the IPCC.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Key findings include estimates that carbon-intensive economies and associated climate change are responsible for five million deaths a year, 90 per cent of them related to air pollution, according to an Agence France-Presse report.

“Failure to act on climate change already costs the world economy 1.6 per cent of global GDP amounting to $US1.2 trillion ($A1.16 trillion) in forgone prosperity a year,” said the report, produced by the DARA research centre and released at the Asia Society in New York.

In addition, “rapidly escalating temperatures and carbon-related pollution will double costs to 3.2 per cent of world GDP by 2030.”

According to the report, “unprecedented harm” is being inflicted on humanity.

However, tackling climate change’s causes would bring “significant economic benefits for world, major economies and poor nations alike,” the report said.

The report was published by DARA, and compiled by the World Vulnerability Forum. 45 Mb download of the entire report is here and the page where parts of the report can be downloaded is here - data can be downloaded as well.

It contains complex information and graphics, so is not easy to decipher. Hopefully, I’ll have time to digest the main points and summarise them here. Hat-tip Rob Gell.

Expert and operating languages around a problem-solution sequence has one or more specific grammars. These terms become the labels for a particular narrative that contains a problem, a process and an outcome. So when Paul Harris, Deputy Director of the HC Coombs Policy Forum at the ANU has a go at wicked problems (Rittel and Webber, 1973) for being, well, wicked – is he rebadging, reframing or is a he just erecting a straw man and flaying it to bits in an attempt to change a prevailing narrative?

Harris’ complaint is about wicked problems. They are everywhere and their number is constantly growing:

Researchers talk and write about these “wicked” problems all the time. The term has become a kind of catch-all, a shorthand used to describe the big challenges facing Australia and the world, and the role of research responding to these challenges.

He then adds that:

the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) released a guide to “Tackling Wicked Problems” as part of its series on Contemporary Government Challenges. Along with climate change and obesity, the Commission added indigenous disadvantage and land degradation to its list of the most pressing problems.

And complains that climate change has been named as a super-wicked problem, which to my mind is the same as saying an original artwork is singularly unique. So he has a point. But this is language as marketing, where terms are used to “sell” a concept, and examples of knowledge marketing are everywhere. Ross Garnaut did the same thing by re-badging climate change as a diabolical problem instead of a wicked problem. Why give an established term a different label, unless you’re marking territory for some kind of personal gain or reframing the problem? So what is Harris doing, reframing or rebranding?

Coining an issue as a wicked problem is for a reason – a wicked problem has a range of attributes that doesn’t lend it to conventional problem-solving. Later in the article Harris admits this, so his objection is not a framing issue, it is a labelling issue. And here the argument goes seriously off the rails. Harris claims that because after 40 years of thinking about wicked problems, we still feel as stuck as ever, that the wicked problem approach has failed. For a start, thinking about a problem doesn’t solve it but working with it might. The APSC 2007 report on wicked problems still has not been seriously applied in mainstream Australian policy-making – if it was applied in the Murray-Darling Basin instead of the technocratic  optimised planning response used, the whole exercise might have got somewhere instead of being scrapped and tried again.

“Perhaps the answer lies deep within the nature of the problems we face”, Harris says. Hmmm, that would make them wicked problems. ”If this is the case, labelling the big problems that society faces “wicked” is only going to make things worse.” Non sequitur. This is a claim that the label wicked is sufficient reason to derail efforts to address such problems.

If the issue was with the label, then regions of the world where such problems are not labelled as wicked, as in South America, Asia and Africa, solutions should be emerging. I doubt whether labelling is the issue with conflict in the Sudan, the drug trade in Mexico, or with religiously motivated violence in Nigeria.

Then the unconscionable claim. Witches are wicked, he says. In the article, the word wicked links to a theatre character in dress-up and green make-up, and the article photo portrays a vaudeville witch with potions and skull. Harris then follows up with the words evil, malfeasance and irrationality, clearly linking these to wicked witches. An argument straight from the coat-tails of the Alan Jones school of gender politics. Overlooking the fact that wicked witches were a construct of patriarchal religious oppression, mainly of women, and the wholesale rejection of their collective wisdom because the only true wisdom can come from god. Wicked witches are #destroyingthejoint.

Why go back to the 16th and 17th centuries to rely on a deeply sexist, patriarchal image of wickedness? The etymology of the word wicce is sorcerer or wizard, and was transferred to witch for obvious reasons. Why not point to the modern slang of wicked as being something excellent, awesome or crazy; one reason why I’m drawn to wicked problems – because they are a challenge to solve.

The remainder of his piece, about the folly of applying “scientifically rational” solutions to messy situations I agree with and have published papers saying just that. This is a point the science community constantly needs to be reminded of but during a recent debate on whether science is central to policy making held at the recent National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) conference, the discussion revealed that climate adaptation research community is very well aware of this point. It is perhaps the more traditional natural scientists who need to be made more aware of wicked problems and messy solutions. So the latter part of his article, about solutions for such problems is not about wickedness, it’s about the inappropriate use of bounded rationality, which applies not only to science but also to most conventional economic approaches to problem-solving.

Note also that Harris used irrational pejoratively earlier in his argument, linking it with witches, but it is now part of messy solutions.

So Harris wants us to stop using the term “wicked” problem but admits such problems exist, yet has no suggestion for how we use language to distinguish solutions for messy, complex problems from those suited to tame problems. He uses John Keane’s term of hyper-complex, then says this:

We need to work at our democracy, to encourage bright young people – in research and in government – to be filled with enthusiasm for spending their lives working on the big difficult problems of the time.

Well why not give them something wicked to work on, but leave the patriarchal, deeply offensive sexist references to wicked witches out of it.

So the argument is not about reframing, it’s about rebranding. With this article Harris has hung out his shingle with a poorly argued advertorial: all straw and no evidence.

Rethinking rural research in Australia

By Andrew Campbell, Charles Darwin University

Rural research is vital. It is about 10% of our national innovation system. Annual investment exceeds $1 billion, according to the Rural Research and Development Council. The rural sector and farm-dependent economy accounts for 12% of GDP, 14% of exports, 17% of employment, 60% of the land mass and between half and two-thirds of total water use. (Mining accounts for 9% of GDP, 35% of exports and 2.2% of employment.)

A vibrant, world-leading rural, environmental and agricultural research sector is more strategically important for Australia now than ever. This is clear from authoritative reviews on climate change, biosecurity, drought policy, biodiversity conservation, food security and energy-water-carbon intersections. The Australian Government has also received the Productivity Commission Inquiry into Rural R&D Corporations and the Rural Research and Development Council’s National Strategic Rural R&D Investment Plan.

All these reviews and reports say we need more and better rural research, development and in some cases extension.

The government has responded with a National Food Plan green paper, and a Policy Statement on Rural Research and Development. The green paper has already been described elsewhere on The Conversation as “putting corporate hunger first”.

We can’t handle this one commodity at a time

The big challenges facing Australian agriculture, land use planning, and natural resource management — such as climate, energy, water, irrigation, biodiversity, biosecurity, soils, carbon, pests, weeds, land use planning and social issues — are not commodity-specific. They are cross-sectoral, demanding integrated approaches within and across geographic scales, and between government, industry and community.

The way we scope, prioritise, plan, fund, manage and disseminate rural research has to be designed to handle these big, intersecting, cross-sectoral challenges.

The strength of Australia’s rural R&D framework is the rural research and development corporations (RDCs). The internationally admired RDC model works particularly well for commodity-specific R&D. Its heart is a government–industry cost sharing partnership in which levies on production are matched by the taxpayer. This engenders high levels of industry ownership and research relevance, and strong uptake of research results and return on investment.

However, the model works much less well for cross-commodity issues. So we under-invest in these areas and in public good research generally.

The structural flaws in the RDC model were exacerbated by the abolition of Land & Water Australia (LWA) and cuts to the Rural Industries R&D Corporation (RIRDC) by the Rudd Government in the 2009 budget. These were the two corporations set up with a mandate to invest in cross-sectoral, public good research.

Could a cross-sectoral R&D corporation help?

The Productivity Commission examined this in depth in its report, after 11 public hearings and 295 submissions (mine is # 271). It recommended fundamental reform to the model, including a new cross-sectoral RDC. The government’s policy statement on rural R&D has picked up some of the Commission’s recommendations, but rejects the cross-sectoral RDC.

The policy statement says the necessary leadership and coordination of investment can be delivered in large part by the National Primary Industries Research, Development and Extension (RD&E) Framework, under the Primary Industries Ministerial Council.

The Ministerial Council endorsed the national RD&E framework in 2009. It has since approved 14 sectoral RD&E strategies and four cross–sectoral strategies (four more are underway).

How do these strategies stack up?

The “completed” RD&E strategies vary enormously in quality and comprehensiveness. They range from barely adequate to OK on context analysis, articulating knowledge needs, summarising research capacity, and proposing better coordination mechanisms.

But most are thin or silent on other crucial elements of a competent research strategy such as types of research, governance and accountability, knowledge management and evaluation. The “E” for extension is largely missing, or treated superficially. The assumption seems to be that extension happens at a regional level and does not require attention in national strategies – seriously flawed thinking.

It is notable that those sectors with strong RDCs – for example dairy, grains and cotton – do a better job in identifying new opportunities and setting out a comprehensive, ‘investment ready’ framework.

The RDCs are dedicated research purchasers, managers, brokers and coordinators. Unlike policy departments, let alone inter-jurisdictional committees, their core business is procuring and managing research and communicating the outputs of that research. It is not surprising they do a better job as research planners, purchasers and managers.

This is even more likely to be the case for cross-sectoral issues like climate, water, energy, food and biosecurity, given their added complexity and the multitude of players. But since the abolition of Land & Water Australia, we no longer have a dedicated statutory body to perform these functions.

We need a national approach to complex rural issues

We need specialist expertise to scan, scope, prioritise, design, procure, manage and disseminate research programs on these big complex issues. This won’t be delivered effectively by part-timers, or people with short planning horizons whose day job is serving a particular industry, writing policy or responding to the minister’s office.

National collaboration and coordination is crucial. But if the default mechanism for national coordination is inter-jurisdictional committees, there is a big risk of defaulting to lowest common denominator consensus — tweaking the status quo while avoiding risk or genuine innovation.

In our Federation, the latter problem bedevils COAG and its subsidiary Ministerial Councils and Standing Committees. Consensus incrementalism pervades the national RD&E strategies to date.

When was the last time a bold reform or innovative new direction was conceived, driven and implemented quickly by a Standing Committee working to a Ministerial Council? On the rare occasions it happens, it is usually in response to crisis, or influenced by a dedicated, expert statutory authority to design and champion the reform and make it happen.

The government’s policy statement sensibly acknowledges that many issues cut across the 22 strategies identified to date. The Australian Research Committee (ARCom) will be asked to provide overall system oversight of rural research and development. This is a good start on a crucial task, but will it have the power or influence to redirect resources?

The policy statement on rural research sketches a road map, but lacks a vehicle. The Productivity Commission was right. A new dedicated statutory RDC (or a substantially reconfigured RIRDC), with a mandate beyond agriculture, is needed to bring national coordination, strategic direction and intelligent research investment and management to these big, complex, intersecting issues.

This would represent real reform, and a great investment.

The need for much better, “joined up” knowledge on how best to deal with climate, energy, water and food challenges won’t go away, not in our lifetimes or those of our kids.

Andrew Campbell was the Executive Director of Land & Water Australia from 2000 to 2006. He has consulted to the Cotton, Grains, Fisheries and Rural Industries R&D Corporations, was a non-executive director of the Future Farm Industries Cooperative Research Centre and chaired the Third Year Review of the Invasive Animals CRC. In his current role at Charles Darwin University he does not receive funding from any of these organisations. The Research Institute for Environment and Livelihoods, could however benefit from any sector-wide increase in more integrated research across climate, water, energy, food and biodiversity issues.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

And then in a conversation with the Chief Scientist Ian Chubb on communicating science, with specific reference to climate science, The Conversation quotes him as saying:

“We scientists need to talk about evidence, and without being cornered into answering questions like ‘do you believe?’,” Professor Chubb said.

“I get asked that every day and every now and then I make a mistake and say yes or no…It’s not a belief, it’s an understanding and an encapsulation and interpretation of the evidence.”

Aaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrggghhh!!!

Ian Chubb was speaking to the Royal Society of Victoria, which launched on August 30th a three-year program aimed at increasing the awareness of science among primary school children. And while I agree with most of what Ian Chubb says in his interview with The Conversation, the belief thing should be called for what it is – a full-blown fallacy.

Of course, our knowledge of belief, both scientifically and philosophically, and how it intersects with common understanding or “common sense” means this issue is not as simple as it might look. This is a point that needs straightforward communication in simple, reproducible terms. Chubb admits to making mistakes when asked, which shows he does not have a settled explanation that he can provide on cue. This does not bode well for the communication of science coming from Australia’s chief scientific advisor and suggests there is some work to be done.

First, let’s start with dictionary meanings from the Oxford online American English:

1. an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists
2. (belief in) trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something

And British and World English (thus implying American is not part of this world):

1. an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof
2. (belief in) trust, faith, or confidence in (someone or something)

The British definition points out the role of proof, whereas the American depends on straightforward acceptance. But the former also says especially, which does not rule out belief with proof, but leans more to emphasis of usage.

Philosophical definitions of belief are more explicit:

Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.

This definition describes belief as a psychological state. Although we currently don’t understand the neuropsychology of belief in any depth, there is plenty of evidence to suggests there is little difference between in the psychological status of belief and justified belief. Subjectively, people subject to delusions have no way of telling they are not perceiving something real unless it is confirmed externally. A proposition can be explicit or implicit, in the same way that we don’t need to reconfirm every day that the big yellow thing in the sky is the sun, or is in fact, a star.

Knowledge and belief are also held to be different. Knowledge is external to individual belief because it can be verified independently. Insofar that knowledge can be justified as being scientific, then we can say that belief in a scientific proposition is scientific belief. Therefore, scientific belief is a type of belief, but it cleaves more to the philosophical position that relies on a premise, and forms a subset of belief known as justified belief.

Why is is this point so important? It’s because the Chief Scientist has just launched a campaign by the Royal Society of Victoria called “Science and my world”, aimed at primary aged school children. It’s because, if people and especially children are told that science is not belief, they are being told non-sense. If we cannot easily distinguish one psychological state of belief from another, then how are we to make sense between those states unless we have a way to test propositions to determine whether they are worthy of belief?

It is more important to teach children how to judge what to believe rather than not to believe. Research clearly shows that positive belief biases reasoned conclusions compared to belief-neutral reasoning¹. Clearly, learning the latter is beneficial to aid sceptical thinking and to avoid conclusions that naturally confirm the proposition regardless of the evidence at hand. If common sense and philosophy can be lined up reasonably consistently, as they can for belief and scientific belief, where the latter relies on applying the scientific method via experiment or by drawing on scientific knowledge, then this makes more sense than trying to justify the acceptance of science as not qualifying as belief.

A clear hierarchy of statements about scientific belief are needed. They may go something like this:

• Belief is the acceptance that something is true.
• Scientific belief is the acceptance that something is true if the evidence supporting that proposition is consistent with the body of scientific knowledge. (Simple version: scientific belief is the acceptance of something supported by scientific evidence)
• Scientific belief will change with new knowledge/evidence.

This doesn’t get around Weebls’ reasoning that “according to science, this is science“, but it does open the door to a useful dialogue in questioning how someone can decide the truth of a matter using the scientific method.

1. Goel, V. and Dolan, R.J. (2003) Explaining modulation of reasoning by belief. Cognition, 87, B11-B22.

So, how concerned should we be about the results? From the press release:

Results published this week (Nature paywall) by a team of polar scientists from Britain, Australia and France adds a new dimension to our understanding of Antarctic Peninsula climate change and the likely causes of the break-up of its ice shelves.

A core of ice was collected continuously through the James Ross Island ice cap, providing the first history of Antarctic Peninsula temperature changes since the last ice age. (Photo: Jack Triest)

The first comprehensive reconstruction of a 15,000 year climate history from an ice core collected from James Ross Island in the Antarctic Peninsula region is reported this week in the journal Nature. The scientists reveal that the rapid warming of this region over the last 100 years has been unusual and came on top of a slower natural climate warming that began around 600 years ago. These centuries of continual warming meant that by the time the unusual recent warming began, the Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves were already poised for the dramatic break-ups observed from the 1990’s onwards.

The paper says that the Holocene high on the AP was 1.3±0.3°C warmer than present in the early Holocene (~11,500 years), consistent with other evidence in the region. During the Holocene, temperatures on the peninsula were around the 1961–1990 average. From 9,200 to 2,500 years before present (ypb) the temperature anomaly was 0.2±0.2°C. At around 2,500 ypb, temperatures “were on average 0.7±0.3 °C cooler than present between 800 and 400 yr BP (AD 1150–1550), and on a decadal timescale temperatures may have at times been more than 1.8±0.3°C cooler than present”.

The other thing the Nature paper did was look at rates of warming on a 100- and 50-year basis, concluding that rates on both scales were unusual but not unprecedented over the  past 2,000 years. The warming of 1.56°C over the past century is highly unusual (0.3%) over the past 2,000 years. The 50-year warming of 2.6 ± 1.2°C per century was similarly unusual.

So the recent warming has brought the AP back to temperatures where it was for most of the Holocene, with further warming in the pipeline. Recent ice-sheet collapses has shown the region’s ice is vulnerable to further warming:

The association between atmospheric temperature and ice-shelf stability in the past demonstrates that as warming continues ice-shelf vulnerability is likely to progress farther southwards along the Antarctic Peninsula coast to affect ice shelves that have been stable throughout the Holocene, and may make them particularly susceptible to changes in oceanographic forcing.

So what did Lloyd of The Australian say? He said the rise in temperatures was ”within the bounds of natural climate variability over the past 600 years”. That is not a quote from either the paper or the press release.

It is true for the rate in rise, because checking the data (included in supplementary material published by Nature) shows that rises over the 17th century were comparable but it is not true for the magnitude of warming. So the statement is a reasonable interpretation of the data. But is it a quote? Lloyd didn’t speak to the authors and it is not in the text of the paper, so no, it isn’t a quote. The authors (via Narilie Abram of ANU) felt that Lloyd’s report was not technically wrong, but that a later AFP report published by the same paper was a better representation of their research.

This particular quote has been reproduced over a dozen times since the article on sites who maintain there is nothing to worry about. What is not reasonable is the next comment, this time Lloyd’s interpretation:

The research by Robert Mulvaney of the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, countered assumptions that human factors were responsible for the warming of the Antarctic ice shelf.

This is just not true, and is not  a reasonable interpretation of the article. It is rubbish. The study was not an attribution study (more on Real Climate - thanks Brian), it was looking at regional warming and assessing the implications of further warming for ice-sheet stability locally and further south. The other report in The Australian sourced from the AFP later that day had a very different take.

AN ice core extracted from an Antarctic islet has yielded further evidence of the impact of man-made warming on the frozen continent, fuelling concern for the future of ice shelves, a report said today.

The results “are consistent with a more rapid human-induced warming on top of a slower natural warming,” Robert Mulvaney, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told AFP.

Now, that’s a quote. Nic Stuart, Canberra Times journo, also noted the difference.

Inclusion of the temperature data allowed me to look at its evolution using other methods. Step-change analysis of ten-year reconstructed temperatures allow large (century to millennial) shifts in climate regimes to be assessed. The following chart shows that the Holocene to about 2,250 years ago was very stable. This was followed by decreased temperatures reducing by about 0.4°C each time. An increase of 0.45°C 450 years ago led to natural warming upon which the anthropogenic warming of the late 20th and 21st century has been imposed.

Statistically significant (1% level) step changes in reconstructed 10-year temperature average for the James Ross Island core of Mulvaney et al (2012).

The period of cooling coincides with wetter conditions over southern Victoria that persisted for 2,000 years to AD1840. This is consistent with southern hemisphere weather systems extending further north under a cooler southern hemisphere climate, but may just be a coincidence. The rapid shifts in regional temperature are also consistent with changes noted in southern Victoria. The date of 600 years before present mentioned in the Nature paper as the beginning of the latest period of natural warming also coincides with dates for dune activation in Australia. Further research on regional changes over this period would be of great benefit as to how future climate may evolve.

My view is that energy held as heat in the Earth’s system can show trending or step-like behaviour. The reconstructed JRI temperatures appear to show both.

Updated August 27.

On June 25th the Understandascope, one of Frank’s major projects was launched at The Edge in Federation Square Melbourne where the above photo was taken. It wasn’t the Crohn’s Disease that got him; diagnosed with a brain tumour late least year, Frank was affected at the launch, but still quietly defiant, as he has always been when faced by what seem like insurmountable obstacles. Kate Auty, a former student Victoria’s Commissioner Environmental Sustainability, wrote a brief tribute after the event (she’s far left in the group photo).

The top photo is how I will remember Frank, his look: kind, curious (quizzical) and pained. For those of you who didn’t have the privilege to know Frank, have a look at the Understandascope, read his latest book Understand Ability. His work will be carried on by the many people he taught, by those who were his colleagues and his friends (and so many were all three, including Anthony James, convenor of the Understandascope and Fran MacDonald appearing with Kate and Frank in the group photo).

Update: A public memorial service for Frank Fisher will be held at the Edge Theatre, Federation Square on Saturday 15 September, from 11am. Further details.

Before Kuhn, our view of science was dominated by philosophical ideas about how it ought to develop (“the scientific method”), together with a heroic narrative of scientific progress as “the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors”

Finding science as equivalent to the truth, external of human agency, is the pre-Kuhnian ideal of what science does. The discovery that science is an all too human endeavour deeply sociological in process, many people still find very disturbing. At best, science can find small t,  truth, as opposed to capital T, TRUTH, the ideological aim of the scientific quest. The probability that t equals T may be very high in some cases, but is never unity.

Interestingly, many who wish to deny the science of climate change adhere to the pre-Kuhnian idea of science as truth. And miscast normal scientific uncertainty as failing Popper’s falsification test. ‘Cause they have a mortgage on the troof. On the other hand, those barracking for conventional scientific theories often maintain that science is not a matter of belief. This has come up on The Conversation in comments to two good articles on climate science and belief (Barry Naughten, Joseph Reser) over the past week or two. Sorry guys, but assessing the probability of t being T, is a matter of belief, as is anything that goes on in the mind regarding external evidence. But there is a difference between belief and true belief.

…take Kuhn’s portrayal of “normal” science. According to Popper, real scientists (as opposed to, say, psychoanalysts) were distinguished by the fact that they tried to refute rather than confirm their theories. And yet Kuhn’s version suggested that the last thing normal scientists seek to do is to refute the theories embedded in their paradigm!

Many people were also enraged by Kuhn’s description of most scientific activity as mere “puzzle-solving” – as if mankind’s most earnest quest for knowledge was akin to doing the Times crossword. But in fact these critics were over-sensitive. A puzzle is something to which there is a solution. That doesn’t mean that finding it is easy or that it will not require great ingenuity and sustained effort.

But what really set the cat among the philosophical pigeons was one implication of Kuhn’s account of the process of paradigm change. He argued that competing paradigms are “incommensurable”: that is to say, there exists no objective way of assessing their relative merits. There’s no way, for example, that one could make a checklist comparing the merits of Newtonian mechanics (which applies to snooker balls and planets but not to anything that goes on inside the atom) and quantum mechanics (which deals with what happens at the sub-atomic level). But if rival paradigms are really incommensurable, then doesn’t that imply that scientific revolutions must be based – at least in part – on irrational grounds? In which case, are not the paradigm shifts that we celebrate as great intellectual breakthroughs merely the result of outbreaks of mob psychology?

Masterman in 1970 pointed out that Kuhn’s paradigms had several aspects, including a theoretical and sociological aspect. The sociological aspect uses evidence to distinguish between belief and true belief in a scientific community. This is carried out via the refereed literature, but is also transmitted via status, experience, world view and so on. And it is easy to abuse if evidence is lacking or can be used to support multiple conclusions.

As for his big idea – that of a “paradigm” as an intellectual framework that makes research possible –well, it quickly escaped into the wild and took on a life of its own. Hucksters, marketers and business school professors adopted it as a way of explaining the need for radical changes of world-view in their clients. And social scientists saw the adoption of a paradigm as a route to respectability and research funding, which in due course led to the emergence of pathological paradigms in fields such as economics, which came to esteem mastery of mathematics over an understanding of how banking actually works, with the consequences that we now have to endure.

Subsequent authors have taken this up, Lakatos to name one, and Sherri Roush on theories of knowledge and tracking truth is another. One of my many unfinished projects is taking this up with climate science. I think that a better understanding of the relationship between scientific practice and the sociology of the scientific project can help us build better narratives of science. These are the stories that we use to communicate and share knowledge.

Hat tip Carolyn Rasmussen.

Curiosity piqued, I checked Perth’s weather data for unseasonal cold. Sure enough, during June and July, Perth and the rest of south west WA had experienced cold conditions, not seen in Perth for 13 years and longer elsewhere. This linked article was published in mid July. In the last three weeks of July, daily temperatures were below 10 degrees on 3, 4 and 3 days, respectively preceding the last weekend of July.

Was it the the poor, the aged and the infirm filling the mortuaries, after repeated, unseasonal cold snaps? Has an overall warmer climate not insulated people from such events? The average temperature at Perth Airport is 13°C and for July was 11°C; perhaps there are some bad respiratory diseases around making things worse.

Perth average daily temperature June-July 2012, showing 10°C threshold

Cold remains dangerous for the vulnerable in southern winters. At this range of temperature, contrasts in temperature are the largest risk to vulnerable people, rather than absolute temperatures themselves.

These are a few of the headlines from the Marine Climate Change in Australia, Impacts and Adaptation Responses 2012 Report Card (download pdf). Put together by the Marine Biodiversity and Resources Adaptation Network (NCCARF), Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, and CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship. The reporting comprehensive,  covering the report card itself and six chapters on marine climate and thirteen on marine biodiversity. Alistair Hobday, summarising the report card on The Conversation.

Here’s a summary with some of my own conclusions about observed and projected changes. The latter you can take or leave as they’re based on my personal views about how climate changes. For recent and near future changes, I place a greater emphasis on how climate is likely to change rather than by how much. This places the emphasis more on the diagnosis and understanding of change rather than prediction. There’s a fair bit in doing this, so amongst other things I’m into today (like gardening, cooking and cleaning), I’ll update these sections as I go (Sunday 11 am, SST; Wednesday, SLR).

Summarised below, the main headings are:

Sea Surface Temperature (SST): high confidence in current observations and future projections (the latter subject to emissions).

Ocean temperatures around Australia have warmed by 0.68°C since 1910–1929, with south-west and south-eastern waters warming fastest. The rate of temperature rise in Australian waters has accelerated since the mid-20^th century; from 0.08°C/decade in 1910–2011 to 0.11°C/decade from 1950–2011.

New results based on a relatively high scenario for greenhouse gas emissions (RCP8.5 ) indicate greatest warming in south-east (>3°C) and north-west waters (~2.5°C) by the end of this century.

The latter can be considered as a business as usual growth scenario with limited GHG mitigation.

An accompanying paper by Sen Gupta, Lough and Hobday gives a really good summary of observations and changes. Annual and seasonal observations of spatial trends since 1950 are below.

Linear SST trend (°C/decade) for a) annual, 1950–2010, b) summer, c) autumn, d) winter, and e) spring, 1950-2011. Data source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology (Sen Gupta et al., 2012).

But the analysis is of linear trend. How has SST actually changed? Lets have a look for Australian average SST (same data set). Analysis using two tests, the bivariate test and Rodionov’s STARS suggests significant shifts in mean in 1933, 1969 and 1997; and 1936, 1969 and 1995, respectively. This is shown below.

Observed Australian SST 1900–2011 with step-change analysis. Data source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

What’s more, these can be compared to the global zonal average air temperature from GISS, also shown. Here the shifts are 1936/7, 1972 and 1997 using both tests.

Observed zonal average air temperature 24–44°S 1880–2011 with step-change analysis. Data source: Goddard Institute of Space Studies

These graphs clearly show the non-linear evolution of SST is related to larger spatial changes (air temperature across the largely oceanic zone of 24–44°S will be closely related to SST across the same zone). Decadal climate variability and anthropogenic climate change are interacting with each other in the way that warming is distributed over space and time. Impacts in related chemical and  biological systems, in addition to containing their own non-linear response, will clearly follow.

So, what of the future? The following chart shows changes from the models, showing the largest warming generally follows the same pattern in the observations. Hot-spots are off the north-west and south-east in the Tasman Sea. The latter is essentially the southward extension of the East Australian Current. Both these changes will affect Australian climate on land in the future. My take is that tropical Australia will become wetter from the north-west following changes over the past four decades, and that occasional breakouts will affect the south-east and that much warmer waters in the south-east will make coastal lows along the NSW/Victorian coast that much stronger. Oh, and non-linear warming consisting of step changes and trends will continue.

Projected change in SST for end of 21st century based on RCP8.5 scenario. Areas where at least 10/11 models agree that warming is greater or less than the region average are mottled (Sen Gupta et al., 2012).

Sea Level Rise: high confidence in current observations and future projections.

Sea levels are rising around Australia, with fastest rates currently in northern Australia. New analyses of sedimentary records from the east coast of Tasmania confirm slow sea-level change over 1000s of years until the early 20th century, when there was a significant acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise. High sea-level events on annual to decadal timescales have increased by a factor of three during the 20th century.

Sea level will continue to rise during the 21st century and beyond, and result in inundation of low-lying coastal regions and coastal recession.

Confidence that sea level will rise in high, but at the high end of risk, the chance of rapid rise due to ice-shelf instability, confidence in the timing and consequent rate of rise is low. High rates of continuing emissions means that these futures may be committed to before they are properly understood. This is one area where scientific confidence cannot be well translated into risk. Very high confidence can be attached to the statement above (it’s virtually certain) but lower confidence – high risk outcomes are also relevant.

The paper accompanying the report, by John Church, Neil White, John Hunter and Kathy McInnes is excellent, updating recent observations. They have this to say about the high risk end of sea level rise in 2100:

Note that some of the projections are approaching the value of 2 m and that Pfeffer et al. (2008) argued that rises above this value were physically untenable. In summary, although semi-empirical models give a warning that larger sea-level rises than suggested by current process-based models may be possible, they should be used with caution until the concerns about their value are adequately evaluated and addressed.

Global mean sea level continues to rise with the recent acceleration shown by the satellite data.

Global mean sea level from 1880 to 2011 with one standard deviation error estimates (blue), and the satellite altimeter records from 1993 to 2011(red) (Church et al., 2012).

In Australia, sea level has also risen over the continent, but recent rises have been much greater in the north. In their paper, Church et al. (2012) show that tide gauge rises have been faster than offshore rises indicating relative shore-level decline, due either to sediment compaction or tectonics, but the regional rise remains faster than in the south.

Sea-level rise during 1993-2011 in the Australian region.

They also show potential change in return periods of high sea levels events, where with mean rises of around 0.5 m, extremes can change by as much as a thousand-fold. That is assuming that the pattern of extremes around the mean remains the same.

Left: estimated multiplying factor for the increase in the frequency of occurrence of high sea-level events caused by a sea-level rise of 0.5 m. Right: sea-level rise allowance (m) for 1990 to 2100 based on preserving the frequency of flooding events as sea level rises, based on global-average projections from the IPCC AR4 and the A1FI emission scenario.

Which may not be the case. Taking three SEAFRAME (high quality) records from southern Australia, there is some divergence between the mean and extremes, though the relatively short  record means this phenomenon may be transitory. The Burnie peak monthly tide gauge measurement decreases relative to the rising mean (though is constant relative to the land) while the Lorne record shows larger increase in peak monthly measurements.

Mean and peak monthly tide gauge measurements from three sites in southern Australia 1993-2011

The final point is, and I know I keep banging on about it, is that regional mean sea level rise is non-linear, occurring of a series of step changes and trends due to non-linear changes in regional circulation and ocean temperature. This will have important implications for both coastal risks and for marine ecosystems.

Fremantle annual average tide gauge data analysed for step and trend changes from 1920, also shown with a linear line of best fit.

Fort Denison tide gauge records with step and trend analysis, combined with simple trend and 11-year running mean.