
Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message - ramonvillasante
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/earth-day-and-the-hockey-stick-a-singular-message/
======
sgt101
A good thing would be to see the graph up to today - am I right that the
article only shows the graph from 20 years ago and then some affirmation of
the validity of that artefact? If so does anyone have a link to the picture up
to 2018?

~~~
f_allwein
NASA has one up to 2017. It does not look pretty.

[https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-
temperature/](https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/)

~~~
IncRnd
My first question, looking at that graph, is "how does that graph calculate a
global temperature for an entire year?" Do you know the actual source of the
global temperature readings going back to 1880? Sure, the webpage says the
dataset came from
[https://climate.nasa.gov/system/internal_resources/details/o...](https://climate.nasa.gov/system/internal_resources/details/original/647_Global_Temperature_Data_File.txt),
but where did they come _from?_

These are the first 10 lines of the linked dataset, showing land and sea
temperatures for the entire earth from 1880 to 1889.

    
    
      1880	-0.19	-0.11
      1881	-0.1	-0.14
      1882	-0.1	-0.17
      1883	-0.19	-0.21
      1884	-0.28	-0.24
      1885	-0.31	-0.26
      1886	-0.32	-0.27
      1887	-0.35	-0.27
      1888	-0.18	-0.27
      1889	-0.11	-0.26
    

I'm curious where this data originated - and that curiosity has nothing to do
with belief in or disbelief of climate change.

~~~
SiempreViernes
To be precise, these are global _averages_ , so from this alone it is clear
the numbers aren't measurements but rather the output of some analysis.

The linked file is simply the analysis output, the source is the Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, presumably their GISTEMP dataset (since that's
the one about global average surface temperature).

The original GISTEMP analysis is documented here:
[https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha00700d.html](https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha00700d.html)

with later refinements found elsewhere on the GISS site.

In brief they simply use weather station data, and build their global average
from that. They also talk about change in the average rather than the absolute
value, which makes sense since you are then much less sensitive to the
absolute calibration error of each station.

Then they do a lot of statistics on it to compensate for lack of coverage etc
etc, read it yourself if 30 year old statistics papers are interesting to you.

~~~
IncRnd
Thank you for that, but if you look once more, you will see that you didn't
answer my question.

~~~
Certhas
They did. As they said, they use (weather) station data + statistics to
compensate for missing data. We have temperature records from weather stations
going back to the 18th century.

Just quickly googling I found this paper that works to make historical records
usable for today:

[https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/gdj3....](https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/gdj3.11)

"Daily observations of weather and climate for the province of Québec, Canada,
start in the 18th century and continue to the present day. Daily temperature
observations from 12 observers ranging from 1742 to 1873 are described here."

That's why the 1880 forward data is different from other reconstructions going
further back. These are measurement instruments by scientists recording
temperature.

------
stareatgoats
Much as I agree that fossil fuel burning is a horrendous thing that has sent
us on a life-threatening trajectory, I also think this narrative is overly
simplified. The fight to minimize fossil fuel would benefit from a more
realistic (i.e. humble) approach IMO. Doubting if Thomas Mann will be the
person to do that though.

To be clear, climate science has come a long way and has shown beyond any
reasonable doubt that fossil fuel burning is changing our climate in ways that
already is causing damage to the livelihood of millions if not billions of
people, something which will accelerate in the short term and put our capacity
for adaption and human compassion to a severe test, that we will probably fail
miserably.

So the core issue is not up for debate. But there are still claims that rubs
me the wrong way, for example that is that this is "a fight between science
and self-interested industry". Yes, to some extent. But climate science is not
a mature science like (some parts of) physics. As a science it is still
struggling to explain why things like ice-ages were (are?) a recurring
phenomenon.

The reason is that climate science is in essence a historical science. What
this means: while we can tell that the climate has behaved in a certain way
historically, and many times (not always) understand why, we have no way to
determine the accumulated future effects of warming beyond a certain, in
geological terms, fairly short horizon. It may well, through the combination
of various tipping point effects, planetary, intergalactic or even hitherto
unknown extra-galactic phenomenon have the exact opposite effect, as far as we
know.

So part of the drama is in my view caused by climate science trying to
establish itself as a mature science with a predictability powers comparable
to sciences that can perform reproducible experiments, downplaying its own
nature as a historical science. The fossil burning industry (and all the other
interests tied in with them) is handed a gift in a way, since they can appeal
to the natural intelligence of the average person, and get an agreement that
the climate science is making hyperbolic claims.

We don't know everything, and it would serve the sane discussion well to
delimit what we can and can not predict.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png)

~~~
Certhas
The science isn't over. There are plenty of things we don't know.

But likewise there are things we do know. I know of no serious climate
scientist who claims we understand the climate. But we still know that human
activity is warming the globe at an unprecedented rate.

The fossil burning industry has been handed a gift not by scientists
overreaching but by systematically discrediting solid science. This is no
different than decades of subterfuge by tobacco to sow doubt about the health
effects of smoking, and similar things with asbestos. Further peoples "natural
intelligence" being really really bad at dealing with uncertainty and slow
multi generational global phenomena. If you predict something to happen with
90% chance, and it doesn't happen, people naturally tend to think you were
wrong. Further, the language of careful uncertainty analysis has often been
twisted by parties who are interested in maximizing the profit from their
historical investments.

Of course you will find individual scientists who disagree over how certain or
uncertain particular results are (and who are more alarmist than others), but
please, since they seem to be so irritating to you, could you actually point
out cases of this supposed overreach?

Because in all honesty it sounds to me like you're more irked by scientists
also being advocates.

In which case you should ask yourself, if your research shows that there is a
considerable risk (which is a criterion well short of scientific certainty) of
dramatic negative consequences, what is your ethical obligation as a scientist
in society? Is it sufficient to publish this result in an academic journal, or
do you have an obligation to ring the alarm bells?

~~~
stareatgoats
We're in agreement regarding the utter seriousness of global warming, glad to
hear. I do believe the main tasks are: adapting to the changes that are
coming, taking care of those of us that will get displaced (which may mean
moving to a green Sahara), and making sure we don't further worsen the
problem. But in light of the prospecting that takes place all over (for
example in Greenland and other areas made exploitable by receding glaciers)
I'm rather pessimistic about the last point. Even with the fairly rapid
development of alternative energy sources (solar, wind, geothermal) it does
not seem that these will replace fossil or nuclear fuels any time soon, only
supplement it.

As for examples of overreach, I was amiss in not citing anything in support,
but the comment was already too long. I'll cite one such example here which I
believe supports my point: The so called 'Climategate' affair, which, while
scientists involved were exonerated from any direct wrong-doing, revealed a
team of distinguished scientists "so focused on winning the public-relations
war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own
cause" [0]

I'll skip your questions based on the straw-man reading if you don't mind.

[0]
[https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01tier.html?_r=3&...](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01tier.html?_r=3&n=Top/News/Science/Columns/Findings)

~~~
Certhas
No but climategate is exactly the type of pseudo-controversy that I was
getting at. Read the reports:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy#Inquiries_and_reports)

No scientific misconduct. No fraud. But yes, concern over the public relations
battle that scientists have been forced into. Would you rather scientists just
concede that battle?

And again, they have been fighting that battle _without scientific
misconduct_. There was no hiding of uncertainties, it's all there in the
papers. There are very few fields of science where uncertainties are so well
studied. The sentence in the NYT article you quote is simply not backed by the
facts, and it is mistaking consensus for group-think.

Opposing requests for transparency (looking at raw code and data) is
unfortunately all to common in science. The culture is shifting, but it's a
result of things being generally messy. Often it takes considerable experience
to reliably reach judgements on what the data/code outputs mean. And that's
typically not well documented. I advocate for open science at my institute
wherever I can. We're getting there.

One perfect example is the "hide the decline". Anyone with statistics training
knows that "the decline" is perfectly consistent with the previous trend +
fluctuations + data problems. It didn't challenge anything. It's also right
there in the published papers. But of course if you want to put out press
releases you can't assume your audience knows that, you need to communicate
that fact. The part of the audience that understands that can read the papers
just fine to figure out the details (they are not hard to read).

------
SiempreViernes
So the history of climate change goes something like: confusion about overall
sign in the 1960's, mounting evidence for warming due to CO_2 in 1970's,
consensus about overall warming caused by human CO_2 emission in the eighties,
and then clarifying in the details since then.

The fact that there still isn't mainstream discussion about how society must
change, but rather eternal growth society is still the default target across
the globe is depressing and gives confidence that we are going to see
substantial civilisation collapse in the future.

~~~
assblaster
I think that alarmism has hurt climate science ever since the 1960s. Past
mistakes matter because people generally won't trust the naysayers when
they've been proven wrong so obviously that grade school children won't trust
them.

From [https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/21/18-examples-of-the-
sp...](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/21/18-examples-of-the-
spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-first-earth-day-in-1970/)
>Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970
when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:

1\. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within
15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing
mankind.”

2\. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this
nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote
Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the
scholarly journal Environment.

3\. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page
warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to
enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and
possible extinction.”

4\. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small
increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the
April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least
100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten
years.”

5\. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the
history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay
titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will
have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines
of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the
ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the
1980s.”

6\. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day
issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4
billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great
Die-Off.”

7\. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes,
the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living
Wilderness.

8\. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970,
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by
1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to
include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year
2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine
conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with
the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in
famine.”

9\. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and
theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban
dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air
pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one
half….”

10\. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen
buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the
atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11\. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up
all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12\. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is
certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years
alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in
1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13\. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other
chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy
of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now
had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current
patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might
level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in
the US is 78.8 years).

14\. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends
continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any
more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and
he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”

15\. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences,
published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and
estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000.
Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16\. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary
of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75
and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17\. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the
original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30
years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will
vanish with it.”

18\. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has
been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends
continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean
temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about
twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

~~~
kevhito
Can you give me a citation for your first quote (from George Ward). Although
it seems to show up on a lot of self-described "climate skeptic" pages, I
can't seem to find any legitimate source for it. It shows up in wikipedia as
well, but the citation there just leads to the same tangled mess of "climate
skeptic" pages that all seem to cite each other.

I'm really curious if George Wald said this at all, and if he did, what
specifically he was talking about. Nuclear proliferation was another of his
areas of activism, for example.

~~~
southern_cross
Maybe someone with access to Ward's papers at the Harvard campus can help you
out here. See the following; search for "Earth Day".

[http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hua02000](http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hua02000)

------
thaumaturgy
If only the senate could have waited a couple of more days before confirming
an AGW "skeptic" to head NASA [1], we could've had some really nice contrast
between this essay and the current government.

1: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/science/jim-
bridenstine-n...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/science/jim-bridenstine-
nasa.html)

------
tobr
We should start talking about actions that contribute to global warming in a
significant/active/systemic way as crimes against humanity. That is what they
are. Executives and politicians need to know that that is how we will judge
them in the future.

~~~
southern_cross
So every time you get in your car and start personally spewing excess CO2,
that's a crime against humanity? Or you fire up your oil or gas furnace? Or
you eat a burger or pretty much anything else produced by Big Ag? Or you build
a concrete structure? And so on and so forth.

As the old saying goes: "Those who live in glass houses should not throw
stones."

~~~
tzs
Is there a recognized name for the fallacy southern_cross is using here?

~~~
thaumaturgy
It could be "Argument of the Beard", "Causal Reductionism", or "Fallacy of
Composition" ([http://www.don-lindsay-
archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html](http://www.don-lindsay-
archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html)).

In any case, you're right to point out that it's troll behavior to dump all of
the effects of industrial pollution and the resultant politics on a single
individual's shoulders, as though one person would have a measurable impact on
global climate.

~southern_cross is just framing their argument as, "if you haven't killed
yourself yet, then you can't care about the environment", and that's an easy
argument to ignore.

~~~
southern_cross
It seems you're doing some serious trolling there yourself - putting words in
my mouth and all. And as to your "one person" argument, then by that logic
none of us should be particularly concerned about making any changes to our
own lifestyle, because it probably won't make any difference anyway - too
insignificant. Amirite?

------
acqq
Regarding ice on Arctic and Antarctic, the extent as we speak extremely low
compared to our historical records:

[https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iq...](https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iqr_timeseries.png)

[https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_iq...](https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_iqr_timeseries.png)

(from National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado)

------
chrisseaton
I was always confused about what people meant by 'hockey stick growth'...
until I worked out they mean _ice_ hockey stick growth. A normal hockey stick
wouldn't be very impressive growth!

~~~
ninkendo
What kind of hockey stick were you referring to?

~~~
chrisseaton
Normal hockey sticks have a little curl that goes back on itself - not great
growth!

[https://www.hockeydirect.com/Catalogue/Hockey-
Sticks/Grays-H...](https://www.hockeydirect.com/Catalogue/Hockey-Sticks/Grays-
Hockey-Sticks)

Hockey sticks that you use to play ice hockey have a long straight line that
goes up and to the right, like strong linear growth.

[https://puckstop.com/product/true-xc9-acf-youth-hockey-
stick](https://puckstop.com/product/true-xc9-acf-youth-hockey-stick)

