I took a look at the public review comments on the CCSP Synthesis report released yesterday that were submitted to the CCSP (here in PDF) earlier this year and there are frequent mentions of my work and how it is at odds with the statements in the report. The following comment from Chip Knappenberger and CCSP response are telling (from p. 299).

Knappenberger:

Citation 27 is to Mills, Science, 2005. The Mills paper has come under intensive criticism, largely from Dr. Roger Pielke Jr - another expert in the field of disaster losses. Pielke Jr. published a response to the Mills paper in Science.

It is inconceivable that the authors of the CCSP report don't know of the Pielke Jr. criticisms (after all Evan Mills is listed as a CCSP author) and yet it is equally inconceivable that knowing of them, that absolutely no reference is made to them.

The fact is, is that Pielke Jr. concluded "Presently, there is simply no scientific basis for claims that the escalating cost of disasters is the result of anything other than increasing societal vulnerability." (Pielke Jr., Science, 2005). This is precisely the opposite of the CCSP conclusion. How can such criticism be completely ignored?

Imagine if an industry-funded government contractor had a hand in writing a major federal report on climate change. And imagine if that person used his position to misrepresent the science, to cite his own non-peer reviewed work, and to ignore relevant work in the peer-reviewed literature. There would be an outrage, surely . . .

The Obama Administration has re-released a report (PDF) first issued in draft form by the Bush Administration last July (still online PDF). The substance of the report is essentially the same as last year's version, with a bit more professionalism in the delivery. For instance, the photo-shopped picture of a flood appears to be removed and the embarrassing executive summary has been replaced by something more appropriate.

This post is about how the report summarizes the issue of disasters and climate change, including several references to my work, which is misrepresented. This post is long and detailed, which is necessary to support my claims. But stick with it, or skip to the end if you've seen the details before (and long-time readers will have seen them often), there is a surprise at the end.

Global warming plays its part in hampering Greenland trek

Two Greenland adventurers say the effects of global warming definitely hampered their expedition.

Steve Wright and Simon Elmont arrived back in the island last month after their expedition was cut short due to Mr Elmont sustaining an ankle injury.

Mr Wright, from Alderney, told pupils at Melrose School yesterday that because of global warming the snow had been a lot thicker and had made the trek a lot harder.

'When we arrived we were told that this was a global warming year,' he said.

Family First Senator Steve Fielding has made up his mind on global warming - there's not enough evidence that it's real.

After talks with the Government and top scientists, Senator Fielding, who holds a crucial Senate vote, has released a document setting out his position.

"Global temperature isn't rising," it says.

On emissions trading, Senator Fielding said he wouldn't risk job losses on "unconvincing green science".

The document was prepared with the help of some of the country's most prominent climate-sceptic scientists.

At least five people have been killed and seven others are missing as tropical storm Nangka sweeps over the central Philippines, officials said Wednesday.

Packing winds of up to 83 kilometres (52 miles) an hour -- with gusts of up to 102 kilometres (63 miles) an hour -- the storm brought floods, landslides and power cuts across small islands in the centre of the archipelago.

Four fishermen drowned off Alabat island southeast of Manila late Tuesday as they tried to steer their boat to shelter from the approaching cyclone, said Perez municipal police chief Inspector Susan Planas.

Eleven other crew members were rescued but one of them was injured, she said in a telephone interview.

Magnitude:
5.1

Date-Time:
- Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 06:43:52 UTC
- Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 05:43:52 PM at epicenter

Location:
19.373°S, 169.361°E

Yesterday I reposted one of Warren Meyers essays on the hilariously flawed GCCI report from NCDC suggesting that the electrical grid is at risk due to increased weather related events affecting electrical systems (Link). The chart looked hinky, turns out it was. One wonders if these guys at NCDC know how to use a telephone, because one phone call is all it took to verify the suspicions Warren had about this graph below being mostly about a change in reporting (baseline) rather than a real trend. His BS detector is very good. Too bad the people at NCDC didn't do some basic due diligence rather than accept the data at face value.

One private citizen and a phone call undid the entire premise of this graph portrayed by the National Climatic Data Center. We need more people like Warren willing to ask questions.

Related: see my report on why tornado trends in general follow this same pattern that duped NCDC and why. (Link) - Anthony

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White House advisers greeted the new Climate Change Science Program(CCSP) assessment report like Bush advisers would have greeted a favorable report on WMD. Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said: "It's not just a problem for the future. We're beginning to see the impact on our daily lives." On the left is a picture of senior White House science adviser John Holdren pointing to a graph showing WMD-like impact of climate change on the U.S. electrical grid system, describing the results as follows:

The electricity grid is also vulnerable to climate change effects, from temperature changes to severe weather events.... The number of [U.S. electrical grid disturbance] incidents caused by extreme weather has increased tenfold since 1992. The portion of all events that are caused by weather-related phenomena has more than tripled from about 20 percent in the early 1990s to about 65 percent in recent years. The weather-related events are more severe, with an average of about 180,000 customers affected per event compared to about 100,000 for non-weather-related events (and 50,000 excluding the massive blackout of August 2003).

For this next post, I skip kind of deep into the report because Kevin Drum was particularly taken with the power of this chart from page 58.

I know that skepticism is a lost art in journalism, so I will forgive Mr. Drum. But in running a business, people put all kinds of BS analyses in front of me trying to get me to spend my money one way or another. And so for those of us for whom data analysis actually has financial consequences, it is a useful skill to be able to recognize a steaming pile of BS when one sees it. (Update: I regret the snarky comment about Kevin Drum - though I disagree with him a lot, he is one of the few folks on either side of the political aisle who is willing to express skepticism for studies and polls even when they support his position. Mr. Drum has posted an update to his original post after I emailed him this information).

First, does anyone here really think that we have seen a 20-fold increase in electrical grid outages over the last 15 years but no one noticed? Really?

In a new report, scientists used seven different climate models to assess human induced land cover change (LCC) at regional and global scales. The first results from the LUCID (Land-Use and Climate, IDentification of robust impacts) intercomparison study by Pitman et al. show no agreement among the models. This study indicates that land cover change is "regionally significant, but it is not feasible to impose a common LCC across multiple models for the next IPCC assessment." In other words, this important factor is missing from current models and scientists are at a loss as to how to add it.

The study, soon to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, performed the type of analysis that was recommended in the 2005 National Research Council report on how to improve climate model accuracy. The results were both as expected, LCC proved to be an important missing factor, and unexpected in that none of the seven models tested yielded the same results. This throws modelers into a quandary regarding how to proceed. Here is the abstract of the paper by A. J. Pitman et al.:

"Seven climate models were used to explore the biogeophysical impacts of human induced land cover change (LCC) at regional and global scales. The imposed LCC led to statistically significant decreases in the northern hemisphere summer latent heat flux in three models, and increases in three models. Five models simulated statistically significant cooling in summer in near-surface temperature over regions of LCC and one simulated warming. There were few significant changes in precipitation. Our results show no common remote impacts of LCC. The lack of consistency among the seven models was due to: 1) the implementation of LCC despite agreed maps of agricultural land, 2) the representation of crop phenology, 3) the parameterisation of albedo, and 4) the representation of evapotranspiration for different land cover types. This study highlights a dilemma: LCC is regionally significant, but it is not feasible to impose a common LCC across multiple models for the next IPCC assessment."