Final thoughts- for now

This post is my final for the Geogg3057 course, although I'm sure I'll be back for more. However, I thought it provided a good opportunity to reflect on what I've learnt from this project so far.

I started the blog largely out of frustration at the poor quality of science reporting in the media, and because I was tired of hearing people spouting unchallenged climate change myths. As the project's gone on I've realised that communicating science is more challenging than I expected. Reassuringly, I've found that many other people have experienced this too, and many have tried to find novel ways to combat it. Others however have tried to exploit this, whether that's simply by trying to get away with lazy reporting or by actively trying to obscure the truth for personal gain.

There's no silver bullet to deal with all this. With media that focuses on bad news and social media that allows us to live in bubbles of like-minded people, in many ways it seems there is little to do. However, I would argue that this makes it more important than ever to find novel ways to communicate climate science.

In some ways social media makes this easier than before, as traditional media can be bypassed. I thought the post about sea ice, in which I used graphs from twitter, was an excellent example of this. Graphics are an excellent way to communicate a lot of information in a simple way, and mediums such as twitter allow a large audience to see them without necessarily having to search for them.

However, as has been widely discussed recently, social media promotes an echo-chamber effect. Even more worryingly, it allows the proliferation of fake news. How this can be combated is a more challenging problem, one for which I'm still not sure I have any good answers.

Overall, I think the main takeaways from this blog should be:
1) Just because something is published in a major newspaper or website, it isn't necessarily true. It's worth learning which outlets tend to report science most accurately, and knowing a good place to fact check (I'd recommend skeptical science for all climate-related queries).
2) Look beyond the headline; more often than not it's clickbait.
3) The importance of effective science communication cannot be overstated, and is certainly an area that would benefit from improvement.
4) Climate change is one of the biggest threats facing the world today, but the worst thing we can do is give up the fight before its even begun. We need to arm ourselves with the facts and build a solution from there.

Finally, I hope you've enjoyed reading the blog so far as much as I've enjoyed writing it. Keep the comments coming, it's always great to hear feedback. Thanks for all your interest so far!

Pause for thought

Possibly inspired by this blog (it’s always good to dream big), it seems that some of the world’s most preeminent climate scientists have been doing some fact checking of their own. This week, a paper was released in Science Advances adding support to the argument that there has not actually been a ‘hiatus’ in warming at all.

You may have seen this reported in the news. It has received quite a lot of attention as it refutes one of the most popular arguments of climate change ‘sceptics’ (see my first mythbusting post).

The paper corroborates an earlier study by the NOAA that the apparent slow down in warming is in fact an artefact of the way measurements are made. Changes in the way sea surface temperature measurements are taken, for example a move towards using buoys rather than ships, have resulted in measurement biases. This distorted the true trend in temperature changes.

Figure 1: From the BBC website, showing the NOAAs new dataset (red), which corrected the biases from older, less accurate instruments (blue).

This week’s paper presented a climate dataset which fully corrected for the different methods of collecting temperature observations. Both this and the NOAA data found rates of warming over the past decade to be comparable to earlier rates, in contrast to previous reports of a ‘hiatus’ which even made it into the 5^th IPCC report.

This paper highlights the importance of critically evaluating science. However, it also reinforces the message from the extreme weather report is discussed in my earlier blog about the difficulty of communicating science. People with more experience science understand the concepts of instrumental bias, error, and uncertainty. However, to most people these words suggest something entirely different.

In some ways it is understandable why so many people are suspicious of claims about climate change when climate scientists themselves can’t seem to decide what’s going on. The scientific community as a whole needs to work on making science communication more accessible. In climate science especially this is of the upmost importance. I think a good start would to spend more time focussing on what we know, and less on what we don’t.

2016

With 2016 drawing to a close the media has been full of reflections on what a year it's been. A notable omission from many of these articles has been how this year has seen climate change progress at a record breaking rate. However, I did come across this article which has a few of the biggest changes and milestones we saw this year. It's well referenced too, so a useful tool if anyone tries to tell you things aren't all that bad/ climate change isn't happening. Check it out here!

Extreme weather

Climate change often receives the most attention in the media when extreme weather is in the news. It seems that every hurricane, flood,  or heat wave sparks a new round of headlines. The public seem to respond to this effect; a 2014 study found that following personal experience of Hurricanes Sandy and Irene, students in the north-east of the US showed increased concern about climate change. Previous negative attitudes towards ‘green’ politicians were even reversed.

However, it’s less certain that these links are scientifically accurate. Is climate change actually causing the rate of extreme weather events to increase?

Over the last few years a number of papers have been published in which the links between specific extreme weather events and climate change have been investigated. However, not much has changed in the way these events are reported in the news. This week a report was published discussing the both the science of extreme weather events and, perhaps even more interestingly, how this is communicated.

Contrary to my impression, the report found that even when links were well established, extreme weather events were often discussed without any mention of climate change- particularly in the US. However, it did note that climate change reporting is dominated by extreme weather events. This is doubly concerning, highlighting how under-reported climate change impacts are. The report also found that prominent public figures played a large role in influencing public opinion, even if they were unqualified to comment

In light of this, the report makes some recommendations about how to best communicate scientific understanding of climate change. The main points are that the reporting should focus on what we do know, rather than what we don’t, and that pessimism and despair should be avoided as they tend to prompt inaction.  This advice may seem common sense, but in reality is rarely followed for a number of reasons. For example, talk of ‘uncertainty’ and ‘error’ is common in science, but these words have subtly different meanings in everyday usage that tend to confuse the public.

This advice could be applied to many areas of science, but is particularly useful for climate change where public understanding and concern lags far behind the science. Let’s hope that these recommendations are widely read and followed, and that it’s enough to counteract the new wave of ‘sceptics’ coming into power in 2017.  

Greenwashing

Rather than look at an article this week, I thought I would be interesting to talk about adverts. This was prompted by the Shell #makethefuture campaign currently running. Its main adverts feature a number of celebrities and cute cartoons of multiple renewable energy projects Shell are currently involved in.

When I first saw the adverts, I was pretty impressed. Burning fossil fuels is the single biggest contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. We need investment in renewable energies to allow us to transition away from fossil fuels without corresponding reductions in quality of life. Furthermore, many of the projects featured can be used in areas without an extensive or reliable energy infrastructure, and so potentially could play a huge role in aiding access to electricity in these areas.

However, a little research has made me somewhat more sceptical about these adverts. They’re not advertising a specific product or service, but are instead a PR exercise aiming to improve the brand’s image in the public eye. In fact, it’s a classic example of what has come to be called ‘greenwashing’: a PR technique used to paint a company as environmentally friendly despite its activities being anything but.  

So what led me to these conclusions? A quick look at some figures is pretty revealing. In 2016 Shell created a ‘New Energies’ division to invest in renewables. Great! Except that this branch of the business receives investments less than 1% the size of Shell’s investments in extracting fossil fuels. That’s an annual expenditure of £200milllion vs the £30 billion spent on oil and gas extraction.

Shell doesn’t have a good record on this front. In 2009 it was reported that despite running adverts mere months before promoting its green credentials, Shell had withdrawn funding for most renewables due to their lack of profitability. In 2008 Shell was reprimanded by the UK Advertising Standards Authority for a ‘misleading’ advert in which it appeared to label its exploitation of the Alberta Tar Sands and the development of the largest oil refinery in the USA as ‘sustainable’.

Figure 1: Shell's 2008 advert deemed 'misleading' by the UKASA.

It’s worth pointing out of course that Shell is FAR from the only offender in this area. See also BP (formally British Petroleum) rebranding itself ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and ExxonMobil running adverts about how green it is while funding climate change denial on a grand scale.

The fact is, these companies’ profits and viability depend on extracting and burning fossil fuels. That’s how they’ve always made their money, and that’s how they hope to continue to make their money. Why not? They know how to do it and there are incomprehensible profits to be made.

The problem for us is that world cannot go on burning fossil fuels at this rate if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. In fact, a 2015 paper in Nature estimated that in order to give us a chance of avoiding 2˚C warming, 80% of known coal reserves, 50% of known gas reserves and a third of known oil reserves cannot be burned. Carbon Tracker’s 2011 Unburnable Carbon Report introduced the idea of a ‘carbon bubble’: the fact that if any meaningful action is taken to avoid climate change, the assets on which these companies base their business models and financial reporting will become stranded. To put it another way, these companies can talk about renewables all they want, but as it stands their viability is reliant on us burning enough fossil fuels to cause climate change far far exceeding 2 ˚C.

So what can be done? Shareholder pressure is having some success, for example leading to ExxonMobil agreeing to stop funding climate change denial (not that they stuck to it).  Many fossil fuel divestment campaigns are also gaining traction , following the success of boycott movements in the past (if you’re interested, UCL has its own campaign).

I personally think that ultimately these companies are too large and too powerful to have to respond to anything but globally coordinated regulation by governments. And that’s unlikely to happen (in democracies at least) until the public demand it. And as long as the fossil fuel giants are keeping us happy with pretty films about how they’re going to change the world, we don’t seem that interested in demanding that our governments take bold action to keep fossil fuels in the ground. It may seem petty, but greenwashing is an incredibly powerful weapon in the arsenal of these companies. Don’t fall for it.

Visualising Global Change

Something a bit different this time, but an interesting perspective on how mass media can change our worldview nonetheless. This week Google Earth updated their Timelapse feature, and it’s really worth checking out (or have a look at the whole collection on youtube here). Not only are the compilations beautiful, they are also an excellent way to visualise the effects we’re having on the planet.

I found the retreat of the Columbia Glacier in Alaska; the cycles of desiccation of Lake Poopó in Bolivia; and rising sea levels in Subarnachar Upazila, Bangladesh three particularly eye-opening and relevant examples. If you’re not convinced by the scale of the problem we’re facing, these might help change your mind. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic sea ice isn’t often out the news these days. Whether it’s used by climate scientists as a warning of things to come or by ‘sceptics’ as proof that things aren’t as bad as claimed, it seems the world is very interested on what’s going on up there.

It can be hard to know what to make of all this. One way to visual what’s going on is with Andy Lee Robinson’s 'Arctic Death Spiral'. (Note: many of the graphics this week are from tweets, to ensure their creators are properly credited. This doesn't mean they are poor science though; you can see the source of the data in each of the images. Have a look at those links if you want to find out more!)

#Arctic Death Spiral - October 2016 average vol: 5,539 km³ - 2nd record lowest (last year 7,052 km³, 2012: 5,036 km³) pic.twitter.com/zXmqkYy8dV

— Andy Lee Robinson (@ahaveland) November 14, 2016

Figure 1: The average area covered by sea ice in the Arctic each month since 1979 until October this year.

Each month has its own spiral because the amount of ice in the arctic changes dramatically over the year. As you can see from this graphic, the ice generally peaks around April and is lowest in September, and has dramatically decreased over the last few decades. After September, temperatures drop again and ice begins to form again. Worryingly however, this November has been anomalously warm; up to 20˚C warmer than average for this time of year. This has resulted in a record breaking lack of ice.

Okay, maybe time to let the #Arctic know what season it is -> another drop in #seaice extent from the last 24-hours (3rd day in a row, JAXA) pic.twitter.com/2Fl1pQUsD4

— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) November 20, 2016 

Figure 2: Arctic sea ice extent this month is lower than ever observed at this time of year.

In fact, as of Wednesday, over half the days this year have broken the record for the lowest extent of sea ice for that time of year.

2016 has now broken daily record min Arctic #seaice extent on exactly 50% of days so far this year. Crazy year in the Arctic! pic.twitter.com/crW9rdc3pV

— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) November 23, 2016

Figure 3: This year's Arctic sea ice cover anomaly relative to the previous record minimum for that date.

So what about all those articles asserting that the situation isn’t all that bad? Many are based around overly pessimistic predictions made during the record minimum of 2012 (see figure 4). The absolute minimum has not been this low since, with this year’s September minimum the same as that seen in 2009 (making it the joint second lowest coverage on record). However, although the terrifying event of 2012 is yet to be repeated, as figure 1 shows there is still a very significant decreasing trend. This trend is still outside the worst case scenarios predicted by early models (shown in figure 4). All in all, not all that reassuring, despite what the Daily Mail wants you to think.

Figure 4: Image from Skeptical Science during the record 2012 minimum compared to model projections.

The recent Arctic Resilience Report doesn’t provide much comfort either. It highlights the vulnerability of the Arctic to climate change, and lists 19 tipping points we are approaching there. This video from The Guardian summarises some of the most important (and terrifying) points from the report.

In summary, despite what can be taken away from cherry-picking data or very short term variability, we are seeing a significant and rapid loss of Arctic sea ice. This has the potential to have dramatic knock on consequences on the rest of the world. And if you’re still not convinced of the seriousness of this issue, just remember: no Arctic sea ice= no polar bears. Time to act.