User talk:Cla68/Article draft work page 2

San Diego Union-Tribune August 26, 2009 Pg. 1

Navy Revamping Drug Policy

More sailors to be tested, DUI rules will get tougher

By Steve Liewer, Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Hoping to stamp out the last vestiges of a culture that tolerated drug use and celebrated binge drinking, the Navy is amping up its crackdown on substance-abusing sailors.

Its new policy increases by half the percentage of Navy personnel that must be randomly drug-tested each month and requires every sailor to be screened within 72 hours of reporting to a new command to show that all units take the campaign seriously. Service members who test positive are automatically discharged.

The revised rules also get tougher with sailors who repeatedly drink and drive. Now a second DUI offense will trigger expulsion from the Navy. Previously, the offender's commanding officer had final discretion.

As part of the stricter program, launched July 30, the Navy is requiring more commands to appoint a senior member as an alcohol and drug control officer. That person will set up prevention programs and get treatment for those who need it.

The Navy's goal is to reduce substance abuse by at least 25 percent in a few years, said Bill Flannery, director of the Navy Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention program.

“Until we achieve zero, I have to assume that substance abuse is out there,” he said. “In the field of prevention, if you feel like you've won, you've lost.”

The Navy's actions follow a revamping of the Army's substance-abuse program six months ago. The Army guidelines mandate, among other things, random urine tests for 4 percent of soldiers in each command per week.

The timing of the Navy's action leaves some military experts puzzled. It comes as military drug abuse has reached a post-Vietnam War low and serious alcohol-related incidents have dropped from the levels of three or four years ago.

“It seems odd that they would be tightening up when everything is fine,” said Don Guter, dean of the South Texas College of Law in Houston and a chief judge advocate general for the Navy and Marine Corps. “It doesn't appear that it's in response to a problem.”

Across the Navy, the annual number of positive drug tests has dropped by nearly two-thirds since 2001 — to 2,309 in fiscal year 2008. For Navy Region Southwest, which includes six states but is dominated by San Diego-based service members, the figure fell more than 50 percent — to 384.

During the same time period, DUI arrests rose about 7 percent across the Navy but dropped 15 percent in the Southwest region.

All branches of the military have battled drug abuse in their ranks since the Vietnam War, when widespread use of marijuana and harder drugs seeped into the military from the broader culture.

President Richard Nixon created the first drug urinalysis program in 1971, targeting troops returning from Vietnam. It was expanded into a militarywide, random drug screening in 1974 to identify candidates for drug treatment.

Six years later, psychologist Robert Bray completed the first of 10 surveys for the Defense Department on service members' health, including their use of drugs and alcohol.

In that original survey, nearly 37 percent said they had used illegal drugs during the past year. The Marine Corps (48 percent) and the Navy (43 percent) recorded the highest percentages.

On May 26, 1981, a jet crash and fire on the deck of the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of Florida killed 14 sailors, injured 48 others and caused about $150 million in damage. What caused a shockwave throughout the Navy, though, was news that traces of marijuana were found in the systems of six of the dead sailors, and that drugs contributed to the crash and its aftermath.

Seven months later, President Ronald Reagan's administration announced a zero-tolerance drug policy for all military branches. All service members were subject to urinalysis, and those who failed could be punished with courts-martial and discharge.

Drug use across the military plummeted by at least two-thirds by 1985, according to Bray's surveys, and it has continued to fall ever since.

Former Navy lawyer Joseph Casas now runs a private practice in San Diego, and he represents many sailors and Marines who have failed drug tests.

“When I get a client who has popped positive, there's not much I can do,” he said. “The Navy is doing the right thing. They should be harsh. There's no room for drugs in the military.”

The Navy's battle against alcohol is much harder because drinking has been part of the service's culture for 200 years, since the days when sea captains recruited their crews from pubs and handed out daily rations of grog.

“Heavy drinking is a tradition. It's part of being a sailor,” said Genevieve Ames, a medical anthropologist at the Berkeley-based Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, who has studied the issue.

Alcohol once lubricated some of the Navy's oldest ceremonies, such as the ancient “shellback” ritual for crossing the equator and the annual initiation of chief petty officers. As a result of changes in the past two decades, drinking is no longer a sanctioned part of such events.

The scandal that followed the 1991 Tailhook convention of naval aviators in Las Vegas caused a seismic change in the military's official attitude toward sexual harassment and drinking. The Navy has been trying to change its “boys club” reputation.

“I see the Navy as a Fortune 500 company that provides people with benefits and a career,” Flannery said. “Alcohol abuse is not what we do.”

But Bray's and Ames' research show that drinking habits have been hard to change. In the overall military, the percentage of service members describing themselves as heavy drinkers has barely dropped — from 21 percent in 1980 to 19 percent in 2005, the latest year for Bray's published results.

Sailors spend long and often dull stretches cooped up aboard ships, punctuated by short bouts of “liberty” in overseas ports. That contributes to binge drinking, which Ames said her research shows is epidemic in the Navy. Most sailors are 17 to 25, a period when they're especially susceptible to alcohol abuse.

Ships' commanders have tried to make a dent by setting up structured tours and community service projects in foreign ports. But pub-crawling remains a popular pastime at every port stop.

The key to cutting drug and alcohol abuse, Ames said, is a strong policy that's enforced consistently. If the new rules do that, she's in favor of them.

“We've got to have safety and readiness,” Ames said. “We're at war.”

Infotrac and NewsStand

 * Leslie, Mitch. "Sifting for truth about global warming." Science 306.5705 (2004): 2167


 * "Welcome climate bloggers." Nature 432.7020 (2004): 933 For those excited about the journalistic potential of the Internet, this September was a seminal month. Much to its embarrassment, the US television network CBS was forced to retract a story about President George W. Bush's service in the armed forces. Crucially, the documents on which CBS based the story were first shown to be a fake not by a hot-shot Washington reporter, but by the authors of a series of blogs -- online news diaries penned by unpaid commentators.

Blogs have been around since the late 1990s, but the political potential of this new media format only became truly clear during this year's US presidential race. Bloggers led some of the freshest debates, helped raise money for political parties and, most importantly from a research point of view, corrected mistakes made by other media outlets. At the same time, one more traditional website dedicated to this final purpose -- http://www.factcheck.org -- became compulsory reading for journalists who wanted to check the accuracy of claims made by the Bush and Kerry campaigns.

Can researchers make use of this new kind of communication? One group of climate scientists thinks so. The nine researchers (six in the United States, three in Europe) launched the RealClimate website -- http://www.realclimate.org -- earlier this month. As the News story on page 937 explains, the blog was motivated by the activities of some think-tanks, predominantly from the United States and often run using industry money. Ever since global warming became an issue of media interest, these groups have sought to play down its dangers. RealClimate, say the blog's founders, will provide rapid rebuttals of some of their more egregious statements.

Few would argue with the need to tackle attempts to distort science, but is a blog the best way to do it? The approach certainly has its dangers. For example, many issues in climate science, such as the course of temperatures over previous millennia, are hotly debated by researchers. Some would argue that a rapid-rebuttal service, run with minimal peer review, can never hope to combat industry propaganda and properly represent this diversity of views.

Such criticisms are legitimate, but there is no reason that a prompt reply need be unbalanced. The researchers involved will, for example, have to work to ensure that they do not oversell their own opinions when commenting on research issues that divide scientists. Their goal is to provide solid scientific comment to journalists and other interested parties -- and there is no reason to doubt that this can be achieved in this fashion.

What will happen if climate researchers do not take this risk? Industry lobbyists, as well as environmental organizations, will be free to distort science to fit their aims. These groups are expert at influencing the media, old and new. Press coverage of climate change is known to overly emphasize the views of the small minority of scientists who dispute the notion of man-made climate change (see Nature 431, 4; 200410.1038/431004a). Mainstream climate scientists need to combat this, and RealClimate is, in principle, an excellent way of doing so.

Similar exercises could aid researchers working on nanotechnology and transgenic crops, and other fields with a high media profile. Nature encourages scientists in these disciplines to consider setting up their own blogs, but also to monitor the progress of RealClimate. The site needs to balance speed with objectivity, readability and accuracy. That's no mean feat. Fail, and the blog will be dismissed as no more trustworthy than the myriad lobbying groups already writing on climate. But if the site's founders pull it off, they could change the coverage of climate change for the better. Good luck to them.


 * "The real word on climate change.(RealClimate website)(Website overview)." Ecos Dec. 2007: 31. Of all the issues facing humanity today, climate change and global warming are probably the most important for all of us to comprehend as clearly and accurately as we can. Given the ever-closing horizons for action to prevent dangerous climate change, it's something we all need to apply ourselves to--myths, fuzzy logic and inaccuracies will just fuel unnecessary conflict and stall global, collaborative efforts to curb the worst of it.

So it's reassuring to know that the word has spread among interested journalists, politicians, concerned citizens and even the scientific community about the award-winning RealClimate website.

RealClimate is a climatology 'commentary site' that has an edge over run-of-the-mill climate change blogs: all nine contributors are climate scientists who take pains to explain current scientific issues, myths and misconceptions about climate and climate change.

[GRAPHIC OMITTED]

The contributors state that the aim of the site is to provide a context that is sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion is restricted to scientific topics: the RealClimate crew say they will not get involved in debating the political or economic implications of the science. The prestigious science magazine Nature, however, has applauded the RealClimate team for using the blog format to provide quick rebuttals to those who downplay the risk of global warming.

The topics discussed are wide-ranging and include IPCC reports, Arctic and Antarctic climate, climate modelling, hurricanes and other extreme events, global warming, greenhouse gases, glacier retreat, oceans, paleo-climate, responses to contrarians, solar forcing, future climate projections, climate in the media, geo-engineering and sun-earth connections. Apart from the discussion index, there are FAQs, a glossary and news and reviews pages.

If you're new to the site, there is an excellent 'Start here' page, a 'one-stop link for resources that people can use to get up to speed on the issue of climate change'. This page includes links to resources for complete beginners, FAQs for people with a little more understanding of the issue, and further links for those 'informed, but in need of more detail ... or more serious discussion'.


 * Webster, Ben, "MY BEST BLOGS; The List." Times [London, England] 3 Dec. 2009: 56


 * Special Report: Climate wars: Climate of suspicion The scientists: 'I know I'm on the right side' Anonymous. The Guardian. London (UK): Feb 3, 2010. pg. 13 Professor Phil Jones Stepped aside as director of the climatic research unit (CRU) after more than a thousand of its emails were published online. In charge of assembling the past 160 years of global temperature records. "I know I'm on the right side and honest, but I seem to be telling myself this more often recently!"

Professor Michael Mann Palaeoclimatologist at Penn State University. Creator of the "hockey stick" graph of temperatures over past 1,000 years. Co-host at RealClimate.org. "This crowd of charlatans . . . look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised."

Professor Keith Briffa Tree ring researcher at CRU, where he is also deputy director. "I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story . . . but in reality the situation is not quite so simple."

Dr Tom Wigley Australian climate scientist. Former director of CRU, now at University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Father figure in many of the emails. "Why, why, why did you . . . not simply say this right at the start?"

Dr Kevin Trenberth Climate scientist at National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Made waves by linking climate change to hurricane intensity in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. "The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming, and it's a travesty that we can't."

Professor Ben Santer Alumnus of CRU. Climate modeller at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Made waves for attributing climate change to discernible human influence in 1996 IPCC report. "[McIntyre] has no interest in rational scientific discourse. He deals in the currency of threats and intimidation."

Steve McIntyre Former minerals prospector and now full-time scourge of climate science. Runs ClimateAudit website. "CRU's policies of obstructing critical articles in the peer-reviewed literature and withholding data from critics have unfortunately placed issues into play that might otherwise have been settled long ago."

The debate over global warming is almost as heated as the rise in temperatures predicted by many of today's scientists.
 * New data dumps cold water on global warming naysayers, Anonymous. Northwest Florida Daily News. Fort Walton Beach, Fla.: May 31, 2008. pg. C.1

Utter the words "global warming" and combatants line up on either side of the issue -- those who believe global warming is real and caused by human activity, and those who believe it isn't happening at all or amounts to a natural cycle in the Earth's climate.

Skeptics of global warming are quick to point out the inexact performance of climate models and gaps in the scientific record that could allow misinterpretation of the data.

They also point to another, less precise rationale for their skepticism, something I'll call the "The Sky Is Falling" factor.

How can we believe the Earth is warming, they ask, when back in the '60s and '70s science told us the Earth is cooling and we could face a new ice age?

That question now has been answered.

Two scientists, climate modeler William Connolley with the British Antarctic Survey and Tom Peterson with the National Climatic Data Center, decided to look at the climate literature published from 1965 to 1979 to see if a coming ice age was the theory de jour. Their findings will soon be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

They pinpointed 71 climate studies that were published during that time frame.

The results?

Forty-four of the papers suggested global warming would take place. Twenty papers were neutral. A whopping seven predicted cooling.

To quote from their blog on RealClimate.org: "In other words, during the 1970s, when some would have you believe scientists were predicting a coming ice age, they were doing no such thing. The dominant view, even then, was that increasing levels of greenhouse gases were likely to dominate any changes we might see in climate on human time scales."

The skeptics write off global warming as a hysterical fraud promoted by researchers hungry for grant dollars or nervous nellies whose agendas are served by another kind of climate: fear.

But it would seem the skeptics themselves are guilty of hysteria .. and maybe cynical myopia. While chunks of ice the size of Rhode Island break off the polar ice cap they tell us nothing is wrong.

That's like standing up in a movie theater and shouting, "There is no fire!" when smoke and flames are filling the room.

The truth should melt the ice age argument once and for all.

Daily News Online Editor Del Stone Jr. can be reached at 863-1111, Ext. 1433, or dels@nwfdailynews.com.


 * Statisticians blast Hockey Stick; [National Edition], Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. National Post. Don Mills, Ont.: Aug 23, 2006. pg. FP.19 T he recently released final report of a panel of three independent statisticians, chaired by an eminent statistics professor, Edward Wegman, chairman of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences committee on theoretical and applied statistics, has resoundingly upheld criticisms of the famous "hockey stick" graph of Michael Mann and associates.

The Wegman report, which was submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives energy and commerce committee in July, stated that our published criticisms of Mann's methodology were "valid and compelling," and concluded that "Mann's assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis."

This comes on the heels of an earlier report in June by a National Research Council (NRC) panel chaired by Gerald North, of Texas A&M University, which also endorsed specific criticisms of Mann's methodology and which concluded that no statistical confidence could be placed in his claims that temperatures in the 1990s exceeded those in the medieval warm period.

Wegman also criticized the lack of independence in paleoclimate science at multiple levels - in the selection of proxies, in the reviewing of articles and in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process itself. In his testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, he sarcastically questioned Mann's citation of his own articles or articles by his students as supposedly "independent" verification of his results.

Given the importance that the IPCC and others have placed on historical temperature reconstructions, Wegman recommended that qualified statisticians be involved in the analysis and that the work be reviewed by truly independent experts.

In response to the Wegman report, Michael Mann issued a statement saying that it "simply uncritically parrots claims by two Canadians." However, in testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the President of the National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, stated his belief that Dr. Wegman was well qualified to make the statements in his report.

In what follows we simply quote, verbatim, from the report and from Wegman's Congressional testimony.

Note that 'MBH98' and 'MBH99' refer to Mann's papers, and 'MM03' and 'MM05' refers to ours.

The report is at the energy committee Web site at energycommerce.house.gov/108/home/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf

WEGMAN EXCERPTS

The debate over Dr. Mann's principal components methodology has been going on for nearly three years. When we got involved, there was no evidence that a single issue was resolved or even nearing resolution. Dr. Mann's RealClimate.org website said that all of the Mr. McIntyre and Dr. McKitrick claims had been 'discredited'. [The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research] had issued a news release saying that all their claims were 'unfounded'. Mr. McIntyre replied on the ClimateAudit.org website. The climate science community seemed unable to either refute McIntyre's claims or accept them. The situation was ripe for a third-party review of the types that we and Dr. North's NRC panel have done.

- - -

While the work of Michael Mann and colleagues presents what appears to be compelling evidence of global temperature change, the criticisms of McIntyre and McKitrick, as well as those of other authors mentioned are indeed valid.

- - -

Where we have commonality, I believe our report and the NRC panel essentially agree. ...We believe that our discussion together with the discussion from the NRC report should take the 'centering' issue off the table. [Mann's] decentred methodology is simply incorrect mathematics ... I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn't matter because the answer is correct anyway. Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.

- - -

The papers of Mann et al. in themselves are written in a confusing manner, making it difficult for the reader to discern the actual methodology and what uncertainty is actually associated with these reconstructions.

- - -

It is not clear that Dr. Mann and his associates even realized that their methodology was faulty at the time of writing the MBH paper.

- - -

We found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling.

- - -

Overall, our committee believes that Mann's assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

- - -

[The] fact that their paper fit some policy agendas has greatly enhanced their paper's visibility. ... The 'hockey stick' reconstruction of temperature graphic dramatically illustrated the global warming issue and was adopted by the IPCC and many governments as the poster graphic. The graphics' prominence together with the fact that it is based on incorrect use of [principal components analysis] puts Dr. Mann and his co-authors in a difficult face-saving position.

- - -

We have been to Michael Mann's University of Virginia Web site and downloaded the materials there. Unfortunately, we did not find adequate material to reproduce the MBH98 materials. We have been able to reproduce the results of McIntyre and McKitrick

- - -

Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus 'independent studies' may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.

- - -

It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent.

- - -

Based on the literature we have reviewed, there is no overarching consensus on MBH98/99. As analyzed in our social network, there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self- reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.

- - -

It is clear that many of the proxies are re-used in most of the papers. It is not surprising that the papers would obtain similar results and so cannot really claim to be independent verifications.

- - -

We note that the American Meteorological Society has a Committee on Probability and Statistics. I believe it is amazing for a committee whose focus is on statistics and probability that of the nine members only two are also members of the American Statistical Association, the premier statistical association in the United States, and one of those is a recent Ph. D. with an assistant professor appointment in a medical school. The American Meteorological Association recently held the 18th Conference on Probability and Statistics in the Atmospheric Sciences.. Of the 62 presenters at a conference with a focus on statistics and probability, only 8 ... are members of the American Statistical Association. I believe that these two communities should be more engaged and if nothing else our report should highlight to both communities a need for additional cross-disciplinary ties.

- - -

Especially when massive amounts of public monies and human lives are at stake, academic work should have a more intense level of scrutiny and review. It is especially the case that authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, should not be the same people as those that constructed the academic papers.

- - -

Steve McIntyre is a retired mineral-exploration businessman who operates www.climateaudit.org.

Ross McKitrick is an associate professor of economics at the University of Guelph.


 * DON'T TIPTOE AROUND CLIMATE CHANGE; [FINAL Edition], PAUL KRUGMAN SYNDICATED COLUMNIST. Seattle Post - Intelligencer. Seattle, Wash.: May 31, 2006. pg. B.6 A brief segment in "An Inconvenient Truth" shows Sen. Al Gore questioning James Hansen, a climatologist at NASA, during a 1989 hearing. But the movie doesn't give you much context, or tell you what happened to Hansen later.

And that's a story worth telling, for two reasons. It's a good illustration of the way interest groups can create the appearance of doubt even when the facts are clear and cloud the reputations of people who should be regarded as heroes. And it's a warning for Gore and others who hope to turn global warming into a real political issue: You're going to have to get tougher, because the other side doesn't play by any known rules.

Hansen was one of the first climate scientists to say publicly that global warming was under way. In 1988, he made headlines with Senate testimony in which he declared that "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now." When he testified again the following year, officials in the first Bush administration altered his prepared statement to downplay the threat. Gore's movie shows the moment when the administration's tampering was revealed.

In 1988, Hansen was well out in front of his scientific colleagues, but over the years that followed, he was vindicated by a growing body of evidence. By rights, Hansen should have been universally acclaimed for both his prescience and his courage.

But soon after Hansen's 1988 testimony, energy companies began a campaign to create doubt about global warming, in spite of the increasingly overwhelming evidence. And in the late 1990s, climate skeptics began a smear campaign against Hansen himself.

Leading the charge was Patrick Michaels, a professor at the University of Virginia who has received substantial financial support from the energy industry. In Senate testimony, and then in numerous presentations, Michaels claimed that the actual pace of global warming was falling far short of Hansen's predictions. As evidence, he presented a chart supposedly taken from a 1988 paper written by Hansen and others, which showed a curve of rising temperatures considerably steeper than the trend that actually has taken place.

In fact, the chart Michaels showed was a fraud - that is, it wasn't what Hansen actually predicted. The original paper showed a range of possibilities, and the actual rise in temperature has fallen squarely in the middle of that range. So how did Michaels make it seem as if Hansen's prediction was wildly off? Why, he erased all the lower curves, leaving only the curve that the original paper described as being "on the high side of reality."

The experts at www.realclimate.org, the go-to site for climate science, suggest that the smears against Hansen "might be viewed by some as a positive sign, indicative of just how intellectually bankrupt the contrarian movement has become." But I think they're misreading the situation. In fact, the smears have been around for a long time, and Hansen has been trying to correct the record for years. Yet the claim that Hansen vastly overpredicted global warming has remained in circulation, and has become a staple of climate change skeptics, from Michael Crichton to Robert Novak.

There's a concise way to describe what happened to Hansen: he was Swift-boated.

John Kerry, a genuine war hero, didn't realize that he could successfully be portrayed as a coward. And it seems to me that Hansen, whose predictions about global warming have proved remarkably accurate, didn't believe that he could successfully be portrayed as an unreliable exaggerator. His first response to Michaels, in January 1999, was astonishingly diffident. He pointed out that Michaels misrepresented his work, but rather than denouncing the fraud involved, he offered a rather plaintive appeal for better behavior.

Even now, Hansen seems reluctant to say the obvious. "Is this treading close to scientific fraud?" he recently asked about Michaels' smear. The answer is no: it isn't "treading close," it's fraud pure and simple.

Now, Hansen isn't running for office. But Gore might be, and even if he isn't, he hopes to promote global warming as a political issue. And if he wants to do that, he and those on his side will have to learn to call liars what they are.

Paul Krugman is a columnist for the New York Times. Copyright 2006 New York Times News Service.


 * Mulling The World From a Bench On Broadway, Anjali Nayar. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Apr 2, 2006. pg. 14.6 ON a traffic island bench in the middle of Broadway near West 112th Street, Gavin Schmidt sipped a cup of Oren's coffee -- milk, no sugar. Across the street from him, people shoved in and out of Tom's Restaurant, a crowd loitered around a chess game, and a gray-haired man wearing a flannel shirt and a lopsided green cap sketched the scene in a notebook.

This traffic island is Dr. Schmidt's favorite place to drink coffee in the late afternoon. He is a climate modeler, meaning he uses physics to understand and make projections about the climate. But after a day in his office above the restaurant, he loves to sit back in this patch of Morningside Heights and try to make sense of the ebb and flow of the street, the city and the world.

The climate is like the city, he said as he gestured at the scene around him.

The city is made up of millions of people making individual decisions: when to wake in the morning, what time to go to work, where to go on vacation. Yet many things about the city can be predicted. On weekdays, the subways will be more crowded at 8:30 a.m. than at midday. The government knows roughly how many jobs there will be next year.

It is the same thing with the climate, Dr. Schmidt said. We don't have to worry about every little detail of the weather to understand what is going on at the global scale, just like we don't have to worry about every person to understand how a city works.

Climate models put together a basic understanding of storms, clouds and weather, past, present and future. More often than not, these models match up well with observed data. As Dr. Schmidt put it: I think Albert Einstein once said, 'The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.' 

Dr. Schmidt's demeanor melds the subtle elegance of an Oxford-educated Englishman (which he is) with the savvy of a street-smart New Yorker. Although born and raised in Britain, Dr. Schmidt, 38, moved to the Upper West Side a decade ago and has lived in the city ever since.

New York lets you be yourself, he said, and that is why I've stayed.

As usual, he was dressed in jeans, a colorful dress shirt and a black leather jacket. He speaks in a squeaky British accent (on the phone, a security guard once mistook him for a woman). His humor is dry and witty, and when he laughs, his bright hazel eyes become squinty.

Dr. Schmidt runs a global climate model, called ModelE, out of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. ModelE is one of about a dozen global models that have been used to project the climate into the future. The results form the basis for international treaties on climate change, including the Kyoto Protocol, and for governmental stances regarding climate change across the world.

ModelE breaks down climate into the basic laws of physics. The equations are written in Fortran, a computer language that is, as Dr. Schmidt puts it, very old and not very trendy. The computer code is 126,327 lines, to be exact, and when Dr. Schmidt scrolls through it on his computer screen, it looks like nothing so much as an extensive (and incomprehensible) grocery list.

In his office, not long ago, Dr. Schmidt tried to translate a few lines:

QNX=QMO2*BYAM(LMIN+1)

QSATC=QSAT(TNX,LHX,PL(LMIN+1))

DQ=MCLOUD*(QSAT-CQNX)/(1.+SLH*QSATC*DQSATDT(TNX,LHX))

These lines, he said, calculate how much water vapor condenses out of air to form a cloud as the temperature decreases.

ModelE suggests that the average temperature of the world is increasing.

Such global warming may mean big changes for Dr. Schmidt's adopted city.

We don't have sea ice or polar bears to worry about, he said. But warmer winters and longer heat waves are reasonable conclusions.

A report by Cynthia Rosenzweig, one of Dr. Schmidt's colleagues at NASA, warns that in New York, global warming may cause dangerously hot summers, increased threats from mosquito-borne diseases, stressed water supplies and loss of beaches.

The biggest potential consequence of climate change in the city is flooding. Many entrances to the city's subways and tunnels, as well as the three major airports that serve the city, lie just a few feet above sea level. In 1938, a hurricane hit the city, and water filled a large chunk of Lower Manhattan. With sea levels expected to rise, future storms could be even more destructive.

In other words, Dr. Schmidt said, Don't buy a basement property in Battery Park City.

BECAUSE so many people get their information about climate change from sources that sit on one side or the other of the global warming debate, Dr. Schmidt started a blog (www.realclimate.org) that provides context for climate stories in the news media. Since the blog was started in December 2004, it has helped nearly a million visitors navigate through the haze of politics surrounding climate change. But the blog has also generated strong criticism.

On a recent afternoon in his small, cluttered office above the restaurant, Dr. Schmidt sat at his computer and read aloud one of the more heated messages: The quality of the postings on realclimate.org is disastrous. You're real losers, junk scientists, and you should be ashamed. I thought that you needed to be reminded of how bad your brainwashing procedures are.''

And that was from a string-theorist at Harvard, Dr. Schmidt said. Really, the hate mail is because I am a bad, atheist, environmentalist lefty.

He is quick to laugh at his spiteful mail, but he responds to most letters with patience and care. As a result, he says, some of his more agitated critics have become more reasonable over time. All the same, after a long day in the office, it is easy to understand why Dr. Schmidt likes to sit here on the traffic island in the late afternoon and just think.

It was starting to get dark. The last spokes of sunlight had faded. Headlights and shop signs blinked on, peppering the street with dabs of color. Dr. Schmidt drained the dregs of his coffee and stood up. It was time to go.

[Photograph] New York lets you be yourself, says Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler who works atop Tom's Restaurant. And that is why I've stayed. (Photos by above, Keith Meyers/The New York Times; top right, Chang W. Lee/The New York Times; middle right, Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times; lower right, John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times)


 * The truth about global warming ; A Seattle Times special report | Scientists overwhelmingly agree: The Earth is getting warmer at an alarming pace, and humans are the cause -- no matter what the skeptics say.; [Fourth Edition], Sandi Doughton. Seattle Times. Seattle, Wash.: Oct 9, 2005. pg. A.1


 * Our denial is at Category 5; [FINAL Edition], Ross Gelbspan. USA TODAY. McLean, Va.: Sep 26, 2005. pg. A.16 The wrenching tragedies that killed more than 1,000 people and uprooted more than 2million from Alabama to the Texas coast are not only heartbreaking. They are also frightening -- omens of some very destructive consequences of global warming.

Katrina and Rita began as relatively small storms off South Florida with wind speeds about 70 miles per hour. As they moved over the superheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico, they intensified to categories 4 and 5 with wind speeds exceeding 160 mph.

Climate scientists cannot attribute any single weather event to our heating of the atmosphere. We have suffered severe floods, storms, droughts and heat waves since the beginning of civilization. But those events have been increasing in frequency and intensity over the past few decades, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Hurricanes take their energy from surface waters. This month, water temperatures in the Gulf hovered in the high 80s. The implications seem clear. As the British government's top environmental scientist, Sir John Lawton, declared: "This is global warming."

For most of human history, the level of heat-trapping atmospheric carbon dioxide (the chief "greenhouse gas") remained about 280 parts per million. But since the late 19th century, when the world began to industrialize, that level has jumped to 380ppm. Our burning of coal and oil has thrown the planet's historical temperature equilibrium out of balance, with the Earth becoming "a net importer of heat," according to a study in Science last June.

Even as floodwaters were being pumped out of New Orleans, a study published on the website realclimate.org said, "An unchecked rise in greenhouse gas concentrations will very likely increase ocean temperatures further, ultimately overwhelming any natural (cycles)." A week before Rita hit Texas, researchers writing in Science found no rise in the number of hurricanes since 1970. But they found a "large increase ... in the proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5." In July, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist reported that tropical storms globally have become 50% more powerful since the '70s.

The question that most requires our courage to answer is: Which, in the long run, is more dangerous -- stronger hurricanes or our own Category 5 denial?

Ross Gelbspan is author of The Heat is On (1997) and Boiling Point (2004).


 * Urban legends get debunked on these sites; [All Edition], GREG KLINENews-Gazette Staff Writer. News Gazette. Champaign, Ill.: Jan 17, 2005. pg. D.1 Next time someone warns you about spider eggs in bubble gum or organ black marketeers harvesting kidneys, head to www.purportal.com and check it out.

The site is a one-stop search engine for major urban legend- debunking sources on the Web, including some that cover computer virus hoaxes.

To check out other spider-related myths, misconceptions and superstitions try this site: www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/ spidermyth.

You can find information on health and medical hoaxes, from the Centers for Disease Control no less, at www.cdc.gov/doc.do/id/ 0900f3ec80226b9c.

Meanwhile, here are some sites related to recent topics in the news, including author Michael Crichton's latest techno thriller, which is wrapped up in questions of debunking itself, and the Iraqi elections.

Crichton's fictional book "State of Fear" pushes the author's real-life skepticism about the dangers of global warning and climate change. It's naturally been panned by environmental groups and hailed by their (generally conservative) opponents.

For a thoughtful critique of "State of Fear," and some of the media coverage of it, see www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74 from the folks at www.realclimate.org, a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for interested members of the public and journalists.

And if the debate over the novel sparks your interest in the topic, check out www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/005.htm for the latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, perhaps the world's most authoritative source on the topic.

To get a good picture, or rather pictures, of the issue, literally, see www.climateark.org/vital.

Finally, visit news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4033263.stm for details on the landmark elections in Iraq on Jan. 30, including the purpose of the vote, the parties and the candidates.

Readers with suggestions, questions or comments can reach News- Gazette staff writer Greg Kline at (217) 351-5215, gkline@news- gazette.com or www.news-gazette.com/circuits.

(From Guardian Unlimited)
 * "Gavin Schmidt: a climatologist trying to give out the right signals amid the noise." Europe Intelligence Wire 6 July 2009 Financial Times Ltd.

Anyone who follows the climate change debate closely will no doubt have come across Gavin Schmidt and the website he co-founded called RealClimate.org during their online meanderings. Schmidt is a British climatologist and climate modeller based at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and he says that he helped to establish RealClimate.org to try to "provide context and background on climate science issues that are often missing in popular media coverage". As you can imagine, he's a busy man.

Schmidt features in this week's edition of The Edge as the latest interviewee in the online magazine's Third Culture series. This regular slot "consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are". A tad grandiose in its premise, but the Third Culture interview often makes for interesting reading.

The Schidmt interview -- which runs to more than 7,000 words -- allows him the time and space to explain some of the theories and practices that underpin his approach to climatology, particularly the hotly debated area of climate modelling. But, more interestingly perhaps, it offers him the chance to stray into more personal territory, such as how he deals with the online critics who say he and his scientist colleagues are spouting nonsense, or whether it's correct for scientists to ever engage in political advocacy something his boss at the Goddard Institute, Dr James Hansen , is more than a little partial to.

Here's Schimdt on whether scientists should "get involved in policy":

Personally, I don't pretend to be an economist; I don't pretend to be a sociologist; I don't pretend to be an expert in environmental regulation. So I generally don't comment on whether a cap and trade system is better than a carbon tax system, or whether or not it is better that it is being run by the [US Environmental Protection Agency]. I leave that kind of stuff for the people who focus on that much more specifically, and I'm pretty much willing to find the most interesting and objective of them and give them the benefit of the doubt.

It's clear that there are a lot of people who talk about politics who are neither interesting nor objective. When it comes to discussing what to do about climate change, it appears to be a fact of life that people will use the worst and least intelligent arguments to make political points. If they can do that by sounding pseudoscientific by quoting a paper here or misrepresenting another scientist's work over there then they will. That surprised me before I really looked into it. It no longer surprises me.

I don't advocate for political solutions. If I do advocate for something, (and if you put your voice into the public sphere, then it has to be to advocate for something. Why would you do it otherwise?) My advocacy is much more towards having more intelligent discussions, which is completely naive and stupid and I realise that.

And here's Schimdt on the "noise" created by the climate change debate, a subject he's touched on before on the Guardian :

In unmoderated forums about climate change, it just devolves immediately into, "you're a Nazi, no you're a fascist," blah, blah, blah. Any semblance of an idea that you could actually talk about what aerosols do to the hydrological cycle without it devolving into name calling seems to be fantasy. It is very tiresome.

The problem is that the noise serves various people's purposes. It's not that the noise is accidental. A lot of the noise when it comes to climate is deliberate because the increase of noise means you don't hear the signal, and if you don't hear the signal you can't do anything about it, and so everything just gets left alone. Increasing the level of noise is a deliberate political tactic. It's been used by all segments of the political spectrum for different problems. With the climate issue in the US and not elsewhere, it's used by a particular segment of the political community in ways that is personally distressing. How do you deal with that? That is a question that I'm always asking myself and I haven't gotten an answer to that one.

You can read and watch the interview in full here.

Other

 * (last one is a blog)


 * Booker, pp. 169-191, 246, 268-269, 295-296, 345.


 * Some of the ClimateGate emails reportedly mention RealClimate.


 * Scientific American editorial. Check article history.


 * Cato Institute opinion. Reliable source?


 * However, Dr. Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former climatologist at the University of Virginia, considers RealClimate.org the "the most prominent place to see how climatologists mix their science with their opinions."http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/feb/06/antarctic-warming-climate-change


 * Nature editorials


 * Check Monbiat's columns in the Guardian.


 * Von Storch's Zentralorgan quote (article history and here)


 * Alexa page




 * "In Climate Debate, The 'Hockey Stick' Leads to a Face-Off", by Antonio Regalado, The Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2005. (Print edition - page A1)


 * "Science ran headlong into society in 2005", by Alan Boyle, msnbc.com, December 12, 2005.


 * "Environmental Media Services -- A Smaller, More Focused Organization", by Bud Ward, Environment Writer, February 2006. (Vol. 17, No. 9)- about EMS


 * "Climate skeptic science does not compute", by Andrew Leonard, Salon.com, May 1, 2006.


 * "Google offers personal searches", BBC News, October 24, 2006.


 * "The New York Times and Al Gore's science", by Andrew Leonard, Salon.com, March 13, 2007.


 * "Global-warming skeptics: Is it only the news media who need to chill?", by Tony Azios, The Christian Science Monitor, October 11, 2007.


 * "50 people who could save the planet", by John Vidal, The Guardian, January 5, 2008. (scroll down aways)


 * "Bye-bye, Antarctica?", by Andrew Leonard, Salon.com, March 26, 2008.


 * "Top Green Websites", by Eric Roston, Time, April 17, 2008.


 * "Climate Scientists Put Their Money Where Their Models Are", by Alexis Madrigal, Wired News, May 8, 2008.


 * "Global cooling theories put scientists on guard", by Gerard Wynn, Reuters, May 9, 2008.


 * "Palin on global warming", by RealClimate, guardian.co.uk, October 6, 2008.


 * "Climate doubts based on short-term irrelevancies", by Gavin Schmidt, The Sydney Morning Herald, November 11, 2008.


 * Solomon column