Temperatures are rising, the Queen learned from King and other scientists, because greenhouse gases are trapping heat in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of such gases, is released whenever fossil fuels are burned or forests catch fire. Global warming, the scientists explained, threatens to raise sea levels as much as three feet by the end of the 21st century, thanks to melting glaciers and swollen oceans. (Water expands when heated.)

The first paragraph I highlight is fair enough at face value. Although it wouldn't have hurt to make clear somewhere in the article that CO2 is not the only big bogeyman in this discussion - something I've been wanting to point out at ET for some time now. Considered at a PR level, I find it foolish to constantly single-out one particular gas in a complex system such as the earth - as it draws the focus away of other problematic emissions. The Vanity Fair article completely fails at this point and propagates the myth that the silver bullet lies in eradicating our CO2.

I like to start by mentioning that James Hansen, a key expert in the climate debate at NASA, suggested in 2000 in a PNAS publication that the role of greenhouse gasses other than CO2 were maybe as large or even larger in the latter half of the twentieth century - notably methane and CFC (those molecules responsible for the tropospheric ozone hole).

Source: NASA

The resulting PNAS article is freely available in its entirety, including more funky graphs.

That's not all. Regional effects of these other greenhouse gasses have not been properly considered everywhere. One of my favourite recent examples is the one I've listed several times, but will do so again: another NASA research that showed the potential role tropospheric ozone has in warming up the Arctic. Tropospheric ozone - which mainly is as anthropogenic as fossil fuel CO2 - has been causing a strongly regional melting effect at the Arctic. The Arctic melting simply could not be contributed completely to the already observed 0.6-0.9 C global temperature increase - but brace yourself for the day you read that in the papers.

And how about soot as climate forcing as it reduces albedo, another study by Hansen? No. Let's not mention that either. Too difficult to handle perhaps for the intellectuals dipping in Vanity Fair, while reducing soot emission is a lot simpler than CO2 reduction and could help us in avoiding the Earth to fall into a positive feedback loop of melting ice. We can go on for a little while like this.

And alas, CO2 has again been singled out as the bully of the climate. Proving that this was just an appetiser and Mr. Hertsgaard is only warming up, he really goes out on a limb in the second paragraph as he sucks dry the cup of doom.

This would leave much of eastern England, including areas near Sandringham, underwater. Global warming would also bring more heat waves like the one in the summer of 2003 that killed 31,000 people across Europe. It might even shut down the Gulf Stream, the flow of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico that gives Europe its mild climate. If the Gulf Stream were to halt--and it has already slowed 30 percent since 1992--Europe's temperatures would plunge, agriculture would collapse, London would no longer feel like New York but like Anchorage.

Where that 31.000 number comes from puzzles me, but I won't comment further on it. Now the Gulf Stream, however... Let's begin at the beginning: Mr. Hertsgaard makes the oft made mistake of confusing the Gulf Stream, which is mainly wind driven with the Thermohaline Circulation, which is largely driven by density differences. It's the latter that brings the warmth of the ocean to the European continent, and it's also the latter that was reported to slow down by 30 percent in a Nature paper last year by Harry Bryden. The BBC environment correspondent Richard Black was bold enough to highlight the research with a quote "This more or less constitutes a smoking gun" in a piece similarly deceptively titled Ocean Changes `will cool Europe'.

Yet scrolling down that same article, Black already highlights the natural variability and possibility of a natural trend. That is not all. In the same Nature edition in which Bryden's paper was published, also an accompanying introduction/review was written by Richard Kerr. He writes, among others:

The picture is still fuzzy, however. "It would be dangerous to jump to the conclusion that there's a persistent weakening" of the conveyor circulation, says ocean and climate modeller Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, U.K. Wood, Rhines, and Bryden all worry that the near-instantaneous snapshots taken by the ocean surveys might have been misleading. Like any part of the complex climate system, the conveyor is bound to slow down at times and speed up at others. The two latest surveys, Wood says, may have happened to catch the Atlantic as the conveyor slowed temporarily, giving the impression that a permanent change had taken place.

On the other hand, the analysis may not have even captured what happened in the past decade or so. Climate models simulating the conveyor in a warming world don't call for such a large slowdown until sometime in the next century, Wood notes. In fact, climate researcher Jeff Knight of the Hadley Centre and colleagues recently reported that changing sea surface temperatures suggest that the conveyor has speeded up a bit since the 1970s (Science, 1 July, p. 41). And physical oceanographers Carl Wunsch and Patrick Heimbach of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have just crunched far more oceanographic data from a variety of sources over the interval of dramatic change (1993 to 2004) in the NOC analysis. In a paper submitted for publication, they report a small slowdown, a quarter the size of the NOC group's. The change in heat transported northward is negligible, they calculate.

This is science working at its best. Your theory is right until the next one shows that yours is wrong. There is no clear idea yet as to what caused the observations of the Thermohaline Circulation. It may be natural variation, it may be not. If I remember correctly, the research by Wunch and Heimbach also compensated for the strong North Atlantic Oscillation observed for the past decade and which has been recently switching back, as depicted in this neat post by Chris Kulczycki.

But Mr. Hertsgaard prefers bed-time horror stories instead, since that makes readers swallow bait, hook and sinker. I find it a missed opportunity he doesn't return on the issue later to correct the aggrandisement.

Thirdly, and lastly: the hurricanes, the big fright for the American coastal zones, especially since last year August. This being a largely meteorological field, it's a field which I do not actively follow - I'm more of an earth-man. But I briefly dipped into the matter after Katrina when I still had easy access to these papers. So for what's it worth:

The first person Mr. Hertsgaard interviews in this context is prof. Emmanuel at MIT, who last year put out both a buzz-worthy article (and also a book), in which he showed that intensified global warming would push hurricanes more often into more powerful categories. Personally, this seems a more than excellent piece of research to me. Jumping onto the shouting box that last year's storms were already the effect of anthropogenic caused warming is not. It ignores the respectable work of dozens and it leaves the feature as presented skewed. First watch how in a few paragraphs the doubts about whether the suffering in New Orleans was solely to blame by global warming gets whittled away chip by chip:

No one can say for sure whether global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. But it certainly fit the pattern. The scientific rule of thumb is that one can never blame any one weather event on any single cause. The earth's weather system is too complex for that. Most scientists agree, however, that global warming makes extra-strong hurricanes such as Katrina more likely because it encourages hot oceans, a precondition of hurricane formation.

"It's a bit like saying, 'My grandmother died of lung cancer, and she smoked for the last 20 years of her life--smoking killed her,'" explains Kerry Emanuel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied hurricanes for 20 years. "Well, the problem is, there are an awful lot of people who die of lung cancer who never smoked. There are a lot of people who smoked all their lives and die of something else. So all you can say, even [though] the evidence statistically is clear connecting lung cancer to smoking, is that [the grandmother] upped her probability."

Just weeks before Katrina struck, Emanuel published a paper in the scientific journal Nature demonstrating that hurricanes had grown more powerful as global temperatures rose in the 20th century. Now, he says, by adding more greenhouse gases to the earth's atmosphere, humans are "loading the climatic dice in favor of more powerful hurricanes in the future."

But most Americans heard nothing about Hurricane Katrina's association with global warming. Media coverage instead reflected the views of the Bush administration--specifically, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which declared that the hurricane was the result of natural factors. An outcry from N.O.A.A.'s scientists led the agency to backtrack from that statement in February 2006, but by then conventional wisdom was set in place. Post-Katrina New Orleans may eventually be remembered as the first major U.S. casualty of global warming, yet most Americans still don't know what hit us.

Eventually? From Emmanuel's own website:

8) Q: I gather from this last discussion that it would be absurd to attribute the Katrina disaster to global warming?
A:  Yes, it would be absurd.

I knew I had talked about Emmanuel before and with a little sleuthing through the ET archive, the name popped up in a question by DoDo during a diary with a similar vein of discussion. Herein I briefly discussed the article of Webster, Holland, Curry and Chang, published about the same time in Science, in which they show that the number of total hurricanes and tropical storms has remained pretty constant with time, but that the category 4 and 5 hurricanes have become more abundant. This concurs with Emmanuel's theorem, but does that immediately mean global warming is here? Even Webster cautions to remain doubtful.

William Gray, one of the other great authorities on hurricanes wholeheartedly disagrees with that view and he even goes on record that he's sceptic on the fuzz around global warming in general - a dangerous thing to do today. I found an insightful interview with him, here. He reports a point I observed last year reading the Webster et al article (somehow this gives me a sense of validation, so if I sound to you somewhat proud, you're right):

The Atlantic has had more of these storms in the least 10 years or so, but in other ocean basins, activity is slightly down. Why would that be so if this is climate change? The Atlantic is a special basin? The number of major storms in the Atlantic also went way down from the middle 1960s to the middle '90s, when greenhouse gases were going up.

Then there are people such as Chris Landsea and his terrific FAQ website on hurricanes who has (as far as I know) withdrawn to work on the Fourth Annual Report of the IPCC because he could not agree with the position that global warming must be the cause of intensified hurricanes - which is the exact opposite conclusion of the previous IPCC Annual Report, the TAR.

Landsea was one of the first to caution about the effect of the AMO, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, say the larger brother of the NAO. In last year's publication in the Geophysical Research Letters, climate modeller Jeff Knight based in Exeter (UK) showed that the AMO delivers a strong signature to the climate - including hurricanes.

And it just happens that the AMO has been coming around - if this is right we've already entered a period in which natural hurricane increase is common. (I note that the time-frame roughly corresponds with Gray's observations in the linked interview.) For those interested, Knight's article can be found here (PDF!!).

So, you could even interpret this as worse news: natural hurricane increase could be on the way - without global warming yet putting its shoulder to the wheel.

In the meantime, Mr. Hertsgaard skips and skittles over the nuances and alternative views and falls into the repeating record of fighting global warming deniers. He later highlights himself that this is largely an American problem - but is it worth 7 out of 10 pages to focus on a powerful but decreasing group of fossilized men? A group which, I must say, have done science a really poor favour: global warming deniers have made it practically impossible for scientists with an opposite view to get the word out on their research. Try finding a mention of Knight's article on the BBC website.

Recapitulating. The article in Vanity Fair encapsulates practically everything what I resent about popular press whipping up their features on climate science. It's biased to the extreme takes, it is without nuance or without context. Context, which I hope to have made clear in this diary:
1.) CO2 is not our only problem in fighting greenhouse gasses emissions. In fact, it's our most difficult one - while other greenhouse gasses with a similar impact can be more easily manipulated or reduced in emissions.
2.) The Gulf Stream is not shutting down, and the observed reduction in thermohaline circulation is so far a recent short-term anomaly - not a persisting trend as yet.
3.) If global warming is indeed generating more intensified hurricanes, but global warming is not (yet) affecting them - we could be truly entering a whole new world of Hurricane Hurt. But keep in mind that there's no proven causation (yet?) that the increased strength of hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin is linked to increasing global temperatures.

And lastly my free advice to Mr. Hertsgaard: Cool it on the climate and stick to reporting what you do best: hobnobs with the royals and the governmental big shots.