News from Antarctica

1. Blog science vs. actual science: the tension comes to a head on Real Climate

If you follow the climate change discussion in the public media, you'll quickly find that there is a determined bunch of skeptics trying to take potshots at the legitimate practice of climate science. (This is not really news.) The tactics are to find a few flaws, or apparent errors, or possible errors, or even just methodological uncertainties -- blast away at them with quick, simple analyses -- and then proclaim quite loudly that a significant study has been "refuted", "debunked", "overturned", "broken", "disabled", etc. (This gets amplified politically and think-tankally.) Findings of minor and easily correctable errors are touted as evidence of incompetence, conspiracy, or both. Even if such errors are quickly corrected and demonstrated to have been clearly minor; even if the quick, simple analyses are shown to have been too quick and too simple, the propagandists put the claims into the mill, grind out press releases and blog postings, and feed the need for support for misguided and misled viewpoints in certain sectors of the political spectrum. Thus, even when the Inhofe machine can claim there are now 700 scientists disputing man-made global warming, I can venture with virtual certainty that 3/4 of those scientists probably don't understand the science sufficiently to have a respectable opinion. (Reading this press release, I noticed that Climatologist and Paloeclimate researcher Dr. Diane Douglas, who has authored or edited over 200 technical reports is going to release a "major new paper". Well, only a bit of checking indicated that Dr. Douglas graduated from the School of Geographical (not Geological*) Sciences at Arizona State University, and she works for the URS corporation, who among other things, "we provide the full range of engineering and environmental services to FORTUNE 500 companies worldwide, including clients in the oil and gas, chemical and pharmaceutical, manufacturing, mining, and pulp and paper industries". Well, isn't that special!)

* really studying paleoclimatology legitimately generally requires a degree in geology, geochemistry, oceanography, or physics (the physics can be environmentally flavored, like atmospheric dynamics, but that is decidedly NOT meteorology).

But I'm straying off topic. What's really interesting is the dialogue taking place in the thread at Real Climate:

On overfitting

In this, and to be brief, the first author of a paper on the general warming of the Antarctic continent, Eric Steig, a paper that has come under critical attack from the climate skeptic howler monkeys of the blogosphere, takes them on. One of them happens to actually be respectful and circumspect, and reasonable points are exchanged. But what's clear -- very very clear -- is that there is much more to the science in a paper than just the statistical analyses of the data in the paper. And that's why that in this new era of science-on-the-fly, scientists really doing the hard, diligent work are getting more than a little peevish when people ask for their code and their data so they can do some "auditing". When the "auditors" find "errors", they usually make a fairly large deal about it. (Occasionally they find things that need to be fixed. Most of the time they don't.) Notwithstanding, scientists should make data and their analytical methods available so that other scientists can examine their methods and conclusions. But they don't have to prostrate themselves to every Dick and Mick who thinks that statistical expertise is a reasonable substitute for climate science expertise. A point Eric makes.

It'll be interesting to see what falls out of this exchange, and if anybody learns to mind their manners better.

2. Finding penguins through poop

This is all over the Internet, because it is so much fun -- and yet it still has important climate change ecological implications. Scientists looking at remote sensing imagery have been able to locate new emperor penguin colonies around the coast of inhospitable and remote Antarctica by finding poop stains on the ice the emperors left behind, using images from satellites, particularly the plucky Landsats. What's also interesting (and less noted) is that while they found several new colonies, they also noted the disappearance of others -- all at the same general latitude. This *might* be climate change related (see above).

So here's one of the many articles about this:
Scientists Map Penguins From Space By Locating Their Feces

This includes a nice map showing the newly-found colonies and also the lost colonies.

Now where I might slightly trump the other blogs picking this up is by pointing to actual images of penguin poop on the ice!

Guano on the ice

Nice argument for continuation of high-quality, high-resolution, publically-acessible remote sensing data. Thus the LDCM.