Why Politics Fails

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 12:19 PM PST

What To Make Of All Those Sea-Level Rise Projections

Originally published on Mon November 11, 2013 12:05 pm

Credit Credit NOAA

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Climate scientists largely agree that sea level is rising. The extent of the change is a far more complicated matter.

“Probably two feet. Three feet, possibly,” said David Enfield, a climatologist with the University of Miami and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. “As an extreme — if for example we see an unexpected acceleration of the melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica, something else we’re not observing — we could be seeing six feet by the end of the century.”

Compare that to the personal projection by Harold Wanless: “Six to 20 feet, somewhere in that range.”

Wanless is a geologist at the University of Miami. He studies the evolution of coastal regions and believes past sea-level rise shows us that when ice sheets start to melt, they melt much faster than experts might think.

“We don’t really know enough about how ice melts: big ice sheets, like the Greenland ice sheet or parts of the Antarctic ice sheet,” Wanless said. “Every year we’re learning new things and they’re all pointing towards a much more rapid rise [in melt] than is presently being projected.”

Individual projections, even expert ones, are not typically the numbers you’ll see being cited regularly. Most of those projections come from groups of experts discussing which models are worthwhile, which published research to believe, and how to interpret the data. Even those meta-projections typically don’t agree with one another, though they generally fall within the eight-inch to six-and-a-half-foot range.

“Everybody’s brother has been trying to predict the sea-level rise,” said Jayantha Obeysekera, chief modeler for the South Florida Water Management District.

Obeysekera recently gave a presentation on that topic to the Florida Water and Climate Alliance. WLRN-Miami Herald News sat down with him afterwards to ask: What should the general public make of the array of sea-level rise projections?

 

Copyright 2013 WLRN-FM. To see more, visit http://www.wlrn.org/.

Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience

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News in Science

Ozone pact helped cool the planet

Monday, 11 November 2013
AFP

One expert says the cooling benefits from the Montreal Protocol ‘are going to be short-lived’ (iStockphoto: david_addimage)

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A slowdown in global warming that climate sceptics cite in favour of their cause was partly induced by one of the world’s most successful environment treaties, a study has found.

The UN’s Montreal Protocol, designed to phase out industrial gases that destroy Earth’s protective ozone layer, coincidentally applied a small brake to the planet’s warming, it says.

Without this treaty, Earth’s surface temperature would be roughly 0.1°C higher today, according to its authors.

“Paradoxically, the recent decrease in warming, presented by global warming sceptics as proof that humankind cannot affect the climate system, is shown to have a direct human origin,” according to the paper, published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Signed in 1987 and implemented in 1989, the Montreal Protocol committed signatories to scrapping a group of chlorine- and bromine-containing chemicals.

Used in aerosol sprays, solvents and refrigerants, these substances destroy ozone molecules in the stratosphere that filter out cancer-causing ultraviolet light.

Some of the chemicals also happen to be hefty greenhouse gases, with a powerful ability to trap the Sun’s heat.

So their phase-out, which began to hit its stride in the 1990s, was also a small but perceptible gain in the fight against climate change, the scientists write.

From 1998 to 2012, Earth’s mean global temperature rose by an average of 0.05°C per decade, a benchmark measure of warming.

This is far less than the average decadal increase over half a century of 0.12°C, and is out of sync with the ever-rising curve of greenhouse-gas emissions.

As a result, sceptics claim the 15-year “Pause” as proof that climate change has natural causes, showing that green calls to reduce fossil-fuel emissions are flawed or a scam.

The paper, led by Francisco Estrada, an atmospheric physicist at the Autonomous National University of Mexico, is a statistical comparison of carbon emissions and warming during the 20th century.

Overall, temperatures rose last century by 0.8°C.

Cooling and warming

Two World Wars contributed to cooling, as did the Great Depression – massively so. From 1929 to 1932, annual emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) fell by 26 per cent.

It took until 1937 for CO2 emissions to return to their pre-1929 levels. The cooling effect took some time to kick in, but it lasted until the middle of the century.

The post-World War II boom led to a surge in emissions that, from 1960, began to be perceived in a clear signature of sustained warming, according to the investigation.

The paper said that the “Pause” may also be attributable, but in a far smaller way, to changes in rice farming in Asia, a generator of the potent greenhouse gas methane.

In a comment on the study, Alex Sen Gupta, of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Australia, says the cooling benefits from the Montreal Protocol “are going to be short-lived.”

“In the end, the continuing rise in other greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, will keep temperatures marching upwards.”

In September, the UN’s paramount group of climate experts scoffed at the “Pause,” essentially calling it a non-issue.

They said the period of 1998-2012 was far too short to give a long-term view of climate trends.

They also hinted at selective bias, noting that the period began with a strong El Niño, a heat-linked weather phenomenon, thus making following years seem cooler by comparison.

Satellites trace sea level change

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Continue reading the main story

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A major reassessment of 18 years of satellite observations has provided a new, more detailed view of sea-level change around the world.

Incorporating the data from a number of spacecraft, the study re-affirms that ocean waters globally are rising by just over 3mm/yr.

But that figure, according to the reassessment, hides some very big regional differences – up and down.

The Philippine Sea, for example, has seen increases in excess of 10mm/yr.

Continue reading the main story

Earth’s oceans

• 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered in salt water, divided into principal oceans and smaller seas
• The Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, and Arctic Oceans are collectively known as the World Ocean
• The World Ocean is the largest confirmed surface ocean on all observable planets

Source:BBC Science

• Where did our water come from?
• Watch how an entire sea can evaporate

Part of that signal reflects the great fluctuation in winds and sea-surface temperature across the Pacific Ocean known as the El Nino/La Nina-Southern Oscillation.

“The trend map is really a way of looking at average field changes over the 20 years,” explained Steven Nerem of the University of Colorado, US.

“The places where you see high trends probably won’t have high trends in another 20 years.

“A lot of this is decadal variability that will average out over the longer time series, which is why we need more missions to understand where this variability is.”

Paolo Cipollini from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre added: “Many of the features in the trend map indicate changes in heat storage and correspond to long-term variations in the ocean currents.”

This is evident if you look for some of the well-established mass movements of water – such as the Gulf Stream arching across the North Atlantic from the eastern US, or the Kuroshio Extension reaching out from Japan into the Pacific.

Surface bounceThe map was unveiled in Venice, Italy, at a symposium marking “20 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry“.

The research will help scientists to tease out the scale of the various contributions to long-term sea-level rise and understand better the annual and inter-annual changes that can occur.

Currently, the most significant contributions are identified as being the expansion of the world’s oceans due to their absorbing more heat, and the melt water coming from eroded glaciers and ice sheets.

A key quest is to identify to what extent sea-level rise may be accelerating and to pull out any long-term oscillations in ocean behaviour that could confuse that signal.

The Jason satellite series is a benchmark for this field of study

The study was completed as part of the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) agreed by European Space Agency (Esa) member states at their ministerial meeting in 2008.

The CCI seeks to deliver long-term observations on a large set of “essential climate variables” – sea-level change being one of the most important indicators of global change.

Measuring ocean surface shape from satellites has a relatively short history.

Routine observations began with Europe’s ERS-1 spacecraft in 1991, and this has subsequently been followed up by a series of international missions.

The benchmark today is arguably Jason/Poseidon – a cooperative venture between the US and Europe (principally France).

Now in its third incarnation, the Jason satellite circles the globe making a topographic map of 95% of the Earth’s ice-free oceans every 10 days.

To do this, it uses a radar altimeter, which constantly bounces microwave pulses off the sea surface.

By timing how long the signal takes to make the return trip, the instrument can determine sea-surface height.

But to get a full picture, Jason’s data needs to be tied into that from satellites which view parts of the world it cannot see, and also mapped on to tide gauge information. Although these coastal stations cannot provide the same global view as space-borne instruments, they capture much longer trends. Some gauge stations have unbroken records going back more than 200 years.

More detailAnother important tool introduced recently is the gravity satellite – specifically, the two US Grace spacecraft. This duo can weigh the amount of ice held in Antarctica and Greenland, and the quantity of water stored on the continents. They have provided new insights into the scale of melting at the poles, and the impact of changes in precipitation that can move huge volumes of water from the ocean to the land.

Esa recently lost its flagship Earth observation satellite, Envisat, after 10 years of unbroken data-gathering.

The spacecraft and its altimeter stopped operating without warning in April, underlining the need for several instruments to be maintained in orbit at the same time.

A replacement altimeter should launch on the Sentinel-3 spacecraft at the end of 2014. A continuity satellite for the present Jason is also expected to go up within months of the Sentinel.

Other types of altimeter are being built, as well. In December this year, France and India should launch their Saral platform. This will carry a high frequency (Ka band) altimeter that should capture better the changes occurring very close to coastlines – detail which is beyond the reach of microwave observations.

“The key challenge in the coming years is to ensure we keep acquiring altimetry data, that we are able to calibrate it and that we can ensure its quality,” said Maurice Borgeaud from Esa’s Earth Observation Science, Applications and Future Technologies Department.

“Also, we need to tackle the new domains of radar altimetry. Coastal altimetry has been mentioned – also what you can do to measure water levels in rivers and lakes. Again, the old generation of radar altimeters were not designed to do this; the latest generation will be.”

The modern tide gauge is now a highly sophisticated tool. Coastal instruments have recorded sea level change at some locations for more than 200 years

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos

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Shared memory and the licensing of hate

Updated 2 hours 23 minutes ago

Photo: Germans walk by a Jewish business destroyed on Kristallnacht.

The historical significance of Kristallnacht cannot be doubted. It marked the escalation of Nazi hatred of Jews into systematic violence. It also serves as a powerful cautionary tale as we debate the racial vilification provisions in the Race Discrimination Act, writes Tim Soutphommasane.

A few weeks ago I had the honour to meet Gerty Jellinek. Gerty is one of the volunteer guides at the Sydney Jewish Museum. Every Friday, Gerty tells visitors her story of survival. Now in her eighties, Gerty grew up in Vienna. She told me that for a number of years a man had boarded with her family in their home. On 13 March 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the boarder appeared in the corridor dressed in brown-shirted, storm trooper uniform. During the years he had lived in Gerty’s family home, the boarder had been a member of the SA (Sturmabteilung, or “assault division”).

It was only a few months later that Kristallnacht took place. We all know what began that night of November 9. Across Germany and Austria, Jews became the targets of an orgy of violence. Families were attacked in their homes. Hundreds of synagogues were destroyed. Thousands of businesses were looted. Cemeteries were desecrated. Beginning on that night, thousands of Jewish men would be arrested and transferred to concentration camps.

What happened 75 years ago was fateful – the shattered glass across central Europe represented not just the destruction of Jewish life, but also the shattering of civilized society. One British correspondent in Berlin, Hugh Greene (who would later become Director-General of the BBC), observed the events with nauseous disbelief. As Greene put it,

Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the “fun”.

These were the scenes that a twelve-year-old Gerty saw in Vienna, where the pogrom against Jews was complete. Nearly all of Vienna’s 94 synagogues and prayer houses were destroyed. As Gerty recalled to me, Jewish women in Vienna were made to scrub the pavements on the city’s streets – a ritual of torment and humiliation.

There are some things that require us to care and to remember. Members of a civilized society should not ignore crimes against humanity. They certainly should not revel in the lamentations of other human beings.

Shared memory can have a universal ring, too. Earlier this year, the Berliner Philharmoniker gave its first performance of A Child of Our Time, an oratorio by Michael Tippett. The composition of A Child of Our Time began in 1939. Tippett, an English composer and a committed pacifist, was deeply shaken by the violence against Jews on Kristallnacht and the trial of Herschel Grynspan – whose shooting of German diplomat Ernst von Rath was used by Nazis as a pretext for the pogrom.

The oratorio has been described as “something Handel might have written had he lived in the age of Auschwitz”. Its themes closely track what happened on Kristallnacht, and the role of Grynspan in its eruption. Tippett’s piece tells the story of a “general state of oppression in our time” and a “young man’s attempt to seek justice [with] catastrophic consequences”. Reflecting later on his oratorio, Tippett would write that “the growing violence springing out of divisions of nation, race, religion, status, colour, or even just rich and poor is possibly the deepest present threat to the social fabric of all human society”. For Tippett, there was clearly a universal import to the Night of Broken Glass.

The historical significance of Kristallnacht cannot be doubted. It marked the escalation of Nazi hatred of Jews into systematic violence. It illustrated the power of words in the mounting anti-Semitism of the time. It demonstrated what can happen when authorities give people permission to conduct violence. It was the opening act of the Holocaust.

The chronology of events shows that Kristallnacht occurred after Grynspan’s shooting of von Rath in Paris. Nazi Germany would use it as an excuse to call for demonstrations against Jews in retribution. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels declared that “insofar as they erupt spontaneously”, such demonstrations “are not to be hampered”.

What resulted was orchestrated violence across Germany and Austria.

Such a pattern of authorisation would be repeated in other episodes of genocide during the twentieth century.

In Cambodia, it was Pol Pot’s call for class hatred against educated officials, businessmen, teachers and city-dwellers that preceded the murder of 25 per cent of the Cambodian national population.

In Rwanda, the butchering of 800,000 people began when a radio station incited Hutus to wage a final war of extermination against the Tutsi. Genocide doesn’t begin with violence – it indeed begins with words.

And it also begins with indifference. What was perhaps most consequential with Kristallnacht was that it was met with such little opposition, both inside Germany and Austria, and from outside. The event confirmed that passivity emboldens the perpetrators of evil: it gives licence to hate; it desensitizes people to the further degradation of others.

This needn’t mean that indifference transforms otherwise upright or good people into menacing agents of evil. Over the decades, prompted by the arguments of Hannah Arendt, we have come to accept that evil may assume much more banal forms. As Arendt reminds us, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made their minds up to be or do evil at all.” When it comes to the worst of crimes against humanity, the problem is that normal people commit them.

We can take from all of this the following. Context and circumstance matter. Moral judgements seldom appear in absolute form. And none of us is ever exempt from human deficiency.

The evidence supports this. Experiments in social psychology reveal how small changes in situational context can affect our moral responses.

In one famous experiment, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo took a group of healthy young men to a makeshift prison in the basement of a university laboratory. He assigned one half to act as prisoners and the other half to act as guards. Zimbardo appointed himself prison superintendent. He gave the guards instructions that they should refrain from physical torture.

Within two days, the student guards had set about inflicting upon prisoners punishments: verbal abuse, sleep deprivation, hours spent in stress positions. Prisoners were forced to repeat physical and mental exercises. Within even this controlled, benign prison environment, the guards grew sadistic. Some prisoners broke into hysteria; others broke into hives. A cycle of degradation had been unleashed.

Here is Zimbardo’s conclusion:

Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us – under the right or wrong situational circumstances. That knowledge does not excuse evil; rather, it democratises it, sharing its blame among ordinary actors rather than declaring it the province only of deviants and despots – of Them but not Us.

It is a dangerous thing, then, to throw around the language of evil. To call someone evil, after all, is to cast a judgment upon someone’s soul. But calling someone’s actions evil is another thing. This may be one way to avoid moral laziness: focus on the action rather than the agent.

Such matters bear upon the question of race in contemporary Australia. We see regularly from our public debates that levelling the charge of racism isn’t to be done lightly. Frequently, those who are alleged to have said or done something will respond – or someone will respond on their behalf – with indignation. To be called racist, they will say, involves a condemnation of moral character that goes well beyond censuring any ignorance.

In my view, it is important that we not be sheepish about condemning bad behaviour when we see it. Something needn’t be violent or maliciously directed in order to count as racism. Racism, as we know, begins with words. And it needn’t be about a doctrinal belief in racial superiority. More often than not, it is about the prejudice born of ethnic stereotypes.

But while acts of racism may sometimes be unintentional, they always have consequences. Racism is as much about impact as it is about intention; it is about the impact of actions on the standing that someone enjoys as a member of society.

In Australia, it is the federal Racial Discrimination Act, which writes into our laws that everyone can participate in the life of the nation as an equal. But the Act is more than just an instrument for guaranteeing equal opportunity. It is also a statement about racial tolerance in a multicultural society – that we regard civility as a cardinal value, and social cohesion as an absolute necessity.

Since 1995, the provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act have included protections against racial vilification, through sections 18C and 18D. Section 18C makes it unlawful for someone to do an act that is reasonably likely “to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” someone on the grounds of their race or ethnicity. Reflecting the fundamental importance of freedom of speech, section 18D ensures that artistic works, scientific debate, and fair comment on a matter of public interest are exempt from being in breach of the Act – provided that something is said or done reasonably and in good faith.

As many of you know, the federal government has said that it wishes to change the racial vilification provisions of the Act. Namely, it wishes that the Act no longer makes it unlawful to offend or insult someone on the grounds of race.

There will be debate about this issue in the coming months. That is how it should be. As citizens in a liberal democracy, we should be able to conduct robust discussions and arguments. If there are to be limits on what we can say, they should have good justifications.

But free speech has never been an absolute value. In practice, free speech has never been entirely unrestricted. We have many laws that limit our freedom of speech: for example, laws concerning defamation, laws concerning advertising, laws concerning obscenity, laws concerning fraud, laws concerning public order, laws concerning national security.

We should ask a number of questions. Would a change to the law leave people with adequate protections against racial vilification? Would a change have the effect of encouraging people to think that they can harass and vilify others on the grounds of race with impunity? What would be the overall impact on our human rights and freedoms?

Any debate should also pay attention to the manner in which the current racial vilification provisions actually operate. Often it is forgotten that section 18D explicitly protects the fundamental value of free speech. Often it is thought that the operation of section 18C serves only to protect hurt feelings and personal sensitivities.

Yet the courts have interpreted the law during the past two decades in a consistent manner. Section 18C consists of an objective test: unlawful acts are those that are proven reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to cause harm. It doesn’t apply to “mere slights” but only to acts that involve “profound and serious effects”. Where people have fallen foul of section 18C in the courts, it has involved racial vilification of a standard that goes well beyond trivial name-calling.

Certainly, in the complaints that reach the Australian Human Rights Commission, it is clear that the current legislation provides redress to people who have been subjected to withering and degrading racial abuse. In what follows, I should warn you that I will be using actual language used in our complaints that may offend.

In recent times, the Commission has conciliated a complaint made about a police officer who was alleged to have called Aboriginal bus passengers “you f***ing hairy monkeys”. Another complaint involved a website inciting people to yell at Asians, “You Gook F**k Off to China”, and encouraging people “to express their anger physically by laying the Gooks out”. Another case involved a man of Jewish ethnic origin putting forward a complaint about a video sharing site on the internet: the website included content in the form of people offering money to kill Jewish people.

These are just some examples of the ugliness that the law in practice serves to combat. Indeed, the Racial Discrimination Act provides important protections against racial hatred. The apparent anti-Semitic attack in Bondi just over two weeks ago provides a sad reminder of why sections 18C and 18D were introduced to the Act during the 1990s. As many of you know, there was determination at the time that stopping racial violence required legislative action against racial vilification – it required action aimed at the roots of racial violence.

As we commemorate 75 years after Kristallnacht, we naturally reflect on what it may tell us today. For members of Sydney’s Jewish community, as for members of Jewish communities everywhere, the Night of Broken Glass is an episode of common and shared memory. It is part of the story of what is your community of memory.

It is also important, I believe, that Kristallnacht be the subject of shared memory for all of us. The reason is simple: a crime against humanity anywhere is a crime against humanity everywhere. And the lessons of Kristallnacht are profound and universal. Let us never be complacent about human frailty. Let us never underestimate our capacity to do evil. Let us never licence hatred, for we can never know its bounds.

This is an edited version of a speech delivered on the on the 75th anniversary commemoration of Kristallnacht at the Great Synagogue, Sydney, November 10, 2013.

Dr Tim Soutphommasane is the federal Race Discrimination Commissioner. He tweets at @timsout. View